• Pop
    1.5k
    Oh well.Possibility

    This was explained to you previously, but in an edit, so you may have missed it.

    **In the end our philosophy is only as good as the reality it creates. I have given my views on this previously - why I argue what I do, and where it leads.Pop
  • Mark Nyquist
    774
    Might have missed a lot. Like in school I missed subtraction using the Venn diagram method.
  • Pop
    1.5k
    ↪Pop Might have missed a lot. Like in school I missed subtraction using the Venn diagram method.Mark Nyquist

    How information shapes and changes us might be another thread. Am a bit pooped at the moment. :smile:
  • Kenosha Kid
    3.2k
    Put it this way, is there any information-talk in physics that can't be (shouldn't be) replaced perfectly well with entropy-talk?bongo fury

    Yes. As I said above, entropy is the _number_ of microstates available to explore. The actual microstate occupied by a system would be the totality of its information, and is not specified by the system's entropy.
  • Prishon
    984
    metaphysicsapokrisis

    Impressed forces? What do you mean? That forces are fotced?
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Let Google be your friend….

    An impressed force is an action exerted upon a body, in order to change its state, either of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a right line. These definitions gave rise to the famous three laws: known as Newton's laws of motion.

    https://www.iitg.ac.in/physics/fac/saurabh/ph101/Lecture3.pdf
  • Prishon
    984
    I that case, Google is not my friend. Not everything there is to find makes sense. Unless tatologies make sense. You just cant take a force and impress it. The impression *is* the force. But I know what you mean.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Unless tatologies make sense. You just cant take a force and impress it. The impression *is* the force.Prishon

    If you have a problem with the phrasing, best take it up with the dude that wrote the law. Tell him what a dope he is. :lol:

    Lex II. Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae,
    & fieri secundum lineam rectam qua vis illa imprimitur.
  • Prishon
    984
    phrasingapokrisis

    Does anyone speak about dope...? :lol:
  • Alkis Piskas
    2.1k

    It is the belief of phenomenology, and the philosophical zombie argument.Pop
    Thanks, but I would prefer your opinion, what do you think/believe and why.
  • Prishon
    984
    thatapokrisis

    Translated in Dutch:

    Wet 2. Verandering in beweging is evenredig met de opgedrukte aandrijfkracht;
    En wordt in lijn gemaakt wanneer de kracht wordt ingedrukt.

    "De kracht wordt ingedrukt". The force is impressed. I would I could contact the guy who wrote that. You either impress or force. The meaning is clear, but hearing that phrase over and over makes the force look as an object. Using these words over and over poisons the mind, like small doses given each time. :)
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    You either impress or force.Prishon

    I can see you are certainly mucho impressed by your own arguments. But Newton likely had his reasons for distinguishing between vis impressa and vis insita, don’tcha think?

    Like Aristotle, Newton in the Principia, refers to two kinds of forces: Vis insita, inertial forces which are seen as inherent to bodies and vis impressa, forces exerted on a body, such as pressure and impact forces.

    https://spark.iop.org/history-force-concept
  • Prishon
    984
    betweenapokrisis

    "I can see you are certainly mucho impressed by your own arguments. But Newton likely had his reasons for distinguishing between vis impressa and vis insita, don’tcha think?"

    Why do you see I am certainly impressed? My arguments impress but i'm not not impressed by them. Certainly not. Maybe Newton had his reasons but that only shows he didn't understand vis. Vis impressa and vis insita just can't be causing one another as he implies. He just didn't understand force. He knew how to use it. And that's where his mistake originated.
  • Mark Nyquist
    774
    Information can be simply defined as the opposite of a blank sheet of paper minus the writing on it[/b]

    So: ( paper - writing )opposite = information. or Paper + writing = information
    Pop


    Another view is:
    Paper is physical matter.
    Ink is physical matter.
    So paper and ink (the combination) is physical matter.

    Information (brain states) is encoded to paper and ink (because it's cheap and relatively stable) and decoded by yourself or others (by convention) - an attempt to transfer brain states.
  • Prishon
    984
    Maximum information is useless. Nothing interesting going on. The chaos is maximal. The same holds for total order. Both can be described in one single line. Interesting things happen in-between. You can write books full about that "state" of intermediate order.
  • Pop
    1.5k
    It is the belief of phenomenology, and the philosophical zombie argument.
    — Pop
    Thanks, but I would prefer your opinion, what do you think/believe and why.
    Alkis Piskas

    I have a short theory of consciousness. It is badly in need of renovation, but it might give you some clues. Ultimately you have to do something like this on your own, unless you are to take somebody else's word for it .
  • Pop
    1.5k
    Information (brain states) is encoded to paper and ink (because it's cheap and relatively stable) and decoded by yourself or others (by convention) - an attempt to transfer brain states.Mark Nyquist

    :up: Yes, and it causes a change in the sender and recipients brain state, thus changing them. And through an ongoing process of such informing, we evolve.
  • Pop
    1.5k
    Maximum information is useless. Nothing interesting going on. The chaos is maximal. The same holds for total order. Both can be described in one single line. Interesting things happen in-between. You can write books full about that "state" of intermediate order.Prishon

    That is a great point! The distinction between order and entropy is the information in the system. That is very much the same as the distinction of the blank page and the scribble on it is information, or the grey nothingness and an object within it is information. The object has form, as distinct to the nothingness.

    At the same time as I describe this I am aware what I describe is identical to my neural patterning creating it. So I am interacting with this idea, which is entirely internal, and when you interact with it, it is internal to you. This creates the process of information, where the form of an idea interacts with a larger form that is our consciousness, thus creating it’s moments, and distinctions of moments and thus sense of time, and this way we evolve..

    Without these distinctions of order against entropy, there would be total order, or total entropy, and this way the system would be a nothing, so could not interact and evolve.

    So, information enables the interaction and evolution of a system.

    The definition of information in this sense is: information enables the interaction of form. or Information = evolutionary interaction

    On a more human scale this definition reduces to: Information changes us, in a continuous evolutionary process.


    This is well illustrated in fictional "form":

    I was bewildered by all the information given to me all at once.

    Information of her brothers death caused her to sink to the floor in tears.

    Information about the party ruined the surprise.

    The information in the rock changed the paleontologist's mind about its origins.



    As I understand it anyhow. :smile:
  • Prishon
    984
    thusPop

    ". That is very much the same as the distinction of the blank page and the scribble on it is information, or the grey nothingness and an object within it is information. The object has form, as distinct to the nothingness."

    Illuminating! :100:
  • bongo fury
    1.6k
    entropy is the _number_ of microstates available to explore.Kenosha Kid

    Cool, where those states are assumed equiprobable, and in which case the analogy according to the linked Wikipedia page is that information is the _number_of messages available to... send? ... store? ... explore? ... whatever, but the cardinality of the message space. The number of alternatives.

    So, is we is or is we ain't... compelled to interpret the one as the other? The maths of alternative states/events/outcomes/anythings as the maths of alternative messages more specifically? If so, where, exactly?

    I thought this would be a physics question, and I should be prepared to accept an interesting justification for the specific interpretation, even while not fully understanding it. But I have to admit,

    The actual microstate occupied by a system would be the totality of its information,Kenosha Kid

    sounds like any old woo. Please explain.

    and is not specified by the system's entropy.Kenosha Kid

    Is it like, the actual message sent along a channel would have its own surprise value, its Shannon 'self-information', analogously not specified by the source's entropy, i.e. the Shannon information of the whole message space? That would make 'totality of its information' the (log of the) probability of that particular state? That doesn't seem to be what you mean.

    Or are you appealing to some non-technical (at least non-Shannon) intuition of information as stream-of-fact?

    'the totality of its information'... how physics, please? Else, what, exactly?
  • Prishon
    984
    It's like the difference between a hot gas and the same gas at absolute zero. The gas contains a high entropy. The solid zero. The sweet temperature in between contains the most interesting configurations. Of course there has to be flow of heat or else there is static equilibrium. A medium between a hot gas and absolute temperature that is rotating too, can develop very interesting forms and processes. If you add ingredients to that medium, shape it in the form of a sphere, put water on it, amino acids, etc. The phenomena get realy truly interesting...
  • Mark Nyquist
    774
    I googled 'physicists definition of information'.

    What is information? - Physics Stack Exchangehttps://physics.stackexchange.com › questions › what-is...
    Jan 23, 2016 — information contained in a physical system = the number of yes/no questions you need to get answered to fully specify the system. https://physics.stackexchange.

    I don't think this means information resides in the physical system but is used by the observer to measure the physical system.
    Other definitions came up but this is the one I agree with.
  • Pop
    1.5k
    information contained in a physical system = the number of yes/no questions you need to get answered to fully specify the system.Mark Nyquist

    This quantifies the information in the system, but does not tell us what information is.
  • Prishon
    984
    Like the word says information is in formation.
  • Prishon
    984
    The letter A contains about as much information as the other letters. In the physical entropy sense (S=lnN). But they are not the same.
  • Pop
    1.5k
    Hey, thanks so much for your comment. it just made something click! :smile:
    I've been searching for a definition of information, expecting to see somebody has beaten me to it, but I can not find anything better. I saw a lecture last night by some information professor, but he had no definition. So still searching hoping not to find it. :razz:
  • Joshs
    5.6k


    the aspect I say is being overplayed by you is how the individual point of view becomes a justification for the reheated romanticism that animates PoMo pluralism and anti-structuralism.apokrisis

    Speaking of Romanticism, let’s get back to Peirce.
    First, let’s review a definition of philosophical Romanticism from The Basics of Philosophy. You’ll notice that postmodernism is not mentioned as a form of Romanticism. On the contrary, it is generally thought that Nietzsche, the first postmodernist thinker, signaled the end of Romanticism.

    ‘The roots of Philosophical Romanticism can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Rousseau, (who is credited with the idea of the "noble savage", uncorrupted by artifice and society), thought that civilization fills Man with unnatural wants and seduces him away from his true nature and original freedom. Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism (see the section on Idealism) posited that we do not directly see "things-in-themselves"; we only understand the world through our human point of view, an idea developed by the American Transcendentalism of the mid-19th Century.

    The German Idealists who followed on from Kant and adapted and expanded his work with their own interpretations of Idealism, can all be considered Romanticists in their outlook. Among these the most important were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and (arguably) Arthur Schopenhauer. Hegel was perhaps the most influential of the German Idealist philosophers, and his idea that each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (Absolute Idealism) had far-reaching effects.’

    Now let’s look at a discussion by Andrew Stables of Peirce’s relation to those ol’ Romantics Kant and Hegel.

    Both Kant and Hegel were progressivists. Kant's moral absolutism can be contrasted with Hegel's universal progressivism. While Kant saw progression through assimilation (via duty), Hegel posits progression through agonism.

    ‘Kant explains the empirical as making sense only within the context of the rational: cognitively in terms of the fundamental Categories, and ethically in terms of the Categorical Imperative and the moral law that flows from it (Kant, 1909, p. 281).Thus mind dictates material/bodily experience. Peirce does not need to separate mind and body, at least in his later semiotic thinking, but he still offers a rational schema which accounts for experience: his various reformulations of the triadic models built on Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. As with Kant, the pure ‘categories' here are implicit and remain hidden: one cannot isolate Firstness any more than one could isolate pure Relation or Modality. Any attempt to explain Firstness in terms of Qualities begs the response that Qualities may be features of a noumenal world that remains ultimately inaccessible at the phenomenal level, though Peirce does not raise the distinction and committed Peirceans take him as denying it. However, as neither Kantian Category nor Peircean Firstness is either empirically or logically testable other than indirectly, through the creation and working out of alternative models, there are no grounds for resolving this.

    Also, Peirce remains as committed as any idealist or rationalist philosopher to the logical possibility of infinite non-existent worlds and entities. Given the role that pure chance plays in the increasingly pansemiotic approach that Peirce takes towards the end of his life, the possibilities for change are potentially infinite.Why actual change should be progressive or rational is entirely unclear, unless some higher power has invested certain beings (specifically humans) with rational power and free will, such that arbitrary change at the level of Firstness (of there be such a level) is transformed into rational change at the level of Thirdness; however, for Peirce explicitly to take this position would be an admission that he had scarcely moved on from Kant at all. While Kant's argument for rationalism is circular, Peirce, like Hegel, effectively collapses mind and experience. Like Hegel, the rationalist idealist, Peirce seems increasingly to see the universe as spirit unfolding or revealing.

    Kant, Hegel and Peirce are all Enlightenment progressivists insofar as progress is regarded as universal and rational. None would be sympathetic to a social constructivist, nihilist, poststructuralist or any strongly relativistic take on progress. Kant has progress flow from the actions of autonomous rational agents motivated by that which guides ‘the starry sky above and the moral law within' (Kant, 1909, p. 260): that is, universal rational laws which are expressed in nature and which guide experience but can be clear only to the mind. While for Kant progress comes through assimilation (freedom as duty), to Hegel it comes via the agonistic dialectic of inevitable opposition and resolution, as reason works itself out in and as the world (Hegel, 1977). Peirce’s concerns are always less social than Hegel's, but in the juxtaposition of Firstness and Secondness and in the resolution that Thirdness offers as the Interpretant Sign, there is a kind of implicit dialectical movement that resonates with Hegel. Also note that Hegel, while commonly construed as an idealist, is arguably not a dualist insofar as the body of the world cannot be divorced from mind itself. Peirce's progressivism can therefore be regarded as broadly Hegelian, though not expressed in terms of alienation, struggle and negation.

    However, just as Hegelian progress can seem to some merely to be inevitable change, since there are no criteria for assessing it as progress (other than the accrual of power, perhaps), Peirce can be held to a similar charge. Peirce assumes change to be progressive because he attempts to explain it as rational process. Of the three, only Kant's Categorical Imperatives offer grounds for judging whether change has been progressive, and even the criteria for judgment thus derived would be open to evaluative interpretation. Universal unfolding is not necessarily progressive. As Peirce assumes it to be, then he must tacitly be working on a basis not dissimilar to Kant's: the logic of the rational outcome.
    Peirce, therefore, owes many debts to rationalism and can be seen as its heir rather than its successor.

    There are many who remain unconvinced that Peirce's work can offer the final word, even in terms of philosophical underpinning, but rather see it, for all its inspiring qualities, as a not entirely happy marriage of competing traditions rather than a final resolution of the tensions between them. Merrell, for example, cites Peirce's ‘collusion . . . of evolutionary cosmology coupled with his no-nonsense “realism” tinged with “idealist' metaphysics' (Merrell, 1997, p. 95). The present argument is that he does not move as far from an Enlightenment rationalism as his more committed followers claim.’
    (Andrew Stables)

    Sounds awfully Romantic to me.
  • Prishon
    984
    seePop

    You are hoping *not* to find? The I think your hopes will come true!
  • Prishon
    984
    Excuse the strange quotations and spelling. Im on a phone with veeeeery smal dials and I have a big thump...:smile:
  • Prishon
    984
    toJoshs

    Are you below the right question?
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