Philosophy of information

[WaveJumper]

This discussion is already bumping into consciousness and will soon hit an impenetrable wall. We cannot fully define the deep nature of information without defining us ourselves and the way we process the incoming information. In the words of the father of quantum theory Max Plank:

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”


I wrote a similar thread titled "What is information?" but deleted it as i deemed it hopeless that it would produce anything worthwhile.

 

[Willowz]

If I read the story out loud to you, the story you heard would contain no ink and no paper. These are not an intrinsic part of the story.

I get that, but what I'm asking is about the "placement", "description" of the story. It might sound funny trying to describe something that is undescribable, but who knows? Would you call it reality?

 

[DaveC426913]

This discussion is already bumping into consciousness and will soon hit an impenetrable wall.

Consciousness has nothing to do with it. A computer program one line long can process information quite happily without the slightest need for consciousness. Your point - while interesting - is not relevant to this discussion.

 

[DaveC426913]

I get that, but what I'm asking is about the "placement", "description" of the story. It might sound funny trying to describe something that is undescribable, but who knows? Would you call it reality?

Then I don't understand your question.

 

[Willowz]

Then I don't understand your question.

When I understand that example about the story and the medium, I think about the concept of the idea that creats the story. Though I would rather speak about objects that you touch and feel. When I look at a circle I don't think about a square. Let's not get into the barriers of language. Becasue you could call a square a circle and vica versa and still the "object" would not be changed. I'll try to sum it up. Now how would you call the object that gives meaning to the "idea", which eventually creats words to describe it...? When I mean idea I think about the curve you see in a circle, the characteristics that make it spesific. I don't think this is off topic because it's looking deeper into what makes information. More info: It's like math IMO, you don't invent it, you just discover it. What do you discover? Reality, logic...neeed mooore words, :/

 

[WaveJumper]

Consciousness has nothing to do with it. A computer program one line long can process information quite happily without the slightest need for consciousness. Your point - while interesting - is not relevant to this discussion.

What is information without consciousness? How do you know there is a computer that is processing, has processed or will process this line of information except through consciousness? There not a "slightest need" for consciousness, there is an absolutely imperative demand for consciousness. Without it, all the "information" in the universe is utterly meaningless(the inverted commas denote the lost status of information as such without a conscious mind, i.e. it stops being information).

 

[JoeDawg]

It would most definitrely not be the same story. While true, for the intent and purpose of reading it, some (but definitely not al) would say it's the same thing, how many times have you heard someone say "You're got to read it in its native language to apprecate it. Something is lost in the translation."?

But this is what I mean, the translation example is not essentially different, it just makes it more obvious, because if you can't read the language you can't understand the information, and there will be subtle differences in the meanings of the words. It depends on how much you decide is sufficient for the story. I don't think you can separate 'information' from existence so easily. Information needs a medium, and while the difference in medium may seem irrelevant, that's only because, for your purposes, you don't require any more detail.

A handwritten book, a type-written book, and an audio-book, might not make people say the story is 'different', but it would effect their experience of the story, even to the degree that might result from reading a translation. The form contains information too.

Precisely. Its "hammerness" is not an intrinsic part of the object. Its "objectness" is.

But hammerness is a representation of an intrinsic aspect of the object. All things of a certain hardness could be used as hammers, but we don't classify them all as such, even though the intrinsic property is what allows us to define it so. The objectness is a type of information.

The fundamental distinction I am pointing out is that the hammer is physical object, whereas the file is the information, which is not physical. A duplicate of a piece of information is, in practice and in principle, the same, not merely arbitrarily the same to a certain amount of measurement.

It will seem to be the same, but it won't really 'be' the same.

Looked at another way, if I recorded a hammer-muffin to an arbitrary level of detail and then attempted to copy it, and then played a shell game with the two of them, the duplicate would always be in principle distinguishable from its original. On the other hand, if I duplicated the information in my file (say, simply my birthdate: 13), and then played the shell game with those two numbers , there is no way even in principle to distinguish which number 13 was the original. 13 is exactly equivalent to 13. A hammer-muffin is not exactly equivalent to a hammer-muffin.

Unless you knew the unique memory location where the original was stored. If you knew where the original was stored, you would know which was the copy.

Perhaps our argument lies in the distinction between the manifestation of a file on a disk and the contents of a file. The contents of a file (the information) is duplicable. There are no contents of a hammer-muffin that can be duplicable, they can only be simulated to an arbitrary level of satisfaction.

I'd say the same thing about the computer file, its just that you are more than satisfied with the level of duplication.

 

[DaveC426913]

What is information without consciousness? How do you know there is a computer that is processing, has processed or will process this line of information except through consciousness? There not a "slightest need" for consciousness, there is an absolutely imperative demand for consciousness. Without it, all the "information" in the universe is utterly meaningless(the inverted commas denote the lost status of information as such without a conscious mind, i.e. it stops being information).

This is a reducto ad absurdum argument. By the same token, nothing in the entire universe is of any significance unless it is observed by some consciousness.

The fact is, the single-line program is quite capable of processing the data in the file without any consciousness. Perhaps every human on Earth has gone into suspended animation and the computer is designed to multiply the number 13 until it reaches a specific value before opening the sleep chambers. Who cares? Make up any situation you want. The program is acting upon the information with no need for consciousness.

 

[WaveJumper]

This is a reducto ad absurdum argument. By the same token, nothing in the entire universe is of any significance unless it is observed by some consciousness.

No, it is not. Defining "information' is neither that easy nor that straight-forward. We have hard data that shows the universe existed before the arrival of consciousness, whereas the abstraction we label 'information' exist only in our perceiving brains. And it only exists now, not in the past or in the future but only now.

The fact is, the single-line program is quite capable of processing the data in the file without any consciousness.

What information and in what program?? A program, in the sense you are implying is an abstraction. A computer, at its hardware level is not processing information per se, it's processing positive and negative electricity, that we dub 0's and 1's. It takes a conscious mind to perceive and understand what a computer is doing information-wise. Otherwise, a computer is simply nothing more than an electrical gadget.

Perhaps every human on Earth has gone into suspended animation and the computer is designed to multiply the number 13 until it reaches a specific value before opening the sleep chambers. Who cares? Make up any situation you want. The program is acting upon the information with no need for consciousness.

The computer becomes a computer when consciousness arrives. And not some kind of consciousness, but the human kind. Could my pekingese perceive as information what my computer is outputting now?

 

[DaveC426913]

No, it is not. Defining "information' is neither that easy nor that straight-forward. We have hard data that shows the universe existed before the arrival of consciousness, whereas the abstraction we label 'information' exist only in our perceiving brains. And it only exists now, not in the past or in the future but only now.



What information and in what program?? A program, in the sense you are implying is an abstraction. A computer, at its hardware level is not processing information per se, it's processing positive and negative electricity, that we dub 0's and 1's. It takes a conscious mind to perceive and understand what a computer is doing information-wise. Otherwise, a computer is simply nothing more than an electrical gadget.




The computer becomes a computer when consciousness arrives. And not some kind of consciousness, but the human kind. Could my pekingese perceive the information my computer is outputting now?

While all this may be true, it is not relevant to this particular discussion about digital files. The file containing the number 13 can indeed be processed by one line code with no consciousness involved in that processing.

At the risk of beating a horse I feel I've already killed:

What information and in what program?? A program, in the sense you are implying is an abstraction. A computer, at its hardware level is not processing information per se, it's processing positive and negative electricity, that we dub 0's and 1's.

So what? It is still processing the file.

It takes a conscious mind to perceive and understand what a computer is doing information-wise. Otherwise, a computer is simply nothing more than an electrical gadget.

So what? It is still processing the file.


I'll grant you one concession/retraction: information is tied to consciousness. Where I come from "information" is "data interpreted to provide meaning" and meaning does require consciousness. I will concede that everywhere I've used the word information I should have used the word data.

That being said, data in a file does not require consciousness. And it is a file of data we've been talking about since post #9.

 

[0xDEADBEEF]

@JoeDawg you are doing the Wittgenstein, reducing the hammer to a word and how people perceive it.

There is a common trend in fuzzing definitions, and declaring everything to be relative to the speaker. I refuse to see these things as a great insight. These are all deviations from the normal understanding of words, and therefore look interesting, but it is not the usual understanding of the word hammer, to think of a frozen cucumber for hammering. There are various degrees of "metaphorism" and various degrees of misunderstanding, but declaring the meaning as void without context does not yield explanatory power.

I refuse to give up the concept of absolute truth and the concept of reality. The tree does fall and it does produce noise when you are not there. This was a great insight from childhood time, and we do not gain by giving it up (except for special cases of quantum mechanics).

If we build on this base, then there is reality. We perceive it through the filter of our senses, but we have figured out pretty much what we are really dealing with, and when our senses play tricks on us. We perceive matter as distinct objects and we give it names. Now the abstraction kicks in. But abstraction always produces errors.

If I point at a hammer and say "this hammer". We are already abstracting. There are electrons leaving and coming in constantly, we cannot say that the hammer consists of the same parts, and if we are exact we cannot even define well what this hammer is. Nonetheless the hammer is real it is a thing and we label it. Not having a definition does not take the reality away from the hammer.

Everything we are dealing with is an abstraction as physicist we are painfully aware of the underlying theories that will split the hammers iron into atoms, the atoms into particles, and the hadrons into quarks, and even destroy our notion of space or existence, still the hammer is a superb concept and "this hammer" even stronger.

We can also abstract more, and there is a common sense how something is more concrete and something more abstract. So we go from "this hammer" to "a hammer" to "three hammers" to "three objects" to "three" where mathematics is waiting for us asking what took us so long.

So maybe this all looks like a human construction, but this is where truth kicks in. Mathematics is very close to truth, and once the mathematical entities are defined well, no one will disagree that 2+2 will ever be different from 4.

And here comes my hope and search. Information is something that is somehow very close to reality. A ball has a position and a weight, you can somehow extract this information, it can change, it can be lost, but there are rules to this. These rules again are very close to mathematics. We can do reasoning according to these rules. Statistical physics and thermodynamics are whole disciplines of physics, dealing with information and ignorance about it.

Right now I don't really know what I want from my philosophy of information, but it's somewhere in there with files, bijective mappings, encryption, recoverability, wave function collapse and entropy.

And now I'll prepare my rant on Kant

 

[0xDEADBEEF]

So where was Kant wrong? I'll start with some remarks on his style: his convoluted sentence structure is an apex of what the German language has to offer in terms of destruction of reading flow. His redefinition, and creation of words use of archaisms and Latin do not serve the purpose of clarification but the purpose shines through of using language as a weapon against less educated and a way of showing off.

After fighting with stomach cramps through "Die Kritik der reinen Verunft" and "Die Kritik der praktischen Vernunft" I feel reluctant to reread it but I'll try to find the main arguments that were wrong in respect to this subject. I would like to quote the passages, but translating would be too much effort.

"1. Die Transzendentale Ästetik"
Kant develops his Idea that time and space are "Erkenntnisse" (revelations/ideas/knowledge) that are known about at birth, and pretty much every thing that we think necessitates them. From a physical point of view I don't think that time and space are different from momentum or charge in any way, but also in a more natural way I don't see why space and time should be different from color, or sound, and if you are trying to find out why, his answer is more or less, because I cannot think of it in another way. The statements in the conclusion section are also mostly incorrect especially from a physics point of view.

In "1 Transzedentale Elementarlehre/zweiter Teil/erste Abteilung/erstes Buch/1. Haupstück/§9" he claims that the "functions of though" could all be put under four "Titles" with three "modules" each. Pure numerology, everything one can think can be written in a symmetrical diagram, this is not the only time that he does it, and I don't know which greek author he was copying.

Then many more needless and wrong generalisations follow:
"Alle Verhältnisse des Denkens in Urteilen sind die a) des Prädikats zum Subjekt, b) des Grundes zur Folge c) der eingeteilten Erkenntniss und der gesammelten Glieder der Einteilung untereinander"

Roughly "All relations of thought in judgments are a) that of predicate to object, b) that of cause to effect c) that of differentiated understanding and the collected parts of the differentiation"

And if you ask why this is false take a sentence like "The earth spins." This is a judgment and none of the above. You might say it's not a relation, it depends on the exact Understanding of "Verhältnisse" which can be read as "how things behave". Even if we eliminate this b) is a special case of a) and well c) is whatever you make of it (and trust me it doesn't get more readable in German) it is either false or doesn't say much.

This is just a small example. He has many more of such statements before he starts with more numerology by putting all thinkable concepts in categories which again form a nice diagram with some nice number.

Well I could go on but as I mentioned it's a painful read. He basically doesn't understand mathematics, and how one can have ideas and form concepts without perception. He doesn't understand mathematical deduction of things like the commutativity of addition (which is not completely his fault as Peano came one century later). He categorizes needlessly in his fruitless attempt to understand abstraction, and finally he throws in everything he thinks he knows about the world and logic where he copies the Greeks. He would be the first to shout that light waves without aether are impossible.

So as nice as some as some of his ideas were, most of those concerned with what kind of objects we know and how we think has been surpassed by virtual objects, mathematics and a deeper thinking about the transfer of information.

 

[JoeDawg]

@JoeDawg you are doing the Wittgenstein, reducing the hammer to a word and how people perceive it.

I think, you are being unfair to W, regardless of whether one is an evil relativist, like myself, I think the man made some important observations, and I don't believe I am reducing it to a word. An experience is an experience, but 'hammer' is a concept linked to experience.

And understanding that context is important, is important to science. Words don't have any inherent meaning. We bundle concepts into words based on the circumstances we encounter. We develop language based on its usefulness to us, but it is this organic nature that creates problems. You dont' need to go into quantum weirdness to see that as an individual you have a limited perspective. Science uses the double-blind method specifically because we aren't very rational about experience.

I refuse to give up the concept of absolute truth and the concept of reality. The tree does fall and it does produce noise when you are not there. This was a great insight from childhood time, and we do not gain by giving it up (except for special cases of quantum mechanics).

Even if an absolute exists, I have yet to see a method for determining it, and we all have a concept of reality, mine simply differs from yours. As to the tree in the forest, that is a thought experiment designed specifically to get you thinking about the nature of sound, of perception, of reality. Its not a denial of reality.

If we build on this base, then there is reality.

Even a radical empiricist like Berkeley doesn't deny 'reality', he just doesn't agree with you on the nature and source of reality.

But abstraction always produces errors.

Abstractions are generalizations. Expecting a generalization to apply to every case, is an error.

If I point at a hammer and say "this hammer". We are already abstracting. There are electrons leaving and coming in constantly, we cannot say that the hammer consists of the same parts, and if we are exact we cannot even define well what this hammer is. Nonetheless the hammer is real it is a thing and we label it.

An electron is just as much an abstraction. We create abstractions, because experience is overflowing with details. Hammer is a simplification, based on sense data and our sense of purpose or utility. Experience is reality, but the causes experience, the explanation for experience, what Kant meant by Noumena, is different. Having an understanding of this can help prevent errrors.

Not having a definition does not take the reality away from the hammer.

Not having a definition, does not mean the source of the hammer experience necessarily stops existing. Ontology and epistemology are different.

still the hammer is a superb concept and "this hammer" even stronger.

Its useful if one wishes to build a house.

Mathematics is very close to truth, and once the mathematical entities are defined well, no one will disagree that 2+2 will ever be different from 4.

Current mathematics is close to experience because we developed mathematics over a very long period while constantly comparing it to experience. Mathematics is dependent, as is all logic, on useful premises. 1+1=2, is a good description of reality because we come across many 'objects' and situations where this is true. Human plus human often equals Human/Human, but it can also equal Human/Human/Human, if there is sex involved. 1+1=3
Mathematics is a series of generalizations, which uses logic developed from experience.

Right now I don't really know what I want from my philosophy of information, but it's somewhere in there with files, bijective mappings, encryption, recoverability, wave function collapse and entropy.

Of course it is, because those are the things you think you know best.

 

[JoeDawg]

So where was Kant wrong? I'll start with some remarks on his style: his convoluted sentence structure is an apex of what the German language has to offer in terms of destruction of reading flow. His redefinition, and creation of words use of archaisms and Latin do not serve the purpose of clarification but the purpose shines through of using language as a weapon against less educated and a way of showing off.

Hahah, apex indeed, clearly you haven't read Heidegger yet, he's an even bigger treat.

Kant is evil, certainly, but he wasn't a stupid man. And he's essential reading, mainly because most philosophers since Kant, spend time criticising him.

 

[apeiron]

This has become a heated debate, but rather odd that no-one is basing their positions on familiar philosophy.

It is a very ancient thing to distinguish between form and substance. And then a very modern thing to distinguish between information and meaning. One was the burning issue of Aristotle's day, and the other the debate of today.

So a hammer - is it a substance or a form? Well a hammer's truth, its essence, has to be modelled using both concepts. They are in fact complimentary descriptions, one the local or bottom-up view, the other the global or top-down view.

A hammer is a form of course, defined by its global purpose or function. It has an organisation that allows it to do something. Bang in nails or any equivalent act.

But a hammer must also be substance. To have a local or actual example of "a hammer", there must be some substantial incarnation.

Even Plato (under the prodding of Aristotle) agreed that there is a world of possible form, but also chora, the formless stuff.

And note the different causality that applies to the local and the global, the substance and the form. Local stuff, like atoms, add together to construct some particular example of a form.

Form, by constrast, acts by downwards constraint. There is a global "idea" or state of organisation that defines what is sufficient to "be a hammer". This is a set of constraints. Then many things, many substantial incarnations existing located in some place, may be examples of "hammers". So a shoe could be a hammer if it does a hammer's job.

The debate here tries to say that a hammer either is this, or it is that. But the correct (and systems science) view is that reality is described by both the local and the global, by the complementary aspects that are the constructing substances and the global forms.

This is why physics does so well using the idea of local atoms constrained by global laws. One is the substance, the other the form.

So in the modern era, we have information and meaning. A new either/or quandry.

Information theory is the result of doing what Aristotle said we shouldn't do - breaking reality into just substantial atoms. Information is the atomisation of global form.

It is about countable microstates. Isolatable markings. The bit that can be seen to make a difference. So information said there is this aspect of reality called its global form, its general constraining organisation. Well we will just smash that form into the littlelist bits. We will model reality as a construction. We will use substance-like bits to construct the forms.

And this, as an arch-reductionist modelling trick, works wonderfully well. On many occasions. So long as we understand exactly what we have done, and so what we may have lost along the way.

What we lose of course is meaning. Smash the idea of form, of global organisation, of constraining context, and you lose the way in which arrangements of atoms actually construct something that has meaningful order, purpose, teleology.

So this is the modern dilemma. Information theory works. It is a great advance. But we have been left without a matching theory of meaning. Although if you study cybernetics, semiotics, systems science, hierarchy theory, you can see how meanings might be re-introduced to modern theorising.

And what of a computer file? Well computers are information theory taken to an extreme. And the limits of this exercise is a well trodden debate - Maxwell's Demon, Turing machines, the Landauer limit, etc.

In an ideal world, we can imagine replicating exactly the same form (the computer file) in multiple locations. And then there are practical limits that the world actually imposes on this imagined capability.

 

[0xDEADBEEF]

This has become a heated debate, but rather odd that no-one is basing their positions on familiar philosophy.

Maybe if someone would recommend books....

[...]
A hammer is a form of course, defined by its global purpose or function. It has an organisation that allows it to do something. Bang in nails or any equivalent act.

But a hammer must also be substance. To have a local or actual example of "a hammer", there must be some substantial incarnation.

Well this is an interesting concept and certainly useful in discussion. Although I disagree with this dichotomy. I see more shades of gray. Mathematical objects are defined by their defined properties, whereas real objects could be said to be defined by their appearance. But I don't think that a hammer is defined by the fact that you can use it for hammering. There is some kind of representation of a hammer in our mind. One of which do not understand how the brain stores it. If we try to communicate it we are forced to use a list of properties or point at perceptions. But using a list of properties is not capturing the whole thing. We can ask someone if hammers leak orange juice, and although they have never saved this information people will say "no", and if we find a hammer that does, it is still a hammer, it's not really important that all other hammers don't.

[...]This is why physics does so well using the idea of local atoms constrained by global laws. One is the substance, the other the form.

I hope you noticed that you changed your definition of form here, before you argued that atoms have a real (substantial) and an imaginary (form) part so to say, and now you argue that atoms are real and laws are imaginary, although we know laws manifest in reality.

So in the modern era, we have information and meaning. A new either/or quandry.

[...]
So this is the modern dilemma. Information theory works. It is a great advance. But we have been left without a matching theory of meaning. Although if you study cybernetics, semiotics, systems science, hierarchy theory, you can see how meanings might be re-introduced to modern theorising.
[...]

This is a great way of looking at it although, as you could guess, I don't see that "either or". But this is exactly what I am interested in. Something that is the same file although it is in two locations. Something that is the same file although it is compressed by some algorithm. If your computer processes information and you are not aware of it, how much do we have to regard the computer as an acting entity. To name some of the things that are closer to "interpretation" and further away from information processing. Maybe we are not that far apart after all.

 

[Anticitizen]

I'll grant you one concession/retraction: information is tied to consciousness. Where I come from "information" is "data interpreted to provide meaning" and meaning does require consciousness. I will concede that everywhere I've used the word information I should have used the word data.

That being said, data in a file does not require consciousness. And it is a file of data we've been talking about since post #9.

Given that framework, and going back to the example of a written story, would you still argue that the story read out loud is the same thing as printed, just in a different medium? A printed story consists of characters that can be treated as data, copied, parsed, compressed, etc without being understood by the machine doing the process, while the act of reading/listening is more of a process than a thing that requires human activity and understanding to function.

 

[Anticitizen]

But using a list of properties is not capturing the whole thing. We can ask someone if hammers leak orange juice, and although they have never saved this information people will say "no", and if we find a hammer that does, it is still a hammer, it's not really important that all other hammers don't.

Related, I suppose, would be the 'ship of Theseus' problem. If you start replacing parts on your hammer (maybe because it's leaking orange juice :tongue: ), is it still the same hammer?

Interesting discussion btw.

 

[apeiron]

We can ask someone if hammers leak orange juice, and although they have never saved this information people will say "no", and if we find a hammer that does, it is still a hammer, it's not really important that all other hammers don't.

.

Actually, this is part of information theoretic approaches. The suppression of noise. And also how brains are known to work.

So when you think of a hammer, you are actually suppressing memories of all non-hammer like information so as to have a high-contrast mental state of "hammer essence".

It is routine to demonstrate this with priming, attentional blink and other psychological phenomenon.

And we even have the popular phrase - give a person a hammer and every problem looks like a nail. Other meanings of the object are actively being suppressed.

And information discard is fundamental to the physical description of computing - again see Landauer.

Or a good popular science book was Tor Norretranders The User Illusion. A good introduction to this area, though not 100% reliable.

I hope you noticed that you changed your definition of form here, before you argued that atoms have a real (substantial) and an imaginary (form) part so to say, and now you argue that atoms are real and laws are imaginary, although we know laws manifest in reality.

.

No. The point is that both are "real". Or rather, both are models of the real. The real is both substance and form in interaction, and we then need to model this complex state using two different but complementary modelling perspectives.

So the physical world is real. We cannot know its truth directly, but we can get good at modelling it if we are willing to be systematic. The system we have been using is based on the ancient dichotomy - substance and form.

Both atoms and laws are fake in the sense they are just modelling constructs. And both are real in being really measureable aspects of reality.

If your computer processes information and you are not aware of it, how much do we have to regard the computer as an acting entity. To name some of the things that are closer to "interpretation" and further away from information processing. Maybe we are not that far apart after all.

What is different and disturbing about computation is the way that it is completely deterministic. The real world has what a systems scientist would call material creativity at the microlevel.

There is at the very least quantum uncertainty at the microlevel of reality. So while we can dream of identical processes being replicated, in reality there are problems. Quantum fluctuations could cause a bit to be flipped in one of your many replicated files. So in reality, computation can be highly determined - which is what makes it so artificial, so close to being "pure form" atomised. But there are asymptotic limits to this in theory.