So "Apple" "Sexy" "Entropy" "Energy" and "Probability" are all EQUALLY in the mind of the intelligence dealing with them.
Anything at all is "in the mind" in the sense that different people might for whatever reason choose to define the words differently. Because this applies to everything, it's not terribly interesting and usually we don't bother to state it. "Apple" and "energy" are "in the mind" in this sense.
But (in principle) someone could give you a definition of "energy" that makes no reference to your opinions or feelings or health or anything else about you, and be confident that you or anyone else could use that definition to evaluate the "energy" of a wide variety of systems and all converge on the same answer as your knowledge and skill grows.
"Entropy" (in the "log of number of possibilities" sense) and "probability" are "in the mind" in another, stronger sense. A good, universally applicable definition of "probability" needs to take into account what the person whose probability it is already knows. Of course one can define "probability, given everything there is to know about mwengler's background information on such-and-such an occasion" and everyone will (in principle) agree about that, but it's an interesting figure primarily for mwengler on that occasion and not really for anyone else. (Unlike the situation for "energy".) And presumably it's true that for all (reasonable) agents, as their knowledge and skill grow, they will converge on the same probability-relative-to-that-knowledge for any given proposition -- but frequently that won't in any useful sense be "the probability that it's true", it'll be either 0 or 1 depending on whether the proposition turns out to be true or false. For propositions about the future (assuming that we fix when the probability is evaluated) is might end up being something neither 0 nor 1 for quantum-mechanical reasons, but that's a special case.
Similarly, entropy in the "log of number of possibilities" sense is meaningful only for an agent with given knowledge. (There is probably a reasonably respectable way of saying "relative to what one could find out by macroscopic observation, not examining the system too closely", and I think that's often what "entropy" is taken to mean, and that's fine. But that isn't quite the meaning that's being advocated for in this post.)
Sexiness is "in the mind" in an even stronger sense, I suppose. But I think it's reasonable to say that on the scale from "energy" to "sexiness", probability is a fair fraction of the way towards "sexiness".
"Entropy" (in the "log of number of possibilities" sense) and "probability" are "in the mind" in another, stronger sense.
Aha! So it would seem the original sense that "Energy" is "realer" (more like Apple) than Entropy is because Entropy is associated with Probability, and Bayesian Probability, the local favorite, is more in the mind than other things because its accurate estimation requires information about the state of knowledge of the person estimating it.
So it is proposed there is a sp...
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