Information, taken in its widest sense as new knowledge relayed across space and time, cannot be thought to be out there existing in itself. There cannot be anything like an information field in physical space because it has no substance or in-itselfness. It is not in other words substantial in the sense of being a manifestation of a substance. Information, like energy, is transmitted thru physical media, but its essence is not tied to that media. I can write or speak the same information. I can even send it in smoke signals. This entails that information is not objectively real in itself, like the medium that is communicating it, but is intentional in its essence, always being ABOUT something else It is freed up to stimulate the phenomenal presence of what is not objectively present. It is a kind of being that by representing conceals its medium of transmission and refers to some other being other than itself. It is in essence subjective in its being while objectifying what it signifies as objective and in-itself. By losing all objectivity as something in itself, which is the essential nature of subjectivity, it can make manifest thru its utter transparence or concealedness the objective being of what it signifies. This inherent vicariousness of information to always be about other things and never about itself is how it communicates new knowledge about objective things/events/states/concepts. The information itself becomes the medium for the phenomenal manifestation of non-present objective being.
Essential viewing like the "I love Lucy" show is now available at a few of the nearest star systems .. without the ability to decode it into pictures and sound the information is just noise (possibly even after).. 'information' has to be bound up with the means to decode it .. back into 'something' .. deliberate vagueness about the 'something' because I can't think quite what the 'something' needs to be.
You raise an interesting issue--how much of information is actually "made", or "instantiated"?, by an intelligent mind? In the movie Contact, astronomers receive a complex extraterrestrial signal that makes no sense until one of them discovers how to decode it as the instructions for building some sort of transdimensional teleporter. The information was surely there to begin with, created by the intelligent senders to be decoded by an equally intelligent species. But without being decoded, it remained in a state of latency, as embedded inside and indistinguishable from the structure of the signal itself. This goes imo to the insubstantial and even somewhat ephemeral nature of information again, that it subsists in some sort of non-objective state of contingency or possibility--actualized only by the decoding mind. Sort of like how observation/measurement collapses the quantum wave function.
Here's something I posted a few months ago on my proposed properties of information:
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20146-...l#pid83552
(May 16, 2026 05:14 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]You raise an interesting issue--how much of information is actually "made", or "instantiated"?, by an intelligent mind? In the movie Contact, astronomers receive a complex extraterrestrial signal that makes no sense until one of them discovers how to decode it as the instructions for building some sort of transdimensional teleporter. The information was surely there to begin with, created by the intelligent senders to be decoded by an equally intelligent species. But without being decoded, it remained in a state of latency, as embedded inside and indistinguishable from the structure of the signal itself. This goes imo to the insubstantial and even somewhat ephemeral nature of information again, that it subsists in some sort of non-objective state of contingency or possibility--actualized only by the decoding mind. Sort of like how observation/measurement collapses the quantum wave function.
Here's something I posted a few months ago on my proposed properties of information:
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20146-...l#pid83552
Transmission of signals carries information into the mind. Information therefore equates to mind, which equates to reality. You are on the right track however. According to this paper, the simulation principle has recently excited renewed interest in the scientific community. I invite you to take a look:
The simulation hypothesis has recently excited renewed interest in the physics and philosophy communities. However, the hypothesis specifically concerns computers that simulate physical uni verses. So to formally investigate the hypothesis, we need to understand it in terms of computer science (CS) theory. In addition we need a formal way to couple CS theory with physics. Here I couple those fields by using the physical Church–Turing thesis. This allow me to exploit Kleene’s second recursion, to prove that not only is it possible for us to be a simulation being run on a com puter, but that we might be in a simulation that is being run on a computer– by us. In such a ‘self simulation’, there would be two identical instances of us, both equally ‘real’. I then use Rice’s the orem to derive impossibility results concerning simulation and self-simulation; derive implications for (self-)simulation if we are being simulated in a program using fully homomorphic encryption; and briefly investigate the graphical structure of universes simulating other universes which con tain computers running their own simulations. I end by describing some of the possible avenues for future research. While motivated in terms of the simulation hypothesis, the results in this paper are direct consequences of the Church–Turing thesis. So they apply far more broadly than the sim ulation hypothesis.
He did not know if he was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.
What computer science has to say about the simulation hypothesis