Ah!-
Good questions.
The first seems to me to be what Bishop Berkeley was getting at when he
asked if a tree were to fall, and nobody observed it, then would it be
really so (or words to that effect) and the second seems also what Berkeley
was getting at in implying that the universe is proof of the existence of
"God".
In the first instance, you seem to be asking if "information" may be so
called before it has been 'picked up', and to this I would answer that the
action of picking up of information does indeed help to empirically verify
information status, (from our point of view), but that is not necessarily
the same thing as saying that if information is not picked up it is not
eligible for serious consideration AS information.
As to 'intent', I'm honestly not sure if this is intrinsic to the notion of
information; certainly it doesn't seem to be in traditional models of the
physical world having 'properties', information about which perceiving
organisms may 'extract' in order to ensure continued survival. I've a
feeling that one couldn't discuss 'intent' without discussing 'an intend-er'
as it were, and in which case one is discussing 'God'. But this would be the
case whether one would consider 'information' to be derived from matter,
energy,etc., or whether one considered such 'physical attributes' to derive
from the universe-as-information, wouldn't it?
Either way, both questions are actually hypothetical in that there ARE
actually 'entities to be informed', and information DOES exist (at least as
far as I personally am aware), and so if intent to inform were implied in
the notion of information then there must be such intent, and whether you
would call it 'God' or 'universe', you would have to be talking about the
same thing....? In which case, questions of the "is there a God" would be
equivalent to "is there a universe", to which we only have the empirical "I
think therefore I am" sort of proof.
Or is this the red wine talking?
ppl
----- Original Message -----
From: <Ropy@aol.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: 24 June 2000 20:31
Subject: Re: MD speed, space and time
> A couple of ponders about calling the basic stuff of the universe
> "information:" can there be information without an entity to be informed?
> And is intent to inform implied in the idea of information?
>
> Ropy@aol.com
>
>
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