Conservation Of Information?

[koganbot]

Posting again on a subject I don't understand and never will: what physicists mean by "information." My brain balks at mathematical symbols, but I'm good at concepts; so my guess is that if some articulate physicist were to wander by, he or she could explain "conservation of information" in a way that doesn't totally leave me at sea. Wikipedia hasn

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Do pointers have a point?

[koganbot]

By the way, what I wrote in my post may incidentally give the false impression that I think that language is fundamentally about pointing, which isn't right. Some words can point, but not all words must point. You can have the words "Frank's apartment," and some equivalent in some other language (except I don't know any other language, but maybe "l'appartement de François" or "François appartement" might work in French); and we can point to my apartment as what the words are referring to, no matter which of the two expressions we use.

And we can have a command like "Come here," and an equivalent command in another language (Google Translate gives me "Viens ici"), but now, with these phrases, there's no third thing, "Come hereness" or "the fact that you want someone [or some being] to come here," that we can point to. Or perhaps you could point at a particular spot, and the other person or being [a robot, say, or a dog] could know that that's a command or a request to come to the spot you pointed at; but still, that gesture doesn't point at some "come hereness" or "the fact that you want darling Fido to come to a particular spot." (Try pointing at the fact that you want darling Fido to come to a particular spot. Just try it. Also, you might not want Fido to come to a particular spot. In fact, you personally don't want Fido to come to that spot, but you were instructed to indicate to Fido that he come to that spot - or you thought you were, but in fact you misunderstood the instructions; so no one wants Fido to come to that particular spot. And the person who wrote the instructions is dead anyway. Nonetheless you've just commanded Fido to come to that spot.)

That "come here" and "viens ici" are the same thing and can be translated from one to the other still doesn't mean that there's some common third thing in no language that they point to. (Don't say, "they each point to the same meaning," as if the meaning were some third thing that magically linked the two phrases.) And actually, "Frank's apartment" only makes sense embedded in a whole bunch of behaviors, and doesn't have any meaning outside those behaviors. I can imagine a language that consists entirely of the phrase "Come here" (someone says "Come here" and the other person goes to where she thinks she's been instructed), but I can't imagine a language that consists entirely of the phrase "Frank's apartment" unless in that language (unlike English) that phrase always works behaviorally, as something like a request or a command or a warning. E.g., I say "Frank's apartment" and you pick up a package and bring it to Frank's apartment. (One hopes the package contains something of value.) So the phrase "Frank's apartment," in that language, means something like the English phrase "bring this to Frank's apartment."

[None of what I just wrote is original with me. I'm aping Wittgenstein, hoping I'm doing a good job of it.]

So, here's a question: in a future where all information was dumped into black holes that have evaporated, but the information still exists by virtue of there being an alternate description that needs neither gravity nor one of the spatial dimensions,* and so "Venez à l'appartement de François" is preserved, what language is the information in? One answer might be "all," but what "all" means is that "The pieces of information are in whatever language they were originally in" (should I add the phrase "or some equivalent"?). Somewhere amidst all this info floating about we've got the information that allows the information to be understood (as well as the understanding, which is also information - and yes I still don't have an intuitive understanding of "as well as the understanding, which is also information"). [EDIT: The way I wrote this last sentence is misleading; go down several comments for my clarification.] Presumably, any language can be learned by anything with the capacity to learn a language.