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Utter junk. Does anybody find articles like this convincing? This has about the same intellectual content as YouTube “proofs” that the earth is flat.

yters 8y ago
Physics (randomness + determinism) cannot create mutual information. This has been proven. So, there must be some other causal entity that creates the mutual information we see around us, and this causal entity cannot be reduced to randomness + determinism.
- eigenspace 8y ago
  I saw a similar (junk) article a while ago about how our minds must be special and can't be replicated on silicon because we can implement pure functions in our minds, but that is impossible in any stateful machine. The author's point hinged on the idea that when I add `2+2`, I am doing the platonic ideal pure operation of addition which is demonstrably false so the entire argument falls away. Similarly, it hasn't been established that our minds possess mutual information in the ideal sense. One should first note that there are well known Bayesian methods for approximating mutual information which sound much closer to what our brains do operationally. Now consider the fact that if you actually were creating mutual information when you looked at a sign, it would be impossible for you to be mistaken about the implication of the sign! You would infallibly understand every streetsign that you read because your undertanding of that sign is mutual information. This is demonstably false. People are mistaken about trains of reasoning they make all the time, in fact this article is a fantastic example of that. Given that, it sounds much more like our minds are Bayesian machines approximating mutual information but not creating it.
  - yters 8y ago
    Not sure why you make the inference that because we don't have the most elegant encoding of the information that absolute mutual information has not been created. As it is, any approximation of absolute mutual information is predicated on the existence of said information.
    - eigenspace 8y ago
      > As it is, any approximation of absolute mutual information is predicated on the existence of said information. That's not true. I can approximate a circle on a piece of paper or with a computer or whatever without there ever actually being a true, platonically ideal circle in the entire universe. Similarly, I can construct a heuristic which approximates shared information without that shared information existing in the first place.
      - yters 8y ago
        That is true, but algorithmic information theory would say the Platonic circle is the best explanation for those approximations, so the approximations are instances of the absolute.

yters 8y ago

Physics (randomness + determinism) cannot create mutual information. This has been proven. So, there must be some other causal entity that creates the mutual information we see around us, and this causal entity cannot be reduced to randomness + determinism.

eigenspace 8y ago
I saw a similar (junk) article a while ago about how our minds must be special and can't be replicated on silicon because we can implement pure functions in our minds, but that is impossible in any stateful machine. The author's point hinged on the idea that when I add `2+2`, I am doing the platonic ideal pure operation of addition which is demonstrably false so the entire argument falls away. Similarly, it hasn't been established that our minds possess mutual information in the ideal sense. One should first note that there are well known Bayesian methods for approximating mutual information which sound much closer to what our brains do operationally. Now consider the fact that if you actually were creating mutual information when you looked at a sign, it would be impossible for you to be mistaken about the implication of the sign! You would infallibly understand every streetsign that you read because your undertanding of that sign is mutual information. This is demonstably false. People are mistaken about trains of reasoning they make all the time, in fact this article is a fantastic example of that. Given that, it sounds much more like our minds are Bayesian machines approximating mutual information but not creating it.
- yters 8y ago
  Not sure why you make the inference that because we don't have the most elegant encoding of the information that absolute mutual information has not been created. As it is, any approximation of absolute mutual information is predicated on the existence of said information.
  - eigenspace 8y ago
    > As it is, any approximation of absolute mutual information is predicated on the existence of said information. That's not true. I can approximate a circle on a piece of paper or with a computer or whatever without there ever actually being a true, platonically ideal circle in the entire universe. Similarly, I can construct a heuristic which approximates shared information without that shared information existing in the first place.
    - yters 8y ago
      That is true, but algorithmic information theory would say the Platonic circle is the best explanation for those approximations, so the approximations are instances of the absolute.