Some thoughts on information as improbability

Following on from my previous post. If you define information as improbability, as Dembski does, there are some consequences that are easily forgotten. If the measure of information is a probability, then information acquires the properties of probability. In particular:

The probability of an outcome depends on how you specify it. I throw a dice and it lands in front of me with the six upmost. The probability of it being a six is one in six. The probability of it being greater than three is one half. The probability of it landing on that part of the table at that angle is much less. In fact you can make the probability of an outcome be as high or low as you like depending on the specification. So the information in an outcome depends on how you specify the outcome. Compare this, for example, to the entropy or energy in a system or object. There is just one answer to the question - what is the entropy or energy.

The probability of an outcome also depends on what prior knowledge you have about the outcome. If I know the dice has landed with six uppermost then the probability of it landing six uppermost is 1. Every real dice will have a slight bias, and if I know what that bias is, then this will affect the probability. This becomes clearer when talking about more natural outcomes. What is the probability of an earthquake at some given location on earth in the next year? If we know nothing about the location then it is very low. If we know it is somewhere with a history of regular earthquakes it is much higher. If seismological readings tell us an earthquake is imminent it becomes very close to 1. So the information in an outcome is relative to our prior knowledge about that outcome.

By talking of information rather than probability the ID community sometimes give the impression that information is some kind of property of an outcome that exists independently of the observer. In fact the value depends very much on the observer as well as the outcome.