On 10/31/2015 7:14 PM, Pierz wrote:
Interesting, but you may be running afoul of some fuzziness in the notion of "information content". What you seem to be referring to is complexity rather than information, which is typically equated with entropy. If you want to reproduce a system by storing information about it, then a disordered system like the state of the rings of Saturn can typically not be compressed at all, whereas an ordered system contains regularities which allow it to be described by some simplifying rules which can be used to compress the information about the system. A jpg compression of a field of pure colour "noise" will be the same size as the uncompressed file. But we need to be careful even here, because I have my doubts that reality can actually be compressed "losslessly" at all. Even empty space is a froth of virtual particles which contribute to the quantum state of the universe as a whole. You might be able to write off huge tracts of the universe as "uninteresting" (for example you could reduce it to x quadrillion cubic light years of emptiness) but the universe may beg to differ.
In a sense, when we appeal to decoherence to explain our definite experience in a world of quantum uncertainty we are ignoring enormous amounts of information. Our conscious perception of the world is roughly classical and has only a tiny fraction of the information that QM says is needed to describe the state of world.
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