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  • Post #81

Apologies. I meant:

That strikes me as particularly anthropomorphic, because it forbids the possibility that there is NO such distinction between data and operations at the deepest level of reality.

Lawrence,

I think you and I see things from a totally different perspective, but I have printed your essay to read when I get the time, but I haven't read it yet.

Re "The transition from one state to another is an operation on a quantum bit.":

Are you saying that in "real life", as opposed to within a quantum computer, logical operations are performed on quantum states which transition them from one state to another? If so, how would you represent a typical logical operation on a quantum state?

Re "A black hole in this perspective is a processor which takes states from the external environment, absorbs them in entanglements and produces Hawking radiation as the "processed output" of these states." :

Are you saying that a black hole in effect performs logical operations?

Re "In saying the universe is a computer, this really means the concept of computation or processes that transform quantum bits or states have elements that are isomorphic to computation mathematics laid down by Turing, von Neumann, Chomsky, and others." :

In a quantum computer, a quantum bit would be utilized to represent a sort of binary code, which ultimately represents particular information connected to a particular problem to be solved. So are you saying that, in real life, quantum bits represent a code to the universe (or something in the universe), which the universe utilizes (or something in the universe utilizes)?

Cheers,

Lorraine

Robert,

I CAN'T agree with what you are saying here! :

"I wondered if [the physicists] were really doing anything all the different than the other antennae on the roof. They certainly believed that they were. But I had my doubts. They believe that they are "seeing", but like all the other antennae on the roof, they are only "perceiving"."

Re "they have convinced themselves that "Our Reality" must be necessarily identical to "The Foundations of Reality." ...My reply is "Because you have failed to clearly perceive perception itself", because you do not clearly understand what information even is...Information only exists at the output of a recovery process, a perception." :

I think I agree with the above sentiments. But surely (pure) information/perception also exists prior to the formation of a message to be sent?

Cheers,

Lorraine

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  • Post #84

Consider an elementary quantum system. You have a two state atom with states up and down. This is then permitted to interact with a photon. This is called the Cumming-Jaynes model. This is in a high-Q cavity so photons are not lost. If the atom is in the up state then it will emit a photon and transition to the down state. If the atom is in the down state it can absorb a photon and transition to the up state. So there are the elementary operations

Up AND no photon --- > down state plus photon

Down state AND photon --- > up state.

This is an elementary operation or process that causes the system to endlessly flip-flop (called Rabi flopping) between these two. This is a perfectly good quantum computation operation. It makes for a rather boring computer, and the Halting state may be defined by the measurement of a photon. A bit more generally, in the teleportation of quantum states a basic operation of a Hadamard matrix. This is equivalent to a CNOT operation.

A Turing machine with a register system that records past data, no information loss or erasure, can well enough be quantized. This quantization is a formal method, so it is an idealization. I am not sure if this is anthropomorphic, but a data stack is just a set of qubits, the system operates on those and transforms them into another output as a different string of qubits.

In physics we tend to use symmetries, which are described by groups and algebras. These symmetries tell us how states transform between each other. As a result there is a sort of morphism between these symmetries and operations on qubits.

This is not to say I go around saying, "The universe is a computer." The idea of a quantum computer is just a tool that one can use to work on certain problems, in particular with the conservation of information or equivalently how entanglements are conserved or transferred.

I have not rated your essay yet. So while it has dropped down in the community rank that is not due to me. I have yet to read the paper by Ken Wharton, whose essay title is similar to yours. There are too many of these to rate many in the time given so far.

Cheers LC

    Lorraine,

    "But surely (pure) information/perception also exists prior to the formation of a message to be sent?"

    Only in the entity intended to receive that message (the perceiver). Information implies the use of symbols. Something has to "assign meaning" to a symbol. That something is the process of perception. For example 372624. What does that symbolize to you? Probably nothing. But it does mean something to me, simply because, and only because, I decided to treat it as though it does; I set (assigned) a combination lock to open when that number is dialed in. If I had not preset the combination to that number, then sending it as a message (dialing that number) would have been meaningless to the lock, and it would therefore not open.

    Everything, and I do mean everything, is meaningless data, until something decided to treat it otherwise. At that instant, it becomes information. Giving meaning to an input is what transforms it from meaningless data, into meaningful information. And the meaning need not be anything more than the ability to recognize the pattern when it is observed again, as is the case for the lock.

    This is what makes evolution of increasing complexity possible. A process does not have to "know" anything at all, in order to transform an input into something of "significance." It simply has to treat it as though it is significant, by, for example, the simple act of remembering an input (an interaction). Thereafter, it "IS significant, simply because it made it so. When two hydrogen atoms meet and combine into a hydrogen molecule, that amounts to forming a memory (a change in state) of the interaction. This creates "significance", because the molecule will interact with other entities in a different manner than the two original atoms; to those entities (perceivers) encountering the molecule means "behave like you just encountered a molecule, rather than an atom." An thus, physics becomes chemistry.

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    • Post #86

    Hi Lawrence,

    I should have been more clear in what I was trying to say. I think that a separation of operands from operators seems to be a reflection of how humans habitually draw fictitious boundaries in this world. Like: An electron annihilates a photon. The annihilation process is an operation. Here we have drawn a fictitious boundary in time between the moment when the photon did exist and the moment it did not exist, and we have hidden (encoded) all that happens during this annihilation process by logically converting it into a single instantaneous operation. Perhaps anthropomorphic was the wrong word to use to describe this, because other animals do this too when they go about solving puzzles and generally living. I got hung up on the word "operate".

    I understand that full-blown string theory has a different point of view, in so much that the annihilation process is not instantaneous, and is a matter of how the string moves and evolves in space over time. As I understand, a "static" state is also a matter of how the string moves and evolves in space over time, and so here the states and the evolution of the states are fundamentally the same thing. Most importantly, the annihilation process is no longer encoded as a mere word. In any case, is this all really computation? I don't think so. When you talk about computation, you automatically bring back the notion of operations and operands -- and tools -- which are very animal, very emergent.

    I think that this might have something to do with what Lorraine is aiming for.

    - Shawn

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    • Post #87

    P.S. I should said "someone" instead of "you", since our opinion seems to be roughly the same. Sorry if that bit came off as finger pointing, because it wasn't meant to.

    I've started a new post thread in order to repeat my assertion that Information Theories are misleading - they don't honestly represent reality. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.

    Below is a copy of my 9 September 2012 @ 12:45 GMT post to nmann:

    nmann, re the online chapter 1 of The Mathematical Theory of Information by Jan Kahre:

    I have read it, and as expected, it's about coded information not information. Noticeable is the way it mixes up information and coded information as though there were no essential difference. Look at these representations:

    (1.5.1) "rel(B@A)" Here A represents a coded message sent and B represents a coded message received.

    (1.2.1) "inf(B@A)" Here B represents a (coded) newspaper article about an event, and A represents the event. (The newspaper article is coded because words are a code)

    But actually A does not represent an objective event. So-called event A is actually the reporter's subjective experience of event A, and B is the coded representation of that subjective experience.

    "Information" theories fail to honestly identify what is going on - they fail to properly identify and highlight the reality of subjective experience. Subjective experience is actually part of these theories, but instead of saying that A represents the reporter's subjective experience they claim that A represents an event.

    As part of my essay, I tried to point out the connection with subjective experience.

      Lawrence,

      Thanks for clarifying what you were saying. I have more to say about that below.

      You will have noticed that, in my essay and posts, I have presumptuously redefined the word information: what is generally called information, I call coded information; what is generally called the subjective experience of meaning, I equate to information. This is because I think it is important to make clear the close linkage between coded information and information. The words generally used, i.e. "information" and "meaning", show no linkage - the word "meaning" is a sort of orphan that doesn't quite belong anywhere.

      Another reason is that although Information Theories make passing reference to meaning, they carelessly mix up the concepts of information and coded information without proper explanation - it's so disorganised that I call it dishonest. The result seems to be that people find it hard to properly conceptualise the place of subjective experience in the scheme of things. See my new post below.

      In your post you talk about the physical properties of the quantum states that occur in a controlled environment that we humans can use to represent logical operations e.g. a CNOT operation.

      I can't see any implication here that fundamental physical reality itself is actually performing logical operations. Instead we are utilizing controlled physical reality to REPRESENT our CNOT operation. This is what happens in any computer - we utilize our knowledge of the properties of physical reality to represent logical operations and coded information.

      You also say that if physical reality (e.g. a black hole?) were in fact like an idealised quantum Turing machine (inputs a string of qubits, performs logical operations on them, and outputs a different string of qubits) then this might seem to imply that this physical reality had human characteristics.

      I would comment that from our point of view, for a computer to be useful to us humans, the input qubit string must be prepared so that it represents in coded form the information we want it to represent; and the output qubit string code must be deciphered, using a code book or knowledge, to extract meaningful (un-coded) information. I emphasize that, from our point of view, the qubits in their controlled environment are utilized to represent what we want them to represent, and in the first level of representation they represent zeroes and ones.

      The issue that I attempted to discuss in my essay is whether or not fundamental physical reality itself functions like a computer i.e. does reality itself effectively reduce physical quantum states to zero/one inputs in order to obtain physical outcome outputs for the next moment in time. Another way to put it is: does fundamental particle-level physical reality deal in coded information, or does it deal with un-coded (i.e. meaningful) information? Note that representing physical quantum states as a zeroes or ones is an act of conversion: physical reality is converted into a code and/or physical reality is experienced as a code. If physical reality (e.g. a black hole) functions like a Turing machine, then acts of conversion are required.

      You also say that the state transformations that occur when quantum states are manipulated in a controlled environment can be sort of understood as being due to symmetries. However, as above, acts of conversion are required. (I don't think I made a number of the above points clear in my essay)

      Cheers,

      Lorraine

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      • Post #90

      Lorraine

      Your philosophy close to Wittgenstein

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus

        Thanks Yuri for that link. I will follow it up.

        To my mind, what I'm trying to say is not so much philosophy, but an attempt to look at the nature of reality.

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        • Post #92

        There does appear to be a difference in how information is defined. In mathematical physics the definition of information is reflected by what I am indicating. The business of coding is a way one can determine or measure entropy of information in a channel. This does not necessarily mean that information passing through a channel, whether that channel is a simple transmission line or some processor, is some form of meaningful information or that there is some process that outputs it as meaningful. A computer which does that is something we fabricate to fill various purposes we have in mind.

        We might consider molecular biology. Consider how DNA is transcribed into mRNA which is then parsed by a ribosome to form a polypeptide. This is a form of lexical analyzer for a Chomsky syntax hierarchy. A polypeptide is a sort of information processor; say a kinase that has a phosphorylated or non-phosphorylated state, that is produced by an elementary quad-rite system. It is then in a sense similar to a compiler. We might say that this functions to serve a purpose for an organism, yet this has emerged by the selection process of evolution. Further, that ribosome might exist in a pneumococcus that along with millions of other is making you awfully sick. So from your perspective that is an anti-purpose. You then ingest tetracycline to bind onto the 60s part of the ribosome to block its action.

        There are then analogues between molecular pathways and computers. Similarly there are analogues between computation or algorithmic structures and the gauge groups of quantum fields or maybe supergravity. This does not necessarily mean there is a computation or algorithm for something which has meaning to us. Even if a black hole is a quantum processor that computes gravity or Hartle-Hawking states with some sporadic group (a matrix algebra of exotic groups like E_8), if that black hole is going to pass through the solar system it means our impending doom. That would not have much meaning to us.

        Cheers LC

        Hi Lawrence,

        Obviously Information Theory equations are useful. But it's clear that the way that these theories conceptualise information leads to confusion: a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article says that "Information is a conceptual labyrinth". It is astonishing that this 2011 article could conclude by saying: "The problem is that we still have to agree about what information is exactly". (1)

        I think information is a "conceptual labyrinth" because Information Theories have disordered ideas about the nature of information. As I see it, the following are the main problem areas:

        - The theories don't recognise the primary place of subjective experience. From an information point of view, there can be no such thing as "events" - there can only be subjective experience of events. Subjective experience of events is the source that, when symbolically represented, becomes what is currently called "information"; but clearly subjective experience itself is the only real information.

        - The theory title inevitably leads to confusion about the nature of information. Information Theory is actually "Coded Information Theory" - it's all about how to encode, preserve, compress, transmit, and check CODED information. Coded information is initially a representation of subjective experience (using a code book and/or knowledge); once subjective experience is encoded in a suitable form it can be logically manipulated by a suitably programmed computer.

        - The theories don't recognise that the final decoding step must once again lead to subjective experience. Coded information can be decoded up to a point via logical manipulation in a computer. But the final step in the decoding process requires a code book and/or knowledge, and the result is un-coded information i.e. subjective experience/meaningful information.

        I don't expect any changes to Information Theories any time soon. Although FQXi's mission includes understanding consciousness and information better, a look at the essays seems to indicate that most of the professionals that enter these essay competitions don't take consciousness seriously, and don't see any problems with Information Theories as they stand.

        Cheers,

        Lorraine

        1. Semantic Conceptions of Information, based on Luciano Floridi's work, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic

        Lawrence,

        Re DNA: I think it is possible that the behaviours of DNA and its associated molecules might be understood by positing that molecular configurations represent a complex information experience (not a code) to other molecules. I don't think that molecular behaviour can be understood as computer-like processing of codes because, to my mind, this doesn't address the issue of how information is apprehended at the molecular level.

        Re black holes: I think that the mathematical representations of black hole events are probably an attempt to represent something about fundamental reality that is not entirely able to be precisely represented. As such, these mathematical representations do not represent the essential nature of reality. I don't think that "there are analogues between computation or algorithmic structures and the gauge groups of quantum fields or maybe supergravity".

        Re "from your perspective that is an anti-purpose": I neither think nor claim that there is an external purpose to the universe. You might think that I think this because I mention subjective experience, but I think that perhaps subjective experience is the entirely natural way that information is apprehended in the universe. Certainly my view has different implications about the nature of reality to a view that posits that subjective experience somehow developed from non-subjective, non-experiential elements.

        Cheers,

        Lorraine

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        • Post #95

        It exists indeed a lot of pelargoniums, they are well put there in Australia. The fact that there is nit a lot of water is interesting :)

        Me I had a collection of fuschias and others plants of orangery. I had several varieties of passiflora, abutilon, Nerium(good also for Australia with cactaes).

        Several tradescantia also. For the fuchsias, in australia ,it is possible. They dislike the full of sun, and they need a kind of ecosystem, humid.The best is to work with argilo humic complex and its potential of fixation like the colloidal systems. With perit and vermiculit more several other matters having the capacity to keep water, the needs in water are decreased. They are well under the trees :) The fuschsias magelanica is very strong and permits to multiplicate and make X. The pollen male with the female.It permits to create new varieties. The Fuscsias "annabel" or the "swing time" with double flowers are wonderful. The perlargoniums are relevant.I see that you like the pelargoniums,me also, it is a relevant plant. I have worked on my global technic agianst paludism and dingue with several varieties of geraniums and pelargoniums. The aim being to fight the moskitoes, these vectors of the pathogen agent. In fact I have inserted an addition of parameters(arachnids or others predators,or more "essential oils" more startegic ecosystems ,more this or that.In fact it decereases the moskitoes of more than 90 per cent you know. The first step is to work the waters where they multiplicate them selves, several predators are relevant also, birds,insects, animals.....it is essential also to redynamize the soils and to insert a lot of plants!!! with the composting at big scale. The interactions of harmonization are better optimized.In fact the secret is these ecosystems harmonized with determinism.

        I am passionated by horticulture but like I have jad a bankrupcy,I am a little destabilized in my mind, so I don't practice a lot.I have not a ground furthermore.Do you know the salvia officinalis ? it is a wonderful plant with a lot of medicinal properties. It is fazcinating in fact the creations.

        Good luck for this contest

        Regards

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        • Post #96

        The biggest problem with information theory today is that people don't seem to get the difference between data and information, that data are just symbols, and that it's only the distinctness of the data that gives rise to information.

        If you want to verify the "objectivity" of a datum, compare it with other data to ensure that there is no distinctness. If one of the data is different from the others, then there is either a single liar or a conspiracy to hide the truth. This is why experiments are repeated.

          Steve,

          thanks for your good luck wishes.

          Yes, I've got Salvia officinalis in the garden just about to open its flowers. I've got a lot of Tradescantia virginiana too - it self-seeds everywhere and I have to pull a lot of it out because it smothers other plants with its strong growth. As you indicate, for healthy plants and animals you need healthy living soils.

          Glad to hear from someone who also enjoys plants and gardening.

          Regards,

          Lorraine

            Hi Shawn,

            But what do you mean by the word "information"? See my 14 September 2012 @ 12:44 GMT post regarding problems with definitions of the word "information": no one agrees exactly what the word means.

            Cheers,

            Lorraine

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              • Post #99

              Hi Lorraine,

              I believe that I mean precisely what Shannon meant: distinctness and balanced frequency of data gives rise to a non-zero average information content per datum, and this is given by his formula for the entropy S. It's just a fancy way of counting how many nats (or bits, if you prefer) would be needed to differentiate between the various distinct data.

              When I read a sentence like "I made a yes/no measurement and from that I obtained one piece of information", I automatically translate it in my mind as "I made a yes/no measurement and from that I obtained one datum". The reason I do this translation is because if you only have one datum, then the information content is precisely S = ln(1) = 0. So, clearly the phrase "... I obtained one piece of information" is an abuse of the terminology.

              Likewise, when I read a sentence like "A reporter sent in a report, which is one piece of information", I translate it to "A reporter sent in a report, which is a datum". Of course, the datum in this case is composite, but that's beside the point. A single report, as a whole datum, and alone, has an information content of S = ln(1) = 0. Again, there is an abuse of the terminology occurring.

              As for subjectivity, you clearly recognize that the data just hold symbolic values. As far as I can tell, the subjectivity problem arose because Jung was a `mystic' who practiced a so-called pseudo-science, and so it was very easy for someone practicing a so-called hard science to come along and arbitrarily replace the words datum/symbol with the words like meme/information (plus, it didn't hurt that Jung wasn't alive to object to such abuse of the terminology). As you've noticed, this causes problems because it removes the importance of the word symbol altogether (it's a subjective abstraction by definition), and it completely eradicates the difference between data and information. The result has been general confusion on what information is, as well as the false glorification of abstract (symbolic) things as objective and fundamental.

              In other words, biologists completely hijacked psychology and information theory, and then twisted them into some bizarre concoction that is all but backwards.

              - Shawn

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              • Post #100

              If I have the array of data '45','45','45','45','45', and I use a map to perform a count / sort, I get a map of size one:

              '45' -> 5 count

              For the array '45', '12', '13', '9', '84', I get a map of size five:

              '9' -> 1 count

              '12' -> 1 count

              '13' -> 1 count

              '45' -> 1 count

              '84' -> 1 count

              Intuitively, I know that the second array contains more information just because the resulting map contains more "metadata". Shannon's entropy formula simply makes the intuition concrete (S = ln(1) = 0 for the first array, S = ln(5) for the second array).