Musings on information

What is information? Does it subscribe to a natural law of behavior analogous to the law of conservation of mass and energy? Does information obey the thermodynamic behavior law of entropy? What is information?

We might start by assuming, intuitively, that information is something that teaches us something. We might start by assuming information is the smallest bit, or any of larger bits, of knowledge. Or that information is something we learn, or something capable of teaching. Or that information is explanation of fact. Or that information is fact, when demonstrated in some way. Or that information is fact, even if not demonstrated, so long as it is fact capable of demonstration. Then of course, there is the colloquial equation that information is power. What does that mean? Does it mean anything on the level of defining what information is? And do any of the assumed definitions or explanations do any aesthetic justice to our understanding of what information is? So what at first seems an innocent term, information, reveals itself to at least exist in a state of complexity, or perhaps only of negotiated meaning. Perhaps this signifies that all communication is only negotiated meaning. But rather than taking the path of Wittgenstein and the philosopher-linguists, perhaps there is another way of looking at information that is both more meaningful and more comprehensive.

What does information do? It serves humans. Cultural examples of use abound: consumer information, traffic information, computer information, job information, route information, historical information…information as a noun can be modified by any number of words to signify a particular kind of information. And indeed, this is really the only way we use the word and the way we humans mean it 99 percent of the time. This is one sense in which information, to humans, is power. Because having, interpreting, and using information enables humans to fulfill some purpose; it helps us to do something we want or need to do. Information also serves other animal life, in the form of sensory information helping animals to survive, and indeed information enables all life to survive. When considered any kind of input or stimulus, information can be pheromones, chemical triggers, enzymes of a particular shape, genetic material signifying particular proteins, or any bit of existence that enables some form of life to respond. To what, it does not matter. So long as life responds, it necessarily is responding to information, if we would adopt this somewhat liberal definition. But beyond a glance it becomes much less liberal: If we accept terms like "input" and "stimulus" for the mechanisms of biological life, then what are these but information? Input requires an interior and an exterior from which information, in some form, travels and then successfully (or not) penetrates to an interior where the information means something to the interior that it does not necessarily mean in the exterior, or which it may not be capable of meaning in the exterior. So without too much digging, "input" must mean information. "Stimulus" is of the same order. The term requires that some system changes as a result of an interior or exterior fact that the system is adapted to respond to. It is information which triggers a response. And in this way humans are no different from their cells in that both systems respond to information. Responses on the human scale may be cultural or complex when compared to the often chemical responses on the cellular and microscopic scale, but in both cases the structure is analogous. Stimulus-response indicates the presence of information, even if we might disagree upon what information ultimately is. There's no doubt it's present in some form as evidenced by responses. Sometimes responses do not display evidence, but information will still trigger a response even if the response is not manifest. So this comes back to arguing that information is capable of teaching, to take teaching in its most elementary form and also to comprise more common meanings of teaching.

So information causes responses. Does anything else cause responses? That is, are we really saying anything significant by saying that information causes responses or is information the only thing that can cause responses? One way to answer this question is to draw the line regarding responses with life. As displayed above, life responds to information. Can nonliving things respond to information? We might be tempted to say that human technology responds to information, most explicitly, the electronic machines known as computers. But also all electronic machines because the basis of electronic technology is a predictable response when current is present or when it is not. So it seems that we cannot draw the line at life, since such nonliving machines demonstrably respond to information. Something must give here. Either the meaning of information is off, the meaning of technology is off, or the meaning of life is off. Perhaps, in broad brushstrokes, the fault is with what we mean by life, or living things. I will return to this point, which I believe is both important in terms of our understanding of information and what it may mean about the nature of the universe, and inconsequential in terms of any violent overturning of cultural norms of defining biological life.

An oblique turn will move us into a better position to see most comprehensively. A better way to answer the question of if anything else other than information causes responses is to look not at the systems into which information is input (i.e. living or nonliving) but rather to look at what bits of reality, in quasi-Humean fashion, do the penetrating of those systems. Are these bits, these signals, living or nonliving? Unless we consider organic compounds to be living in terms of themselves, the answer is going to be that they are without fail nonliving. So information does not live. On the human level, this is relatively easy to intuit: We communicate with one another by exchanging, distributing, or accumulating information, but it is not living in terms of itself. That is, facial expression are information about another human being's emotional state, but the expression is not alive. Similarly, words spoken or on the page are dead, to paraphrase a poet. Yet words speak. The information speaks, so to speak. But the information is not alive. When a baby cries, or vomits, or runs a fever, it is not the living baby which comprises information about the state of being of the living being; it is the information of the cries, vomit, or forehead temperature. On nonhuman scales, this point may be somewhat obscured because microscopic organisms themselves may be the instigators of information, for example, when viruses or bacteria invade a host. Bacteria are alive. They might also be construed to be the information causing the response of illness. But a closer examination shows that, like the analogies of human-scale communication, it is not the living bacteria but their behaviors that cause a response. They consume and reproduce and their consumption and reproduction are not alive. There is a deep isolation between living being and behavior, between beings and information.
So does it really make sense to divide information and being into nonliving and living respectively? Does this distinction make a difference? Here comes the first inversion of the intuitive response to the question What is information?

What is information?

Information is narrative is consciousness.

Is information neither created or destroyed?

No. Information is both created and destroyed.

Why? How do we know?

Because information multiplies across scales, like life—with life.

Here I will let the unsubstantiated claims penetrate into the consciousness of the reader while I make another oblique turn to enable a more comprehensive view of reality. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle rests upon the oft-cited example of human beings trying to directly observe the discrete position and energy of an electron. The example illustrates both the futile process of pure observation—observation implies interaction (in this case a controlled photon must bounce off the electron to indicate what is considered desired information, the position of the electron, but when the photon interacts with the electron to inform the human observer of the electron's location, its energy both changes the energy and position of the electron in question) and thus the concept underlying the theory of quantum mechanics—that we cannot know with certainty the happenings of the world of subatomic scales (which some have taken to mean by extension that we cannot know with certainty the happenings of the world on any scale, particularly, on our human scale). In so articulating the uncertainty principle, the example renders "information" on subatomic scales as impossible to achieve with certainty. This principle then undermines certainty on other scales, contributing to postmodernism, etc. But the example is inadequate philosophically because it assumes something about the nature of information that is dubious, and perhaps wrong. It assumes that the position of an electron is information. Operating under the assumptions about information above, that information causes a system to respond, or at least is capable of causing a response, is relative electron position information? The position of the hypothetical Heisenberg electron is not information. Why? Because information is behavior. Information behaves and causes or can cause responses. The behavior of an element is information (i.e. how its electrons interact with those of other atoms); the positions of particular electrons may be information, but the hypothetical position of the Heisenberg electron is not. The articulation of the physics principle response is caused by the thought experiment, not by the informationless-dubbed electron.

Because information is more than mere fact. The fact of the electron's position is uncertain because it cannot be observed. But information teaches, it causes response, it stimulates—that is not what a fact does. A fact is. Information does or can do. And so information is not uncertain. At least it is not made uncertain by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Facts, in their existence, obey natural laws. Information need not. Information is not a thing, but a kind of thing happening. In doing, information represents an interface between at least two systems. The interface operates through signals, or through facts, but the meaning is in the interface, not in the signal or the fact. Where the interior meets the exterior, there is information. We might also say that information conveys meaning. Meaning has no necessary physical root. This is another way of saying that context is necessary in explaining meaning. But our understanding of what information is has never changed even when our understanding of context increased.

So far this doesn't seem to mean anything. Here's why it might be highly significant.

If information conveys meaning, what else conveys or can convey meaning? To say that information conveys meaning, that it teaches, that it can teach, that it causes response, that it can, is not to prove information is narrative. But I will make the connection. Information is narrative. Information tells. Information tells what? A story. Tells whom? Us. Or life or living systems or systems capable of stimulus/response. One way to think about this and reconcile it more on a more intuitive level is to think in terms of scales. For example, the facial expression of the evolved primate is information that she is in heat. The facial expression tells potential mates and those systems capable of understanding the meaning that she is in heat. It doesn't follow the exposition/rising action/climax/falling action/resolution writers' pyramid, but nonetheless it tells a story. A simple story that the female wants to mate. Information (information) of this kind operates on a different scale than information (narrative) found in a children's book, or for that matter in King Lear. But insofar as each tells, each is identical in structure. Each is information and thus each is narrative. Only the scale, the complexity, and the meaning of the narrative differentiates the information.

So, of course, then, we can lose information (narrative). Stories are lost and found, then lost for good or transmuted or destroyed or forgotten. So too with information (information). We can lose our bank book, our computer hard drive can crash, our bodies wither and perish. And we can create information (narrative), witness not only writers and painters and those creative types, but everyone who converses about their day in a bar or birds that construct elaborate nests to attract females or anyone or thing that tells (a story). And we can create information (information), witness spreadsheets, mathematics, geography, scientific data and conclusions, satellite transmissions, advertising programs, and most importantly, human memory.

So viewing the physical law that neither matter nor energy is created nor destroyed but only transmuted, and viewing the fact of human memory, what conclusions can we infer? On some level—at one scale—human memory is caused by chemical and electrical and possibly even quantum-level systems interactions. But on the intuitive scale, human memory is attached to that philosophical beast known as consciousness because memory replays in our awareness. It is information created by the behavioral experience of living (information) and is information available to retell, reteach, recause response. It exists. And it tells. Back to memory and consciousness in a bit.

Einstein famously said "God does not play dice." The maintenance of his opinion of the ultimate orderliness of the universe set him up for disparagement from the quantum mechanicists, whose credo was uncertainty and whose only certainty was faith in probability. If the scientific leaps Einstein is more known for had not been borne out by corroborating scientific evidence, however, this assertion would have been perhaps less problematic, because the stature of his brilliance and his ideas would not have achieved their public brilliancy to contrast with the ascendance of quantum mechanics. The observation that stars in proximity to the sun appeared where Einstein's idea of relativity predicted them was information that corroborated it as a scientific theory. But without any way to test a hypothesis, it is not science. Lucky for Einstein, his ideas became testable in his lifetime. But his lifetime did not extend long enough for his ideas about God not playing dice to become testable. He didn't have the mathematics of chaos. The mathematics of chaos deals with large problems like the orderliness of large systems by examining system behavior at different scales. It doesn't look at the physical particulars of the things behaving in the systems; it examines their behavior. And so it is situated to deal with information across many scales because information has that in common with the mathematics of chaos. Information can operate through many different physical substances, information can come from matter or energy; it's the behavior of the matter or energy that counts because it's that behavior that tells, that's what is the information.

And so we are coming to something that looks like the old philosophical discriminations between form and content, existence or essence, or innate substance and attributive substance, the philosophical idea that there's an essential difference between an object's extension (its dimensions, mass, volume, and these directly quantitative characteristics) and its attributes (the wavelengths of light it reflects, the qualitative nature of its particulate emissions, its relative qualities like hardness or softness, etc. Because the new dichotomy that arises from looking at information as narrative and information as the meaningful interface between systems and information as the behavior with a capacity to teach or cause response is this: Capability vs. Behavior. Capability is existence. Behavior is function, action, potential information creation, destruction, change, or use. Capability is going to deal with physical laws of nature. Behavior is going to deal with how information moves, and what happens as a result. But behavior in this sense, dealing with information, has no necessary connection to the natural physical laws. In fact, it is already demonstrated that information does not operate like mass or energy—its very essence is in its creation and destruction, though like matter and energy it also transmutes from one form to another; perhaps unlike matter and energy, though, information transmutes across scales and multiplies across scale boundaries. This is what makes it so closely associated with life because that is also how life behaves. Life deals with information, brokers it like no other physical system. And in brokering information, living beings increase the information in the universe. This happens at the same time physical and thermodynamical entropic forces are necessarily and perpetually decreasing the total order of the universe. This is not a new idea, that life creates complexity in the face of entropy. But I do not know and have not read anything to suggest that information has been considered in the sense of information is narrative (is consciousness). For life is the primary teller of stories, the prime narrator, the information broker. On one scale, this consists of cell membranes and cell walls regulating the flow of different chemicals based on their shapes, so that information (shape) determines response (behavior, green or red stoplight into or out of the cell). On another scale, this consists of people telling stories to advance their culture to the younger generation, for it is through information and narrative (both explicit and implicit) that our behavior adapts on a cultural level as human beings. On a still more massive scale, our "information" technology is a new pathway, another circulatory system through which information travels and encounters still new and more interfaces with other systems. So when information is the common denominator, we might appreciate how it is the "God does not play dice." And chaos theory, unlike quantum mechanics, allows the perception of orderliness and disorder in system behavior across scales rather than intensely mining the deepest scales we can observe to discover principles that we hope unify all scales of existence. There remains a deep-seated linearity in such scientific enterprise, that if we only dug deep enough, we'd find the answer, and I do not mean to disparage the industry of this drive, but I do mean to suggest that the kinds of answers and the kinds of cohesive unity being sought for something as massive and comprehensive as a unified field theory must become even more comprehensive in its means of search as it is within the physical realm of forces. That is, instead of looking for an equation that ties together all observable forces and phenomena, we ought to look at all observable forces and phenomena and in observing their common behaviors and the way in which information moves into and out of different physical and nonphysical systems, use this broader mathematics, this broader language in order to arrive at something that would be the ultimate comprehensive explanation of all that is. It ought to make an oblique turn and treat the different forces as different scales, and then detect the patterns across these scales. Otherwise, the particulars of the different physics will forever mar a fruitful cohesion.

Information is not just the pattern—it's appreciating the pattern. Information depends upon appreciation. Appreciation makes information successful. And appreciation makes some sense of information. Hence the colloquial relationship that information is less (whole) than knowledge which is less (whole) than wisdom…and on. The emphasis on wholeness is an attractive one because it shares the aim of the would-be unified field theorists in comprehension. But if information is narrative, not simply fact, its communicative function makes the appreciation of fact informative while a simple fact is not. So there must always be some mechanism or some spark that ignites us from the scale of fact to the scale of information, something that makes it (information) more whole. Life does this. Somehow (we might say through evolution by natural selection). And humans do this too (through conscious appreciation of information patterns and through the creation of narrative). So consciousness is up one scale from narrative which is up one scale from information which is up one scale from fact. Consciousness is living narrative. Narrative is living information. Information is living fact. The linkages are here. The logical explanation may be lacking. And perhaps that is itself information (narrative (consciousness)). What is the spark? What comprises the link? Why does information work? These questions are unanswered except through consciousness, which raises other questions. Evolution (which ought to be seen as a chaotic system working across scales) might be the best answer, but it leaves philosophical gaps.

If you bang enough stuff together you get something new.

This works for human technology, from stone flake tools on up, and it works for biological life, through evolution by natural selection, and it works on cosmic scales with galaxies and stars and the mass of collapsing stars forming black holes. Reduction or accretion affects the matter and the energy of the physical universe, but it's the change in behavior that differentiates a red giant from a black hole, an Acheulian hand ax from a Clovis point, a DNA-based otter from a DNA-based chimpanzee. It's on the level of information that meaningful difference occurs regardless of the information's relationship to physical or cultural laws.

If a teacher came into class the first day of class and instructed his students "Come into class tomorrow with a completely new idea" what would happen? Could they do it? Where would such ideas come from? Where would the newness come from? It seems that something new must incorporate part of something older than itself, and therefore it cannot be completely new. So we come back to if you bang enough stuff together you get something new. The memory, the consciousness, the narratives, the information of those students would mix and mash and reduce to form their homework assignment, if they tried. The result would not be completely new, but it would have demonstrated the interplay of information across multiple scales as their completed assignment would represent a new narrative. Physically and compositionally it would not be unique. But the narrative would be unique. So its information would be unique. So the result would be more than the sum of its parts. The narrative would defy entropy because it is not bound by physical laws, and it represents one additional level of orderliness established in the universe, in this case, by a consciousness, which is itself a living narrative.

Thus a unified field theory must work with ideas (narratives) not atoms as its most basic component, for only through ideas (information) can it arrive at something comprehensive enough to unify across all observable scales (consciousness).

One final note. If information depends upon appreciation, or at least the capability of appreciation, then there are two interesting prospects for integrating this perception of information into the greater body of physics. One concerns "losing" information into black holes (for, the prospect of memory being an nonphysical repository for information suggests that while information can be created and destroyed, its creation ultimately outweighs its destruction as the memories of human beings, even if dead, contain or have contained lifetimes of information/narratives/consciousness. This line of feeling hooks in with many religions' sense of life after physical death because it is counterintuitive to believe that what has accrued as information/narrative/consciousness over a lifetime ceases total organization upon physical termination. This could be argued both ways, but it would be useful to know what happens to information on a quantum level that gets sucked into a black hole. How is this information lost? Does that loss of information compare with other scales of information loss, such as physical death? The other prospect involves dark matter and energy which scientists have proposed accounts for most of the observable mass of the universe although they cannot directly detect it. While there is no test for dark matter and energy, these somewhat nebulous terms have come to represent whatever it is that accounts for the unobservable mass (or rather, for the observed behavior of mass (information)). But this information is somewhat unappreciated. We don't know what it means. We don't know what systems are behaving to signal this information to us, so in effect the comparison is of dark matter and energy speaking gibberish to us: We hear but we do not appreciate. The use of scales to examine whatever dark matter and energy are in terms of information is perhaps instructive. For the physical universe, let us apply an analogy to the fact-information-narrative-consciousness relationship. Energy is living matter. Matter is living (dark matter & energy). Again, what connects the scales is unclear, but perhaps thinking in terms of scales and systems is valuable.

Finally, what is the implicit primary purpose of all information regardless of its scale or meaning? To be remembered.

-Michael Timm
December 3, 2005