Jade produces some interesting brain teaser videos. Here’s one where she talks about the Landaur Limit.
My sticking point throughout the video is the concept of “pure” information - is actually discussing the manipulation of ones and zeros on a silicon chip. Subsequently the ones and zeros create information, like a steam turbine create information in the form of electrical energy - that we use for lighting (information ?) and to transform into physical work (information ?) and heat (information ?) .
Quite often, “Information” is never really formally defined beyond ones and zeros on a chip. But the biological world doesn’t act that way, every photon bouncing around conveys . . . what kind of information? Beyond that, within biological creatures, let alone their interactions, there’s no analogy to this binary foundation of the “information” our computers create.
It’s exactly what I mean about that divide, between the mind, and our thoughts.
The mathematics vs. the actual factual physical world that we struggle vainly to grasp.
Going to the grand scale, it seems to me most great thinkers have never really wrestled with that mindscape/reality. Why? Because it didn’t fit in with the human condition? Survival of the fittest since the fittest could conquer and destroy other peoples and dominate their lands and resources?
Then came Abrahamic thinking with that self-absorption that produced our God vision - our Ego incarnate. Why do so few face that personal reality of the religions we create to wrap around ourselves, like tailored god-impregnated armored cloaks?
With a demand for perfection and certainty, which has permeated westered thinking, up to and including the dualism that is still a thing, rather than part of history.
Yes, yes, this is overstating, there were other ideas, but it’s impossible to consider the whole, by nitpicking nuances, because the whole has been dominated and driven by that “truth”. J.C. look at how we humans continue acting, and the things we’ve been able to once again allow, look at Putin channeling Genghis Khan without the brains. Or, we informed intelligent Americans made Trump our nation’s president because he best represented the general publics disregard for anything beyond one’s own needs. {There was more than voting for or against him - the normalization of an objective baldfaced lie, with the tactical intent of slandering and delegitimizing another American. And we all pretty much stood by silently, as though it just didn’t matter.}
1:50 - you say information “has its own energy cost”, but aren’t you talking about storing & moving bits of information on a chip? In which case, why isn’t it similar to your other examples, except that it happens on a microscopic (quantum) level?
The chip requires energy to store energy. So I’m thinking, it’s not “pure” information, it’s stored/processed “information on a silicon chip”.
Or?
How would you define “pure” information? As opposed to information stored on a chip?At 11:11 she discusses schemes to supercool computers, which would make the storing/processing of bits to beat the Landauer Limit*
Isn’t that slightly disingenuous, how much energy is require to produce the refrigeration that super cools the computers?
- This kinda looks like an answer.
"… The challenge in confirming the Landauer principle experimentally for a classical system was that such systems are usually described by a continuum of states, rather than the two discrete states required for a classical bit. The first experimental confirmations made an effective two-state system by using laser light [2] or electric fields [3] to confine a Brownian particle in a controllable double-welled potential.
…
“Taking on this challenge, Feng and colleagues [4] conducted an ingenuous experiment to verify the Landauer principle in the quantum regime. In their setup, the qubit was comprised of two internal states of a trapped calcium ion. The heat reservoir was supplied by the ion’s own vibrational modes, which were cooled to a few tens of microkelvin. At the start of the experiment, the researchers prepared the qubit such that its two states were equally populated, a condition of maximal entropy known as a classically mixed state. They then “erased” part of this information using a laser, which coupled the qubit to the reservoir and enabled the conversion of entropy into heat (Fig. 1). By taking multiple measurements of the ion, the team recovered the population of the atom’s two levels and the population of the vibrational modes. Comparing populations before and after an erasure, the team determined all terms appearing in the second law (Σ,Q,ΔS) and showed that the Landauer principle holds in the quantum regime. The team also found that achieving close to zero entropy production with a quantum reservoir was very difficult, particularly at low temperatures. …”
On a tangent. In reading articles like this, I’m struck by the notion that personal Knowledge can be compared to a sieve. The more you learn, the more strands are created between the hoop, and the more substance one’s mental sieve can capture.
For me, it’s a postcard where I can make out some fundamental concepts and arguments, that’s a far cry from internalizing (which is what that visceral is about) the full substance of that paper.
Beyond that, within biological creatures, let alone their interactions, there’s no analogy to this binary foundation of the “information” our computers create .
Down in the subatomic, sure guess that would be quanta, but here’s another case where scaling matters.
The Quantum world creates the substructure, skeleton, frame, but when we start scaling up, that “quantum” (a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents.) recedes into stuff that recedes into coordinated stuff, that becomes biological units, that build up to more complicated capable biology, that are capable of way more, than those original quantized building blocks.
