bart <bar### [at] homeorg> wrote:
>  >bart <bar### [at] homeorg> wrote:
>  >> >  >  What else?
>  >> > pure consciousness?
>  >
>  >  What is that?
> You know what is that, everyone does.

  I don't know what "pure consciousness" is. Can you explain it to me?
And how is it distinct from energy and information?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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> If it exists, the it's part of this
> universe, in other words, it's one component of the universe.

Sure, everything that exists can be called a component of the universe, but 
it doesn't automatically mean that there are existing certain components 
that cannot be made from energy.

>  If it exists and it can be created and destroyed, that makes it distinct
> from energy, which cannot be created nor destroyed.

How about arrangements of energy?  They can be created and destroyed, yet 
are still just energy in the end.

>> >  Hence there exists at least two different things in the universe:
>> > Energy and information, and they are not the same thing.
>
>> Cars also exist, and they are not the same as energy or information
>
>  On what do you base the claim that they are not information?

There's an important difference to what I said and you claimed I said.

Birds are animals, but "bird" has a different meaning to "animal".
Cars could be considered "information", but a "car" is different to 
"information".
Cars are made from atoms, but a car is most certainly different to an atom.

My point is that information is just specific patterns of energy. I know 
"energy" and "information" have different meanings and refer to different 
things, but that doesn't mean information must be made up of something other 
than energy.

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Warp wrote:
>   Time must exist, or else it would be impossible to postulate essential
> properties of physics such as the second law of thermodynamics. 

The second law is statistical.

> You can unambiguously distinguish if a closed system is going forward in
> time by measuring its entropy.)

No you can't, because time is reversible. Entropy is an artifact of measurement.

Take a deck of cards and shuffle it. How likely is the order of cards you 
just shuffled?  It's exactly the same as the likelihood that all the cards 
are in the canonical order (ace to king, sorted by spade, heart, club, 
diamond).  Entropy is a measurement of how interesting to us a particular 
arrangement of atoms is.  The fact that you can't get work out of random 
heat is simply saying that it's really, really unlikely for random heat to 
suddenly all go one direction.

Note that QM has no arrow of time. Reactions going forward are identical 
(altho inverted) to reactions going backwards.

Break a rack of pool balls. (I.e., start the game.) Suddenly, it's much less 
ordered. But if you could measure exactly where everything is at the end and 
how fast it was going before it stopped and exactly how much friction there 
was and etc, you could reverse that. (Modulo QM uncertainty, of course.)

>   Space must exist, or else it would be impossible to postulate essential
> properties of physics, such as the Pauli exclusion principle. 

The Pauli exclusion principle is not part of GR. It's part of QM. :-)

> (How could
> you state that two particles cannot be at the same *place* at the same
> time if the very concept of "place" wouldn't exist?)

It does in QM. That's the fundamental problem and tension preventing GR from 
being unified with QM.

The *concept* of place exists. It's just a question of whether it's 
something real or something that falls out of our math and "common sense".

>   Just because space and time are relative doesn't mean they don't exist.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting stuff like this:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/background.html

It seems to be saying that GR says that space and time exist because matter 
and energy exist. You can't have space or time without energy to be 
experiencing them, just like you can't have sound without air to carry it.

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

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bart wrote:
>> Sound exists as a pattern of air molecules. But it's made out of air
>> molecules, just like the molecules are made out of atoms, and the atoms
>> are out of protons and electrons and such. If you beleve that sound is
>> made out of something other than air, then you believe that air is made
>> out of something other than atoms.
> what happened to the sound under water? Is it made of "air molecules" too?

You're trolling, right?

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

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Warp wrote:
>   If it exists and it can be created and destroyed, that makes it distinct
> from energy, which cannot be created nor destroyed.

It can be distinct from energy and yet still be made from energy, just like 
sound isn't air but it's made from air.

I'll grant you that "information" in the sense of "patterns of combinations 
of something else" does "exist". I'm not sure you can say something is "made 
out of" information, or that "information" would exist without the substrate 
carrying it.

And I'm still not convinced you can actually destroy information. At the 
quantum level, time is reversible, which means that information at that 
level does *not* get destroyed.  From lots of things I've read, figuring out 
how you can have black holes and QM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound

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

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bart wrote:
>  > I think you can be conscious without being self-aware. I'm pretty sure
>> that, for example, chickens would be considered conscious, even tho
>> they're probably not self-aware.

> Yes, it is convenient to think so, but on the other hand they probably are.

No, they probably aren't. You can test such things, you know.  Dolphins, 
gorillas, a few others probably are, including some birds.

Chickens and fish probably aren't.

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

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>You're trolling, right?
Not at all; the question is interesting and
I just don't get it why you limit it the the air?
We can easily make and hear sounds under water, can't we?

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On 11/04/2010 04:59 PM, Darren New wrote:
> bart wrote:
>> > I think you can be conscious without being self-aware. I'm pretty sure
>>> that, for example, chickens would be considered conscious, even tho
>>> they're probably not self-aware.
>
>> Yes, it is convenient to think so, but on the other hand they probably
>> are.
>
> No, they probably aren't. You can test such things, you know. Dolphins,
> gorillas, a few others probably are, including some birds.
>
> Chickens and fish probably aren't.
>
You are right, it would be difficult to eat them otherwise.

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On 11/04/2010 03:20 PM, Warp wrote:
 >I don't know what "pure consciousness" is.
 >Can you explain it to me?
I'd like to, but the language is a very limiting tool for this purpose.
I think of pure consciousness as the very basic self-awareness,
nothing more. It is clearly a distinguishing feeling,
but normally we have it at a very low intensity,
only sometimes it could suddenly become very intense for a short time.
Some find that the easiest way to deal with it is to assume
that it is one of the fundamental feature of the universe in the first time.

 >And how is it distinct from energy and information?
This is what I eager to know too. May be information
could be considered as a structured energy?
Or an ideal structure, that could be filled with energy?

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bart wrote:
>  >You're trolling, right?
> Not at all; the question is interesting and
> I just don't get it why you limit it the the air?
> We can easily make and hear sounds under water, can't we?

Of course, in which case the sound is made out of water molecules.

I'm not limiting sound to only be in air. I'm making an analogy.

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

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