Hi Lee,
Lee Corbin wrote:
>George writes
>
>
>
>>Is the world fundamentally physical or can it be reduced to ideas? This
>>is an interesting issue. If a TOE exists then it would have to explain
>>the physics and the objects.
>>
>>This reminds me of the Ether controversy. Is there a need for the Ether
>>for waves to propagate? The most up-to-date answer is that waves carry
>>their own "physical substrate." They can be waves and/or particles.
>>Similarly there should be equivalence between information and
>>matter/energy. Thus a process or algorithm should have inherently within
>>itself its own physical substrate.
>>
>>
>
>Well, that sounds good to me, but what do I know.
>
>
>
>>Since information is observer-dependent (Shannon) this issue brings us
>>back to the observer. I think that eventually all observables will have
>>to be traced back to the observer who is in fact at the nexus of the
>>mind-body problem.
>>
>>
>
>But why can't photographic apparatuses, or amoeba, count as observers?
>(They don't have minds, right, or, uh, do they?)
>
>I really confess to not understanding the claim that information is
>observer dependent; if a region contained one of thirty-two possible
>binary bit strings of length 5, it seems to me that it would contain
>five bits, even if no light from it ever reached other parts of the
>universe.
>
>Lee
>
>
>
If I say something to you in Sanskrit you will likely not understand it.
It will carry zero information. However If I say it in English you will
be much more likely to understand it.
If I say to you that your name is Lee Corbin, it will not add any
information to what you already know. Again, it will carry zero
information.
This is what Shannon calls Mutual Information. In the first case *you*
don't have the decoder to translate Sanskrit to English. In the second
case you have the decoder but for *you*, the information is not new: you
already know that your name is Lee Corbin. Old information is no
information at all.
Received mutual information is dependent on the information that already
exists in the mind of the receiver (or observer). In this sense
Shannon's information theory is a relativity theory of information just
like Galileo's dynamics and Einstein's relativity are relativity
theories of physics and just like Everett's interpretation is a
relativity theory of quantum events.
This is the reason I believe that the observer is at the nexus of the
mind-body problem and that eventually we'll find that the "mind" and the
"body" are two aspects of the same thing. Bruno seems to be in the right
track in developing a calculus of the soul (or consciousness).
George
>>
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Jun 21 2006 - 23:39:32 PDT