The limits of information (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The limits of information (2014)

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103 pointswhitecream21 comments

The premise that we think we can pack an infinite amount of information into finite space time just feel wrong to me.

Can you think an infinite amount of thoughts?

Are thoughts information?

Interestingly, if the answer is "no" to the first question, that implies we should be able to quantify the maximum number of thoughts we can think in a single hour. I wonder if there's any research along these lines...

This makes me wonder how the information is stored in nature? Like how the characteristics of the particles and fields and all the interaction rules are are stored or embedded?

If we know how much bits nature is taking to store some data and how it is storing, can we use this knowledge of structure to somehow compress the data and store it more optimally? Or is nature have most optimal storage ever?

Like how the characteristics of the particles and fields and all the interaction rules are are stored or embedded?

That's an interest thought; I assume the storage is the particles. An electron acts like an electron because it's an electron. You'd have to change the particle itself to get it to act some other way.

That said, we are already exploring some ways to store information like nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage

So that's where my question is. Can we store the complete information an electron carry optimally, like in a space smaller than the electron itself? This leads to the question: is this possible to save the current state of universe in a space smaller than universe without loosing any information?

Scientists don't really ask the question that where nature stores the laws it operates under. This is because the laws of nature (such as general relativity) are human conceptions - we don't think these laws are true laws of nature, only approximations to them. If the actual laws of nature are different from the ones found in science textbooks, they probably they have different storage requirements. For instance, right now physics theories use a number of different constants, such as the masses of all the massive particles (electrons, quarks, neutrinos). But we think the true laws of nature will require a fewer number of constants to define, or better still no constants at all - the numbers will emerge automatically from some consistency requirements. It seems pointless to go looking for places where nature is storing the electron mass when there might be no such place. In other words, don't confuse your map of reality with reality itself.

Along these lines, also see the Anthropic Principle [0] which states that "observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it."

[0] [RABBIT HOLE WARNING] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Also silly unfalsifiable argument without any external reference frame. It might well be that the universe is ultimately incompatible with sentient life, just incidentally appears as such in the current timeframe.

The simpler version of it is "God's will".

Well, for starters, the holographic principle hints at the sheer level of symmetry in the state space of the universe -- so redundant that a whole dimension can be shaved off. (3d space -> 2d space.)

Statistical mechanics is basically the study of how nature stores information. Or at least, what this means for certain kinds of physics.

This article is about relatively new things, but if you rewind 100 years, you find people thinking hard about this in simpler contexts. Gibbs is the big name, who essentially re-wrote thermodynamics (the study of heat, which until then had been thought of as some kind of invisible fluid) in the statistics of microscopic particles. This often involves counting the number of different possible states, for instance of all the atoms in a gas. Gasses whose molecules have two atoms (like N_2, compared to He) have larger heat capacity precisely because there are more different ways that these bi-atoms can be oriented, i.e. more information is needed to write down their states completely.

The older, thermodynamic, description is in a sense an optimally compressed representation of this microscopic picture. It keeps only what little information is visible to giants like us, who cannot see the individual atoms.

16 bits per second - the bandwidth of consciousness:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828313

That sounds very wrong.

I tripped hard yesterday and realized that it is likely that the subsystems of our brain harbor other consciousnesses. If consciousness is an artifact of our brain's process of decision making, acting on sensory inputs -- then consciousness is like a black hole, it is marked by an event/information horizon. The outside world is higher dimensional and the conscious subject experiences a lower dimensional projection of it - forever trapped within a reality of qualia like vision and sound, formed by downsampling the actual phenomena.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron

Are you sure the trip is over? ;)

But kidding aside, yes, what we're experience is lower-fidelity version of the outside world. First reference to that idea that I'm aware of is Plato's cave. Of course, that idea and Occam's razor together says that trips aren't deep insights, but merely differently distorted but still low-fidelity projections of the world around us.

I'm liking the thought of a brain as a time share, though. If nothing else, it makes for a rich subject for interesting stories. And a good metaphor for the existence of the subconscious (and heck, the limbic system)

I am pretty much back to normal except for the unsettling thoughts about alternate consciousnesses in the same being. Like you say, why wouldn't different parts of the brain have a will - the limbic system certainly has sway.

Do you know if there have ever been experiments done to investigate whether alternate subconscious will can 'show itself conscious' by way of asking a person for a demonstration? Of course, this would require the subconscious to both observe the instruction and follow it, and have some method of conveying action. I tend to think that only the main consciousness would be able to execute direct actions. So I would guess the experiments would be very hard to perform without some clever setup.

It sounds almost silly but I really do wonder if the other decision making / executive functional parts of the brain have some level of understanding about their relative capacity to influence the body they reside in? Sharing a mind seems like such a silly "alien body snatchers" kind of idea. But HTM seems to hint at it.

https://discourse.numenta.org/t/oscillatory-thousand-brains-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory

Since it's not entirely sure that we as a whole person have entirely free will (instead of a really elaborate after-the-fact-excuses machine), I'd think the concept of a "will" for individual systems needs to be very loosely defined to apply here.

If you're interested in the science, I'd suggest starting from the Libet experiments (who essentially thinks his experiments show that the subconscious makes decisions, and the conscious retains a veto right)

It's a fascinating thought to entertain. (But you will forever doubt if you our your subconscious made the decision to think about this ;)

If you care more for pop-sci, Kahnemann's "Thinking fast and slow" idea of system1/system2 thinking might be a good read.

That still doesn't mean that different consciousnesses share a mind. We certainly have different systems competing for attention, but what consciousness even means. (I'd recommend Popper as a starting point for that debate, but mostly because the science is still very much in the "Dunno, but what happens if we poke here?" stage, IMHO. Philosophy seems more apt)

Kurzgesagt[0] and CGP Grey[1] did a fun little 2-part intro into "split mindedness" i.e. the idea that we may have multiple consciousnesses(?) contending for control.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVmkDUkZT4 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

premise that we think we can pack an infinite amount of information into finite space time

The point of the article is that we think we cannot. And the fact that the upper bound grows not as the volume of space, but as the area of its boundary, has deep and subtle implications which we're slowly trying to figure out.

> The premise that we think we can pack an infinite amount of information into finite space time just feel wrong to me.

Why?

Z = { x | ... -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 ... }

I just packed an infinite amount of information in a couple of characters.

No, you did not. The point of information is how many different things you can encode, or could have encoded. Among rules about like yours (but reversed, or only the even numbers, etc) this will be about 10.

The information will still be mainly stored on servers... That tiny little chip just needs some connectivity to reach it when it's needed.

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