At Friam today, we had our first discussion of entropy in a while. It was like old times. I really enjoyed it.
But the following disagreement came up. I am, I think, a bit of what philosophers call an essentialist. In other words, I assume that when people use the same words for two things, it aint for nothing, that there is something underlying the surface that makes those two things the same. So, underlying all the uses of the word “entropy” is a common core, and …. Here’s the tricky bit … that that common core could be expressed mathematically. However, I thought my fellow discussants disagreed with this naïve intuition and agreed that the physical and the information theoretical uses of the word “entropy” were “not mathematically equivalent”, which I take to mean that, no mathematical operation could be devised that would turn one into the other. That the uses of the word entropy were more like members of a family then they were like expressions of some essence.
I wonder what you-all think about that.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |