Untangling Entanglement

What to Feynman was interference (see the previous post), to Erwin Schrödinger (he of the cat) was the phenomenon known as entanglement: the 'essence' of quantum mechanics. Entanglement is often portrayed as one of the most outlandish features of quantum mechanics: the seemingly preposterous notion that the outcome of a measurement conducted over here can instantaneously influence the outcome of a measurement carried out way over there.
Indeed, Albert Einstein himself was so taken aback by this consequence of quantum mechanics (a theory which, after all, he helped to create), that he derided it as 'spooky' action at a distance, and never fully accepted it in his lifetime.
However, viewing quantum mechanics as a simple generalization of probability theory, which we adopt in order to deal with complementary propositions that arise when not all possible properties of a system are simultaneously decidable, quantum entanglement may be unmasked as not really that strange after all, but in fact a natural consequence of the limited information content of quantum systems. In brief, quantum entanglement does not qualitatively differ from classical correlation; however, the amount of information carried by the correlation exceeds the bounds imposed by classical probability theory.

A Difference to Make a Difference, Part II: Information and Physics

The way I have introduced it, information is carried by distinguishing properties, i.e. properties that enable you to tell one thing from another. Thus, whenever you have two things you can tell apart by one characteristic, you can use this difference to represent one bit of information. Consequently, objects different in more than one way can be used to represent correspondingly more information. Think spheres that can be red, blue, green, big, small, smooth, coarse, heavy, light, and so on. One can in this way define a set of properties for any given object, the complete list of which determines the object uniquely. And similar to how messages can be viewed as a question-answering game (see the previous post), this list of properties, and hence, an object's identity, can be, too. Again, think of the game 'twenty questions'.
Consider drawing up a list of possible properties an object can have, and marking each with 1 or 0 -- yes or no -- depending on whether or not the object actually has it. This defines the two sides of a code -- on one side, a set of properties, the characterisation of an object; on the other side, a bit string representing information this object contains. (I should point out, however, that in principle a bit string is not any more related to the abstract notion of information than the list of properties is; in other words, it's wrong to think of something like '11001001' as 'being' information -- rather, it represents information, and since one side of a code represents the other, so does the list of properties, or any entry on it.)