1y ago

Any 'creation' of information (pictures, books, code, etc) is just pruning the huge space of possible information to leave just the information you want.

Like carving a block of stone to leave only the form of a horse.

The stone (or the information space) already contained the horse, and a million other possibilities, the job of the artist is to collapse those possibilities into a single reality.

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Information has a mathematical definition, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
- Thanks!
- I'm interested but I'm not sure I have the brain cells for this right now.
i think spongebob covered this well in his attempt to teach squidward how to sculpt
- Ah, I haven't watched The Simpsons.
  
  my fav bit is when the baby screams 'not the momma'. you should totally check it out.
Kind of like the Library of Babel
If you have a block of stone and cut it in two pieces, the position and angle of the cut is information. By carving down a pool of information, you add information to it.
- Yes, the position and angle of the cut is information, but there are an infinite, or at least very large number of possible cuts. That's what I mean by the possibility space. By carving it, you collapse the information from lots of possible states to one real state, thus pruning the possibilities to get one reality.
Except, ideally, a PhD thesis. Which should contain a completely new piece of information for the world.
- Well no. It's still just a list of text, so that text as well as all other text with minor and major variations exists in the information space. As I said, the hard part is getting rid of all the wrong stuff.
- A good portion of any paper is citing references

12 comments