On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: >> It's true that as I've described it using nothing but English it does >> sound a little subjective and vague about where exactly the transition >> between micro and macro states occurs, however if you use mathematics you >> can become much more rigorous and show that for some things, like a bucket >> of water, changes at smaller and smaller scales produce exponentially >> smaller changes at larger and larger scales; while for other things, like a >> perfect diamond, that effect is much less pronounced. >> > > > Less pronounced to whom though? >
Less pronounced for anyone using the lens of mathematics. As the scale of changes becomes smaller the result of those changes becomes smaller at larger scales, and they do so in a way that can be precisely calculated with statistical methods. Depending on how many of these small scale changes exist that lead to small changes at larger scales is how we determine if something has high or low entropy. > If a seed falls in a bucket of water, the water becomes part of an > entropy reducing plant. A plant may reduce entropy locally but it can't do so globally, nothing can do that, entropy stays the same or increases, it never decreases. > If you look at the water over 10,000 years, you might see many low > entropy forms, clouds, ice, etc while the diamond has comparatively high > average entropy. > No idea what you're talking about. > No, it depends on sense and participation. Information is a second order > sense of a primary sense, derived through measurement, memory, inference, > etc. > So a 100 carat diamond must be exactly the same thing as a charcoal briquette of the same weight because they are both made of nothing but carbon atoms and neither the diamond nor the charcoal can sense anything. Or are you a fan of solipsism and think that nothing exists until you look at it, if so then you must believe that information is even more important than I do because the ONLY thing that you or I or anybody can understand is information, so if only what you understand exists then only information exists. > >> Bad example, MPEG and JPEG files deliberately loose information that, >> due to the particular nature of the human visual system, make a only a >> small contribution, considering their large size, to the look of the final >> movie or picture. A Martian who's eyes work differently might throw away >> different information. We should use lossless compression algorithms like >> GIF or ZIP in examples like this. >> > > >No, that's exactly why it's a good example. It shows how information is > subjective. > The quality of information is subjective but it's quantity is not. It is objectively true that there is more information in a bucket of water than in the DNA of your body, but most human beings would consider it's quality to be much much less because they don't care what a particular water molecule in that bucket is doing. > A Martian microscope might work differently might see movie stars > pictures inside of molecules that ours miss. > If the Martian is mathematically literate he could tell how much information was in the image he was studying and we Earth people would agree with him on that figure, although we might disagree about what parts of the image are important and what parts are not. And a Martian would know the difference between a lossless compression program and a lossy one and he would know that if he used the lossy one there would not be enough information to exactly reproduce the original picture or movie or sound or martian klogknee or whatever the information is encoded for. Neither science nor mathematics can take sides in matters of taste, physics can tell you how to build a bridge that won't fall down but it can't tell you if building a bridge is something worth doing. > Warm water has more physical entropy than ice, but a movie of ice melting > has more information entropy than a movie of water, if you use any sort of > compression. That was my whole point. > You're whole point was that a movie of something is more objective and in your opinion more important than the real thing? > blue cannot be seen by the blind, no matter how convincingly we describe > it to them > You don't know that, nobody can know that. You can see blue without light in a jet black room just by putting pressure on your eyeball, perhaps the blind see blue all the time but they just don't know it's the same thing we mean when we say "blue". > The point is, that no scheme of compression or treatment of information > has anything to do with the physical entropy of an actual substance. > I'd say mathematical and physical entropy have one hell of a lot to do with each other! Mathematical compression programs work by getting rid of redundancy in files, the more redundancy they have, that is to say the less entropy in them, the better they work; they don't work at all on white noise. A physical crystal with its atoms all lined up in a regular lattice has a lot of redundancy and thus little entropy, a bucket of water with its molecules bumping around chaotically has much less redundancy and much more entrophy. > You can't compress the substance, because it is not information. > Information is a subjective (or intersubjective) measurement, nothing more > and nothing less. > If information is just subjective then when you've had a few too many drinks and a charcoal briquette starts to look like a diamond to you then it really is a diamond because the only difference between the two is the information on how the carbon atoms are arranged. If your above statement is true then it is also objectively true that you Craig Weinberg can turn charcoal into diamond with nothing but the power of your mind. Sounds like a comic book superhero. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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