From: mshute@cs.man.ac.uk (Malcolm Shute)
Newsgroups: bionet.info-theory
Subject: Re: More wacky theory
Date: 10 Sep 92 10:28:46 GMT
Distribution: bionet
Organization: Dept Computer Science, University of Manchester, U.K.

In article <1992Sep9.212445.16675@hellgate.utah.edu> tolman%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:
>From this viewpoint, there are two types of information, "local", and
>"universal".  The universal information can not go up with any deterministic
>causal chains.  So if our flip flop were being deterministically flipped,
>its universal positive change would be zero.  However, that bit which you
>erased may or may not be a copy of something sitting elsewhere.  If it
>is an "original", then you would be losing that information to heat 
>dissipation, and the universal information would actually go down a bit. :)
Of course, the amount of heat generated by the event is independent of whether
the bit of information in the flip-flop is the last surviving copy of
that information, or is a mere copy of something backed up elsewhere.
Does your theory therefore predict that the temperature (amount of disorder)
of the universe is independent of its information content?

>I am not sure, I was thinking about this in the car.  A detective at a scene
>finds lots of information that was sitting there but unseen by everyone
>else.  A memory of the past may suddenly become important.  A person 
>percieving information in the universal context is merely copying information
>that is "out there".  Therefore, they are not increasing information, unless
>they use it creatively.  However, if the "out there" source is destroyed,
>they become the sole bearers of that information.
True.
If I put an electric heating element in a beaker of water, and watch it all
boil away, I will have succeeded in heating up the universe a bit, increasing
its disorder, at no gain in information.
By looking at a number of simple dials, I can repeat the same exercise,
and for the same increase in disorder of the universe, gain information
about the specific heat capacity of water, its specific heat of boiling,
the amount of steam produced from a unit volume of water, etc, etc.

We had a couple of guest speakers from the University of Birmingham
talking about the interaction between representation and discovery.
They showed a few mind puzzles (knights moving a 4x4 chess board,
canibals and missionaries crossing a river, 3x3 magic square (all
the numbers 0..9 arranged to total 15 in each row, column and diagonal)).
They showed a way of re-representing the problems, and how after being
shown this, they would never be 'problems' for us again (if you remember
the representation, the solutions become 'trivial').

Experiment, then, isn't the only way to acquire new knowledge about
the universe... it can also be done via thinking in a sealed room.
The reason is that we are not short of information... in fact the
opposite.  Our experiments collect too much of the stuff... and the
real advances in understanding are made by finding ways of filtering
out useful patterns of information, from the tangle that comes from
the experiments.

But where does all this leave your theory?
If you are only interested in measuring the information contained
by the universe (regardless of whether anything will ever use that
information before it is destroyed), then surely, you are merely
counting the number of particles in the universe.  (N particles
can be arranged in N! ways (or something like that), so representing
an entropy of lg(N!)).

If, on the other hand, you are interested in which information is used,
and which is destroyed before it has a chance to influence anything,
you are going to run into some enormous problems?  Luckily, I believe
you meant the former, not this latter.
Ultimately, this version would end up measuring the complexity of the
universe by counting the number of possible states in the observer's
brain... and asserting the existentialist's view that the rest of the
universe, beyond the observer's horizon, does not exist while he is not
able to see it.
--

Malcolm SHUTE.         (The AM Mollusc:   v_@_ )        Disclaimer: all
Newsgroups: bionet.info-theory