Arturo, List: This is a view that was fairly common, especially associated with Edwin Jaynes, but the other view has also been put forward by people like Brillouin and, more recently, John Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann and Seth Lloyd, for example. Cosmologist David Layzer is another example. Interesting that they are all physicists.
My PhD student, Scott Muller, published a book based on his dissertation, Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information, (Springer 2007) that uses Jaynes’ notion of an IGUS together with group theory to define the amount of information in an object (I have a different way of doing that). Jaynes held that each IGUS had its own measure of information in something, and there was no common measure. Scott argued that you can combine the information measured by all possible IGUSs (sort of like observers or interactors, but more strictly defined) to get the information in the object. I define it as the minimal number of yes-no questions required to completely describe the thing. The two should be equivalent. So you are siding with Jaynes, I think. I think Scott nailed the idea of objective intrinsic information on solid ground. By the way, Shannon’s measure is of the information capacity of a channel. There are better ways to define the information in a real situation (e.g., the computational notion of information), but Shannon’s approach can be adapted to give the same result with some relatively intuitive assumptions. John Collier Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of tozziart...@libero.it Sent: Sunday, 11 December 2016 5:57 PM To: fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: [Fis] A provocative issue Dear FISers, I know that some of you are going to kill me, but there’s something that I must confess. I notice, from the nice issued raised by Francesco Rizzo, Joseph Brenner, John Collier, that the main concerns are always energetic/informational arguments and accounts. Indeed, the current tenets state that all is information, information being a real quantity that can be measured through informational entropies. But… I ask to myself, is such a tenet true? When I cook the pasta, I realize that, by my point of view, the cooked pasta encompasses more information than the not-cooked one, because it acquires the role of something that I can eat in order to increase my possibility to preserve myself in the hostile environment that wants to destroy me. However, by the point of view of the bug who eats the non-cooked pasta, my cooked pasta displays less information for sure. Therefore, information is a very subjective measure that, apart from its relationship with the observer, does not mean very much… Who can state that an event or a fact displays more information than another one? And, please, do not counteract that information is a quantifiable, objective reality, because it can be measured through informational entropy… Informational entropy, in its original Shannon’s formulation, stands for an ergodic process (page 8 of the original 1948 Shannon’s seminal paper), i.e.: every sequence produced by the processes is the same in statistical properties, or, in other words, a traveling particle always crosses all the points of its phase space. However, in physics and biology, the facts and events are never ergodic. Statistical homogeneity is just a fiction, if we evaluate the world around us and our brain/mind. Therefore, the role of information could not be as fundamental as currently believed. P.S.: topology analyzes information by another point of view, but it’s an issue for the next time, I think… Arturo Tozzi AA Professor Physics, University North Texas Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/
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