Pick a song you love. You’ve heard it once from a vinyl record, once from your phone, once from someone humming it by the café. Three completely different substrates. A plastic disc scraping against a needle, a digital memory blinking on and off, air leaving a throat. Not one atom is shared among the three. And still, without hesitating, you say: it’s the same song.
So what is the song? Not the record, since it plays without it. Not the file, for the same reason. The song is something that stays identical while all the material beneath it changes. We call that thing a pattern. And in more precise language: information.
The thing that remains when the material changes
This isn’t a special property of music. A recipe stays the same recipe whether we write it with a pen, print it, or dictate it into a phone. A phone number is the same number carved in stone or whispered in an ear. In all these cases something passes from substrate to substrate without breaking. The substrate changes, the pattern survives.
In the previous issue we touched the edge of this idea. We said that maybe what we call “I” has less to do with the atoms that make us up and more with the pattern by which they’re arranged. If that’s true, then “I” is the same kind of thing as a song. A pattern. That is, information.
What science really says, and where it’s careful
The idea that information is something measurable isn’t a hypothesis. In 1948 Claude Shannon gave the word “information” a precise mathematical definition, measured in units, independent of the material that carries it. Every phone, every network connection, every file sent runs on this basis. It’s one of the solid things science has.
But here we have to stop and be honest, because there’s a trap. Shannon’s “information” is quantity, not meaning. A file of pure random noise can carry more “information” in this sense than a love letter. The number doesn’t know whether behind it is a picture of a cat or gibberish. When we say “information” we usually mean the second thing, the one that has sense. The two meanings share a single word, and they are not the same thing.
The leap, and where it becomes philosophy
Some take this further. The physicist John Wheeler coined the phrase “It from Bit,” suggesting that maybe information is the bottom layer of reality, and matter is derived from it rather than the other way around. In brain research, Giulio Tononi’s theory proposes identifying consciousness with “integrated information.” These are serious proposals, and contested. Not consensus, and not proof.
And there’s a tempting line that’s easy to fall for: “consciousness is information experiencing itself.” It sounds deep, but look closely and it solves nothing. It gives a new name to the hard problem from the previous issue instead of answering it. Why would information, however integrated, feel anything from the inside? That’s still the same open question. It’s fair to say information is an interesting way to look at consciousness. It is not fair to say it’s the answer.
What tradition offers about this
The intuition that beneath the physical world there is something more like a structure or a text than like matter is ancient, and shared by many traditions. One of its phrasings is the Jewish one: “Sefer Yetzirah” describes creation through letters, and uses the word “engraved.” Not a scientific statement, and obviously not a prophecy of information theory. It’s an entirely different language that maybe feels out a similar idea from its own direction: that at the foundation of things there is something closer to form and letter than to stone. We point at the resemblance and leave it to you to decide whether it says something, or is only beautiful.
To close
A song survives every change of substrate because it was never the substrate. Maybe the same is true of what we call “I.” And that is exactly why the word “information” feels so fitting, and also why it isn’t yet an answer.
We’ll end with the usual question: a song that’s playing and a song written in a drawer are exactly the same information. The only difference is that one is happening now, and one is waiting. If “I” is a pattern, which of the two are you made of?