What is Information?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
Chriswl
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Chriswl »

Greta wrote:
Chriswl wrote: (Nested quote removed.)

It does not seem obvious to me that the early universe contained information. It contained matter and energy arranged in various ways ...
You accidentally contradicted yourself. Any "arrangement" of material, no matter how temporal, is information. The stuff is energy and however it is ordered (or disordered) is information. Just existing physically involves information - size, shape, density, temperature and so forth.
This seems like a non-standard use of the word "information". We would normally say that we have information about some arrangement of matter, not that the arrangement of matter was in itself information.

Imagine a traffic cop standing by the side of the road who measures the speed of a car at 85 mph. He has this information (he reads it so it's now in his memory), the speed gun has the information and is displaying it. But the car does not contain the information '85 mph' anywhere. It may be a fact that the car is moving at approximately this velocity, but if information is merely another word for facts then it would not be interesting philosophically (or from an engineering point of view). Also, information can be wrong, facts cannot be, so they can't be the same thing.
Philo_soph
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Philo_soph »

Webplodder wrote:
Looking at the early universe there were many processes which could be said to have been organized in the absence of any 'consciousness', so things like the hydrogen atom have been 'doing their thing' long before any lifeform capable of asking questions about it evolved. In other words, information has been an ancient and persistent part of our universe, in fact, we are just one example of information focusing on itself.
This is an important point and a whole new theory has been proposed about it by the French philosopher Meillassoux. He calls the human-less creation of the universe “ancestrality.” Apparently, as conventional science suggests, our life on earth has been a fraction of a second (or something like that) compared to the age of the whole universe. So, we must agree, considering this postulate, that human beings have no monopoly over anything; they are not the “purpose” of creation!

I posted a tread long ago about Meillassoux, receiving no responses (see here http://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/ ... =2&t=14539); yet, I was not surprised, because almost everyone here is a “correlationist”, that is a person who believes in some sort of mediatory space “between” the human mind and the external world. Meillassoux believes that correlationism was an invention of Kant. Most of you, I, and apparently Meillassoux himself, are correlationists.

What I asked in that post addresses the possibility of going beyond correlationism. What I perceive is that to assume the existence of a human-less period on the earth, we inevitably have to think about the existence of humans, never getting out of the correlate. For instance, “organized in the absence of any 'consciousness'”, is an idea that again emphasizes a mediation between the world and 'consciousness.'

The implication is, unlike Greta’s idea (post #57), physical information (e.g. size shape) cannot have a meaning in itself, unless it comes to the perception of an information-processing agent.
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Sy Borg
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Sy Borg »

Chriswl wrote:
Greta wrote: (Nested quote removed.)

You accidentally contradicted yourself. Any "arrangement" of material, no matter how temporal, is information. The stuff is energy and however it is ordered (or disordered) is information. Just existing physically involves information - size, shape, density, temperature and so forth.
This seems like a non-standard use of the word "information". We would normally say that we have information about some arrangement of matter, not that the arrangement of matter was in itself information.
Everything about energy and matter is information.
It depends on the field. In science, that is an everyday use of the word "information". Each entity has two components - energy and its arrangement. All arrangements are, by definition, informational.
Chriswl wrote:Imagine a traffic cop standing by the side of the road who measures the speed of a car at 85 mph. He has this information (he reads it so it's now in his memory), the speed gun has the information and is displaying it. But the car does not contain the information '85 mph' anywhere. It may be a fact that the car is moving at approximately this velocity, but if information is merely another word for facts then it would not be interesting philosophically (or from an engineering point of view). Also, information can be wrong, facts cannot be, so they can't be the same thing.
You are thinking of knowledge v information. The car has a particular velocity, trajectory and acceleration at any one time - this is all information. The information is there, intrinsic (and also within every aspect of the car's configuration) whether humans notice it or ascribe labels to it or not.
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JamesOfSeattle
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Re: What is Information?

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

Philo_soph wrote:The implication is, unlike Greta’s idea (post #57), physical information (e.g. size shape) cannot have a meaning in itself, unless it comes to the perception of an information-processing agent.
I'm with Greta here. Maybe the difference we're getting caught on is the difference between information and meaning. Greta and I agree that the physical system contains information in itself. But the same information can have many many meanings. The meaning which results from an interpretation is determined by the knowledge that the interpreter brings to the table.

So the fact that John is in the room at 1:00 AM is information. For Larry, that information means his daughter Susan, who also is in the room at 1:00 AM (knowledge that Larry has) is not alone (for good or ill). For Clarice, the ship's captain, that means that John is not in the lighthouse where he is supposed to be. Etc.

So to say it a different way, John being in the room at 1:00 AM is a system that contains information. That information can mean that Susan is not alone. It can also mean that John is not in the lighthouse. It can also mean a near infinite (actual infinite?) number of other things. But the information is there in the system, regardless.

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Eaglerising
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Eaglerising »

Phio_soph & Chriswl – Basically are you saying that matter created consciousness?
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Sy Borg
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Sy Borg »

Philo_soph wrote:Webplodder wrote:
Looking at the early universe there were many processes which could be said to have been organized in the absence of any 'consciousness', so things like the hydrogen atom have been 'doing their thing' long before any lifeform capable of asking questions about it evolved. In other words, information has been an ancient and persistent part of our universe, in fact, we are just one example of information focusing on itself.
... almost everyone here is a “correlationist”, that is a person who believes in some sort of mediatory space “between” the human mind and the external world. Meillassoux believes that correlationism was an invention of Kant. Most of you, I, and apparently Meillassoux himself, are correlationists.

What I asked in that post addresses the possibility of going beyond correlationism. What I perceive is that to assume the existence of a human-less period on the earth, we inevitably have to think about the existence of humans, never getting out of the correlate. For instance, “organized in the absence of any 'consciousness'”, is an idea that again emphasizes a mediation between the world and 'consciousness.'

The implication is, unlike Greta’s idea (post #57), physical information (e.g. size shape) cannot have a meaning in itself, unless it comes to the perception of an information-processing agent.
I generally agree with James and enjoyed the quote of Webplodder you provided.

Maybe this is a function of being a "correlationist" but I am having trouble understanding your ideas on ... non correlations between mind and matter? It's an interesting challenge. Are you suggesting that there was consciousness from the beginning, just not in the human sense that we understand?

Some suggest that Platonic shapes were intrinsic to the pre-BB universe while others believe that matter and information are two sides of one coin and are both dependent and co-emergent. However, non-linearity and the ease with which we can create abstract models and fiction with no physical correlates suggests that information is a "larger" domain in which the physical domain resides. Note: This is not a point I'm trying to make (although I find the idea cool), I'm just improvising and riffing and seeing where it leads.
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JamesOfSeattle
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Re: What is Information?

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

Greta wrote: However, non-linearity and the ease with which we can create abstract models and fiction with no physical correlates suggests that information is a "larger" domain in which the physical domain resides. Note: This is not a point I'm trying to make (although I find the idea cool), I'm just improvising and riffing and seeing where it leads.
I'll make the point! But I wouldn't use the term information for the "larger domain". I use the term "patterns". I reserve the term "information" for a pattern that is discernible in a physical system. Note: any physical system is likely to embody a large number of patterns. The specific information discerned is determined by the specific variables (data) measured.

An interesting side note is that the domain of patterns contains some patterns which cannot be physically embodied. Examples include self-contradictory concepts, like the married bachelor. Nevertheless, references to such concepts can be physically embodied as symbols, and so such symbols constitute information.

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Philo_soph
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Philo_soph »

First, it should be noted that these recent ideas are issues of debate even among masters of philosophy; so confusion, inaccuracy and implications abound. Second, the idea of correlationism was originally devised to convey something “bad.” It’s a negative notion; if someone is called “correlationist”, it means the person believes in some sort of dogma. Yet, no one really knows what it means.

Greta wrote:
Maybe this is a function of being a "correlationist" but I am having trouble understanding your ideas on ... non correlations between mind and matter? It's an interesting challenge. Are you suggesting that there was consciousness from the beginning, just not in the human sense that we understand?
ALSO

Eaglerising wrote:
Phio_soph & Chriswl – Basically are you saying that matter created consciousness?
These two questions ask relatively ask the same question. Well, I should declare here that the ideas in my post, no matter how innovative they may appear, are majorly implications of the French philosopher’s work. Personally, I cannot pass judgment on the possibility of an eternal consciousness. It might be possible and could totally remove the subject-object conflict one day.

About the ideas shared in the above posts, we can distinguish them concerning their degrees of correlationism. With our present knowledge status, we could say everyone is correlationist but with different levels and assumptions. Gertie and I seem to be weak correlationists, as we say:
- There is external reality outside of our mind;
- There is a correlate that helps us perceive reality (language and cognitive framing);
- The correlate is not subjectivist! (If explanation in needed tell me).

Yet, Greta’s (and to some extent JamesOfSeattle’s) versions involve strong correlationism. They call something “information” even if it’s in pure nature. It also highlights a radical view that external reality doesn’t exist on its own and is there only to give us information.
That is, the world is already a human-related component to be analyzed in our systems of physics, mechanics and mathematics. This would lead to a contradiction, considering “ancestrality”: there is scientific “information” in fossils dating back to a time (millions of years ago) when there was no science.
Chriswl
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Chriswl »

Greta wrote:
Chriswl wrote: (Nested quote removed.)

This seems like a non-standard use of the word "information". We would normally say that we have information about some arrangement of matter, not that the arrangement of matter was in itself information.
Everything about energy and matter is information.
It depends on the field. In science, that is an everyday use of the word "information". Each entity has two components - energy and its arrangement. All arrangements are, by definition, informational.
Chriswl wrote:Imagine a traffic cop standing by the side of the road who measures the speed of a car at 85 mph. He has this information (he reads it so it's now in his memory), the speed gun has the information and is displaying it. But the car does not contain the information '85 mph' anywhere. It may be a fact that the car is moving at approximately this velocity, but if information is merely another word for facts then it would not be interesting philosophically (or from an engineering point of view). Also, information can be wrong, facts cannot be, so they can't be the same thing.
You are thinking of knowledge v information. The car has a particular velocity, trajectory and acceleration at any one time - this is all information. The information is there, intrinsic (and also within every aspect of the car's configuration) whether humans notice it or ascribe labels to it or not.
You have a redundant ontology here - you have things and then, in addition, you have the way things are (information). This is unnecessary, it is enough to have the things, things have to be a certain way in order to exist at all.

I understand that some physicists use the term 'information' in a non-standard way because it fits in well with quantum physics. But this doesn't scale well to the macro world where all the interesting ideas of information theory are based. For example, these physicists assume that information must be subject to a conservation law - it can neither be created nor destroyed. But this is obviously not our everyday experience. If I have just one copy of some important document and I burn it then clearly some information has been destroyed. It's no good to say that the information still exists in the position and velocity of all the soot and smoke particles, if only we could measure it all accurately enough. Erasing information is a real thing, we do it everyday. There is even a law that tells you the minimum amount of energy required to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle).

I think information, more or less is knowledge, fallible knowledge anyway. You have a physical system and you have agents that have some degree of (assumed) knowledge about that system. Why is there any need for a third thing? The agents' knowledge may turn out to be wrong, not by failing to correspond to some 'information' that the world contains but by failing to serve the agent's purposes when used to guide that agent's interactions with the world. If you attempt to manipulate the world based on wrong information you get unfavourable and unexpected results and thus have to revise your beliefs (update your information). Information is pragmatic.

Yes there are facts about how the world is and we can imagine a world with agents who would act in such a way that they would make a decent job of ultimately discovering many of those facts (e.g. they follow the scientific method). But anyone who insists on defining information as simply meaning 'the facts' is left with nothing interesting to say about information at all. Which would be a shame as the everyday notion of information has yielded some very interesting and surprising results in the form of Shannon's information theory and related developments. It seems very philosophically interesting to me.
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JamesOfSeattle
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Re: What is Information?

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Philo_soph wrote:Yet, Greta’s (and to some extent JamesOfSeattle’s) versions involve strong correlationism. They call something “information” even if it’s in pure nature. It also highlights a radical view that external reality doesn’t exist on its own and is there only to give us information.
That is, the world is already a human-related component to be analyzed in our systems of physics, mechanics and mathematics. This would lead to a contradiction, considering “ancestrality”: there is scientific “information” in fossils dating back to a time (millions of years ago) when there was no science.
Philo_soph, what highlights a radical view that external reality doesn't exist on its own? Not my view that information exists in "pure nature", right? My view is information exists in pure nature that is really out there. It only gets used when something with a purpose comes along.

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-- Updated May 29th, 2017, 12:49 pm to add the following --
Chriswl wrote:I think information, more or less is knowledge, fallible knowledge anyway.
And I think all knowledge is information, but not all information is knowledge.
The agents' knowledge may turn out to be wrong, not by failing to correspond to some 'information' that the world contains but by failing to serve the agent's purposes when used to guide that agent's interactions with the world. If you attempt to manipulate the world based on wrong information you get unfavourable and unexpected results and thus have to revise your beliefs (update your information). Information is pragmatic.
By my understanding/definition, knowledge is a specific kind of information, namely, semantic information. By Floridi's definition (see his book Philosophy of Information, or just google "Floridi semantic information") misinformation/disinformation is not actually information, which means knowledge based on same is not actual knowledge.
But anyone who insists on defining information as simply meaning 'the facts' is left with nothing interesting to say about information at all.
Them's fightin' words!
Which would be a shame as the everyday notion of information has yielded some very interesting and surprising results in the form of Shannon's information theory and related developments. It seems very philosophically interesting to me.
Shannon's information theory is hardly based on the everyday notion of information. His theory is based on a very specific notion of communicating coded information without regard to the meaning that information. Philosophers want to be able to tie meaning to that information in some useful way, and to do that they a need a concept for the basis of information. That's what I am trying to provide.

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Sy Borg
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Re: What is Information?

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Chriswl wrote:
You are thinking of knowledge v information. The car has a particular velocity, trajectory and acceleration at any one time - this is all information. The information is there, intrinsic (and also within every aspect of the car's configuration) whether humans notice it or ascribe labels to it or not.
You have a redundant ontology here - you have things and then, in addition, you have the way things are (information). This is unnecessary, it is enough to have the things, things have to be a certain way in order to exist at all.

I understand that some physicists use the term 'information' in a non-standard way because it fits in well with quantum physics. But this doesn't scale well to the macro world where all the interesting ideas of information theory are based. For example, these physicists assume that information must be subject to a conservation law - it can neither be created nor destroyed. But this is obviously not our everyday experience. If I have just one copy of some important document and I burn it then clearly some information has been destroyed. It's no good to say that the information still exists in the position and velocity of all the soot and smoke particles, if only we could measure it all accurately enough. Erasing information is a real thing, we do it everyday. There is even a law that tells you the minimum amount of energy required to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle).
Since when does theoretical physics need to be practical, Chris? :) By the above logic, it's not good enough to say that energy can be neither created nor destroyed either, because we all snuff it (ie. energy becomes dissipated, desystematised and unusable). You refer to our practical human reality. In actual reality, energy and information are not apparently destroyed, they just become inaccessible to us.
Chriswl wrote:... the everyday notion of information has yielded some very interesting and surprising results in the form of Shannon's information theory and related developments. It seems very philosophically interesting to me.
Which aspects?
Eaglerising
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Eaglerising »

An ignorant person doesn’t recognize or understand he or she displays their ignorance to those who have “eyes that can see” by everything they say and do. An ignorant person is someone who is ruled by thought and/or authority. In turn, thought causes them to believe they understand what they think they know and it is accurate. Therefore, they never consider the possibility their perception is inaccurate or question it. Instead, they defend their perception – what they think, know, and believe. They are totally unaware they do this automatically and mechanically because they haven’t allowed themselves to experience something different. Consequently, they are unaware of their ignorance because they are unaware of themselves.
Philo_soph
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Philo_soph »

JamesOfSeattle wrote:
Philo_soph, what highlights a radical view that external reality doesn't exist on its own? Not my view that information exists in "pure nature", right? My view is information exists in pure nature that is really out there. It only gets used when something with a purpose comes along.
Yea! And sure, there is external reality, as I emphasized above: “There is external reality outside of our mind.” Your correlationism may be focused on some version of pragmatism (“gets used”), and I personally approve it. So, what we have talked about is not much different, although the term information is still problematic. Why not simply say what is got used is information, and before that it remains as potentiality or property (of a rock for example)?

Existing property --> human agent (user, interpreter, analyzer, observer) --> information produced
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Sy Borg
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Re: What is Information?

Post by Sy Borg »

Eaglerising wrote:An ignorant person doesn’t recognize or understand he or she displays their ignorance to those who have “eyes that can see” by everything they say and do. An ignorant person is someone who is ruled by thought and/or authority. In turn, thought causes them to believe they understand what they think they know and it is accurate. Therefore, they never consider the possibility their perception is inaccurate or question it. Instead, they defend their perception – what they think, know, and believe. They are totally unaware they do this automatically and mechanically because they haven’t allowed themselves to experience something different. Consequently, they are unaware of their ignorance because they are unaware of themselves.
The Dunning Kruger effect.
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JamesOfSeattle
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Re: What is Information?

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

Philo_soph wrote:Why not simply say what is got used is information, and before that it remains as potentiality or property (of a rock for example)?

Existing property --> human agent (user, interpreter, analyzer, observer) --> information produced
I do say what got used is information. Information was there, and then it got used. Just like a bicycle is a bicycle before it ever gets used as a bicycle.

Consider a different property of the rock: its mass. This property only becomes relevant if something interacts with the rock, but we still say it is a property of the rock and not a property of the interaction.

BTW, your formula (property --> agent --> information) recapitualates a variation on my idea of the basic unit of consciousness, although I might write it more like:
Input information --> agent --> output information. (And of course the agent need not be human)
Did you do that on purpose?

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