dshortt writes:
quote:
Information theory is elemental to biology, as I argued just the other day. Nothing surprising here. Semantic is still a bad term; you are referring to information and data.
So DNA would compare to a computer-like code? Why is semantic a bad term?
He's saying this for strictly technical reasons. If the context is information theory then you want to avoid concepts like meaning and semantics, which are human interpretations attached to information. This is from
Shannon's Original Paper on Information Theory:
"Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem."
--Percy
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