Tackling Information

[Craig Weinberg]

I have been mapping out the integration of computation in my model.

Multisense Realism model with information processing integration.

Breaking down information into its realistic constituents, inform and formation, where informing is to decode meaning or receive semantic value and formation is to encode for semiotic expression.

The breaking of information into inform and form as stages within the cycle of perspective transformation parallels the breaking of spacetime into Space and Time (really Spacetime and Timespace, but this is crazy looking enough as it is) and Matter and Energy.

I use the term Process to denote serial and parallel arrangements of encoded forms into process protocols, as the processor motive executes them as object transformations or changes to states of material inertia across space.

The cycle begins and ends with sense - the initiation of experience or afferent input.

As usual with these syzygy diagrams, all of the derived symmetries and cyclic phases are meaningful. Entropy opposes Form, Significance opposes Process, Subject and object are to significance and entropy are to matter and energy and spacetime, etc. The curved arrows here are useful to connote the inside-outside topological involution throughout.

(Previous post leading up to this)

There seems to be a lot of confusion resulting from Shannon’s use of the term entropy, and conflating it with thermodynamic entropy. I maintain that Shannon Entropy™ is closer to the inverse of thermodynamic entropy than it is a synonym for it.

From what I understand, Shannon entropy is the dissipation of information processing efficiency in the context of data compression, not a general property that relates to physical materials involved. If information is highly compressible, ie, 10,000 zeros in a row, then it has a very low Shannon entropy - it is easy to compress, and not a lot of *extra* information needs to be sent on top of the text to allow the text to be reconstituted on the other end.

This is almost the opposite of thermodynamic entropy, in which a box of half hot coals and half ice cubes has lower entropy than that same box when it has reached equilibrium as warm coal mud. The uniform distribution of warmth gives it higher physical entropy, because, in this case, it would be harder to do work with the energy going on in the mud when it has already reached an equilibrium within its closed system.

I could be wrong about this but I think I have it straight.

If we throw in QM and get a whole other idea of information and physics, where physics itself is pure information. I sympathize with the effort to unify under something like pattern or information, but ultimately it fails to explain how or why information would make up its mind to pretend to be the universe. It’s kind of a mess, and I think it takes us away from the more relevant issue of information’s direct relation to consciousness (sense) and consciousness’s direct relation to physics (motive). When you put a subject in the mix, there is a body of semiotic work to approach it with - semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics. Trying to link ‘information’ with physics directly I think destroys any possibility of understanding awareness. It is like trying to build a car out of exhaust.

The Extreme Physical Information (EPI) principle builds on the well known idea that the observation of a “source” phenomenon is never completely accurate. That is, information present in the source is inevitably lost when observing the source.

I think that Multisense Realism offers is a more elegant possibility for a Full Spectrum Information theory where:

1. Information is not passively received by an observer but rather an observer is informed by mutual collaboration on multiple levels with the source.
2. Since we can only be sure of how it feels to be informed as a human being, we cannot speculate meaningfully on non-human semantic observers. Non-human observers presumably have fewer levels of senory-motive collaboration.
3. The human experience of being informed occurs on multiple levels or castes, which can be modeled in a hierarchy or holarchy from low level or bottom up phenomena such as physical and chemical interaction, to high level or top down phenomenology such as cultural or creative insights.
4. Multisense Realism suggests the interior/external symmetry of each layer (‘horizontal’ interaction) is such that it can be described externally as objects in space, and internally is subjects through time.
5. What EPI considers a loss of information from source to observer, MR considers a refraction of sensation such that rather than a net loss of information, there is a qualitative enhancement on the observer end. The less horizontally complete the information received from the source, the more vertically rich the observer’s contribution to their sensation will be.
6. This principle of subject-object qualia-quanta fungibility I think may be novel and experimentally discoverable property. We can see it informally ourselves. The role that mystery plays in fantasy and perception. The banality of purely literal expressions. The more there is to know about the source that the observer is uncertain about, the more the observer can generate enthusiasm and fertile subjectivity.
7. As the observer’s personal contribution to the sensation-observation increases, the supposed EPI loss of (horizontal) source information into a gain of (vertical) observer qualia and conserving the equilibrium significance of the sensation/observation as a whole.
8. Thus, the more complete the information we already have of an external object, the less we can subjectively invest in it. To understand the world of objects, we have to ‘go horizontal’ and flatten our subjective imagination to an impersonal, generic, and universal mode.
9. MR posits that information transfer is entirely dependent on sense, which is an internal, semantic, essential property of the cosmos. Not ‘a’ process, but the only process, which gives rise to all second order logic like sequence, identity, symmetry, mind, and time.
10. Computation is the flattest sensation; a 100% non-mysterious, horizontal movement or replication of low caste sense so that it is literal, discrete, digital, and a-signifying. Pure quanta has no sense to it other than vectors in ‘computational space’. It is no different here or there, close or far, mine or yours.
11. Consciousness is the deepest ‘container’ of sense within sense; a 100% mysterious, vertical range of stillness or uniqueness. A source* of genuine high caste motive-will that is figurative, compact, analog-synthetic, and semantic. Pure consciousness has no computation to it other than an inferred invariance of awareness through time. It is proprietary and defined precisely by it’s capacity to discriminate mine and yours, before and after, high and low, etc.

*see etymological relatives: soul, solitude, solitary, solace, solemn, solar, self, soleil/sun/solar, isolated, solution, insoluble, solid, consolation, stand, stable, static, stasis, sol, whole, holistic.

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There seems to be a lot of confusion resulting from Shannon’s use of the term entropy, and conflating it with thermodynamic entropy. I maintain that Shannon Entropy™ is closer to the inverse of thermodynamic entropy than it is a synonym for it.

Physical entropy is a measure of the number of micro-states something can be in without changing its macro-state. A bucket of water can be in many many micro-states and yet the end result of them all would still look and act like a plain old bucket of water. So if you wanted to know the micro-state of that particular bucket over there, if you wanted to know the position and momentum of every water molecule in the bucket it would take a great deal information to distinguish that particular micro-state from the huge number of states that the bucket could be in and still look the same, far more information than DNA has in your body. The bucket has a lot of entropy and a lot of information, although it is information that most humans would consider spectacularly unimportant. If the bucket of water froze the molecules would line up in a regular lattice so the ice bucket would contain less entropy and less information than the water bucket because fewer micro-states could produce the same macro-state; with ice you would be less surprised about where a molecule is and mathematical entropy is a measure of surprise.    

That's why if you use a lossless compression program the output tends to look like white noise. White noise has maximum entropy and maximum information density; you could change it in a enormous number of ways and it would still look like white noise.

  John K Clark

[Craig Weinberg]

On Thursday, June 14, 2012 1:21:07 PM UTC-4, John K Clark wrote:

Physical entropy is a measure of the number of micro-states something can be in without changing its macro-state. A bucket of water can be in many many micro-states and yet the end result of them all would still look and act like a plain old bucket of water.

That is a definition from statistical thermodynamics, but if entropy is to mean anything objectively, then how it looks and acts on one level compared to another can't matter since the difference between micro-states and the macro 'end result' is a matter of subjective perception, not physical law.

I am talking about classical thermodynamics, where if I lose power and the food in the refrigerator goes bad, it goes bad regardless of who observes it or what level of description they access.

So if you wanted to know the micro-state of that particular bucket over there,

if you wanted to know the position and momentum of every water molecule in the bucket it would take a great deal information to distinguish that particular micro-state from the huge number of states that the bucket could be in and still look the same, far more information than DNA has in your body.

If the bucket was filled with DNA instead, you couldn't tell the difference at the macro level either.
 

The bucket has a lot of entropy and a lot of information, although it is information that most humans would consider spectacularly unimportant.

Entropy and information here are figures of speech though. There is no actual physical property you are talking about, only perception for a specific purpose of measurement.
 

If the bucket of water froze the molecules would line up in a regular lattice so the ice bucket would contain less entropy and less information than the water bucket because fewer micro-states could produce the same macro-state; with ice you would be less surprised about where a molecule is and mathematical entropy is a measure of surprise.    

Ok, this is cool. I readily admit that I'm not at all qualified in this area and that I would defer to your knowledge on this, and in this case I was ready to concede your point, because indeed, the way you are looking at it, freezing water to ice would both decrease physical entropy of the water* as well as decreasing the informational energy of the ice since it would, as you say, be easier to compress the positions of every water molecule if they were lined up - but wait!

Here's the thing. Using the atomic description level is arbitrary. Shannon information is about data compression, and the quality and quantity of data is entirely dependent upon the quality and quantity of measurements you perform. Information entropy does not pertain to any property of the water itself, it pertains only to a given description sampled from the water. So here is a multisense example for you.

I have a glass of ice (low physical entropy). I make a movie of the ice melting so that it takes one hour to melt completely. Then I keep the camera rolling for another hour at the glass of water. I compress them as mpegs and boom, the warm water has very little Shannon entropy and I wind up with a small file output. The ice, with all of its nooks and crannies gradually shifting and reflecting as it melts, slides, and floats in the water = heavy mpeg file.

What this does for me is help clarify how information is not tied concretely to physics, but rather to sense perception. Objects contain no information and only a first person subject can be meaningfully informed. Information and physics do relate to each other, but indirectly, and always mediated by sense.

*although at the cost of increasing the entropy of the freezer - that needs to work hard to transfer the entropy from the water to the radiator.

That's why if you use a lossless compression program the output tends to look like white noise. White noise has maximum entropy and maximum information density; you could change it in a enormous number of ways and it would still look like white noise.

It doesn't matter if it looks like white noise to us. Its aesthetic appearance has no bearing at all on the amount of information that has been encoded in it. It could be the architectural drawings of the Sistine Chapel or TV fuzz containing no recoverable data at all, it depends entirely on what senses, forms, processes, and motives are employed in the encoding and decoding.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

additions for clarity:

I have a glass of ice (low physical entropy). I make a movie of the ice melting so that it takes one hour to melt completely. Then I keep the camera rolling for another hour at the glass of water. I compress them as mpegs and boom, the warm water by itself has higher averaged physical entropy over the duration of the movie, but very little information entropy and I wind up with a small file output. The first movie of the melting ice, with all of its nooks and crannies gradually shifting and reflecting as it melts, slides, and floats in the water = heavy mpeg file. Or you could run the movie backwards and make it seem like Shannon entropy is directly proportional to information energy…it doesn’t matter.

Craig

[meekerdb]

On 6/14/2012 2:34 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

additions for clarity:

I have a glass of ice (low physical entropy). I make a movie of the ice melting so that it takes one hour to melt completely. Then I keep the camera rolling for another hour at the glass of water. I compress them as mpegs and boom, the warm water by itself has higher averaged physical entropy over the duration of the movie, but very little information entropy and I wind up with a small file output.

It has lots of information - just not in a form you can record with a camera.

Brent

The first movie of the melting ice, with all of its nooks and crannies gradually shifting and reflecting as it melts, slides, and floats in the water = heavy mpeg file. Or you could run the movie backwards and make it seem like Shannon entropy is directly proportional to information energy�it doesn�t matter.

Craig
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[Craig Weinberg]

On Thursday, June 14, 2012 7:01:45 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

 
If you turn that understanding around though, you will solve the hard problem:

The micro-state description has lots of information missing, but the absence is in a form that you need a macroscopic human observer (with or without a camera) to record. When you look to the micro you get a lot of low quality but precise data. When you look at the macro you get less data but it has much more meaning and aesthetic value to the observer.

What your view is missing is that it takes for granted that the micro, distant, a-signifying presentation is not a presentation at all, but rather just the totality of what 'simply is'. When we focus on that hyper-realization of objects, we get a worldview which necessarily de-personalizes the subject. We disqualify and discard the universe of 'information' that 'seems like' it might be, based on the momentum of history which is still recovering from the excesses of worldviews which hyper-personalize the object and de-realize the subject.

If you look at my diagram, I am integrating information as a two part phenomenon - inform and form. I think this solves the explanatory gap as the space between 'Sense' and 'Inform' denotes the symbol grounding problem where the stream of sense input may or may not match the capacity of the system to be informed by it - as you say 'not in a form you can record with a camera.' Human emotion is information which is not in a form you can record with silicon.

The micro state is what I call 'lower caste' relative to our higher caste anthropological world. The lower castes are available to the higher castes but described in mechanistic, generic terms. Castes that are higher than our own, by contrast, appear to us as uncanny synchronizations and coincidences, as well as super-signifying icons and archetypes, cliches, narratives, etc.

[meekerdb]

On 6/15/2012 9:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Thursday, June 14, 2012 7:01:45 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

 
If you turn that understanding around though, you will solve the hard problem:

The micro-state description has lots of information missing, but the absence is in a form that you need a macroscopic human observer (with or without a camera) to record. When you look to the micro you get a lot of low quality but precise data. When you look at the macro you get less data but it has much more meaning and aesthetic value to the observer.

What your view is missing is that it takes for granted that the micro, distant, a-signifying presentation is not a presentation at all, but rather just the totality of what 'simply is'. When we focus on that hyper-realization of objects, we get a worldview which necessarily de-personalizes the subject. We disqualify and discard the universe of 'information' that 'seems like' it might be, based on the momentum of history which is still recovering from the excesses of worldviews which hyper-personalize the object and de-realize the subject.

I'm willing to work a little to try to extract meaning from information - but not enough to try to extract it from blather.

If you look at my diagram, I am integrating information as a two part phenomenon - inform and form. I think this solves the explanatory gap as the space between 'Sense' and 'Inform' denotes the symbol grounding problem where the stream of sense input may or may not match the capacity of the system to be informed by it - as you say 'not in a form you can record with a camera.' Human emotion is information which is not in a form you can record with silicon.

So you pontificate...over and over and over.

Brent

The micro state is what I call 'lower caste' relative to our higher caste anthropological world. The lower castes are available to the higher castes but described in mechanistic, generic terms. Castes that are higher than our own, by contrast, appear to us as uncanny synchronizations and coincidences, as well as super-signifying icons and archetypes, cliches, narratives, etc.

It has lots of information - just not in a form you can record with a camera.

the warm water by itself has higher averaged physical entropy over the duration of the movie, but very little information entropy and I wind up with a small file output. --

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> if entropy is to mean anything objectively, then how it looks and acts on one level compared to another can't matter since the difference between micro-states and the macro 'end result' is a matter of subjective perception, not physical law.

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.  So we can say (using the language of mathematics not English) with objectivity and precision that the bucket of water has a lot of entropy and the diamond much less.     
 

> Entropy and information here are figures of speech though. There is no actual physical property you are talking about

If that's true then I don't understand why soot or charcoal is different from diamonds, physically they are made of exactly the same thing, carbon atoms. Assuming you weigh 200 pounds I don't understand why you are different from 36 pounds of charcoal, 3 pounds of calcium, 2 pounds of phosphorous, and tanks filled with 130 pounds of oxygen gas, 20 pounds of hydrogen, 6 pounds of nitrogen, and about 3 ponds of a powder made of potassium sulfur sodium and magnesium.

The physical property of something can not just be the parts it's made out of, the physical property depends on how those parts are put together. In other words it depends on information, I can't imagine how anyone could hope to make sense of the world without understanding this, yes there is no other word for it, information.
 

> I have a glass of ice (low physical entropy). I make a movie of the ice melting so that it takes one hour to melt completely. Then I keep the camera rolling for another hour at the glass of water. I compress them as mpegs

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. 

> and boom, the warm water has very little Shannon entropy and I wind up with a small file output.

Warm water has more entropy than ice not less, and the compressed water file might be smaller than the uncompressed water file but it would still be larger than the compressed ice file. I said "might" because as entropy increases the less difference lossless compression makes, that's why with a file with maximum entropy, such as a movie of white noise, a lossless program would be useless, the "compressed" and regular file would be the same size. But you could still use lossy compression, like MPEG, because human eyes can not easily tell one variety of white noise from another, it's all just a bunch of hash, although Martians might see things differently. 

  John K Clark  
 

[Craig Weinberg]

On Friday, June 15, 2012 12:08:15 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

I'm willing to work a little to try to extract meaning from information - but not enough to try to extract it from blather.

New ideas have always required new vocabulary. How could it be otherwise? I can see how it might not seem clear, but I don't think that any degree of clarity can compensate for someone who isn't interested in the ideas behind them.

If you look at my diagram, I am integrating information as a two part phenomenon - inform and form. I think this solves the explanatory gap as the space between 'Sense' and 'Inform' denotes the symbol grounding problem where the stream of sense input may or may not match the capacity of the system to be informed by it - as you say 'not in a form you can record with a camera.' Human emotion is information which is not in a form you can record with silicon.

So you pontificate...over and over and over.

Brent

And so you deny without explanation, over and over and over.

[Craig Weinberg]

On Friday, June 15, 2012 12:10:23 PM UTC-4, John K Clark wrote:

> if entropy is to mean anything objectively, then how it looks and acts on one level compared to another can't matter since the difference between micro-states and the macro 'end result' is a matter of subjective perception, not physical law.

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? Without some subject to establish a scale, you can't say that there is any difference between the small changes and what you interpret as their consequences. Objectively, there are simply changes and that is all. There is no production of anything without a sense of what constitutes a whole or a part of the event.
 

  So we can say (using the language of mathematics not English) with objectivity and precision that the bucket of water has a lot of entropy and the diamond much less.     

Precision, yes, but objectivity, it depends what you mean. If a seed falls in a bucket of water, the water becomes part of an entropy reducing plant. 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.
 

 

> Entropy and information here are figures of speech though. There is no actual physical property you are talking about

If that's true then I don't understand why soot or charcoal is different from diamonds, physically they are made of exactly the same thing, carbon atoms. Assuming you weigh 200 pounds I don't understand why you are different from 36 pounds of charcoal, 3 pounds of calcium, 2 pounds of phosphorous, and tanks filled with 130 pounds of oxygen gas, 20 pounds of hydrogen, 6 pounds of nitrogen, and about 3 ponds of a powder made of potassium sulfur sodium and magnesium.

The physical property of something can not just be the parts it's made out of, the physical property depends on how those parts are put together. In other words it depends on information,

No, it depends on sense and participation. Information is a second order sense of a primary sense, derived through measurement, memory, inference, etc.
 

I can't imagine how anyone could hope to make sense of the world without understanding this, yes there is no other word for it, information.

Information is a good word to use for computation, because you want to shrink the subject of your computation to the least difficult representation that you can work with. When you turn that on yourself however, you disappear. When you take it literally as a worldview, then the world disappears.
 

 

> I have a glass of ice (low physical entropy). I make a movie of the ice melting so that it takes one hour to melt completely. Then I keep the camera rolling for another hour at the glass of water. I compress them as mpegs

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. A Martian microscope might work differently might see movie stars pictures inside of molecules that ours miss.

> and boom, the warm water has very little Shannon entropy and I wind up with a small file output.

Warm water has more entropy than ice not less, and the compressed water file might be smaller than the uncompressed water file but it would still be larger than the compressed ice file.

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.
 

I said "might" because as entropy increases the less difference lossless compression makes, that's why with a file with maximum entropy, such as a movie of white noise, a lossless program would be useless, the "compressed" and regular file would be the same size. But you could still use lossy compression, like MPEG, because human eyes can not easily tell one variety of white noise from another, it's all just a bunch of hash, although Martians might see things differently. 

The point is, that no scheme of compression or treatment of information has anything to do with the physical entropy of an actual substance. You can't compress the substance, because it is not information. Information is a subjective (or intersubjective) measurement, nothing more and nothing less. Matter is also only subjective or intersubjective, but it is a sense experience (which can be measured and abstracted through other layers or castes of sensemaking) from which the extraction of 'information' is neither necessary nor sufficient to reproduce. This is why blue cannot be seen by the blind, no matter how convincingly we describe it to them or how precise our formulas lead to producing technologies that produce blue experiences for those who can see them.

 

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whats...@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

[meekerdb]

On 6/16/2012 9:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whats...@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. 

Or have a look at:

arXiv:1009.1630v2 [quant-ph]

The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy

Lídia del Rio, Johan Aberg, Renato Renner, Oscar Dahlsten, Vlatko Vedral

(Submitted on 8 Sep 2010 (v1), last revised 27 Jun 2011 (this version, v2))

Landauer's erasure principle exposes an intrinsic relation between thermodynamics and information theory: the erasure of information stored in a system, S, requires an amount of work proportional to the entropy of that system. This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S, and the work necessary to erase a system may therefore vary for different observers. Here, we consider a general setting where the information held by the observer may be quantum-mechanical, and show that an amount of work proportional to H(S|O) is still sufficient to erase S. Since the entropy H(S|O) can now become negative, erasing a system can result in a net gain of work (and a corresponding cooling of the environment).

Where is shown explicitly how extract energy by erasing information.

Brent

   

> 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

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[Craig Weinberg]

On Saturday, June 16, 2012 12:56:39 PM UTC-4, John K Clark 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. 

As the excerpt Brent posted says: "This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S".

>  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.    

Yes, but we're only talking about local entropy and information.
 

> 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.

Saying that entropy depends on the scope and method of your perception:

"This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S"

> No, it depends on sense and participation.

(translation: sense and participation = the qualities which allow an observer to be informed.)
 

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.

I don't say that carbon can't sense if it's organized like a diamond, only that it doesn't understand human thoughts and feelings.
 

Or are you a fan of solipsism and think that nothing exists until you look at it,

Nope. But a universe that cannot see has nothing to look at.
 

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.

Information is the process of being informed. That process has to do with sense imitation and integration, not with a substance of 'information' that exists independently of sense.

 

>> 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.

 

"This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S"

Sounds like quantity also, to me.
 

It is objectively true that there is more information in a bucket of water than in the DNA of your body,

Nope. Nothing about the information of anything is objectively true. It is conditional on the observer.
 

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. 

They don't care for a good reason. It has high quantity and precision but low significance and quality. That's the difference between organic intelligence and AI. We can tell the difference between what matters and what doesn't.
 

> 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

There is no information in the image. There is no image in the image. Image and information are in the eye of the beholder. The rest is matter and energy.
 

, 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

All programs begin with lost data from the start, since the input begins with a lossy sampling.
 

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.

Exactly. Which is why physics needs to expand if we want it to apply to the physical universe as it actually is, where physical organisms feel strongly about whether something is 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?

Uh, no. Not. at all. My point is that regardless of what kind of compression algorithm you use, as long as you use the same one, the movie of the ice melting has higher information entropy than the warm water, and that is the reverse of the thermodynamic entropy of the physical water melting - which gains entropy as the ice melts, not loses it. This shows that a picture of water is not a map of water, and that no information is a complete map of what we think it refers to.

"This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S" is all that my thought experiment shows. Observation is a determining factor, not physics alone.
 

> 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.

Yes, somebody can. I can describe blue to someone blind from birth and then when they get their eyesight surgically restored, they will know for sure whether or not my description evoked a blue experience for them.
 

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". 

It depends on the circumstances of their blindness and where their visual system fails, but no, in the accounts I have read, it is affirmed that blind people who are able to see for the first time have no prior experience of it. By the same token, people who lose their eyesight completely at a young age gradually lose the ability to remember what things looked like.
 

> 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!

Yes but only through sense as the intermediary.
 

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.      

Yes, but it's metaphor, not causality. Information isn't causing physical changes. We make of the two subjects in a similar way, sure, but so what? I might think that the sun looks like a pumpkin at sunset. I could prove that a photo of each contains a high ratio of orange frequency photons. That doesn't mean the sun is a pumpkin.
 

> 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.

There are a lot of differences between the two, but information isn't what those differences are made of. For humans we care about what we think looks beautiful and perfect and rare, so feeling that an embodiment of such qualities is figuratively 'part of us' is significant and makes us feel enthusiastic. None of that has anything to do with carbon atoms. The carbon has to do with it's durability and hardness and rarity, but the brilliance and transparency has nothing to do with carbon or specific arrangements of molecules. The value of a diamond has nothing to do with any information that it might hold. A diamond ring has no function that pertains to the information of the stone. It's all about sense and experience.
 

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.

Straw man diversions.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Saturday, June 16, 2012 3:55:03 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

Thanks, that make my point exactly:

"This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S, and the work necessary to erase a system may therefore vary for different observers."

Craig

Or have a look at:

arXiv:1009.1630v2 [quant-ph]

The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy

Lídia del Rio, Johan Aberg, Renato Renner, Oscar Dahlsten, Vlatko Vedral

(Submitted on 8 Sep 2010 (v1), last revised 27 Jun 2011 (this version, v2))

Landauer's erasure principle exposes an intrinsic relation between thermodynamics and information theory: the erasure of information stored in a system, S, requires an amount of work proportional to the entropy of that system. This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S, and the work necessary to erase a system may therefore vary for different observers. Here, we consider a general setting where the information held by the observer may be quantum-mechanical, and show that an amount of work proportional to H(S|O) is still sufficient to erase S. Since the entropy H(S|O) can now become negative, erasing a system can result in a net gain of work (and a corresponding cooling of the environment).

Where is shown explicitly how extract energy by erasing information.

Brent

   

> 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

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