Is the universe made of information?
Is the universe made of information?
Information exists only if we detect it. But maybe we should call for information. That involves deliberate information as data. Deliberate information exists only if we detect it.
The fact is that this thing depends on the way we think about information. We can think that all physical things are information. Or we can think. That information is an abstraction that makes something visible. Things like quantum technology are opening the vision about information as separated from material or physical particles.
The physical particle can carry information. And then we can face things like electromagnetism as the information carriers. The electromagnetic field can carry information, or, in wave-particle duality, the electromagnetic field can transform or condense into a particle.
Or a particle can turn into the electromagnetic field. That happens in annihilation. Information is independent of direct observation. We know that there are things like eagles, even if we don't see one of them ourselves. Another person can tell us that thing. So, in that case, the medium actor lets us know that there is something called an eagle. And if that person is inaccurate enough, we can even believe that there are eagles on Earth. Eagle is bird and they live somewhere, even if we don't see them.
The question is, will the universe be a form of information? There is a lot of information about the universe. The thing is that the universe is like Schrödinger's cat. It forms of information and it doesn't form of information. The thing is this. We must determine the information before we can answer that question. If we want that information to mean something, that means the universe is not formed of information. But if information doesn't need to mean anything, that means information forms the universe.
But if the information must make sense, the universe involves only meaningless oscillations and waves. So when we talk about things like black holes, we talk about information. That vanishes. Or, we talk about information that slides through the event horizon. In that case, the information means the particles and quantum fields that slide into the black hole. That means a black hole collects information, but we cannot reach it through the event horizon.
The information is substantial, or substance. That means the existence of information depends on the information itself. The material is not a substance because its existence depends on the universe and quantum fields. Without those things, Materia turns into wave movement. But information doesn't need even the universe to exist. If some civilization can exist after the ultimate end of the universe, that civilization has knowledge of the universe. They have information about their past. And they can talk about the universe even if they didn't see it themselves.
They can make clones of animals that lived in the universe. But for that work, those creatures require physical things. So, information itself cannot make anything. It can interact with the physical universe through sockets. Those sockets can be the DNA molecules that contain information. Those sockets or tensors that connect information with the physical world can be the bits in the computer's mass memory.
But a computer cannot turn that information into a physical form. Without robots. Robots are tensors that allow computers to turn abstraction into reality. Materia can be destroyed. But information lives forever. Theoretical information can be reorganized into a new form.
There must be some information stored in the system that the system can sort data into a new form. In human brains, memory cells are like the net eye. They can sort information from those cells into a new form with a very high accuracy. The reason for that is that there are so many small information dots that the brain can put into a new order. And the number of those memory dots determines how accurate that image is. The information can make sense. But that information must not have a match in the real world.
Or, we just don't find that sense from the captured information. Or maybe we should call that thing signals. But are signals physical things? Maybe, maybe not. That means we capture radio signals from space that involve information about reactions in distant worlds.
Is some other, intelligent civilization behind some of those radio signals?
The answer is this: researchers have not detected any confirmed messages from another civilization.
Or a shorter version is: nobody knows. There might be many messages that mean deliberate information. But researchers and AI don't detect those messages from natural radio signals. That means the search continues. And we are alone until we get an answer. We get an answer only if there is a message that comes from a confirmed alien source. Until that silence continues and the answer remains open.
That is the problem with things like language science and especially the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI. That means we might have billions of alien messages. But we cannot detect the information that those signals involve.
Because. We don't know anything about the information systems that they have. So we cannot separate those messages from the cosmic background. That is one version of the theories why we don't have alien contact. That model goes like this. They cannot detect our messages, as we cannot detect their messages. And maybe we should be glad about that possibility.
We call virtual information imagination. That information can seem very reasonable, like a human who walks on air. We know that thing is impossible, but in the virtual world in our brains, those things might seem very reasonable. Or at least we see those things while we sleep.
In the human body, neurons connect information with physical things. Neurons use information to control muscles and other things. The information that we get exists only if we detect it. If we don't detect that information, it doesn't exist to us.
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