I think I agree with what you are saying. What I am saying is that it seems Eric is arguing that the LZ compression function itself (which in Eric’s implementation here consists of 25 lines of code) has some mutual information between itself and whatever is being compressed or copied. In that way, he argues that duplication does not increase mutual information in the system. That doesn’t make sense to me, because it is literally false. The information that is being compressed by the function is not contained in the function itself. However, it is true that when you apply the function to something to duplicate it, the total mutual information in the system increases.
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