Determinism: Difference between revisions
→Information by Claude Shannon
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According to Shannon, the less likely an event is to occur, the higher the informative content of a message that is delivered to the reciever, and vice versa. | According to Shannon, the less likely an event is to occur, the higher the informative content of a message that is delivered to the reciever, and vice versa. | ||
In a deterministic world, however, any discussion about the probability of an event | In a deterministic world, however, any discussion about the probability of an event occurring would become unnecessary, because all events would happen with certainty, leaving no room for alternative events in the same place and time, which would imply that, by the idea of Shannon, the role of information might be drastically diminished. | ||
How much the concept of information | How much the concept of information would lose its significance, depends on the receiver's ability to deduce the content of a message independently, relying on his knowledge about natural laws, his logical reasoning and how much he knows about previous events and their causal relationships to the event in question. | ||
In a deterministic world, where humans would have the ability to deduce any event if given enough data, no amount of information would be obtained from the message about any event. | In a deterministic world, where humans would have the ability to deduce any event if given enough data required to deduce it, and would have access to that data, no amount of information would be obtained from the message about any event, rendering the concept of information, in Shannon's sense, obsolete. | ||
Realistically though, humans would always need at least a basic set of informational statements, which they could use as a starting point to deduce new information based on their own reasoning. | |||
This basic information would represent the fundamental building blocks of the events in the entire universe, fully sufficient to deduce any event at any point in time, if the knowledge about all natual laws and logic are applied correctly. | |||
Since humans are susceptible to logical errors, it is not ensured that they would be able to always deduce an event correctly, so the information content of a message about an event they did not manage to deduce correctly on their own, is still present to a certain extent, which is determined by the amount of error in the recipient's prediction. | |||
All in all, it can be said, that based on Shannon's idea of information, determinism would likely limit the amount of information recieved, but not fully remove it, because any logic used to predict an event requires premises in the form of knowledge about previous events, and humans, practically might misapply their logic, leading to a false prediction. | |||
== '''Knowledge and Determinism''' == | == '''Knowledge and Determinism''' == | ||