On Tuesday, March 9, 2021, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 6:00 AM Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 9:41 AM Lawrence Crowell < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Nothingness is a paradoxical thing. Does nothingness exist? If so, then >>> by having existential properties it is not pure nothingness. If nothingness >>> does not exist then there must exist something. In a sense God is the >>> antithesis of nothingness and in a sense shares the same paradoxical issue. >> >> >> There is a strange and paradoxical sort of identity between *nothing* >> and *everything*, particularly as it relates to information theory. >> Insofar as the total set of all possibilities has zero information content. >> > > > A random message string can contain zero information, but still exist -- > written on a piece of paper, for example. This idea that zero information > equates to 'nothing' is just an elementary confusion of categories. > Random strings contain a maximum amount of entropy per bit and are incomprehensible. They may not signify anything useful but they require more bits to encode/represent than any less random string of the same length, so in that sense are maximal in the information they convey. I think you may be operating under a different definition of information than the standard Shannon sense of information theory. I grant that the equivalence between all strings and no strings is unintuitive, but I think my section on the Library of Babel is illustrative: https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#The_Library_of_Babel Jason > > This is the main subject of Russell Standish's book: Theory of Nothing: >> https://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html >> > > > That is why Russell got so many things wrong in this book. > > Bruce > > -- > 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ > msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLTXSHt%3DASkdBiA%2Bh_- > 4d3FCAHMX7puXWq9_1tG%3DnjbXSg%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLTXSHt%3DASkdBiA%2Bh_-4d3FCAHMX7puXWq9_1tG%3DnjbXSg%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUi9C5bB1AuGe8jb1oM6penik7y94d4rrMYPhUvh1Kk7GA%40mail.gmail.com.
