How come a combination of atoms can lead to information being stored in a computer or a brain?
In: Physics
Information storage in your brain is almost completely the opposite of information storage in a computer. This shows that “information” isn’t a thing at an atomic scale. There is charge, and spin, and magnetic dipole moment, and ion concentration, but not information.
It represent information in charge, the way a USB thumb drive does, you need an external structure and specification that defines the “meaning” (0 or 1) of each structure element.
Information is an emergent property, it isn’t a “thing” in the same way protons and electrons are. We can for instance assign meaning to an arrangement of matter and it now “holds information” despite nothing at all actually occurring to the matter in question.
For example we might point at a flag and say “If the enemy is spotted and trouble is coming, lower the flag to half-mast to indicate distress. If the flag is up you are fine.” Nothing changed with the flag itself yet it now holds information.
Because what you said is the definition of information (or rather, of a physical representation of it): simply the way things are arranged.
The information contents of something is not a physical quantity, though. It’s a subjective concept, because it depends on the capacity of something/someone to derive meaning from it.
If you write something in a foreign language, it may have information to you, but to me it’s just noise. If everyone went to somehow forget that language, would the text still hold information?
If so, I could write down some gibberish, which of course holds no information — but who can say that there isn’t a language somewhere, or at some point in time, where it happens to make sense to some people?
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