That assumes that there is something that the physical state is /about/.
If I write "tamaontietoa" is it information or gibberish? Is it about
something? All the science of information is about encoding and
decoding; it is not only substrate independent, it is content independent.
Brent
On 1/20/2024 10:23 PM, 'scerir' via Everything List wrote:
"In some respects, information is a qualitatively different sort of
entity from all others in
terms of which the physical sciences describe the world. It is not,
for instance, a function
only of tensor fields on spacetime (as general relativity requires all
physical quantities to
be), nor is it a quantum-mechanical observable.
But in other respects, information does resemble some entities that
appear in laws of
physics: the theory of computation, and statistical mechanics, seem to
refer directly to it
without regard to the specific media in which it is instantiated, just
as conservation laws
do for the electromagnetic four-current or the energy-momentum tensor.
We call that the
substrate-independence of information. Information can also be moved
from one type of
medium to another while retaining all its properties qua information.
We call this its
interoperability property; it is what makes human capabilities such as
language and science
possible, as well as biological adaptations that use symbolic codes,
such as the genetic
code.
Also, information is of the essence in preparation and measurement,
both of which are
necessary for testing scientific theories. The output of a measurement
is information; the
input of a preparation includes information, specifying an attribute
with which a physical
system is to be prepared.
All these applications of information involve abstraction, in that one
entity is represented
symbolically by another. But information is not abstract in the same
sense as, say, the set
of all prime numbers, for it only exists when it is physically
instantiated. So the laws
governing it, like those governing computation – but unlike those
governing prime
numbers – are laws of physics. In this paper we conjecture what these
laws are.
Also, despite being physical, information has a counter-factual
character: an object in a
particular physical state cannot be said to carry information unless
it could have been in a
different state. As Weaver (1949) put it, this word ‘information’ in
communication theory relates not so much to what you *do* say, as to
what you *could* say…." D.Deutsch, Constructor Theory, Arxiv
Il 21/01/2024 01:28 +01 Brent Meeker <meekerbr...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
The problem with this is that information, like complexity, has no
physically definite operational meaning. You can't go into the lab
and ask what's the information content of "this".
Brent
On 1/19/2024 10:46 PM, 'scerir' via Everything List wrote:
Interesting quote about all that (and information)
Frank Wilczek: "Information is another dimensionless quantity that
plays a large and increasing role in our description of the world.
Many of the terms that arise naturally in discussions of information
have a distinctly physical character. For example we commonly speak
of density of information and flow of information. Going deeper, we
find far-reaching analogies between information and (negative)
entropy, as noted already in Shannon's original work. Nowadays many
discussions of the microphysical origin of entropy, and of
foundations of statistical mechanics in general, start from
discussions of information and ignorance. I think it is fair to say
that there has been a unification fusing the physical quantity
(negative) entropy and the conceptual quantity information. A strong
formal connection between entropy and action arises through the
Euclidean, imaginary-time path integral formulation of partition
functions. Indeed, in that framework the expectation value of the
Euclideanized action essentially is the entropy. The identification
of entropy with Euclideanized action has been used, among other
things, to motivate an algebraically simple (but deeply mysterious
"derivation" of black hole entropy. If one could motivate the
imaginary-time path integral directly and insightfully, rather than
indirectly through the apparatus of energy eigenvalues, Boltzmann
factors, and so forth, then one would have progressed toward this
general prediction of unification: Fundamental action principles,
and thus the laws of physics, will be re-interpreted as statements
about information and its transformations."
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.07735v1.pdf
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1503.07735v1.pdf&h=6AQGH8JQz>
Il 20/01/2024 01:10 +01 Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
I put together a short write up on the relationship between
physics, information, and computation, drawing heavily from the
work of Seth Lloyd and others:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/124q3ni51E3sf9kMC_sNKgP3ikcl8ou1t/view?usp=sharing
I thought it might be interesting to members of this list who often
debate whether our reality is fundamentally
computational/informational.
Jason
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