[Fis] it from bit

[Terrence W Deacon]

Dear FIS colleagues,


Now that the period for responses to Stu Kauffman’s 2024 inaugural FIS
paper has been completed, I wanted to return to a brief comment I made
early in the process that was both too brief and too out of context, and
which also immediately inspired Gordon to write a critical response. Her
response was fair and warranted given my cryptic comments, but I now want
to briefly explain why I reacted to the “It from bit” perspective as I did.


Basically, I worry that there is a strong contemporary tendency to think of
information in immaterialist terms. I think this is the source of
considerable confusion. Let me explain.


Quoting Wheeler’s 1990 defense of this paradigm, he says:


“It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has
at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source
and explanation”


He goes on to add:


“that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of
yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses”


I suggest that implicit in this way of phrasing the issue is a confounding
of two distinct uses of the concept of information - roughly, confounding
structural-statistical-computational uses of the term (a technical
engineering use) with referential uses (colloquial semiotic uses in which
"aboutness" is the defining property).


Though our measuring devices indeed provide what Wheeler describes as
yes-no (digital) answers to our experimental questions, this answers
referential questions (knowledge of the world) - epistemology, in
philosophical terms - but that doesn’t necessarily imply that reality
itself (ontology) is created by such processes. Nor can we infer from this
that the yes-no results of such measurements have an “immaterial” form. I
suspect that even Wheeler would recognize that information is always
materially embodied (including energetically embodied).


The bits that we interpret our apparatus to provide are abstracted from a
physical state of that device, while ignoring the many other physical
attributes of the substrate of their embodiment. I think this bracketing of
the physical embodiment  leads to a cryptic form of Cartesianism suggesting
that the  information being thereby provided is somehow “immaterial” -
rather than an abstraction from the materiality. In other words, the bit of
information is an analytical dissection of some physical property from its
whole embodiment that we take as an affordance for possible reference.


My perhaps obvious point is that the abstraction should not be confused
with what it is abstracted from. I suspect this confusion arises from the
fact that the same bit pattern can be embodied by many different physical
substrates and the same physical substrate can afford many different forms
that can be rendered (described) in bits. But there can be no disembodied
bit pattern, nor physical substrate lacking distinctions that can be
abstracted and described as a bit pattern.


So, to risk contradicting one of the most illustrious physicists of our
time, I would argue that all bits are abstractions from its - or simply,
“bits from its.”


In our explorations of the foundations of information science, I would urge
us not to be seduced into treating our abstractions from physical processes
- whether quantum events or computing machine operations - as more
fundamental than those whole processes that are their necessary embodiment.
Perhaps I am preaching to the choir, so to speak, when I echo the phrase
“information is physical.” And yet it seems so tempting to follow Plato and
Descartes into the Wonderland of immaterial ideas and ideal forms.


If this seems an obvious point, I beg your forgiveness for taking your
valuable time to read this preachy mini essay. If it seems wrong-headed, I
at least hope that the irritation it has created will stick with you for a
while.


Thanks, Terry

-- 

*Professor Terrence W. DeaconUniversity of California, Berkeley*
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