Another example, if you have an electron in a superposition of half spin-up and half spin-down, then the probability to measure up is objectively 50%.
Another example, GPT-2 is a probability distribution on sequences of integers. You can download this probability distribution. It doesn't represent anyone's beliefs. The distribution has a certain entropy. That entropy is an objective property of the distribution.
The others are both partial-information problems which are very sensitive to knowing certain hidden-state information. Your random number generator gives you a number that you didn't expect, and for which a formula describes your best guess based on available incomplete information, but the computer program that generated knew which one to choose and it would not have picked any other. Anyone who knew the hidden state of the RNG would also have assigned a different probability to that number being chosen.
So I would say the same of GPT-2. It's not a random variable unless you query it. But unless you know unreasonably many details, the best you can do to predict the query is the distribution that you would call "objective."
But I think if we take the view that it's not a random variable until we query it, that makes it awkward to talk about how GPT-2 (and similar models) is trained. No one ever draws samples from the model during training, but the whole justification for the cross-entropy-minimizing training procedure is based on thinking about the model as a random variable.
E.g. your random number generator generates 1, 5, 7, 8, 3 when you run it. It generates 4, 8, 8, 2, 5 when I run it. I.e. we have received different information about the random number generator to build our subjective probability distributions. The level of entropy of our probability distributions is high because we have so little information to be certain about the representativeness of our distribution sample.
If we continue running our random number generator for a while, we will gather more information, thus reducing entropy, and our probability distributions will both start converging towards an objective "truth." If we ran our random number generators for a theoretically infinite amount of time, we will have reduced entropy to 0 and have a perfect and objective probability distribution.
But this is impossible.
For example my cat weighs 13 pounds. That seems objective, in the sense that if two people disagree, only one can be right. But the claim is based on my observations. I think your logic leads us to deny that anything is objective.
Why, that would mean that...I really don't
know what the outside universe is like at
all, for certain.I don't think you need to have any information to have a probability distribution; your distribution already represents your degree of ignorance about an outcome. So without even sampling it once, you already should have a uniform probability distribution for a random number generator or a coin flip. If you do personally have additional information to help you predict the outcome -- you're skilled at coin-flipping, or you wrote the RNG and know an exploit -- then you can compress that distribution to a lower-entropy one.
But you don't need to sample the distribution to do this. You can have that information before the first coin toss. Sampling can be one way to get information but it won't necessarily even help. If samples are independent, then each sample really teaches you barely anything about the next. RNGs eventually do repeat so if you sample it enough you might be able to find the pattern and reduce the entropy to zero, but in that case you're not learning the statistical distribution, you're deducing the exact internal state of the RNG and predicting the exact next outcome, because the samples are not actually independent. If you do enough coin flips you might eventually find that there's a slight bias to the coin, but that really takes an extreme number of tosses and only reduces the entropy a tiny tiny bit; not at all if the coin-tossing procedure had no bias to begin with.
However the objective truth is just that the next toss will land heads. That's the only truth that experiment can objectively determine. Any other doubt that it might-have-counterfactually-landed-tails is subjective, due to a subjective lack of sufficient information to predict the outcome. We can formalize a correct procedure to convert prior information into a corresponding probability distribution, we can get a unanimous consensus by giving everybody the same information, but the probability distribution is still subjective because it is a function of that prior information.
Did you take stats at MIT? I'm going to through their online material, because I very much am very confused.
The best introduction that I can recommend is this type-written PDF from E.T. Jaynes, called "probability theory with applications in science and engineering": https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/science.pdf.html
It requires a lot of attention to read and follow the math, but it's worthwhile. Jaynes is a pretty passionate writer, and in his writing he's clearly battling against some enemies (who might be ghosts), but on the other hand this also makes for more entertaining reading and I find that's usually a benefit when it comes to a textbook.
Thank you!
So now you are forced to consider e.g. temperature an impossibility without quantum-derived randomness, even though temperature does not really seem to be a quantum thing.
Entropy is a macroscopic variable and if you allow microscopic information, strange things can happen! One can move from a high entropy macrostate to a low entropy macrostate if you choose the initial microstate carefully. But this is not a reliable process which you can reproduce experimentally, ie. it is not a thermodynamic process.
A thermodynamics process P is something which takes a macrostate A to a macrostate B, independent of which microstate a0, a1, a2.. in A you started off with it. If the process depends on microstate, then it wouldn't be something we would recognize as we are looking from the macro perspective.
Which we don’t know precisely. Entropy is about not knowing.
> If you somehow learned these then the shannon entropy is zero.
Minus infinity. Entropy in classical statistical mechanics is proportional to the logarithm of the volume in phase space. (You need an appropriate extension of Shannon’s entropy to continuous distributions.)
> So now you are forced to consider e.g. temperature an impossibility without quantum-derived randomness
Or you may study statistical mechanics :-)
No, it is not about not knowing. This is an instance of the intuition from Shannon’s entropy does not translate to statistical Physics.
It is about the number of possible microstates, which is completely different. In Physics, entropy is a property of a bit of matter, it is not related to the observer or their knowledge. We can measure the enthalpy change of a material sample and work out its entropy without knowing a thing about its structure.
> Minus infinity. Entropy in classical statistical mechanics is proportional to the logarithm of the volume in phase space.
No, 0. In this case, there is a single state with p=1 and and S = - k Σ p ln(p) = 0.
This is the same if you consider the phase space because then it is reduced to a single point (you need a bit of distribution theory to prove it rigorously but it is somewhat intuitive).
The probability p of an microstate is always between 0 and 1, therefore p ln(p) is always negative and S is always positive.
You get the same using Boltzmann’s approach, in which case Ω = 1 and S = k ln(Ω) is also 0.
> (You need an appropriate extension of Shannon’s entropy to continuous distributions.)
Gibbs’ entropy.
> Or you may study statistical mechanics
Indeed.
>> Entropy in classical statistical mechanics is proportional to the logarithm of the volume in phase space [and diverges to minus infinity if you define precisely the position and momentum of the particles and the volume in phase sphere goes to zero]
> [It's zero also] if you consider the phase space because then it is reduced to a single point (you need a bit of distribution theory to prove it rigorously but it is somewhat intuitive).
> The probability p of an microstate is always between 0 and 1, therefore p ln(p) is always negative and S is always positive.
The points in the phase space are not "microstates" with probability between 0 and 1. It's a continuous distribution and if it collapses to a point (i.e. you somehow learned the exact positions and momentums) the density at that point is unbounded. The entropy is also unbounded and goes to minus infinity as the volume in phase space collapses to zero.
You can avoid the divergence by dividing the continuous phase space into discrete "microstates" but having a well-defined "microstate" corresponding to some finite volume in phase space is not the same as what was written above about "particles having a defined position and momentum" that is "somehow learned". The microstates do not have precisely defined positions and momentums. The phase space is not reduced to a single point in that case.
If the phase space is reduced to a single point I'd like to see your proof that S(ρ) = −k ∫ ρ(x) log ρ(x) dx = 0
So the case I mentioned, where you know all the positions and momentums has 0 shannon entropy and -Inf differential entropy. And a typical distribution will instead have Inf shannon entropy and finite differential entropy.
Wikipedia has some pretty interesting discussion about Differential Entropy vs Limiting density of Points, but I can't claim to understand it and whether it could bridge the gap here.
No, Shannon entropy is not applicable in that case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(statistical_thermodyn...
Quantum mechanics solves the issue of the continuity of the state space. However, as you probably know, in quantum mechanics all the positions and momentums cannot simultaneously have definite values.
Conditional on the known macrostate. Because we don’t know the precise microstate - only which microstates are possible.
If your reasoning is that « experimental entropy can be measured so it’s not about that » then it’s not about macrostates and microstates either!
Enthalpy is also dependent on your choice of state variables, which is in turn dictated by which observables you want to make predictions about: whether two microstates are distinguishable, and thus whether the part of the same macrostate, depends on the tools you have for distinguishing them.