Quoting Michael Devereux <dbar_x@cybermesa.com>:
Dear Michael,
You wrote:
<So, according to Landauer, and many scientists who have read his work, the
<correspondence of information with the experienced, physical world is
definite.
We had a brief side conversation about this last year.
Landauer did define information (data)as a physical but also a 'slippery'
experience and pretty convincingly set about proving it. That uncertain
'slipperiness' takes us into QI and probability theory - information as
unexpected variety within a constraint (in scientific and in aesthetic
experience).
Is the commodification of information not similar to the mechanisation of
time as a physical clock in the eighteenth and nineteenth century -
till Messieurs Heidegger and Einstein came along? Likewise before Humboldt
the phenomenon of language was simply nominalist marks describing objects.
From another perspective matter is form with an address (form-at) and
form yields shape pattern and matter (in science and art). Lanadauer's
in-format-ion corresponds to Aristotle's first - material - cause “that o
ut of
which a thing comes to be, and which persists,” and represents marked dat
a,
documents, hardware/software etc. X is what Y is made out of.
John Collier's recent attempts to base 'information' on formal causation
and symmetry breaking tend to address the second - formal - cause the
statement
of essence (X is what it is to be Y). [in-form-ation]. Von Weiszacker and L
yre
's pragmatic school found information on the efficient cause
(X produces Y) [in-formation] Paninformationists (like Norbert Wiener)
who deny
the materialist basis of information tend to describe the final cause
(X is what Y is for) [in-for-mation].
If we can ground our concepts of information on Aristotelian causation
IS may no longer be the pseudo-science it is today.
In this sense the 'difference that MAKES a difference' can be based on
Aristotle's cause (aitos) (what makes information intrinsically information
)
(AITOS = make).
The relationship between the phenomenon information and the material world
is what information science is yet to discover.
That split between 'informatio sensis' and 'informatio intellectus possibil
is'
(informationem de voluntate et meditationem de potestate nexu individuo
commiscens et copulans) which occurred in Bacon's Novum Organum
still continues today in rival material/nonmaterial or realist/antirealist
information theories.
In a quantum sense both are wrong and both are right at the same time.
Sincerely
John H
> Dear Andrei, John, and colleagues,
>
> The relationship between information and the material world was
> correctly described, I believe, some ten years ago, by Rolf Landauer,
> the chief scientist at the IBM Watson laboratory in New York. In
> several seminal papers he insisted that all information is physical.
> In his words, "Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it
> is always tied to a physical representation. It is represented by
> engraving on a stone tablet, a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched
> card, a mark on paper, or some other equivalent. This ties the
> handling of information to all the possibilities and restrictions of
> our real physical world, its laws of physics, and its storehouse of
> available parts." (Physics Letters A 217, 1996, p. 188.)
> When information is exchanged between two objects, as in a
> measurement, there is, necessarily, a transfer of some physical
> thing. I would note that all physical objects are composed of quanta
> and all quanta carry energy. So, according to Landauer, and many
> scientists who have read his work, the correspondence of information
> with the experienced, physical world is definite.
> Cordially,
>
> Michael Devereux
>
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Received on Wed Jul 19 11:23:01 2006
