Information Through a Systems Architect's Eyes

I approach information with an occupational habit: I want to draw boxes and arrows. That habit is useful because architecture forces questions about state, boundaries, interfaces, resources and failure. It is dangerous because natural systems were not designed to respect our diagrams.

In technical contexts information can be quantified without reference to meaning, while biological and human meaning depends on an interpreting system. The same physical pattern can have different consequences under different codes and contexts.

Where does state live?

In technical contexts information can be quantified without reference to meaning, while biological and human meaning depends on an interpreting system. The same physical pattern can have different consequences under different codes and contexts.

Software gives us the expectation that important state should have an owner. Natural systems often distribute state across structure, concentrations, relationships and history. A snapshot can therefore tell us less than the process that produced it.

Where are the interfaces?

Architects routinely separate payload, encoding, schema and semantics. That discipline prevents the word information from becoming a mystical substitute for mechanism.

Engineered interfaces are declarations. Natural boundaries are often material: membranes, tissues, ecological borders, channels, gradients or social conventions. They can leak, adapt and participate in the behavior they constrain.

What is the failure model?

Information theory deliberately abstracts away semantics. Importing its mathematical vocabulary into biology or philosophy without restoring context can create an illusion of explanation.

Failure analysis is useful because normal operation hides assumptions. A healthy component can coexist with an unhealthy whole. A local optimization can damage the larger system. Robustness at one level can create fragility at another.

History is part of the architecture

Shannon made communication mathematically tractable by focusing on uncertainty and transmission; biology adopted information language because heredity genuinely involves copying and coding, but the mapping is partial.

In a designed system, legacy structure may be accidental baggage. In an evolved or historically accumulated system, legacy structure can be the reason the current architecture exists at all. The path is not documentation around the system; sometimes it is part of the system.

The zoom test

A good architectural description should survive zooming. Going down a level should reveal mechanisms capable of implementing the higher-level pattern. Going up should reveal regularities that justify discussing the larger entity in its own vocabulary.

Information is best treated as physical differences made consequential by the organization of a system.

When does a physical difference become information for something?

Reading trail

• Aeon — Information theory and life's origins
• Nautilus — In the Beginning, There Was Computation
• Aeon — We are not machines

These links are starting points for the scientific and historical ideas. The systems interpretation, analogies and conclusions here are my own.