George Levy wrote:
> 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.
>
> Since information is observer-dependent (Shannon)
Inasmuch as it is, it isn't somethign that can be equated
with physical properties. Inasmuch as it is something that can be
equated
with physical properties, it isn't observer-dependent.
> 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.
>
> 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.
That's "mutual" information as opposed to other kinds...like
the kind that can be equated with the non-observer-dependent quantity
of entropy.
> George
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Received on Thu Jul 06 2006 - 16:41:56 PDT