What are your thoughts, queries, arguments, definitions, and insights? It would be great to have a general understanding of information on this forum. — Pop

Where in this statement is there an invite for unreasoned derision?

Reasoned argument is always welcome. Much has been stated, there is plenty of meat to work on.

That would be how information integrates in mind. What makes information integrate generally is the big question? — Pop

Semantic information? Or just the information associated with an organism's environment? @Isaac is familiar with some of the theories about how that happens. One is that attention creates a grand central station where integration takes place.

What are your thoughts, queries, arguments, definitions, and insights? It would be great to have a general understanding of information on this forum. — Pop

I found an article online by a biological theorist, Marcello Barbieri,What is information?

It starts off with:

Molecular biology is based on two great discoveries: the first is that genes carry hereditary information in the form of linear sequences of nucleotides; the second is that in protein synthesis a sequence of nucleotides is translated into a sequence of amino acids, a process that amounts to a transfer of information from genes to proteins. These discoveries have shown that the information of genes and proteins is the specific linear order of their sequences. This is a clear definition of information and there is no doubt that it reflects an experimental reality.

The advantage of this approach is that it specifies the definition of 'information' with respect to a definite subject matter, namely, biology. It is well worth reading this article. This author is a pioneer of what he has called 'code biology' which develops from that understanding of DNA as a code. The sense in which DNA encodes and transmits information is fundamental in this article.

Otherwise, saying 'everything is information' means very little in my opinion. Something which explains everything, explains nothing, because it's too general to be meaningful. And 'everything is information' fails for that reason.

I suspect that a lot of this talk goes back to the celebrated exclamation of pioneering information technology theorist Norbert Weiner, who said in his seminal book Cybernetics, that 'information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day'. Great! said some. 'Let's not talk about matter~energy any more! Let's talk about "information"! Then we'll survive in the present day!' But as said above, the problem is that it's too general to be meaningul. At least matter or matter-energy can be defined within a range by physics. The term 'information' is polysemic, meaning it has many different definitions in different contexts. So saying that 'everything is information' is not a meaningful statement, in my view.

Otherwise, saying 'everything is information' means very little in my opinion. Something which explains everything, explains nothing, — Wayfarer

Information isn't an explanation. It's an observation. The universe is not uniform.

Information isn't an explanation — frank

That would be news to the OP:

Everything that exists, exists as a body of evolving information, integrating more and more information into itself — Pop

One is that attention creates a grand central station where integration takes place. — frank

Yeah, everything is a self organizing system. And the thing being organized is information.

Well, let's ask. @Pop. Do you see information as a causal entity? Or as an explanation for everything?

Or is it that a universe characterized by disuniformity gives us stars and planets and the potential for consciousness?

Otherwise, saying 'everything is information' means very little in my opinion. Something which explains everything, explains nothing, because it's too general to be meaningful. And 'everything is information' fails for that reason. — Wayfarer

I did comment on this earlier.

At least matter or matter-energy can be defined within a range by physics. The term 'information' is polysemic, meaning it has many different definitions in different contexts. So saying that 'everything is information' is not a meaningful statement, in my view. — Wayfarer

Yet everything is information, from an idealistic perspective. Consciousness has an ability to grey out certain information, to focus on specific information. As stated earlier, If we could grey out all information, nothing would be distinct, there would be no consciousness.

I am mindful of what you are saying, and admit there are pros and cons to this approach, but given the information on hand, this is a way towards an understanding.

I am also mindful that this might present a threat to those whos epistemic stance is one of no understanding.

Consciousness has an ability to grey out certain information, to focus on specific information — Pop

I think what you're referring to here is the faculty of judgement. That is the faculty that synthesises sensory data into judgements, including elementary judgements - 'is' 'is not' 'is the same as' 'is different to' and so on. The mind is doing this all of the time - the brain with its billions of neural connections is like a vast Virtual Reality synthesizer that works to create the unified sense of self. But the question arises, what is the faculty that is performing that? There seems to be an ordering principle at work. And I don't know if that faculty can be understood in terms of 'information' or whether it exists on another level altogether. Analogously, it might be compared to the operating system of a computer, which sorts and indexes all the data in the disk storage. So there's the data, the binary code that contains the information, but the contains the instructions how to process and present that data. That seems analogous to how the mind operates (although I'm mindful of the limitations of comparing minds and computers).

Wiener and those other pioneers in information technology, were dealing specifically with information systems, and encoding and transmitting information across various forms of media. And that's all great work, and one of the reasons why we have access to such incredible technology nowadays. They were brilliant scientists. So naturally in those disciplines they're dealing with the means by which information can be stored, transmitted, and so on, which can be used for any kind of subject matter, and which also suggests many metaphors for the way reasoning, thinking and biology is organised. But it's still a leap from there to the claim that 'everything is information' in a metaphysical sense, as if in itself this idea comprises a grand philosophical synthesis. It's part of the picture, but not the whole picture.

Also note this source that was linked a few years back by @Galuchat Philosophy of Information Handbook.

Isaac is familiar with some of the theories about how that happens. — frank

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15249-0.pdf

Is a good primer for any interested.

But the question arises, what is the faculty that is performing that? There seems to be an ordering principle at work. And I don't know if that faculty can be understood in terms of 'information' or whether it exists on another level altogether. — Wayfarer

What integrates the information In mind and everywhere else, is the big question? I think it is the anthropic principle. In certain ordered pockets of the universe the combined laws of nature are already integrated, forcing everything to self organize, forcing all the distinctive matter to integrate as best it can.
It is a way to understand how a ribosome and RNA integrate in the cellular environment. If they are informational bodies that can only integrate with each other in a certain way and with nothing else, would explain the mind element that is missing from cellular biology.

But it's still a leap from there to the claim that 'everything is information' in a metaphysical sense, as if in itself this idea comprises a grand philosophical synthesis. It's part of the picture, but not the whole picture. — Wayfarer

Philosophy of Information ( P.I ) is not well received in philosophical circles, reading between the lines ( SEP ), for this very reason, that it can in its own right narrate a grand synthesis.

As to whether you believe it or not, is up to you. :smile:

Thanks for the link. I need a break. I'll read it later and comment.

Thanks for the link. I need a break. I'll read it later and comment. — Pop

No problem. Hope you enjoy it.

Could you simplify that some? Aren't there multiple theories about how the brain integrates data?

Could you simplify that some? — frank

Sure.

The headline is that the brain is hierarchical (in both structure and network relations) such that each cortex or cluster has, as it's data input, the ouput from those areas below it in the network. In this model integration is achieved hierarchically (the Markov Decision Process described), information is integrated in local models which produce discrete states to form part of a new level of information to be integrated by the model above. There's then a cascade of prediction flowing back down the hierarchy which filters and limits the outputs to give a less noisy feed. The working memory is the collection of regions responsible for both averaging output signals as they change over time (again, to reduce noise) and for developing policies which filter signals on the basis or prior predictions as to the cause of the signal.

So for eyes - you might get a load of light and dark receptors fire, they're modelled as being the result of some shape (light space, dark space not randomly distributed) so receptor signals not conforming to this prediction are suppressed, to reduce noise and these might then be sufficient to fire models for 'edges' - more feedback suppression, signal sent forward (skip a few dozen steps, you get the picture). We might eventually have 'car' being suggested from the Visuo-spatial sketchpad, and also 'car' from the Phonological loop (audio data).

Trouble is, these won't arrive at the same time, but that's OK because within milliseconds the working memory is suppressing the early signals using it's prediction of 'car' giving a uniform signal to feedback. The part of the WM that does this is called the episodic buffer, but it's not one brain region, it's several. Once the working memory has got 'car' it'll send that signal back through the whole cascade to inform the priors what to expect. Eventually motor movements (in this case saccades) are initiated on the basis of that expectation to focus attention on the areas of sensory input most likely to confirm the 'car' hypothesis.

Some models include a central executive (again, a cluster of regions, not one brain area), but Friston's model doesn't need one (one advantage of it) because the hierarchical structure doesn't require any further integration. There's never, as far as I know, been a hold account of how a central executive might work, and in fact it fell out of favour round about the time computational neuroscience matured Enoch to model hierarchical networks.

There are, as you say, other theories, but I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with them to give a good account.

Tononi has written a good summary in https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/comments/S1364-6613(98)01259-5, but it's payalled (I don't know if you'd have access).

Thanks! Fascinating.

Tononi's abstract:

"The brains of higher mammals are extraordinary integrative devices. Signals from large numbers of functionally specialized groups of neurons distributed over many brain regions are integrated to generate a coherent, multimodal scene. Signals from the environment are integrated with ongoing, patterned neural activity that provides them with a meaningful context. We review recent advances in neurophysiology and neuroimaging that are beginning to reveal the neural mechanisms of integration. In addition, we discuss concepts and measures derived from information theory that lend a theoretical basis to the notion of complexity as integration of information and suggest new experimental tests of these concepts."

Glad you found it interesting.

that the information "always" exists entangled in a substance, and so this leads to a monistic understanding. — Pop

Our physical Senses are able to detect Information (meaning) only in its "entangled" or embodied physical form. But human Reason is able to detect Information in metaphysical (disembodied) form (ideas; meanings). Like Energy, Information is always on the move, transforming from one form to another. Likewise, Energy is only detectable by our senses when it is in the form of Matter. For example, Light (photons; EM field) is invisible until it is transformed into some physical substance, such as the visual purple in the eye.

However, since Information/Energy can exist in both forms, physical (actual) and metaphysical (potential), it transcends those dualistic (either-or) categories into the monistic (both-and) class of Universality. :nerd:

That is more theology than physics. — Banno

No. It's Epistemology, and Ontology -- hence, appropriate for a Philosophy Forum. Your comments might be more appropriate on a Physics Forum.:smile:

I'm trying to understand your meaning of the word 'integrate'.

Consciousness integrates information. — Pop

Do you mean processes? Or combines/mixes? Some dynamic process?

integrated to a point — Pop

This didn't help. Do you mean information can be focused?
Is it mathematical like a calculation, dynamic process, or changing state?
I've read through most of the comments into the fourth page and I'm not getting it by the context. It just reduces to techno jargon to me.
And why does every 'thing' need to irreducibly contain information? So would you say something elementary like a hydrogen atom has some information pixies hanging about. How does that work. Why not make it easy on yourself and identify it as a hydrogen atom, period.

At least matter or matter-energy can be defined within a range by physics. The term 'information' is polysemic, meaning it has many different definitions in different contexts. So saying that 'everything is information' is not a meaningful statement, in my view. — Wayfarer

The confusion arises because metaphysics, and hence the natural sciences, must work their way to an answer by the logical structure of a dichotomy. The world must be broken into its complementary aspects.

The popular notion of information is that it is all about messages that convey meanings. Symbols that can be read. So Shannon's big step to a foundational model of information was to make the basic dichotomous distinction between signal and noise. Given some collection of material events - like crackles on a telephone line - what would we characterise as noise just because it was perfectly random as a pattern, and what would we characterise as signal because it was so clearly deliberate and intentional in its structure?

It was a short step from that to a view of information that was simply about the measurement of an environment's total capacity to be marked by discrete or atomistic events. The question was how many definite symbols could some physical system contain - how many binary 1s vs 0s - regardless of whether any meaning (or act of interpretation) was actually attached to such a mark. All marks just became treated as countable noise.

And that turned out to be its own deep question. Quantum theory showed that the classical physical realm had strict "holographic" limits to its carrying capacity. A volume of spacetime contained a finite number of countable degrees of freedom because every physical event or putative mark became a fuzzy uncertainty at the Planck scale. The logical question - "are you a 1 or a 0?" - became impossible to answer past a quantum limit.

So that is all very exciting from the natural science point of view. The whole of physics could be rebuilt on a metaphysics of marks - the smallest scale of definite events or countable degrees of freedom. It was a way to both recognise the underlying quantum nature of existence, and yet also apply the constraints of an emergent classical picture where reality is formed by a material capacity to ask the critical question of a spatiotemporal location - "are you a 1 or a 0?"

You will note how this rather turns the metaphysics of physics on its head, treating the existence of reality as a matter of inquiry. Can even the Universe be certain a binary question has a concrete answer? Well the Planck scale tells us where the countability of nature starts.

And of course, thermodynamics and entropy theory had arrived at the same equations for the same essential reason. The quantum limit of certainty was also the quantum limit of uncertainty, or disorder. So information and entropy were two ways of describing the same general thing.

Physics thus steered talk about information in the direction of talk about marks that were meaningless - or at least meaningful only in the simplest possible way. It developed the information theoretic framework which could measure the Cosmos's raw capacity for definite events - the pure dichotomy of particle and void, a happening or its absence.

And that both avoids the usual popular notion of information as physical marks that have some meaningful message - to an organism or mind - and also paves the way to a scientific account of meaning-making or higher level semiosis. If you have a clear and measurable definition of noise, then you can start to build a matching theory about signals and their interpretation - or organisms and their use of codes.

That is where cybernetics started to make its contribution - Gregory Bateson definition of information as "a difference that makes a difference". And biology generally is showing how organisms are semiotic - Peircean systems of interpretance.

So physics is being revolutionised by just asking the simple question of how does a reality based on quantum uncertainty even start to be organised enough to be considered a play of distinct marks.

This is a view of information that leaves out any receiver of the information. It is moot whether an event or degree of freedom is considered to be random noise or orderly signal as there is no higher meaning or symbolism being attached to the mark. The first step is just to discover the foundational thing of a counterfactual - the starting point of it being even meaningful to ask of anything: "are you a 1 or a 0? A presence or an absence? A something or a nothing?"

And then we can start to build towards a science of semiotics, a science of organismic meaning. This brings us to new basic principles like the epistemic cut, modelling relation, and other elements of biosemiotic theory.

We can recover the other sense of information as not just about countable physical differences, but differences that make a difference to someone as they are symbols being read as part of an exchange of messages.

So the natural sciences might seem to be confused about "information" as a physicalist notion. But in fact, they are breaking things down to be both far more simple, and far more complex, than the general folk notions of what "information" might mean.

Yeah, everything is a self organizing system. And the thing being organized is information. — Pop

... and what the natural sciences can carefully tease apart, folk metaphysics will gleefully smush back into ugly confusion.

So Shannon's big step to a foundational model of information was to make the basic dichotomous distinction between signal and noise. Given some collection of material events - like crackles on a telephone line - what would we characterise as noise just because it was perfectly random as a pattern, and what would we characterise as signal because it was so clearly deliberate and intentional in its structure? — apokrisis

Noise was a known problem before Shannon because their technology was analog. It was basically a mass of transmitters and receivers sprawled across the continent. There were all sorts of ways to suppress noise but in the real world there were too many variables to approach the problem purely logically. Enter Shannon.

So the natural sciences might seem to be confused about "information" as a physicalist notion — apokrisis

I myself wasn't saying that natural science was confused about this notion, but that the effort to understand everything in terms of information, as given in the original post, is too general to be meaningful. (But I'm hoping that my attempt to analyse it might be useful from the perspective of constructive criticism, I'm not just trying to throw stones.)

I think the two paragraphs under 'Some definitions' are confused.

Information is merely relations between physical entities viewed from our modeling perspective, a distinctly human formal causality. — Pop

What i think this is saying is that the mind generates a 'modeling perspective' which interprets the relations between physical entities, and that the ability to do this is something distinct to humans.

But then:

"Information" is a reifying of all the observed causal interactions between a given set of existents, and lacks independence from matter — Pop

So here I think the attempt is to avoid a dualism of mind and matter by saying that this modeling perspective doesn't exist separately from the material domain - ' The information a gene, quantum process etc. contains is not ontologically distinguishable from the structure of its components.'

But I think underlying this attempt is the assumption that material substance, or the domain of objects presented in everyday experience, is fundamentally real. So it's wanting to preserve a realist metaphysics, which can't help but be question-begging, because it's the very nature of the objective domain for which an explanation is being sought.

(The Wikipedia article on 'information' to which this passage links is not all that clear. If you look at the discussion on the 'talk' page of the article, you'll see that there has been some argument about the content of that article, which turns into a kind of index of different meanings of 'information' in various contexts.)

The whole of physics could be rebuilt on a metaphysics of marks - the smallest scale of definite events or countable degrees of freedom. It was a way to both recognise the underlying quantum nature of existence, and yet also apply the constraints of an emergent classical picture where reality is formed by a material capacity to ask the critical question of a spatiotemporal location - "are you a 1 or a 0?" — apokrisis

Yes, but there's that well-known quote from John Wheeler:

"It from bit" symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.

He doesn't seem to want to go full idealist, but it's hard to avoid. Article goes on:

Anton Zeilinger, Director of the Institue for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, explains: "My interpretation [of "it from bit"] is that in order to define reality, one has to take into account the role of information: mainly the fact that whatever we do in science is based on information which we receive by whatever means."

But can we go one step further? Can we say reality is information, that they are one and the same? Zeilinger thinks not: "No, we [need] both concepts. But the distinction between the two is very difficult on a rigorous basis, and maybe that tells us something." Instead, we need to think of reality and information together, with one influencing the other, both remaining consistent with each other.

Perhaps the answer will follow Einstein's great insight from one century ago when he showed that you can't make a distinction between space and time, instead they are instances of a broader concept: spacetime. In a similar way, perhaps we need a new concept that encompasses both reality and information, rather than focusing on distinguishing between them.

Sounds an awful lot like 'mind' to me.

Enter Shannon. — frank

Right. And Claude Shannon was an electronics engineer, dealing with a specific form of information, namely, information being transmitted across media. i don't know if he was at all concerned with 'information' as an abstract concept was he? I found this amusing anecdote somewhere on the Web:

Claude Shannon introduced the very general concept of information entropy, used in information theory, in 1948. Initially it seems that Shannon was not particularly aware of the close similarity between his new quantity and the earlier work in thermodynamics, but the mathematician John von Neumann certainly was. "You should call it entropy, for two reasons," von Neumann told him. "In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

There is a purported analysis of this here http://www.eoht.info/page/Neumann-Shannon%20anecdote

This whole subject is so ripe with metaphor and suggestion that you can get almost anything out of it.

Information is very boring, bookish, and formal. When we start to talk about other things, we're talking about energy. Information is that which ought to approach truth in writing.

And why does every 'thing' need to irreducibly contain information? — Mark Nyquist

It is logical. If we are to know about it, it will be via information of it. This is the simple reality.
Everything is information. You can negate ( Popper ) this statement by providing something that is not information! Don't do this at home, it is not logically possible. :smile:

It follows information is a co-element of any substance.

Quantum Information and Randomness

Once we start to describe a substance, we start describing its form , whether it be chemical, electrical, physical, etc. The way the form of a substance connects with its surroundings, is information of how substances are connected. So there is a lateral informational flow, of substance and it's surroundings, contained within our personal perspective of the object / substance. In the end everything is connected via information.

Right. And Claude Shannon was an electronics engineer, dealing with a specific form of information, namely, information being transmitted across media. i don't know if he was at all concerned with 'information' as an abstract concept was he? — Wayfarer

The information he was dealing with was a mixture of voice and carrier frequency. From his angle it was pretty abstract. He was a mathematician. Back then if you had a bachelor's degree in electronics, you knew everything there was to know about it. It was common for people to have multiple degrees with electronics engineering being one of them.

The information he was dealing with was a mixture of voice and carrier frequency. From his angle it was pretty abstract. He was a mathematician. — frank

But he wasn’t a philosopher. He was concerned with abstraction for practical reasons.

But he wasn’t a philosopher. — Wayfarer

As I understand it, initially Shannon called it a theory of communication.

But he wasn’t a philosopher. He was concerned with abstraction for practical reasons. — Wayfarer

Sure. This topic is on the border of science and philosophy of science.

In that article, the application to ‘information’ is mainly in respect of using entanglement to provide secure communications a.k.a. ‘quantum cryptography’. Nowhere does it say that information is a constituent of matter, unless I missed it.


And metaphysics.