VirgilT7@aol.com On Tue, 23 Jun 1998 Wrote:
> information is not fundamental, because for information to exist
>there must be things =about= which there can be information.
But information is a thing, and this is not just an esoteric nit pick, it's
very practical. The Internet search engine companies provide information
about information, that's all they do, yet they're the hottest thing on
Wall Street, their stock price has gone to the moon in the last year.
>if we examine all the different uses of the word, though, the
>pattern that emerges is that something is fundamental if it is
>necessary to exist for anything else to exist.
Without information there would be no such definition, nobody around to
appreciate it, and nobody to debate what has the most of it.
>It seems far more plausible to me, here at the outset, that a set of
>all the facts that describe X is NOT identical with X itself.
Perhaps, but Science is about experiment and there is no conceivable
experiment in which you could prove that to be true.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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