During the last century, considerable attention has been paid to theories about information, most notably that by Claude Shannon. These theories are mainly about how information works and how to work with it. They do not to any great extent address the ultimate origins of information and how it evolved over time. Though I suspect it’s out there somewhere, I have never found a text that addresses these to my satisfaction. For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts on the topic.
The Merriam Webster dictionary provides several definitions of information. Two particularly relevant to this topic are: “the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects,” and “the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence.”
From a purely philosophical perspective, it is possible that everything is information – what we call matter/energy being just a form of it. This is the perspective of idealism. From a purely subjective point of view, everything we know and experience about the world is in the form of information. The brain and the five senses work together to collect and process information. For some mysterious reason, the brain has an inner dimension which we consider to be a self, our “I”. It is composed out of information and has the ability to recompose this information in novel forms. I think this fact is what makes idealism creditable.
True as this may be, I will assume a more external and materialistic starting point. From the materialistic perspective, information is not primary. It emerged from the interactions of matter/energy. Sequences of genetic nucleotides, most likely in RNA rather than DNA, represent the first emergence of information here on earth – or at least the first of which we have knowledge. This is consistent with the first dictionary definitions listed above.
Just how molecules of nucleic acid, capable of storing and using information, and the proteins and other molecules that comprise organisms entered into their complex relationship is a mystery. In this relationship, the nucleic acid directs the organization of molecules into a form capable of surviving. The survivability of that organization created modifies the nucleic acid.
Most of the articles I have read that try to explain how life came into existence do not dwell long on how this arrangement came to be, since we just don’t know. But somehow it did and with it began both biological evolution and the evolution of information (for a few billion years, the two are basically identical). The genetic material scattered throughout the biosphere is a great library of strategies on how to survive on planet earth.
Information does not follow conservation laws as do matter and energy. A piece of information, whether genetic, written or digital can be copied endlessly, and it can disappear without a trace. As large as the information content of the biosphere is, an even larger amount has been lost with only a few fossil forms to suggest how it approached the question of survival.
The Emergence of Other Forms of Information
Genetic information, it would seem, was the only form of information on earth up to roughly a billion years ago. Then, a new informational structure develops: this is the nervous system of animals, which ultimately evolved into brains. Living things developed the ability to adapt their behavior based on information about their environment. With further evolution, they developed the ability to communicate information to others. The “waggle dance” of bees, as first studied by Konrad Von Frisch, is my favorite example of an early form of such information conveyance.
Sometime within the past 200,000 years, members of one branch of life, us humans, developed a complex symbol system, a language, that emerged as a new way to store and communicate information. This led to early forms of human culture – a culture can be thought of as warehouses of information – a kind of software available to members of a culture.
For thousands of years, culture was transmitted orally from one generation to another. Then about 6,000 years ago, humans developed forms of writing, which we can consider as yet a another form of information storage and generation. Thanks to writing, we still know something of the thoughts of the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Chinese and others.
And in very recent times, novel forms of information storage and generation have appeared – digital communication, the Internet, and artificial intelligence, to name a few. But I think all of us are familiar with this. We who are alive today, which has quite rightly been called the Age of Information, are living through an incredible period in the evolution of information.
In rough outline, this would seem to be the basic stages of the evolution of information. The careful reader will note that the last couple stages of this outline focus on humans (and to some extent, computers).
There is a notion prevalent in naturalism that humans are just another animal. From the point of view of biology, this is undoubtedly correct. But from the point of view of the evolution of information this is most questionable. Humans represent a loci of emergence of types of information generation and storage not found, or found only in vestigial form, in other animals.
I do not mean to imply by this that humans are “special.” Quite the contrary, I would point out that humanity in its entirety is a part of Nature and that the creative use of information found amongst humans is just an extension of Nature’s creativity. But to ignore the vast differences between how humans and other creatures use and generate information strikes me as rather serious ignoring.
So how is this relevant to naturalistic spirituality?
Naturalism has a hard time explaining how we get a world of such diverse, complex, and novel organizations as ours based solely on the ideas of physics and chemistry. But when we add the emergence and evolution of information to the story, there is no problem. It makes the naturalistic account of the world more comprehensible. What separates the living from the non-living is information – genetic and other. What makes humans seem so different from other animals is information. To the religious criticism that science cannot explain the human moral will and the human’s ability to govern their lives, again, the answer is in the evolution of information.
Spirituality of any kind, including naturalistic spirituality, has a good deal to do with self-governance. Learning to govern our life based on learned principles rather than instincts is key to the morality that underlies spirituality. Some dualists are convinced that this ability transcends the world studied by the sciences — that it belong to something that transcends nature. That we have God-given free will.
In the light of the evolution of information, though, there is no need to introduce something beyond Nature. The rational spirit, including our intentionality, is composed of information, information that comes close to transcending biology, but is still very much a part of Nature.
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Interesting article Thomas. Two things that often strike me about discussions on information is the neglect of its material basis: DNA base pairs, neuron patterns, silicon gates etc, and that it exists only as per its value or function for living beings. Idealist philosophies seem to ignore both. Also when physicists talk for example about the information of black holes they mean something quite different to the everyday term. The idea of information just out there as an objective property like complexity or entropy is a related but different concept to the everyday one. Perhaps the latter is a subset of the former? In any case I would say that for something to be information means it is a sign indicating something of value or significance to some organism. The ideas of biosemiotics and CS Pierce are pretty useful in that regard.
Dwayne,
Thanks for your comment. Gregory Bateson defines information as “a difference that makes a difference.” Which I like. In his book “The Mind as Nature” he argues that a genetic mutation is a difference and a successful mutation is a difference that makes a difference. It makes a difference, sometimes small sometimes large, to a whole ecosystem – so that other organisms within the ecosystem may have to adapt to this difference. But mostly the definition would apply to organisms. A movement in our field of vision is a difference, but if it poses a danger it is difference that makes a difference. It is important information.
I agree to your comment on the material basis of information – information is always found on some kind of material substrate. But I would add that information cannot be reduced to that material substrate. One uses paper to write on, but the information written does not depend on that medium and can easily be reproduced on another medium, such as a computer screen.
Stored information is an organization of something – letter, sounds, the 1s and 0s of code, etc. I plan to write about the two-way relationship of organization and information in a future article.