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Comment by Asraelite | Hacker News Reader

Bits are a perfectly acceptable way to measure biological information processing. These are not the boolean logic digital bits like on a computer. They're the more abstract concept of a bit in information theory.

Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system can be in (accounting for statistical uncertainty/biases if needed), take the base 2 logarithm of that number, and you have the bits of information in the system. This can be applied to basically anything, biological or otherwise.

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But if your measurements are unreliable or downright flawed, then it's just garbage-in-garbage-out.

Sounds like the statistics in the papers from the social "sciences".

"There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Unknown

I don't think you're going to be able to count the "number of distinct possible configurations" of an even moderately complex living system.

It's more like statistical mechanics and the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics.

Unless entropy is a damned lie. Which I'm not saying it isn't, but claiming such a thing is a pretty strong claim. Possibly one of the strongest claims you can make in physics (which is why it's associated with cranks).

I'd expect some perpetual motion machines after overturning such a principle.

But I do agree you need to be careful defining the scope of microstates and macro states.

> Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system

Easy for an isolated system. Human body is 6000 billion cells, each of them has many possible configurations, most of them share and process informations. I respectfully doubt there’s much to do with bits outside of a tiny bit if flesh in a petri dish.

6 trillion * number of configurations of each cell * number of configurations of interactions between cells = (very very large) finite number. The thing about numbers is that they go on forever. There's not a cutoff for "ok, this number is too big for bits".

Take whatever that mind-bogglingly huge number is, take the logarithm base 2, there you go, that's how many bits you need.

Yes no problem to imagine or process numbers, how big they might be.

I just don’t see how that makes a practical sense in the context of the article. Doing a full "scan" of a tiny biological material to study it, ok. Doing a full scan of "our body" as MrMcCall describe (and reject it)? I don’t think it’s possible in a near future. I totally agree with Asraelite in theory but don’t think that will be apply in reality.

I think I see the disconnect. "Practical application" here does not mean "doing a scan". Don't let the word "bit" lure you into thinking we want to do something on a computer. This is using bits purely as a unit of measurement of information quantity. It applies practically in reality the same way any other unit of measurement applies. The same way we can ask how much something weighs or how fast it's going, we can ask how much information it has.

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