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Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

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Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#21

Post by morelisp »

tmcb wrote: post #20
nil-sec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shannon wasn’t the first to think about entropy. It’s a general concept that is hugely important in thermodynamics and statistical physics. Information theory itself becomes increasingly more important in fundamental physics, see the firewall problem of black holes. It’s even harder to overlook these ideas and claim the human brain and our ears are somehow relevant to the definition of information and entropy.

Indeed, he was not the first at all. The concept of thermodynamic entropy predates, with a huge margin, its information theoretical counterpart. You make it look like I am saying there is a mystical property of the human brain that backs the validity of information theory, an assertion that has no resemblance at all which what I am attempting to express, and sits in the same category the ones I am trying to debate ag…

> there is no such a concept as absolute information, you always define it on mutual terms.

This is true of classical information theory, but not (as I understand it) algorithmic information theory. I think the jury is still out on whether it makes philosophical sense to generalize over universal machines like AIT does, and the practical applications compared to classical information theory seem minimal, from a layman's view it seems like it's been mathematically very fruitful.

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#22

Post by Retric »

clairity wrote: post #8
captaincole wrote: post #2

I really had fun reading this and thinking deeply about the blurry Ill defined line between things that are alive (an individual) and things that are not. To take this experiment to a conclusion which the author has “left to the reader” as all good texts do, let’s think about a virus. A virus has information, in the form of dna or rna (I believe this is what a coronavirus uses), that it injects into a cell to then ca…

viruses have no agency so they don't attempt to reduce entropy across time. viruses are a reduction of entropy across time, just by being an organized structure (of rna and protein strands folded together) requiring energy to create and maintain. information is encoded in that structure--both in the sequence and in the shape--and that's transmitted through time.

Viruses increase entropy like all life. Their reproductive process destroys a much larger and more complex cell.

Plants convert light into chemical energy at low efficiency, the rest goes to waste heat. Animals do the same thing with chemical energy.

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#23

Post by tmcb »

morelisp wrote: post #21
tmcb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, he was not the first at all. The concept of thermodynamic entropy predates, with a huge margin, its information theoretical counterpart. You make it look like I am saying there is a mystical property of the human brain that backs the validity of information theory, an assertion that has no resemblance at all which what I am attempting to express, and sits in the same category the ones I am trying to debate ag…

> there is no such a concept as absolute information, you always define it on mutual terms. This is true of classical information theory, but not (as I understand it) algorithmic information theory. I think the jury is still out on whether it makes philosophical sense to generalize over universal machines like AIT does, and the practical applications compared to classical information theory seem minimal, from a layma…

My understanding is that, in order to recognize information, you should at least compare it to the outputs of a source of entropy.

It is a common mistake to conflate information and entropy. A bad analogy to mechanics is that the outputs of an entropy source are the frame of reference, the signal is a body and information might be whatever property you wish to analyze, such as velocity or acceleration.

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#24

Post by praptak »

captaincole wrote: post #2

I really had fun reading this and thinking deeply about the blurry Ill defined line between things that are alive (an individual) and things that are not. To take this experiment to a conclusion which the author has “left to the reader” as all good texts do, let’s think about a virus. A virus has information, in the form of dna or rna (I believe this is what a coronavirus uses), that it injects into a cell to then ca…

How do you define the information-theoretic entropy of a physical object, like a virus?

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#25

Post by monadic2 »

Retric wrote: post #22
clairity wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

viruses have no agency so they don't attempt to reduce entropy across time. viruses are a reduction of entropy across time, just by being an organized structure (of rna and protein strands folded together) requiring energy to create and maintain. information is encoded in that structure--both in the sequence and in the shape--and that's transmitted through time.

Viruses increase entropy like all life. Their reproductive process destroys a much larger and more complex cell. Plants convert light into chemical energy at low efficiency, the rest goes to waste heat. Animals do the same thing with chemical energy.

I disagree with life increasing entropy; it does do that but it expels the entropy.

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#26

Post by tmcb »

tmcb wrote: post #9
captaincole wrote: post #2

I really had fun reading this and thinking deeply about the blurry Ill defined line between things that are alive (an individual) and things that are not. To take this experiment to a conclusion which the author has “left to the reader” as all good texts do, let’s think about a virus. A virus has information, in the form of dna or rna (I believe this is what a coronavirus uses), that it injects into a cell to then ca…

The blog entry is quite good, but it seems to suggest that the breakthrough consists in analyzing living organisms through the lenses of information theory. This is not a mistake in itself, but a shallow perspective nonetheless: information theory is, supposedly, a mathematical representation of the ways our brains make sense of the world around. The blog entry accidentally gives leeway to readers think that there is…

If I could edit the parent comment, I would replace “our brains” by “an observer”, which is common physics parlance.

As far as I know, all uses of information-theorical approaches outside of its original scope also involve a scenario where an observer is originally unable to formulate a model that allow them to draw conclusions from alleged discrepancies. This paper is just one more example of that.

This somehow reminded me of the following quote by Bertrand Russell. “Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#27

Post by selestify »

monadic2 wrote: post #25
Retric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses increase entropy like all life. Their reproductive process destroys a much larger and more complex cell. Plants convert light into chemical energy at low efficiency, the rest goes to waste heat. Animals do the same thing with chemical energy.

I disagree with life increasing entropy; it does do that but it expels the entropy.

Living things are low-entropy internally, but produce higher entropy externally than would have been without life.

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#29

Post by nil-sec »

tmcb wrote: post #23
morelisp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no such a concept as absolute information, you always define it on mutual terms. This is true of classical information theory, but not (as I understand it) algorithmic information theory. I think the jury is still out on whether it makes philosophical sense to generalize over universal machines like AIT does, and the practical applications compared to classical information theory seem minimal, from a layma…

My understanding is that, in order to recognize information, you should at least compare it to the outputs of a source of entropy. It is a common mistake to conflate information and entropy. A bad analogy to mechanics is that the outputs of an entropy source are the frame of reference, the signal is a body and information might be whatever property you wish to analyze, such as velocity or acceleration.

So if I’m understanding this correctly you have a relativistic understanding of information in which the zero state is observer dependent? Just for my understanding, consider for example the spin of an electron. It can be in one of two states, up or down. In which scenario am I unclear about the absolute information content of knowing the spin state?

Re: Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

#30

Post by morelisp »

tmcb wrote: post #23
morelisp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no such a concept as absolute information, you always define it on mutual terms. This is true of classical information theory, but not (as I understand it) algorithmic information theory. I think the jury is still out on whether it makes philosophical sense to generalize over universal machines like AIT does, and the practical applications compared to classical information theory seem minimal, from a layma…

My understanding is that, in order to recognize information, you should at least compare it to the outputs of a source of entropy. It is a common mistake to conflate information and entropy. A bad analogy to mechanics is that the outputs of an entropy source are the frame of reference, the signal is a body and information might be whatever property you wish to analyze, such as velocity or acceleration.

> in order to recognize information, you should at least compare it to the outputs of a source of entropy.

Again, this is correct for classical information theory which requires some frame of reference for "likelihood". But AIT claims a "global frame" over the minimal representation in all universal machines, the particular choice of machine being at worst constant overhead.

You can argue, I think somewhat plausibly, that this frame is still an (inter)subjective frame rather than an objective, absolute one. But if we assume C-T (and we virtually always do), that argument is pretty weak - any other definable frame becomes formally "worse" in that it becomes "merely" a specific case of the universal one.

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