Julian Barbour Making Sense of Information

At 2 minutes 53 seconds. Then he immediately goes and ruins it by talking utter nonsense about money! There is no difference between measuring the value of money by accounting in units of US$ dollars or by weight of gold. You are doing the same thing in both cases and relying on your knowledge of the value of US$ or the value of fine ounces of gold. They both depend upon your knowing how much currency is being created and what is the demand for that currency. So the use of fiat currency per se is not the underlying problem in the global economy. Just because it is in practice easier to defraud systems that use fiat currency rather than currency backed by gold bullion reserve does not mean that gold bullion reserves are a sound basis for measuring value.


Wozciech Zurek on information and representation. He talks about what motivates this strange-sounding notion of information as fundamental in physics. His slogan is "There is no information without representation", to which I add "and there is no representation without conscious interpretation by some experiencing subject". See Annaka Harris on Consciousness and Jade Explaining the Global Economy.


See Measuring Ignorance.

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