Information sync vs. information transfer (my notes)
The is an efficiency factor in information encoding which is to do with the relationship between the encoder and decoder.
For example a large 1 on a billboard, consisting of thousands of light bulbs is less effiently encoded than directly reading a bit from the memory of a computer. In other words there is a notion of number of transferable bits per number of encoded bits.
Although this need not imply that there is such a thing as a fundamental bit, independant of a potential decoder, it does mean that one can imagine a maximum effiency where the number of bits required to describe the computer itself (i.e. the encoder) is the same as the number of bits that the decoder can interpret.
Imagine an idealized encoder: 1 and a decoder 0, where 1 is maximally efficient - i.e. the machine itself is merely the information it stores, it actually represesents the position in phase space, of the encoder relative to the decoder, not just the information stored there.
Information transfer from one to the other would mean that the two items subsequently occupied the same position in phase space, i.e. they would literally be the same, the encoder would have merged with the decoder. If a third party is able to observe this (at this fundamental level, and not a higher abstraction) then it implies that the third party is part of the same universe of information, equivalent to being part of the same inertial system for a moving body.
What has happened: 1 -> 0 = 1 and 1. Since they occupy the same position in phase space, what has happened in this idealized form of information transfer is not information flowing from one place to another, but rather the elimination of difference, via syncing. The net result is actually a ‘delete’, i.e. the encoder and decoder have actually merged.
This seems contradictory at a large scale, and particularly when there are three systems, two sharing information about a third. This is lagrely what most communication consists of, rather than the one on one communication above.
One source of paradox is that as people share information, even if it is actually reducing the total potential information ‘exchange’, it unlocks the potential for more information exhange in each subsequent interaction. ‘Getting to know one another’ maximizes the potential rate of information exchange in the future.
Information exchange between two people is normally of the form:
Initial state: Actor A’s relationship to the environment (history of interactions over time) Actor B’s relationship to the environment (history of interactions over time)
Shareed experiences i.e. similarities, allow development of a syntax to transfer (or more porperly to sync differences between them, based upon their different histories of interaction with the environment.
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