Toward an Informational Mechanics by Karl Coryat

Hi Karl,

I was very glad to find your essay and enjoyed it very much, since my own ( An Observable World ) also deals with the assumption that the informational environment we can observe must be based on some kind of underlying reality. I was especially happy with your thoughts on the history of the universe, since I'd wanted to include something similar in the last part of my essay. I had to cut it, since the piece was already too long and too condensed.

The main difference between our approaches is that you're envisioning a physics based on a new kind of fundamental entity, the bit -- per your response to Georgina Parry above. You told her information exists in the same way we think of objects as existing. To me, the key point about information in physics is that it's observable, i.e. definable in the context of other observable information. Some kinds of physical information do resemble binary bits, but I don't think it's helpful to think of all such information as reducible to simple interchangeable bits. Instead, the question is how all the different kinds of physical information contribute to an environment that's able to define them all, in terms of each other.

If we open up the question of how information gets physically defined, we get a picture of the informational environment that's anything but elegant or unified . So I don't envision replacing our theories of fields and particles with an all-embracing theory of information. To the extent that it works to describe our world in terms of real, objective entities, I think we should certainly do so. My point is that we shouldn't be surprised that this kind of theory doesn't work at a fundamental level. It's only when we try to understand how our theories fit together, how they constitute a basis for the observable world, that we need to switch over to an informational viewpoint.

Anyhow, it will be some time before it's clear just how to make this conceptual shift, from the world as a structure of real things-in-themselves -- inferred from phenomena -- to the structure of communications that constitute the phenomena. I appreciate your brave incursion into this unexplored territory.

Thanks -- Conrad

Hello Mr Coryat,

I beleive strongly that the electromagnetism is so complex.I have several relevances considering the polarizations of informations. With a diffrent sense of rotation than m for the hv. The spherical volumes for the serie of uniqueness becomes very relevant. But in fact the complexity of this electomagnetic scale is very important considering the volumes of entangled spheres. In fact the volumes are the key !!! it permits to class the informations and the synchro and sortings.

See that the gravitation is for the most important volume, the electromaginetism is the number x very important, the gravitation the 1 more the volumes , it is very relevant.

The entanglement is like our universal sphere with the central sphere the most important volume. It permits to class better the forces, foundamental between the mass and the light in a pure evolution point of vue.The spherization is fascinating.

Regards

I dunno... I think that your essay is pretty awesome as it is, and I gave it a solid community score accordingly.

Hi Karl,

As I mentioned on my thread, I enjoyed your essay immensely - it is well written, well argued and extremely interesting.

I am in full agreement with you that information, rather than objects, is ontologically fundamental as Wheeler first suggested and as the philosophy of ontic structural realism has fleshed out (Dean Rickles has a superb essay in this competition on this matter). To my mind, theoretical discoveries such as the holographic principle, as you noted, and the various dualities in string theory make an object-based ontology pretty impossible to uphold. (In case you're interested, I wrote a short essay about this last year on the Edge website.) I also totally agree that information is fundamentally relational, as Rovelli boldly expressed.

Your idea that observations made by one observer places constraints on another is really fascinating - I have to spend some more time thinking about it to fully wrap my head around it. I'm also intrigued by your claim that multiple individual observers connected by contextual information correlations are topologically equivalent to a single super-observer. As I mentioned in my essay and on my thread, the idea of a single super-observer (an observer who effectively stands outside the universe independent of a coordinate frame) seems to violate certain laws of physics, as demonstrated in Susskind's horizon complementarity. However, if you can model the superobserver as many individual local observers, that raises some interesting new questions.

Thanks again for a wonderful read.

Best regards,

Amanda

Dear Karl,

My own ideas on an algorithmic world are somehow consonant with your information mechanics, at least in some aspects. I also think that the role of the observer is key in modern theories of physics (beyond the current state given to the observer in quantum mechanics). A la Wheeler you place information at a lower level underlying the rest of reality. I would have liked you to contrast your ideas with that of the so-called digital physics where this assumption is the founding stone (although some may think I am making a conflation between information and computation, which might be the case). I found interesting your attempt of formalisation of objectivity by means of invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms, I would have liked to see it further formally developed.

In biology evolution of life is seen as indirected, in your view you seem to suggest that there is an increase of complexity, I think it is risky to do so because the notion of complexity would need to be much more precise and I also think it is not easy to justify such an increase of complexity from the evolutionary point of view (it is evident that some sort of "complexification" had to happen to come from, for example, unicellular to multicellular organisms).

Hi Karl, I think that you are very right in identifying the diagrammatic language and relationalism. I always find most relational approaches to vague on what they mean by "relation", while the compact closed categories underpinning graphical reasoning are a natural formal way expressing what relations when interacting, and hence avoiding the need to give an explicit description of the underlying objects. Classicality (of ...) is then an extra ability to manipulate "whatever these relations carry", resulting in additional structure, the dots in the diagrams. These relations aren't really the mathematical relations, but something more flexible and general, closer to what we mean by relation in natural language.

If you do not understand why your rating dropped down. As I found ratings in the contest are calculated in the next way. Suppose your rating is [math]R_1 [/math] and [math]N_1 [/math] was the quantity of people which gave you ratings. Then you have [math]S_1=R_1 N_1 [/math] of points. After it anyone give you [math]dS [/math] of points so you have [math]S_2=S_1+ dS [/math] of points and [math]N_2=N_1+1 [/math] is the common quantity of the people which gave you ratings. At the same time you will have [math]S_2=R_2 N_2 [/math] of points. From here, if you want to be R2 > R1 there must be: [math]S_2/ N_2>S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] (S_1+ dS) / (N_1+1) >S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] dS >S_1/ N_1 =R_1[/math] In other words if you want to increase rating of anyone you must give him more points [math]dS [/math] then the participant`s rating [math]R_1 [/math] was at the moment you rated him. From here it is seen that in the contest are special rules for ratings. And from here there are misunderstanding of some participants what is happened with their ratings. Moreover since community ratings are hided some participants do not sure how increase ratings of others and gives them maximum 10 points. But in the case the scale from 1 to 10 of points do not work, and some essays are overestimated and some essays are drop down. In my opinion it is a bad problem with this Contest rating process. I hope the FQXI community will change the rating process.

Sergey Fedosin

Hi Karl,

Thanks for the great read! You present a lot of interesting ideas. I am curious, even with looking at living systems, how useful the concept of "contextual information" will turn out to be in the long run. Right now I agree that is is a very constructive way of thinking about these issues (which is why I like to use it as well!), but it is very difficult to formalize. This is one reason I have been leaning toward causal descriptions which are more rigorously defined. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Again, thanks for the engaging read!

Best,

Sara

Dear Karl,

Once again you wrote a very insightful and beautiful essay. It was interesting to me to see how far one can go without assuming that information is "about something". I think that what we can know are relations, and they can provide a complete description of reality (at least the accessible reality). You may want to take a look at some slides I prepared for a talk named "Global and local aspects of causality", where I take the wavefunction and unitary evolution seriously, and try to explain quantum correlations by global consistency effects (this is not related to my essay, named "Did God Divide by Zero?").

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

Any complex square matrix is triangularisable.

Eckard