Daniel BoydDaniel Boyd is an independent scholar and researcher in the Netherlands. He has developed an interpretation of information as a substance residing in its own separate dimension, which exists alongside the space and time dimensions of the physical world. He calls this "emergent information theory." The starting point of the theory is similar to many others: it recognizes that information is something other than matter or energy. What distinguishes this theory is that it concerns only a very specific type of information: that exploited by systems whose function is based on information rather than on physical properties. In such systems interaction between a source (S) and target (T) changes the physical state of T in such a way that it carries information (I) about the state of S. What distinguishes these systems is that further processes (P) involving T are based on its representation (I) of the state of S rather than on the physical properties of T. A simple example is seen in the physical bits of a computer. These have a magnetic orientation, but this orientation is not the ‘difference that makes the difference’. Instead what matters is the binary value that is attached to this orientation by the processes that caused it. That this binary value is not matter or energy is demonstrated by the fact that it is impossible to determine the value simply by looking at the bit. After all, the same bit could carry different values depending on the mechanisms that determined its state. A similar situation is seen in sense organs. When a retinal red cone discharges, what matters is not the electrical impulse, but the information carried by that impulse that red light has entered the eye. Significantly, such dislocation of cause and effect is not possible in physical systems in which interaction can only ever be based on the current states of the interacting entities. The creation of systems with these remarkable properties is one of the more remarkable achievements of biological evolution. In a secondary creative phase, intelligent organisms (humans) designed and built information technologies that also exploit these possibilities. Since quarks are the most elementary particles in the physical world, Boyd suggests that the fundamental element of his "information dimension" be regarded as "information quarks," or more succinctly, "quirks." Like the digital bits of Shannon information, Boyd's quirks take on values of 1 and 0. Unlike many cosmological theories that assume the information in the universe today must have been present at the universe origin, Boyd argues (correctly) that information is being created, that it is an emergent property. Information philosophy has shown that the universe began in a state of minimal information (the maximum disorder or entropy for its density at that time). See the cosmic creation process. Just as macroscopic physical objects are made of combinations of microscopic particles (quarks form nucleons, which combine with electrons to form atoms, which combine to form molecules, etc.), Boyd visualizes information objects (or structures) as built from the smallest information "particles" or "quirks."
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