arranging things
gaita, drums and modernized traditional portuguese music
previously i discussed how things can work becoming agents, and how change is always for the worse on a global perspective. but since this is a very sad and gloomy perspective, let’s be a bit naive now and forget about all the stuff that is going to waste and draw a boundary around a system that allows ectropy, like the earth. from now on, all ectropy must be seen as part of a greater, globally increasing, entropy.
a key aspect of information theory is how we can quantify the structure of things when they are arranged in a specific way. but how do we know they are arranged in a specific way, rather than just a random one? this is a common dilemma, and can be exemplified by asking how many grains of sand are there in a pile of sand. this faces us with a simple question. when do things become parts of a bigger thing? when does an alphabet become a novel, and not just any random assortment of letters?
there are many ways of answering this, but since this is my page, i can answer with my own perspective on it. in my view, when agents increase information in a system so that the total information is more than the sum of all the information required for each thing, we’ve just created a new thing, be it an agent or not.
so let’s go back to the sand issue. each grain of sand can be our unit of information, so let’s say we need g bits to adequately describe (save and restore) each grain of sand. a pile of sand would take, therefore, n x g bits. let’s now take an empty hourglass, and say it’s simple enough that its information fits in h bits. our system now has n x g + h bits in total. now let’s say an agent decides to do work on these things. depending on the agent we choose, and depending on whether we want a fully restorable system, we might want to add the agent information too, let’s say a bits. this is optional, since we might just want to use a hourglass, and not make a hourglass. so now our system has n x g + h + a = s bits.
after our agent works on the system (creating entropy outside the system), let’s say he inserted the sand into the hourglass, giving the system extra structure (more information). what is this information? it is the one provided by the new vocabulary available to both the grains of sand and the hourglass, meaning, each one is now an agent acting on the other one, and therefore, since they have a relationship between them, this must be accounted for (remember Kolmogorov complexity?). so the equations that govern sand in an hourglass might be simple, but they no longer fit in our s bits. the whole is more than the sum of the parts, because the relationship between our two things created new agents, let’s call them l, for laws. our total system is s + l.
note that the previous agents already at work are still there. things like gravity and the glass blower that made the hourglass, have been accounted for as requirements for the initial things. but the fact that each grain of sand in the hourglass cannot go anywhere, instead being confined to the hourglass shape, is entirely new to the system. we just witnessed an agent being born! it came from the simple fact that we connected two things and they became agents limiting each other. in this case, it’s more the hourglass than the sand doing the limitation, but nevertheless, the hourglass is not an agent until it has sand inside it.
thanks to structuring, or work, we have increased the information in our system not only by its parts, but also, inadvertently, created more things. this is ectropy, or like we humans like to call it, making things pretty.
now, a hypothetical natural hourglass, fruit only of secret agents (laws of nature without a mind), could be filled with sand just by random chance, thanks to the free energy on earth, coupled with gravity. if this were the case, we would have more information in our system, even though there were no minds to use the hourglass. so information synthesizes itself simply because things jiggle a lot and bump into each other.
this is one of the things we see a lot of on earth. spontaneous order from nothing, and we’ve also seen how easy it is to synthesize information, by merely making things constrain other things. so information increases when there are more restrictions (agents or laws) to a system when it is assembled than the ones that exist for its parts.
this is why you can’t reduce everything to simple equations, because some restrictions emerge from their interaction, that require more information than the original formulation to be saved and retrieved. it should be obvious that these new laws are consequence of earlier “deeper” laws, and anyone with sufficient patience could prove that there is no need for a new thing since the previous thing is enough.
this is superficially true, but it avoids the problem of generating the work between the two states. it’s like saying that between an empty plate and a full plate all we have are molecular interactions. yes, it’s true (more like a deepity). but these molecules are restricted to such an extent (the molecules in the ingredients, the molecules in the maker’s brain, the molecules in the tools, etc), that stating all the restrictions created by the thermodynamic trajectories of all those molecules in time (ectropy, information) would require the same time as the process itself. meaning, you’d have to ask the annoying physicist (they’re always physicists, aren’t they?) to demonstrate with his equations the motion of every single particle of every single molecule he claims is the central thing. or, you can just accept a new thing (or law), that like the hourglass example, governs the macroscopic properties of your system. in this case, which ingredients, which recipe and how good is the cook. much easier than typing the trajectories.
this means that things are created only due to these restrictions that are simpler using a thing than using deeper things. or, the simplest way to explain is usually better. some people call this the Occam’s razor principle. this is only relevant, again, if you want to retrieve and save things (observe, discuss, are subsets of these two simple forms of work). nature itself goes on not giving a shit about how much information it has or doesn’t. it’s its own thing.
it is also where all arguments for and against reductionism amount to. one is saying “all you need is the single one secret agent“, and the other one is saying “you can’t describe everything just using secret agent“. they are both right, and here’s how.
while it is true that there can be a single core secret agent, people call it theory of everything these days (back in the day it was god), it is not possible to save or retrieve the entire work done by this agent in enough time to have a conversation (not even a lifetime). so to allow our tiny monkey brains to discuss big things we either create new laws, or are left with a never ending complexity that is impossible to deal with in useful time (not computable in useful time). just ask any physicist to solve the three body problem. though gravitational equations are beautiful, they grow ugly really quickly. and even though that secret agent might be beautiful, it grows ugly by simple entropy. new laws make it pretty again, not ugly, since laws can emerge from any kind of system, made of things or things of things and so on.
if you can say “sand can’t go through glass”, you save 3 hours of painful molecular dynamics, that would waste your time in discussing whatever idea you were trying to discuss to make yourself feel superior to others. note that you can still dissect that phrase onto simpler things, but doing so would waste time, because the information dealt with is the same! we would be manipulating the same information using first an alphabet of just one thing, and then one with many things on top of things, abstraction. abstraction makes it easy to manipulate massive amounts of information. more things mean a richer vocabulary to store and retrieve information! abstraction is just laziness at work! how terrible!
in a way, it is very similar to the way our cortex works. but that’s for later. for now, more music, we already had enough fun. there are many hard concepts in these paragraphs.
this last one is from a (sadly) deceased portuguese artist that took a lot of old traditional material and mixed it. his entire repertoire is freely available at the tribute website