[foxdev]

This is something that hit me when I found out how to translate between decimal and binary. If an A on a screen can be a grid of numbers, and those numbers can be reduced to a series of 1s and 0s and stored in a bunch of fancy wires, then who knows what else it could be translated to or from. Look back far enough and the A is a series of photons clashing with orbiting subatomic particles at certain frequencies.

We use math based on the status of a sea of transistors to store it in other atoms with forces we're slowly discovering how to communicate about. It's all layers of finding new ways to describe something that was already there, spinning and bumping photons long before any of us had photon detectors in our heads or a chemical machine capable of deciding to call one pattern A and all the ways to translate it into sound waves.

One pattern is called "solid state drive," and we seem to have some say in what that pattern does from our frame of reference. Maybe it was always a solid state drive and we're the language the universe uses to describe its smaller parts.

I promise I'm not high, and probably not a Boltzmann brain. Though I'm not sure about the latter.

[dfischer]

Signal theory is deeply interesting based on your line of thinking here. I’ve been postulating similar things. The universe gives a lot of potential for things to communicate. In the end what is recognized as signal and or information is a matter of imagination and consistency given the plethora of potentially unlimited signals available.