Developing a nurturing attitude towards one’s surroundings definitely produces positive results. Whether or not plants can “think and remember” depends on exactly what we mean by that. And even if we think we know exactly what we mean by that, we might not know, ultimately, if it is true or not - just as ultimately we don’t know if we ourselves can “think and remember”. I mean, do we even know what it means to remember? Are we absolutely sure there is such a thing as a past and future? But we can know this: Developing a nurturing attitude towards one’s surroundings definitely produces positive results. If Prince Charles said this, I agree with him completely.
It sure works around here where I live. I’ve never seen trees take to a place like they do here. People here love the green.
Where is here?
Austin
Nice. For green I might have guessed Chicago, or somewhere in Europe.
You don’t know that. It could be air pressure, or poorly constructed materials reacting to heat/cold. Nowhere does the dent represent the cause. It only represents the effect. The dent is the effect. Effects only represent themselves and nothing more.
You make an inference based upon past observations. But not based upon any code that actually told you what happened. You make the inference based upon past observations codified as memorable information.
A thought about a past experience is codified into memory. You’ve codified that past experience without even realizing it. “Oh, hard objects can dent metal”. It’s a thought, and from that past thought, you infer new codified thoughts. “Oh, then this new dent must be from a hard object hitting my car”.
But the dent didn’t’ convey any information to you whatsoever. You created all of the information in your mind through observation and description. It’s science, not mysticism. Dents don’t speak.
And neither do tree rings.
An altered state is an effect. What does the engine or tree remember of the cause? Memory is not a matter of noting the current condition. Memory must note a past condition, and access it into the present.
The only memory of the engine is in the original designers plans. Refer to the codified plans, and that will allow you to remember what the engine is supposed to be like.
The only memory of the tree is in the original plans. Refer to the DNA and that will allow you to remember what the tree is supposed to be like.
There must be a genuine code present to access memory. The bump and the dent are not the code, and they have no code. They have no mechanisms to create a code with. They cannot possibly communicate messages to humans. They have no transmitter, no alphabet A, no noise reduction, no error correction, no redundancy, no syntax, no semantics, no agreed upon convention of symbols with their intended receiver. It’s just a damaged pattern. But it’s not a code that communicates information. Humans observe the pattern and describe it with code. Then, and only then, do we have genuine information. And then, and only then, may we communicate that information to others.
Agreed.
How so? Perhaps I should have said patterns? And let’s get past Mandelbrot, for those are codified as computer models. Of course they can be duplicated exactly. It’s code. But find me an exact duplicate of a coastline in nature. Find me an exact duplicate of a tornado, or a lava flow. Find me two stars with the same signature. They are repeating patterns, but they will never be expressed as exact duplicates. It’s Chaos. It can’t.
Find me two car dents or two sets of tree rings that are exactly the same. Nature doesn’t copy Chaos. If it did, it wouldn’t be called Chaos.
Only code can be duplicated exactly. Nothing else in the known universe can.
“See dog run” is an exact duplicate of “See dog run”. And I would suppose that both of our computer monitors are representing an exact duplicate of this thread.
And genuine information is independent from the medium that expresses it.
“See dog run” means “Se hunden springa”. It can be expressed in color codes, smoke signals, binary… whatever.
It is completely mappable from probability space alphabet A to probability space alphabet B, which is the formal definition of code from Purlwitz, Burks and Waterman.
The song, Sunday Bloody Sunday cannot be reduced to the medium that expresses it. 10 million copies sold do not represent 10 million different pieces of information. They all reference the EXACT SAME Information. And so does the sheet music, the MTV video, and the shitty cover band playing that tune in the local tavern.
Dents and Bumps only represent themselves, unless of course, a mind has established them as an alphabet A used as a medium to express a thought… like Braille.
Books have been encoded with an agreed upon convention of symbols between the sender and the receiver. Books are not reducible to ink, paper, and glue.
How do you read tree rings? What is the established system of symbols that you and the tree have agreed upon? How does the tree transmit the signal to humans? And most importantly, what does it say, other than “tree rings”?
Without the data from the Growing Seasons, one would never associate them with Tree Rings. Sentient observers describe phenomenon. That description is codified as information. Information is undetectable otherwise. Upon these codified descriptions, we infer a relationship. But the tree rings cannot be read. There is nothing to read. They can only be observed and described.
And our descriptions are not about the medium of ink and paper. They refer to something else. Our descriptions refer to the tree rings.
Agreed. That’s why a lost manuscript still represents information even though it’s lost. If it is found, then it can be deciphered with Purlwitz, Burks, and Watermans definition of code mapping alphabet A to alphabet B.
But tree rings have no alphabet. And thus, they have no mechanism to transmit a message to humans.
Yes, I know. That’s very unfortunate. For patterns(fractals) and codes are complete opposites.
In honor of Dawkins coining of the term “Apparent Design”, I have coined my own term, describing your process as “Apparent Information”. It only seems to be information. But it is not.
Your description of the pattern is information. But the pattern does not have the proper mechanism to communicate information to humans. We must first observe and describe them. And then, and only then, do we have access to Genuine Information.
Please refer to the Discipline Independent Definition of Information. You may inject your process model into the heirarchial definition. But you cannot deny the rest of the heirarchy.
With your background, you should understand that Code is the only mechanism that can communicate, transmit and receive Information. Observation alone doesn’t cut it.
The implications of this are profound. For it resolves Dawkins assertion that Paley’s watch could have arisen by chance. It also has great implications for any arguments against intelligent design.
How do we determine if a thing is designed or not? Sure, the watch could have somehow arisen by chance. There is no reason that it couldn’t have. But when we find the original plans to the watch, that determined the watch existence in the mind of a designer, before the watch ever manifest into physicality, then me know it was designed.
The watch consists of the same materials as a rock. There is nothing for us distinguish them from one another. But the watch has one extra ingredient. Information.
Find a code (plans). Infer sentient authorship.
Inorganic matter = energy + matter + chaos
Life = energy + matter + information.
There is a huge chasm between them. And I for one will not conflate them as being the same, simply to allow physics to promote their personal definition of information.
Patterns don’t communicate information. They can’t. They have none of the mechanisms necessary to do such a thing. If you found a set of plans that predetermined the existence of the pattern in advance, then the plans could be considered as representative of information. But until we find the plans for a tornado, we must author our own information about them.
Hot air + cold air + pressure + wind + time = Tornado
But the tornado didn’t tell me any of this. It can’t. I had to observe and describe it. If I did find a set of plans for a tornado, then I could create exact copies of it.
My word, you say alot. 
Not so. You are denying what “hardness” means. No matter what caused the dent, by definition of “hard” and knowing the structure of the metal, I can easily deduce that whatever hit the car was hard. Even if it were air, the air would have to have been made into a hard substance (compressed) else there would be no dent.
No. What you are describing is the act of presumption and is very common and is truly the exact cause of all “sin” and error. But you are presuming that I was presuming. I “remembered” the event not because of presumption of some earlier hard contact, but because hardness is required by the situation that is still being shown. The present state is what reveals the necessary history. It is not ALWAYS presumption, but at times, merely storage of the state that is later used in deduction. Don’t presume all memory to be of presumption. Perception is the greater issue.
Perception CAN be corrupted by presumption. It very often is, But it is NOT always so.
Taking a break… will respond to the rest later.
ALL memory is merely a state of the present. There is no actual past.
I was merely referring to the act of “accessing” the stored effect. In the limited example, the engine accesses the dent when it attempts to follow its original design and is foiled by the dent. Of course, the engine is not conscious. It doesn’t realize anything. I am not talking about the other aspects of conscious thought, but merely the act of accessing a stored effect from a prior event, thus a memory function, isolated from an otherwise conscious entity.
That is your assertion. You are defining such as to make that claim. Again, I object to the definition you suggest based merely on the concern that it leaves out potentially relevant concerns as “not information” merely because the state was not interpreted or deciphered.
This is all irrelevant and presumes your chosen definition. I agree that infinite similarity or homogeneity is physically impossible.
But shouldn’t it also be independent of the person interpreting it? If so, that leaves ANY pattern to be “information” capable of potentially being interpreted into relevance. One cannot assume relevance and THEN interpret patterns. That is the EXACT cause of prejudice and delusion.
Again, you merely presume that information is only what has relevance to the interpreter and that nothing else is valid information. That is a sociological dangerous definition to accept.
And I think that is our only actual issue.
The established agreement is called Science. Science discovers how reality behaves and then we agree to read reality’s messages with that in mind. Reality agrees to allow us to succeed in our endeavors as long as we keep reading its signs properly.
Right there is my point. You are trying to contrive a definition of a word to persuade a political argument about who should be followed and create a prejudice concerning Truth/Reality.
Every “code”, every letter, is a pattern, so how can you make such a claim?
You say,
ALL memory is merely a state of the present. There is no actual past.
You know that dent in your car? OK, when that car hast rusted out and is sitting in the junkyard after being shredded, then recycled into an I-beam for a bridge in the future, where is the memory then?
How will the pseudo-info that you somehow receive from the I-beam communicate any memory of your car from so many years ago?
While you’re trying to communicate and extract pseudo-info from an I-beam, I’ll be down at the Ford plant looking through the archives for the original plans of the car. I’ll be looking at a genuine code that represents genuine information. Which one of us will have a more accurate memory of the car?
What will the I-beam tell you of the dent? I’ll be at the DMV looking through accident reports and insurance settlements. Who will have a more accurate depiction of the dent, the one who references codes that were authored by observation and description, or the one who thinks they can extract info from an I-beam?
Genuine memory/info requires a code.
You say,
You are defining such as to make that claim.
No, I’m adhering to the standards set by the UNC School of Information and Library Science, and Information Theory. I didn’t define it as such… They did.
You say,
No matter what caused the dent, by definition of “hard” and knowing the structure of the metal, I can easily deduce that whatever hit the car was hard.
You’re right. YOU deduce, but you don’t get info from the dent. The deduction is yours to make. It is not from a conversation with a dent that somehow communicated info to you with no established protocols to fulfill a transmission of info from point A to point B.
And besides, you’ve not only avoided my point about substandard materials reacting to heat/cold, but you cannot possibly know the structure of the metal unless you refer to the code that founded it. Your knowing the initial condition is dependent upon the very code of which you would otherwise deny.
You say,
What you are describing is the act of presumption and is very common and is truly the exact cause of all “sin” and error.
Wait a minute… Is it not presumption to assume to know the materials without referencing the actual code that founded them? Is it not presumption to deduce a hard object without having witnessed the actual event?
You say,
But you are presuming that I was presuming.
Are you not presuming I presume that you were presuming?
You say,
Perception CAN be corrupted by presumption.
That’s why we should be very careful in our observation and description, otherwise we might be tempted to forgo that process in favor of thinking we can somehow communicate and extract information from dents… when there are no known protocols to allow such a thing.
You say,
ALL memory is merely a state of the present. There is no actual past.
Then how did the present come to be?
You say,
But shouldn’t it also be independent of the person interpreting it? If so, that leaves ANY pattern to be “information” capable of potentially being interpreted into relevance.
As long as a genuine code is established with agreed upon convention of symbols, effective communication may take place by adhering to Shannon’s communication model. It is rife with checks and balances designed to promote effective information transfer. Non encoded patterns fail the protocols at the very first step.
You say, on books:
Again, you merely presume that information is only what has relevance to the interpreter and that nothing else is valid information.
I made it clear before that information exists at the time of encoding a thought or observation. Hence my reference to the lost manuscript. It’s there, regardless if anyone can decipher it or not. But communicating that info is dependent upon a receiver mechanism and the Shannon protocols. Books transmit information to their readers in this manner. Non encoded observations have no mechanisms to fulfill anything remotely close to these universally accepted, tried and true, proven, tested, repeatable, predictable protocols… which by the way have thousands of years of precedent to call upon to support their validity. Anything less is talking to trees.
You say that you can read tree rings, and the established protocols that allow you to do this…
The established agreement is called Science. Science discovers how reality behaves and then we agree to read reality’s messages with that in mind. Reality agrees to allow us to succeed in our endeavors as long as we keep reading its signs properly.
But science is a methodology of first encoding a hypothesis based upon an observation. You can’t jump straight to talking with dents. You must first codify your thoughts about that dent.
Believing otherwise begs one to personify objects by presuming that reality has behaviors, like a good or bad child. Well how do we know this without first observing and describing them with code? And how exactly does reality “agree to allow”?
I smell a dogma wagging its tail.
You say,
You are trying to contrive a definition of a word to persuade a political argument about who should be followed and create a prejudice concerning Truth/Reality.
No, again, I’m adhering to the Scientific disciplines of Information Theory and abiding by the Discipline Independent definition of Information as set forth by the UNC School of Information and Library Science. If you reject these establishments as presumption, then please provide another resource that better explains the scientific methodology you would have us consider.
I said, that Patterns don’t communicate information. They can’t.
You say,
Every “code”, every letter, is a pattern, so how can you make such a claim?
That’s just not true. Every code and letter is not a pattern. That would create a circular feedback loop, thereby halting any progress in communicating information. What pattern do you see forming from our current discussion? There is plenty of code here to determine your analysis.
“Every code/letter is not a pattern”. Search for the sentence I just wrote. It will only come up once. I haven’t tried, but I’d wager that you could type that phrase into google and it wouldn’t even come up. Give it a try.
Some codes can be formed as patterns. These include S.O.S. signals and even repeating chorus in music. But that is far different than presuming that every code, and every letter, is somehow reducible to a pattern.
Codes and Patterns are complete opposites.
You give humans too much credit in thinking that we do anything differently than a plant or another animal. We’ve just evolved enough to where we can question things around us and change things to better ourselves. (Typically with disregard to plants and animals…) What is thought if not just a reaction to what we feel due to the inner workings of our body?
Also, our bodies do react to sunlight. When it’s nice out, most people tend to be happier. We are programmed to wake up by it. Circadian rhythm?
Obviously Cause/Effect isn’t the same thing as Thought/Affect. However, Cause/Effect is the same as Affect/Thought, with affect being defined in the psychological sense as a feeling or emotion.
The human race isn’t that great, we’re just lucky to be blessed with the mental capacity we have. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean other organisms can’t have thought. I am not saying I fully agree with the article, but it cannot be fully discredited, therefore I believe it is plausible.
The simple definition of communication is to impart knowledge or to make known. Patterns do and can communicate information. We learn from patterns every single day. Obviously, they communicate information.
How can a code not be a pattern? A pattern is a style. Did you define pattern within your argument? There are around twenty definitions of the word pattern. Every code can be a pattern, but every pattern cannot be a code. Also, there is a pattern to your argument. It’s called bickering back and forth without ever seeing (or rarely seeing) the other person’s side. That doesn’t mean it is necessarily a negative thing, just technically a pattern.
Codes and Patterns are not complete opposites if they can be made into the same thing.
I didn’t say anything about memory being immortal?? There is reasonable speculation that the information never really gets erased, but rather, like energy, gets so dispersed as to be unrecoverable by practical means. That doesn’t mean the information isn’t there, just un-interpretable at that time.
Actually due to yours being only a concept design, yours will necessarily be inaccurate, especially considering the alterations perhaps from a variety of prior sources. Your source is merely more convenient so as to come close enough. It is necessarily not exactly correct. The physical cannot ever be the design. You have only the model, not the actual manifestation (reality).
Again, that is your assertion proposal. But you have already displayed how it will immediately be used for political deceptions rather than really reflecting any better model of reality from which to advance knowledge or ability.
Okay, “you AND they”. You here, and they elsewhere.
Every memory deduction or interpretation (using your definition OR mine) requires additional information besides the proposed memory cell. Computers do the same. It is a metaphysically required issue.
Were the Egyptian writings information before they finally found the Rosetta Stone? Or did they become information somehow coincident to them finding the Stone with which to decipher it?
No, ALL “knowledge” and measurements are related to each other. No one, by your definition or mine, can ever interpret or deduce memory void of all other information/knowledge. It would be a bit pointless.
Reference above.
I’m afraid Science would disagree. A good chemist and/or physicist could deduce a considerable amount from such a dent.
The present is what IS (as in exists). The past is what WAS (as in no longer exists) and thus MUST be deduced.
Who dictates “genuine code”?? Or is this to further provide more socialistic dictators of what we are allowed to think?
What you are disallowing is that reality is doing the “encoding” already in everything, but you don’t want to call it information. I asked earlier what you would want to call it when either a non-person encoded it or an unknown person encoded it or even if the code is merely unknown - yet.
You seem to not be catching onto the idea that reality follows laws and by knowing those laws to some degree, they serve as a “code”. A law is a “code of behavior” and thus allows for deduction of prior events. That is exactly what memory is all about.
Huh?? “codifying your hypothesis”?? which has to be based on an observation before it even gets codified?? How do you remember the observation that you are going to use to hypothesize? Wouldn’t you have to codify your pre-observation before it was valid? Doesn’t that present a regression problem? At what point is the first codification done so that the first observation can take place?
I see beggars all the time. You don’t HAVE to pay them.
Ignoring and perverting reality so as to avoid a childish behavior is a bit…emm… childish in itself.
That is your excuse, not your reasoning.
And I disagree. It seems that I get to listen to patterns communicate (reveal history) and you don’t. I suspect that I have the upper hand.
Show me one letter that is not a pattern. Or do you have some strange definition for “pattern”?
Each sentence is a pattern. If it weren’t neither you are I could decipher it. You are conflating “repeated pattern” with “pattern”, I suspect. A single square is the pattern of a square. But don’t go confusing the naming involved. To have a name, the pattern must be repeated at least once so as to establish reference for the name. That is a different issue.
Or has that been your issue all along? Confusing the map with the terrain?
“There shall be only maps (codes). No such thing as actual terrain (reality)!”
Hey it’s been a real pleasure discussing this issue with you. I certainly wish there was more time in my day to continue.
The last word is yours my friend.
Hey QuinticNon,
Before you go, I’d really appreciate you tickling my fancy a bit with my last two points if your time permits. I really would like to hear your thoughts.
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.
Sure, I’ll try and be brief.
Yes, both the system and the description are both states. But there is a difference. One is codified, and the other is not. I’m sure there are those here who reject accepted information sciences, so as not to carry on an on in debate, I’ll share what I can.
The object does not convey. The object simply is. It has no mechanism to transmit (convey) a message. It is often unwittingly personified as having pseudo-mind capacity, in that it is mistakenly labeled as possessing attributes of “conveying”. Yet the only known mechanism to “convey” or to transmit a message, is through the Claude Shannon protocols as set forth in his book A Mathematical Theory of Communication.
Here’s the model.
You’ll notice that “Message” is at the beginning and end of the protocol. There is no other known or proposed mechanism to transmit information. This protocol runs our modern day lives and is adhered to by every discipline except for some physicists. No one really knows why physics has abandoned this protocol. Physics hasn’t even presented their own. But for some reason, many physicists want to claim it works another way.
In later models, Information Source is exchanged synonymously with Alphabet A. And Destination exchanged for Alphabet B. For it is noted that the only thing that can make it through the protocol is a genuine code that conforms to Purlwitz, Burks, and Watermans formal definition of Code. That being, probability space alphabet A mapped to probability space alphabet B.
So claiming that the object is “conveying” information, one is by default claiming that object is in possession of an alphabet A, and a message.
There is only one thing from nature that runs through the protocols without fail. DNA to RNA transcription. In Hubert Yockey’s book, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, Yockey goes into great detail as to why DNA is not a template and not a pattern. It is called the Genetic Code for extremely specific and precise reasons. And by noting it as such, biology and genetics have been advancing rapidly.
Yockey’s model here:
It is identical to the Shannon model. This model is used in everything from computer science to manufacturing and right down to the words you see on this thread in which we communicate our thoughts to one another.
It would seem as such. But that’s not accurate at all. Phenomenal Observations are not interpreted. They are described.
No human interpreted a message from the cosmos and thereby deciphered the Laws of Physics. Not at all. Humans observe and describe the cosmos. It would be nice if the cosmos spoke to humans. That would make our jobs a whole lot easier. We could then just interpret and decipher that message all at once and never have to observe ever again. But instead, our lot is to observe, describe, analyze, theorize, debate, and then create new instrumentation that allows more precise observations. And then with better telescopes and microscopes, we once again observe, describe, analyze, theorize, debate.
Now, in another post, James posted the foundations of the Scientific Method as:
a) Define a hypothesis to be demonstrated
b) Define the Environment to showcase the demonstration
c) Define terms and variables (obsolete)
d) Demonstrate the hypothesis in a repeatable manner for verification
e) State conclusion and reasoning
f) Publish (recently by approval only)
But for some reason, when it comes to physics and information, he suggests that we abandon that methodology. You’ll notice it begins with “Define”. He actually rejected my stating that earlier, in reference to physics/info of course. Well enough, but if the first step is to “Define”, then physics should have their own Scientific Method which exchanges the word “Define” for “Interpret” or “Decipher” or “Read”. For physics would have us believe that in their special arena, that we are not Defining our criteria through Observation and Description, but instead we are leapfrogging past all known protocols of information transmission and somehow Reading a phenomenon, rather than Defining a phenomenon.
I cannot argue the point with anyone who rejects the entire establishment of Information Sciences. What left is there to say to one that will not hear? All are free to have their own opinions. Who am I to foist known Science upon anyone, just to have it rejected as Science?
Information Theory would disagree. Our descriptions are from first hand observations, they are in no way… second-hand. Confusion arises because two separate observers will describe phenomenon in two separate ways. The spectrum of description is wide and subjective to the observer. On one end, we have mathematics and precision instrumentation that is utilized for accurate descriptions. On the other end we have Poets, Artists, and Philosophers who describe phenomenon with logic, metaphor and allegory… many times personifying objects, or objectifying personage in order to present comparative insights. None is any better or worse than the other. But we do well to note the differences.
“Furthermore, but more importantly”, extrapolation doesn’t occur at all. When observing phenomenon, all we may do is describe it. Some describe it better than others. Be wary of those who claim to read it. For next they’ll shanghai you into their religion or cult. Dogma wags its tail.
The only known mechanism that allows extrapolation of information, is a genuine code that conforms to Purlitz, Burks, and Waterman’s formal definition and runs through the Shannon protocols effortlessly. Material Phenomenon alone fails miserably.
And that’s the exact reason why we call DNA the Genetic Code… because it is one. And that’s the same reason we don’t have terms like the Tree Code, or the Cosmos Code, or the Tornado Code… They don’t have any code. They are not codes. And therefor they cannot intend, infer, convey, or transmit any message to humans whatsoever.
Let’s remember, the Laws of the Universe were not communicated to humans by the Cosmos. The Laws of the Universe were written by Humans to describe the Cosmos. And upon further observations, with greater instrumentation, they will continue to be written and rewritten. Otherwise, why not just read them all at once and get it over with?
We should not hold humanity accountable for poor descriptions that were dependent upon poor instrumentation of the past. We will always describe the best we can with whatever mechanisms we have at our disposal… Starting with our own physical human senses. From stimulus and observation, phenomenon is observed and described. That’s it. That’s all.
Peace Out!
Quin, you greatly distorted what I have said. I have merely being talking about the definition of the word “information”. And it seems that your only real incentive for using the definition that you recommend, is so as to avoid some small cult from popping up. No religion actually began by someone saying “God spoke to me”.
The religions began exactly as Science began, by someone doing something phenomenal and/or undeniable and then giving an explanation. Science merely requires more than one person doing it. That is not an outstanding improvement and the Quantum Magi are proving that as they form their cult of prophets, priests, and followers all within “Science”.
So merely for the purpose of preventing someone from possibly saying, “the universe spoke to me”, you suggest perverting a definition which will distort Science students and their conclusions for generations. You are suggesting what amounts to a paranoid hyper-response.
Sorry friend, I suggest adhering to a definition, not perverting one.
And as I’ve said so many times before, I adhere to A Discipline Independent Definition of Information,
ils.unc.edu/~losee/b5/book5.html
which is a peer reviewed paper with a bibliography ten miles long,
ils.unc.edu/~losee/b5/node12.html
as presented by the UNC School of Information and Library Sciences,
sils.unc.edu/
and,
“…may be applied to all domains, from physics to epistemology.”
with one of the reasons being what you suggest, "of preventing someone from possibly saying, “the universe spoke to me”.
And again, we are all capable of having our own opinions. I encourage anyone who rejects this definition of information to present another for our thoughtful consideration.
OH, I see… [size=150]“Authority says…”[/size]
So then without doubt… In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Who would know better than the Catholics? That makes thinking easy doesn’t it. 