<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:large">





<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Dear FIS colleagues,</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Quoting Wheeler’s 1990 defense of this paradigm, he says:</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">“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”</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">He goes on to add:</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">“that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses”</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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). </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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). </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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. </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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.”<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>ideal forms. </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">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.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26);min-height:17px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:15px;line-height:normal;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Thanks, Terry</span></p></div><div><br></div><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i>Professor Terrence W. Deacon<br>University of California, Berkeley</i></font></div></div></div>