On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 09:00:38AM +1100, Bruce Kellett 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.
To be fair, I usually talk of descriptions that are sets of infinite strings equivalent under some observer's notion of classification. Strings sharing a suitable common prefix are usually equivalent. Information is a property of these descriptions. I never claimed that a random description has zero information, just that it is low information. From my point of view, a string consisting of the works of Willam Shakespeare, followed by an arbitrarily long sequence of random bits is not a random string, even though it would be considered as such by AIT. By excluding such sequences as non random, actual random string will still have non-zero information. > This idea that zero information > equates to 'nothing' is just an elementary confusion of categories. > I think I said that nothing and everything are duals, in the same way the empty set and the full set are duals. I never said zero information equates to nothing. The full set of strings, corresponding to the zero length description has zero information. This is what I'm identifying as the Everything. How is this a confusion of categories? > > 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. > You need to engage with the work rather than making sweeping statements like this. Perhaps it is you who got so many things wrong in the 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. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders [email protected] 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/YEnRLHDvM6KEHngZ%40zen.
