Re: Again on physics, entropy and information

(message from werner_ebeling@web.de)
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Dear FISers,

I am following our discussion already a while without interfering.
After reading again about 100 pages of discussion
I would like to make the following remarks:

We should never forget in our discussion about basic problems that
the information concept has a very solid fundament in physics,
communication, computers, internet etc.. We are living in an
information society and several concepts are simply fixed
already they cannot be traded freely.
Anybody who forgets all this will be like Antaeus.
Let me mention a few concepts which as I believe should not be
thrown away lightheartly:

- information is a binary relation between a sender and a receiver
(I cannot understand why several FISers like to consider information as
a property of a system itself, like mass, energy, momentum in physics.
To me and I believe to any engineer,
information is binary as interaction in physics it is a relation between
two things),

- flow of information between sender and receiver is connected
with decrease of uncertainty (why we should give up such an
extremely fruitful concept due to Shannon. Communication networks
and by the way also our internet discussion would break down.
We should not ignore the reality of communication based on this).

- information flow is connected with entropy flow, this is expressed
by the Boltzmann Shannon formulae.
(Entropy in physics is one of the fundaments of any physical theory
the number of technical applications from cars to refrigerators are
uncountable).

Of course there many other aspects which are more or less fixed by
practice.

To me the unsolved problems are:

- what is the exact relation between physical entropy and information
entropy (there were very interesting remarks by Shu-Kun Lee on this
L = I + S but things are much more complicated, by the way also
the information content relation to stability is not a clear concept).

- is there any measure of the meaning of a message (this is indead
a very complicated question, Shannons measure expresses clearly
only the quantity not the meaning)

- the specific properties of information in biological/social systems

- selforganization of information processing systems in the
evolution of life.

By the way to me information is not a physical concept, it is not
contained in the axioma of physics. There was no information before the
first living system appeared on earth and as far as I see information
processing is always at least indirectly connected with biological
social technical systems.
It would be very interesting for me to learn about an
information processing system absolutely independent from life.

Summarizing I thing this discussion is extremely inspiring and useful
but sometimes we have to come back to our earth.

Regards
Werner Ebeling
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Received on Thu May 30 10:08:46 2002