A couple of things: > There are of course > practical issues in trying to recover information, > but this is a different issue entirely.
> It may be horribly > scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. > It's just converted into a different form. I feel like there is a hole here in our understanding of information. In a sense we can consider information the potential to be informed, but that potential I think may be a theoretical abstraction. Something only becomes information when it is recovered - when it informs something else. To say that information is only converted to a different form is misleading because in-form-ation is nothing but the consequences of interpreted form. Consider an event like stepping in a puddle. The actual event is over in an instant, but records of the splash, in the form of mud stains on your shoes, footprints in the mud, memories in the mind, vibrations of the sound through the eardrum of a nearby squirrel...these could all be used to forensically reconstruct a model of some aspects of the event. The more access you have to examine everything in the environment and the more knowledge you have about how to read those details as a historical text, the better your model would ostensibly be. What if a scientist on a distant planet with a powerful telescope takes a photo of you stepping in the puddle - now there is information there too. What if the scientist mentions the photo on a radio show to millions of aliens who are listening? Even though the Earth is swallowed up by a black hole, the kids of the aliens on planet Uhaul will still know about it, so we could say that the information has not disappeared. But if we can't recover the 'information' we can't really say that it 'exists' in the same sense. Once a sand castle washes into the ocean, the form that the castle had is no longer present. We can have cognitive or photographic representations that remind us of its presentation, we can have measurements and coordinates which allow us to build a mold to crank out copies of the castle, but each one of these instances is its own presentation. It takes an interpreter to equate one presentation with another as related in some way. Something to see through the literal forms of matter-energy-spacetime to internalize an semantic pattern which is figurative and orthogonal to spacetime. Once we see how deeply orthogonal and symmetrical pattern recognition is to the idea of objects-in-space, we can begin to see that understanding sense-making requires an equally contrary idea of physics. Rather than stringing memories together in a linear group like beads, I propose that memory is like the sensitivity of the string itself. It is what holds the beads together. I don't think that there are Platonic forms which act as index, rather it is more like figurative grooves within our perception which we inherit through nature and nurture and then add to and deepen individually through our experience. It is subtractive rather than additive - and this is important. Our perceptions fall into place. The 'ring of truth' refers to this kind of meta-signalling of integrity. It fits with the rest of the patterns in the inertial frame. It completes a puzzle that was already there, and when the final piece is placed, there is closure of an open circuit. Two different things/experiences/meanings are figuratively elided as one and there is understanding. A signal without an interpreter is noise, but sensitivity can allow an interpreter to turn noise into signals. Probably no two interpreters can recover the same signals in the same way but neither are any interpreters of the same signals completely free to interpret the signal in a way that cannot also be approximated by some combination of other interpreters. The problem with information-as-physics is that it conflates all forms of interpretation and takes them for granted. This assumption of 'is'-ness fails to ring true. There is no information, only sense experience which informs sense experience. Craig On Apr 6, 2:05 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: > Comment by steveb: > > There is a school of thought in modern physics that information > is never truly destroyed. Actually, it is more than a school > of thought because it is the primary school of thought and > all firmly accepted fundamental physics theory is founded > on information preserving principles. There are of course > practical issues in trying to recover information, > but this is a different issue entirely. > > It must be remembered that we often use black box models > and statistical techniques to deal with very hard problems, > and hence much practical theory seems to show that information > is destroyed. However, this is an illusion, > and if more fundamental theory is used, this fact can be shown. > > This concept was brought to the forefront in the famous long term > debate/battle between Hawking and Susskind about black holes. > The present view is that Susskind has won and information is > not even destroyed by a black hole, which was previously thought > to be true by Hawking. Hawking claimed to have proved that > Black holes are the the one thing that can and do destroy > information. > After the long battle, Hawking conceded he was wrong. > > Speaking out against Hawking's statement that he proved that > black holes destroy information, Prof. Leonard Susskind commented, > "It violates one of the fundamental principles of physics, which says > nothing is ever lost completely. You may say, "How can you say > information isn't lost? I can erase information on my computer." > But every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't > disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly > scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. > It's just converted into a different form." > > The following reference says, "During this discussion Stephen Hawking > stated that the information inside a black hole is lost forever as the > black > hole evaporates. It took 28 years for Leonard Susskind to formulate > his theory that would prove Hawking wrong." > > from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind > > / steveb / > __________________ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
