Information-not-thing: further problems with and alternatives to the belief that information is physical

Abstract

In this short paper, we show that a popular view in information science, information-as-thing, fails to account for a common example of information that seems physical. We then demonstrate how the distinction between types and tokens, recently used to analyse Shannon information, can account for this same example by viewing information as abstract, and discuss existing definitions of information that are consistent with this approach.Résumé: Dans ce court article nous montrons qu'une vision populaire en sciences de l'information, l'information en tant qu'une chose, échoue à rendre compte d'un exemple commun d'information qui semble physique. Nous démontrons ensuite comment la distinction type/token, utilisée récemment pour analyser l'information de Shannon, peut rendre compte de ce même exemple en considérant l'information comme abstraite, et nous discutons des définitions existantes de l'information qui sont compatibles avec cette approche.

What Is Physical Information?

“…It would seem clear to conclude that abstract information exists, so information is really information A , not information C . Such a conclusion has been reached in many studies [66,67,85,86]. However, we claim that this conclusion is incorrect or at least inaccurate.…”

“…Information A is created by a cognitive agent when it encounters some otherwise meaning-less physical phenomenon and decodes its form or organization (usually only a very selective subset of information C ) for its own use or benefit. This explanation should, we hope, counter any assertions that a physical object cannot be information because it cannot carry information A [67,85].…”

“…This perspective, therefore, excludes any conceptualization of information C as something mysterious or esoteric or any other form of magical phenomenon hitching a ride on a physical medium. 11 What is more, we also prevent anyone from associating this information with some structure that overlays physical objects, as was suggested by Bates [66], Dinneen and Brauner [67], and in some sense Von Weizsäcker [41].…”

“…Dinneen and Brauner [67] claim that "information-as-a-thing," which for them is information as a physical phenomenon, cannot account for "typical views of information". 28 These problems are avoided, they say, if information is seen as an abstract entity.…”

What an Entangled Web We Weave: An Information-centric Approach to Time-evolving Socio-technical Systems

“…Further, TICs apply particularly well to two of the four views in a taxonomy of perspectives on information presented by McKinney Jr and Yoos (2010): the low-level matching of patterns for cascade construction entails looking for small but meaningful units in data sequences and thus reflects the 'token view' (McKinney Jr and Yoos, 2010;Lee, 2010), and the mechanism to add relationships between 'temporally coincident' (Jung, 2010) occurrences of those tokens lets the model transcend to the higher-order 'information in the syntax view' (McKinney Jr and Yoos, 2010;Lee, 2010) as an abstract type (Dinneen and Brauner, 2017).…”