smithza

  Semantic information, you see, obeys a contrary calculus to that of physical bits. As it increases in determinacy, so its syntactical form increases in indeterminacy; the more exact and intentionally informed semantic information is, the more aperiodic and syntactically random its physical transmission becomes, and the more it eludes compression. I mean, the text of Anna Karenina is, from a purely quantitative vantage of its alphabetic sequences, utterly random; no algorithm could possibly be generated — at least, none that’s conceivable — that could reproduce it. And yet, at the semantic level, the richness and determinacy of the content of the book increases with each aperiodic arrangement of letters and words into coherent meaning.