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Topic: Dogma? (Read 3843 times) |
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romanov
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Doctor of Philosophy? What disease is that?
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Re:Dogma?
« Reply #15 on: 2004-02-02 23:02:38 » |
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If you are talking about information in the sense of the amount of total information, then the absolute amount never changes in a closed system. And Lucifer is right: if we could directly experimentally access this other "universe" it would by definition form part of our universe.
If, on the other hand, you're talking about the 'quality' of the information, how 'ordered' the information is, then this is subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy always prevails and the level of order in the information will decrease over time.
Incidentally, life works by opposing the second law, not by 'creating' new information, but by maintaining, imperfectly, the integrity of existing information, something that the second law says will inevitably require energy- hence the need to consume surrounding energy resources, leading to competition, co-operation and selection (not to mention that this tendency towards disorder is what creates mutation in unstable DNA in the first place).
So on the one hand, the universe by definition is a closed dying system, at the whim of the second law. On the other, evolution requires the second law, and we could not exist without it.
romanov
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Gunit
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Heeeer's Gunit!
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Re:Dogma?
« Reply #16 on: 2004-03-23 02:27:47 » |
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Quote from: David Lucifer on 2004-01-28 13:31:48
On a related note, do you think the amount of information in the universe is growing, decreasing or remaining steady?
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I'm not sure I understand what you mean by information. It seems to me that 'information' is meaningless without someone to interpret it. Also, anything can be considered information. Light from the sun tells us that it exists, that its yellow, that it is hot. Similarily the molecules of a pen tell my senses that it exists. In that sence the amount of information can not increase or decrease, because energy (and matter) can neither be created nor destroyed.
If you are refering to the amount of order in the universe as information then I'm not sure that I agree that all order is information. Again, order depends on the viewpoint. Something could be ordered by one person and be meaningless chaos to another.
GUnit
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
 
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Re:Dogma?
« Reply #17 on: 2004-03-23 20:01:59 » |
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[Lucifer]
If a source of energy was discovered "outside" our universe wouldn't the borders of the unvierse be redrawn to include the source? If so, then the universe is thermodynamically closed by definition.
[Jake]
hmm. Well, by the time we have reached a context of such a magnitude, we may be dealing with an entirely different set of rules. I guess this is part of the problem with dealing with concepts like "universe". Maybe it would be better to simply say "the universe as we know it" to avoid definitional conundrums like this.
[Lucifer]
I don't see a conundrum, I was just pointing out that the universe is usually defined as everything that exists, so it doesn't make sense to speculate about external energy sources or anything else that could possibly make the universe anything other than a thermodynamically closed system.
[rhinoceros]
What Lucifer says makes logical sense but I would partly share Jake's caution. Defining a system of "everything that exists" may (or may not) prove worthwhile, but its utility is not as easily testable as the utility of the systems for which thermodynamics was developed.
Also, extending the borders of a universe defined this way to include an external source may (or may not) prove to be problematic in the case of "one way" borders, such as black holes.
That said, I think that making the assumption that the universe is a closed system and working out the consequences is good science.
[Lucifer]
On a related note, do you think the amount of information in the universe is growing, decreasing or remaining steady?
[Jake]
I'm guessing that the answer to this depends on how much life, and how much intelligence there is in the universe, since lifelike and/or intelligent phenomenon seem to use and generate information more so than other things.
[Lucifer]
Life is certainly generating information, but I'm wondering whether it is doing so at the expense of information elsewhere.
[romanov]
If you are talking about information in the sense of the amount of total information, then the absolute amount never changes in a closed system. And Lucifer is right: if we could directly experimentally access this other "universe" it would by definition form part of our universe.
[GUnit]
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by information. It seems to me that 'information' is meaningless without someone to interpret it. Also, anything can be considered information. Light from the sun tells us that it exists, that its yellow, that it is hot. Similarily the molecules of a pen tell my senses that it exists. In that sence the amount of information can not increase or decrease, because energy (and matter) can neither be created nor destroyed.
If you are refering to the amount of order in the universe as information then I'm not sure that I agree that all order is information. Again, order depends on the viewpoint. Something could be ordered by one person and be meaningless chaos to another.
[rhinoceros]
Sure, the information that "this object is a chair", the fact that it is something suitable for people to sit on is not contained in the chair itself, no matter how comprehensively we describe it. It is contained in the whole system consisting of the chair-object, gravity, human anatomy, human culture and much more.
Shannon's information theory is the only one I know which successfully managed to separate information from any kind of meaning and to make it a pure quantity expressed in bits.
Basically, Shannon's came up with a quantity for the information content of a system and showed that this quantity is analogous to its thermodynamic (Bolzman) entropy. According to this, the information content of a closed system (or even the universe) never decreases -- it can only increase. In fact, Shannon named the information content of a system "entropy".
Schematically the reasoning goes like this:
1) drawing information from a system = reducing our uncertainty about the system
2) drawing ALL information from a system = reducing our uncertainty from its highest point down to zero
3) information content of a system = all the uncertainty contained in a system = thermodynamic entropy of the system
Note that, according to Bolzman's definition, entropy is roughly the number of all the possible combinations of states of the elements of the system. In Shannon's definition of information, this can translated into the number of bits needed to fully describe the system.
Now, what does it look like in practice? A well ordered system can be described with fewer bits, so it has a lower entropy and a lower information content. For a very high entropy system, one which has suffered a "thermal death" and there is nothing else but thermal motion of the molecules, we would need to describe each and every molecule's motion. This system has a high information content according to Shannon's definition.
Hawking came up with an interesting theory saying that the area of the event horizon of a black hole never decreases -- it can only increase (same as entropy). That led to one more interesting theory saying that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its area. There was a very interesting speculative article in Scientific American touching on some of these issues several months ago. If you have a SciAm online subscription you can find it here
Information in the Holographic Universe
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF
or else you'll have to grab a pirated copy such as this one:
http://www.gulizk.com/fizik/holographic.html
Heh, tired now.
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Matt Arnold
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The Electric Monk
     
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Re:Dogma?
« Reply #18 on: 2004-05-20 13:20:06 » |
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I'd like to go back to the topic for which Stray started this thread, and address it. He seems to be saying that if Virian doctrine is constantly open to change, then the old obsolete versions have died and are therefore not immortal. At first glance this does make the claim of doctrinal immortality seem like a paradox.
Transhumanists have a speculative concept we call "death forward." This refers to a person who lives for so many millenia that eventually he accumulates so many changes to who he is that he is no longer recognizably the same individual. Some of them consider this a gradual and acceptable form of "death." Similarly, if Virian doctrine is allowed to change, it could experience "death forward."
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He believed in a door. The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.
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deusdiabolus
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NEVER underestimate monkey!
 
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Re:Dogma?
« Reply #21 on: 2004-09-29 02:52:33 » |
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Quote from: stray on 2003-07-29 00:51:41
Would you be able to give me an example of what the CoV considers to be a " truly meaningful life", an example of immortality that is not a mystical delusion and would it be possible to explain the Cov's tenet of immortality in a supposed ever changing system?
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I was under the impression that they were referring to the ideology structure as becoming immortal, not actual human beings. Even if that were feasible, it would probably be quite a way off in the future. Of course in the meantime we can find a combination of vitamins, minerals, herbs and physical regiments to extend our lives that much more. And there is always magickal exploration.
But isn't it an interesting possibility that we might actually have the key to immortality, and all we have to do is figure it out?
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my WR0N9 is LEGEND
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deadletter-j
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How many Engstrom's does it take?
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Re:Dogma?
« Reply #22 on: 2005-01-26 22:24:54 » |
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Hello again. Standing here on a meme-complex about language parsing, I will tell you a catchphrase we coined to address this issue.
1) Encourage Derivatives.
With many progeny, the fundamental identity of the original meme/gene recoalesces as the aggregate of the offspring.
For example, there was one Jewish family named 'Grad' Now there are several thousand of us. The original family's immortality is in the collective version of us now. Our collective imprint.
Here's another example. After the Palm Pilot first came out, there came out copies. These pushed the popularity of the original.
When copywrite laws discourage copying, the original fundamentally suffers. Ritalin didn't really go big until methylphenidate was copied by other drug companies.
Kleenex. Post-its.
This is the beautiful component of open source. Open Source filmmaking (coming to a town near you in a few years!) is going to kick closed-source filmmaking (hollywood, bollywood, etc) on its butt.
Encourage Derivatives. Where is the original? In all the descendants together.
When there are many, many, many, memetic churches, the Church of the Virus will exist in all of them. The Goddess reborn as Virgin Mary, etc.
We call this 'transmogrification'.
thanks, Calvin and Hobbes.
-b
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