This continues the discussion on the ontology of information. Someone suggested that “information” has been shown by Rolf Landauer to be physical, and therefore not a thing-in-itself. I happened to have been reading some of Landauer’s work before this theological discussion for a law paper I’m working on right now relating to the legal regulation of information through intellectual property law (thrilling, I know).
The problem I see with using Landauer’s view of information is that it seems inseparable from a materialist metaphysics. Here is Landauer’s opening salvo in “The Physical Nature of Information,” Physics Letters, July 15, 1996:
“Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation.”
He continues:
“our assertion that information is pysical amounts to an asertion that mathematics and computer science are a part of physics.”
Later, explicitly contrasting his view to (what he perceives to be) Christian theology and earlier scientific views derived from theology, he says:
“Our scientific culture normally views the law of physics as predating the actual physical universe. The law are considered to be like a control program in a modern chemical plant; the plant is turned on after the program is installed. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John I, 1), attests to this belief. Word is a translation from the Greek Logos “thought of as constituting the controlling principle of the universe.”
He concludes:
“The view I have expounded here makes the laws of physics dependent upon the apparatus and kinetics available in our universe, and that kinetics in turn depends on the laws of physics. Thus, this is a want ad for a self-consistent theory.”
Given the argument here in “The Physical Nature of Information,” which follows up on his “Information is Physical” (Physics Today May 1991), it seems to me that Landauer clearly is proposing a materialist metaphsics. I can’t reconcile that entirely physical view of “information” with the belief that, as we in the ASA have put it, “in creating and preserving the universe God has endowed it with contingent order and intelligibility, the basis of scientific investigation.”