The Universe Is Not Like a Computer by Lorraine Ford

The last Anonymous post was from me. This is not the first time the system as logged me out just before I posted a message. I even checked to verify that I was logged in just one second before I clicked the "Submit New Post" button. Oh Well...

Hi Edwin,

Why call it pure information? Because it is necessary to distinguish pure information from code, and also to show pure information's link to code. What is normally called information is in fact code (coded information). Code does not imply meaningful information - you need a code book or knowledge of the code. I contend that it is only when every level of code is deciphered that you are left with pure information; and pure information is experience.

To communicate complex information, you seem to need a physical code. Even at the molecular or the "neural network" level, this physical code must seemingly represent aspects of pure information experienced by molecules. (And presumably the organism as a whole must experience need-to-know type of executive-level summaries of more basic information)

Re particles in physics never being seen except in the context of significant preparation: I think so-called "physical reality" is partly explained by information, information with a point of view. Underneath all the complexity, the content of information seems to be categories and relationships. To greatly simplify the situation, I think that instruments convey category and relationship information to experimenters.

You say "what constitutes 'information' for one observer, is not necessarily 'information' to another". I agree: "pure" information, i.e. experience, has a point of view (see my essay). But I think my definition of "pure" information is different to yours: I don't agree that "...Such 'serial numbers' are 'pure information'".

Re "the sender need only send the 'serial number' of the intended message..." Clearly, after the processing of this serial number, the resultant message is still a code (coded information). Only when a human being deciphers all the layers of code in this resultant coded message, are you left with "pure" information i.e. experience. My essay tries to argue that information at the level of fundamental particles is not a code - it is "pure" information.

I would also like to comment that John Searle's "Chinese Room" is a very clunky explanation.

Your definition of "pure" information is indeed different from mine, and inconsistent with how the term "information" is used in Information Theory. Like the physicists, you are confusing "Information" with the "stuff" that gives "significance" or "meaning" to that "information". As you have said, experience is such "stuff".

For an "ignorant" observer, that has little or no a priori knowledge, information appears like specks of gold dust scattered within a pile of dirt. In a very counterintuitive way, it is the dirt that gives significance and meaning to the gold, precisely because it is not gold. Gold is whatever is let when you remove all the dirt. Physicists have confused the dirt and the gold.

For example, if you observe a physical phenomenon that has a low information rate, you will observe many "constants" and "periodicities" and "predictable" occurrences. Physicists often treat these as the gold. But they are the dirt. Gold is what is left when you remove all that is known, and that includes all that is predictable. That "dirt" is what gives "significance" to the gold, but it is not gold itself. From the perspective of Information Theory, gold is precisely that which you do not yet possess, that which cannot be predicted. That is why it must be sent to you in a message, if you are ever to obtain it. But as soon as you have received it, it ceases to be "information" and becomes part of your accumulated "experience", which may subsequently give meaning and significance to future information bearing messages.

The point that you have missed is that Information Theory is all about how inanimate entities, like radio receivers, deal with "information". Hence, its definition for "information" has nothing whatever to do with what more complex entities, like humans, subsequently do with that information. On the other hand, in a reductionist sense, it has a great deal to say about the behaviors of all the inanimate entities from which humans are constructed. In that sense, it says a great deal about human behaviors.

The "Chinese Room" is not an explanation. It is a phenomenon, and one that can only be exhibited by an entity with a great deal of a priori knowledge regarding the "significance" of the experience of receiving a given serial number. Searle's point is that this phenomenon will pass the Turing Test for intelligence, even though it is not intelligent; it is "merely" very knowledgeable.

Robert,

"Inanimate entities, like radio receivers" deal with coded information only: their input radio waves and output sound waves represent something else. Don't forget that so-called "Information Theory" is actually "Coded Information Theory". Almost every time this theory uses the word "information", it should be replaced with the words "coded information" so that the true nature of what we are talking about is made clear.

Words and sentences are codes (coded information) too. So what is un-coded information? I contend that when every layer of coded information has been deciphered you are left with "pure" (i.e. un-coded) information, and that "pure" information is experience.

Lorraine,

I am highly sympathetic to your view. The problem is, there is no such thing as "uncoded information" in experience. Experience is all about coding, such as sensory coding. For example, you may experience yellow colors, even when no yellow frequency exists in the light entering your eye. Your retina codes a combination of red and green with the same code it uses for yellow only, thereby causing red and green to be experienced as yellow. All sensory outputs are similarly coded. Without such coding, you would experience nothing.

Hi Lorraine,

Although I agree with Robert, I think I can also see where you're coming from.

Just to make sure I'm on the same page as you guys, I'd like to give an example of what I think of information is. Hopefully we all agree on at least this part.

If I receive three distinct symbols in the form of sentences such as "Hello.", "How are you today?", and "Lovely weather, don't you think?", the information content per symbol (in natural units) is [math]S = \ln(3)[/math]. If I'm understanding correctly, according to Robert's definition that's pure gold, no dirt.

If I concatenate the sentences and then break them down into their roots (individual characters), I get a different value for the information content per symbol because there are now repetitions (including spaces and punctuation, only 22 of the 58 total symbols are distinct): [math]S = 2.8[/math]. Since the pure gold measure would be [math]\ln(58) = 4.06[/math], this means that there's a lot of dirt.

With all of that aside: Is it an accurate guess for me think that you're searching for the most "broken down" description of physics, where the most fundamental of root symbols are all that's to be considered? Or is it kind of the opposite, where you're looking for the highest level symbols (leaves, for lack of being able to think of better word that is opposite to root)?

Robert kind of brings up a good point about the JPEG image data versus the JPEG decompression data, insomuch that they're both just data (although the image tends to vary often and the algorithm not so much, and so the images have a good chance of bearing greater information). Is it accurate to guess that whatever you're searching for (root or leaves) would be a synthesis of the "image" data and "algorithm" data, or would it be just the "algorithm" itself?

This was a very thought provoking essay. Thank you for sharing it.

- Shawn

That wasn't very clear. When I concatenated the sentences, I took the result to be: "Hello. How are you today? Lovely weather, don't you think?". In other words, I forgot to say that I put spaces in-between the sentences as I was concatenating them. It does make a bit of a difference when working out the final information content per symbol (S = 2.8 with the two extra space characters, S = 2.9 without them), and so I apologize for making the mistaken of not specifying this in the original message.

Hi, Robert,

"The point that you have missed is that Information Theory is all about how inanimate entities, like radio receivers, deal with "information". Hence, its definition for "information" has nothing whatever to do with what more complex entities, like humans, subsequently do with that information. On the other hand, in a reductionist sense, it has a great deal to say about the behaviors of all the inanimate entities from which humans are constructed. In that sense, it says a great deal about human behaviors."

That, of course, is traditional Shannonian Information Theory you're talking about, which doesn't address "meaning" instead limiting itself to the abstracted transmission of physical data. (And always factor a few subtle redundancies into your writing ... you clearly do it very well and I like to try.) Anyway, there's long been an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Shannon Information because it ignores the more subjective aspects of Information as that word is understood and employed in ordinary language. At last, however, we may have a New Testament: Jan KÃ¥hre's "Mathematical Theory of Information". It's pretty cool and addresses many received limitations but this isn't the proper forum in which to discuss it assuming I could.

Yo, Lorraine,

"Pure information" or "Information qua Information" is an intuition just as "Energy (qua Energy)" is an intuition. All that Qua stuff. We can observe Information and Energy only in their coded forms -- words on a page or in conversation, or sparks shooting out of a wall socket while you hope the circuit-breaker works so all that electrical energy won't decode into major thermal energy. ... Unless, possibly, isomorphisms can be taken as evidence of pure information. How come, for instance, wave mechanics is wave mechanics whether the waves in question are quantum or hydraulic? And speaking of double-slit experiments: There's at least one demonstrating that information can be erased and then made to reappear. But maybe that's too much about something.

Okay ... Jan Kahre. That neat "a" with the tiny "o" over it looked fine in the preview.

Hi Robert, Shawn, nmann, and Lorraine,

Re: "Shannon's measure of information does not explicitly account for meaning".

I am not at all certain that meaning can be quantified, and therefore that any meaning beyond Shannon's treatment is possible. Meaning is *always* contextual, as I indicated above with

"One if by land, two if by sea."

This is simply meaningless unless one knows the history [true or not] of Paul Revere's midnight ride, of April 18, 1775. And further that the numbers reference the number of lanterns to be shown in the steeple of the old North Church, the source of the information from observers who were watching to see whether the British Army was coming by land or sea. More meaning is attached to the fact that this preceded the Battles of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution.

The context can be expanded indefinitely, as is, I believe, much of the point that Robert McEachern makes in his essay concerning the amount of initial data that is involved in interpreting any information, including even the simple 'up' or 'down' of the particle in an EPR experiment, based on sending 'entangled' particles through inhomogeneous magnetic fields, etc, etc, etc.

It is the inherent meaninglessness of physical data that calls the notion of information into question as in any way of physical import. At root is 'interaction' and if one 'source' interacts with another 'detector' through an intermediate medium or 'channel', then one can claim there is information transmitted. I'm not sure one can claim anything meaningful beyond this. Everything else is contextual and involves some sort of decoding or 'placing in context'.

Glad to see everyone focused on what is really a very important topic for physics today.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi, S Halayka,

Some of what you're talking about sounds like it's relevant to the Newell-Simon theory in which meaning is claimed to reside in the symbols ("tokens") themselves instead of possessing the meaning a given culture or subculture assigns, often arbitrarily, to any particular symbol. According to Newell-Simon the programmed computer "reads" the symbol (token) then incorporates and processes the symbol's meaning without reference to any external context. Personally I don't buy that approach. Hilary Putnam (a comp. sci. pioneer, among other things) calls it "magical thinking." It dovetails also with what John Searle was getting at in his Chinese Room thought-experiment. Symbols mean nothing in and of themselves, even symbols fairly obviously (to us) representing the sun, a stick-figure person etc. They mean only what some collection of people agree they mean.

You could imagine a culture in which a symbol that looks to us like the sun meant something entirely different ... a god taking the form of a flower or whatever. Putnam has a riff about how he can't tell the difference between a beech and an elm and so he and someone else (who actually knows what an elm is) could appear to be talking about "elms" while actually talking gibberish because Putnam was thinking the whole time of beeches.

But Claude Shannon wasn't addressing that issue anyway. He was interested in how to transmit a given data-string (it could be anything at all) with minimum garbling, and ended up inventing mathematical information theory by identifying entropy as a link between information and thermodynamics. It's sort of Information Mechanics, a raw formalism. You want to transmit the word "dog" without "cat" being received at the other end. Maybe in the language you're employing "dog" means what we call "cat" and vise versa. That's not important.

For completeness I should have included the phrase:

'One if spin up, two if spin down'

to complement

'One if by land, two if by sea'.

So little meaning without the understood context.

Hi E.E.K.,

I went to lunch in the middle of composing my post and so we cross-posted. Offhand I don't see disagreement but we'll probably both find something.

The first sentence of my long post should have read something like:

"Some of what you're talking about sounds like it's relevant to the Newell-Simon theory in which meaning is claimed to reside in the symbols ("tokens") themselves instead of THE SYMBOLS possessing WHATEVER meaning a given culture or subculture assigns, often arbitrarily, to THEM."

More or less.

Hi Edwin and nmann,

Ok, so far I think I am on the right page insomuch that Shannon entropy is not what's being searched for here.

I really like that example of "one if by land, two if by sea". It was very informative for one, but it also helps me see meaning is a big can of worms here. The analogy of "one if spin up, two if spin down" is also great because it points back to Boltzmann and von Neumann entropy, which are pretty much analogous to Shannon entropy, if I'm not mistaken. Like with Shannon entropy, the problem with von Neumann entropy is that there is also meaning involved, and so not even this version of entropy is helpful. For instance, in terms of a black hole, someone might say that the entropy S means that there are "bits" which could represent a binary spin up/down which means that the event horizon area is quantized (and thus black hole mass is quantized), and another person (Edwin, myself) might say that it's more than just about binary spin and that the entropy is not discretized as such.

So, how would our description of physics change from this von Neumann approach? Is that what this search is for? To eliminate room for interpretation? I apologize if this is frustrating.

Would it be easier to discuss it in terms of object oriented programming, where there are classes (categories) and class member functions (morphisms that act on categories in a way that do not alter the fundamental structure of the category)? I know this kind of thing far better than I know physics.

I'm just having trouble visualizing what kind of "thing" would be in hand when the search is complete -- like what's its structure? I read one of those papers mentioned earlier about the Mathematical Theory of Information by Kahre, and it said right near the beginning that their theory gives Shannon entropy in a limiting case. I could not follow their argument, but it seems that they weren't eliminating Shannon entropy, but more like generalizing it. Help? Please? :)

- Shawn

Thank you for yet another reference to look up. I am reading it and trying to digest it all.

I suppose a better question is: what do you mean by 'information qua information'? Perhaps knowing that will help me see Lorraine's point of view better.

I apologize for taking this off on a tangent by bringing up "meaning", especially after Edwin had already pointed out that it was a can of worms. I just wanted to eliminate what's *not* beinig searched for. I do appreciate your patience with me.

Haha, I have to laugh at myself a little bit here. You and Edwin definitely bring up a good point about cultural differences -- even the word information is in and of itself context-specific. I think that this is why I am having trouble getting off of the ground here, because I have thought of the word information in terms of entropy for so long. Like, when someone says to me "So, what's new?" I think of them as saying "Please give me information.". I'm not trying to be intentionally slow-witted here, I'm just having some trouble reprogramming my brain. I do appreciate all the answers to the questions that I'm asking. Again, apologies if it's frustrating.

Regardless of whether or not this has anything to do with what you're trying to explain... it sure would be neat if we created a neural network that takes an input state and gives an output state, and by luck (huge luck, involving how we picked the training to take place) the network started predicting experimentally-verifiable results that our current rule-based theories didn't call for. :)