Documentary on Claude Shannon

Quoting Wayfarer

Just noticed this via an article in Quanta magazine - Claude Shannon, the Prophet of Information. Haven't watched it yet but thought it might be of interest to others.

The article refers to him as "the over-looked genius". Perhaps, the typical texting-while-driving cell-phone abuser "over-looks" the Prophet of the Information Age. But us acolytes of The Informer are still discovering more evidence of his genius after a century of world-changing effects. :smile:

Reply to Gnomon well, yes, he's certainly well-regarded amongst the digital cognoscenti, but not so much amongst the population at large. But surely amongst his peers Norbert Wiener must be on about equal footing, I would have thought.

Cantor's Paradise; https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-absent-minded-father-of-cybernetics-norbert-wiener-2a0b66aa6b4b:Wiener would be the man to give modern meaning to the word ‘feedback’ through his invention of cybernetics (the study of regulatory systems) which has since birthed revolutionary subfields such as artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, neuroscience, and many more.

Well we know what the father of information theory, Claude Shannon, would've been doing if not establishing a new discipline (information theory) at Bell labs. He would've been part of a circus troupe!

Some time back the president of the American Mathematical Society could do this juggling trick.

What is it about these big-shot intellects that they are attracted to this sort of thing? :chin:

Quoting Wayfarer

Haven't watched it yet but thought it might be of interest to others.

The link goes to a trailer for a full-length feature. I didn't see any way to watch it. Perhaps I missed it. From what little it showed, it seemed a bit Neil DeGrasse Tysony.

Reply to T Clark True, I think you have to track it down. (It's on Curiosity Stream, which I subscribe to.) It's the same director who made Particle Fever, about the LHC, which I watched a couple of years back. Never sat through any of Tyson's shows, they weren't very popular here in Aus.

Quoting jgill

What is it about these big-shot intellects that they are attracted to this sort of thing?

Richard Feynman playing bongos (although I have to say that juggling whilst unicycling is much more impressive.)

Quoting jgill

What is it about these big-shot intellects that they are attracted to this sort of thing?

It's a game requiring "the" intellect. To be analyzed or even programmed. A friend of mine got off on it too. "Look, if the orange is up in the middle, your left hand starts moving away, and then your,,,", yeah yeah....

Somehow, this beats the juggling theorem:

Quoting Wayfarer

?Gnomon
well, yes, he's certainly well-regarded amongst the digital cognoscenti, but not so much amongst the population at large. But surely amongst his peers Norbert Wiener must be on about equal footing, I would have thought.

I agree that Wiener's notion of Cybernetics was a genius move. He's right up there with Bertalanffy, and his Systems Theory, for nudging the reductive focus of Science to include emergent Holistic functions, derived from feedback loops. Ironically, Holism still seems to be a four-letter word to some posters on this forum. :meh:

Quoting Wayfarer

Never sat through any of Tyson's shows, they weren't very popular here in Aus.

For me, Tyson represents what I call "Gee whiz!" science, which I dislike. Was my impression that the Shannon film was like that correct?

Reply to T Clark I haven't watched it yet but from reading the promotional material, I think not. It's aimed at explaining the significance of Shannon's work which apart from being foundational to digital communications also has ramifications in philosophy and systems theory. I'll try and find time to watch it today and say a bit more.

Reply to Wayfarer

I'll be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Reply to T Clark I've started it, and it's [s]magnificent[/s] pretty good. They have the [s]archival[/s] recreated the footage of a long interview conducted with Claude Shannon in his home workshop in 1986, and he's an utterly charming and fascinating character, humourous and intensely intellectually alive (and with a lovely speaking voice). His home workshop is full of curios and oddities including a computer he built for calculating in roman numerals (his wife remarks 'when he was supposed to be working'.) Haven't gotten through it all yet but the presence of the man himself really adds to it. Where I'm up to, he's explaining to the interviewer that his basic idea for the bit came from studying morse code.

UPDATE: I now learn Shannon's character is re-created by an actor, John Hutton. He does a great job. And then there's other archival footage and reconstructions from his earlier life. Worth watching.

Wikipedia:

Meditation

Paradoxically, the same processes that are well known for exercising the body, can also be a very relaxing activity. As meditation, juggling a repeating pattern or patterns can take one's mind off the stresses they might encounter in their daily lives. Jugglers have described a phenomenon of near-disembodiment and tranquility which may come over them while juggling.[citation needed] :grin: The constant rising and falling of the objects, the regularity of the rhythms, can become almost hypnotic, and the attention of a juggler while tightly focused on the juggling pattern may seem to expand and even to "encompass the universe."

Really appreciate his ideas. They work on so many levels.


I particularly like information ontology, "it from bit." It is one of the more coherent interpretations of quantum physics to my mind.

What makes it so appealing is that information ontology, when paired with the concepts of chaos/emergence, self-similarity/reoccurence, and feedback loops/self-replication/natural selection (all related to fractal geometry) is an ontology that seems like it may be able to explain conciousness.

Conciousness would be the fractal reoccurence of the universe encoding information about itself within itself. Rerepresentation essentially, accumulating local self knowledge. So, DNA is often thought of as storing information about the enviornment. Nervous systems are a higher level reoccurence of this representation and storage. Language and the information stored by organizations would again be another level. Each increases in complexity and is able to better represent more of the world outside its own physical system. The laws of the universe have tended to introduce greater and greater levels of complexity and new levels of this recursive self knowledge over time.

A world of information coming to know itself as its self. Very Hegelian.

Related to that thought, there is Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.

Penrose was inspired by an interesting mathematical connection between a very hot, dense, small state of the universe – as it was at the Big Bang – and an extremely cold, empty, expanded state of the universe – as it will be in the far future. His radical theory to explain this correspondence is that those states become mathematically identical when taken to their limits. Paradoxical though it might seem, a total absence of matter might have managed to give rise to all the matter we see around us in our universe.

Under an information ontological approach, this, extreme heat or cold would be a zero entropy universe due to lack of differentiation. All ones or all zeros contains the same amount of entropy, zero. Or, to think about it in plain terms "without anything by which a thing can be defined, it cannot exist."

What's interesting to me is this is essentially Behemism, and Hegel's argument for for becoming.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Really appreciate his ideas. Information ontology is one of the more sensible interpretations of quantum physics to my mind

What have zeroes and ones gotta do with QM? The zeroes and ones are nowhere to be seen in a wavefunction. You can represent the wavefunction by ones and zeroes, as information on a computer chip.

Total disorder (an ultra hot gas) is essentially the same as a totally ordered one. You need very little to know the whole state. In that sense is the beginning the same as the end. But the interesting things happen in between. Medium order.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I particularly like information ontology, "it from bit." It is one of the more coherent interpretations of quantum physics to my mind.

That's John Wheeler, nothing to do with Shannon (other than Shannon coined the term 'bit' although he claims a colleague thought of it first).

But you might like this anecdote.

When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanics but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the term you will always be at an advantage!

which in my opinion leads to an awful lot of pseudo-scientific blather about information and entropy.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Conciousness would be the fractal reoccurence of the universe encoding information about itself within itself. Rerepresentation essentially, accumulating local self knowledge. So, DNA is often thought of as storing information about the enviornment. Nervous systems are a higher level reoccurence of this representation and storage. Language and the information stored by organizations would again be another level. Each increases in complexity and is able to better represent more of the world outside its own physical system. The laws of the universe have tended to introduce greater and greater levels of complexity and new levels of this recursive self knowledge over time.

A world of information coming to know itself as its self. Very Hegelian.

That, I agree with. And I think it dovetails very nicely with the traditional understanding of 'nous'. But of course, such thinking is strongly rejected in the mainstream academy as it implies orthogenesis, teleology and so on, all of which are strictly taboo in neo-darwinian thinking.

His radical theory to explain this correspondence is that those states become mathematically identical when taken to their limits

It shows, again, the connection between zero (zero entropy at the start) and infinity (maximum entropy of the photon/neutrino gas at the end).

Reply to Wayfarer

Wheeler coined the term, but it's deeply influenced by Shannon. Landauer bridged the gap between Shannon Entropy as solely a mathematical abstraction and information as an element of the physical world.

I see the connection of Shannon to physics come up more often in stuff on gas equilibrium, phase space, but information ontology is the more interesting connection to my mind.

Reply to EugeneW

The zeros and ones come in because there are a finite number of things you can measure about a particle. That is, there is only so much information you can gather about it.

The proposed existence of this information imposes some fundamental questions about it: “Why is there information stored in the universe and where is it?” and “How much information is stored in the universe?” Let us deal with these questions in detail.
To answer the first question, let us imagine an observer tracking and analyzing a random elementary particle. Let us assume that this particle is a free electron moving in the vacuum of space, but the observer has no prior knowledge of the particle and its properties. Upon tracking the particle and commencing the studies, the observer will determine, via meticulous measurements, that the particle has a mass of 9.109 × 10–31 kg, charge of ?1.602 × 10–19 C, and a spin of 1/2. If the examined particle was already known or theoretically predicted, then the observer would be able to match its properties to an electron, in this case, and to confirm that what was observed/detected was indeed an electron. The key aspect here is the fact that by undertaking the observations and performing the measurements, the observer did not create any information. The three degrees of freedom that describe the electron, any electron anywhere in the universe, or any elementary particle, were already embedded somewhere, most likely in the particle itself. This is equivalent to saying that particles and elementary particles store information about themselves, or by extrapolation, there is an information content stored in the matter of the universe. Due to the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, we postulate that information can only be stored in particles that are stable and have a non-zero rest mass, while interaction/force carrier bosons can only transfer information via waveform. Hence, in this work, we are only examining the information content stored in the matter particles that make up the observable universe, but it is important to mention that information could also be stored in other forms, including on the surface of the space–time fabric itself, according to the holographic principle.

This ties into decoherence since the amount of decoherence is dependant on the amount of information exchanged between systems. https://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=919863

Quoting Wayfarer

That's him there, riding a unicycle while juggling.

Nothing impressive. I've seen jugglers on bike circling around a tight circular platform.

I guess, but I liked the whimsical nature of that shot. It captures something of his mischievous character. He was always interested in gadgets and magic tricks.