Where the data Analogy Breaks

Calling information a data is useful for about five minutes. The comparison can expose structure that ordinary language hides. The problem begins when the comparison stops behaving like a tool and starts behaving like a claim about what the thing literally is.

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

What the metaphor gets right

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

This is why engineering metaphors are so attractive. They compress a complicated relationship into something we can manipulate mentally. In the best case, the metaphor produces predictions and sharper questions.

What it smuggles in

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

Engineering words often carry hidden assumptions: a designer, a specification, modular ownership, explicit goals, a stable machine underneath the program. Those assumptions must be tested rather than inherited.

Return to the physical story

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.

Once the mechanism is back in view, the analogy can be kept on a short leash. We can state which relation is genuinely similar and which difference would make the analogy generate a wrong prediction.

My three tests for a metaphor

1. What mechanism does this comparison help me see?
2. Which engineering assumption does the natural system not share?
3. What would I predict incorrectly if I took the comparison literally?

The third test is the most important. An analogy that cannot fail is decoration, not explanation.

Beyond the borrowed language

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.

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

When does a physical difference become information for something?

A good metaphor should eventually make itself less necessary. It gets us close enough to the real system that we can see where the scaffolding ends.

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.