Information Agelessness

Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. wikipedia

What is it about Van Gogh's portrayal of the night sky from his east facing window of the the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum that draws the eye and makes us wonder?  For me it is how the stylized and abstract dynamic swirls and flows capture the patterns found in nature. Was he imagining the recently discovered spiral nature of galaxies depicted in the science literature of the times, or remembering the way water swirled in a pond near his childhood home?

These words I am typing and seeing on the screen, they puzzle me, just like "The Starry Night." I mean, I get the ones and zeros, the electrical aspect of it. I understand the photons eminating from the screen to my eyes. Somehow my brain processes it and that turns to meaning, as does Van Gogh's painting. What is it about meaning? In this post I wonder about the nature of meaning.  I wonder about wonder, and that takes me back to the phenomenon of information.

What is it that is so wondrous about the information in my genes?  A simple code based on four characters creates my body, everything that I am, it seems. Yet, there is no brain involved, no need for mind to be the creative agent. My genes do quite a tidy job at conveying meaning.  These sequences of bases found in DNA, made from adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) means my eyes will be brown. It is puzzling how that information can be saved on a hard drive and be written down although that would take a lot of paper. Will the technology exist someday to 3D print that information, insert it into an ovum and create another me?

What if I wrote these same sentences about DNA on a piece of paper, rather than a blog on the internet? There would be no electric ones and zeros involved, yet the meaning of the words would be more or less the same. The Starry Night enchants  as the photons from this electronic image leave the screen and enter my eyes as they would if the painting stood in front of me.

It seems that it is the information that creates meaning and not the medium. Meaning is a phenomenon independent of  whether it is conveyed through matter or through energy. Information seems to engender meaning in the mind and in the physical world as it shapes my body and the universe.

A traditional scientific explanation is simply that information is "contained" within a physical system and that's that. Scientifically, reality is defined by matter and energy. If something isn't material and/or energetic it doesn't exist. Hence information is understood as derivative. Could there be more to it? Without this phenomenon we call information there would be no way to know anything, there would be no reality whatsoever. Is information more fundamental than matter/energy?  Is space/time generated by an information field rather than the other way around?

Oh, I know, this kind of thinking always leads to metaphysical questions about spirit and god and thus it is immediately embraced or dismissed, depending on one's world view. What if we just didn't participate in that same old tired "God question" trope and allowed ourselves to freely ask questions and wondered about the underlying nature of nature?