Deep section · I — Information

Information (I): patterns that constrain what can happen

Given a web of relations, information arises when some patterns become stable enough to rule in or rule out possibilities. IO uses a structural sense of information that does not depend on any particular observer or language.

1. Information as constrained possibility

A system contains information when its current configuration makes some other configurations more or less likely. The classic intuition:

• A detector that reliably flips when a particle passes through contains information about that event.
• A pattern of footprints in snow contains information about the path and kind of walker.
• The state of a memory cell rules out some bits and permits others.

In each case, we can say: given this state, these possibilities are excluded, these others remain open. That exclusion is what IO treats as informational.

2. Structural, not purely subjective

It is tempting to define information purely in terms of what an observer knows. IO resists that temptation. The footprints still constrain what happened even if no-one ever sees them; the flipped detector still narrows the space of possibilities.

Later, when awareness and meaning enter the picture, information will also have "for-someone" aspects. But at the I stage, the focus is on structure: which patterns make a difference to what can happen next, regardless of who is looking.

3. Quantitative vs. qualitative

In information theory, information is often quantified: bits, entropies, mutual information. IO is compatible with that, but not limited to it. The key idea is more qualitative:

information is pattern that matters for the structure and dynamics of a system.

You can count how many bits are needed to encode a message, but IO also cares about what the pattern is about for systems that act on it. That is where the later stages (A, V, M, P) come in.

4. From information to awareness

Up to this point, information could exist in a world with no self-organising or self-maintaining systems. The next step in the chain, awareness, begins when information is systematically taken up by a system in ways that affect how it continues.

The move from I to A is not about adding magic consciousness dust. It is about a change in how information is used.