infoparticle
NOTE(coined-term): This is a term coined by myself.
Infoparticle refers to the idea of treating information like particles in theory. The theoretical smallest infoparticle would be called as infon (info + -on, a suffix used to name certain particles) or infom (info + atom).
(This is me trying to come up with new ideas by word alchemy…)
This idea actually comes from the idea of transclusion, which is itself a term coined by Ted Nelson, the father of hypertext. The thought process is as follows:
- It's easy to transclude text; but how to transclude audio and/or video?
- It makes sense to transclude audio by referencing a section of the audio, but audio is 1D and video is 2D, wouldn't it be too restrictive if we only allow transclusion of the whole size of the video? Wouldn't it be cool if we can just transclude video like how people combine different videos into one big video in all the cool ways?
- What is the minimal unit of transclusion for audio and/or video? For text it's obviously a single character, I suppose for audio it's one sample (which doesn't mean anything unless it's put under a context - people don't listen to sample points but the function that one can interpolate from the sample points) and for video it's one frame.
- It makes sense to transclude an audio, but how does it make sense to transclude a piece of music? Should the melody and the rhythm be able to be transcluded separately? What does a piece of music include, actually? Because even if you write it down as music score, people can still interpret it differently and make different versions of it.
- If we want to be able to transclude anything, we must believe that there is some kind of "minimal information unit" that all information can be decomposed into.
- But can information be "divided" in the common sense? Informations about information are definitely also informations; it's like every single piece of information is a fractal tree. I shall name this property "para-atomic".
- We shall assume this "minimal information unit" exists and try to start from there anyway.
I don't know the implications of this and where this idea could bring us to; I'm writing it down just in case.
2024.8.1