Hello Magnus and Focs,
> However, when you mentioned information theory I got to think about a funny
> twitch I read about a few days ago about this second law. Perhaps it's the
same
> result Shannon gave rise to? Anyway, as time passes, the entropy or disorder
of
> a system is supposed to increase, and a system with maximum entropy is a
system
> with only white noise, i.e. no information.
>
Let me interject an inversion . . .
. . . AS ENTROPY/DISORDER INCREASES, TIME IS PERCEIVED SAID TO PASS".
It may be an aside to Magnus's main point, but let's not forget that TIME and
not entropy is the topic of the month.
> But information theory, or rather compression techniques compresses
information
> by removing redundancy, i.e. order. So, a maximally compressed system is
also a
> system with only white noise, but such a system contains a maximum amount of
> information.
> So, is a system with maximum entropy full of information or empty?
> (Didn't some of you discuss this last year? I'm beginning to get a faint
recollection.)
Very nice Magnus - the compressed system does indeed look like white noise . .
.
. . .but it isn't. You can completely reshuffle the white noise and it stays
white noise.
However, with the compressed signal, changing just one "bit" is a significant
change.
This was the whole point of the "randomness" discussion a while back. My
conclusion was that the randomness isn't an objective property of the system,
but also depended on the subject making the observation. The same goes for
information content. The receiver has to make a decision what to accept as
"meaningful" and what to throw out as noise. Otherwise, the output of a monkey
at a keyboard would be just as meaningful as anything else written here. I
could go on, but this is off topic, technical and it has been discussed
before.
>
> > P.S. Magnus, you asked Roger "When we leave the inorganic world and
> > enter the quantum level, time does not exist anymore, right?" I don't
> > understand your question. Please explain.
MAGNUS [more detailed explanation was in Magnus's original post]
> My question, or rather assertion, above that time doesn't exist when we
enter
> the quantum level is based on such experiments. Quantum particles simply
don't
> know, nor care, what time is. Time is something that inorganic patterns are
> bound by, quantum patterns are not. ...
Magnus, I don't think that there is any such beast as a "quantum particle".
Particles are particles and belong squarely in Pirsig's inorganic level. The
problem with isolated particles is that they cannot exhibit population
behaviour! This makes it very hard to talk about thermodynamics and entropy
which - those "properties of state" are essentially descriptions populations
of particles. It thus makes sense to me that IF TIME IS A CONSEQUENCE OF
ENTROPY INCREASE,then when we try and look at single particles we lose sense
of both entropy and time. It is little wonder that time has strange properties
in those "quantum" experiments.
I hope I haven't offended any Kant fans by writing this . . .
Jonathan
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