Re: Washington Times: Internet Patents Divide Industry Gregory Ah aronian

[Kiesewetter-Köbinger Swen <Swen.Kiesewetter-Koebinger@dpma.de>]

> >Yes. But remember that the point is not so much that property is not
good,
> >but rather that information as such is of a different character entirely.
> 
> Such a statement is totally ignorant of the latest theories of theoretical
> physics where information is not only physical (and therefore can be a
> property as can be other physical quantities), but also that information
> is more fundamental to physical reality than energy or matter. An article
> in the August 2003 issue of Scientific American, near the end, has the
> following statement:
> 
> .. that such a final theory [of physical reality] must be
> concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather
> with information exchange among physical processes.
> 
> from "Information in the holographic universe" by Jacob Bekenstein.

You should not mix up Shannons definition of information as the ability of
physical signals to carry information (above the noise level, which is a
measure of entropy) and information as meaning of data which requires human
comprehension or according to ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993 "Knowledge concerning
objects, such as facts, events, things, processes, or ideas, including
concepts, that within a certain context has a particular meaning". 
It is the same name for two totally different concepts! 
The article in Scientific American is about Shannons information transfer
(communication theory), but the discussion in this list server is about
information as meaning.

Dr. Swen Kiesewetter-Köbinger