What Words Are Not

I think the three type of media do have something in common, though, and that is the fact that the same serial stream of digital data can be produced from them physically without interpretation. I’m not sure the sequence of, say, zeroes and ones, is intrinsically information. Doesn’t it have to be interpreted before it is information? (Nothing is ‘informed’ otherwise.)

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Well there are different definitions of the word physical. From Merriam-Webster…

1a : of or relating to natural science
b(1) : of or relating to physics
(2) : characterized or produced by the forces and operations of physics
2a : having material existence : perceptible especially through the senses and subject to the laws of nature // “everything physical is measurable by weight, motion, and resistance”— Thomas De Quincey
b : of or relating to material things
3a : of or relating to the body

As a physicist, clearly the most important definition for me is the first two of these (different dictionaries have lists which are somewhat different in order and number). Measurability makes something capable of study by the physical sciences (and all measuring scales are ultimately arbitrary). It is the last definition which is the least significant to either science or philosophy since this would make the mind non-physical by definition. It is also the last definition in addition to equating it with the word “tangible” which contributes the most confusion. But by the first two definitions the capability of measurement is the essence of physicality. It is the one distinction of real substance for tangibility can be considered nothing more than a subjective experience resulting from the interaction of electromagnetic fields.

Come on, y’all are making this way more complicated than it needs to be. It’s very, very simple. Consider another medium: take the DVDs for the entire Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and translate the binary to a series of 1’s and 0’s on paper. Then you have the entire movie recorded as black symbols on paper. In a thousand years that info could be translated from the pattern of 1’s and 0’s back into a pattern of sound waves and light waves. It is objective. It is intrinsically there, whether anyone translates it or not. It is available, like a book sitting on a shelf. Scientists take it for granted that information is available like that everywhere in the universe—available to be translated such as the equations for photosynthesis or for gravity were discovered (not authored) and translated. Whether we discover and translate such information, it is there.

Now yes, of course, since both the paper and the DVD’s are both physical, they both have physical things in common. For example, they both have electrons. Obviously. But when I say they don’t need to have any physical qualities in common, I mean that as mediums of information, the DVD’s carry it as a series of bumps and dents in plastic, whereas the paper carries it as a series of black symbols—two completely different physical media with exactly the same information in common. Whatever you want to call that information—a “stream”, an “emergent property”—it has zero physical properties. There is zero ambiguity in that statement.

Now The Lord of the Rings movies are a pretty complex bundle of information. So consider a much simpler piece of information: the number 11. (I said earlier that my point is exactly the same as observing that mathematics is immaterial.) Consider, for example, eleven apples sitting on a table—large, red, juicy, sweet, crisp apples. Now one of the apples has eleven small bites taken out of it, and so eleven fruit flies are doing the Macarena on it—a dance with eleven steps. That’s four different ways of conveying the meaning of the word eleven. Yet we can look right at each one of them and observe the absence of any physical qualities in that number. Yet the objective information is available to be discerned/counted—again, like a book on a shelf.

Thus an immaterial reality is objective and just as “real” as the material reality (or as “real” as the meaning of the word real is real, <=).

The meaning of the word eleven is a count that is 1 greater than 10. You provided 4 examples of using that meaning of the word. They are not different ways of conveying the meaning.

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My point is that the numbers are immaterial. They have zero physical qualities even though they are objective. In your answer, you represented them as black symbols. You can also represent them as a pattern of beads on an abacus, a pattern of knots in a rope, etc. Regardless, what is the meaning behind the medium? It is pure, nonphysical/immaterial meaning.

Sorry but the plain fact remains is that the spirituality you are selling is that that of Plato and Neoplatonism and for me this contradicts the very reasons I believe in a spiritual aspect to reality in the first place.

Everything physical can be considered an encoding of information in the same medium of particles and forces. Often they have a dynamic structure that maintains itself by replacing its material components from those in its environment and this applies not only to living organisms but to other things like hurricanes and tornadoes. This is why many physicist will consider information to be the very essence of all things physical.

Frankly reducing spirituality to something like this is to do away with it altogether and what you really have is naturalism again. You provide the perfect basis for the naturalists and atheists to simply say that such spirituality is simply an outdated and inferior explanation of nature and science is the far more rational explanation of the same things.

So to clarify once again… I am not saying that the spiritual (non-physical) does not exist, only that it is a mistake to identify these which information, ideas, and other objects of mental activity. It doesn’t do justice to the spiritual and it doesn’t work as a means of establishing the existence of the non-physical either.

Only if you decide in advance that the meaning of this pattern of knots is a count of eleven. Patterns mean nothing if there is no agreement as to what the pattern means. You could say it is the agreement that leads to the information. Your DVD example could represent a collection of random numbers instead of a movie if that is the agreement as to what the DVD represents.

My understanding is that anything with a particular, distinguishable order constitutes information, shuffling of a given order is an increase in entropy, so that does not rest on intelligibility. This can get very arcane. I have nowhere near the training to read, say, Hawking’s academic papers on the black hole information paradox, so I am not qualified to make contributions towards a physical understanding of information. Once someone has gained the required mathematical skills and the attention of the academic community, then I am inclined to listen to what they have to say.

Interpretation is an interesting question, and I’m not sure what to make of it all yet. For instance, the color green can be defined as a wave length of light, or a physiological response to that light, but that does not really capture our perception of it. Our perception is a reality, but of what kind? Color perception is just a very simplified aspect of our consciousness. While a DVD encoring a picture of a verdant green forest is not remarkable in terms of digital sequences, our interpretation of that information is another level of phenomena. Information itself is entirely explicable in physical terms. The interpretation of information, however, while processed in our brains and so material, is at least somehow emergent. It is remarkable that in all the randomness in the universe, there are little packages of highly organized matter - that would be us - that purposefully channel energy to organize other matter by increasing overall entropy. To me, the existence of consciousness and purpose is the fascinating question.

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There is a lot I don’t know about information theory, or Shannon Information or all that … so perhaps my following speculations, ignorant as they may be, might become the occasion of reducing that ignorance.

All those zeros and ones on the DVD might well be indistinguishable from noise to any aliens who can read them. For one thing, if we assume near-perfect data compression - then in fact they are nearly perfectly “random”. Alternatively (and without regard to any compaction) the entire movie could be encrypted using a random (noise-generated) key that is as long as the data itself. In that case, the so-encrypted data and the truly random key itself are now truly indistinguishable until brought together.

In other words - information may sometimes exist only in the eye of the beholder (decoder). If on a long mountain hike I pick up a conspicuous rock along the way and carefully set it down on the opposite side of the tree where I found it, that will mean absolutely nothing to anybody else who comes along afterward. UNLESS … somebody knew about that rock and tree, and I pre-arranged with them that if they saw it moved thus, then that means I had been along that way. Now the otherwise purely natural status of the situation suddenly became information … but only to the one person who knew to interpret it as such. There is something about information that prevents it from being such in the absence of any possible interpreters who know something of the encoder and the encoding so used.

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True, but to transfer those zeros and ones from one substrate to another must maintain the bit order, so that would be information. Actually, even transferring a bit order originally created by what is indeed noise to another medium is information, in that the arrangement is a particular one of a much larger set of possibilities. So intelligibility is something distinct from information.

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Yes! - thanks for adding that basic clarification.
And it seems to me that it is intelligibility that exists entirely in the minds of the communicators (transmitters and correspondingly-knowledgeable recipients).

Indeed, if you see the number 22 written by itself on a piece of paper, and know nothing of who wrote it or why, then it is not information to you of any meaningful kind. You may recognize the numerals and so share the vague concept of that quantity with somebody - so it may be “intelligible” to you in that sense. But not nearly so intelligible as to the person who had just asked the author how old he was. To that person, the arrangement of ink on the paper has a meaning and intelligibility that it can never have to the rest of us who know nothing of the context.

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Platonism tries to tell you what information is–Platonic Forms and all that they entail. The materialistic establishment has many other names for the mystery–qualia, memes, items in a superseded ontology, etc.

By contrast, I’m trying to avoid interpreting the facts and simply pointing to the facts. I’m just pointing out what information is not. It’s not physical. This is something that naturalistic establishment zealously insists cannot be true. Especially in the realms of neuroscience and psychology: they presuppose that we are our brains. But the brain obviously cannot perceive something immaterial (I have a separate post for this). Therefore, they will not tolerate challenges to the presuppositions of materialism.

But it makes no difference whether anyone can rightly interpret the information or not. It is still objective. For example, for many years we thought that much of the DNA sequence was static junk. Now we’ve realized that there is more there.

Similarly, space at first appeared to be full of mostly random, meaningless data. But then, all at once, the data was brought into focus, compressed, and translated into elegant sentences like “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.”

Slow down there – you have shown that at all. It’s not at all clear to me what you mean by ‘information’, since you seem to be referring to very different things with the term. Information in the sense of a message is very much not objective: any string can code for any message, so that interpretation is inherently subjective.

Indeed.

Yeah, now we have even more reason to think that most of the DNA is meaningless junk. (Not ‘static’ though, since DNA keeps changing.)

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Intelligibility is an interesting discussion. But my main point is still simply that the information (the meaning behind the medium) is immaterial, regardless of how subjective or objective the interpretation of that information is, and regardless of how well we are able to understand it. Whether it is the objective information conveyed by the nucleic acid bumps on a DNA molecule (which I personally cannot translate at all), or the objective information carried by stellar light waves (which I only have a vague understanding of), or the both objective and subjective information carried in a wireless download of the Les Misérables song “J’avais rêvé d’une autre vie” (which I can certainly enjoy even though I don’t speak French)—all the information carried by those various media is likewise nonphysical.

As to how we comprehend it and debate the interpretation of it, that’s a whole other issue. (Which is why I tried starting another post on it.) But the simple evidence for an immaterial reality–that’s huge. That changes everything. If we acknowledge that, for example, pi (3.14…) is just as objective and useful as a chunk of iron ore, that changes everything.

The naturalistic establishment [ mainstream science ] obviously knows the difference between CD encoding and a song, or words transcribed from papyrus to stone. How is this a new insight that changes everything? How do you think that they missed something which has been blindingly obvious for thousands of years?

This would require that it is possible to have information without material. No paper, digital media, just the cold vacuum of empty dark space. Otherwise, as has been pointed out by Mitchell, information is material in a similar sense as heat is material phenomena.

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But it does if you want to translate from one form to another. The only way to do that is to understand how the original data is interpreted and how the changed data will be interpreted. Otherwise you get GIGO.

Exactly. If you translate the pattern of raised dots from one medium to another, it really matters whether it’s the shape of the dots or their color that represents the relevant information.

Regardless, the point is that it is objective. If part of it is random and meaningless (i.e. junk), it’s not because we have declared it to be so but because we have discovered it to be so. The information in DNA was there long before Watson and Crick et al discovered it.

Of course its not a new insight. Many are aghast that the establishment absolutely insists on the presupposition of materialism–on figuring out, for example, “How Matter Becomes Mind”, as the title of a recent Scientific American article put it.

No, you’ve made an entirely arbitrary statement there. My point is that if two different physical media can have exactly the same information in common without needing to have any physical qualities in common, then that information has no physical qualities.

However, since you bring it up, infinity is something that cannot have any material representation. By contrast, the number 5 can be imaged through 5 abacus beads, five knots in a rope, V apples, etc. But infinity is, literally unimaginable. Yet it is as necessary (via calculus and trig) for all our modern technology as is a power plant.