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Date:         Fri, 24 Jul 1992 06:44:57 -0600
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Energy, Entropy, Info
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[From Bill Powers (920723.2130)]

Allan Randall (920723.2100) --

><Information does not necessarily travel in the same direction as
><physical energy.

>I think you are confusing the concept of energy and that of entropy. >They
are related, but not the same. It is the latter, not the former, >that
information theorists associate with information content. There is >no need
in traditional information theory for the kind of "net flow" of >energy in
the direction from source to destination that you talk about >in your
examples, both of which I think are pretty easy to refute.

It's been a long time since I studied anything having to do with entropy,
so remarks like yours create instant insecurity. I went back to my old
books, and found in the Handbook of Physics:

     The increase in the entropy of a body during an infinitesimal state
     of a reversible process is equal to the infinitesimal amount of
     heat absorbed divided by the absolute temperature of the body. Thus
     for a reversible process

                    dS = Q/T


... where Q is the infinitesimal quantity of heat.

I have seen a somewhat different and more general-seeming definition,

                  dS = k(dQ/Q),

where dQ is simply a signed amount of energy absorbed and Q is the amount
already present (of the same form). Shroedinger uses this form of
definition in "Order, disorder, and entropy" in _What is life?_

It seems clear that the change in entropy is a signed quantity, and that
the sign (for the receiver of the energy) is the same as the sign of the
direction of energy transfer dQ. (But see correction below -- I have this
backward).

You say,

>The entropic formulation of information theory, along with the related
>algorithmic formulation, has a pretty firm mathematical basis ...

A firm mathematical basis does not mean the same thing as a firm physical
basis, and a firm physical basis is not the same thing as a firm
experiential or semantic basis. What do we gain by calling Q "order" and
1/Q "disorder?" Schroedinger proudly declares that only a physicist can
understand his definition of negative entropy and its relation to order and
disorder. If that is so, then physicists have created a systematic delusion
which can be shared only with people who have been painstakingly trained to
believe in it. We should not assume that everything we ordinarily call
order and disorder is what a physicist would mean by such a term -- for
example, the difference between THEDOG and TDHOEG. What a physicist means
by order is not what other people mean by it, or even what the physicist
means by it when, attempting to make physics explain life, he or she
substitutes the ordinary meaning for the special meaning as if there were
no difference. There is a certain arrogance in this proprietary attitude
toward understanding that has always put me off physics -- even when I was
a physics student.

Browsing through my old Buckley, I find Raymond's article on
"Communication, entropy, and life." Here he defines "The rate of increase
of thermodynamic entropy during communication" as

      dS/dt = W/T,

where "W is the average power expended in the communication device...", a
neat way of avoiding saying which way this power (energy per unit time) is
traveling. The assumption, of course, is that it is traveling into the
receiver. The idea that you can affect a receiver by draining energy from
it never occured to him, or as far as I can tell, any other information
theorist.

RE: the telegraph example.

>The mistake you are making here is using the energy output of the >battery
as the transmitting energy flow. This is incorrect. You are >treating the
battery as the information transmitter.

No, I am only assuming that the battery is the ENERGY source. Information
is transmitted by draining the battery, which is located at the destination
end of the circuit in the first form of my example. So if we include the
battery as part of the black-box receiver in Chicago, it's clear that
during transmission of a message, the wires at the Dodge City end are
warmed when the key is closed (dQ), which increases their entropy by an
amount depending on their initial temperature-energy, Q. The entropy has to
"flow" in the same direction as the energy flow. However, the message
"flows" in the opposite direction.

[Here I discovered my error]

Actually, now that you pin me down, I realize that I've made a mistake, but
not the one you mention. If a constant current flowing in a wire heats it,
the temperature (Q) rises, and as it does so, with dQ constant, dQ/Q must
be falling. So in fact, entropy flows OPPOSITE to the direction of flow of
energy. I told you it's been a while. All this does is change my examples
so that entropy flows in the reverse direction -- it still doesn't
necessarily flow in the same direction as information.

>But the battery is NOT the originator of the message. It matters not a
>wit whether we consider the battery to be part of the sender or the
>receiver. The battery is thus more justifiably considered as part of >the
medium of transmission. The message actually comes from the human >being
who is putting out the dots and dashes. This *is* a flow of >energy from
the human, and *does* decrease the entropy of the receiver >and increase
the entropy of the source (and the universe).

This "deduction" depends on insisting that energy DOES flow in the
direction of the message -- you're begging the question. If energy or
negative entropy flow is NOT the same thing as information flow, your
argument is false. You can't (legally) assume your conclusion and then use
it to prove that your conclusion is true. The battery is NOT, as you say,
the originator of the message. But it IS the originator of the energy flow,
and entropy flows in the opposite direction to energy.

(By the way, if the telegraph operator is using a bug, there is no longer a
single movement for each dot or dash, because the operator can simply hold
the bug paddle sideways until the correct number of consecutive dots or
dashes is perceived. And there's no energtic, or entropic, difference for
the operator between making a dot and making a dash)

So in this case the entropy and the information are travelling in the same
direction. By moving the battery to the sending end, you can make the
entropy and information flows go the opposite way (as normally assumed in
transmitting messages by wire, sound, light, or radio waves by sending
energy through a medium from a transmitter to a receiver).

>Compare what happens to the case of a transmitter that outputs dots and
>dashes due to chaotic or random forces in the world around it. These
>messages are less ordered, and thus higher entropy, than the messages >put
out by the human.

Why are they less ordered, when they are telling us in detail about some
very complex processes that present an endlessly new pattern? Does a
message contain less information when it is about a more complex process?
This concept confuses the atomic type of random-seeming disorder with
macroscopic disorder, a completely different proposition. I consider a
phase plot of a chaotic system to contain information.

The relation of order to entropy at any level but the atomic is an analogy,
not an equivalence. "Order" is an experiential term based on our capacity
to perceive pattern and sequence; physicists have attempted to appropriate
it to mean only the reciprocal of statistical disorder, and then have
turned around to say that this restricted meaning is the ONLY meaning, thus
invalidating the ability to perceive pattern and sequence. Physicists, like
behaviorists and other psychologists, thus have blamed our ignorance on
nature. The moment they did that, physics ceased to progress and started to
disintegrate (expensively) into particles.

For a clearer example, just think of transmitting a dot-dash message by
touching an ice-cube to someone's skin. The body loses heat to the ice-
cube, decreasing the ice-cube's entropy and increasing that of the body and
its "cold receptors" -- I hope I still have my signs right. Information
being defined as the negative of the entropy change, the formal definitions
of information theory would say that we are taking information out of the
body and putting it into the ice-cube. If instead we use a warm soldering-
iron, at a temperature well above the skin temperature, then the entropy of
the body is decreased by each brief touch and that of the soldering iron is
increased. So in that case formally defined information is flowing from the
soldering iron into the body. In both cases, information (semantic) is
being transmitted into the body, for sensory nerves respond in either case.

If you want yet another example, consider sending a message from ground
level to someone two stories up by opening and closing a valve that lets
water out of a hose. There's no way that energy can be transmitted up the
hose, or entropy down it, using the valve.

I don't think that the originators of information theory were thinking very
much in terms of nervous systems. I don't think that they were looking for
counterexamples, either. Physicists pay little attention to the properties
of human perception. Especially at the higher levels, they simply project
them into an objective universe. When HPCT gets into physics, physics, too,
will undergo a(nother) revolution.

>But what Shannon and Weaver showed was that there is a key aspect of
>communication, which is now usually called information, that is
>independant of this "meaning" or semantic content and has nothing to do
>with perception. I think they succeeded.

They succeeded in analyzing the physical situation under the assumption
that the source of energy would always be at the source of the
transmission, and that the energy would then travel to and have an effect
on the receiver. They made a blunder in assuming that you can only affect
the receiver by putting energy INTO it, but that doesn't make much
difference under the circumstances they were trying to analyze. They didn't
even have to worry about PNP vs NPN transistors -- just vacuum tubes.

They didn't have to use the word "information" at all, except that they
hoped to draw a parallel between the physical interactions and the
psychological or semantic world. They never considered any of the details
of sensory perception or neural transmission, so it never occurred to them
that energy entering the nervous system didn't simply proceed into neural
channels and make its way to higher centers, like electron flow in a wire.

>Your rubber band experiment merely shows one example of a case where
>control is necessary for information to be transmitted. It says nothing
>about whether such control is necessary for information transmission in
>general. I don't think it is. Give me reason to believe otherwise.

If you consider information transmission to consist only of objective
signals traveling through a physical channel independently of human
knowledge, you're talking about physical "information" -- simple lineal
cause and effect. But that kind of information transmission (whichever way
the energy and entropy go) does not explain communication among human
beings, which is a closed-loop process. All it does is set the limits of
accuracy in transmitting the level-zero message, as in Martin Taylor's
Layered Protocol scheme. As I said in my talk, the _meaning_ of a
communication must be supplied by the receiver, and it is not likely to be
identical to the meaning intended by the transmitter. The difference is not
due to channel noise, but to the different experiences of the human sender
and the human receiver.

In fact, symbolic communication is an iffy way of getting meaning from
source to destination. Experience is always far more detailed than our
communications about it. When a mover struggles into the living room
carrying a chair, the owner may say "Just put it down anywhere." But that
is impossible: the behaving system has to put it down EXACTLY SOMEWHERE, to
the limit of perceptual resolution. Our actual control processes are
quantitative to the limit set by system noise; our symbolic communications
are vague and fuzzy in comparison, admitting of many variations in the fine
details of meaning that would still fit the message. So in interpreting
communications, we always add enormously more detail by way of meaning than
the message can possibly carry. This is why we misunderstand each other so
easily despite all the acks and naks and multiple-bit error-detection and
correction that goes on between keyboard at one end and screen at the
other. Even despite the dictionaries we keep at our elbows. We do not mis-
receive or misread the letters; we translate them into the wrong meanings.

That is why control is required: we must not just emit our messages blindly
and assume that the intended meaning shows up at the other end. We must not
just assume that what we read into messages we receive was intended to be
launched.  We must get information back -- first from our own fingers as
they blunder about over the keys, then from our own screen that shows what
code was actually produced by our own flakey keyboard (displayed in a form
we easily recognize), and then from the recipient of the message, to see,
if we can, what meaning the recipient assigned to the strings of symbols we
stuffed into our end of the wire. Many rounds of this closed loop must be
traversed before a wise transmitter will admit that the intended meaning
may just possibly have been noticed at the receiving end. Isn't that what's
going on here?

>PS: I'm actually a lot more favourable to PCT than I appear in
>my posts.

I knew that. Once you understand PCT, you can't un-understand it again.
It's a trapdoor.

Best,

Bill P.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU