I define "power" simply as the ability to do something that you couldn't do, or do as well, otherwise. Thus, knowledge empowers, as it is confers a potential ability advantage over ignorance.
I agree with the rest of your post, except the last part about the brain. It is the organ that does all of the information processing, regardless of whether the output is made available on the conscious level or not.
So, finally, going over the page this post is on. . . . above you state that information exists independent of observers, and here it seems necessary to discuss the information processor we use. hmmm. . . . hearing echos of charges about "subjective experience". This is pretty wacky stuff.
The universe must be inclusively defined to include human brains and human purposes I suppose, but when we discuss science we usually are talking about stuff that exists independently of our opinions, as the objective observable material we can subject to some measure or test in demonstrating a reproducible phenomena or principle. I'd use the term "information" to be some ordered view or interpretation of reality, or maybe an array of ordered physical computer memory bits. But I've heard, and acknowledge, proponents of another definition of "information" as any ordered relation of things past or present, as memory.
I don't, however, care to characterize politically expedient campaigns for developing support for government action the same kind of "science" that has generally advanced human progress. Where are the independent researchers who work independently of government funding? The present network of financial supporters of research on AGW or climate change, like the researchers in pharmacology and military applications, seem to me to exist to conflate science with psy-op protagonists . . . at least potentially. Maybe to be nice, I should just call them our world managers, or decision-makers, but some call them "interests" or more specifically "motivated interests" working the levers of our political machines for their own benefit. I wonder, at all your skepticism about human belief systems, why you don't exercise the same skepticism with science so compromised.
For me, the data presently being promoted supports an increase in worldwide temps of around 2 degrees F, or 1 C, in a hundred plus years of fossil fuel consumption. It is projected to accelerate if we don't do something to change our use. But I've not found the science sufficiently rigorous in terms of the equations and calculations involved in the projected impacts, lots of assumptions and big fudge factors, lots of thumbs on the scales so to speak. And the net claimed change, per our data, is within known variances observed in climate across geological time accessible to some method of correlation of various measures believed to be linked to temperatures in time past. That set of facts does not validate aggressive government mandates for changed economics/taxes/regulations.
But I don't think we should just burn all our carbon fuels, really. I get interested in folks with some new technology under research, like say hydrogen fuel cells linked to solar electric production which can store energy in the form of compressed hydrogen gas that can be burned efficiently and safely in automobiles, eliminating the need to carry batteries half the weight of electric vehicles. Lots of stuff like that, it seems, could render all the alarm about AGW moot. Why don't we put the research funds into something with realistic benefits to mankind?
