Information, Ghostly Apparitions And Dinosaurs

TheMadFool

I was just mulling over Information Theory and how I recall reading that information can't be destroyed.

It got me wondering about how light reflects off of objects and this reflected light, according to optics, lands on our retinas and we, well, see the world around us.

Assuming the specific patterns of lightwaves/photons that constitute visual images are information then, if information can't be destroyed, all the images that light from a source has ever produced must still exist at this very moment.

Is it possible then that visual reports of ghosts - a person seeing an apparition - are simply indestructible visual image information being sensed by people? I mean if the pattern of photons my late grandfather consisted of, thoroughly mixed by now with other photon patterns of other people and various objects, were to fall on my retina, I would actually see my late grandfather again! :chin: In medieval terms I would see my late grandfather's ghost.

Other information patterns of matter-energy may also persist and, in my humble opinion, may account for so-called paranormal phenomena.

Tapping into this kind of information source we could, in theory, see the entire history of the earth - dinosaurs and all. The Loch Ness monster maybe an instance of people seeing such reconstituted prehistoric information?

Pfhorrest

While information can’t be created or destroyed, like energy it can be rendered inaccessible, through the exact same process: the second law of thermodynamics’ inevitable increase of entropy.

Energy and informational are quite closely related (and are in effect the modern equivalents of substance and form). Heat energy is essentially the same as informational noise: it is just disorder. “Noisy” arrangements of energy are all that heat is.

The second law, in its deeper statistical form, basically says that the information of the universe gets noisier, more disordered, over time; it losing usable energy to heat is just a byproduct of that, since heat is noisy energy. And just as it is hard to extract useful information from a noisy source, so too is it consequently difficult to extract usable energy from heat.

The upshot here being that although the information is not destroyed, it is still lost, inaccessible, through the passage of time, just like usable energy gets lost to useless heat over time.

A Seagull

I recall reading that information can't be destroyed. — TheMadFool

As I recall, information can be destroyed in a black hole.

Gregory

If only the present exists them information can be rearranged and have destroyed that way. What is the world's substratum? Big debate

Pfhorrest

↪A Seagull

Nope, Hawking fixed that with his eponymous radiation.

A Seagull

↪A Seagull Nope, Hawking fixed that with his eponymous radiation. — Pfhorrest

The hawking radiation conjecture doesn't prove it.

Pfhorrest

↪A Seagull

Not by itself but the solution involves it.

TheMadFool

↪Pfhorrest

↪A Seagull

↪Gregory

Yes, there's entropy and the photon pattern of historic objects may subsequently be affected by it and that, for me, explains why most ghosts seen by people are hazy/blurry/shadowy images, an indication that some information was "lost" (to entropy or something else).

Pfhorrest

↪TheMadFool

The thing is, the information of the image isn't any kind of special thing above and beyond the arrangement of the photons, so you would need some ordinary optical explanation for how that pattern of photons got shuffled around somewhere for some period of time only to reappear intact later. Entropy would explain why they would tend to come out of that process imperfectly, but that's like saying the image reflected by a mirror or seen through a camera and then projected somewhere is imperfect... you still need the mirror, or the camera/projector, or something, to explain how it stayed even as intact as it did, and didn't get mangled beyond comprehension as the photons just scattered off of an ordinary surface.

TheMadFool

↪Pfhorrest

Is the probability of photon patterns of objects reforming to produce either an exact image or a blurry version of the image zero?

Pfhorrest

↪TheMadFool

Negligibly close to zero, yes.

Odds comparable to a dropped and broken egg un-dropping itself into an intact egg again.

TheMadFool

↪Pfhorrest

But not zero.

Information, Ghostly Apparitions And Dinosaurs

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions