Sculptor1 wrote: ↑April 27th, 2023, 2:01 pm
Information is a word that is currently suffering from a good deal of abuse ATM.
It was once something consciously given from person to person. Particularly from a teacher to a student. Or could be to report facts.
It was not something passive offered by natural processes.
These days food is information. Sugar informs the pancreas to secret insulin.
Worse still sunlight is now said to have information which can be "lost" to heat energy which is an end state, where the information is given away.
Now if we step back a moment and reflect on the widest interpretation of "information", re: the question. What chance is there that "reality" whatever that means can be deduced from a conceptualisation of a word that is not even static or that people have exact agreement about its definition?
So we have information in sugar as potential instructions to a part of the body, and through light which contains information about structures of 3D objects in the physical world. Then we have information which is "knowledge" from those in the know, or from media, verbal, visual, textural, tactile ad infinitem....
The answer lies within the structures of neural matter, particularly in the brain, how that is translated and processed. This is not only mechanical but interpretive, it involves the reconstruction of virtual images and sounds as well as conceptual and ideational. It never meets a completely blank canvas. The tabula is never rasa, as it were. Even as a new born we are keyed to find, to seek out large fleshy orbs to locate food from a fleshy nipple, and our brain is ready to accept the input of sounds and faces with intricately designed structures in the brain we all have with specific functions. Such as the Broca's area for language; another for faces..
Speech and face recognition are not objectively true in an absolute sense. They are mammal specific, perhaps to birds and reptiles too, but having this ability means that we can "SEE" faces where none exist such as in a cloud or the bark of a tree.
It is thus that we adjust reality to our purposes and can never see the thing-in-itself.
Information in its most common sense is data that corresponds to an aspect of reality from which concepts can be built.
Reality is that from which our concepts are deduced.
Concept is what is deduced from reality.
But data is not the cog in the gear that moves the next wheel. The amount of sugar that triggers insulin is not information. In the classical sense.
The sentence "The dog bites a bone" is different from the beam of light rays that allows us to see that a dog bites a bone?
A baby does not use information to find the mother's nipple. He uses only gears at that stage.
What does "interpretive" and "ideational" mean to you?
That we prioritize the recognition of patterns corresponding to faces is just an evolutionary trait. Other animals pay attention to all kinds of patterns. Insects, fish, birds, etc.
Humans adjust reality to their purpose using actions. This is not related to the simplification of the concepts of reality. Simplification is not a misrepresentation of reality.