Warp wrote:
>   Paper and ink is just that, paper and ink. There's nothing else there
> than paper and ink. Yet there can be: If there is, for example, some
> written text, there is *something* else than just paper and ink there.
> It's what is commonly called "information". I simply can't get a mental
> grasp of what exactly that is, at the lowest conceptual level possible.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/what-is-evidenc.html

> It's something that is and is not there, at the same time. It transfers
> something from person to person, something which isn't physical. If it
> isn't physical, how can it "exist" at all?

It's patterns that make the result of interacting parts of the physical 
system behave differently.  That's the trick, tho. There isn't 
"something" there other than paper and ink. It's the arrangement of 
paper and ink that makes the difference, not the "thing". Once you 
accept that the front of a rifle causes fear and the back of the rifle 
causes confidence, even tho it's both "the rifle", then it's easier to 
think about and figure out. It's not "the rifle" that causes it; it's 
the relationship of the rifle to you. It's the patterns on the paper, 
and their relationship with the patterns in your brain (and in 
particular their relationships with the patterns representing your 
memory of how to read and what you've read) that is the "something" there.

A computer program is nothing more than a collection of bits in memory 
as it runs. There are an exponential number of states the computer can 
be in after you turn it on, and the external stimuli can guide its 
choices through the state space. Loading a program pushes the computer 
into one subset of the state space in which consecutive memory locations 
hold the bytes of the program. Moving into the state space where the 
program counter includes a memory address inside that program's memory 
causes the very fact that it's in a particular part of the state space 
to route things around.  In other words, the program being loaded is a 
small part of the possible state space of the whole machine. But that 
state space has many more links to other states including the program 
being loaded than it does to state spaces in which the program is no 
longer loaded.

"Transferring" literature involves changing the state space of the 
person you're transferring it to into a part of the state space where 
the literature exists, and self-references.

Think about it the next time someone asks "do you believe in life after 
death?"   My answer: "Sure. Know who Abraham Lincoln is?"  How much of 
Lincoln's state space still exists in other people nowadays? How much of 
your parents' state spaces did they manage to guide you into? If you're 
in a state space where you think X is good or Y is bad because that's 
what your parents told you, aren't they living on in you in some sense, 
even after they're gone?

I highly recommend a few Greg Egan novels for you. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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