"I'm telling you, information can in fact move faster than light."
"No way."
"Way. Here's a thought experiment. You have a bat signal, a super-powerful spotlight. Super-super powerful, like made of lasers. You cast the signal to the west. The light flies out into space. Then, with the light still on, you smoothly pivot your spotlight to the east. This motion takes you, say, three seconds. All the while the bat signal is spreading across the night sky until you stop at the east. Now suppose there's a planet many light years away directly west of your bat signal and another planet equidistant from your spotlight but directly east. In three seconds, the bat signal has traversed light years of space in three seconds."
"Something's wrong. The light of the bat signal takes years to get to each planet -- at the speed of light, not faster."
"The light, yes, but the bat signal does not consist of just the light that travels at one moment. It's the symbol alone that remains stable across the skies. The symbol and its meaning don't even depend on any light. You could transcribe it with a pencil or a stencil or draw it on sand or an arrangement of cheer-leaders. What has traveled across the sky is not one particular arrangement of light, but the shape signifier holding the interpretable meaning of Batman."
"Why should I take that as one bat signal traveling across the sky rather than a series of distinct bat signals?"
"Because the recipient on the distant planets interprets the signal as the same, coming from the same source from the relatively same time."
"But how do they know it's from the same source?"
"Suppose in this thought experiment, they'd been told year ahead that they'll get a bat signal on a certain day. And they get it that day. They then report back and some years later the report arrives and indeed they both got the signal the same day but one three seconds later than the other."
"Okay, it's a thought experiment, so let's suppose all that. It's still a kind of a fiction that they got the same signal, since they didn't get the same one -- they got a similar signal from a different set of configured light rays."
"Sure, but you can see that which lights don't matter, it's the symbol and, importantly, its information, that is the same, and that it's from the same source. Right?"
"But so what? No light has traveled faster than light."
"Well exactly!! No light or light information has violated any reductionist law of physics, but the symbol and its information has."
"How can the laws of physics not apply to something physical."
"Symbols are not just physical. They carry meanings, and meanings are not physical."
"Don't get all Platonic on me. I don't have to buy that other-worldly realism, Aristotle crushed that one two thousand years ago."
"You tell me what a thought is or what a meaning is. Look, here's a simpler example. Suppose the moon is casting a shadow out in space. What's creating the shadow? No trick question, just simple."
"The moon. It's in the way of the sunlight."
"Okay. Suppose you're traveling away from the moon in its shadow . As you go through space you'll see the shadow gets wider, the diameter gets wider because the rays of light from the sun are not parallel, they are radiating from the sun each at a light angle, like a flashlight."
"The moon is obstructing the sun's light cone. Okay. I think I see where this is going."
"As the moon moves, the shadow moves faster further from the moon. Eventually it will be moving faster than light."
"I get it, but I don't understand how it can be since it doesn't accord with the law of physics, the limit of the speed of light."
"Nothing has been violated. Literally. A shadow is not a thing. It's an absence of a thing, namely the absence of light. And the sun's light is not traveling faster than the speed of light. It's the absence that is traveling. Nothing is traveling faster than light in this example. Literally, a nothing is traveling faster than light.
Take the bat signal again. The light is not traveling faster than light, and the symbol is not traveling from one planet to the other. It's only the cognitive information of the symbol -- our perception of meaning tied to the symbol -- that is traveling faster than light. It's a kind of fiction ranging over the light rays. That fiction is what is meant by emergence. The shadow of the moon doesn't physically, reductively move faster than light, and that's because a shadow is, reductively, a nothing, an absence of light, not a physical thing. What then is a shadow if not a physical thing? It's a pattern that we perceive that we give a name. Even the physical effects of the shadow, any cooling of what's in its path, are only traveling faster than light in the sense that we perceive those aggregate effects are integrated -- by our interpretation! -- as the effects of a unity we identify as the shadow. It's a fiction of your symbolic representation, like a zero -- "0" -- the symbol that denotes what? Nothing! And it's not the symbol that moves, it's the interpretive information attached to it, not of itself, but by virtue of our collective meaning-association.
Zero is a symbol, and a symbol token -- any particular use or application of it at some place and time -- has a physical shape. But as a symbol it also has a meaning. It means nothing, an absence of all things. Zero represents our concept of nothing. But notice that a meaning is itself not a physical thing. Symbols are mostly like this -- they are at a remove from things because they represent some kind of meaning or idea, for example, a shadow. There is no such physical thing as a shadow. There's just absence of light and our interpretation -- meaning again -- of that aggregate of absences. It's a pattern, and we can represent that pattern as a nothing thing called a shadow. It's just a name and a perception that we can talk about, locate, explain and use in our science. And it's that pattern of nothingness that can move faster than light because it's not any physical thing, it's a cognized pattern, in this case, a pattern of nothing. But any symbolic pattern could conceivably travel faster than light."
"You mean, because the bat signal is interpreted as the same symbol with the same meaning, the same information from the same source that thought it and intended it and directed it intentionally..."
"Yessss. Symbolism is a paragon of emergent properties. And it is characteristic of emergent properties that they have their own laws and don't have to follow the reductive laws of physics. Their constituent parts may have to follow reductionist laws of physics if those parts are physical, but the emergent properties or entities don't have to and often don't. That's what emergence is all about."
"I see. No physical thing has been violated. Physics has not been breached in this interpretive information travel. It seems like physics information and symbolic cognitive information belong to different...I don't want to say worlds or realms, but to different sciences."
"Yep, But they may as well inhabit different realms or worlds. You could show the physical consequences of a meaning -- here are all the chairs denoted by "chair" -- but those consequences do not exhaust the meaning, since "chair" applies to the possible chairs as well as the actual ones you can display."
"A definition of the word "chair" would imply the possible chairs..."
"But the definition is just another expression of the meaning, and you'd have to ask, what do the words of that definition mean. There is something beyond the physical about meanings."
"So this really is Platonic after all."
"Maybe. Depends on what you mean by Platonic. I'll tell you this: pretty much no one thinks consciousness is a physical phenomenon. But no one thinks it's Platonic. It's somehow tied to the physical, only physical beings have it, and only that thing can have its own consciousness. But meanings aren't tied to things at all. They don't even have a location. Or even words, since they can be translated from language to language."
"So what are they?"
"Elusive."
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