Saturday, January 29, 2011, 9:39:09 PM, Stanley wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 6:41 AM, Gavin Ritz <garr...@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> SS: Info theory presumably applies to everything and anything.
> GR: It was never intended to apply to anything but communication
> instruments. That is sending English language down a pipe.
> S: Since it was abstracted from human communication systems, it has
> taken on a 'life of its own', as any abstraction has a right to do.
I agree with this. I'm no mathematician, but I believe that the
broader significance of Shannon's work was a method of quantifying
"pure pattern". This was then adopted by physicists who saw that
material form can be treated as pure patterns, and thus we get such
concepts as the conservation of "information" in quantum mechanics and
in black holes. "Conservation of information" can be translated as
meaning that physical laws do not break down, and the state of
affairs at one time can be considered "encoded" in the state of
affairs at another time. For instance, events within the event horizon
of a black hole (or, on the holographic principle, on the surface of
the event horizon) could, in principle, be determined by examination
of the Hawking radiation that escapes as the hole diminishes.
> I think
> the crux of the matter is being examined right now -- is information
> ('bit') primal or is stuff ('it') primal? In my view there needs to
> be stuff in order for there to be a perspective, and there needs to
> be a perspective before there is anything to communicate.
I share your focus on perspective (and also context), but I'm not
clear why perspective requires "stuff" -- but see below.
> Information is an abstraction related closely to form, which it is
> supposed always could be translated to instructions in a computer,
> creating 'bits' from inspection of 'its'. Then the supposition is
> that The World also reckons with information, leading to" 'its from
> 'bits' ". This, to me, is implausible.
I tend to feel the same way about "it from bit", but I think it should
perhaps be taken as implying that the idea of substance derives from
form, which to me is highly plausible. We can take the view that form
is what we encounter -- at all levels, personally and scientifically
-- and substance a theoretical entity or set of such. This view is
related to philosophical idealism, and is, like that, I believe,
strictly irrefutable. By the same token, being unverifiable, it has no
practical consequences. Which is more real, or which came first, form
or substance? These questions are, strictly speaking, meaningless.
Etymologically, "information" is extremely closely related to "form",
and the concept of information used in physics simply IS material
form, where that is generalised from shape to encompass all material
properties. Just as past and future states of affairs are encoded in
the present, so genetic information is encoded in DNA. Biological
information is just a subset of physical information. DNA molecules,
like all physical entities, encode the outcomes of all of their
potential interactions, but in the case of DNA the outcomes are
constrained by the cellular context.
I'm currently working on a paper in which I argue that intentional
information -- using "intentional" in Brentano's sense, and
encompassing meaning and all mental content -- is best considered
encoded in physical/biological information, being decoded in use.
Perspective is obviously highly relevant here, but it seems to me that
it can probably be explained in (literally) formal terms, that
substance as such need not enter the picture, but perhaps I'm missing
something?
--
Robin Faichney
<http://www.robinfaichney.org/>
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