Comment by mmiller

This kind of gets into philosophy, but a metaphor I came up with for thinking about this (another phrase for it is "thought experiment") is:

If I speak something to a rock, what is it to the rock? Is it "signal," or "data"?

Making the concept a little more interesting, what if I resonate the rock with a sound frequency? What is that to the rock? Is that "signal," or "data"?

Up until the Rosetta Stone was found, Egyptian hieroglyphs were indecipherable. Could data be gathered from them, nevertheless? Sure. Researchers could determine what pigments were used, and/or what tools were used to create them, but they couldn't understand the messages. It wasn't "data" up to that point. It was "noise."

I hope I am not giving the impression that I am a postmodernist who is out here saying, "Data is meaningless." That's not what I'm saying. I am saying meaning is not self-evident from signal. The concept of data requires the ability to interpret signal for meaning to be acquired.