Hi again Graham
you wrote:
> You seem to be saying that it is only information if it exists in the human mind. DNA has been doing its thing for millions of
> years, but the patterns it contains only became information about 50 years ago when we started to discover how to unravel it.
You didn't hear the term "human mind" from me. Otherwise, well, yes, it wasn't information to *us* until we unraveled it.
It may seem to be a lame excuse that it wasn't information to *us* until recently but it's hardly unprecedented. Hieroglyphs
lacked meaning to us until someone found the Rosetta stone, not until that moment did our society have the language needed
to read the information hidden in hieroglyphs.
> Or, probably closer to my understanding of the term, you are saying that it is only information if we assign meaning to it. The
> question is then: is meaning a uniquely intellectual property? Could it not be said that biology demonstrates that it finds meaning
> in the DNA patterns by decoding them as it does?
A very good point. I've been trying to find out for a long time if anyone knows anything about this. Does biology interpret
information in DNA with some kind of microprocessor or is it just following some natural law when a new cell is created?
The only thing that seems to be clear is that the DNA is copied, but nothing is ever said about how the DNA is used to
create new cells.
> MAGNUS:
> I'm not really sure what you're trying to ask here, the term 'quantum information' is a contradiction in terms in the MOQ.
> If you are asking whether it's possible to reverse the dependency I'd say no. A lower level pattern is not necessarily a
> higher level pattern, but a higher level pattern is by necessity also all lower level patterns.
>
> GRAHAM:
>
> I am not really sure what I mean either, so I suppose that I should say that I will get back to you when I have had a chance to
> think about it. But this could take months, so to take a stab at it I suppose that what I mean is that patterns of value at the
> quantum level are the basis for inorganic quality. The inorganic world in built from them, and that the fact that they contain
> meaning is demonstrated by the fact that they decode into the physical world we see around us.
>
> Of course, it all depends on what you mean by meaning, I suppose.
Indeed, I agree with what you said to Andrea that the term information is useless without meaning. In my understanding of the MoQ,
information is intellectual patterns, the meaning comes from the social layer and the media comes from the inorganic layer. When
information theory "hijacks" the term information to mean the bits without meaning, the only thing left is the inorganic pattern
that is being stored, transferred or whatever.
This also means that it's impossible to have information without meaning *and* media. And since the media is inorganic, it seems
impossible that quantum patterns could support information.
And I don't think a quantum pattern *can* store information as we know it. It seems to require an inorganic quality event to
'evaluate' or 'collapse' the quantum bit into an inorganic pattern. I just read about researchers at IBM that built a quantum
computer consisting of seven atoms. The main obstacle is to manipulate and read the state of the particles without affecting
them. There seems to be no direct entrance to the quantum world, you must always pass through the inorganic layer.
Back to your paragraph above, you wrote:
> the fact that they contain meaning is demonstrated by the fact that they decode into the physical world we see around us.
I'm not sure I agree with this. It seems to imply that the quantum world is some kind of Matrix-like program, which would
require another static level ladder below our universe and I'm not too thrilled about that idea.
BTW, the term 'decode' you used, wouldn't that be 'valued' in the MoQ?
Magnus
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