ABSTRACT
It is typical of young children to label as "dogs" all objects that have four legs and move. In time, they learn to differentiate dogs from other creatures that have four legs, and one breed of dog from another. So it is too with all other objects and events in the world around them: originally "global" and undifferentiated perceptions become more detailed and discriminating, the net yield being a tremendous amount of specific information. Cybernetics, a twentieth-century science, is the study of automatic control systems; and it defines "information" in a rather specialized way. The simplest such choice is one that is made between two possibilities which are equally likely—a coin toss, say—and the cybernetics people have consequently chosen to use the amount of information produced by this kind of choice as their basic unit of measurement.
