On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 9:21 AM Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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, > It is certainly unintuitive. But does it make any sense? You have made the retrievable information content of the strings to be of paramount importance. But that is just a choice on your part. Other choices could work better in these circumstances. Information content in the form of comprehensible messages is not the only property of the strings, so they are not equivalent to 'nothing'. Applying information theory outside of its intended domain can lead to all sorts of confusion.. Bruce but I think my section on the Library of Babel is illustrative: > https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#The_Library_of_Babel > > Jason > -- 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/CAFxXSLTNhD8et7PNZPMUUhjc5dK6fvcgMG7H-1oJukXkLDdqVA%40mail.gmail.com.
