Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id VAA25195 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 4 May 2001 21:53:47 +0100 From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Fri, 4 May 2001 15:56:19 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Information Message-ID: <3AF2D123.1951.78C244@localhost> In-reply-to: <20010503185245.C1419@ii01.org> References: <20010502183712.AAA20344@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]>; from wade_smith@harvard.edu on Wed, May 02, 2001 at 02:37:01PM -0400 X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 3 May 2001, at 18:52, Robin Faichney wrote:
> On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 02:37:01PM -0400, Wade T.Smith wrote:
> > On 05/02/01 12:54, Robin Faichney said this-
> >
> > >> Information about something is hardly relevant _until_ it _can_
> > >> be used, and for all purposes and intent, has no existence until
> > >> it _is_ used.
> > >
> > >So you agree with Joe that unapprehended things cannot be said to
> > >exist? This is more like philosophical idealism than scientific
> > >rationalism.
> >
> > I agree that until the information is _derived_ from whatever system
> > that process is resident within, it is without value and irrelevant.
> >
> > That is far from saying it is not there.
>
> Considering the following quote from the same article, do you still
> insist that intrinsic information (J) is of no significance?
>
> To derive each law--or, more accurately, each Lagrangian--we have
> to ask an incredibly simple yet fundamental question, such as
> "what is the precise location of a particle in space and time?"
>
> Any attempt to answer such questions requires the same two
> quantities: the information that exists in any given thing
> or system, J, and the information we can acquire, I. Frieden
> has developed methods of calculating both for a wide range of
> phenomena in physics. Subtracting J from I then leads straight
> to the appropriate Lagrangian, and when this is made as small
> as possible, the appropriate law of physics "emerges".
>
The spatiotemporal location of any particular particle is a matter of
its extension and duration, properties of its existence. Information
is what we actually or hypothetically can derive concerning these
existential properties given actual or ideal conditions. The reviewer,
who was NOT Friedan, just missed this. J is the information that
one could extract if there were no Heisenbergian constraints
imposed by the interaction-effect between observer and observed; J
is the information we can indeed extract given the presence of
those constraints. Friedan himself said that his entire system
amounted to a generalization of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
I leave you with the 1990 quote from Professor J. A. Wheeler that
both begins (p.1) and ends (p.281) the book (asteriks mine):
All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and *this
is a participatory universe...Observer participation gives rise to
information*, and information gives rise to physics.
> --
> Robin Faichney
> Get your Meta-Information from http://www.ii01.org
> (CAUTION: contains philosophy, may cause heads to spin)
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri May 04 2001 - 21:57:21 BST