On Tuesday, March 9, 2021 at 4:00:51 PM UTC-6 Bruce 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.
>
A random string of characters of length N, where each character has p_n
probability of occurring in the string has entropy
S = -k sum_{n=1}^N p_n log(p_n).
If p_n = 1/N then S = k log(N), consider sum as an integral and use
properties of log, which is Boltzmann's rule. This is a measure of
information. It may tell you nothing, but it actually still has information.
LC
>
> 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
>
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