I find the seemingly undeniable relationship between consciousness and information
extremely interesting--first and foremost, and perhaps unfortunately, because “information” is likewise a difficult term to define. In the most non-technical sense, information can be defined as a reduction in uncertainty. Yet, in physics, information is a well defined and highly important quantity. See:
What is information?
In this regard, I think one should not overlook that a recent study showed that the assumption by which Ralph Landauer famously asserted that "information is physical"--i.e., is logically irreversible, and therefore is physically irreversible--is false:
The motivation that led Bennet to introduce logical reversible operations was to overcome the minimum energy expenditure introduced earlier by Landauer. Bennet wrote:
"Landauer has posed the question of whether logical irreversibility is an unavoidable feature of useful computers, arguing that it is, and has demonstrated the physical and philosophical importance of this question by showing that whenever a physical computer throws away information about its previous state it must generate a corresponding amount of entropy. Therefore, a computer must dissipate at least kBT ln2 of energy (about 3 X 10-21 Joule at room temperature) for each bit of information it erases or otherwise throws away."
This limit was generally attributed to all the logical irreversible devices, and among them, the traditional logic gates like "OR", "AND" and "NAND." The work of Landauer and Bennet inspired a significant amount of scientific literature opposing or supporting the existence of such a minimum limit. It's no exaggeration to state that for more than 40 years, the topic has been considered highly controversial.
Now, an experiment has settled this controversy. It clearly shows that there is no such minimum energy limit and that a logically irreversible gate can be operated with an arbitrarily small energy expenditure. Simply put, it is not true that logical reversibility implies physical irreversibility, as Landauer wrote.
The results of this experiment by the scientists of NiPS Laboratory at the University of Perugia are published today in
Nature Communications. They measured the amount of energy dissipated during the operation of an "OR" gate (that is clearly a logically irreversible gate) and showed that the logic operation can be performed with an energy toll as small as 5 percent of the expected limit of kBT ln2. The conclusion of the
Nature Communications article is that there is no fundamental limit and reversible logic is not required to operate computers with zero
energy expenditure.
[. . . ]
Though Landauer famously said "information is physical," it turns out that
information is not so physical after all.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2016-07-refutes-famous-physical.html#jCp
So apparently information processing in a computational device can be done with no minimum expenditure of energy--I find that just a mind-boggling fact. Yet, it does not ameliorate the importance or fundamental nature of information in physics and other scientific disciplines, as succinctly summarized by physicist Jacob Bekenstein in a 2003 article in
Scientific American, Information in the Holographic Universe:
Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told “matter and energy.” Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.
Bekenstein proceeds to elucidate the quantitative nature of information and its association to thermodynamics:
Shannon’s entropy does not enlighten us about the value of information, which is highly dependent on context. Yet as an objective measure of quantity of information, it has been enormously useful in science and technology. For instance, the design of every modern communications device -- from cellular phones to modems to compact disc players -- relies on Shannon entropy. Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement.
So in my overtly ignorant way, I would try summarize some of the above as indicating that information is a fundamental phenomena in the empirical universe and even in the development of biological entities; information is a quantity; information is not “physical”; and information and consciousness are somehow inextricably related.
Granted, everything I just said would presumably be quite unsatisfying to a lot of people. And I must admit that I find unsatisfying some of the arguments I've seen for a metaphysics in which information is fundamental, where (therefore) consciousness is explained by and is a product of information. I don't think that the consequent of that conditional is where the facts lead. If nothing else, I keep coming back to simplest forms of the premises and conclusion of Strawson's argument whereby physicalism--as long as we do not assume eliminative physicalism--entails panpsychism. But beyond that, I think that the idea that information accounts for consciousness misidentifies the cart and the horse.
In any case, these days I want to be committed to avoiding the pitfalls of commitment to any particular metaphysical thesis. In RF and other such debate forums, I believe I perceive that and how such commitments to a favorite metaphysical thesis lead otherwise highly intelligent and reasonable people into spouting just abject nonsense. But I think there is a clue or puzzle piece supplied by some of the above regarding consciousness and information and the empirical universe.
