Information
The same song from vinyl, a phone, or a hum — no shared atom, yet the same song. What survived is a pattern.
Pick a song you love. You've heard it off vinyl, out of your phone, and from someone humming it badly by the coffee machine. Three completely different media, not one atom in common — and yet, without a second's doubt, it's the same song. So what is the song? Not the record, not the file. Something that holds steady while all the matter underneath it gets swapped out from under it.
Level 2 The explanation▾
What stays put when the medium changes we call a pattern — and, said more precisely, information. In 1948 Claude Shannon gave the word a hard mathematical definition: a quantity, measured in units, that doesn't care what matter happens to be carrying it. Every phone call and every saved file rides on this. It's one of science's genuinely solid wins.
But here's a trap worth naming out loud. Shannon's "information" is quantity, not meaning. Pure random noise can carry more Shannon "information" than a love letter does. The two senses wear the same word and are not the same thing — and nearly all the muddle around "everything is information" comes from sliding between them without noticing.
Level 3 Deeper▾
If "I" am less the atoms and more the arrangement they're holding, then "I" turn out to be the same sort of thing as a song. That isn't a proof. It's an angle worth turning over.
The philosophical leap. John Wheeler floated "It from Bit" — the idea that information might be the bottom layer, with matter coming out of it rather than the other way around. A serious proposal, and a contested one; not consensus, and not proof.
There's a line that always tempts: "consciousness is information experiencing itself." It sounds deep and settles nothing — it just renames the hard problem instead of cracking it. Fair to call information an interesting lens on consciousness; not fair to call it the answer.
What is known
Pattern/information can persist through a change of medium; Shannon information is measurable and well defined.
What is open
The link between information (quantity) and meaning, and between information and felt experience.
Off limits
That "Shannon information" explains meaning or consciousness — these are two different senses of the word.
Level 4 Sources▾
- Shannon, C. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Information as quantity, distinct from meaning.
- Wheeler, J. (1990). Information, Physics, Quantum. "It from Bit" — reality from information (inspiration, not proof).
- Sefer Yetzirah, ch. 1 — creation through letters and numbers; an intriguing resemblance, not a prophecy of information theory.