# Dual Use of Information > The essence of self-copying in this program is to use the same information stored in memory in *two ways*: first as **instructions** to be executed, and second as **data** by those instructions. The dual use of information is also at the heart of Godel's paradox, embodied by his self referential sentence "This statement is not provable". This dual use of information is also key to Turing's proof. ### Things to think about * My intuition is that there is definitely a connection here between the way that (in linear algebra) a matrix can either contain data (a data matrix) of observations, or by a linear transformation that can act upon the data matrix. * Or, as another example, consider a graph consisting of nodes and edges (i.e. a data structure). This can be represented as a matrix (linear transformation). * In general this makes me think of [Duality](Duality.md) --- Date: 20210921 Links to: [Big Ideas MOC](Big%20Ideas%20MOC.md) [Things to Think About Deeply](Things%20to%20Think%20About%20Deeply.md) [Duality](Duality.md) Tags: References: * Complexity, a Guided Tour, pg 121