---
title: "Incomplete Nature"
chunk: 4/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_Nature"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:32:47.944742+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Information ==
One of the central purposes of Incomplete Nature is to articulate a theory of biological information. The first formal theory of information was articulated by Claude Shannon in 1948 in his work A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon's work is widely credited with ushering in the Information Age, but somewhat paradoxically, it was completely silent on questions of meaning and reference, i.e., what the information is about. As an engineer, Shannon was concerned with the challenge of reliably transmitting a message from one location to another. The meaning and content of the message was largely irrelevant. So, while Shannon information theory has been essential for the development of devices like computers, it has left open many philosophical questions regarding the nature of information. Incomplete Nature seeks to answer some of these questions.

=== Shannon information ===
Shannon's key insight was to recognize a link between entropy and information. Entropy is often defined as a measurement of disorder, or randomness, but this can be misleading. For Shannon's purposes, the entropy of a system is the number of possible states that the system has the capacity to be in. Any one of these potential states can constitute a message. For example, a typewritten page can bear as many different messages as there are different combinations of characters that can be arranged on the page. The information content of a message can only be understood against the background context of all of the messages that could have been sent, but weren't. Information is produced by a reduction of entropy in the message medium. 

=== Boltzmann entropy ===
Shannon's information based conception of entropy should be distinguished from the more classic thermodynamic conception of entropy developed by Ludwig Boltzmann and others at the end of the nineteenth century. While Shannon entropy is static and has to do with the set of all possible messages/states that a signal bearing system might take, Boltzmann entropy has to do with the tendency of all dynamic systems to tend towards equilibrium. That is, there are many more ways for a collection of particles to be well mixed than to be segregated based on velocity, mass, or any other property. Boltzmann entropy is central to the theory of work developed earlier in the book because entropy dictates the direction in which a system will spontaneously tend.

=== Significant information ===
Deacon's addition to Shannon information theory is to propose a method for describing not just how a message is transmitted, but also how it is interpreted. Deacon weaves together Shannon entropy and Boltzmann entropy in order to develop a theory of interpretation based in teleodynamic work. Interpretation is inherently normative. Data becomes information when it has significance for its interpreter. Thus interpretive systems are teleodynamic - the interpretive process is designed to perpetuate itself. "The interpretation of something as information indirectly reinforces the capacity to do this again."

== References ==

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-04991-6
Deacon, T. (2006) Reciprocal linkage between self-organizing processes is sufficient for self reproduction and evolvability. Biological Theory 1 (2) 2006, 136–149.