What is Information?

[Zarathustra]

I'm finally getting around to reading the article that Fist recommended:https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/ ... .2015.0060

This is the crux of the problem:

"What is not clear, however, is the ontological status of information, and the result is that today we have two conflicting paradigms in biology. One is the ‘chemical paradigm’, the idea that ‘life is chemistry’, or, more precisely, that ‘life is an extremely complex form of chemistry’. The other is the ‘information paradigm’, the view that chemistry is not enough, that ‘life is chemistry plus information’. This implies that there is an ontological difference between information and chemistry, a difference which is often expressed by saying that information-based processes like heredity and natural selection simply do not exist in the world of chemistry."

This is important because it "sits below" the issue of emergentism, forming a more fundamental question. Some people view emergent phenomena as nothing more than "the wetness of water," i.e. something that arises due to scale, but still reducible to the physical. But if information is ontologically different from chemistry, then the difference is not merely one of scale; it exists at the very "bottom" of reality. Scaling up information processing does indeed produce emergent phenomena--which I believe AREN'T reducible to matter--but that's merely a macro way to view the problem. At the most micro-level you can imagine, matter does not seem to be anything other than information. So we don't need a macro example to justify its existence as an ontologically real thing. In fact, it seems more real than matter itself, which could just as easily be described as an emergent phenomenon of information! So the issue of information being nothing more than chemistry misses the point entirely: chemistry is also an emergent phenomenon that is built on nothing more than information. We're starting at the wrong point.

According to physicalism, biological information and the genetic code are mere metaphors. They are like those computer programs that allow us to write our instructions in English, thus saving us the trouble of writing them in the binary digits of the machine language. Ultimately, however, there are only binary digits in the machine language of the computer, and in the same way, it is argued, there are only physical quantities at the most fundamental level of Nature.

What??? If there are only binary digits in an abstract language, then how does this lead to "only physical quantities are the most fundamental level"?? They physicalist interpretation begs the question by assuming that binary information is physical. It makes no distinction between signal and signified.

In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems,

Again, I can't accept this conclusion. Information is definitely present in non-living systems. But information processing is very rudimentary in non-living systems, and never self-referential.

There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

If inanimate matter didn't store information we wouldn't be able to carbon date rocks. We can tell that the earth is over 4 billion years old because that information is stored in the Earth itself. There would be no other way to discover it if this were not the case.

Yockey [17–19] has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.

Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’ [18], p. 105.

This is indeed an important distinction, but it's not the dividing line between information and non-information. Analogue systems can hold info. We hear the same song whether on CD or a record. And we'd certainly hear the same audio book in either format.

Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.

No, this isn't the dividing line. Chemical evolution does indeed cross the barrier of analogue/digital. Even if it's analogue in itself, this is the same as saying it's an emergent phenomenon arising from an underlying information processing that could very well be digital. DACs (digital-analogue converters) are not only logically possible, but real things we produce In audio electronics. We hear the world in analogue, and yet our music is stored digitally. The two are interchangeable.

However, I think I agree with the author's overall claim, that information is ontologically distinct from the physical, just as it's also distinct from the phenomenal. Both physical and phenomenal are emergent phenomena of information processing. I think the author is just starting at the wrong point, at a level of significant emergence. I'm looking forward to reading the rest!

[Fist and Faith]

There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

If inanimate matter didn't store information we wouldn't be able to carbon date rocks. We can tell that the earth is over 4 billion years old because that information is stored in the Earth itself. There would be no other way to discover it if this were not the case.

It seems to me there are significantly different kinds of information. DNA is one thing that is about another thing. A codon is not an amino acid. They're nothing alike. But specific codons mean specific amino acids. It's absolutely bizarre and mind-blowing!!! One amazing protein is called aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase. Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase knows which codon means which amino acid. There's an aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase for each amino acid. When a particular aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase sees a particular transfer RNA, it hands over the correct amino acid, which is joined with other amino acids, in the order DNA says they should go in, to form proteins.

The tree rings I brought up, and the isotopes in the earth that I believe you're referring to, aren't about anything. They don't stand for anything. They are only what they are. Yes, understanding their properties, we know how to extract information from them. But the information we get isn't about something else. It's about the trees and isotopes.

Very different kinds of information.

At the most micro-level you can imagine, matter does not seem to be anything other than information.

I have a thought. Around the 14:00 of this Ted Talk, Brian Greene starts talking about Calabi–Yau shapes. If the idea is correct, the strings of String Theory would vibrate according to the geometry allowed (insisted upon?) by the term dimensions the theory says exist.

The ten dimensions determine the Calabi–Yau manifolds. There's your information!

I guess it doesn't necessarily do something, the way DNA does. It doesn't construct the strings. But it is the information on which the strings act.

[Zarathustra]

Yes, there is information with causal power, and then just plain old information. The former is the only one that has "aboutness," and perhaps this is the only kind that can produce emergent phenomena. But even the latter must have a cause, so that the information that caused it had aboutness. So at the root of everything, it's all caused by information with causal power. Sometimes the information string (i.e. the effects of causes) just ends without any further referent. Like the tree rings. But all it takes is an information processing system (such as consciousness) to turn that information into something with causal power. For instance, knowledge of the age of the trees could cause humans to value them and thus protect them. Once consciousness is in the picture, the universe starts looping back on itself, which is to say that no information string need be a dead end, causally speaking.

[Fist and Faith]

This is the beginning of the Introduction to the book From Matter to Life: Information and Casualty.

The concept of information has penetrated almost all areas of human inquiry, from physics, chemistry, and engineering through biology to the social sciences. And yet its status as a physical entity remains obscure. Traditionally, information has been treated as a derived or secondary concept. In physics especially, the fundamental bedrock of reality is normally vested in the material building blocks of the universe, be they particles, strings, or fields. Because bits of information are always instantiated in material degrees of freedom, the properties of information could, it seems, always be reduced to those of the material substrate. Nevertheless, over several decades there have been attempts to invert this interdependence and root reality in information rather than matter. This contrarian perspective is most famously associated with the name of John Archibald Wheeler, who encapsulated his proposal in the pithy dictum ‘it from bit?’ (Wheeler, 1999).

In a practical, everyday sense, information is often treated as a primary entity, as a ‘thing in its own right’ with a measure of autonomy; indeed, it is bought and sold as a commodity alongside gas and steel. In the life sciences, informational narratives are indispensable: biologists talk about the genetic code, about translation and transcription, about chemical signals and sensory data processing, all of which treat information as the currency of activity, the ‘oil’ that makes the ‘biological wheels go round’. The burgeoning fields of genomic and metagenomic sequencing and bioinformatics are based on the notion that informational bits are literally vital. But beneath this familiar practicality lies a stark paradox. If information makes a difference in the physical world, which it surely does, then should we not attribute to it causal powers? However, in physics causation is invariably understood at the level of particle and field interactions, not in the realm of abstract bits (or qubits, their quantum counterparts). Can we have both? Can two causal chains coexist compatibly? Are the twin narratives of material causation and informational causation comfortable bedfellows? If so, what are the laws and principles governing informational dynamics to place alongside the laws of material dynamics? If not, and information is merely an epiphenomenon surfing on the underlying physical degrees of freedom, can we determine under what circumstances it will mimic autonomous agency? This volume of essays addresses just such foundational Questions.

[Zarathustra]

If everything reduces down to information, as he suggests, then why isn’t there only one kind of causation? Why does there have to be a material causation and an informational causation? Wouldn’t it just all be information causation?

[Holsety]

At the most micro-level you can imagine, matter does not seem to be anything other than information.

I'm not sure about this. I don't understand much of what you guys are talking about for sure, but let me object. I see online in dictionaries that information is frequently defined as something perceived or noticed. What about matter that isn't perceived or noticed? They can still have an effect. I guess you could say that things we aren't aware of can influence parts of us that are too small for us to be aware of them fully...but to me, that's enough to say they're information to us. The study of information might at its most ambitious be a study of all information and its effects on everything there is, but we'll never get there. So I think some matter isn't information, because we're not going to account for it in fullest detail. I guess it might be information to part of existence, but not the whole of existence. If, thanks to the big bang or whatever, things get far enough away from each other that they'll never perceive each other, they'll never be information to each other.

Matter defines itself for us if we perceive it. And since I've seen some matter (kinda, I guess I haven't literally seen what protons are like, but you know, I've seen rocks) I can imagine that there is matter I'll never perceive. And I could probably rule out certain things matter I'll never perceive definitely is like or isn't like. But I can't call vague imaginings of matter I'll never see (like the estimation that there might be a planet in the universe we'll never reach, no matter what we do, somewhere) information about the matter we'll never perceive. It's information about what the matter we'll never perceive could be like.

The planet none of us who see proof of each other never see is made of matter. Or maybe anti-matter? But, it's not information to any of us who never see it.
("not seeing it" is a simplification, meant to exclude, for instance, a planet we never see, but which has alien life forms we do meet. I find it a good hypothetical for things that even a very advanced civilization with a great deal of knowledge will know probably do exist, but can never be sure of.)

Last you told me you go by Occam's Razor. To me, saying god doesn't exist could be a fair argument from Occam's Razor. But it's not reasonable to say that simply because we'll never perceive something, it doesn't exist, nor is it reasonable to say that we have any information on it besides derived information from other things. The thing that DOESN'T exist in our perception isn't information.

[Fist and Faith]

I can't say I have a good understanding of what Z means. He's said it a couple times, but I don't get it. However, this has happened a couple times in the past, and he's managed to make me understand in the end. I imagine we'll get there with this, also.

[Zarathustra]

The idea comes from physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in his 1989 paper, INFORMATION, PHYSICS, QUANTUM: THE SEARCH FOR LINKS. Describing this in my own words, the gist is that every physical property of particles (mass, spin, charge, etc.) is nothing more than a numeric or mathematical quantity measured in some units. If we achieve a full scientific description of matter, there is nothing left to be described besides these quantities--i.e. nothing but information. For instance, matter is mostly empty space. The impression of solidity comes from electrons of different atoms repelling each other, just like little magnets. So "solidity" is an illusion. It's nothing more than a force (electromagnetism). But what is a force? It's a field. What is a field? A set of values spread out in space. What is space? A geometric construct. And so on. There's no "substance" to matter, only quantities of particular types. Its objective reality collapses into a set of measured quantities which are nothing more than information.

Basically, you can never get to the "stuff" of matter, because as soon as you did, it too would be reducible to "pure quantity." Otherwise, it would have no objective, measurable existence. It would just be "magical reality dust." Thus, it turns out that objective matter is a contradictory idea. A myth.

In Wheeler's words:

No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy. Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.

If you search the evolution thread for "hard problem of matter," you'll find our original discussion of this. The question of what matter is besides the information that fully describes it is the "hard problem matter." In my opinion, it's related to the question of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathmatics," which approaches the mystery from the other side. The puzzle of how something immaterial and abstract--such as math--connects to matter is only a puzzle because we imagine these things to exist in two different "realities," concrete vs abstract. Or material vs immaterial. But that assumption creates the entire problem. If matter is nothing more than information, then it's no longer a puzzle. Of course math describes it, because that's what it is.

[Fist and Faith]

Ok, I think I understand. In Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, Brian Greene writes:

If you’re wondering what proto-consciousness really is or how it’s infused into a particle, your curiosity is laudable, but your questions are beyond what Chalmers or anyone else can answer. Despite that, it is helpful to see these questions in context. If you asked me similar questions about mass or electric charge, you would likely go away just as unsatisfied. I don’t know what mass is. I don’t know what electric charge is. What I do know is that mass produces and responds to a gravitational force, and electric charge produces and responds to an electromagnetic force. So while I can’t tell you what these features of particles are, I can tell you what these features do. In the same vein, perhaps researchers will be unable to delineate what proto-consciousness is and yet be successful in developing a theory of what it does—how it produces and responds to consciousness. For gravitational and electromagnetic influences, any concern that substituting action and response for an intrinsic definition amounts to an intellectual sleight of hand is, for most researchers, alleviated by the spectacularly accurate predictions we can extract from our mathematical theories of these two forces. Perhaps we will one day have a mathematical theory of proto-consciousness that can make similarly successful predictions. For now, we don’t.

The Audible version is read by Greene. The italics are mine, because of how he emphasizes those words.

I'm not quoting this in order to discuss proto-consciousness. I'm just saying someone who knows an awful lot about particles and their properties doesn't know what the properties are. He only knows how to measure what they do. That's all we can do, and seems to be all there is. Consistent properties. And how can they be consistent if there are no rules, no information at the root of it?

And that leaves us with information being the foundation, the fundamental beholding block of reality. Not matter. Not energy. Not particles. Information. Hmmm...

Now I have to wonder why the information is such that it produces the specific properties that our universe has. Why mass, charge, spin...?

[Zarathustra]

That quote is appropriate, because we originally discussed this issue in terms of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. From either end--subjective to objective--we can't say what reality *is*. All we can do is trace the connections/structures, and those connections are meaning, information.

So why does the universe have these particular structures? Because we're here. The Anthropic Principle. If all possibilities happen in the multiverse, then those universes in which humans are possible will have properties that make such an existence possible. In other universes, there might be entirely different laws describing entirely different properties. This is what's so appealing about Wolfram's project. He claims that beneath all laws of physics--even all possible laws--are simple computations. He has already shown that quantum mechanics and relativity can be derived from a computational model of reality. So if all possible computations are "running" in the Ruliad--what he calls the multiverse, a structure of all possible rules--then there could be vastly different universes. But those that don't support the evolution of life won't have beings to question the structure.

[Fist and Faith]

Yeah, I understand that. That's why I don't think the effectiveness of math is unreasonable. If things weren't mathematically consistent, and probably consistent in other ways, then there would be chaos. There couldn't be life in a universe where, with no consistent pattern, sometimes 1 + 1 = 2, sometimes it equals 3,547,877, sometimes it equals jello, sometimes it equals ... on and on. It's only unreasonably effective if we don't consider the Anthropic Principle.

But still, I wonder what it is that makes the specific properties. What holds things fast, as they are? Or is it truly the uncaused cause?