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I find the hierarchy of “mental content” to be kind of confusing. He posits “the hierarchy of mental content, which, in order of increasing value, are: data, i

• omeze 8y ago
  I believe the distinction is: information is encoded in data (or, data holds information). E.g. a compressed data file stores the same information as it's uncompressed form, but the information is not necessarily usable without further processing.
• PurpleRamen 8y ago
  Information is data with a meaning. Like a series of bits is just data, but by decoding and interpretating them they can become useable information, a number or a string.
  • no_identd 8y ago
    > Information is data with a meaning. Of course, we can turns this on its head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Marshall_McLuhan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Marshall_McLuhan Or rather, like a certain German philosopher did with another certain German philosopher, turn it from standing on its head to standing on its feet.
• jononor 8y ago
  From a practical engineering viewpoint more than information theoretical: The bytes of an image is data. That the image contains a cat is information. The pixels of the image is data. That the predominant color of the image is green is information. The distinction is usually dependent on a particular viewpoint. Some sort of interpretation is usually applied to gain information from data. Information are the things relevant and applicable to the task at hand, data (on its own) is not. The data not considered information may be considered noise.