Somewhat of a tangent from the OP, but the psychology of information theory could come around and connect with consciousness again, so I think it's worth pursuing in this thread. Its Conscious Electromagnetic "Information" theory after all, so let's talk about information!
The Enformationism thesis is my amateur synopsis of another new paradigm : an "information theoretic" worldview. As one writer put it, this is another "Copernican Revolution" in perspective. But, we are still in the early stages of constructing a scientific model around the notion of Information as the fundamental basis of reality. Note that in the links below, it's still posed as a question, not a fact. — Gnomon
Three overlapping concerns I see with information theory:
a. Its existential impact
b. Its effect on social dynamics
c. Its implications for what can be intuitively modeled
As for a., I think your quote from Wheeler clarifies the main idea nicely: this is a "participatory" universe, meaning that its form is determined by the properties of human interaction with it, amounting to technologies and theories generalizable as various mediums of information. So information underpins our modern image of the cosmos, the most philosophically profound factor amongst existence as we know it.
But "it from bit", which he claims as reduction to a "yes and no" interrogation of existence seems manifestly superficial and even pernicious. The closest corrolary to a yes or no ethic in modern culture is reality tv elimination shows, which give not a thought to the real well-being of individual participants and viewers alike, let alone the long-term prospects of humankind. This is symptomatic of a general trend in which culture channels human agency, especially adult motivation, into a preset range of choices requiring barely any innovation, a virtual reality where almost all decisions are made for you, by organizers who are working at a frantic pace that allows for minimal reflection.
A philosophy of information such as that of committed innovators such as yourself who include a personalized dimension is deep, thought provoking, socialized enough, but the ethic of information consumption evolving out of information science's vision and implementation is like a cage for the intellect, albeit adorned with marginally appealing bells and whistles which are of course only accessible to a limited range of demographics in extremely restricted ways. And this almost sugar coats it with generalization: the situation is dire, a society where citizens are forced into narrow participation brackets and then frequently forced to fail. Restricted participation is of course a constant throughout history, but modern society tries to bewitch with egalitarian ideals that most leadership has not intended to actualize in half a century while summarily flunking millions of citizens out of the economy, and it doesn't work, as all the growing discontents of society make quite obvious.
It's as if academics tried to create a prison of information for the average citizen and unleashed a tide of disgruntlement that can't be held back by the harshest of first world authoritarianisms presently possible. But information theory helps actualize you specifically, so how did you make it damn near work where the majority fails miserably?
As for b., these are excerpts from a discussion about the social effects of information that I had at this forum:
@Enrique
...seems to me that the value form is transitioning from labor to information, as you in essence begin to suggest. A single individual (or fleet of robots?) can create huge economic value using minimal amounts of traditional labor via the programming of computer systems with information in various forms. How this will radically change the structure of society remains to be seen...
...The change in value form isn't towards computers as analogous to the technologies that humans operated like machinery prior to the Information Age, but rather consists in the data itself encoded as abstract meaning within software and interfaces. The significance is that physically instantiated work is effectively excised in various ways from its role as focal point of social and economic organization, replaced by information as the engine that drives culture. This has all kinds of ramifications:
The economy can transform more rapidly, making job security vulnerable.
Citizens place less value on employment, giving rise to so-called welfare states.
Exploitative crimes by all classes are easier to commit, transitioning governments into police states with pockets of extremely antiestablishment community.
Demographics can be barred from civic participation via restricting access to information sources.
A majority of human jobs will be phased out by the next decade if automation increases uninhibited via legislation etc.
Communities become more impersonal because every interaction is mediated by software that utilizes remote interfaces.
Human psychology changes due to different forms of stimulation, primarily computer interfaces.
Citizens who have large amounts of access to information become much smarter, while those with restricted access are much less intellectual (but not necessarily less influential).
As computers become more sentient, social dynamics change in fundamental ways.
The huge proliferation of data makes it more possible to objectively track changing social and environmental conditions, but also extremely complex.
@kudos
What we call information or facts are our subjective determinations and can easily sway one way or another to become mis-qualifications and mis-delineations. It makes little difference if information is retrieved by a person or a machine. Where work is characterized by a certain narrative that is partly a form of expressing a social contract through its form and content, information on the other hand is characterized by almost pure transparent content; once we start to doubt its underlying form it becomes unstable.
@Enrique
The lack of equivalency is exactly what I would focus on: information is a completely new core of culture that is displacing (not blending with) human work as the source of economic and social leverage.
So like you say, the value form as information becomes characterized by skepticism about the social contract, instability, impersonality, subjectivity, basically the postmodern perspective. Rather than being of huge influence, perhaps the seminal postmodernists were way ahead of their time.
This can be contrasted with labor as based around civic reasoning, self-interest, cooperation etc., the Enlightenment perspective which when synthesized with Hegelianism and evolutionary thinking gave rise to a theory of dialectical materialism...
...The nature of human relationships and thinking are changing dramatically. It might be a radical rupture with the past, of the type described by Foucault, that is unless media can sustain a strong cognizance of history.
@kudos
I do see how money can be made from machines, but they don’t generate value to us in and for themselves...It makes me wonder why there exists this impulse to destroy certain jobs. More often than not the rationale is that it is one job being traded off to create other jobs though usually there is no real measure of these created jobs at hand. It seems unreasonable for individuals seek to lose money by paying more workers when they already pay less, so these new jobs must come as a result of increased overall activity. However, with that activity comes less overall human physical work as more and more of this is automated; and that work is traditionally done by the working class.
@Enrique
It's not the machines utilized in making money that are changing society, it's how every transaction or social interaction is encoded as information in order to be processed, worked with, so that civilization revolves around the psychology of information that you aptly summarized. Perhaps it is a case where economic value loses some of its natural psychological value, so that business is divorced of meaning. Without the meaning that labor as value form attaches to economy, atrocious events can take place, such as rapidly driving the majority of jobs out of existence without reconstituting social organization so that citizens can live securely while lacking employment.
Hypothetically, freeing a large segment of the population from coerced work could result in self-empowered actualization of the human race, but instead dialectical materialism runs its course absent much rational intervention by humans and the system changes as usual through arational upheavals, which are becoming more difficult (but perhaps not impossible) to navigate as even well-educated intellectual capabilities are stretched to the limit while we struggle to theorize these developments. Perhaps if we recognize and seek to understand it we can change it.
How is a philosophy of information theory going to be integrated into cultural evolution as the predominant paradigm while meeting these challenges? Perhaps you can give this some informed thought.
As for c., I find it conceivable that if every academic model must accord with a philosophy of information theory, the paradigm could become as problematic as physicalism and its discontents which are endlessly enumerated at this forum, with defunding of not only the humanities but every noncomputational approach to modeling in even the hard sciences. We will be inundated with huge amounts of data that only a computer is really capable of processing, and imaginative insights of a type of thinking like Einstein's, built from the periodic, cumulative ruminations of an entire lifetime, could become impossible.
McFadden's CEMI theory was originally called CEM theory, first formulated in the early 2000's as he pondered physicist Penrose's initial attempts at a quantum theory of consciousness. CEMI theory has made minimal impact and he doesn't even work on it for a salary, probably because it can't be modeled yet using computation, but each new paper he comes out with makes it even more certain that these are THE first steps in explaining human will from a neuroscientific perspective and approaching the binding problem of consciousness.
If scientists had've been performing gedanken experiments like Einstein's immediately when CEM came out, we would probably have deep brain EEG and related technologies at this stage, but no one cared because information theory has begun to make every scientific idea that doesn't involve a data set irrelevant. If all scientists are doing is programming and calculating, consciousness and many additional domains may never be conclusively theorized, and if no one has the existential or socially instilled compulsion to perform qualitative thought experiments, information theory might be the end of the line for radically new paradigms that aren't initiated by a sentient computer.
What to do about all of this?