What constitutes information in each particular case depends on what it means for us. — SophistiCat
Nicely illustrating the fact that the boundary between ‘information’ and ‘meaning’ is a rather porous one. — Wayfarer
The latter sentence doesn't follow from the prior one.The point of falsifiability is to distinguish empirical statements from those that are not. But to then say that ‘only empirical statements are meaningful’ is to endorse positivism, which is another thing altogether. — Wayfarer
Information can be entirely meaningless, utterly devoid of significance, sheer gibberish - it would nonetheless be information. The OP is no doubt trying to milk semantics from information. But it's a mostly dead end. — StreetlightX
Turning back to information, semantics doesn't matter for the mathematical theory of information, but it is what motivates its applications. — SophistiCat
How were humans informed of the Big Bang if not by observing space expanding? The expansion of space (the effect) is information because it was caused by the Big Bang. It is about the Big Bang. It informs us that the Big Bang happened.The space between atomic particles has never conveyed information to me in the same way as a cherry pie or a bag of rocks. I've heard rumors and theories about the space between particles but a bag of rocks or a cherry pie is different from a theory or a rumor.
It would be hard to argue empty space is information. — ZzzoneiroCosm
So meaning is how useful some bit of information is?One possible source of confusion among posts here is the conflation of information with meaning. The two are not the same. Shannon was quite clear the information is an entirely syntactical issue, and has nothing to do with semantics:
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages" (my emphasis).
Information can be entirely meaningless, utterly devoid of significance, sheer gibberish - it would nonetheless be information. The OP is no doubt trying to milk semantics from information. But it's a mostly dead end. — StreetlightX
I've been reading more of Davies' book and just came across this example:
In some species of deer, if you cut a notch in the antlers, next year’s regrown antlers come complete with an ectopic branch (tine) at that same location. Where, one wonders, is the ‘notch information’ stored in the deer? Obviously not in the antlers, which drop off. In the head? How does a deer’s head know its antler has a notch half a metre away from it, and how do cells at the scalp store a map of the branching structure so as to note exactly where the notch was? Weird!
Davies, Paul. The Demon in the Machine (pp. 119-120). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
This is in the context of other examples which posit electrical fields as possibly have an influence in epigenetics and therefore morphogenesis. I wonder if they’re related to the magnetic fields that purportedly allow pigeons to navigate and salmon to find their home creek. Nature sure seems to have memories. — Wayfarer
The presentation of Enformationism is unapologetically idiosyncratic, and the website was inspired by the site of another far-out "peculiar" thinker, Gevin Girobran : http://everythingforever.com/.But I think your philosophy is a little too idiosyncratic, and little on the pop-sci end of the spectrum, for my liking. — Wayfarer
Yes, Wayfarer seems to be trying to turn the focus from the Reductive methods of Shannon Information Theory to a more Holistic approach. It's not a "rhetorical crutch". but a philosophical category shift : "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem". If you can't understand why a philosopher would prefer to focus on human "meaning" than mathematical "specificity", you're on the wrong forum. :cool:So you want to employ information without reference to any of its specificity? Just a rhetorical crutch? Par for Wayfarer course. — StreetlightX
If you say, well, everything is information - the space between every atomic particle, the composition of every object - then you're saying nothing meaningful. Someone already said that I'm sticking to a strict definition of 'information' - this is true. To define something is to say what it isn't - de-fine, delimit, mark out. So if you simply say 'well everything is information', it doesn't say anything, because it makes the term so broad as to be meaningless. — Wayfarer
So when Dennett says, 'oh yes, I'm a materialist, all that exists is matter and energy - and information' - then is he still a materialist? — Wayfarer
Information increases as order decreases. — unenlightened
What you offer as information is disinformation. — unenlightened
Information can be entirely meaningless, utterly devoid of significance, sheer gibberish - it would nonetheless be information. The OP is no doubt trying to milk semantics from information. But it's a mostly dead end. — StreetlightX
I guess communication is the transmission of information from one point to another. As Shannon wrote - the next sentence after the one I quoted - the problem of communication "is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point... The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design".
What is transmitted is information insofar as it is univocal from one end to the other: that it is the same message that gets from A to B, regardless if that message is total junk. — StreetlightX
Paul Davies is a physicist, whose focus has shifted from tiny particles to the universe as a whole system : the Cosmos. And he believes, not based on "faith" but on evidence, that Information is the essence of reality --- of both Matter and Mind; both "invisible transcendental" Energy, and visible tangible Matter. This notion is gaining traction among even atheist scientists in the 21st century. :nerd:Maybe information is this invisible, transcendental thing that can be seen to express itself in all manners of completely different systems in arbitrary ways or perhaps, information is simply an abstract concept we assign to things- surely it is one of the two. There is little reason to believe the former- to do so would be faith (there is no proof for information being some real, physical thing after all). — tom111
How do we define this abstract concept? Well, if system A has a lot of ‘information’ on system B, then from system A’s state (from its fundamental quantities maybe, its position, momenta, temperature, order etc) we can deduce a lot about system B and the quantities associated with it. Again, the key is we can ‘deduce’. In reality these two systems are simply similar to one another or connected- we take the step to take certain qualities of A that are similar to B and label these ‘information’, disregarding the innumerable other qualities of the system that we can deduce less about B from. There is nothing physically special about these qualities apart from the fact that we can use them to find out more about the nature of B. — tom111
A physical system manifests itself only by interacting with another. The description of a physical system, then, is always given in relation to another physical system, the one with which it interacts. Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information which a system has about another system, that is to say, the correlation between the two systems...
The description of a system, in the end, is nothing other than a way of summarising all the past interactions with it, and using them to predict the effect of future interactions.
The entire formal structure of quantum mechanics can in large be expressed in two simple postulates:
1. The relevant information in any physical system is finite.
2. You can always obtain new information on a physical system.
Here, the ‘relevant information’ is the information that we have about a given system as a consequence of our past interactions with it: information allowing us to predict what will be the result for us of future interactions with this system. — Carlo Rovelli ‘Reality Is Not What It Seems’
And he believes, not based on "faith" but on evidence, that Information is the essence of reality --- of both Matter and Mind; both "invisible transcendental" Energy, and visible tangible Matter. — Gnomon
As usual, all religious and spiritual implications are grammar mistakes. — StreetlightX
We can reduce everything to two fundamentals, matter, atoms, or particles (however you want to call them), and the relations which these have with each other. — Metaphysician Undercover
Atomism - pre-Hobbes, Gassendi, La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Feuerbach ... "materialism" - includes 'void' as well as 'atoms'. Besides, the intractable incommensurability of QM and GR suggests that the current fundamental physics is "incomplete" (i.e. approximate) as well.Fields are just as fundamental, if not more so, than particles. Materialism is an incomplete understanding. The world is made up of more than particles. — Marchesk
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