Information

Information is anything that the brain can use to make a decision, conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary. It can be gotten from anything to which the brain can have a reaction. This means that information includes emotions, unconscious tendencies, and many other things not usually described with that word. As it also influenced by the physical form of an individual's brain and their genes, it means that there is information that cannot be learned entirely identically by two people, although it is clear that an enormous amount can, for all intents and purposes. Information exists in pieces that can be considered separately. This definition for information was inspired by the work of the mathematician Claude Shannon, founder of the field of information theory, the theoretical underpinning of all computing, and the work of the biologist Richard Dawkins, who defined the concept of a “meme” as a transmittable unit of culture (which is information by this definition) and founded the field of memetics.

An individual's information, which is to say what they know, feel, and remember, as well as how they think and react, is the only thing on which they are able to base any and all of their decisions. This is inherent in the definition used. This is perhaps best expressed by the second tenet of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by the important 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The world is the totality of facts, not things.”

A situation that is not desirable to a person can be considered a problem to them. Changing the situation, which includes the person's perception of the situation, can be considered solving the problem. If a situation is undesirable, but it cannot be possibly changed in a way that the person to whom it is a problem would find desirable, that problem can be considered resolved. As every action of a person can be assumed to be intended to change a situation in a certain way, then everything that we do is solving problems.

Together, all of the information that a person has that is relevant to a problem dictates all of the decisions that they can possibly make in regard to it. This information includes what physical things are available to bring to the problem, and how to use them. If a person's information encompasses everything that is relevant to a problem, it allows them to solve, or recognize as impossible to solve, any imaginable problem. (This does not assume that a single problem can be entirely understood by a single person. What a person knows is simply a limit of what they can possibly do.)

The ability to ask the questions "What information will solve this problem?" and "What information will tell me what information will solve this problem?" etc. means that there is always a way for any person to move closer to the solution or resolution of any problem.

The number of things that can be expressed with even a very small amount of information is extraordinarily large, and grows at an enormous speed, the more information that is used. This is because information consists of individual pieces, and these pieces can be combined in virtually limitless ways. If a problem is considered as the absence of the information that will solve it, then it can be seen that they are equally complex.

Due to this complexity, and so the number of possibilities that must be examined, it may require an enormous amount of time to create a new combination of pieces that as a whole is a useful piece of information. As a result of this, a very large amount of the information that someone has was gotten from, and created by, other people. It is simply not possible for a person to independently discover all of the combinations of information (i.e. ideas) that they use in their life. This includes an enormous amount of information that may be considered “obvious.” Besides being able to see the re-use of ideas everywhere in the world, particularly in every school and bibliography, Berkeley professor of city and regional planning Annalee Saxenian documents this convincingly in a comparison of two centers of computer technology development. One of them shares all of the information that the companies develop independently, and strongly outstrips the one that keeps all of its research secret.

All interaction between people involves the exchange of information, even if nothing is said, and the information is no more than what the people can see of each other. The information that is exchanged, and the emotion that the people attach to that information, is the entire basis for the relationship between them, although it is considered with all of the other information that they both have.

Community is based on a large number of people all sharing information to which they attach emotion, which can be called personal information. This information is often unique to that person. A formal study of the importance of community, and the information that people exchange even informally, can be found in the work of Harvard professor of public policy Robert Putnam. Putnam has done a large amount of foundational work on social capital, which is roughly defined as the strength of social networks in an area. More intuitively, it can be thought of as a measure of community. His work correlates social capital to participation in government, how much people vote, life spans, children's grades in school, and more. Social capital can be entirely explained, and the trends that accompany it better understood and measured, as the exchange of information.

Empathy results from two people having the same information in regard to a certain situation. Because they have the same information, they would perform the same actions, and thus have empathy for the actions of one another. This idea is very similar to the idea that people will make similar decisions if they have similar information, which is developed by the the renowned political philosopher John Rawls, in his thought experiment the “veil of ignorance.” The idea here has greater potential for practical use, as it is easier to give people information than take it away.

The information that is most important for empathy is the information that allows a person to see themselves in someone else. The information that will do accomplish this most often is information that displays a quality that is common to being valued by all humans, which in turn is often personal information. This leads to trust of a person, and empathy with them, also because you have more faith that what they say is true, even without having their information yourself. The importance of the exchange of personal information to trust is seen in the work of SUNY Stony Brook professor of psychology Art Aron.

The effective exchange of information, which is a mechanism that can lead to empathy, is thus crucial to interesting someone in a problem, and so solving problems that do not have a sufficient number of people working on those problems to solve them by themselves.