Sit in a clearing in the woods. Do you see all the different kinds of trees hosting different species of birds? What about all the little creatures wiggling through the grass? Maybe there are some big creatures, yet unseen, peering into the clearing.
Now let’s look at this as a pattern of DNA molecules floating in space where their parent organisms are. The pine trees are DNA molecules with coding 1. The crows are DNA molecules with coding 2. The grasses are DNA molecules with coding 3, and so on. There would be thousands of DNA molecules floating in space all looking alike to you and me. The invisible coding in each DNA molecule gave its parent some unique chemistries, structure and advantages to give it a reasonable change of surviving in the clearing in the woods. The sand and the rocks had no such dynamic advantages, and so they sat there maybe just the way they were millions of years ago.
What has happened from some inspired time eons ago is that information came to the fore as the building block of growth systems. Biochemistry in the form of proteins and genetic encoding was added to the landscape of inorganic wastelands. Energy and mass were no longer the only basic variables of physical systems. Increasing information, gathered and stored in many places become the new variable, and formed the core conceptual element of life and computers.
The information sought by life organisms and computers can be sorted into three types:
1 – Inherent in the organism (or computer): the coding of its structure and operation
2 – Of use to the living organism: knowledge about its immediate surroundings
3 – Of use to everyone: general knowledge such as survival and communications
What makes a painting interesting to me and not to you? This is information of relational value based on similar reference information already gathered by that organism. All through our life we gather information that relates to our past experiences, curiosities and tastes. A painting of a sailboat in a little harbor may remind us of a little harbor we knew and loved as a child. The development of self by adding information to a core base is a fundamental attribute of humans.
Information of intrinsic value on the other hand is information of interest to everybody for generations and centuries. This could be the knowledge of how to raise children, why the sky is blue or how to defeat a disease.
Information is what structures the existence of living things. The explorer seeks information about what is over the next hill. The mouse seeks information about lurking threats such as a nearby cat. DNA represents information about the structure of its carrier being. Information tends to improve over time both in quantity and quality.
Reacting intelligently to new information is proof of consciousness and self-awareness. This is done by creatures including humans, animals and birds.
Little islands of information attach to each other through common reference points. These agglomerations of networked information form data bases ranging from the wisdom of the ancient one to searchable data bases of Google. There is real information such as the laws of physics and virtual information that is the basis of an imaginary world that looks something like the real world.
