Although Shannon’s theory measures the amount of information in a sequence of symbols or characters (or chemicals functioning as such), it doesn’t distinguish a meaningful or functional sequence from useless gibberish. For example: “we hold these truths to be self-evident” “ntnyhiznslhtgeqkahgdsjnfplknejmsed” These two sequences are equally long and equally improbable if we imagine them being drawn at random. Thus, they contain the same amount of Shannon information. Yet clearly there is an important qualitative distinction between them that the Shannon measurement does not capture. The
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