<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:large">Of course we agree at base, but it is one thing to say that we learn about the world from our interventions, and quite another to suggest that this intervention itself is what creates that world. Clearly, the knowledge we gain this way enables us to intervene in small ways to create unprecedented new versions of nature's furniture (now including spacecrafts and computers). To echo your point, indeed Life itself is a "strange loop" in which the information it embodies alters the materiality of its embodiment. But this very fact, exemplifies what millennia ago Aristotle called 'hylomorphism' and today we should recognize as the necessary (but flexible) unity of form (constraint, information) and substrate (matter, energy) - i.e. that there can't be material lacking all form, nor can there be form that isn't embodied materially. Wheeler's phrase that "all things physical are information-theoretic in origin" has always implied to me that his view is not hylomorphic. But I agree that we should be suspicious of simple notions of material, and for the same reason we should be suspicious of simple notions of information.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 2:07 PM Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic <<a href="mailto:gordana.dodig-crnkovic@mdu.se">gordana.dodig-crnkovic@mdu.se</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="msg8720944775613178068">





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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">Dear Terry and FIS colleagues,<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">Thank you, Terry, for reopening this very central question. I agree with you. Many forget Zurek's statement from 1994: 'No information without representation.' Landauer expressed a similar
 thought in his 1996 paper 'The Physical Nature of Information' (Phys. Lett. A 217, p. 188).</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">Perhaps there is a circular motion of information. Obviously, 'bit from it' (epistemology from ontology), but then also 'it from bit' (ontology from epistemology).<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">As a physicist, I believe Wheeler was not questioning the material world, whatever we mean by matter, certainly nothing supernatural.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">I agree that Wheeler's quote is confusing. Perhaps he was suggesting that at the very foundation of existence lies something that is not 'matter' in the everyday sense.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">The continuation of the quote is interesting:
<i>'That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.'<u></u><u></u></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">All our knowledge of the world is informational in origin. This is a participatory universe in the sense that an observing agent actively perceives the world, processes the informational
 input, and reconstructs, extracting meaning.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">And as you point out, all of this processing is happening in a physical substrate. But what is that physical substrate itself? How can we say? Again, through observation and measurement,
 creating an interesting recursive process or a “strange loop”.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="SV" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">All the best,<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="SV" style="font-family:"Avenir Book"">Gordana<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="SV" style="font-family:"Avenir Book""><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Avenir Light",sans-serif;color:black">__________________________________________________<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="SV" style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Avenir Light",sans-serif;color:black">Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Professor<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Avenir Light",sans-serif;color:black"><a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://gordana.se/__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Tt8iW-cvR5tS58FvICLG21LHaqy7MnlW8sCEtXsALE4ugTKXBql_UB_-s0FwV459yzXXhe26yMMn10mVSwm2yA$" title="http://gordana.se/" target="_blank">http://gordana.se/</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;color:black">From: </span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;color:black">Fis <<a href="mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es" target="_blank">fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es</a>> on behalf of Terrence W Deacon <<a href="mailto:deacon@berkeley.edu" target="_blank">deacon@berkeley.edu</a>><br>
<b>Date: </b>Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 21:43<br>
<b>To: </b>Foundations of Information Science Information Science <<a href="mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es" target="_blank">Fis@listas.unizar.es</a>><br>
<b>Subject: </b>[Fis] it from bit<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">Dear FIS colleagues,</span></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
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<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">Quoting Wheeler’s 1990 defense of this paradigm, he says:</span></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
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<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">“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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">He goes on to add:</span></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
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<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">“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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-p1" style="margin:0cm;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal">
<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">
</span></span><span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">ideal forms.</span></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">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></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span class="m_8720944775613178068gmail-s1"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)">Thanks, Terry</span></span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(26,26,26)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="m_8720944775613178068gmailsignatureprefix">-- </span><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Professor Terrence W. Deacon<br>
University of California, Berkeley</span></i><u></u><u></u></p>
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</div></blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="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>