Weighing in on this thread: Comments here are quite vague, compared with the mathematical crispness of algorithmic information theory.
@John - the amount of surprise actually related to the concept of mutual information, which is the amount of information some message tells you about some other message. Any incoming message will have a certain amount of mutual information with the contents of your memory. The amount of surprise you have is what's left in the message after the mutual information is taken out. So information itself is computed from the probability that a particular message meaning has if selected from the set of all messages. This requires fixing the meanings attached to messages - eg via my "observer map" O(x). In the Shannon information channel case, each distinct sentence has a distinct meaning. @Chris @Albert - the value, ie the intrinsic economic value is probably related to how rare something is, ie its information content or perhaps more likely the "surprise" that John introduced, which depends on the individual economic agent. The price of something is then determined by an economic market process based on the different values each agent assigns. It can be determined mathematically in principle, if the O(x) function is known for each agent. In practice, O(x) can only ever be approximated, of course. As Chris would say - just riffing. The notion of economic value is a rather contentious topic. Cheers On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 11:42:55AM -0700, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote: > > > > > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark > Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2015 10:46 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Food for thought > > > > On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 3:23 AM, Alberto G. Corona <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > > It sems that one image is worth a thousands Shakespeare books. > > > > Mathematics can tell you how much information something has, but it can't > tell you how important that information is because that is a function of > individual personal taste and neither mathematics nor science has anything to > say about that. > > > > Agreed, and what I was pointing out in a response I just sent out. We can > analyze the information potential contained within some bit stream in a > mathematical sense, but without any knowledge of the context it is impossible > to quantify the “value” contained in the stream. > > Chris > > > > John K Clark > -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
