Information

   Information and the Human Brain

   Information is carried by physical entities, such as books or sound waves or brains, but it is not itself material. Information in a living system is a feature of the order and arrangement of its parts, which arrangement provides the signs that constitute a "code" or "language." . . . The organization of the brain can be considered as the written script of the programs of our lives. So the important feature of brains is not the material that they are made of but the information that they carry.

   What neuroscience can do is to translate the language in which the brain programs are written into ordinary language. Since these are the programs that produce the phenomena of human language we are not really escaping it. We are using the analogies of language and of writing to understand the entities that produce them. As so often in the past, man, having invented an artifact (in this case writing) to help him with his life (by carrying information), is now trying to describe himself in terms of his artifact. (Young, 1978, p. 2)