[Fis] Is information physical? A logical analysis
Burgin, Mark
mburgin at math.ucla.edu
Thu May 31 04:24:38 CEST 2018
Dear Loet,
Only one remark. There is no Shannon-type information but there is
Shannon's measure of information, which is called entropy.
Sincerely,
Mark
On 5/23/2018 10:44 PM, Loet Leydesdorff wrote:
> Dear Mark, Soren, and colleagues,
>
> The easiest distinction is perhaps Descartes' one between/res
> cogitans/ and/res extensa/ as two different realities. Our knowledge
> in each case that things could have been different is not out there in
> the world as something seizable such as piece of wood.
>
> Similarly, uncertainty in the case of a distribution is not seizable,
> but it can be expressed in bits of information (as one measure among
> others). The grandiose step of Shannon was, in my opinion, to enable
> us to operationalize Descartes'/cogitans/ and make it amenable to the
> measurement as information.
>
> Shannon-type information is dimensionless. It is provided with meaning
> by a system of reference (e.g., an observer or a discourse). Some of
> us prefer to call only thus-meaningful information real information
> because it is embedded. One can also distinguish it from Shannon-type
> information as Bateson-type information. The latter can be debated as
> physical.
>
> In the ideal case of an elastic collision of "billard balls", the
> physical entropy (S= kB * H) goes to zero. However, if two particles
> have a distribution of momenta of 3:7 before a head-on collision, this
> distribution will change in the ideal case into 7:3. Consequently, the
> probabilistic entropy is .7 log2 (.7/.3) + .3 log2 (.3/.7) = .86 –
> .37 = .49 bits of information. One thus can prove that this
> information is not physical.
>
> Best,
> Loet
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Loet Leydesdorff
>
> Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
> Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
>
> loet at leydesdorff.net <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net>;
> http://www.leydesdorff.net/
> Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
> Sussex;
>
> Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
> Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
> <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
>
> Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of London;
>
> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
>
>
> ------ Original Message ------
> From: "Burgin, Mark" <mburgin at math.ucla.edu
> <mailto:mburgin at math.ucla.edu>>
> To: "Søren Brier" <sbr.msc at cbs.dk <mailto:sbr.msc at cbs.dk>>; "Krassimir
> Markov" <markov at foibg.com <mailto:markov at foibg.com>>;
> "fis at listas.unizar.es" <fis at listas.unizar.es
> <mailto:fis at listas.unizar.es>>
> Sent: 5/24/2018 4:23:53 AM
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Is information physical? A logical analysis
>
>> Dear Søren,
>> You response perfectly supports my analysis. Indeed, for you only the
>> Physical World is real. So, information has to by physical if it is
>> real, or it cannot be real if it is not physical.
>> Acceptance of a more advanced model of the World, which includes
>> other realities, as it was demonstrated in my book “Structural
>> Reality,” allows understand information as real but not physical.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Mark
>>
>> On 5/17/2018 3:29 AM, Søren Brier wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Mark
>>>
>>> Using ’physical’ this way it just tends to mean ’real’, but that
>>> raises the problem of how to define real. Is chance real? I Gödel’s
>>> theorem or mathematics and logic in general (the world of form)? Is
>>> subjectivity and self-awareness, qualia? I do believe you are a
>>> conscious subject with feelings, but I cannot feel it, see it,
>>> measure it. Is it physical then?? I only see what you write and your
>>> behavior. And are the meaning of your sentences physical? So here we
>>> touch phenomenology (the experiential) and hermeneutics (meaning and
>>> interpretation) and more generally semiotics (the meaning of signs
>>> in cognition and communication). We have problems encompassing these
>>> aspects in the natural, the quantitative and the technical sciences
>>> that makes up the foundation of most conceptions of information science.
>>>
>>> Best
>>>
>>> Søren
>>>
>>> *Fra:*Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> *På vegne af *Krassimir Markov
>>> *Sendt:* 17. maj 2018 11:33
>>> *Til:* fis at listas.unizar.es; Burgin, Mark <mburgin at math.ucla.edu>
>>> *Emne:* Re: [Fis] Is information physical? A logical analysis
>>>
>>> Dear Mark and FIS Colleagues,
>>>
>>> First of all. I support the idea of Mark to write a paper and to
>>> publish it in IJ ITA.
>>>
>>> It will be nice to continue our common work this way.
>>>
>>> At the second place, I want to point that till now the discussion on
>>>
>>> *Is information physical?*
>>>
>>> was more-less chaotic – we had no thesis and antithesis to discuss
>>> and to come to some conclusions.
>>>
>>> I think now, the Mark’s letter may be used as the needed thesis.
>>>
>>> What about the ant-thesis? Well, I will try to write something below.
>>>
>>> For me, physical, structural and mental are one and the same.
>>>
>>> Mental means physical reflections and physical processes in the
>>> Infos consciousness. I.e. “physical” include “mental”.
>>>
>>> Structure (as I understand this concept) is mental reflection of the
>>> relationships “between” and/or “in” real (physical) entities as well
>>> as “between” and/or “in” mental (physical) entities.
>>>
>>> I.e. “physical” include “mental” include “structural”.
>>>
>>> Finally, IF “information is physical, structural and mental” THEN
>>> simply the “information is physical”!
>>>
>>> Friendly greetings
>>>
>>> Krassimir
>>>
>>> *From:*Burgin, Mark <mailto:mburgin at math.ucla.edu>
>>>
>>> *Sent:*Thursday, May 17, 2018 5:20 AM
>>>
>>> *To:*fis at listas.unizar.es <mailto:fis at listas.unizar.es>
>>>
>>> *Subject:*Re: [Fis] Is information physical? A logical analysis
>>>
>>> Dear FISers,
>>> It was an interesting discussion, in which many highly
>>> intelligent and creative individuals participated expressing
>>> different points of view. Many interesting ideas were suggested. As
>>> a conclusion to this discussion, I would like to suggest a logical
>>> analysis of the problem based on our intrinsic and often tacit
>>> assumptions.
>>>
>>> To great extent, our possibility to answer the question “Is
>>> information physical? “ depends on our model of the world. Note that
>>> here physical means the nature of information and not its substance,
>>> or more exactly, the substance of its carrier, which can be
>>> physical, chemical biological or quantum. By the way, expression
>>> “quantum information” is only the way of expressing that the carrier
>>> of information belongs to the quantum level of nature. This is
>>> similar to the expressions “mixed numbers” or “decimal numbers”,
>>> which are only forms or number representations and not numbers
>>> themselves.
>>>
>>> If we assume that there is only the physical world, we have, at
>>> first, to answer the question “Does information exist? “ All FISers
>>> assume that information exists. Otherwise, they would not
>>> participate in our discussions. However, some people think
>>> differently (cf., for example, Furner, J. (2004) Information studies
>>> without information).
>>>
>>> Now assuming that information exists, we have only one option,
>>> namely, to admit that information is physical because only physical
>>> things exist.
>>> If we assume that there are two worlds - information is physical,
>>> we have three options assuming that information exists:
>>> - information is physical
>>> - information is mental
>>> - information is both physical and mental
>>>
>>> Finally, coming to the Existential Triad of the World, which
>>> comprises three worlds - the physical world, the mental world and
>>> the world of structures, we have seven options assuming that
>>> information exists:
>>> - information is physical
>>> - information is mental
>>> - information is structural
>>> - information is both physical and mental
>>> - information is both physical and structural
>>> - information is both structural and mental
>>> - information is physical, structural and mental
>>>
>>> The solution suggested by the general theory of information tries to
>>> avoid unnecessary multiplication of essences suggesting that
>>> information (in a general sense) exists in all three worlds but … in
>>> the physical world, it is called *energy*, in the mental world, it
>>> is called *mental energy*, and in the world of structures, it is
>>> called *information* (in the strict sense). This conclusion well
>>> correlates with the suggestion of Mark Johnson that information is
>>> both physical and not physical only the general theory of
>>> information makes this idea more exact and testable.
>>> In addition, being in the world of structures, information in the
>>> strict sense is represented in two other worlds by its
>>> representations and carriers. Note that any representation of
>>> information is its carrier but not each carrier of information is
>>> its representation. For instance, an envelope with a letter is a
>>> carrier of information in this letter but it is not its representation.
>>> Besides, it is possible to call all three faces of information by
>>> the name energy - physical energy, mental energy and structural energy.
>>>
>>> Finally, as many interesting ideas were suggested in this
>>> discussion, may be Krassimir will continue his excellent initiative
>>> combining the most interesting contributions into a paper with the title
>>> *Is information physical?*
>>> and publish it in his esteemed Journal.
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>> Mark Burgin
>>>
>>> On 5/11/2018 3:20 AM, Karl Javorszky wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Arturo,
>>>
>>> There were some reports in clinical psychology, about 30 years
>>> ago, that relate to the question whether a machine can pretend
>>> to be a therapist. That was the time as computers could newly be
>>> used in an interactive fashion, and the Rogers techniques were a
>>> current discovery.
>>>
>>> (Rogers developed a dialogue method where one does not address
>>> the contents of what the patient says, but rather the emotional
>>> aspects of the message, assumed to be at work in the patient.)
>>>
>>> They then said, that in some cases it was indistinguishable,
>>> whether a human or a machine provides the answer to a patient's
>>> elucidations.
>>>
>>> Progress since then has surely made possible to create machines
>>> that are indistinguishable in interaction to humans. Indeed,
>>> what is called "expert systems ", are widely used in many
>>> fields. If the interaction is rational, that is: formally
>>> equivalent to a logical discussion modi Wittgenstein, the
>>> difference in: "who arrived at this answer, machinery or a
>>> human", becomes irrelevant.
>>>
>>> Artistry, intuition, creativity are presently seen as not
>>> possible to translate into Wittgenstein sentences. Maybe the
>>> inner instincts are not yet well understood. But!: there are
>>> some who are busily undermining the current fundamentals of
>>> rational thinking. So there is hope that we shall live to
>>> experience the ultimate disillusionment, namely that humans are
>>> a combinatorial tautology.
>>>
>>> Accordingly, may I respectfully express opposing views to what
>>> you state: that machines and humans are of incompatible builds.
>>> There are hints that as far as rational capabilities go, the
>>> same principles apply. There is a rest, you say, which is not of
>>> this kind. The counter argument says that irrational processes
>>> do not take place in organisms, therefore what you refer to
>>> belongs to the main process, maybe like waste belongs to the
>>> organism's principle. This view draws a picture of a functional
>>> biotope, in which the waste of one kind of organism is raw
>>> material for a different kind.
>>>
>>> Karl
>>>
>>> <tozziarturo at libero.it> schrieb am Do., 10. Mai 2018 15:24:
>>>
>>> Dear Bruno,
>>> You state:
>>> "IF indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive
>>> science,
>>> THEN “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical
>>> term, i.e. “physical” becomes a mathematical notion.
>>> ...Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there
>>> is a level of description of the brain/body such that I
>>> would survive, or “not feel any change” if my brain/body is
>>> replaced by a digital machine emulating the brain/body at
>>> that level of description".
>>>
>>> The problem of your account is the following:
>>> You say "IF" and "indexical digital mechanism is the
>>> HYPOTHESIS".
>>> Therefore, you are talking of an HYPOTHESIS: it is not
>>> empirically tested and it is not empirically testable. You
>>> are starting with a sort of postulate: I, and other people,
>>> do not agree with it. The current neuroscience does not
>>> state that our brain/body is (or can be replaced by) a
>>> digital machine.
>>> In other words, your "IF" stands for something that possibly
>>> does not exist in our real world. Here your entire building
>>> falls down.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Inviato da Libero Mail per Android
>>>
>>> giovedì, 10 maggio 2018, 02:46PM +02:00 da Bruno Marchal
>>> marchal at ulb.ac.be <mailto:marchal at ulb.ac.be>:
>>>
>>>
>>> (This mail has been sent previously , but without
>>> success. I resend it, with minor changes). Problems due
>>> to different accounts. It was my first comment to Mark
>>> Burgin new thread “Is information physical?”.
>>>
>>> Dear Mark, Dear Colleagues,
>>>
>>> Apology for not answering the mails in the chronological
>>> orders, as my new computer classifies them in some
>>> mysterious way!
>>>
>>> This is my first post of the week. I might answer
>>> comment, if any, at the end of the week.
>>>
>>> On 25 Apr 2018, at 03:47, Burgin, Mark
>>> <mburgin at math.ucla.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Colleagues,
>>>
>>> I would like to suggest the new topic for discussion
>>>
>>> Is information physical?
>>>
>>> That is an important topic indeed, very close to what I
>>> am working on.
>>>
>>> My result here is that
>>>
>>> *_IF_*indexical digital mechanism is correct in the
>>> cognitive science,
>>>
>>> *_THEN_* “physical” has to be defined entirely in
>>> arithmetical term, i.e. “physical” becomes a
>>> mathematical notion.
>>>
>>> The proof is constructive. It shows exactly how to
>>> derive physics from Arithmetic (the reality, not the
>>> theory. I use “reality” instead of “model" (logician’s
>>> term, because physicists use “model" for “theory").
>>>
>>> Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there
>>> is a level of description of the brain/body such that I
>>> would survive, or “not feel any change” if my brain/body
>>> is replaced by a digital machine emulating the
>>> brain/body at that level of description.
>>>
>>> Not only information is not physical, but matter, time,
>>> space, and all physical objects become part of the
>>> universal machine phenomenology. Physics is reduced to
>>> arithmetic, or, equivalently, to any Turing-complete
>>> machinery. Amazingly Arithmetic (even the tiny
>>> semi-computable part of arithmetic) is Turing complete
>>> (Turing Universal).
>>>
>>> The basic idea is that:
>>>
>>> 1) no universal machine can distinguish if she is
>>> executed by an arithmetical reality or by a physical
>>> reality. And,
>>>
>>> 2) all universal machines are executed in arithmetic,
>>> and they are necessarily undetermined on the set of of
>>> all its continuations emulated in arithmetic.
>>>
>>> That reduces physics to a statistics on all computations
>>> relative to my actual state, and see from some first
>>> person points of view (something I can describe more
>>> precisely in some future post perhaps).
>>>
>>> Put in that way, the proof is not constructive, as, if
>>> we are machine, we cannot know which machine we are. But
>>> Gödel’s incompleteness can be used to recover this
>>> constructively for a simpler machine than us, like Peano
>>> arithmetic. This way of proceeding enforces the
>>> distinction between first and third person views (and
>>> six others!).
>>>
>>> I have derived already many feature of quantum mechanics
>>> from this (including the possibility of quantum
>>> computer) a long time ago. I was about sure this would
>>> refute Mechanism, until I learned about quantum
>>> mechanics, which verifies all the most startling
>>> predictions of Indexical Mechanism, unless we add the
>>> controversial wave collapse reduction principle.
>>>
>>> The curious “many-worlds” becomes the obvious (in
>>> arithmetic) many computations (up to some equivalence
>>> quotient). The weird indeterminacy becomes the simpler
>>> amoeba like duplication. The non-cloning of matter
>>> becomes obvious: as any piece of matter is the result of
>>> the first person indeterminacy (the first person view of
>>> the amoeba undergoing a duplication, …) on infinitely
>>> many computations. This entails also that neither matter
>>> appearance nor consciousness are Turing emulable per se,
>>> as the whole arithmetical reality—which is a highly non
>>> computable notion as we know since Gödel—plays a key
>>> role. Note this makes Digital Physics leaning to
>>> inconsistency, as it implies indexical computationalism
>>> which implies the negation of Digital Physics (unless my
>>> “body” is the entire physical universe, which I rather
>>> doubt).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> My opinion is presented below:
>>>
>>> Why some people erroneously think that
>>> information is physical
>>>
>>> The main reason to think that information is
>>> physical is the strong belief of many people,
>>> especially, scientists that there is only physical
>>> reality, which is studied by science. At the same
>>> time, people encounter something that they call
>>> information.
>>>
>>> When people receive a letter, they comprehend
>>> that it is information because with the letter they
>>> receive information. The letter is physical, i.e., a
>>> physical object. As a result, people start thinking
>>> that information is physical. When people receive an
>>> e-mail, they comprehend that it is information
>>> because with the e-mail they receive information.
>>> The e-mail comes to the computer in the form of
>>> electromagnetic waves, which are physical. As a
>>> result, people start thinking even more that
>>> information is physical.
>>>
>>> However, letters, electromagnetic waves and
>>> actually all physical objects are only carriers or
>>> containers of information.
>>>
>>> To understand this better, let us consider a
>>> textbook. Is possible to say that this book is
>>> knowledge? Any reasonable person will tell that the
>>> textbook contains knowledge but is not knowledge
>>> itself. In the same way, the textbook contains
>>> information but is not information itself. The same
>>> is true for letters, e-mails, electromagnetic waves
>>> and other physical objects because all of them only
>>> contain information but are not information. For
>>> instance, as we know, different letters can contain
>>> the same information. Even if we make an identical
>>> copy of a letter or any other text, then the letter
>>> and its copy will be different physical objects
>>> (physical things) but they will contain the same
>>> information.
>>>
>>> Information belongs to a different (non-physical)
>>> world of knowledge, data and similar essences. In
>>> spite of this, information can act on physical
>>> objects (physical bodies) and this action also
>>> misleads people who think that information is physical.
>>>
>>> OK. The reason is that we can hardly imagine how
>>> immaterial or non physical objects can alter the
>>> physical realm. It is the usual problem faced by dualist
>>> ontologies. With Indexical computationalism we recover
>>> many dualities, but they belong to the phenomenologies.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> One more misleading property of information is
>>> that people can measure it. This brings an erroneous
>>> assumption that it is possible to measure only
>>> physical essences. Naturally, this brings people to
>>> the erroneous conclusion that information is
>>> physical. However, measuring information is
>>> essentially different than measuring physical
>>> quantities, i.e., weight. There are no “scales” that
>>> measure information. Only human intellect can do this.
>>>
>>> OK. I think all intellect can do that, not just he human
>>> one.
>>>
>>> Now, the reason why people believe in the physical is
>>> always a form of the “knocking table” argument. They
>>> knocks on the table and say “you will not tell me that
>>> this table is unreal”.
>>>
>>> I have got so many people giving me that argument, that
>>> I have made dreams in which I made that argument, or
>>> even where I was convinced by that argument … until I
>>> wake up.
>>>
>>> When we do metaphysics with the scientific method, this
>>> “dream argument” illustrates that seeing, measuring, …
>>> cannot prove anything ontological. A subjective
>>> experience proves only the phenomenological existence of
>>> consciousness, and nothing more. It shows that although
>>> there are plenty of strong evidences for a material
>>> reality, there are no evidences (yet) for a primitive or
>>> primary matter (and that is why, I think, Aristotle
>>> assumes it quasi explicitly, against Plato, and
>>> plausibly against Pythagorus).
>>>
>>> Mechanism forces a coming back to Plato, where the
>>> worlds of ideas is the world of programs, or
>>> information, or even just numbers, since very elementary
>>> arithmetic (PA without induction, + the predecessor
>>> axiom) is already Turing complete (it contains what I
>>> have named a Universal Dovetailer: a program which
>>> generates *and* executes all programs).
>>>
>>> So I agree with you: information is not physical. I
>>> claim that if we assume Mechanism (Indexical
>>> computationalism) matter itself is also not *primarily*
>>> physical: it is all in the “head of the universal
>>> machine/number” (so to speak).
>>>
>>> And this provides a test for primary matter: it is
>>> enough to find if there is a discrepancy between the
>>> physics that we infer from the observation, and the
>>> physics that we extract from “the head” of the machine.
>>> This took me more than 30 years of work, but the results
>>> obtained up to now is that there is no discrepancies. I
>>> have compared the quantum logic imposed by
>>> incompleteness (formally) on the semi-computable
>>> (partial recursive, sigma_1) propositions, with most
>>> quantum logics given by physicists, and it fits rather well.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> Bruno
>>>
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>>
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