timelets

To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say.

That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. If one is confronted with a very elementary situation where he has to choose one of two alternatIve messages, then it is arbitrarily said that the information, associated with this situation, is unity.

The concept of information applies not to the indi- vidual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a whole, the unit information indicating that in this situation one has an amount of freedom of choice, in selecting a message, which it is convenient-to regard as a standard or unit amount.

To be somewhat more definite, the amount of information is defined, in the simplest cases, to be measured by the logarithm of the number of available choices.

-- Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949).

...it is now clear that the elaborate organizations that human beings have constructed in the modern world to carry out the work of production and government can only be understood as machinery for coping with the limits of man’s abilities to comprehend and compute in the face of complexity and uncertainty.

Herbert A. Simon. Nobel Prize lecture, Dec 8, 1978.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1978/simon-lecture.html

A most useful way of demonstrating the existence of a certain phenomenon is to examine the implications and consequences of its absence. As Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested, if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious.

The obvious methodological implication of this is that investigating the "pathological" might help us to discover, unveil, or simply bring into focus the "normal," which we usually take for granted and­ therefore tend to ignore.

--- Evitar Zerubavel. Hidden Rhythms, 1985.