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August 09, 2005

Negative Information

By way of Mark Pesce, comes this story:

Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative information makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, negative information does exist in the quantum world. Small objects such as atoms, molecules and electrons behave radically different than larger objects -- they obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
What could negative information possibly mean? In short, after I send you negative information, you will know less. Such strange situations can occur because what it means to know something is very different in the quantum world. In the quantum world, we can (in some sense) know too much, and it is in these situations where one finds negative information. Negative information turns out to be precisely the right amount to cancel the fact that we know too much.

While all this might appear to be very mysterious, negative information, can be put on a rigorous footing. I will try to explain how to do so here, in a manner which I hope is accessible to all. This description is intended for those who have an interest in this subject, but may not have a background in quantum information theory. Most of this text should be understandable by anyone willing to put in a bit of effort, and the rest should be understandable by anyone with some knowledge of quantum mechanics (or by anyone willing to put in a lot of effort). So if there are parts which continue to be unclear after some time, please let me know [email J.Oppenheim (at) damtp.cam.ac.uk], and I can modify this text to make things clearer.

Posted by paul at August 9, 2005 09:00 AM
Comments

Thanks for the link paul :)

Posted by: nmatrix9 at August 9, 2005 01:33 PM

There is no such thing as negative information. Of course you can create any form of semantic play. How about negative space or negative time or perhaps negative meaning or negative semantics or negative dimensions? In a sense it is true since the word negative exists. In that sense you can always add the word negative to anything and define its meaning later. In the universe of words words are important, but beyond the wordyverse other laws rule. Anything is information, or you could not even think of it. So even the word information is an absurdity. Show me something, that is not information, and I will make you the king. If you attribute a negative meaning to something you are conscious of, then it's negative for you, negative information. Does information at all exist? Since everything we can possibly think of is information, we wouldn't even know, if outside our thinking there is something like non-information. How can we say, that inside our thoughtspace there is information, since the frame of reference would have to be non-information and since we cannot even think of that frame of reference? Information is a nil-word, since thinking as such takes place inside the realm of information. Ask a blind man, what colors are. Does that question make sense? I don't think so.
Non-information is to the mind what colors are to the blind man. You can have something and add something else to it and end up having nothing. There seems to be something negative in this, like the anti-something, but the anti-something is still something. Forms can cancel each other out, like two waves with shifted phase, but I wouldn't call this negative information. InFORMation is a form, but what is a form? Platon would say forms are thoughts as such, base ideas, the universe is made of. Postmodernists seem to disregard this, but belonging to the group of post-postmodernists, I think Platon is more modern than ever before. Platonists unite! If you can think it, it's real!
Platon's base ideas are not information structures, that are constructed by our neuronal system, but ontological meaning-entities, like beauty as such or fear as such. Think about it. Think it! Give it reality, now! Perhaps words do only describe, what we can think of, and perhaps we can think of negative information, so it's real after all. If we couldn't think of it, how could anyone possibly have had the idea of it? The idea is real, because the idea exists as such so it's real! And like this the child of negative information was born into this world.

Posted by: omikron23 at August 11, 2005 10:18 AM