[Air-l] How Much Information / Information Growth

[Charlie Breindahl]

On 2/28/07, Semenov Alexander <semenoffalex at googlemail.com> wrote:
> P.S. I wonder - when did the notion of "information" separated from notion
> of "knowledge" in philosophical sense? Isn't it connected with emergence of
> computers, Internet, etc.? Does anybody have any ideas about it?

A very interesting question. Others on this list probably know a lot
more, but I would suggest at least two trajectories: The disembodiment
of mental processes after Descartes and the quantification of
knowledge in the 19th century.

At any rate, when Shannon writes his historical paper on the
mathematical theory of information in 1948, the process is complete:

Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell
System Technical Journal, 27(July; October), 379-423; 623-656.

I would suggest Katherine Hayles as a possible source:
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in
cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of
Chicago Press. ISBN: 0226321460

Best,
Charlie Breindahl