[ExI] Another reason why Platonism can't be true

[scerir]

Interesting page from Frank Wilczek, about information and (physical) action.See also R.Thom and the same topic.

"Information is another dimensionless quantity that plays a large and increasing role in our description of the world. Many of the terms that arise naturally in discussions of information have a distinctly physical character. For example we commonly speak of density of information and flow of information. Going deeper, we find far-reaching analogies between information and (negative) entropy, as noted already in Shannon's original work. Nowadays many discussions of the microphysical origin of entropy, and of foundations of statistical mechanics in general, start from discussions of information and ignorance. I think it is fair to say that there has been a unification fusing the physical quantity (negative) entropy and the conceptual quantity information. A strong formal connection between entropy and action arises through the Euclidean, imaginary-time path integral formulation of partition functions. Indeed, in that framework the expectation value of the Euclideanized action essentially is the entropy. The identification of entropy with Euclideanized action has been used, among other things, to motivate an algebraically simple but deeply mysterious "derivation" of black hole entropy. If one could motivate the imaginary-time path integral directly and insightfully, rather than indirectly through the apparatus of energy eigenvalues, Boltzmann factors, and so forth, then one would have progressed toward this general prediction of unification: Fundamental action principles, and thus the laws of physics, will be re-interpreted as statements about information and its transformations." http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.07735v1.pdf

scerir

> Il 22/02/2026 14:44 CET Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> ha scritto:
> 
>  
> On 22/02/2026 11:41, John K Clark wrote:
> > ... it's impossible to process data without physics
> 
> 
> Very good point. And further, it's impossible for information to even exist without some kind of physical embodiment.
> 
> That's all that needs to be said, really.
> 
> 1) It rules out the existence of a 'Platonic realm' containing all of maths, because maths is full of things that need to be calculated in order for them to be known.
> 
> Unless you claim that all the results of all the calculations that are possible, already exist (an infinite number).
> 
> And then, 2) you'd need to explain how this infinite amount of information can exist without any physical embodiment.
> 
> If that were somehow possible, what would then be the point of the physical world? Why would it even exist? That would be the biggest violation of Occam's Razor possible.
> 
> There's no information processing, or even any information to be processed, without the physical world. Any possible 'platonic realm' would have to be another physical world, but with an infinite information capacity (and probably no time dimension).
> 
> -- 
> Ben
> 
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat