David Gould

Is information ever created? Does it just appear?
I have read somewhere that entropy is a measure of information loss. Is there a measure of information gain?

I ask this question because I have just started reading an introduction to philosophy and have come across Aristotle's argument against materialism - basically, he says that things cannot be simply their materials because a house is not simply bricks and mortar: it is instead a particular arrangement of bricks and mortar.

His argument is that while all existing things need materials, that is not all they consist of.

I am fairly new to the topics of information, materialism and philosophy in general so I need some fairly simplified answers, i guess.

Francois Tremblay

That's not an argument against materialism. Indeed most materialists acknowledge that matter has patterns and that these patterns are significant to us - there is nothing non-material about it.

There is a big thread about this on the Philosophy board, but the question basically comes down to the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever for other modes of existence than matter. As long as there is no evidence, other positions are little more than mind games.

Photocrat

If you want the mathematics, read up on compression algorithms. According to the definition of information used in them, random bitstrings have the most information in them. Entropy tends to make things more random, rather than more ordered [or so it's usually generalized; please read up on thermodynamics for the full explanation & don't try to equivocate 'closed' and 'open' systems as some do... :]

Happy Wonderer

I would argue that the physics model doesn't fit information theory very well. There is no conservation of information. Energy can only change form; information can be created and destroyed (by a shredder at Arthur Anderson...)

Consider a programming team that decides to create a communication standard to facilitate data transfers across various brands of databases. This interface doesn't depend upon the details of how any particular database works. Other programmers write "drivers" for their particular database that would convert to our interface; once this is done application programs written using our interface standard would in theory be able to operate on different brands of databases without modification. You could also consider the Java programming language to be an example.


Designing an interface involves making decisions (many of which are mundane.) For example, to connect to a database may require a function call to send both a user name and a password. When designing an interface, you have to decide which comes first: is it "user name" followed by "password" or vice-versa? In many cases the decision is arbitrary. Once this arbitrary decision is made, I'd argue that information was created.

Why created? In such an example, no existing information is destroyed (or perhaps even used). Because of the arbitrary nature of programming, I don't see that one could argue that the interface "existed" beforehand and was merely "discovered" (as one might a mathematical proof.) To argue that it pre-existed as a member of "all possible interfaces" would lead to an uninteresting logical view where the definition of existance would have little meaning.

Of course, you can argue that the underlying processes governing the beings and machines who create the information are captive to the laws of thermodynamics; but from my point of view that only argues that information can be destroyed rather than that it cannot be created. The novel form that the energy took is the information.

I'm not aware of any general measures of information gain but I wouldn't claim to be an expert on it. "Information" is such a large term that I think it would be difficult to put a unit of measure on it. How would you compare the information represented by a general-purpose programming language with the information represented by the global climate system? This is also a problem with trying to apply a law that is specfically about energy states to something as general as information.

HW

This is my first post here, hope it works and that I haven't offended anybody....

Coragyps

Hey, HW, welcome! And refuse to trouble yourself that you might offend someone on here - we nearly all act like adults over 30% of the time!

David Gould

No offence - great ideas, food for thought.

Thanks.

David

David Gould

The philosophy book that I read stated it as an argument against 'crude materialism' whatever that means.

I have read the thread you are referring to - I even put down some ideas of my own. I am certainly a materialist. However, I think there is something in the information argument - if information is created, out of what is it created? How is it created? Et cetera. I am thinking about the position that maybe information is never created at all...

David Gould

Interesting that they define 'randomness' as the most information...
That means that entropy does not measure information loss.
Excellent - I suspect that that supports the idea that information is never destroyed.

Francois Tremblay

I already told you what information is - information is a pattern of matter to which we attribute meaning.

Look, for example, at what you are reading right now. No doubt it has informational content ! What is it really ? On my screen anyway, it is an arrangement of lighted liquid crystals such that they form letters that I recognize. That is how I know the pattern of light on my screen is information. There is nothing mystical or mumbo-jumbo about it.

Photocrat

I would be careful about reasoning that way. 'Information' in such a context has a precise mathematical meaning--you do have to be careful to use the word in the same sense, later. As someone pointed out, you can destroy some of what we think of as "information" [e.g. in the aforementioned shredders]