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  • Anthony Aguirre, "Infinity and Indexicality: Some Provocations"

Anthony Aguirre offers some provocative comments on information.

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Keywords: Information, Aguirre, Vieques,

What is information? Information is about what IS, what exists, as opposed to what is possible or probable.

What is possible or probable in the low-level world depends on what the on-the-spot situation currently is, not that physicists seemingly believe that there is such a thing as an actual on-the-spot current situation.

But the concept of what is possible or probable in the low-level world is a fantastical construction that only exists in the minds of high-level entities (physicists), who want to try to pin down a world that is not entirely pin-downable in terms of actual outcomes.

Our way of thinking about the world, thanks to the work of physicists and mathematicians, is based on categories, relationships between these categories, and the numbers that apply to the categories.

So in realistic terms, as opposed to bringing in new fantastical entities, the information that exists about a current situation can only be represented as a collation of the on-the-spot, IS-TRUE numbers that apply to the categories, where this information in turn applies to non-pointlike entities like atoms or particles.

Consciousness/ information is the system’s, or the entity’s, on-the-spot, point-of-view and ever-changing, collated knowledge of itself, i.e. collated knowledge of its own on-the-spot categories and numbers.

Consciousness/ information can only be symbolically represented in terms of AND, OR, and IS TRUE, as well as symbols representing the categories and numbers.

The ANDs, ORs and IS TRUEs of consciousness/information are not weird fantastical, illogical entities. Instead, they are necessary aspects of a system.

    Lorraine Ford
    Back in 2014 when this video was made, zeroes and ones were popular, and I guess they are still popular.

    Anthony Aguirre’s concept is of a no one, nowhere, at no time, “indexical information” universe that encompasses all possibilities, where all possibilities are assumed to be something that could literally actually exist. (Unfortunately, we just happen to be stuck in one of the “indexical information” universes where there are a lot of wars and killings going on. Such a comforting thought that everybody is all lovey-dovey in another “indexical information” universe.)

    Getting back to the real world, what is real-world information? Real-world information is NOT information unless it has a real-world potentially-measurable category, and a number that applies to the category, and a relationship between the category and other categories that firmly ties the information into the rest of the real world.

    In addition to this, this real-world numeric information, possibly collated with other such real-world numeric information, is NOT information unless it is experienced as being IS TRUE from a point of view, not a vanishingly small point that exists in a mathematical fantasy, but the real-world point of view of (e.g.) a particle or an atom (or, at higher levels, a living thing).

      Lorraine Ford
      Information/ knowledge/ consciousness is all about the NUMBERS.

      As opposed to the “laws of nature”, which are relationships between the categories, information/ knowledge/ consciousness is all about the on-the-spot numbers that apply to the categories. These on-the-spot numbers are not fully accounted for by the relationships between the categories. Information/ knowledge/ consciousness is all about what actual collation of numbers (that apply to the categories) IS TRUE from the point of view of small parts of the system.

      The world is run from the inside, not the outside. There exists no mighty-Godlike or Platonic entity with knowledge of the vast landscape of the world, there is only point of view knowledge of the world (representable as a collation of numbers that apply to categories), and relationships between the categories (that seemingly hold the world together).

      But, as opposed to law of nature relationships between categories, should a type of landscape of averaged-out behaviour of the small parts of the system, where the small parts of the system individually “jump” their own numbers, should a type of landscape of averaged-out behaviour be considered a “law of nature”?

      Clearly, a type of landscape of averaged-out individual behaviours of the small parts of the system, as apprehended by other parts of the system studying this behaviour, is not exactly a “law of nature”.

      The functional aspect of the agency/ behaviour of the small parts of the system is only correctly representable using IF…THEN… symbols. This type of representation doesn’t claim any type of mathematical relationship between the IF (information/ knowledge/ consciousness) part and the THEN (agency/ behaviour) part.

        Lorraine Ford
        Anthony Aguirre’s “indexical information” idea is just another example of the increasingly weird ideas that desperate physicists keep on coming up with. Because, seemingly most physicists are convinced that the world is actually a pathetic automaton, 100% specified by rules of one sort or another, and the job of physics is to find these rules.

        The only group of physicists that have any actual respect for the world or for living things or for people are the QBists, who are saying that the world is literally creating itself as it goes along, with the assistance of law of nature relationships.

        Anthony Aguirre, and the other disrespectful physicists, are inevitably left with the conviction that every mangled teddy bear, found on a grey dusty bomb site, was determined since the beginning of time.

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