[Fis] Is information physical?

[Dai Griffiths]

Thanks everyone, all very stimulating!

On 25/04/18 03:47, Burgin, Mark wrote:
> Any reasonable person will tell that the textbook contains knowledge 
This is a metaphor. It is helpful in managing the complex relationships 
of humans with media, but will lead us into tangles if we believe that 
it is anything more.


Mark Johnson, thinking about music followed up with a pertinent question
> What is the relation of the score to what occurs?

I'd say that both the book and the score are most usefully seen not as 
the transfer of information, but as coordination in relation to an artifact.


Arturo warned against anthropomorphism, and said
> I start to sweat. ... my body (without the need of my mind!) extracts 
> a termic information from its surrounding environment 
As Lou says, "Information in the sense that you indicate is pattern that 
is independent of the particular substrate on which it is ‘carried’."  I 
sweat because of the interaction between my body and its environment, 
through of a cascade of cellular interactions, mediated by chemical 
processes. We can describe these chemical processes as patterns, and 
from those descriptions learn something about physiology. But that does 
not mean that the processes themselves are composed of pattern or of 
information.

To my mind 'extraction' of information is a metaphor (and from Lakoff's 
perspective it is therefore anthropomorphic). Does the body send out 
emissaries to mine the information? Of course Arturo does not believe 
that, and I'm not trying to score cheap points here. I just want to 
point out that language is not a neutral tool when we are discussing 
information. Lou's "in the sense that you indicate" correctly alerts us 
to the fact that there is more than one meaning to the word 
'information', and implies a warning that we will talk past each other 
unless we are willing to clarify the distinctions we are making when we 
use the word. There is a long and valuable intellectual tradition that 
uses the word information in terms of entropy, but that is not the only 
way that the word is used.

Best
Dai

-- 
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Professor David (Dai) Griffiths
Professor of Education
School of Education and Psychology
The University of Bolton
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