Information

A name retains a distinction by discarding some of its details and thereby performing a fold: a richer structure of distinctions is fixed in a simpler and more stable form.

Folding is associated with the loss of distinctions. Since all distinctions rest on the elementary distinction of one and the other, conventionally designated as 1 and 0, the loss of distinctions can be interpreted as a loss of information.

Unfolding is not an operation equivalent to folding in reverse. Lost distinctions cannot simply be recovered from a name. They must be produced anew — new distinctions must be made, drawing on surviving traces, context, and the current situation.

If folding corresponds to the loss of distinctions and thus of information, unfolding requires the generation of new information — information arising through new distinctions.

Here we discover that the concept of information can be used to analyze the dynamics of distinctions. At the same time, this offers a hint of the informational organization of thinking: thinking retains and develops distinctions through their folding and unfolding.