Comments on: Information is physical

By: Mike Cane

Mike Cane — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:14:33 +0000

What a shock it was for me to trip across this post. I had this revelation on my own about a decade ago and friends would look at me as if I’d dropped my brain when I tried to explain this to them. Thanks!

By: Agnius

Agnius — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:42:05 +0000

But the number 171 is itself representation of quantity in decimal system. Can we think about quantities without representation of it in ANY numeral system ? Obviously NOT.
Think about history of counting - in prehistoric times counting was only done with the help of body parts - especially fingers (even now this is used for teaching children of counting). Only in Upper Paleolithic appeared other forms of counting - by using tally sticks for example. And with the help of progressing civilization we learned counting with many other things - including computers. So we can say that with the evolution of human, abstraction of numbers (and counting) gets “more abstracted”. But what this means in reality ? By looking back into our history, we can safely claim that “more abstracted” integers just means our ABILITY of transfering one representation of numbers into bigger amount of numbering systems. So abstraction is only indicator of how much we understand patterns in nature - the better our knowledge about nature - the better abstractions we are capable to produce. And of course as Daeniken said - abstractions (be it number, or something else) always exists in physical form, in our heads as movement patterns of electrical charges in brain cells - neurons.

By: ox69

ox69 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:12:57 +0000

I tend to think about information as pattern of something. However in general information is ambigous term. For example - what information is here ?
___
| |

One may be able to say that it is
1) Number Pi.
2) Nail head
3) Simply 3 distinct lines
n) …
n+1) Just some set of black pixels on screen
n+2) Places on monitor which emits no photons.
n+m) …
So what really is that “thing” depicted above ???
The answer is - there is no answer without the chosen rules about How to extract information from that, or How to map given “thing” to the knowledge which we already have ?
Clearly, this kind of transformation is done only by intelligent being - us humans (so far). So this leads to conclusion that information (or modelling of reality) is clearly a property of mind.
In the end, in reality there are no things such as Integers,Pi, Nail, Lines, pixels, screen or photons, /insert other abstraction here/. There is only a plain reality from which we always try to capture some patterns or construct new patterns by the needs we have - which is of course very nice.

By: Daeniken

Daeniken — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:19:20 +0000

There is one question that cuts to the core of this matter:

Can one give any example of the presence of information without it being tied to some physical representation?

Representation of information might be inkblots on a paper - certainly physical. What makes those inkblots a representation of information? I’ts their connection to something else in an observer capable of processing them. So it can say to me “beware” and it has a meaning to me because my mind connects that configuration of inkblots into ideas about danger. Information itself in that situation is this connection and it’s no less physical than the representation, because at any given time it embodies some physical form - pattern of photons, my neural pathways etc.

Numbers are representations of quantities, not pure information whatever that means. They make a reference to some quantity in a mind of an observer and that relation constitutes the information - the match between a physical instance of a symbol and observers ability to connect that symbol to a certain quantity.

There is a distinction between representation of information and information itself but both of these have always a physical form.

By: jofr

jofr — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:04:54 +0000

Interesting post. I think it is the representation of an information which is material and physical, not the information itself. For example the prime number 171 looks in base 16 like 0xAB and in base 2 like 10101011. The representation in a certain base is physical, not the number itself.

By: Barry Cipra

Barry Cipra — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:31:04 +0000

There is a very simple explanation for why your laptop has gained no weight from all the information you’ve been putting in it: By organizing files there, you are reducing the entropy inherent in the bits and bytes of your machine’s memory. And we all know what a dense, heavy concept entropy is….

By: Twitter Trackbacks for bit-player » Blog Archive » Information is physical [bit-player.org] on Topsy.com

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:50:49 +0000

[...] bit-player » Blog Archive » Information is physical bit-player.org/2009/information-is-physical – view page – cached I’m still busy digitizing a lifetime’s accumulation of clippings from magazines and journals, along with heaps of old tech reports, memos, and miscellaneous other cruft. There’s something… Read moreI’m still busy digitizing a lifetime’s accumulation of clippings from magazines and journals, along with heaps of old tech reports, memos, and miscellaneous other cruft. There’s something slightly eerie about the process. So far I’ve emptied out a dozen file drawers, run several hundred pounds of paper through the scanner, and created thousands of PDFs. Yet my laptop is not a gram heavier. The glib explanation is that I’m just scraping pure information off the pages, leaving behind the ink and cellulose; I’m saving the bits and recycling the atoms. But is information so readily dematerialized? One of the manila folders I have just dredged up out of a filing cabinet is bulging with publications by the late Rolf Landauer, including several papers on the theme “Information is physical!” Read less [...]

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:52:36 +0000

If this stuff is really precious you might want to consider off-premises storage of your digital data. JungleDisk, which uses Amazon S3 (at least three copies of all data in Amazon data centers), is what I use, but I don’t have any video and not too many images, so costs are trivial — a few dollars a month.

(I promise this is not sp*m.)

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:58:03 +0000

Lovely post, thanks.

Your musings on the physicality of information put me in the mind of the works of science fiction author Greg Egan. I’ll recommend the short story Luminous in support of the necessity of information being tied to the physical universe, and perhaps the novel Permutation City as an exposition on the opposite view. Happy reading!