Gpuccio: Functional Information Methodology

[gpuccio]

@swamidass

What is the object? The starry sky? You mean our galaxy, or at least the part we can observe from our planet?

What is the function?

I said the information is the positions of visible stars in the sky. The function of this information, for many thousands of years, was navigation (latitude and direction), time-telling (seasons), and storytelling (constellations). Any change that would impact navigation, time-telling, or storytelling, or create a visual difference would impact one or all these things.

There are about 9,000 visible stars in the sky (low estimate). Keeping things like visual acuity in mind (Naked eye - Wikipedia), we can compute the information. However, even if there are just two possible locations in the sky for every start (absurd) and only half the stars are important (absurd), we are still at 4,500 bits of information in the position of stars in the sky. That does not even tell us the region of sky we are looking at (determined by season and latitude), but we can neglect this for now.

I wll briefly answer this, and then for the moment I must go.

What makes the current configuration of the stars specific to help navigation, time telling or story telling? If the configuration were a different random configuration, wouldn’t it be equally precious for navigation, time telling and storytelling?

There is no specific functional information in the configuration we observe. Most other copnfigurations generated by cosmic events would satisfy the same functions you have defined.