information – Harmonia Philosophica

What is an individual?

It’s almost impossible to imagine biology without individuals — individual organisms, individual cells, and individual genes, for example. But what about a worker ant that never reproduces, and could never survive apart from the colony? Are the trillions of microorganisms in our microbiomes, which vastly outnumber our human cells, part of our individuality?

The authors of a work published in the journal Theory in Biosciences suggest that one way to solve the puzzle comes from information theory. Instead of focusing on anatomical traits, David Krakauer, Nils Bertschinger, Eckehard Olbrich, Jessica Flack, and Nihat Ay suggest that the individual must be seen as a verb: what processes produce distinct identity? The authors’ information theory of individuality (or ITI) indicate that individuality relates to a blend of self-regulation and environmental influence. (1)

Processing information.

Processing food.

Processing data.

Processing others.

We are all about processing.

And yet at the end, we end up being processed.

And this is what defines us.

That we are part of everything.

And we know it.

And we accept it.

And even though we may process information.

We choose not to.

And even though we could be apart from God.

We chose to return to Him…

And be able to process everything.

To know it all.

To control our self.

To live. To die.

To be human once more…

Information for… ever. Against knowledge.

Photo by **Alex Powell** from **Pexels**

As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information. (1)

We want to store information for ever.

But can that be information?

Every piece of data becomes information within a specific context.

Get that context out and even the most elaborate set of data will be rendered meaningless.

Information can never be stored for ever.

For even after some time the context will be completely unknown or irrelevant to whoever reads it.

Leave the context out.

And you will see the only thing which can ever have meaning as knowledge.

It is simple. It cannot be written or spoken.

Irrational and illogical.

Raw and deep like the ocean.

Raging and dark like the abyss.

There is no way of knowing it. Unless you discard everything you know…

PS. Read the relevant post on harmonia-philosophica.blogspot.com today.

Quantum memories…

Quantum cryptography today uses optical fiber over several hundred kilometers and is marked by its high degree of security: it is impossible to copy or intercept information without making it disappear.

However, the fact that it is impossible to copy the signal also prevents scientists from amplifying it to diffuse it over long distances, as is the case with the Wi-Fi network.

Since the signal cannot be copied or amplified without it disappearing, scientists are currently working on how to make quantum memories capable of repeating it by capturing the photons and synchronizing them, so they can be diffused further and further. All that remains is to find the right material for making these quantum memories. “The difficulty is finding a material capable of isolating the quantum information conveyed by the photons from environmental disturbances so that we can hold on to them for a second or so and synchronize them”.

Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, in partnership with CNRS, France, have discovered a new material in which an element, ytterbium, can store and protect the fragile quantum information even while operating at high frequencies. (1)

Conveying messages.

Message that will be lost.

Inside the whirling wind…

The great mountain is looking.

Listening to all the messages.

Passing through the forest trees.

It knows that it will be here tomorrow.

But it will not convey the message.

Because that was never the goal.

The message was not to be conveyed.

Only the silence was.

Before and after the message…

Can you listen to the wind?

Light. Data. Universe.

The internet is often called the “World Wide Web,” but it’s not actually accessible to residents of a large portion of the world. Today, four billion people are offline, and 1.6 billion of them live in sparsely populated areas around the world. In recent years, a race to solve that problem has emerged among big tech companies like Google, SpaceX and Facebook. Now, Facebook has published research on an unconventional solution: using light to wirelessly transmit internet signals.

Most internet signals today are transmitted at high rates through wired optical fiber networks — which require expensive infrastructure — or at lower rates through wireless radio frequencies, which are limited in bandwidth, subject to regulations and vulnerable to interception.

In a paper published in Optica, researchers from Internet.org’s Connectivity Lab have outlined a new type of light detector that can be used for free-space optical communication, a communication technique that uses light to send data wirelessly. (1)

Data through light.

Look around.

At the sunlight. The grass. The shiny spoon. The TV. The floor. The cat. The door. The small airplane above. The car passing by.

Light is all around you. The story of the cosmos.

Light. From the beginning of time, it has always been there. Transmitted, generated, affected by every single moment of existence.

The story of aeons is here.

The story of the cosmos – past, present and future alike – is before you. Your eyes see it. But your mind is unwilling to watch.

Look!

A car passed by.

Look!

The cosmos was just created!

Information. Decay. Entropy. Clues…

Information may seem ethereal, given how easily we forget phone numbers and birthdays. But scientists say it is physical, and if a new study is correct, that goes for quantum systems, too.

Although pages of text or strings of bits seem easily erased with the press of a button, the act of destroying information has tangible physical impact, according to a principle proposed in 1961 by physicist Rolf Landauer. Deleting information is associated with an increase in entropy, or disorder, resulting in the release of a certain amount of heat for each erased bit. Even the most efficient computer would still output heat when irreversibly scrubbing out data.

This principle has been verified experimentally for systems that follow the familiar laws of classical physics. But the picture has remained fuzzy for quantum mechanical systems. Now a team of scientists reports April 13 in Proceedings of the Royal Society A that Landauer’s principle holds even in that wild quantum landscape. (1)

The world naturally decays.

The world will naturally turn into nothingness.

And yet we deny the existence of someone who created it.

And yet we refuse to see that something must have made it.

Existence implies existence. Order implies order. Follow the tautologies and you will understand everything. Starting from yourself.

The world cries out loud God.

All we have to do is feel the heat inside us…