Is Information Embodiment Meaningful?

It is extremely tempting to be able to speak of the embodiment of a collection of information; we as humans desire to be able to anthropomorphize the things we see around us, in order that we might more naturally relate to their experience.

When we detect a pattern with a sustained form, we identify it as an object. In general, physical objects are considered to be solid bodies, although, as we know, the material that makes up true biological bodies is in constant flux: it is the pattern of that material that we insist on as the body. So if the truest bodies are mere patterns, why can't we think of all mere patterns as bodies?

In some sense we can, of course, but it turns out not to be very helpful in the naive sense. We instantiate ideals in bodies so that we may categorize and recognize their influence on the surrounding environment. When we speak of the body of a rock, we think of its resistance to incoming forces. When we speak of the body of a tree, we think of its ability to push up the soil, shade the forest floor, and house birds. When we speak of bodies, we think of affecting the environment.

Thus to think of the individual torrent swarm as the embodiment of a buried seed of data is a bit naive and myopic: this swarm alone merely instantiates that data: it does not enable its activation within its environment. This requires more: take for example the case of the movie file. Its embodiment requires first off the software that will allow for its playback, and in turn the hardware that can run that software and reproduce a physical instance of the file. Finally, we see that the system as a whole requires human desire to activate the programmatic framework, and here we follow the chain back to the earth as a whole.

This is frustrating. It is hard to ferret out the affective capability of the torrent, indeed of any idea, without tracing the support structure and instantiation back to all of society. Perhaps the most meaningful embodiment statement is therefore the noocortex concept: that we are all an embodiment of the global brain.

To narrow the situation any further we must restrict ourselves to mere instantiation of a set of data, much as we might think of language embodying an idea, a similarly frustrating proposition. But this is a retreat from our original desire to empower the data.