Warp wrote:
>   Would you agree that the information portrayed by the text exists?

Now you have to define "exists." :-)

The text "exists" only because I look at it and the light from the ink and 
paper stimulates the neurons in my brain into a different pattern.  The 
information represented by the text does not "exist" if there's nobody to 
read it.

> We know the information exists because of the causality effects it can
> produce. The outcome of events can be affected by the information that
> is portrayed by the text.

Sure, in some sense.  The arrangement of the atoms of ink and paper have a 
surprisingly large causal effect when they are (for example) a declaration 
of war. I don't know that you can say the *information* exists independent 
of the text, for example.

>   If something exists in this universe, then it is part of it, and hence
> the universe is made of it (among other things).
> 
>   Also, if information exists, it cannot be the same thing as energy
> because information can be created and destroyed (or, more specifically,
> the amount of information can be changed, as it's basically tied to
> entropy, while the amount of energy cannot, as it stays constant).

Entropy is order, not information.

>   Hence there exists at least two different things in the universe:
> Energy and information, and they are not the same thing.

 From lots of stuff I've read, information can't actually disappear. Or, to 
put it another way, the "information" measured by entropy is only 
"information of interest".

Certainly if you take a dynamic but deterministic system, like perfect balls 
bouncing around inside a perfect box, and you start with all the balls on 
one side and none on the other, entropy will increase even tho there is no 
state of the box you cannot deduce from looking at any two moments of state.

QM does have a concept of "information" as well, and it's a symmetry (i.e., 
it might change form but the total amount stays the same).  Indeed, that 
gives rise to one or the other of the conservation laws that everyone accepts.

>   The third thing I postulated that exists, and which is neither energy
> nor information, is timespace. You would agree that timespace exists.

My understanding is that spacetime (aka timespace ;-) doesn't actually 
exist, and the lack of its existence is the difference between SR and GR. If 
you reformulate special relativity in such a way that you don't have a 
"background" coordinate system but only the interactions between what's 
there, you get GR.  (I may be misunderstanding this, tho.)

> The only other question is whether timespace is distinct from energy.
> As far as I can see, it is (although my arguments of why I think so
> are admittedly less thought-out and thus weaker).

I think that it's more a question of definitions than facts. :-) We have 
names for all sorts of things that don't exist in the way they're defined, 
like "meaning".

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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