Dear Mark,
I share your inclination, albeit from a different perspective.
Consider the two statements:
1. Information is impossible without a physical carrier.
2. Information is impossible without the influence of that which does not exist.
There is significant truth in both statements.
I
Just a few short comments in response to Mark & John:
We definitely must reconsider the logic of biology! To start with, we must
abandon the Aristotelian prohibition of circular causality, as Alicia
Juarrero suggests. Life is all about recursion! Then there's the inherent
dialectical nature of
Dear Loet,
Shannon "information" is indeed counter-intuitive, and we have John von
Neumann's joke to thank for that confusion.Shannon asked von Nuemann what
to name his formula. von Neumann told him to name it "entropy", because his
metric is "formally identical to von Boltzmann's probabilistic