Re: The Whole Universe as a Finite Binary String?

On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:58:38 -0700, dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

r norman wrote:
On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:46:25 -0700, dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


r norman wrote:


On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:24:40 -0700, dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



Seanpit wrote:



SETH LLOYD is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a
principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He
is also adjunct assistant professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He
works on problems having to do with information and complex systems

from the very small-how do atoms process information, how can you make

them compute, to the very large - how does society process
information?

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd2/lloyd2_index.html


snip...



"All physical systems can be thought of as
registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define
computation will determine your view of what computation consists
of. . ."

This is the key idea. This means that living things are also
information processors. The amount of information in a living system can
increase as it grows, for example, from a single fertilized egg, or it
can decrease, when it dies.



There might be a philosopher or two amongst us who would likely demur.
Does an 'electron in a box' (a standard first example in quantum
mechanics) process information just because it might have discrete
states?

The electron may not process information, but if it interacts with a
photon and changes state, there's a change in information for both
electron and photon. So you could say that the electron-photon system
actually processes inofrmation.


If you can define some sort of information processing for
every conceivable physical system activity then it would seem like
'information' really doesn't mean anything. After all, if everybody
is a somebody then nobody is an anything.


I remember that Wilkins wrote something similar and I replied that every
conceivable physical system can be reduced, at least theoretically, to
pure energy, but that doesn't mean that energy really doesn't mean anything.


I do believe that _some_ physical systems do process information and
that living systems are usually examples. But that does _not_ mean
that every aspect of biochemistry and biophysics is an informational
transaction.


According to Lloyd, every aspect *is* an informational transaction:

"One of the book's main ideas is that information and energy are
equivalent, reading the book would give the reader a better idea of how
and why this is so."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Universe

Every chemical reaction involves an exchange of energy, and if energy
and information are equivalent, then chemical reactions are
informational transactions.



What I am trying to tell you without coming right out and saying so in
a way that Wilkins will hear is that you are merely setting up a
softball pitch for him to slam out of the ball park.


I've already gone at least one inning with him over this and he didn't
slam anything out of the park. At best he managed to hit a weak ground
ball.

I think what you biology guys need to realize is that the concept of
information as used in physics is different than what it is in
information theory. It doesn't imply signal transmission between a
source and a receiver. Information is not something that "exists in
heads" and that is applied to the physical world in anthropocentric way.
That is an objection that is quite absurd. The definition of
information in physics is precisely mathematical and objective.

Seth Lloyd is hardly the first physicist to use concepts of information
to advance physical theories. Hawking and other cosmologists have been
using it for decades to study what happens to matter falling into black
holes.


Yes, I am familiar with Feynman's "Lectures on Computation" and
Gell-Mann's "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and
the Complex" and various works on the physics of computation and
information and what happens to information falling into black holes
and what that means for entropy and energy and all that.

Still, there is an enormous difference between saying "everything is
energy" and "everything is information". For one, there is the notion
of the conservation of energy but there is no corresponding
conservation of information unless you want to believe Dembski. That
is one enormous difference.

.

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