Dear CornflowerCicada,
“But what is “information” and what is “processing”?”
Good question. Also your question about symbols. The latter I think is what has been called the “symbol grounding problem”.
I think the term “information” in our usage is a symbol that means “knowledge”. Within a pure information processing paradigm, “processing” then could mean to hand over “knowledge” (for example how to further behave as a particle after an interaction). “Processing” in general would then mean for two particles to somewhat hand over the needed knowledge about the laws of physics.
That interpretation totally antropomorphises what humans mean by knowledge and information and handing the latter over to another person. Nonetheless, in an information theoretic sense one could view such a process at the bottom of physics as having the goal of ensuring that the physical world works consistently according to the laws of physics, instead of inconsistently. But one therefore had to assume a certain kind of goal-like behaviour at the bottom of physics. Moreover one had to assume that this goal was set up by a goal-oriented being that knows the difference between consistent and inconsistent and at least knows the laws of physics (if not facilitated them). Dead matter cannot make these distinctions by definition.
With all the above I do not intend to see particles as capable of discriminating between consistent and inconsistent. I merely want to stress how difficult it is to use the words information and knowledge for the bottom of what we know about physics today.
A linguist may tell you that the word information means “bringing something into a certain form”. If I would use “noitamrofni”, that wouldn't be the correct form, since it is the reversed form of the term “information”. But there are many other forms of symbolising the term “information” since there are and could be a plethora of different symbols that have attached the meaning “information”.
To know that they have attached that meaning, you somewhat had to be informed that this is the case, and what does inform you of that case other than other symbols you are already informed about that they mean something specific. So “meaning” also comes into the quest about what is information.
In my opinion the terms “information”, “meaning”, “consistent” etc. are able to be meaningful because the existence of consciousness must be considered as a meaningful, but yet unexplained phenomenon in its own right in a world that also has meaning independent of human beings. Independent because a physical world without human beings would surely operate as consistent as it does now and this in my opinion is already a meaningful distinction from inconsistency in and by itself. So I conclude that there must be something meaningful that has informed the physical world in the first place to operate consistently. That in my opinion is the true source for “meaning” being at all existent in this world: there is information about the true source for “meaning in the world, by means of logical thinking, by means of observing nature, by means of observing one's own desire for meaning (even atheists have that desire, they strive for the meaning of existence to be meaningless and try to convince others).
Back to computers: for the case of a computer, the latter is only possible because human beings exist, understand what symbols mean, invented new symbols (zeros and ones), figured out how matter works to build the hardware and then wrote the inherent meaning of the software into some matter.
So I totally agree with you when you say
“It is time to come to grips with the issue of symbols, especially in order to understand the true nature of computers/ Ais.”
The paradigm of pure information processing has to aknowledge that the mere existence of computers in this world is already a signature for the existence of meaning in this world. But not in the sense that the world is purely information processing in nature, which in my opinion is not the meaning one can logically give to the “meaning in this world” since the term “information” has its problems, as I intended to show with the above lines of reasonings. One has also to factor in the fact that human beings can extract meaning from what they find in the external world and that they can conclude that “meaning” must mean more than just subjective definitions, otherwise computers wouldn't be possible.
In constrast to the information processing interpretation of the world I would say that what we found out about nature and about ourselves up to now strongly suggests that there must be a layer of reality that is made out of what you call “aspects that are not in themselves symbols”: these aspects do not refer to something else but are truths in their own right qua the power of their mere existence. Even the belief in something is a truth in its own right, since that belief exists. Independent of whether or not that belief meets reality, the mere fact that beliefs exist already meets objective reality. And the fact that meaning exists also does already meet objective reality, as can be seen by the consistent behaviour of a physical world that is independent from the presence of human beings but nonetheless acts consistently instead of inconsistently.
That all of this can be conceptualised is by what we call knowledge and by the fact that consciousness exists. So the existence of consciousness is already a proof that there exists objective meaning, objective information in the world that cannot be squeezed into some information processing symbols. Alfred Tarski already pointed this out by his undefinability theorem that roughly says
“The theorem applies more generally to any sufficiently strong formal system, showing that truth in the standard model of the system cannot be defined within the system.”
And in the Gödelian sense one cannot make truth more reachable by adding more and more axioms to a certain standard model, since for reaching objective truth there had to be added infinitely many such axioms.
So for the truths I sor far mentioned above to be recognized as truths by human beings and to be regonized as being fundamentally different from pure information processing algorithms, it already necessitates that there must be “aspects of the world that are not in themselves symbols”. Therefore I conclude that one of these aspects is objective meaning in conjunction with objective information, both being able to exist in the world because they inherently and immanently are already the signature of a certain goal that was “implemented” together with the existence of the world.
This view of mine is in constrast to the point of view where the universe is seen as a purely information processing entity, but when asked what's the information content it computes the answer is “nothing” (or likewise “everything”). Both answers contradict the objectivity assumption, the assumption of there being an external world that is consistent and independent of beliefs, and therefore these answers already contradict the standard model itself (means the pure information processing paradigm). Thus, that paradigm in my opinion is not consistent with our notion of truth, and therefore not consistent with a consistent logics.