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Information: patterns that can make a difference
Once relations become stable, something new appears: patterns that can be used to predict or guide what happens next. That's the sense of "information" we'll use here.
Footprints in the snow
Imagine you wake up after a fresh snowfall. The ground outside is perfectly smooth—until you notice a line of footprints crossing the yard.
The footprints are just differences in the snow. But they also tell you something:
- Someone or something walked by.
- You can guess which way they were going.
- You can estimate how long ago it happened from how sharp the edges are.
The shape and spacing of the footprints form a pattern. That pattern makes some possibilities likely and others unlikely. In that sense, it carries information.
Patterns that matter
Information, in this ontology, is not about news headlines or meaningful sentences. It's more basic than that. It's about which possibilities get ruled in or out by the way things are arranged.
A few examples:
- The position of the hands on a clock tells you what time it is.
- The colour of a traffic light tells drivers whether to stop or go.
- The pattern of dark and light bars in a barcode lets a scanner identify a product.
In each case, a stable relation—between shapes, colours, positions, timings—makes a difference to what can be expected or done next.
Deeper insight: information without a reader?
Do you need a conscious mind for there to be information? IO leans toward "no" in the basic sense used here. The footprints in the snow constrain what happened whether or not anyone looks at them.
Later, when we talk about awareness and meaning, we'll layer on the idea of information being used and experienced. But at this stage, information is just about structure in the world that makes some possibilities stand out from others.
What to carry forward
From this step, keep this in mind:
When relations form stable patterns that rule in and rule out possibilities, we have information in the structural sense.