What is Information and Where Does it Come From?

Starting 2025 with a Little Series about Big Questions

Happy New Year, and a warm welcome if you are new here!

If you’ve been around for a while, you know I love exploring the fascinating intersection of neuroscience, consciousness, and AI. Typically, I do this by writing in-depth essays. But for the start of 2025, I thought we could try something different — a series of shorter pieces to spark our curiosity.

Over the holiday break, six questions kept tugging at my thoughts. I’d like to share these questions with you through a mini-series of essays. Think of them as conversation starters — I’ll dive deeper into each one throughout the year ahead.

Let’s begin with Question 1...

In 2024, I wrote 50 Substack articles on topics at the intersection of neuroscience, consciousness, and artificial intelligence.

Last week, just for fun, I decided to write some code to analyse the words I used most frequently in those articles — excluding all the usual suspects like ‘the’, ‘is’, and ‘and’.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the top two words were brain (703 times) and consciousness (551 times).

But the third word caught me a little off guard: information (338 times).

Information is a word we use a lot. We say we’re surrounded by it, that things contain it, and that we either want more of it — or, sometimes, less. It’s one of those words that feels familiar, almost intuitive. But when you stop to think about it, you realise it’s surprisingly slippery, defying simple definitions.

So, here’s the first question on my list of questions for 2025:

What is information, and where does it come from?

A common use of the word information is related to understanding and meaning. When we don’t understand something, we often say we need more information.

But the word information is also frequently used interchangeably with data. In this sense, information becomes something that can be precisely measured, counted, and stored — like bits in a computer.

This second view suggests that information is like building blocks that can be stacked together to create more complex structures. After all, that’s how computers work, right? They process information bit by bit, following specific rules to produce increasingly sophisticated outputs.

But when it comes to biological systems like brains, the concept of information becomes much murkier. Take the human genome, for instance—it’s often said to contain the information required to build a brain. But how does it achieve this? There aren’t nearly enough genes to specify every connection between billions of neurons, let alone to account for all the complex behaviours that brains are capable of. And yet, from this relatively simple genetic code emerges an organ of immense complexity and adaptability. How does that happen?

This creates a fascinating paradox that challenges us to reconsider what we mean by information. Is it simply a set of instructions, or does it involve something more dynamic, like interactions, self-organisation, or even emergence? We can see this puzzle play out in striking ways in nature.

Consider the monarch butterfly.

Though these insects typically live no longer than 4 weeks, they somehow manage one of nature’s most remarkable migrations. In North America, they travel up to 3,000 miles to arrive at an area that takes up no more than a square mile — a journey that takes more than 2 months to complete.

The insects that arrive in the north are typically the grandchildren of those who started the journey. What’s even more remarkable is that these butterflies don’t just fly north — they also return to the south. The following year, their great-great-grandchildren will somehow find this square mile in the north despite never having made the trip before.

The Monarch butterfly’s navigation ability isn’t learned. The information required to navigate the journey must be encoded in their genes. But how could a simple genetic code contain such detailed instructions about specific migration routes? Much like the human brain, the monarch butterfly’s journey reveals a paradox: there seems to be far more information in the system’s final complexity than could ever be accounted for by the genes alone.

Where does the additional information come from?

Getting something complex from something simple — like detailed migration routes or the intricate structure of a brain from a relatively simple genetic code — violates our basic intuition: you can’t get more information out than you put in.

But are our intuitions correct? Or have we been thinking about this all wrong?

Is all the information there from the start, encoded in the genes, and we just don’t recognise it yet? Or are we conflating different meanings of information — the kind in genes versus the kind in behaviour or development?

Perhaps there’s something about the process of development itself that generates new information.

And if that’s the case... well, there. are. so. many. questions!

If development can indeed create new information, what does that mean for the artificial intelligence systems we design with fixed architectures? Do we need to rethink our entire concept of information to understand how complex systems like brains — and perhaps even consciousness — work?

Next Week…

We’ll pick up from this question to explore another fascinating puzzle: Why is it that we can have all the information about a system and still not be able to predict what that system will do?