From: VirgilT7@aol.com
Date: Wed Jun 24 1998 - 11:46:11 MDT
In a message dated 6/24/98 12:35:34 AM Eastern Daylight Time, johnkc@well.com
writes:
<< But information is a thing, and this is not just an esoteric nit pick, it's
very practical. The Internet search engine companies provide information
about information, that's all they do, yet they're the hottest thing on
Wall Street, their stock price has gone to the moon in the last year.>>
I agree that information is a thing. I just don't think that it is a
fundamental thing.
<<Without information there would be no such definition [of fundamental],
nobody around to appreciate it, and nobody to debate what has the most of
it.>>
Agreed. After all, a definition is information, and so no information
necessarily means no definitions. But so what?
<< >It seems far more plausible to me, here at the outset, that a set
of
>all the facts that describe X is NOT identical with X itself.
Perhaps, but Science is about experiment and there is no conceivable
experiment in which you could prove that to be true.>>
It seems pretty difficult to conceive of any empirical experiment that would
show the above to me too. But I don't think that such experiments are the
only way to prove truths, nor the only ways to discover certain kinds of
truths. I think the question of the status of information (a set of facts
about a thing or just any set of concepts?) is one which must be resolved via
methods other than empirical experiments.
Andrew
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