Dear Sylvia,
Thank you for the answer. I think I understand what you mean, but I don't think I made you understand what I mean.
"If I tell you an episode of my life, my life itself will not turn into words." Sure it will not. And even if you give me the complete list of episodes, your life will not turn into words. What I mean is that its structure will be captured in those words. So, going back to my words "That line contains your entire life", I should have said perhaps "That line contains a complete description of your entire life". The main subject of my essay was about the relation between mathematics and physics, and I was careful to mention that I don't aim to explain unphysical stuff, perhaps consciousness being an example.
You give a good example, that of a color. But you answer it yourself, you can reproduce it on a computer (and that information can be expressed if we wish as words, or as a point on a segment). Your worry that there will be not enough room for hardware in the universe to simulate the color is a new element you add. But the proof of principle remains: the possibility to describe that particular color exists. I am talking about the possibility of a description, not a real implementation of it, not of a hardware. I don't think that, in order to prove it, one should effectively build that description. For instance, the number π exists even if its decimals are nowhere written completely, and even if the entire universe is not enough to write it.
"On your view, can you destroy all copies of a book (including our memories of reading it etc.) without destroying the text?" If you destroy all writings containing Pythagora's thereom, you will not destroy it, you will destroy the information about it that we have. It will be soon rediscovered. But if you destroy all books by Shakespeare, I don't expect that we will rewrite them soon. They will still be in that segment, but we will lose the address to retrieve them. Think for example at a computer. When you normally delete a file, you delete a reference to it, but the information remains on the hard drive, and can be recovered by special software, until you overwrite it with other information. When you lose the address, the file is not lost. A home is not lost when you lose the address. But you lose your access to it. In the case of a book, the address is the book.
But when we talk about life, the things are different... I don't think that a complete description of your life values at least 0.000...01% of your life. You may think that this is a contradiction: on the one hand I claim that everything is isomorphic to a mathematical structure, on the other hand, I don't reject the possibility that consciousness or life is more than this. Maybe this is not obvious in my essay of this year (where I focused on the relation between mathematics and the physical world), but perhaps the one for last year is more on this topic.
Best wishes,
Cristi