Well, maybe Prince Charles was right and it is worthwhile to talk to plants and make them feel good.
The very first book I ever read was about how trees can walk.
yeah.
I also enjoyed the Ents in Lord of the Rings.
I think trees know when they are loved and grow well in response. That certainly looks like the case here in Austin. 
How would you define thought then? Would it be considered proto-thought or mentality?
How unfortunate that scientists are so vulgarly loose with the words they choose to describe their experiments. Yet another attempt to get headlines. Headlines and publicity make it much easier to attain grant money and project funding. How unfortunate.
The article begins with a false premise.
“Plants are able to “remember” and “react” to information contained in light, according to researchers.”
There is no information inherently contained in light. Light is a medium. It is not a message.
Everything else described in the article is simple cause/reaction. There is a huge chasm between cause/reaction and thought/action.
Notice how it says “react” and not “act upon”. Big difference. Codified information is acted upon, not reacted to.
Information Theory teaches us that there are extremely precise protocols that must be adhered to in order for any communication to take place. There must be a transmitter, receiver, alphabet A, alphabet B, error correction, redundancy, semantics, syntax, and noise reduction. Take any part of this procedure away, and there is no possibility that information can be communicated.
I’ve seen these types of articles before. They are always claiming intelligent plants. Yet a deeper look clearly illustrates simple cause/reaction, sensory equipment reacting to stimuli. The plant has no more of a memory than a rock concert glow stick. Sure, the reaction may take some time to subside, but this is a poorly chosen metaphorical use of the term memory. There is no coding structure to form a memory upon. And reacting to stimuli is not the same as acting upon codified instructions. The sunlight didn’t speak to the plant, and the plant cannot receive messages from the sun.
Science should be more careful with the words chosen to describe their observed phenomenon. For in this case, once again, science is literally and unwittingly giving support to ancient myth and folklore of talking trees, whispering streams, and burning bushes that somehow give instructions to birth a violent nation. It’s just absurd, and turns the scientific community into a parody of the religious fanatics they mock.
The next thing you know, they’ll be advertising Miracles in the Garden.
beyondthesidewalks.countrysidema … he-garden/
and giving science the credit for it. Are you ready to pay tithes to the holy church of Scientism?
It’s just absurd.
Household Windows can “Think and Remember”
You can try this yourself and see…
Strike a window with a hammer on one edge, and a chemical reaction carries the information all the way to the other side. And even in the dark, days later, it shows signs of remembering the event without further human assistance.
I don’t believe that it’s so absurd. Plants are reactive to sunlight, and I don’t see why light can’t contain information. After all, there are different kinds of light.
As for “miracles,” I don’t know how you would explain places like Findhorn. It’s pretty amazing.
That’s not memory. That’s actually entropy.
It’s no different than taking a warm rock in the sun and placing it in the freezer. Just because it doesn’t react immediately to freezing doesn’t mean that the rock has memory of the heat. It just hasn’t fully succumb to entropic decay yet.
Memory is a form of thought codified as information. It involves image/object relationships. Memory is immaterial. It has no physical structure. Humans arrange physical structures (mediums) to represent past thoughts. The plant could be used as a medium, for instance, if a human arranged a number of them into the shape of a heart. That shape represents a thought of a loved one, in memory of, our time together last summer. But the arrangement itself is not the memory. It only represents the memory, the thought.
The medium is material substance (arranged objects). The message/memory is an immaterial agent (thought). The process of codifying representation is called Information. The act of creating thought in-to-form. The “ation” designates an action. Thus, in-form-ation.
This plant experiment is the result of cause/reaction. It does not demonstrate thought/action. That requires a genuine code that conforms to Claude Shannon protocols of Information Theory. Our entire modern lives are run by these protocols.
As Norbert Weiner tells us:
“Information is information. Not energy and not matter. Any materialism that does not allow for this cannot survive in the present”
Cybernetics, p147
Cause/reaction is not the same as thought/action. You are correct to note that plants react to sunlight. But they do not act upon sunlight. Your skin does the same thing. But your skin has no memory of the sunlight. It doesn’t have the equipment necessary to codify a memory into representation. Cause/Effect is not the same as Thought/Affect.
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. First of all, information is not a substance that can be contained. It is immaterial. It is not a physical object. Refer to the Norbert Weiner quote above. Information is not like water in a bucket. Information is referred to. It is pointed to. It is referenced. But it is non-physical. We need a tool to reference Information. That tool is called Code.
Code is a material lens that allows us to view the immaterial agent of Information. If there is no code, then there cannot possibly be any Information.
Light can be used as a medium to express a message. Fiber optics and lighthouses use light as a medium all the time. But the light is not the message. The light is codified to represent a message. Light by itself has nothing to say. It has no mind that intends to say anything at all. But a mind can use it as a medium, just like smoke signals, color code, vibration, or ink and paper. It always takes a mind to form a medium into information. The cosmos is blind deaf and dumb. It cannot form messages on its own.
The entire universe is amazing. But it does not contain or represent information. The cosmos does not speak.
Sorry to intervene, but I have some thoughts on this. Isn’t memory simply an impression? We normally consider it from a mental/brain perspective, but I believe its a bit more universal. Whether or not plants retrieve information/memories (at least like we do), is up for consideration, but an organic reaction to sunlight in itself implies some form of implicit recognition embedded within the plant species that necessitates a uniform reaction to that sunlight. You could describe these reactions to sunlight as purely physical and reactionary, but the self preserving nature of the behavior points to more than a simple energetic response to force (such as the wind blowing a flower). What is occurring is an actual response, originating from the plant itself. In order to respond in such a way, there must be some form of self preserving intelligence native to the plant species. This “intelligence” can be understood as the plants own energetic information, which is ‘set’ to respond to particular perturbations in a particular way. Is this not a rudimentary form of memory?
I’d also disagree about the skin not having “the equipment necessary to codify a memory into representation”. How then, does UV radiation produce skin cancer? Damaged cells may seem like a simple cause and effect reaction to the UV, but the re-population of the damage is a clear indication that in some way, the cells have remembered their harming experience of light.
I believe it to be in our nature to separate information from its manifestation. Information isn’t just immaterial, it’s also the material. It is everything we can see and not see. It is the physical. We experience a particular manifestation or representation of that physical information through the use of our senses. Per this understanding, light is information. It doesn’t need to “carry” the information per se, because it naturally conveys information through its presence or physicality.
We utilize light as a medium for communication, but our utilization does not negate its own natural provocations. If a plant must “convert” light into energy, what exactly does it convert? I’ll admit I am not physicist or biologist (it must be apparent), but I have a natural inclination that light itself must be informative. Otherwise, how could anything respond to it? If light was entirely devoid of information, it would not exist and essentially go unnoticed.
Could you expound on this.
Actually its more accurate to say that memory is an accessible stimulus altered state. And memory is probably the most material thing associated with thought. It’s function is to be firm/material.
Accessible impression.
Anything can store the effect and thus the occurrence of an event and thus “memorize” the event. But to “remember” the event really requires that the object re-access the effect so as to react due to the effect - “re-member”.
In the plant, the effect is merely prolonged into the night, it is not re-accessed so as to respond differently. The plant displays hysteresis, not really any capability to re-member. An alteration in effort would have to be involved to display remembering. A plant, as far as I know, is always trying the same simple effort and merely accomplishes what it is allowed by its environment (until it seeds anyway).
If the seeds showed signs of carrying forth altered effect from an event experienced by the plant, a “genetic memory” could be claimed. To a minimum degree such is no doubt true for the species pool memory although I doubt the seeds reflect any direct experience of the parent plant. By the number of seeds, a species gene pool memory is always being updated.
As far as “thinking”, thought requires abstract associations (“form”) accessed internal to the object and a objective/purpose being sought by the object using those abstract associations.
A thought is not a memory. A memory is the actual altered state, the “arrangement”.
The relevant philosophical question is whether an arrangement is “material”.
That’s a good note.
I’m afraid I have to consider information to be material (“matter”). It is pretty obvious in metaphysics, but probably obscure to information theorists.
Accessible in-form-ation is memory. The universe has accessible in-form-ations, memories of its past. Material objects are no more than that.
If a plant has memory, then after every period of darkness, the leaves would be arrayed to the exact position of the rising sun of the last period of light. When you can show this, you might be able to call it memory. You can’t. Coming from darkness, a plant will slowly turn its leaves to obtain maximum light energy, but this is simply a photochemical reaction, not memory.
So then, I think what you are extrapolating here is the distinction between what I would refer to as a “conscious remembering”, marked by a re-accessing (re-accessing implies something has to be re-accessing, ie. consciousness), and “perpetual memory”, which is the inevitable and enduring differentiation that occurs once an object has been affected. In light of this, I then have to consider whether or not the latter form of perpetual effect could be considered a proto-type of the conscious remembering described. If so, the enduring effect would be a rudimentary form of remembering, as the “re”-ing can be said to be perpetually occurring through the continued stabilization of the physical state in the moments affecting the registered effect. What seems to distinguish this from the conscious remembering is a greater aspect of time, whereas the original state of effect never truly goes away, but can be restrengthened after a period of cessation.
Only because of our erroneous propensity to personify objects and/or objectify persons. We’ve become so accustomed to describing everything subjectively with metaphor that we’ve forgotten that science has no place for metaphor whatsoever. Instead, we promote our opinions, disguise them as theories, and justify ourselves behind the religion of science.
Does the plant know? Or do humans know, through mindful observation, that the plant is reacting? Memory is a property of mind. It takes a mind to even claim that plants have memory. Can plants forget? Humans can, and that’s why we arrange physical objects (code) to re-mind us. Can a plant be re-minded? Shall we delve into the mind of plants? Perhaps so, for if they can remember, but not forget, and have no need for being re-minded, then humans may actually benefit from this pursuit.
But perhaps we simply have a propensity for personifying objects, and any such pursuit would prove unfruitful… (oh, did I just personify a fruit tree?)
We must be very careful with the words we choose when speaking of scientific pursuits.
It is implied because of our propensity to personify objects which have no person hood to personify. Reactions don’t imply. People do. People imply the craziest notions based upon their observations. Implication is a property of mind. Reactions have no mind to imply anything with.
And it’s even worse when compounded in the form of “…in itself implies some form of implicit…”. Now we’ve gone circular because we’re implying the implicit. All to justify a plants ability for recognition. A recognition “embedded” within? How is event recognition embedded without first having been experienced? Now the plant must experience an event first, then somehow embed that experience in memory? Next thing you know we’ll be talking about plant opinions about their experiences. Let’s not go there.
I fear that science is unwittingly supporting dogmatic religious propositions of a talking universe, a nature that speaks and thinks like humans do. Perhaps this is some form of subconscious attempt at relating to nature better… I don’t know.
Your argument is with Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon and all Information Sciences, not with me. See below for the definition of information that I adhere to and let me know if you have any issues with it after reading the paper linked.
To believe that information is everywhere, and that all physical objects are a source of information, and that information is somehow communicated to humans, well… that is supportive of mysticism and dogmatic religions that promote that trees can talk and streams can whisper. I don’t want to let science go there.
I can’t really buy that as stated, on a number of different levels.
Accessible to/by whom or what? Do you speak of potentiality, in the sense that a plant has the potential to access a certain state if the conditions are proper? Or do you mean accessible to the sentient being that qualifies such a state as information?
For instance, a snowflake has no potentiality to achieve a spherical shape. Yet it forms by stimulus of chaotic forces. It is cause/reaction.
And a dog has no potentiality to access that (so called) information, for he doesn’t have the capacity to reason shapes or concepts to the same degree as a human observer.
So which accessibility are you speaking of? The potential to achieve the state, or the potential to observe the state?
Regardless, I still don’t accept either one of those potentialities as valid.
Its essence may be represented by the firm/material. But its function is to inform. It informs us of past thoughts. And it accomplished this by being associated with a symbolic arrangement of matter/energy. But it is always an association, never to be conflated as unified. It’s still an image/object relationship.
You must be careful here, because later you say that information is matter. But here you claim that memory is material association. The only way to resolve these statements is to believe that memory is not information. Do you promote that?
Right there is the crux of our disagreement. I clearly see a difference between cause/effect and thought/affect.
Effects are not stored. They are caused. They are caused by chaos. There can be no memory for there were never any intentions involved in the first place. The effect, doesn’t know, that it’s been effected.
Affects are stored. They are stored by the thoughtful process of codifying information. The affect is a physical representation of knowledge. The affect is knowledge made manifest into a physical condition.
But reactions are effects. Cause/Reaction means the same thing as Cause/Effect.
So nothing reacts due to the effect. Things react due to causes. Effects manifest due to causes.
This is why it is so important to acknowledge the differences between Cause/Effect-Reaction and Thought/Affect-Action.
Look, you’re going to think I’m picking on you, but I’m really not. I have this problem with all of society, and especially science. Plants don’t try. That denotes desire, and plants don’t desire. My issue is not with you. I’m sure to some degree you used that word metaphorically. But society and science in general have been more and more inclined to personify objects that don’t deserve personification. It causes semantic misunderstandings. I don’t believe there is any room for metaphorical terms being used in science whatsoever. My concern is actually deeper than that, for along with personifying objects, society has also grown very comfortable with objectifying people. The term Darwinism comes to mind.
When discussing science, I try my best to be a hard linguist. It’s really nothing personal I assure you. I’m very much enjoying our discussion.
Again I disagree. The arrangement still refers to an event past, which is no longer material. And the event past is not reducible to a mere arrangement. For instance, that arrangement means something to me, but means nothing to another. There is meaning behind the arrangement. But the arrangement itself is not meaning. If it were, then it would mean the same thing to everyone, whether they had experienced the event or not.
Arrangement (Code) is a material object that represents and immaterial agent. If it did not represent an immaterial agent of thought or memory, then it would not be code. It would just be meaningless scribbles.
You’re speaking of fractals from the complexity of chaos. That has nothing to do with codified information whatsoever. In fact, they are complete opposites. Information must be represented upon a code. Fractals are not code.
Fractals cannot be duplicated exactly.
Code can be duplicated exactly.
Fractals are irreducible.
Code is always reducible.
Fractals only represent themselves.
Code always represents something other than itself.
Fractals are the result of an outcome.
Code predicts an outcome.
Fractals are observable phenomenon.
Code describes observable phenomenon.
Fractals are mindless.
Code requires mind.
Tree rings do not tell us about the growing seasons. A snowflake contains no information.
It takes an observer to codify a description of these phenomenon, and then, and only then, do we have information. Our thoughts about these phenomenon are manifest into a physical form.
Ring #1 2cm
Ring #2 3cm
Ring #3 1cm
Nothing about this codified observation says anything at all about the Growing Seasons. But when another observer describes their observations about Growing Seasons, we then infer a relationship between the two sets of sentient authored data. Thinking otherwise suggests that Tree Rings are spreading rumors about the Growing Seasons, or the Growing Seasons are whispering in the ear of the Tree Rings. That’s not how it works.
Yes, I’m familiar with physicists changing the meaning of information to suit their particular discipline. They use the process model.
This is unfortunate, and only demonstrates a lack of knowledge about what information actually is. It also has the affect of bringing about a great deal of confusion in interdisciplinary discussions.
The typical physicist will define information as: The state of a system. Such as tree rings. But they’ve leapfrogged over an important quality. Information is a description of the state of a system. Information refers to and represents the state of a system, but it is not the actual state of a system. And therefor, neither is memory.
It is particularly unprofessional for any scientific discipline to hijack a word and redefine it to suit their specific purpose. Get your own word, but don’t disregard that which has already been established. It slows progress, births dogma, and is very misleading to students.
There is a call to correct this truancy. And as such, I adhere to the Discipline Independent Definition of Information as set forth by UNC School of Information and Library Science.
sils.unc.edu/
Specifically, refer to A Discipline Independent Definition of Information.
ils.unc.edu/~losee/b5/book5.html
“This discipline independent definition may be applied to all domains, from physics to epistemology.”
“Information may be defined as the characteristics of the output of a process, these being informative about the process and the input.”
Characteristics OF… but not the actual process itself.
Informative ABOUT… but not the actual process itself.
“Models of communication (Shannon), perception, observation, belief, and knowledge are suggested that are consistent with this conceptual framework of information as the value of the output of any process in a hierarchy of processes.”
Value OF… but not the actual process itself.
This definition covers all industries and disciplines with equal clarity.
“Topics or definitions provided include information, value, function, argument, process, informative, reversibility, message, channel, inverse functions, representation, perception, belief, knowledge, information loss, perfect information, incomplete information, and misinformation.”
You’ll note this Hierarchical model begins with Knowledge.
And is based around the fundamental properties set forth by Claude Shannon.
It’s quite a thorough peer reviewed paper with a bibliography ten miles long. It covers Shannon’s model of information and the beginnings of Information Theory. It illustrates the differences between disciplines and effectively bridges the gaps whilst explaining much of the confusion about the misuse of the word information.
It clearly separates the medium from the message.
“Information may be understood as the value attached or instantiated to a characteristic or variable returned by a function or produced by a process.”
Value attached or instantiated to… but not the actual function or process itself.
It uses an effective and logical model of stacked processes, allowing for the numerous interpretations to satisfy their particular industries, yet conform to unity.
“The use of the hierarchical model allows one to focus on the level in the hierarchy that is of greatest interest, rather than getting into a debate about whether information is of one nature or another, whether it is located at one level in the hierarchy or another.”
“Using the proposed hierarchical model of stacked processes one may model existing ideas about information, including the communication model proposed by Shannon, information as thing” or information as knowledge.” The information hierarchy provides a satisfactory link between physical processes and consistent ideas about information and higher level mental functions discussed by psychologists and philosophers. This allows information scientists and others to examine information in a uniform way across the breadth of information phenomena, providing a level of precision to some interdisciplinary discussions of information, and serving as a base to which additional limiting assumptions may be added within specific disciplines, such as the concept of ``value” for economic studies of information.”
I’d be interested in knowing if you feel the same about information after reading this paper.
Well, I’d have to say that the “code” would have to represent the occurrence of an event. The dent in your car represents the occurance of something hard hitting your car. The memory is stored, but only truly accessed by humans. On the other hand, if such a strike were to affect the engine such as to alter its performance, then the memory of the event would be accessed by the other parts of the engine when it started up. That would be a more true memory function.
A tree “remembers” bumps into its trunk. Long after the bump has passed, the plant still contains an “altered arrangement” that forces the effort of growth to alter in response to the damage (purposeful pursuit of survival).
Emm… no. I don’t even dream about fractals, much less think in such terms. Whether something is fractal or not has nothing to so with whether it is information. As you pointed out yourself, information is “if-form-ation”, whether it happens to be in a fractal configuration is entirely a separate issue.
Emm… you must have a different definition of “fractal”.
?? You are really running far away from any understanding that I have of codes, information, or fractals.
If that is the case, then books tell us nothing about history, mankind, or nature. The issue is merely whether you know how to read them.
I think you are conflating the word “information” with another that would more represent language - meaningful information.
ALL “code” or “information” must be interpreted into relevance. It doesn’t stop being information due to not having a decipherer handy. It is merely useless information because it cannot be associated with relevance - YET.
People love to rename things for special agendas and respect.
But a physicist would say, “information is contained within the system as its pattern”. So the physicist is really calling the pattern of the state its information or code that is as yet undeciphered.
It seems merely a semantic issue.
Well, being an electronic/digital engineer and psychologist specializing in intelligence design, I can understand from where Claude Shannon is coming even though I would have to contend with some of the definitions. But the definition being provided, I find lacking. It isn’t so much what is being included as information, but rather what is being left out. It decribes only value assessed information.
I’m all for getting the language and definitions straight and properly assigned to ensure all bases are covered, but…
What do you propose to call the patterns that could reveal “knowledge” about an event if and when a translator can be found, if not “hidden information”? And if it is found by two different value minded people, which value system is to declare what parts are information and what parts are to be ignored?
Shannon was speaking strictly in terms of digital computer concerns in his papers. He defined words with only computer needs in mind. That was fine then, but now, I have to step in a bit. The human mind is no mystery to some of us and the words being argued about by others tends to malign their future understanding of their own mind. I am specifically thinking of “knowledge”, “information”, “memory”, “thought”, “idea”, “mind” itself, “consciousness”, “conscience”, “purpose”, and the like.
Any proposal that would lead to ignoring potential information, I consider with extreme suspicion because that is how investigations get ridged and prejudices get formed. “The Devil is in the Details.”
“I provided all of the information we had (because the rest wasn’t important).”
Everything is in reference to ourselves. Scientist have formed a false objectivity, which is marked by what we can call a “separative metaphor” or myth. Any knowledge we can discuss about any given thing, is referential. When we think and draw conclusions about the world around us, the mind is involved. The knowledge we essentially create through our interaction with the environment, is coming from us (more specifically, it is coming from our bodies). Our bodily information, feelings, and experiences, ie. our natural inner workings, are referenced to provide information about the world around us. These natural inner workings are essentially what I was pointing to earlier, the perpetual memory. We don’t have to think about it, but it influences our thinking entirely (I’d say it enables it).
It is said that in the past, man was diametrically connected to his environment in his thought. There was no separation. This is evidenced by the work of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung among others (sorry I study psychology and consciousness, but maybe you will enjoy reading a different perspective). Jung believed, and I agree, that unconscious influences were filtered through the physiological urges of the individual experiencing them, then that particular individual combines and relates these feelings with an outside experience. Now, you may be saying, “unconscious influences” are bologna because they aren’t necessarily scientific, but I’d like to see you explain our archetypal behaviors and cultural similarities from a purely objective perspective. Never mind my assumptions though, let me continue and let you provide the response.
Ultimately, seeing the world in relation to the individual self, early man made sense of and understood all experience through personification. Jung writes:
Humankind’s ability to know is the ability to imagine, to see the self in and to personify the experience of life. Jung believed that all labeled experience was understood through the “symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which only becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by way of projection- that is, mirrored in the events of nature”. In essence, the only way humankind can know itself is through a projected analysis of itself on the world surrounding it. To know or to explain experience is to know and explain the individual self’s feelings and urges. Thus, the ways in which mankind has come to know the world directly reflects the evolution of mankind itself. Joseph Campbell, after surveying various cultures and their history writes:
Here we see how much myth, metaphor and personification influenced not only how humanity saw itself, but also how it decided to act in regards to this vision, even to the point of death. This gradual evolution of personification has not stopped, it is the same propulsion that has brought much of humanity through the dark ages, the enlightenment period, the industrial revolution, and finally, into the technological age we are experiencing now. Just as the kings and queens saw themselves in the stars, humanity is now at large seeing itself through all the disciplines through which it attempts to know the world. No matter how much an attempt at objective knowledge ensues, metaphor will always color our interpretation of knowledge and information.
Through the sciences attempts at an objective epistemology, humanity becomes more detached from itself through this metaphorical interpretation. It has tricked itself into believing that the overlapping myth of reality is not real, and that mankind can be separate from experience. All of knowledge is mythic and metaphorical, we’ve just become better apt at looking at the world, which is actually our own internal projections, through a pseudo-objective lens.
I apologize for running off on such a tangent, but for me, it is paramount to our discussion and particularly my understanding of the phenomena in question. When talking of scientific pursuits, I often passionately contend any claimed objectivity or in this case, a lack of personifcation.
Point rightly taken; but note mine above. Anything we can say about an object has been referenced to ourselves (personified) in some way. I’m willing to go as far as to say that any and everything we say is bullshit. We derive understanding, purpose, meaning, in every theoretical attempt at explaining this world. Even your quoted text falls victim. You use language, which is metaphorically referencing actual events, those events, through any type of understanding, will inevitably be referenced back to some “mind”, whether it be yours or someone else’s. We use these concepts to further propel a created understanding, and we build upon them. Any attempt at separating these concepts from their sources will result in confusion and inexplicableness (not to say that that is an issue, because I believe that to be the ultimately reality of things, but in understanding how language and knowledge works, we can at least create knowledge that “intuitively” lines up with what we experience.).
Who’s to say that it hasn’t been experienced? We don’t fully understand memory, and we won’t if we continue to project a false objectification throughout our understandings. We’ve learned through epigenetics that the environment imprints on our bodies, which in turn allow that imprinted information in future generations. We term this genetic heredity. Here we have a clear and scientifically observed (we were forced to observe it) phenomena which provides insight into how this process of memory can work. If it happens in the human body, why not in plants?
Or rather, perhaps science has finally reached the end of its pseudo-objectivity.
If we don’t concede to the idea of a “talking universe”, we run into philosophical dead ends and conundrums such as how nothing (consciousness) comes from (something), or vice versa. Do you not have the slightest intuition, based upon all of the knowledge you have obtained throughout your life, that the orientation of thought or consciousness delves deeper than the human mind?
Why not? If you don’t wish to term this communicative essence to information, would energy be better? Lol I imagine that made you cringe a bit.
If you can take your mind off of metaphysics and new age “hoo hah”, pretending any ideas from these realms never existed, would you then have any objections to science moving into similar relams?
Is the representation of the state of a system not a state as well? In some essential sense, do they not perform the same function, albeit through different means. The representation provides “information” through words or images, and as such influences another state. How is the representation, beyond our natural contribution to its presentation through extrapolation and separation, any different from the source in terms of function? They both convey; it is up to us to interpret. If we call the representation informative (or information), then it has to follow that the source was as well.
“Characteristics of” and information about are interpreted, extrapolated, and ultimately created. Our descriptions of processes are second-hand, and inevitably invoke confusion. We are getting further and further away from the source material or “process”. This is akin to the separation between the physical and mental. The definition of information quoted here fully separates the physical (process), from the mental (reflections and considerations extrapolated from the process).The information in this definition lacks certainty. This is reflective of that need to provide objectification through separation in science. It helps because we can understand the details a bit more, but it ultimately skews the larger perspective. We lose sight of the forest for the trees. This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle on a larger mental/physical scale. If we can get past this separation, we can inevitably get closer (as close as we can possibly get, because it is still an interpretation or extrapolation) in our understandings to a more cohesive view of reality. At least that’s my assumption and intuitive notion.
Furthermore, but more importantly; if the state isn’t informative, how can any extrapolation occur? How can there be (even interpreted or extrapolated) characteristics of an information-less process? Essentially this is a debate of semantics, but I believe this separation ultimately does more harm than good.