If I may reply in terms of personal experience: when students start"doing philosophy", one of the first thing they (need to) learn isthat what seems obvious to x may be much less so to y. As soon as things become interesting, they stop being obvious. Yet I have noticed that this is not the only important lesson about "obvious". For once they have understood therelativity of "obviousness" then they also need to realize that no answer in terms of “obviously p ” will ever convince anyonewho was not already convinced that p in the first place. Philosophy is not doneadverbially, as it were, since “obviously (clearly, truly, certainly…) 2 + 2 =4” is no more (nor less) convincing that “2 + 2 = 4” as a reply to someone whoshare a different sense of the obvious. So there are no obvious p on which philosophers agree (or they would not discuss them) and no obvious way (i.e. "obviously") to tackle them.

This is really a series of nested questionsthat might be treated separately, so let's see if I can be of some help. 1) Is it theoretically possible to quantifyall information, regardless of source? Yes. As far as the quantification ofinformation is concerned, there is a well-developed branch of mathematics,called information theory, which deals with the quantification of information.It was founded by Claude Shannon in the late forties and has been refinedsince. See, for a very simple introduction, http://www.lucent.com/minds/infotheory/ In the following entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia I provide an overview http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/ for beginners. The important thing to remember is that,when we quantify information, we are really quantifying data, that is, we arenot taking into consideration the meaning, truthfulness, relevance or utilityof the gigabytes we are handling. In other words, when we quantify informationwe are only...