Information, as we know it, is either stored materially in memory chips or is on the way as electromagnetic wave in a medium. But both refers to the "carrier" of the information, matter as particle or energy e.g. as wave. But this is not itself the information. Aids must be used to transmit or store information.
Black holes:
One of the theories of information retention at the black hole is from Hawking and states that the information is deposited at the event horizon. This would be an example that this information can be no matter and also no energy, because the particle itself falls into the black hole. I would call the matter-free and energy-free form of the information as the most original form of the information. It was produced by matter or particles. Is now without a spatiotemporal extension nevertheless present.
Information is the term used for describing a physical system-that is, its states. It is, also, used in another way. The typical example is a book: On the one hand it’s a physical object, on the other hand its content doesn’t have much to do with the way of describing the physical properties of the book.
Regarding black holes, the information that is referred to about objects that ``fall" in a black hole refers to the properties of these as physical objects. The reason the information is ``lost" is, simply, due to the fact that black hole spacetimes are incomplete, because they contain singularities. In classical gravity these singularities are ``hidden'' by event horizons-they aren't accessible to ``outside'' observers: Indeed the horizon separates the observers into those that do have the singularity in their future (they define the interior of the black hole) and those that don't (they define the exterior). The problem is that quantum probes of black hole spacetimes can detect that the black hole radiates, thus loses energy, therefore can, eventually, evaporate and, thus, expose the singularity-which would mean that the distinction between exterior and interior doesn't exist for quantum probes, so the singularity is ``naked'' and must be resolved. How to do so is an open problem. Alternatively, the singularity ``disappears'' upon the black hole's evaporating, but this, also, means that the information about the states of the objects that ``fell'' in the black hole has disappeared, which means that the quantum evolution of the probe isn't unitary. So that's the information loss problem: How to define the states of the objects that fall in a black hole so that the evolution of a quantum probe is unitary.
Once more, however, information is about matter-it describes the states of matter and, therefore, its energy.
There's no such notion as ``matter-free'' or ``energy-free'' information. The information contained in a book is distinct from the information about the book as a physical object; nevertheless it does have a material basis, distinct, though this may be from that of the book itself.
Philosophically, information is a mental state of the person perceives, then it is not physical (if do not believe in reductionist account of mental state). However, this mental state could be represented (or coded) by some physical systems. Have you see how people send their message by Morse code? if there was not a person to take the message the Morse pulse would not mean anything.
Mojtaba Shahbazi
When a human being receives information as a message, this happens via the brain, which encodes the information. This is again a material process in the brain. With the information itself I can agree with you in this case that it has a mental character. However, the mental or virtual information can also be stored in memory cells. This is independent of whether this information is ever received by a living being. Also every physical process generates information.
“What can the information be?”
- the answer/comments to this question see in SS posts on pages 1,2,3 in https://www.researchgate.net/post/WHAT_IS_THE_MYSTERIOUS_STUFF_OF_INFORMATION_A_Short_but_Clear_Definition/1
- and in the links in the posts, first of all in the really philosophical 2007 Shevchenko-Tokarevsky’s “The Information as Absolute” conception, recent version of the basic paper see
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363645560_The_Information_as_Absolute_-_2022_ed
- where, including, the absolutely fundamental phenomenon “Information” is rigorously scientifically defined.
Cheers
Helmuth Grötzebauch
Do you believe that the Morse code is information or the representation of it?
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