A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything • Hacker News Board

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#11

Post by Avshalom » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:00 PM UTC

jamesbritt wrote: post #5

Qz wrote: post #2

It's a book review -- doesn't really explain what the physicist is arguing in any meaningful sense.

"It's a book review -- doesn't really explain what the physicist is arguing in any meaningful sense." Indeed, the review ends with this: "Mr Vedral makes a persuasive argument for a third option: information can be created out of nothing." That's a remarkable claim, and the review says zip about how it is presented. It seems that it would also be the key concept of the book, making this a pretty lame review.

Well it's not really remarkable at all, the argument is basically that information and entropy are mathematically equivalent and so information like entropy spontaneously increases.

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#12

Post by wolfhumble » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:01 PM UTC

"Unusually for a physicist, Mr Vedral spends a fair bit of time talking about religious views, such as how God created the universe. He asks whether something can come out of nothing . . . Mr Vedral makes a persuasive argument for a third option: information can be created out of nothing."

Somehow this reminded be about this verse in the Bible: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", http://bible.cc/john/1-1.htm

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#13

Post by Confusion » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:02 PM UTC

Mistaking the deepest abstraction you are capable of for the fundament of all reality is hubris.

Philosophy is one of those subjects that most intelligent persons think they can master pretty well. It all seems pretty simple and straightforward. Especially physicists fall into that trap again and again, up to great string theorists putting forward anthropocentric theories of the universe. These people usually make trivial mistakes that any real philosopher spots in no time. Intelligence is not a substitute for knowledge and this guy seem to have fallen into the same trap as well. In this case you don't even need to be a philosopher. He defines information based on the frequency of 'events'. This means that both time and 'events' are more primal than his notion of 'information'. Consequently, 'information' is not at the root of anything. And how could it be, if we need minds and language to discuss 'information' in the first place?

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#14

Post by Anon84 » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:05 PM UTC

yafujifide wrote: post #10

This article seems to imply that the author equates Shannon entropy with information. Is that so? It has always struck me that Shannon entropy is a good measure of information, but is not a good definition of information itself. Like the difference between a vector and the magnitude of a vector, information and its measure are not the same. What is information itself? If this author actually has a definition of that,…

"You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

John von Neumann to Claude Shannon

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#15

Post by _delirium » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:08 PM UTC

I don't tend to find these varieties of ontological reductionism that compelling, though it is interesting to read when people propose new ones. Sure, you can construct a coherent account of how everything really is just X for a lot of X, and everything else is merely higher-level structure on top of it. But picking the X always seems to be a bit arbitrary. Here he argues for the primacy of information; traditional materialists argued for atoms; some dynamicists argue for dynamics and state spaces; phenomenologists argue for conscious experience; Cartesian dualists argue for both atoms plus consciousness (everything reduces to those two, but neither reduces to the other); social constructionists argue for human social relations; some mathematicians argue for atoms plus math; etc.

Although I don't like everything else they write, I sort of like the manifesto of the Object-Oriented Ontologists, which is more or less that, while objects like televisions undoubtedly are made up of atoms, can be analyzed using information theory, are phenomenological entities, have a (perhaps socially constructed) role in human society etc., those are each just methods of investigating televisions, and televisions themselves "really" do exist as well: http://ooo.gatech.edu/

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#16

Post by amichail » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:10 PM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #13

Mistaking the deepest abstraction you are capable of for the fundament of all reality is hubris. Philosophy is one of those subjects that most intelligent persons think they can master pretty well. It all seems pretty simple and straightforward. Especially physicists fall into that trap again and again, up to great string theorists putting forward anthropocentric theories of the universe. These people usually make tr…

Mistaking the deepest abstraction you are capable of for the fundament of all reality is hubris.

What's important is coming up with a theory that can make accurate predictions. No need to worry about whether it actually corresponds to reality.

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#17

Post by T_S_ » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:41 PM UTC

I doubt it. Maybe if he said "monetization the root of everything".

Most philosophy of science arguments remind me of old costume dramas. They tend to say more about the times of the people who made them than about the times of the people depicted in the story.

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#18

Post by albertzeyer » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:49 PM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #13

Mistaking the deepest abstraction you are capable of for the fundament of all reality is hubris. Philosophy is one of those subjects that most intelligent persons think they can master pretty well. It all seems pretty simple and straightforward. Especially physicists fall into that trap again and again, up to great string theorists putting forward anthropocentric theories of the universe. These people usually make tr…

He does not define information. He relates to the general accepted definition of information by Shannon. There is a whole research field on this area, called information theory.

The base of this definition of information has nothing to do with time. It is rather a mathematical measurement for entropy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#19

Post by troystribling » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 9:51 PM UTC

yafujifide wrote: post #10

This article seems to imply that the author equates Shannon entropy with information. Is that so? It has always struck me that Shannon entropy is a good measure of information, but is not a good definition of information itself. Like the difference between a vector and the magnitude of a vector, information and its measure are not the same. What is information itself? If this author actually has a definition of that,…

Shannon does not define information but the entropy of information.

Re: A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything

#20

Post by Qz » Sun, Apr 25, 2010, 10:04 PM UTC

dmfdmf wrote: post #8

No surprise here... Edwin Jaynes called this the mind projection fallacy whereas Ayn Rand called it the primacy of consciousness, an epistemological error. If everything is "information" then what are the physicists studying? To quote AR "A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms". Full quote here; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html

Consider a computer program with access to the memory in which the program is running and no other inputs. The program is information, and only has access to information. The information is embodied in some set of hardware, but the computer program has no way of knowing or accessing this hardware (and we assume the hardware is 100% reliable, e.g. no memory faults due to overheating RAM or whatnot). So from the perspective of the program, everything is information, including the program itself. Substitute 'conscious mind' for 'program' and you have a conscious mind in a world of nothing but information. The fact that a 'hard' world exists outside of the 'soft' world is irrelevant, by virtue of being unknowable.