Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical?

[Bruno Marchal]

 

The logicians are the one who discovered the universal machine (computer), 
before it was build. You are using one just now. You seem to ignore Gödel’s 
contribution, which in my opinion is, when we assume mechanism (the older 
metaphysical/theological assumption)  the most important result ever discovered 
by the humans.


> Sorry again! 
> 
> 

You don’t need to be sorry, but my feeling is that you are not aware of the 
result that I got. It is science, which means that it is not a question of 
agreeing or disagreeing, but of understanding or refuting.
Maybe you could study the following papers (if interested):

Marchal B. The computationalist reformulation of the mind-body problem. Prog 
Biophys Mol Biol; 2013 Sep;113(1):127-40

Marchal B. The Universal Numbers. From Biology to Physics, Progress in 
Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2015, Vol. 119, Issue 3, 368-381.

B. Marchal. The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations. In 4th International 
System Administration and Network Engineering Conference, SANE 2004, Amsterdam, 
2004.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html 
(sane04)

Plotinus PDF paper link:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CiE2007/SIENA.pdf
(Reference: Marchal, B, 2007, B. Marchal. A Purely Arithmetical, yet 
Empirically Falsifiable, Interpretation of Plotinus’ Theory of Matter. In Barry 
Cooper S. Löwe B., Kent T. F. and Sorbi A., editors, Computation and Logic in 
the Real World, Third Conference on Computability in Europe June 18-23, pages 
263–273. Universita degli studi di Sienna, Dipartimento di Roberto Magari, 
2007).

The math part requires some background in mathematical logic including 
provability logics, like:

G. Boolos. 1979, The Unprovability of Consistency, an Essay in Modal Logic, 
Cambridge University Press.

G. Boolos. The Logic of Provability. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 
1993.


Best,

Bruno

PS That is my second message. Possible comment next week.


>   
> 
> 
> 
>> -- Messaggio originale -- 
>> Da: Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> 
>> A: FIS Webinar <fis@listas.unizar.es> 
>> Data: 14 maggio 2018 alle 11.48 
>> Oggetto: Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical? 
>> 
>> Dear Arturo, Dear Colleagues, 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 11 May 2018, at 18:36, tozziart...@libero.it 
>>> <mailto:tozziart...@libero.it> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dear Bruno, 
>>> I'm sorry, but I cannot agree.
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> I take a disagreement as a courtesy to pursue a conversation, which would be 
>> boring without them.
>> 
>> But, what I say has been proved, peer reviewed by many, so it is perhaps 
>> more a matter of understanding than of agreeing.
>> 
>> Or you are just telling me that you disbelieve in Mechanism. I prefer to 
>> remain agnostic.
>> 
>> Mechanism is my working hypothesis. The idea is to take it seriously until 
>> we find a contradiction (internal or with the observation). It is a common 
>> by default type of hypothesis, held by many people, notably most 
>> materialist. But here I can prove that (even weak) materialism (the belief 
>> in ontological primary substances/matter) is inconsistent with (even weak) 
>> mechanism. See my papers for this, it is not entirely obvious. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> "eve­ntually I found a co­nceptually isomorphic explanation in 
>>> ari­thmetic."  Isomorphy is a dangerous claim: the underliying mechanisms 
>>> in biology could be something other than isomorphism (i.e., an Ehresmann 
>>> connection in a hyperbolic manifold, as it occurs in gauge theories).
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> Nothing in the observation point on either primary matter, nor on non 
>> mechanism. I am not sure why you think that Ehresmann connection or gauge 
>> theories are non mechanist. Actually Mechanism entails that the physical 
>> phenomenology cannot be mechanistic. You might confuse Mechanism in the 
>> cognitive science with digital physics. 
>> 
>> Digital physics (the idea that the physical reality is Turing emulable) does 
>> not make any sense. It entails mechanism, but mechanism entails the falsity 
>> of digital physics (see my paper or ask question: that is not obvious). So, 
>> with or without Mechanism, Digital Physics makes no sense.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Futhermore, you simply change the name of the primum movens, the first 
>>> principium: instead of calling it physics, you call it arithmetic.  This is 
>>> as fideistic as the Carnap's physicalist claims.  
>>> 
>> ?
>> 
>> Physics assumes Arithmetic.
>> 
>> Arithmetic do not assume

Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical?

[Bruno Marchal]

Dear Arturo, Dear Colleagues, 


> On 11 May 2018, at 18:36, tozziart...@libero.it wrote:
> 
> Dear Bruno, 
> I'm sorry, but I cannot agree.
> 
> 

I take a disagreement as a courtesy to pursue a conversation, which would be 
boring without them.

But, what I say has been proved, peer reviewed by many, so it is perhaps more a 
matter of understanding than of agreeing.

Or you are just telling me that you disbelieve in Mechanism. I prefer to remain 
agnostic.

Mechanism is my working hypothesis. The idea is to take it seriously until we 
find a contradiction (internal or with the observation). It is a common by 
default type of hypothesis, held by many people, notably most materialist. But 
here I can prove that (even weak) materialism (the belief in ontological 
primary substances/matter) is inconsistent with (even weak) mechanism. See my 
papers for this, it is not entirely obvious. 



> "eve­ntually I found a co­nceptually isomorphic explanation in ari­thmetic."  
> Isomorphy is a dangerous claim: the underliying mechanisms in biology could 
> be something other than isomorphism (i.e., an Ehresmann connection in a 
> hyperbolic manifold, as it occurs in gauge theories).
> 
> 

Nothing in the observation point on either primary matter, nor on non 
mechanism. I am not sure why you think that Ehresmann connection or gauge 
theories are non mechanist. Actually Mechanism entails that the physical 
phenomenology cannot be mechanistic. You might confuse Mechanism in the 
cognitive science with digital physics. 

Digital physics (the idea that the physical reality is Turing emulable) does 
not make any sense. It entails mechanism, but mechanism entails the falsity of 
digital physics (see my paper or ask question: that is not obvious). So, with 
or without Mechanism, Digital Physics makes no sense.




> Futhermore, you simply change the name of the primum movens, the first 
> principium: instead of calling it physics, you call it arithmetic.  This is 
> as fideistic as the Carnap's physicalist claims.  
> 
?

Physics assumes Arithmetic.

Arithmetic do not assume physics.

I can follow you with the idea that arithmetic still ask for some faith, but 
the amount is less than assuming a primary physical reality.

Then, I have never heard about parents taking back their kids when they are 
taught elementary arithmetic.

Also, with mechanism, we need to assume only a Turing universal machinery. With 
less than that, we get no universal machinery at all. With one of them, we get 
all of them. I simply use arithmetic because everyone are familiar with it. The 
theology and physics of machine do not depend on the choice of the universal 
system assumed at the start. It is an important new invariant of physics. 
Indeed, it determines entirely physics (always assuming Mechanism (aka 
computationalism).




> "If you think that a brain is not Turing emul­able, you might be the one to 
> whom people can ask".  The burden of the final proof is yours, because your 
> claim is stronger and less conventional than mine.
> 

Mechanism is a common, implicit or explicit, hypothesis among philosophers and 
scientists. It is a very old theory, already in “the question of Milinda” (a 
buddhist old text), and of course Descartes. Diderot identified it with 
rationalism. That makes sense, because to assume its negation consists in 
adding something for which we do not have any evidence (until now).

Maybe you confuse computable (like automata) and semi-computable (like Turing 
machine). It is the existence of universal machine which is responsible for the 
incompleteness of theories, because there is no complete theory possible for 
anything enough rich to prove the existence of universal machine, like, 
amazingly enough, already very elementary arithmetic.



>   If you say that angels do exist, you have to provide the proof, it's not me 
> that have to provide the proofs that they do not exist.  
> 
> 

But you are the one saying that “angels” exist, with “angels” pointing on 
something not “computable nor semi-computable” in nature or the mind …

Mechanism is just the conjunction of the Church-Turing thesis (CT) + “yes 
doctor” (YD, the idea that we can survive with a brain digital prosthesis). A 
version of Mechanism is that there is no magic at play in our body.

Then it seems that you claim a form of weak materialism, but there too, you are 
the one reifying the notion of primary-matter. That is a strong axiom in 
metaphysics, and there are no evidences for it. It is a natural extrapolation 
from the mundane experience, and we can understand why evolution has select 
such a belief, as we need to take the existence of prey and predator seriously. 
But this, as the Indian and Greeks understood a long time ago, does not provide 
any evidence of primary matter (a notion absent of any book in physics).


> "I will ask your evidence for the wave collapse." This is indeed a strange 
> claim.  There are tons of published papers that 

Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical?

[Bruno Marchal]

Dear Arturo,


> On 10 May 2018, at 15:23, tozziart...@libero.it wrote:
> 
> Dear Bruno, 
> You state: 
> "IF indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science,
> THEN “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e. 
> “physical” becomes a mathematical notion.
> ...Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of 
> description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any 
> change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the 
> brain/body at that level of description".
> 
> The problem of your account is the following:
> You say "IF" and "indexical digital mechanism is the HYPOTHESIS”.
> 
Yes, indeed. It is my working hypothesis. The idea came when asking myself how 
an amoeba can build an amoeba. Then I discovered the solution provided by 
molecular genetics, and eventually I found a conceptually isomorphic 
explanation in arithmetic. Note that by making explicit the use of the level of 
description, my hypothesis is much weaker than most form of computationalism 
you can see in the literature. My reasoning would remain valid even if my body 
is the entire universe, described by quantum string theory with 10^(10^100) 
exact decimals.

> Therefore, you are talking of an HYPOTHESIS: it is not empirically tested and 
> it is not empirically testable. 
> 
I start from an hypothesis and show, on the contrary that it is testable. I 
predicted well before I knew anything on quantum mechanics that Mechanism 
entails that if we look at nature below our substitution level, we should find 
the trace of infinitely many computations, and only later did I discover that 
quantum mechanics, without the wave collapse, entails something very similar. 
But Mechanism leads also to a complete formalism for both quanta and qualia, 
and here too, the theory/hypothesis match with facts. As it predicts a richer 
formalism, some crucial tests remain to be done. 



> You are starting with a sort of postulate: I, and other people, do not agree 
> with it. 
> 
I prefer to not say my opinion. I am not defending Mechanism. I show it 
testable. My goal consists in showing that we can do metaphysics with the 
scientific method, where we never claim that something is true, just that the 
evidences makes it plausible.

The negation of the digital mechanist theory is usually considered as more 
“extra-ordinary”, as it implies either actual infinities, or some sort of 
magic. If you think that a brain is not Turing emulable, you might be the one 
to whom people can ask: what is your evidence? You might need to refer to 
something non computable in Nature and not recoverable through the first person 
indeterminacy. Note that mechanism entails that physics is NOT emulable by a 
Turing machine, and that consciousness is NOT emulable by a machine), so you 
need special sort of infinities. In fact, non-computationalism can only benefit 
from the study of computationalism, as it shows what is need for a theory to be 
a non-computationalist theory of mind. 



> The current neuroscience does not state that our brain/body is (or can be 
> replaced by) a digital machine.
> 
At which level?

Except for the famous but controversial “reduction of the wave packet” we still 
don’t have find in Nature a non computable process. That might exist, as we can 
“mathematically” find non computable solution to the Schroedinger equation, but 
those are not of the type we observe anywhere.



> In other words, your "IF" stands for something that possibly does not exist 
> in our real world.  Here your entire building falls down.  
> 

?

It falls down because you are making the contrary hypothesis, the hypothesis 
that something is not Turing emulable in nature, nor recoverable by the first 
person indeterminacy. That might be possible, but that has not been proved, nor 
even really defined. Your own hypothesis falls down by a similar argument than 
yours, but your own hypothesis is not as well clear as mine, unless you invoke 
the wave collapse? In that case, I will ask your evidence for the wave collapse.

You cannot use the word “real”. That is the same mistake than using the word 
God. What is real is what we search. We cannot start from the answer.

My feeling is that you confuse the universal machine, which is only partially 
computable, and confronted to a lot of non computable truth in arithmetic with 
the pre-Godelian conception of the machine, closer to to the notion now called 
automata. I guess I will have opportunity to make this clear.

I would like to insist (and detailed perhaps later) that Mechanism is the less 
reductionist theory we can imagine. Indeed, a universal machine can refute all 
complete theories about itself. It is a sort of universal dissident. More 
intuitively, it does not qualify as zombie a man or woman who would have 
survived with some brain prosthesis. The moral question will eventually be this 
one: “do you accept that your son or 

Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical?

[Karl Javorszky]

Dear Arturo,


There were some reports in clinical psychology, about 30 years ago, that
relate to the question whether a machine can pretend to be a therapist.
That was the time as computers could newly be used in an interactive
fashion, and the Rogers techniques were a current discovery.
(Rogers developed a dialogue method where one does not address the contents
of what the patient says, but rather the emotional aspects of the message,
assumed to be at work in the patient.)

They then said, that in some cases it was indistinguishable, whether a
human or a machine provides the answer to a patient's elucidations.

Progress since then has surely made possible to create machines that are
indistinguishable in interaction to humans. Indeed, what is called "expert
systems ", are widely used in many fields. If the interaction is rational,
that is: formally equivalent to a logical discussion modi Wittgenstein, the
difference in: "who arrived at this answer, machinery or a human", becomes
irrelevant.

Artistry, intuition, creativity are presently seen as not possible to
translate into Wittgenstein sentences. Maybe the inner instincts are not
yet well understood. But!: there are some who are busily undermining the
current fundamentals of rational thinking. So there is hope that we shall
live to experience the ultimate disillusionment,  namely that humans are a
combinatorial tautology.

Accordingly, may I respectfully express opposing views to what you state:
that machines and humans are of incompatible builds. There are hints that
as far as rational capabilities go, the same principles apply. There is a
rest, you say, which is not of this kind. The counter argument says that
irrational processes do not take place in organisms, therefore what you
refer to belongs to the main process, maybe like waste belongs to the
organism's principle. This view draws a picture of a functional biotope, in
which the waste of one kind of organism is raw material for a different
kind.

Karl

 schrieb am Do., 10. Mai 2018 15:24:

> Dear Bruno,
> You state:
> "IF indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science,
> THEN “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e.
> “physical” becomes a mathematical notion.
> ...Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of
> description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any
> change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the
> brain/body at that level of description".
>
> The problem of your account is the following:
> You say "IF" and "indexical digital mechanism is the HYPOTHESIS".
> Therefore, you are talking of an HYPOTHESIS: it is not empirically tested
> and it is not empirically testable.  You are starting with a sort of
> postulate: I, and other people, do not agree with it.  The current
> neuroscience does not state that our brain/body is (or can be replaced by)
> a digital machine.
> In other words, your "IF" stands for something that possibly does not
> exist in our real world.  Here your entire building falls down.
>
> --
> Inviato da Libero Mail per Android
> giovedì, 10 maggio 2018, 02:46PM +02:00 da Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be
> :
>
> (This mail has been sent previously , but without success. I resend it,
> with minor changes). Problems due to different accounts. It was my first
> comment to Mark Burgin new thread “Is information physical?”.
>
>
> Dear Mark, Dear Colleagues,
>
>
> Apology for not answering the mails in the chronological orders, as my new
> computer classifies them in some mysterious way!
> This is my first post of the week. I might answer comment, if any, at the
> end of the week.
>
>
> On 25 Apr 2018, at 03:47, Burgin, Mark  wrote:
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I would like to suggest the new topic for discussion
>
>   Is information physical?
>
>
> That is an important topic indeed, very close to what I am working on.
>
> My result here is that
>
> *IF* indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science,
>
> *THEN*  “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e.
> “physical” becomes a mathematical notion.
>
> The proof is constructive. It shows exactly how to derive physics from
> Arithmetic (the reality, not the theory. I use “reality” instead of “model"
> (logician’s term, because physicists use “model" for “theory").
>
> Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of
> description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any
> change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the
> brain/body at that level of description.
>
> Not only information is not physical, but matter, time, space, and all
> physical objects become part of the universal machine phenomenology.
> Physics is reduced to arithmetic, or, equivalently, to any Turing-complete
> machinery. Amazingly Arithmetic (even the tiny 

Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical?

[tozziarturo]

Dear Bruno, 
You state: 
"IF indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science,
THEN “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e. 
“physical” becomes a mathematical notion.
...Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of 
description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any 
change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the 
brain/body at that level of description".
The problem of your account is the following:
You say "IF" and "indexical digital mechanism is the HYPOTHESIS".
Therefore, you are talking of an HYPOTHESIS: it is not empirically tested and 
it is not empirically testable.  You are starting with a sort of postulate: I, 
and other people, do not agree with it.  The current neuroscience does not 
state that our brain/body is (or can be replaced by) a digital machine.
In other words, your "IF" stands for something that possibly does not exist in 
our real world.  Here your entire building falls down.  
--
Inviato da Libero Mail per Android giovedì, 10 maggio 2018, 02:46PM +02:00 da 
Bruno Marchal  marc...@ulb.ac.be :

>(This mail has been sent previously , but without success. I resend it, with 
>minor changes). Problems due to different accounts. It was my first comment to 
>Mark Burgin new thread “Is information physical?”.
>
>
>Dear Mark, Dear Colleagues,
>
>
>Apology for not answering the mails in the chronological orders, as my new 
>computer classifies them in some mysterious way!
>This is my first post of the week. I might answer comment, if any, at the end 
>of the week.
>
>
>>On 25 Apr 2018, at 03:47, Burgin, Mark < mbur...@math.ucla.edu > wrote:
>>Dear Colleagues,
>>I would like to suggest the new topic for discussion
>>  Is information physical?
>
>That is an important topic indeed, very close to what I am working on. 
>
>My result here is that 
>
>IF  indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science, 
>
>THEN   “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e. 
>“physical” becomes a mathematical notion.
>
>The proof is constructive. It shows exactly how to derive physics from 
>Arithmetic (the reality, not the theory. I use “reality” instead of “model" 
>(logician’s term, because physicists use “model" for “theory").
>
>Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of 
>description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any 
>change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the 
>brain/body at that level of description.
>
>Not only information is not physical, but matter, time, space, and all 
>physical objects become part of the universal machine phenomenology. Physics 
>is reduced to arithmetic, or, equivalently, to any Turing-complete machinery. 
>Amazingly Arithmetic (even the tiny semi-computable part of arithmetic) is 
>Turing complete (Turing Universal).
>
>The basic idea is that:
>
>1) no universal machine can distinguish if she is executed by an arithmetical 
>reality or by a physical reality. And,
>
>2) all universal machines are executed in arithmetic, and they are necessarily 
>undetermined on the set of of all its continuations emulated in arithmetic. 
>
>That reduces physics to a statistics on all computations relative to my actual 
>state, and see from some first person points of view (something I can describe 
>more precisely in some future post perhaps).
>
>Put in that way, the proof is not constructive, as, if we are machine, we 
>cannot know which machine we are. But Gödel’s incompleteness can be used to 
>recover this constructively for a simpler machine than us, like Peano 
>arithmetic. This way of proceeding enforces the distinction between first and 
>third person views (and six others!).
>
>I have derived already many feature of quantum mechanics from this (including 
>the possibility of quantum computer) a long time ago.  I was about sure this 
>would refute Mechanism, until I learned about quantum mechanics, which 
>verifies all the most startling predictions of Indexical Mechanism, unless we 
>add the controversial wave collapse reduction principle.
>
>The curious “many-worlds” becomes the obvious (in arithmetic) many 
>computations (up to some equivalence quotient). The weird indeterminacy 
>becomes the simpler amoeba like duplication. The non-cloning of matter becomes 
>obvious: as any piece of matter is the result of the first person 
>indeterminacy (the first person view of the amoeba undergoing a duplication, 
>…) on infinitely many computations. This entails also that neither matter 
>appearance nor consciousness are Turing emulable per se, as the whole 
>arithmetical reality—which is a highly non computable notion as we know since 
>Gödel—plays a key role. Note this makes Digital Physics leaning to 
>inconsistency, as it implies indexical computationalism which implies the 
>negation of Digital Physics (unless my “body” is 

Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical?

[Bruno Marchal]

(This mail has been sent previously , but without success. I resend it, with 
minor changes). Problems due to different accounts. It was my first comment to 
Mark Burgin new thread “Is information physical?”.


Dear Mark, Dear Colleagues,


Apology for not answering the mails in the chronological orders, as my new 
computer classifies them in some mysterious way!
This is my first post of the week. I might answer comment, if any, at the end 
of the week.


> On 25 Apr 2018, at 03:47, Burgin, Mark  > wrote:
> 
> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> I would like to suggest the new topic for discussion
> 
>   Is information physical?
> 

That is an important topic indeed, very close to what I am working on. 

My result here is that 

IF indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science, 

THEN  “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e. 
“physical” becomes a mathematical notion.

The proof is constructive. It shows exactly how to derive physics from 
Arithmetic (the reality, not the theory. I use “reality” instead of “model" 
(logician’s term, because physicists use “model" for “theory").

Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of 
description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any 
change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the 
brain/body at that level of description.

Not only information is not physical, but matter, time, space, and all physical 
objects become part of the universal machine phenomenology. Physics is reduced 
to arithmetic, or, equivalently, to any Turing-complete machinery. Amazingly 
Arithmetic (even the tiny semi-computable part of arithmetic) is Turing 
complete (Turing Universal).

The basic idea is that:

1) no universal machine can distinguish if she is executed by an arithmetical 
reality or by a physical reality. And,

2) all universal machines are executed in arithmetic, and they are necessarily 
undetermined on the set of of all its continuations emulated in arithmetic. 

That reduces physics to a statistics on all computations relative to my actual 
state, and see from some first person points of view (something I can describe 
more precisely in some future post perhaps).

Put in that way, the proof is not constructive, as, if we are machine, we 
cannot know which machine we are. But Gödel’s incompleteness can be used to 
recover this constructively for a simpler machine than us, like Peano 
arithmetic. This way of proceeding enforces the distinction between first and 
third person views (and six others!).

I have derived already many feature of quantum mechanics from this (including 
the possibility of quantum computer) a long time ago.  I was about sure this 
would refute Mechanism, until I learned about quantum mechanics, which verifies 
all the most startling predictions of Indexical Mechanism, unless we add the 
controversial wave collapse reduction principle.

The curious “many-worlds” becomes the obvious (in arithmetic) many computations 
(up to some equivalence quotient). The weird indeterminacy becomes the simpler 
amoeba like duplication. The non-cloning of matter becomes obvious: as any 
piece of matter is the result of the first person indeterminacy (the first 
person view of the amoeba undergoing a duplication, …) on infinitely many 
computations. This entails also that neither matter appearance nor 
consciousness are Turing emulable per se, as the whole arithmetical 
reality—which is a highly non computable notion as we know since Gödel—plays a 
key role. Note this makes Digital Physics leaning to inconsistency, as it 
implies indexical computationalism which implies the negation of Digital 
Physics (unless my “body” is the entire physical universe, which I rather 
doubt).

> My opinion is presented below:
> 
> 
> 
>Why some people erroneously think that information is physical
>
>The main reason to think that information is physical is the strong belief 
> of many people, especially, scientists that there is only physical reality, 
> which is studied by science. At the same time, people encounter something 
> that they call information.
>When people receive a letter, they comprehend that it is information 
> because with the letter they receive information. The letter is physical, 
> i.e., a physical object. As a result, people start thinking that information 
> is physical. When people receive an e-mail, they comprehend that it is 
> information because with the e-mail they receive information. The e-mail 
> comes to the computer in the form of electromagnetic waves, which are 
> physical. As a result, people start thinking even more that information is 
> physical.
>However, letters, electromagnetic waves and actually all physical objects 
> are only carriers or containers of information.
>To understand this better, let us consider a textbook. Is