What is Information?

I have studied and taught physics for years. With a background in communications engineering, I was drawn to the understanding of Information. The categories of physics are space, time, matter, and energy. On top of all that we have the so-called "Laws of Physics."

In what sense are they laws? Apart from the fact that we assume they do not change and operate in any corner of the Universe, they are not laws in the sense of human laws; or are they?

Human laws are conventional; it is o.k. to circumcise a girl in some parts of the World, but not in Mexico. We have the convention here, that girls are not circumcised.

Enter physics: momentum is conserved we say, it is now, it was before, and it will always be; besides, no matter where in space we are, momentum will be conserved. There are conditions for this to be true, the object must be free of external forces. Even with those caveats, many of these physical regularities are used by humans to get by on this Earth of ours; our ideas fit with observed behaviors.

Information can be defined as a set of marks made by one part of the Universe, other parts of the Universe then, are affected by those marks and behave in recognizable ways. Nevertheless in physics we make a description like this. Two objects approach each other, a force field produced by one, affects the space of the other which behaves differently from the case when the first object was not there. We even have equations that allow us to predict future marks in the Universe.

One question then is; do these objects have a version of our mathematical description in their very working environments?

Before I was not sure, now I am inclined to the following explanation.

No copy whatsover of similar scribbles on paper, computer programs, or computers, are needed. Objects in the Universe do something similar to what Maturana and Varela claim, organic objects do.

Information as we have taken it to be in engineering, is a late product of a more interesting process going on among living beings. The following is a description of how living systems affect and are affected by their environment.

Teleology is a crucial word here: . One part of the universe does not have the power to completely set the course of behavior of other nearby parts. That Greek word telos, means purpose. Engineering products do have purpose, we made them to serve a purpose. On the other hand two co-evolving cells do not have a purpose in that sense. What they do is reach a state of dynamical equilibrium through their interaction. Purpose as we know it, appears when higher order organic beings like us, other primates, and whatever other animals have this emergent property, acquire it.

As it happens, once this dance on the biosphere is going on; our societies construct meaning for us, to better deal with the environment. Each one of us acquires consciousness, and we can go on socially constructing more and more abstract ideas with the use of the scientific method.

In conclusion, Information must enter in the categories of physics; but first we have to settle our personal relation with it.

Nowadays Information resides not only in our notebooks, but in our netbooks and in the cloud. Up there all humans are building a supra-brain, constructing what Teilhard de Chardin, already called the noosphere. For me though, it is not an unknown new field, but just the extension of our human conventions to a physical network of wires and computers on the surface of the Earth.

These ideas have been motivated by the work of: Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Terrence Sejnowski, and Steven Quartz.