obviously, since humans aren't ghosts. but coding and decoding done by humans involves language. a system where the physical processes and the meaning are not inherently connected; this linguistic abstraction makes information, not the physicality

information can be lost without the physical state of the information changing, simply because there is no entity left that can translate the second, symbolic layer of the physical state. this doesn't happen with dna or other informationless, purely physical systems.

This is just "if a tree falls and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Sound waves are physical, sound is a type of information physically encoded by things with 'ears' and auditory processing functions

nope. sound is not, in itself, information. it's just specific movements of molecules. the same movements are always the same sound. it becomes information when it is used by humans to encode language with it "speech, radio, etc)

I understand what you and @kh0rish.bsky.social are saying here, but this is not how modern physicists understand the concept of "information." You are welcome to disagree with them, of course.

you better not be basing this claim on stuff like the article you linked.

Are you looking for an explainer type overview or foundational texts or...?

neither, i'm saying the article spends 100% of its time talking about humans using language. HUMANS can express every aspect of a particle as information, HUMANS can translate it into binary, etc. the actual physical matter isn't doing any of that.

it also notes that this is all a fringe theory that originates in theories about human language use

Sure, that article talks about humans when you don't actually need humans, they likely figured most readers needed it put in human terms

see that's the thing, the moment you say that it can be put in bonary you absolutely do need a human. the universe isn't putting itself into endless strings of on/off pulsing. humans do that

Thats how they would interpret it too if they are a good physicist. They dont just imbue properties to things willy nilly they would use the term information only if trying to make a specific point or quantification. This is just “It from Bit” nonsense trying to make sense of the unknown, not fact

this is probably a good spot to mention the concept of "model based reality". as far as i know, physicists are generally quite clear that they're working with abstractions of reality rather than reality itself. that their theories are maps, not the territory.

so like, sure, "information" may be a particularly useful mapping method or whatever; but it's not actual part of the territory, it's a way for himans to understand the territory.

This is a long-standing epistemological debate - can we definitely say anything at all about 'reality' or is it all just mathematical models. Most physicists accept that there is no ultimately authoritative God's Eye view of reality, so it's all models all the way down.

i'm not engaging in the epistemological debate, i'm pointing out that "information" is like "species" or "planet". a way for humans to understand reality, not part of reality itself. it's used in models, it's part of the map

Yea we gotta be careful here. There is definitely a material reality we exist in, the math and models are to help us quantify the nature and limits of that material

Yeah, what I'm saying is the standard understanding in physics is that information is as close to "the terrain" as is accessible in any sort of dispositive way, because everything is an arrangement of microstates and therefore everything is "information" (which is not the same thing as "knowledge")

Dont use appeal to authority, own it and make the case yourself

While there is no single accepted definition, and the division between classical and quantum creates its own distinctions, generally speaking information is a measure of the number of microstates of a system, i.e., of differentiation of physical states.

see, this is what i mean; if information is the measure of actually existing physical microstates, it's an abstract human tool much more than a phhysical quality of reality. stuff doesn't have information, humans use this measure to quantify the properties stuff has

that everything can be measured and mapped, by humans, with information as defined above wasn't in dispute here. only whether "a measure" is/can be an inherent natural quality of actual physical reality.

Which is all good as long as you keep it there, and dont make the common category error by overloading that definition to then claim that everything is also computation, and that biology is doing computation, therefore computers can do what biology does. Computers have far FAR fewer microstates.

Yes, I would agree with all of that in full

No, the sound only becomes information when there is an organism to experience it as such and use it as a reference for some other past experience. Otherwise its just vibrating molecules transmitting that energy of vibration to other molecules.

yeah, it's information when it is connected in the human brain with other meaning: the image of a tree, thoughts about storms or lumberjacks, etc. in itself it lacks information, it's just vibrations.