[Fis] black hole and information

[Terrence W. DEACON]

Dear colleagues,

Endless circles. Depending on who is writing the FIS communication the term
'information' is implicitly assumed to be one of the following (while all
other definitions are treated as illegitimate):

1. the physical signal medium
2. the statistical properties of the physical signal medium
3. what the statistical properties of the physical signal medium could
possibly be about
4. what the statistical properties of the physical signal medium are
specifically about for some interpreting agent
5. what the statistical properties of the physical signal medium are
specifically about that is useful for some interpreting agent
... and possibly more.

Of course none of these are illegitimate definitions, depending on the
context of their use. But if these different assumptions are not
distinguished it can lead to mutually incompatible accounts and tiresome
semantic quibbles. The Black Hole account clearly assumes 1 and possibly 2.
>From my perspective, however, things only start to get interesting with 3,
4, and 5. But we will never succeed in resolving the challenges posed by
them if we continue to try to collapse these distinctions and argue that a
particular use is the only legitimate scientifically valid one. I know I
must sound like a broken record when I suggest that our discussions would
be more fruitful and less contentious if people would just recognize this
polysemy and indicate which of the possible uses of the term they are
assuming.

— Terry

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 8:45 AM Karl Javorszky <karl.javorszky at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Xueshan, Krassimir et al,
>
>
>
> In my humble reasoned opinion, this group should already have been
> nominated for the next Nobel prize; whether in Physics or Biology, is but a
> detail.
>
> We have, during the last 25 years, under the prophetic leadership of
> Pedro, arrived at cornering the term ‘information’ on many levels and by
> many descriptions. The group work has been done by the non-dogmatic,
> dialogic method, by employing the recurrent questioning technique of
> Socrates: *But then, how do you explain this:?*
>
> In the present iteration, Krassimir again raises the point of *information
> is in your head. *The answer is, again, that we would not have an organ
> for perceiving *information*, if the stimuli which this organ perceives,
> would not have an *independent, interpersonal* *existence*.
>
> Compare it with the perception of magnetism by migratory birds or of
> electric fields by some sea floor searching predators. Discussing among
> each other, two storks can agree that magnetism is only in a stork’s head,
> as can two hammerhead sharks agree, that electric impulses of the prey are
> only in the heads of hammerhead sharks. Owls would not agree with snakes,
> that the smell and warmth is what is important to watch for, because they
> know that it is the noise and the optical pattern of the prey what decides
> about the success of the catch. Humans happen to use information in the
> same fashion, without being presently able to agree on the semantics of the
> concept, much less a name for it.
>
> Information is the slight deviation between how it should be and how it
> is. The deviation between what can be the case and what is the case is a
> property that transcends smell, magnetism, optical pattern properties,
> noises and warmth. Both the *how should it be *and the *how is it *are
> pictured in the brain of the predator. Humans are able to talk about the
> difference. Sharks, owls et al are acting on the difference (by moving – in
> several senses – in such a fashion, until the perception hits the match
> between how it is and how it should be: that is, the impression fits the
> schema). Humans also act on the difference (they eat if they are hungry),
> but they are able to talk about the difference also. They may call it a
> reverie, a wish-fulfilling phantasy, an elaborate complot, an intrigue, a
> plan, an inventory, a design, a model, a roadmap, a flow diagram and an
> algorithm.
>
> *If you look at a pizza* of which a slice is missing, the *pictures* of
> the *factually present* part, the *expectation* of the whole pizza and
> the *information*, that such a slice has already been eaten, *are only in
> your head*. We certainly agree, that the partly eaten pizza exists
> furthermore in the actual world, too. This is what we say is the case. What
> Krassimir implies is, that the whole pizza does not exist outside of our
> head, nor does in his view exist the slice of the pizza that has been
> eaten, in the outside world, neither. This may be evidently true in the
> case of pizzas. What we *talk about *is indeed only in our head. What we
> *experience*, is actually present in the outside world.
>
> *How have we got there* that we experience the whole of the pizza and the
> missing part also, even if these are not actually there? The answer is in
> the pre-logical, axiomatic nature of our world being subject to *periodic
> changes*. We can take a lunar month as a convenient example, because it
> is faster than the year period and slower than the day period. In any
> moment, we are experiencing a partly eaten pizza, here in the form of a
> partly consumed day, lunar month, year. By being adapted to our planet’s
> periodic habits, we *know*, what part of the day has already passed, and
> which seasons are yet to come, and if one is of a poetic inclination, how
> far the Moon is from being fully round again. Our pizza is a temporal one,
> and there exist objective facts, which determine, what part of it has been
> eaten by Time, that eternal devourer and recreator of pizzas. One may
> assent to Krassimir: yes, our pictures are in our head, but then add: they
> reflect the outside world correctly. In the outside world there is always,
> in every moment, a partly fulfilled *is-the-case *which can be easily and
> explicitly, exactly distinguished to a relevant *can-be-the-case*, and
> the difference between these two, which we call *information*, in other
> words, what could also have become the case, or simply, what
> *is-not-the-case*. By this window, we have climbed into that room, on the
> door of which Wittgenstein has fixed a note: “Do not enter here. You get
> crazy here. You would need devices not invented yet to deal with what is
> not the case. Leave this subject aside for a while. Better not say anything
> about what is not the case.”
>
> All sensory organs use the difference between the schema and the
> impression. Humans have invented the sensibility to talk about the
> sensitivity as such. The alertness as a neurological faculty is of course a
> property of highly regulated systems, but the stimulus must exist on lower
> levels, too, if the perception of it is optimised for reasons of evolution.
>
> That there is an *innate, immanent, axiomatic wiggle-woggle* among
> several variants of *is-the-case *is what is hard to swallow,
> intellectually. One loves his Descartes home where Newton rules. Who would
> want to live in *two *Descartes spaces which partly crowd each other out,
> usually merging more or less peacefully into *one *space, in which the
> Newton etc laws are valid, but mostly in the form of some special cases,
> among manifold, interacting others?
>
> We build the picture of the world according to the axioms we experience,
> perceive and learn. If the picture of the world is incoherent, illogical,
> contradictory or inexplicable, then the axioms are to be questioned in the
> order: *learnt – perceived – experienced*, because if the individual is
> healthy, his experiences are in congruence with Nature; although he may
> perceive other stimuli than usual, as long as his faculty of perception is
> working, the reason for the many riddles in his picture of the world can
> only be in that set of axioms which he has learnt. To paraphrase
> Wittgenstein: if we lived in harmony with Nature, we would understand how
> she works, even if we were not able to speak about it. (Because we would
> lack the words for dissonances and urges, in Nirvana everything being
> always in its perfect realisation.)
>
> We have problems with our *prefabricated concepts*, with the words we
> use. We are used, e.g., to speaking about *6 *as if it was one
> indivisible Sachverhalt, which can be included in some Zusammenhaenge. Six
> is however the first case of a collection being sufficiently similar so
> that a difference can be pointed out (3 are the background to a different
> 3, on which it is demonstrated that 1 is different to 2, which in the
> background is not the case.) If one plays with six units, one almost
> inevitably creates monstrosities, which are a hybrid between a partition
> and a permutation. These are the first Lego or Tetris elements of a new
> algorithm, words of a logical language, in which a Zusammenhang among
> several Sachverhalte can be expressed, both in a sequential reading and in
> a commutative one.
>
> Dear Xueshan, Krassimir, and you all my respected right honourable learned
> friends, please circulate the following invitation on your respective black
> boards:
>
> *“Wanted: Programmers, graphic artists, data miners. Task: Data crunching
> on natural numbers. Tabulating. Maintaining a database /a little brother of
> oeis/ on names of patterns. Designers and name-givers: hunt for and
> classify patterns. Must be ready to count different kinds of cuts on
> intervals. No cash payments possible yet. First class promises. Needs
> venture capital. Great potential. Radically new method of counting explains
> some of Nature’s shenanigans.”*
>
> The hybrids (partitions laid over each other, rotated) would be of eminent
> interest to particle physicists, if they ever got around to combining their
> ideas about what, where and when. Astrophysicists could find some
> imaginative reveries if they contemplated the pictures Nature draws when
> undecided about which, if any, order exists: how much of something is
> usually where, and so forth. It is indeed educative if one studies the
> tables of trigonometry and of multiplication and of sorting and of addition
> and of reordering, if one wants to have a solid grasp of what a
> Zusammenhang is among Sachverhalte. Even more educative, if one outlines,
> draws and fills up a table oneself according to some elementary rules that
> have not been investigated yet. This requires preparedness for
> self-education, the main task is done by the numbers. The Zusammenhang lies
> imbedded in the Sachverhalte. There exists a Zusammenhang which relates to
> the way we distinctly count what follows in a different state of the world
> and what is different within the same state of the world. We are used to
> placing the Sachverhalte in differing contexts. This creates manifold
> inexactitudes in the relative references. The whole is here understood as a
> prediction, the actually existing part is the fulfilment, and the
> collection of inexactitudes is the information in the statement. The model
> is a picture we make in our own head, but the model mirrors Nature well.
>
> *There is an inbuilt rivalry* between *a* and *b*, and the cuts that
> separate these two, are alive and kicking. We cannot afford to neglect
> them, if we want to count exactly. The cuts cannot be left aside. We have
> to count with them. The rules of counting in terms of cuts are more or less
> self-explanatory, but the task needs name-givers for the results
> /proto-agglomerations/. Information is a property of the physical world,
> and our senses have learnt to use it. Unifying the counting unit means that
> we accept that we live in a three-phased dual world, of which the axes are
> differently numbered. The axioms we *experience *support the idea, as we
> procreate by merging two versions of the same story. The axioms we
> *perceive* intuitively reject the idea, because we live in *one *world,
> but insight supports it by means of microscopes and other devices that
> enhance perception, where we discover duality to actually exist in
> molecules and in many other realisations of Nature. The axioms we have
> *learnt* are the only difficulty to overcome. We have gotten used to a
> traditional model, which is nice for its simplicity, but not precise enough
> to be able to differentiate among slightly deviating perspectives. Our
> mysteries are self-created, they come about by our neglecting the syntax of
> the left side of *a+b=c*, having thought erroneously, that counting only
> by means of the syntactically simple units of the right side is precise
> enough.
>
> The Nobel prize should be awarded to the FIS as a group. We could not have
> come so far without each other. The dialogue has kept this group awake. Our
> many various half-baked ideas about what is information have in the
> concentrated lights of so many minds yielded a common roast, which is the
> nourishing slice of the pizza of information.
>
>
> Best wishes to you all
> Karl
>
> Am Di., 6. Okt. 2020 um 16:19 Uhr schrieb Krassimir Markov <
> markov at foibg.com>:
>
>> Dear Xueshan,
>> I have only one remark.
>> The Nobel Prize is given to researchers but not to the Black hole and not
>> to any other object in the Cosmos!
>>
>> Without observer there is no Black hole entropy, there is no information.
>> So, the consciousness is needed to reflect reality and to assume some
>> reflections as information.
>>
>> Friendly greetings
>> Krassimir
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Xueshan Yan <yxs at pku.edu.cn>
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, October 06, 2020 3:37 PM
>> *To:* FIS Group <fis at listas.unizar.es>
>> *Subject:* [Fis] black hole and information
>>
>>
>> Dear colleagues，
>>
>>
>>
>> This year's Nobel Prize in physics goes to black hole research today.
>> When the curvature of space-time of a celestial body is so large that even
>> light cannot escape from its event horizon, we call it a black hole. I.
>> Once a black hole is formed, except for mass, angular momentum, and
>> electric charge, all the previous material properties as objects disappear;
>> II. The horizon area of the black hole is equal to its entropy (entropy
>> equals negative information). These two issues form a close relationship
>> between the research of black hole and information. The follow-up effect of
>> this year's Nobel Prize in physics may lead to further thinking on the
>> information in the future by astrophysicists, and lay a reverie foundation
>> for the informational interpretation of matter several years later.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best wishes and health,
>>
>> Xueshan
>>
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-- 
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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