khafra comments on Open Thread: April 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Unnamed 08 April 2010 03:09AM

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Comment author: khafra 08 April 2010 12:53:52PM 4 points [-]

One thing you may want to address is what you mean by "gather and preserve information." The maximum amount of information possible to know about the universe is presently stored and encoded as the universe. The information that's useful to us is reductions and simplifications of this information, which can only be stored by destroying some of the original set of information.

Comment author: Document 08 April 2010 09:41:11PM *  1 point [-]

In other words, "information" in this case might be an unnatural category.

Comment author: khafra 08 April 2010 10:47:42PM 1 point [-]

Yes. CannibalSmith's usage sounded to me somewhere indeterminately in between the information theoretic definition and the common meaning which is indistinct but similar to "knowledge." My request for clarification assumes the strictly information theoretic definition isn't quite what he wanted.

Comment author: CannibalSmith 08 April 2010 04:21:00PM 0 points [-]

My mom complains I take things too literally. Now I know what she means. :)

Seriously though, I mean readable, usable, computable information. The kind which can conceivably turned into knowledge. I could also say, we want to lossly compress the Universe, like an mp3, with as good a ratio as possible.