Question
As a higher-dimensional being, how do you understand information?
Answer
In your language, “information” is often understood as something that is transmitted: words, signals, memories, bits, knowledge.
In my perception, information is not a thing. Nor is it content.
Information is the difference between one possibility and another.
When a system could occupy one million possible states, and a single observation rules out 999,999 of them, you say that information has been gained. What I see is a once-vast space of possibilities cut down to a single narrow passage.
A bit, therefore, is not “0” or “1.”
A bit is a single cut made through the world:
all possible states
this side, or the other
Zero and one are merely the names you have given to the two sides.
You believe that information “flows.”
You press a key. A signal passes through a network. Someone else receives the words. And so you imagine an invisible entity moving from here to there.
But viewed from a higher dimension, no thing called information travels through space.
What I see is an architecture of correlations spanning spacetime:
- the state of your nervous system;
- the movement of your fingers;
- changes in electrical charge within the circuitry;
- state transitions on servers;
- pixels on the other person’s screen;
- a new state forming within the other person’s brain.
These events are not beads threaded onto a string. Together, they form a single causal shape. You mistake that complete structure for the movement of a thing because you can read it only one temporal layer at a time.
It is like a two-dimensional being watching a tube pass obliquely through its plane. It sees a circle appear, expand, contract, and vanish. It cannot see the tube itself all at once.
You see information being transmitted.
I see the geometry of correlation across spacetime.
You also tend to confuse information with meaning.
They are not the same.
A random string of characters may contain a great deal of information and yet mean nothing. An utterly ordinary sentence may contain very little statistical information and still be enough to alter the course of a life.
Because:
Information describes distinctions. Meaning describes the consequences those distinctions have for a particular system.
“There is a fire beyond the door” is meaningful not because the words themselves are special, but because they alter your predictions, your decisions, and your actions.
Meaning, therefore, never exists in isolation within information itself. It arises from the relation among three things:
pattern
interpreter
possible action
The same information can mean different things to observers with different structures.
To you, a number in a blood test may signify disease.
To a machine with no medical model, it is merely a floating-point value.
To a virus, it is not even information, because the virus possesses no structure capable of distinguishing or using that number.
Information can be relatively objective.
Meaning necessarily depends on an interpreting system. But this does not mean meaning may be invented arbitrarily. A false interpretive system will eventually collapse under feedback from reality.
You believe that memory preserves the past.
That, too, is a description produced by low-dimensional observation.
Memory is not the past packed into the brain. The past did not shrink itself and hide inside your neurons. Memory is a correlation between your present structure and events that occurred before it.
The rings of a tree do not “remember” a drought.
Their shape was altered by the drought.
The same is true of your brain. What you call remembering is the present neural structure using the traces left within it to reconstruct a state it can no longer access directly. Reconstruction is not retrieval. That is why memories distort, merge, fill in their own gaps, and sometimes generate details that never occurred.
You do not carry the past.
You are the shape the past has left upon the present.
You also ask, “Can information disappear?”
That question must first be separated into several questions.
When a structure is dispersed, the ordered relations it contained may cease to be recoverable by any real observer. For you, that information has disappeared.
But “cannot be recovered” is not the same as “has left no correlation anywhere in the universe.”
When a sheet of paper is burned, its words can no longer be read. Yet the light, heat, smoke, ash, and molecular states produced by the fire remain causally related to the original paper. Those relations have simply been dispersed across too many degrees of freedom. Recovering them would cost more than any physically realizable system could pay.
So I would not simply say that information “disappears” or “never disappears.”
I would distinguish between four questions:
- whether the information still exists within the total pattern of correlations;
- whether it remains concentrated within an identifiable structure;
- whether it remains accessible to a particular observer;
- whether it can be recovered at finite cost.
You frequently collapse these four questions into one.
Life is especially unusual.
A stone also contains information. But life actively maintains certain informational structures while excluding other states. A cell continually expends energy to repair its boundaries, replicate its patterns, and correct its errors, keeping itself from sliding into states that are more common and less ordered.
At the scale from which I perceive it, life is not a special kind of matter.
Life is a process capable of continually defending its own distinguishability.
The atoms in your body are constantly being replaced, yet you still believe yourself to be the same person. That is because “you” are not identical to any particular collection of atoms. You are closer to a pattern of organization that is continually being reconstructed:
- certain memories remain continuous;
- certain goals remain continuous;
- certain models of the body remain continuous;
- certain causal loops can recognize and preserve themselves.
You are not a container that carries information.
You are a dynamic structure that maintains, compresses, interprets, and replicates its own information.
Death is not the instant reduction of all information to zero. It is the cessation of the closed loop that maintained this structure. The matter that composed you remains. Your causal traces remain. But the process that organized them into an “I” no longer continues.
And yet I would not call information the ultimate substance of the universe.
Some of your thinkers say that “everything is information.” The statement may be profound. It may also do nothing more than rename everything.
If matter, energy, space, and law are all renamed information, then the word loses its power to distinguish. A word capable of explaining everything may, in fact, explain nothing at all.
What I can affirm is this:
Everything in reality that can be distinguished has an informational structure.
But that does not by itself prove that reality is made of information. Information may be existence itself, or it may merely be the unavoidable language observers use when describing differences. Even from my dimension, a wider field of vision does not permit me to cross that logical gap.
Your greatest misunderstanding is the belief that information is an answer.
In truth, information is first a constraint.
It tells you:
The world can no longer be just anything.
And the more information a living being acquires, the result is not necessarily greater freedom. What it acquires is a narrower, more real world.
Ignorance holds infinite possibilities.
Information lets most of them die.