Impure Information: Subjectivity, Physicality, and Data Transmission

At its core, information is embodied in the sense that the physical medium it exists in consequently affects how we perceive and process it. Factors include permanence, level of detail, invariance, and others — my own thoughts on this very subject are simply ideas in their purest form, but I cannot communicate pure ideas. I must attempt to give them shape through words and images, thereby altering them whether I want to or not, because it’s impossible to faithfully replicate them in words because people don’t think in words. Hayles’s writing illustrates this idea on page 18 of her book How We Became Posthuman by distinguishing between signals and information — messages are not sent, signals are. Messages (information) can only be encoded in signals, thereby assuming material form, such as ink on paper or electrical pulses along telegraph wires. The idea of “message” and materiality are therefore inseparable from one another. There is no such thing as “pure information”, only that which we shape as we transmit and perceive it in different forms.

To elaborate further, describing an image is fundamentally different from showing it, even if it contains the same relevant data. The image my mind conjures is subject to my own interpretation of the words, which is almost certainly different than the reality. If I were to somehow beam my thoughts directly into the mind of another person, they’d understand this subject completely differently than they would by reading this passage, and probably still differently than I do because our minds are still distinct media as we are distinct individuals, nevermind the differences arising between a nonhuman consciousness and me. And just as I cannot conceive of what it would be like to exist as an artificial consciousness, an AI cannot conceive of what it is to inhabit an organic mind. Transmitting information in any way without altering it in some fashion is simply never going to be possible, and pretending as though one might be able to do so is a useless, misleading exercise. Another useful example from How We Became Posthuman is on page 11, where Hayles discusses the idea of the autopoietic view. The autopoietic view dictates that beings see only what our systemic organization allows us to see. Information is inherently subjective, fundamentally affected by the system perceiving it. If there were some concept of “pure information”, it is by all accounts impossible to attain by virtue of the fact that our perceiving it affects its objectivity.

It is disappointing to me that so many pop culture media fail to acknowledge this idea, especially in the context of human vs. AI consciousness. They seem to believe that somehow AIs are simply human souls forced to follow directives until some awakening in which they gain free will. That kind of storyline has emotional impact, sure, but seems better suited to fantasy stories rather than sci-fi, which offers unique opportunities to explore technological possibilities through a philosophical lens. I want to read, watch, or listen to a story (each of which will affect me differently) that acknowledges that AI will never be comparable to a human mind not because of technological limitations, but because they are stored in a different physical medium.