this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I should make one thing more clear: Information is **not **an absolute thing. It's **not **like mass or temperature.

You can pick up a rock and determine its mass. You cannot determine its information content. The rock's information is what facts about it, you want to record or communicate to other people.

Even if you only wanted to record the rock's mass, that's still not an absolute amount of information. If you measure small pebbles and huge boulders, you have to record if the numbers are in grams or tons. And that's assuming that it's clear that the numbers give the mass of rocks and not something completely different. Then the record of that rock's mass is more information because of the different context and not because of anything about the rock itself.