3 Substances in 3 Environments

I think before anything else we might need to decide what "Information" is.

I actually do need to apologize to @stephenw on that score because awhile ago I said I'd make a thread on the subject and until today I had forgotten my intention.

Perhaps a good starting point is this remark from Faggin in Irreducible:

Shannon’s information is equivalent to having a machine counting the symbols that appear, and after collecting their statistics, it tells us how much “objective” information is contained in each symbol. This is a perfectly adequate measure of information for a machine that cannot understand the subjective meaning of symbols, but for us it is totally inadequate since the notion of information is only useful in connection with the transmittal of meaning. Without meaning, information is useless. A machine can only recognize a symbol and act on it based on a predetermined response decided by its designer.

Shannon’s information is what counts for unconscious machines, but it is not what interests us. It is essential to clarify this point, because the ambiguity of the words used to describe robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems tends to eliminate the abyss that separates human beings from so-called intelligent machines. The information that matters most to us is not the symbolic but the semantic information, and here consciousness is indispensable. The objective recognition of a symbol by a computer which is passed off as understanding by AI practitioners is only a mechanical function that we also perform automatically and unconsciously.

Faggin goes on to distinguish Shannon Information from "Live Information". I am trying to think of how to summarize this, but I think the quotes above may be a good starting point?

edit: Someone else made a decent summary of what I've gotten out of Faggin's book, posted it in another thread.