Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
In last week's post on entropy and information, I started off complaining about the most common definition of entropy as disorder or disorganization. One of the nice things about blogging is you often learn something in the subsequent discussion. My chief complaint about the disorder definition was that it's value-laden. I asked: disordered according to … Continue reading Reconciling the disorder definition of entropy
I've long struggled with the concept of entropy. Part of the reason is the way it's often described in popular science accounts, which typically seem subjective and value laden. The most common way of describing it is the amount of disorder in a system. But disorder according to who? A room that appears messy and … Continue reading Entropy, information, and causality
When discussing eternalism and the block universe, the concept of "now" always ends up getting relegated to an aspect of our consciousness, not something "out there". "Now" seems to be the boundary between what we can remember and what we can only anticipate. But if, aside from entropy, the laws of physics are reversible and … Continue reading Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?
The black hole information paradox has been receiving some attention lately. This is the fact that information, that is any pattern of matter, that falls into a black hole is completely crushed as it approaches the singularity, losing whatever differentiation it might have had before. This has long been recognized as a problem, because in … Continue reading A basic question on the black hole information paradox
From an evolutionary standpoint, why does pain exist? The first naive answer most people reach for is that pain exists to make us take action to prevent damage. If we touch a hot stove, pain makes us pull our hand back. But that's not right. When we touch a hot surface, nociceptors in our hand … Continue reading Pain is information, but what is information?
Peter Kassan has an article at Skeptic Magazine which sets out to disprove the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we're all living in a computer simulation. I personally find arguing about the simulation hypothesis unproductive. Short of the simulation owner deciding to jump in and contact us, we can't prove the hypothesis. Even if the … Continue reading Does information require conscious interpretation to be information?
SelfAwarePatterns 