The problem I see with this proposal is that the concept of “information” that you are using here is not a physical concept but an epistemological one. The lamp is information to your friend, but it would not be information to another person in the same location who was unaware of your plan. So trying to reduce this concept of information to fundamental physics seems incorrect—except in the sense that we can reduce your friend’s brain to fundamental physics.
I agree with your example and think that it touches on something important. However, in this post, I did not claim that the counterfactual condition was the only condition required for information transfer. You are correct to say that the lamp signal would not constitute information to someone who was unaware of the plan. But this is because, in that situation, there are other conditions that have not been met. Since the other person seeing the lamp signal would not react differently to the different signals, there is no causal link between the signal and them. This is also required for information transfer. I tried to explain this idea a bit more in my subsequent post.
If you don’t like the idea of information being physical, rather than epistemological, then maybe you can think of this post as asking the question ‘what are the physical conditions that a system must satisfy in order to transmit epistemological information?’
The problem I see with this proposal is that the concept of “information” that you are using here is not a physical concept but an epistemological one. The lamp is information to your friend, but it would not be information to another person in the same location who was unaware of your plan. So trying to reduce this concept of information to fundamental physics seems incorrect—except in the sense that we can reduce your friend’s brain to fundamental physics.
I agree with your example and think that it touches on something important. However, in this post, I did not claim that the counterfactual condition was the only condition required for information transfer. You are correct to say that the lamp signal would not constitute information to someone who was unaware of the plan. But this is because, in that situation, there are other conditions that have not been met. Since the other person seeing the lamp signal would not react differently to the different signals, there is no causal link between the signal and them. This is also required for information transfer. I tried to explain this idea a bit more in my subsequent post.
If you don’t like the idea of information being physical, rather than epistemological, then maybe you can think of this post as asking the question ‘what are the physical conditions that a system must satisfy in order to transmit epistemological information?’