Diversity, University and Information

When storing information you can either have a distinct character for every eventuality, or you can limit the characters and instead store information in their spatial orientation. A graph or mono-chrome screen is an excellent example of the latter where monotonous binary points (on or off) can represent vast amounts of information simply by their relative position. A text like I write here is a mixture of 26 characters {A-Z,a-z} and a few punctuation marks e.g. {space,."()}... and on a aside it's interesting in a text how to grammatically produce a list of grammatical marks... actually I think its impossible (a Quine requires another approach to work)... these characters are orientated in 1 dimension to produce a line of text (which is wrapped but that doesn't change the meaning). Then we could have a sentence of Chinese where a greater diversity of characters doesn't even require place order.

So here we see that "essence" and "where and when" are actually inter-changeable!!! When we decide that something is a unicorn we are locating at a certain space and time a "thing" which is different from a "horse".

But exactly the same information is present in such a construction as we would have by limiting the types of thing but increasing the complexity of space and arrangement. Isn't this exactly what science does. We don't need to think of the multi-million number of species that might be in a particular space (unicorns, horses etc) we can think of the 100 or so types of atoms in hugely complex arrangements and "systems". "Arrangement" in then an abstraction of space into time so that states can preceed or postceed one another. This is necessary because without time... well that is a mystery... why do we need "now"? It is something to do with self-reference but can't quite see it.

We can then simplify further into subatomic particles, fields, strings whatever at each stage of simplification the "spatial" arrangement gaining a more sophisticated description. The information is thus preserved.

So very crudely "what", "where" and "when" provide a constant of information and these three components can be transformed one into the other without loss. Nice to see substance blend with location and age. Isn't this what Buddha does also when he says that there is no self or soul or substance unique to things only whetever is caused at a given time and place by prevailing causes and conditions.

(Just self-reflecting I'm probably rehashing in my own stream of thinking insights from relativity that I gained from that audio-book)