How come a combination of atoms can lead to information being stored in a computer or a brain?
In: Physics
Because what you said is the definition of information (or rather, of a physical representation of it): simply the way things are arranged.
The information contents of something is not a physical quantity, though. It’s a subjective concept, because it depends on the capacity of something/someone to derive meaning from it.
If you write something in a foreign language, it may have information to you, but to me it’s just noise. If everyone went to somehow forget that language, would the text still hold information?
If so, I could write down some gibberish, which of course holds no information — but who can say that there isn’t a language somewhere, or at some point in time, where it happens to make sense to some people?
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