6. Information Doesn't Exist

We live in an age saturated with information.

Genes are said to contain it. Brains are said to process it. Communication systems are said to transmit it. Physics, biology, linguistics, computer science, and cognitive science all speak fluently in its vocabulary.

It has become one of the most universal explanatory terms in contemporary science.

And yet it is rarely asked what kind of thing information actually is.

At first glance, the answer seems obvious.

Information is what is carried in signals, encoded in DNA, stored in memory, transmitted across networks, and extracted from data.

But each of these descriptions already assumes something that deserves closer attention.

To say that information is carried is to invoke a physical metaphor.

To say that it is encoded is to assume a code that precedes interpretation.

To say that it is stored is to imagine a substance persisting in a container.

In each case, information is treated as though it were a kind of invisible stuff distributed across different substrates.

This is where the difficulty begins.

Consider a simple example.

A string of marks on a page:

1011001

Does it contain information?

The answer seems to be yes.

But now ask: information about what?

About binary arithmetic? A genetic sequence? A computer instruction? A symbolic encoding system? Without a system of interpretation, the marks remain simply marks.

Nothing intrinsic to them determines what they mean.

The same pattern can function as different information within different relational contexts.

What changes is not the pattern itself.

What changes is the construal.

This suggests something important.

Information is not a property of a physical configuration considered in isolation.

It is a relational effect that emerges when a configuration is taken up within a system of interpretation, distinction, and use.

A genome does not contain information in the way a bottle contains liquid.

A DNA sequence participates in a complex developmental system that has been shaped through evolutionary history. Within that system, certain variations reliably correlate with certain developmental outcomes. We describe this stability using informational language.

But the language describes a relation.

It does not name a substance.

The same is true in neuroscience.

Neural signals are said to encode sensory information, motor commands, or cognitive content. Yet these signals acquire their informational character only within the interpretive framework that relates neural activity to behavioural, environmental, and experimental conditions.

Outside that framework, they are simply electrochemical events.

Not messages.

Not representations.

Not packets of meaning.

Likewise in physics, where entropy and information are often treated as interchangeable quantities. Yet even here, information depends upon a partitioning of the world into states, distinctions, and coarse-grained descriptions. Change the partition, and the “amount of information” changes with it.

Across all these domains, a consistent pattern emerges.

Information appears whenever a system of distinctions is imposed upon a domain of variation.

It is not a thing in the world.

It is a way of organising the world.

This does not make information illusory.

But it does make it dependent.

Dependent on systems that distinguish, interpret, and act.

Dependent on the relational structures within which patterns become meaningful.

From this perspective, information is not fundamental.

It is derivative.

It arises when a difference is taken up within a system capable of responding to that difference.

A signal is not information in itself.

It becomes information when it is actualised as such within a relational field of interpretation and use.

This is why the idea that genes “contain information” or brains “process information” is so powerful—and so misleading.

It encourages us to imagine that information is already fully formed inside a physical substrate, waiting to be decoded.

But nothing in the substrate guarantees this.

DNA does not interpret itself.

Neurons do not read themselves.

Paper does not understand writing.

Information appears only when construal occurs.

This is the crucial shift.

Not from physical to mental.

But from substance to relation.

From contained meaning to actualised distinction.

From thing-like information to event-like information.

Seen this way, information does not exist as a fundamental ingredient of reality.

What exists are structured differences within physical systems, and the relational practices through which those differences are taken up as meaningful, functional, or significant.

Information is the name we give to that uptake.

It is not what the world is made of.

It is how certain differences become available within it.

And once this is recognised, the familiar picture reverses.

We do not live in a world made of information.

We live in a world in which information occasionally happens.

5. Brains Don't Think

It sounds absurd.

Of course brains think.

Brain scans reveal patterns of activity associated with memory, attention, decision-making, language, and imagination. Damage particular regions and particular cognitive abilities disappear. Every modern neuroscience textbook assumes that thought is produced by the brain.

Surely the matter is settled.

Perhaps not.

The question is not whether brains are necessary for thinking.

They plainly are.

The question is whether thinking is the sort of thing that can be located inside a brain.

Those are very different claims.

Consider a conversation.

Two people speak.

Words are exchanged.

Questions are asked.

Ideas emerge that neither participant anticipated.

At what point, exactly, does the thinking occur?

Is it inside one brain?

Inside the other?

Half in each?

Or does the thinking emerge through the unfolding interaction itself?

We instinctively answer the first question because we have inherited a powerful image of thought as something hidden inside individual minds. The brain becomes a container within which thoughts are generated before eventually escaping into speech.

Neuroscience has often reinforced this picture by identifying the neural processes that accompany different cognitive activities.

These discoveries are remarkable.

But they do not demonstrate that thinking itself is located inside the neural tissue.

They demonstrate something slightly different.

Brains participate in thinking.

The distinction may appear trivial.

It is not.

Imagine attending an orchestra.

The performance depends upon violins, cellos, brass, percussion, a conductor, musicians, an audience, an acoustic space, and a shared musical tradition.

Suppose someone points to the first violin and asks,

"Where is the symphony?"

The violin is indispensable.

Remove it and the performance changes.

Yet no one imagines that the symphony resides inside the instrument.

The symphony exists only as an actualised performance.

Thinking appears remarkably similar.

Neurons fire.

Muscles move.

Words are spoken.

Gestures are made.

Objects are manipulated.

Other people respond.

New possibilities emerge.

Thinking is not hidden inside one component of this extraordinarily complex system.

It is actualised through the coordinated activity of the system itself.

Modern cognitive science increasingly points in this direction.

Researchers study embodied cognition, distributed cognition, ecological psychology, cultural evolution, and social interaction. They investigate how thinking depends upon bodies, environments, tools, languages, and communities rather than isolated nervous systems alone.

Again and again, the science becomes more relational.

Yet our explanations often retreat to the familiar language of brains producing thoughts.

Perhaps the difficulty lies in the image itself.

To say that brains think is rather like saying that lungs breathe.

Strictly speaking, lungs do not breathe.

Organisms breathe.

Lungs participate in breathing.

Likewise, brains do not think.

People think.

And people think through relations extending far beyond their nervous systems.

The language they inherit.

The conversations they enter.

The books they read.

The cultures they inhabit.

The environments they navigate.

The symbolic systems through which entirely new possibilities become available.

None of this diminishes the extraordinary importance of the brain.

Without brains, human thinking as we know it would not occur.

But necessity should not be confused with location.

Oxygen is necessary for breathing.

No one therefore concludes that breathing happens inside oxygen.

The same confusion quietly accompanies much contemporary neuroscience.

Neural activity becomes increasingly sophisticated.

Brain imaging becomes increasingly precise.

Correlations become increasingly detailed.

Then, almost unnoticed, participation becomes identity.

The brain is no longer one indispensable participant in thinking.

It becomes the place where thinking supposedly occurs.

The experiment itself has not demonstrated this.

The ontology has supplied it.

Relational ontology begins elsewhere.

Thinking is not an object hidden inside an organ.

Nor is it a substance flowing through neurons.

Thinking is an event.

It is the continual actualisation of possibilities through the coordinated relations among biological systems, symbolic systems, material environments, and other thinkers.

Brains are indispensable participants in that process.

They shape it profoundly.

They constrain it continuously.

They make it possible.

But they do not contain thought.

The mistake is understandable.

For centuries we have searched for the place where thought resides.

Perhaps the search itself has been misguided.

Perhaps thought is not located because it is not the kind of thing that has a location.

Like a conversation.

Like a symphony.

Like meaning itself.

Brains do not think.

Brains participate in thinking.

And once that distinction is recognised, the remarkable achievements of neuroscience become no less impressive.

They simply become part of a much larger story about how possibility becomes actual.

4. Models Don't Represent Reality

Ask almost anyone what a scientific model is, and the answer will probably sound something like this:

A model is a simplified representation of reality.

It is an appealing idea.

Maps represent landscapes. Scale models represent buildings. Diagrams represent machines. Scientific theories, we naturally suppose, represent the world.

The metaphor seems so obvious that we rarely stop to examine it.

Perhaps we should.

The history of science is littered with successful models that describe the same phenomena in remarkably different ways. Light has been modelled as particles, as waves, as electromagnetic fields, and as quantum systems. Matter has been described using atoms, fields, strings, and geometrical structures. Even space and time have been reconceived repeatedly.

If models are representations, which one represents reality correctly?

Perhaps none of them.

Or perhaps that question misunderstands what models are doing.

Consider a map.

A road map does not represent a mountain range in the same way as a geological survey. A weather map does not represent political boundaries. A nautical chart ignores features essential to a hiking map.

None of these maps is false.

Each is organised for a different purpose.

The map is not attempting to reproduce the landscape in miniature.

It is making particular distinctions useful.

Scientific models behave in much the same way.

A model does not present reality exactly as it is.

It organises possible observations in ways that make certain relations visible.

The familiar language of representation quietly encourages us to imagine that somewhere behind every model lies a complete reality waiting to be copied with increasing accuracy.

Yet scientific practice rarely proceeds in this manner.

Scientists build models because particular questions demand particular distinctions. Different models reveal different regularities. Some models become extraordinarily successful within one domain while proving almost useless in another.

This is not a failure of science.

It is precisely how science progresses.

The trouble begins when we mistake the usefulness of a model for evidence that it mirrors reality itself.

A subway map offers a simple illustration.

No one mistakes the coloured lines of a subway diagram for the city itself. Distances are distorted. Streets disappear. Rivers are simplified. Entire neighbourhoods may be omitted.

The map succeeds precisely because it leaves so much out.

Its power lies not in representing everything but in organising the distinctions relevant to travelling through a transport network.

Scientific models achieve something remarkably similar.

They foreground certain relations while backgrounding others.

The resulting organisation is not arbitrary.

It is disciplined by observation, experiment, mathematics, and continual empirical testing.

But none of this requires that the model exist as a miniature duplicate of reality.

The representational metaphor quietly invites another confusion.

If a model represents reality, then success is naturally interpreted as correspondence between the model and the world.

But what if successful science depends less upon correspondence than upon the capacity to generate fruitful construals?

A model allows us to ask new questions.

It allows us to make new predictions.

It allows us to recognise new phenomena.

Most importantly, it allows us to make distinctions that were previously unavailable.

Seen from this perspective, a scientific model is not a mirror held up to reality.

It is an instrument of construal.

This does not make reality subjective.

Reality continues to constrain every successful model. Experiments still fail. Predictions remain testable. Nature stubbornly refuses to cooperate with inadequate theories.

The world is not invented by our models.

But neither is it simply copied by them.

Between invention and imitation lies something more interesting.

Construal.

A model participates in the actualisation of phenomena by making particular relational distinctions available. It opens one way of seeing while necessarily closing others. Different models therefore reveal different aspects of the world's relational organisation without requiring that any one of them constitute reality itself.

This observation explains something curious about the history of science.

Again and again, revolutionary theories are not created by discovering new objects.

They emerge by reorganising existing relations.

The mathematics changes.

The distinctions change.

The phenomena become newly intelligible.

Reality itself has not changed.

Our construal of it has.

Nothing in scientific practice becomes less rigorous under this interpretation.

Models remain indispensable.

Prediction remains essential.

Experiment remains the final discipline upon speculation.

What changes is the role we assign to models.

They are no longer miniature replicas of an independently structured world.

They are disciplined instruments through which particular relational organisations become available to inquiry.

Models do not represent reality.

They participate in construal.

And perhaps that is why the history of science has been so extraordinarily creative—not because humanity has gradually assembled a perfect picture of reality, but because we have continually discovered new ways of making reality intelligible.

3. Particles Don't Have Properties

One of the most enduring images in science is that of the particle.

We imagine tiny objects moving through space, each carrying its own collection of properties: mass, charge, momentum, spin, position. These properties are thought to belong to the particle itself, much as colour belongs to an apple or weight belongs to a stone.

Quantum physics has spent the better part of a century complicating this picture.

Yet remarkably, our everyday language has hardly changed.

Open almost any popular account of quantum mechanics and you will still read that particles have properties. The mystery, we are told, is that these properties somehow remain indefinite until measured.

The experiment, however, suggests something rather different.

Again and again, quantum experiments reveal that what can be observed depends upon the experimental arrangement through which the observation is made. Change the arrangement and different aspects of the phenomenon become available. Alter the relational configuration and the observed outcome changes with it.

This has often been described as one of the great mysteries of modern physics.

Perhaps the mystery lies elsewhere.

Perhaps the difficulty begins the moment we assume that properties exist independently of the relations through which they become observable.

Consider a familiar example.

Suppose someone asks for the north side of a mountain.

The request makes perfect sense.

But remove every point of orientation—every compass direction, every horizon, every observer—and what becomes of "north"?

The mountain remains.

North does not.

North is not a substance hidden inside the mountain.

It is a relational distinction that emerges within a particular system of orientation.

Properties in quantum physics appear surprisingly similar.

Position, momentum, polarisation, and countless other measurable quantities are not simply extracted from particles like objects retrieved from a box. They become determinate through carefully specified experimental relations.

The experiments themselves repeatedly demonstrate this.

Yet the accompanying explanations often continue to speak as though the properties had always been quietly residing inside the particle, waiting for the correct measurement to reveal them.

The result is an endless succession of paradoxes.

How can a particle possess incompatible properties?

How can measurement disturb what was already there?

How can observation change reality?

Each question quietly assumes the very ontology under dispute.

It assumes that properties belong to independently existing objects.

Relational ontology begins elsewhere.

A particle is not first given its complete collection of intrinsic properties before entering into relation with the rest of the universe.

Rather, properties are actualised under particular relational cuts.

The phrase is important.

A relational cut does not create reality out of nothing.

Nor does it merely reveal a reality already complete.

It actualises a particular distinction within an underlying field of possibility.

The property belongs to the event, not to an isolated object.

This interpretation does not diminish the remarkable achievements of quantum physics.

Quite the opposite.

It allows the experiments to speak in their own voice.

For decades, physicists have shown that changing the experimental arrangement changes what becomes physically determinate. Entangled systems exhibit correlations that cannot be understood by treating their components as independently property-bearing objects. Complementary measurements reveal mutually exclusive aspects of quantum systems without implying that one hidden set of properties lies beneath them all.

Again and again, the experiments point toward relation.

Again and again, our explanations retreat toward substance.

The familiar language of particles carrying intrinsic properties is deeply intuitive. It reflects centuries of thinking about the world as a collection of independently existing things.

Quantum physics has steadily eroded that picture.

The experiments themselves are not confused.

Our ontology is.

Perhaps the real lesson of quantum mechanics has never been that the universe behaves strangely.

Perhaps it is that our inherited picture of what a thing is has quietly ceased to fit the evidence.

The world revealed by modern physics appears less like a collection of objects carrying their own properties than an evolving network of relations through which particular distinctions become actual.

Particles remain indispensable.

Properties remain measurable.

Nothing in the experimental science is lost.

What changes is where we locate those properties.

Not inside isolated things.

But within the relational events through which they are actualised.

Particles do not have properties.

Properties emerge through relational cuts.

And once that possibility is entertained, many of quantum physics' greatest mysteries begin to look rather less mysterious than the ontology we have been using to explain them.

2. Genes Don't Contain Information

If you have ever opened a biology textbook, you have probably encountered a familiar claim:

Genes contain the information needed to build an organism.

It is such a commonplace that it scarcely invites reflection. Genes are said to store information, cells read that information, and organisms emerge from the execution of a genetic programme.

The metaphor has been enormously successful. It has inspired generations of research and provided an intuitive way to explain heredity. Like all good metaphors, however, it eventually risks becoming invisible.

When that happens, we begin mistaking the metaphor for the ontology.

The trouble begins with a deceptively simple question.

What exactly is this information that genes supposedly contain?

Consider a strand of DNA removed from a living cell.

Chemically, nothing has changed. The sequence of nucleotides remains precisely the same.

Yet outside the extraordinarily complex environment of a living organism, that DNA does nothing. It constructs nothing. It develops nothing. It specifies nothing.

It simply exists as a remarkably stable molecule.

Whatever "genetic information" may be, it cannot be something that resides inside the DNA alone.

The familiar blueprint metaphor quietly encourages us to imagine otherwise. Blueprints already contain the building they describe. A competent builder simply follows the instructions.

Development is not like that.

Every organism emerges through the continual interaction of genes, proteins, cells, tissues, physical forces, chemical gradients, environmental conditions, evolutionary history, and chance. Alter any one of these relationships and development changes—often dramatically.

Genes do not operate independently of these relations.

They operate through them.

Modern developmental biology has increasingly revealed precisely this picture. Genes regulate one another. Cells exchange chemical signals. Embryos continually respond to their changing environments. Development unfolds through an intricate web of reciprocal interactions extending across multiple scales.

In other words, the science has become progressively more relational.

Yet the language often remains stubbornly substantialist.

We continue speaking as though genes contain instructions waiting to be read.

The metaphor is understandable.

It is also misleading.

Suppose we say that a musical score contains a symphony.

In one sense, that is perfectly ordinary language.

But strictly speaking, the score does not contain music.

It contains marks on paper.

The symphony emerges only through the coordinated activity of musicians, instruments, acoustics, listeners, and the cultural practices through which those marks become meaningful performances.

The score participates in the conditions under which the symphony may be actualised.

It does not contain the symphony.

DNA occupies a remarkably similar position.

Its nucleotide sequence participates in an immensely sophisticated developmental system. Remove that system, and the sequence remains—but the organism does not.

This observation points toward a deeper philosophical mistake.

We often imagine information as though it were a substance capable of existing independently of the relations through which it functions.

But what if information is not a substance at all?

What if it is instead a way of describing stable relations within organised systems?

Seen from this perspective, genes do not contain information in the same sense that a bottle contains water.

Rather, genetic sequences participate in developmental possibilities that have emerged through billions of years of evolution.

Evolution has not filled genes with instructions.

Evolution has shaped relational systems within which particular genetic variations reliably participate in particular developmental trajectories.

The distinction is subtle.

It is also profound.

Nothing in modern genetics becomes less true.

DNA remains indispensable.

Genes remain central to heredity.

Genetic mutations continue to influence development in countless fascinating ways.

What changes is not the science.

It is the ontology through which we interpret it.

The remarkable achievement of contemporary biology has been to reveal the extraordinary relational organisation of living systems. Development is not the execution of a pre-written script but the continual actualisation of biological possibility through an evolving network of interactions.

Genes are indispensable participants in that process.

But they are not tiny containers of information hidden inside our cells.

They participate in developmental possibility.

And perhaps that is even more remarkable than the blueprint metaphor ever allowed us to imagine.

1. Neurons Don't Contain Nouns

Every few months a neuroscience paper appears with headlines announcing that we have finally discovered where language lives in the brain.

This month's contribution (here) reports an impressive technical achievement. By recording the activity of individual neurons in the human frontotemporal cortex during spontaneous conversation, researchers identified neurons whose activity reliably correlates with particular aspects of sentence production. Some neurons preferentially fire before nouns, others at the end of phrases, and still others appear sensitive to broader syntactic structure.

The experimental accomplishment is remarkable. Recording single-neuron activity during natural conversation was unimaginable only a few decades ago. The study represents an extraordinary advance in our ability to observe the neural dynamics accompanying speech.

The interpretation, however, deserves rather more caution.

The accompanying commentary announces that researchers have discovered "specialised linguistic building blocks" within the brain. One investigator is quoted as saying:

"We used to think language was this diffuse, whole-network phenomenon. But it turns out you have specific neurons that only care if a word is a noun."

This is an extraordinarily strong conclusion.

Unfortunately, it is not the conclusion the experiment demonstrates.

The experiment shows that particular neurons participate selectively during linguistic activity. It does not show that nouns themselves exist inside neurons.

That distinction matters.

The study begins with an existing linguistic analysis. Spoken utterances are first segmented into words, phrases, syntactic dependencies, semantic relations, and grammatical categories using contemporary linguistic models. Only then is neuronal activity compared with those pre-established categories.

In other words, the neuroscience depends entirely upon prior linguistic theory.

The neurons are not discovering nouns.

The linguists already have.

The experiment asks whether neural activity systematically covaries with distinctions that linguists have independently identified.

That is a perfectly legitimate scientific question. It is also a rather different question from asking whether nouns are physically located inside the cortex.

The shift from one claim to the other occurs almost invisibly.

Correlation quietly becomes constitution.

This move is familiar throughout contemporary cognitive neuroscience. We are repeatedly told that neurons "encode", "represent", or "store" meanings. These expressions are often useful shorthand. The trouble begins when the shorthand hardens into ontology.

Within a relational ontology, meaning is not an object that can be stored anywhere—not in books, not in computers, and certainly not in neurons.

Meaning is actualised through construal.

The symbolic phenomenon exists only as an instance within a relation between a symbolic potential and a construal that actualises it. Neural activity is undoubtedly one of the biological conditions that makes such actualisation possible. But conditions of possibility should not be confused with the symbolic phenomenon itself.

A neuron no more contains a noun than ink contains a sonnet.

Ink participates in the conditions under which a poem may be actualised. Remove the ink, and the printed poem disappears. But no one concludes that Shakespeare resides chemically inside carbon pigments.

Likewise, the selective firing of neurons before the utterance of a noun demonstrates that those neurons participate in the biological organisation of language production. It does not demonstrate that nouns are biological objects.

The title often given to these discoveries—"how the brain builds a sentence"—contains a similar ambiguity.

Does the brain build a sentence?

Or does the brain participate in the biological actualisation of speech, from which symbolic phenomena subsequently emerge under construal?

The difference is subtle but profound.

From a relational perspective, the sentence is not hidden inside the cortex awaiting expression. What exists is a coordinated biological system capable of actualising symbolic potential. Speech, gesture, sound waves, hearing, and interpretation together constitute the event through which a sentence comes into being as a symbolic phenomenon.

The sentence is not found in the neurons.

Neither is it found in the sound waves.

Nor is it found in the printed marks on a page.

It exists only as an actualised symbolic relation.

Ironically, some of the study's most interesting findings point in precisely this relational direction. The authors describe neurons whose activity depends upon context, whose behaviour changes as sentences unfold, and whose responses reflect evolving grammatical dependencies rather than isolated words.

These are fundamentally relational observations.

The neural organisation appears remarkably sensitive to changing patterns of relation across an unfolding utterance.

Yet the interpretation repeatedly retreats into the comforting language of internal representations and building blocks.

Perhaps that language reflects less what the experiment has discovered than the representational assumptions neuroscience continues to inherit from twentieth-century cognitive theory.

None of this diminishes the scientific achievement.

On the contrary, the experiment reveals something genuinely fascinating: the extraordinary degree to which biological systems become differentiated in support of symbolic activity.

What it does not reveal is where language is stored.

Because language is not the sort of thing that can be stored.

The remarkable neurons identified by the researchers are not miniature grammatical categories hiding inside the cortex. They are biological participants in the actualisation of symbolic potential.

Neurons do not contain nouns.

They participate in the conditions under which nouns become possible.