Re: Information

From: Robin Faichney (robin@ii01.org)
Date: Sat May 05 2001 - 13:47:07 BST

  • Next message: Robin Faichney: "Re: Information"

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    Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 13:47:07 +0100
    To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    Subject: Re: Information
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    In-Reply-To: <3AF2D123.1951.78C244@localhost>; from joedees@bellsouth.net on Fri, May 04, 2001 at 03:56:19PM -0500
    From: Robin Faichney <robin@ii01.org>
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    On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 03:56:19PM -0500, joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:
    > On 3 May 2001, at 18:52, Robin Faichney wrote:
    >
    > > 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...

    Please explain any difference between the meanings of "the information
    that one could extract if there were no Heisenbergian constraints" (what
    you said) and "the information that exists in any given thing or system"
    (quoted from the article).

    Then, given that there is none, tell us why the "reviewer" (it wasn't
    actually a review) was wrong to use that phrase, when physicists treat
    the structure of matter as information in the context of the application
    of communication theory to thermodynamics.

    -- 
    Robin Faichney
    Get your Meta-Information from http://www.ii01.org
    (CAUTION: contains philosophy, may cause heads to spin)
    

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