Knowledge and information

The foregoing  pages  have transmitted knowledge to us,

In this, the digital age, there’s a tendency to treat knowledge and information as being the same; but in fact this is not the case.   A paragraph or a picture, or indeed a piano concerto, may be sent as a collection of ‘bits’ — as a datastream — from one place to another as a signal and reassembled at the receiving end into the information it represents; but we will be wise to distinguish this signal (as a computer would not) from the actual knowledge it contains, which is decoded and made available only to our minds.

We might suggest that knowledge is what is produced when information is transferred from the physical world to the mind.

For our present purposes, it is enough to observe that those data-streams which represent knowledge are often transmitted from place to place, and from mind to mind, in the form of

BOOKS.