Properties of information

[Magical Realist]

1) non-physical--it is not extended in space and can't be measured and is immaterial and can exist in multiple minds and mediums. While it does require a physical substrate or medium to be instantiated, it is yet not identified with that.

2) polysemantic--it can have more than one meaning or interpretation depending on its context and translation.

3) subjective--it is not objective but depends on who receives it and also requires an informable mind.

4) relatively true---depends on the time it is generated and whether it corresponds to a factual state.

5) can be lost---there is information in the past that is lost forever.

Agree or disagree?

[C C]

1) non-physical--it is not extended in space and can't be measured and is immaterial and can exist in more than one mind and medium at the same time.

2) polysemantic--it can have more than one meaning or interpretation depending on its context and translation.

3) subjective--it is not objective but depends on who receives it and also requires an informable mind.

4) relatively true---depends on the time it is generated and whether it corresponds to a factual state.

5) can be lost---there is information in the past that is lost forever.

Agree or disagree?

1. _X_ information is substrate independent or multiply realizable by different physical things: written language, radio waves, smoke signals, sound, pheromones, neural activity, etc. That arguably makes it abstract, but it's always instantiated by something concrete or physical. Even a divine revelation obviously had to affect brain tissue for the body to relay it to the faithful, and it's not within human ability to prove that it came from an immaterial source rather than cerebral regions typically responsible for hallucinations.

2. Words can obviously have several definitions in a dictionary. And across different languages -- "gift" means poison in some Germanic languages.

3. Standards can be established for enforcing _X_ to only mean a specific thing, like in computer programming or International Morse code. But outside those regulatory domains the meaning is fair game. "Information has no intrinsic meaning."

4. Probably.

5. In theory perhaps not, but in practical reality humans lack the capacity to reconstruct what was on the pages of a burned book that no one has read or or copied in 600 years.

[Magical Realist]

That arguably makes it abstract, but it's always instantiated by something concrete or physical.

At least it requires a physical medium to be transmitted in a physical world. But is the information once received and existing in a mind still physically instantiated? I contend not. A physicalist may claim the information is still physically instantiated and exists in some form in the medium of the brain. But as a dualist I disagree. I don't think any amount of analysis could ever turn up the actual information that exists in someone's mind.

Reducing information to its physical medium is like analyzing the phrase "The horse is black." for the information it instantiates. Where shall we find the horse and its blackness in the letters it is composed of? Being essentially abstract or ideational, information is also "intentional" in the philosophical sense of always being ABOUT something. But its physical substrate or medium of transmission isn't about anything. It just is.

From article: The fact that black holes store information implies that spacetime itself can store information and possibly that spacetime is information. The fabric of the universe may be made up of tiny, quantized units of information, and the ways those units are correlated with one another—or entangled—might determine the shape of space and time.

Either way, it seems that information is safe in the universe. In a world where life is ephemeral, where no one and nothing can last forever, not even planet Earth, this rule feels comforting. There will always be a record, however inscrutable, of what happened here.

That's profoundly exciting! But again it assumes that information is identical to its physical substrate or medium--in this case the tiny quantitized bits (data points?) underlying spacetime. Is the substrate at this point in fact an abstract or ideational substrate, much like whatever instantiates the laws of physics? This enters cosmopsychism territory, in which there is a universal Mind or implicate order connecting all the events and objects in the universe.