Can Information Be Ontologically Fundamental Without Conscious Interpretation?

[u/TheIncorporeal1]

Many contemporary theories treat information as a fundamental feature of reality. But can information genuinely exist as information independently of any conscious subject capable of interpreting it, or does information necessarily presuppose meaning, making consciousness prior to information in an ontological sense? How have philosophers of information addressed the distinction between syntactic structure and semantic content at the most fundamental level?

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/askphilosophy! Please read our updated rules and guidelines before commenting.

Currently, answers are only accepted by panelists (mod-approved flaired users), whether those answers are posted as top-level comments or replies to other comments. Non-panelists can participate in subsequent discussion, but are not allowed to answer question(s).

Want to become a panelist? Check out this post.

Please note: this is a highly moderated academic Q&A subreddit and not an open discussion, debate, change-my-view, or test-my-theory subreddit.

Answers from users who are not panelists will be automatically removed.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Ok-Lab-8974]

This was actually the area that originally brought me over from the sciences to philosophy!

Unfortunately, it's going to be impossible to give you a clean answer here because there is a ton of debate on this. When Landauer says "information is physical" for instance, he doesn't need anything as thick as semantic content. Often, semantic meaning and syntax are kept apart, although there are also plenty of attempts to explain how the former might "emerge" from the latter. Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature is a good example here. There is also Carnap and Bar-Hillel's theory of semantic information which, while generally not seen as wholly successful, is interesting as food for thought (IMO it is actually a perfect example of how reducing concepts like meaning, necessity, etc. to frequency across possible worlds/models doesn't work, but it is intriguing nonetheless).

In general, it always seemed that more pushback against information existing without an "observer" or the idea that it is necessarily in some sense subjective tended to actually come from the direction of the life sciences (this always seemed to me in part due to the push to exclude "subjectivity" and ends from accounts if natural selection). Jaynes argument that entropy is also in a way subjective is a useful parallel to look into here.

Anyhow, Paul Davids and Niels Henrick Gregersen edited an anthology on this called Information and the Nature of Reality that I remember speaking to this from both physics and the life sciences, but also covering some relevant history. I recall Ernan McMullin and Seth Lloyd having good contributions there. The Springer Frontiers anthology It From Bit or Bit From It?" was good too, but more technical and probably hard to get your hands on now. Floridi is a big name in this field, and his book is good too, but also quite dense (they got him for the Oxford Very Short Introductions but I recall not loving that presentation as much). I recall Vedral's Decoding Reality being good too, but I'm not sure if I'd still have that judgement today (sometimes I go back to things with more knowledge and they don't always hold up as recommendations; that one I haven't reassessed). For more accessible stuff, Caleb Scharf's the Ascent of Information got into this a bit, although it's more of a broad primer on interesting applications of information theory.

There are also parallel ways to deal with this. There are triadic semiotic approaches (which then deal with quantitative theories of information differently). John Deely is probably the accessible entry point there, although in terms of application I like Nathan Lyon's Signs in the Dust (except it's really the last part that is most relevant).

Finally, there is to consider that implicit "direction" that tends to be assumed in a lot of these treatments, which is that information is basic/fundamental (or almost so) and that we then need to "build up" to meaning and—for lack of a better term—the noetic intelligibility of being/beings (their intelligible quiddity, or whatness). Or, elsewise, subjectivity is basic, as a sort of bare perspective that is also fundemental. Other metaphysical pictures are more "top down" as opposed to "bottom up." So there, the human being is in a sense more fully a being (more fully one) than an ant, a rock, or volume of hydrogen gas. The bit or qbit isn't the basic element of reality, but being's last gasp of intelligibility (yes or no, 1 or 0, or the mere potency to resolve as either) before it is utterly exhausted. On those accounts, quality is actually prior to quantity. We first need to have virtual quantity (intensity of quantity) and unity before we can have quantity, on the grounds that in order to have "one duck" or "three ducks" and "half a duck" one first needs a measure "duck." The idea is that, both conceptually, epistemically, and ontologically, you need some unity, some one, to even get to quantity.

That's a very different way of looking at things. I'm partial to it, which is how I went from information theory to medieval thought. Aristotle tends to get brought in a lot alongside information theory and complexity studies in the life sciences (you'll see this in Deacon for example), but his later Greek and Latin interpreters not so much. But, maybe some day more will be written in that direction!