/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15033283
...with something where relationships are fundemental. Probably something more like formalism in mathematics. "An object is what it does."

Even though it is absolutely not what the author intended, I think this view goes great with this genius definition of information from group theory. The intro parts of this are very accessible and an excellent primer on information theory, which unifies cognitive science, biology, and physics.

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TL;DR, you definitely live in experienced reality. If you look at some musings on the holographic principal, you'll see that this might be true on a level deeper than just the fact that the objects you perceive don't exist outside your perception of them (at least they don't exist as anything like what your perceive).

As to us being in a simulation controlled by God-like ETs, this seems less likely. It's possible, sure, but I haven't seen good arguments for it.

I find Hegelian/informational based theories to handle the problem of the noumenal/phenomenal cleft most intriguing.

>>14991602
... heaping praise on it and calling it worthy of Bohm.

So, formalism just seems the most pragmatic.


>>14991584
I'm not saying anything that people in philosophy of mathematics/mathematical foundations/information haven't said.

Or maybe everyone who does that work is a pseud. But then you've just called out all the major contributors to mathematics pseuds since they were deeply concerned with foundations and philosophy of mathematics.

Being genuinely interested in this stuff definitionally makes you a pseud?

The arguments I've seen for formalism just seems better. Was Hilbert a pseud? Were the Pythagoreans pseuds?

>>14971930
Now let's go to mathematics. You can define numbers in terms of the world. You can have 5 oranges and add 3 for 8. However, this edifice on numbers being symbols for instantiations of objects falls apart pretty quickly. I can't subtract 6 oranges from 3 oranges. Division can be done for somethings, but many things cannot be divided without ceasing to be what they are (e.g. a helium atom split in half is not a helium any longer). The instantiation of zero is also a problem. Is every space filled with a nullity of all possible objects that could be there? Can you split an object by Pi, into fractions of infinite length?

In the abstract view of mathematics, this is not a problem. Negative numbers come from negative additives, the simple statement that for any number A there is a number B that, when added to it, sums to zero. You can answer questions of division by positing the rule that for any number A there is a number B for which A × B = 1.

In this view, a number "is what it does" (a concept borrowed from Sausser in semiotics). A number is defined by its relationships.

This would seem to imply that relationships, not objects are primary.

And indeed, in answer to the Quine-Putnam indespensability argument, the argument that physics requires numbers and thus that numbers are real, folks have put together a partial description of physics only in terms of logical relationships.

>>14959610
Yes, that is the route cope line people are told to recite. Until Bell's Inequalities were tested and forced this to be accepted as a "good" answer, it wasn't generally thought to be acceptable. What people cared about was if causality could propagate faster than light.

The use of the term information itself is a hint since it's something that is incredibly vague and used poorly by many physicists. You'll see books and articles of people claiming that "the universe is made of information," and that various particles store X bits of information. This is nonsense. A particle only has information in that it differs from the background, from the measurements of "(relative) void. You need difference to have surprise and information entropy is defined by surprise.

But there isn't a solid consensus on what it is in the first place. It's a rare work that actually takes this seriously instead of assuming Shannon Entropy answers this (it doesn't). Pic related. Bohm was good on this sort of thing too.

You'll see a similar problem with decoherence and "sharing information causes collapse." First, where is this in the Schrodinger equation. Collapse is adhoc, Everett's point still stands on that. Second, components of entangled systems have mutual information. Information about the system is being shared.

You'll find the same Copenhagen murkiness about what constitutes observation lurking in what constitutes information exchange, just with extra levels of confusion (and sometimes obscurantism) to get around it.

Dissertations that flew totally under the radar that you think will come back as key in the history of science, sort of like Everett and MWI?

I always had a problem with the way information was formalized. For one, in Kolmogorov Complexity, a random stew of gas can be more complex than a human brain, which doesn't make sense. But at a deeper level, emergence creates new types of relationships and distinguishibility and distinguishibility is crucial for information. The idea of particles "containing" information in It From Bit formulations is ridiculous. If you don't have a background that varies from the measure you get for the particle, then you have no information. Information is asymmetry in measure.

Can't find anything on what happened to this guy though.

I still think he's somewhat wrong in that information can only be determined by distinguishibility, which can in turn only be determined by which two systems are interacting. Synonymity is one system =\= synonymity in all cases. So, this theory is most of the way there, but you need to drop the objective information part, and make it relational. I don't know how to formalize this yet, but it probably means using Bayes theorem instead of assumed objective frequencies.

Never found anything else like this that cuts against the grain so hard, but seems so right.