Does Nature Have a Definite Information Content? by Dan J. Bruiger

Dan,

A very readable and clear exposition on many of the basic assumptions and prejudices manifesting in the discipline of physics. Unfortunately it expresses the effective reasons it won't win the contest, as belief systems naturally promote advocates and demote skeptics. While it has certainly been brave of FQXi to ask such a contest question as this one, the judging of previous contests has been fairly conservative. That said, there are a number of similar efforts to seriously upend the apple cart and not just patch the more apparent holes. It will be interesting to see whether a serious paradigm shift is considered, or if the results conform to current models.

The point I raise in my essaythat our sense of time as a progression from past to future events, which physics re-enforces by treating it as a measurement, is actually a subjective perception of the changing configuration of what is, turning future potential into past circumstance, leads to a number of observations that relate to various of your points. Such as information being the configuration of energy. Thus while energy goes from prior to succeeding configurations, the resulting information is necessarily being created and destroyed, since the amount of energy is conserved. There being no blocktime conservation of information.

Entropy only applies to a closed system and if time is an effect of action, rather than the geometric cause, than space has no dynamic properties, thus cannot be bounded, bent, etc. and therefore is an infinite equilibrium state. So there is no ultimate closed system and energy is simply traded around. What is radiated away and ejected by collapsing systems, is absorbed by expanding ones.

As for determinism, all the processes effecting a system may well be deterministic, but if the input into that system cannot be defined, it is non-deterministic. With time as emergent effect, it is the collapse of future probabilities, which yields current actualities. The cat is not both dead and alive, because we are not traveling some vector from a determined past into a probabilistic future. It is the actual, physical course of events which determines the fate of the cat. To wit, the earth doesn't travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. We cannot know all input into any situation prior to its occurrence, since that would require signaling faster than the input is traveling. It is a non-linear reality out there.

Good luck in the contest and hopefully some non-belief based science can come of all this.

As once told famous neurologist Warren McCulloch :Greatest puzzle in the world is what is the same?

Dear Dan Bruiger,

I believe and certainly hope that you have a winner here! I began my comment by planning to quote certain things you said, but the comment began to be pages long! My first essay also focused on "the imagined causal power of law" as a religious hold-over and the evident self-organizing power of nature as a more 'faithful' interpretation, leading, as you suggest, even to the possibility of the self-evolution of fine-tuning. I think you might like to read that earlier essay. I certainly plan to read your earlier FQXi essay!

I could not have written your essay nearly as well as you, nevertheless you reflect my thinking on almost every point you touch, and certainly on information, entropy, holography holes, etc. Thank you. I plan to quote you in the future and hope you keep writing. I am very interested in reading more of your well-written words.

Your claim that "no aspect of nature is completely reducible to specified information or to any formalization whatsoever" exposes reductionism as a metaphysical pseudo-religious belief system based on largely simplistic cartoon-like abstractions from the natural world. I hope your essay is widely read. It seems ideally suited for a Scientific American article.

Your observation that "the idealist thread in science views matter as a mere abstraction" and "it is circular reasoning to assume that the being or behavior of a *natural* thing is exhausted in a human definition, design, or a formulation that has been abstracted from it in the first place" seem to be becoming more widely understood. It's about time.

Since you also go into some detail about quantum theory, I invite you to read my current essay, The Nature of the Wave Function, which seeks to establish the connection between the local "real" (but "non-deterministic") physical wave and the abstract (but statistically useful) probability amplitude. I think my approach is completely consistent with yours.

I am tempted to begin quoting your many wonderful observations about the nature of information, but I will stop here and simply urge all readers to study your essay.

Best of luck in the contest and in life.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

"What is the same information?" is the modern version of oldest problem starting from Plato question: What makes beautiful things "beautiful". Problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics. Bertrand Russel wrote that all Western philosophy is the comment to Plato.

In My Humble Opinion Plato's question is tautological question and according to Wittgenstein does havn't sense.

Dear Dan Bruiger,

I really enjoyed your essay. It is very clearly written and well argued. It also contains a lot of food for thought.

The overall feeling I get is that you are saying it is impossible to absolutely capture nature. I don't think I can disagree with that. I am not sure though, that there has been the intention to do that. Science developed from early attempts to understand the world by observing it. Those observations were described or recorded, such as in the many beautiful drawings of early naturalists. I am sure they never confused their drawings with the plants or animals themselves, though they strove to make their illustrations as accurate as possible.

Similarly in the other sciences, models were made as illustrations and tools for calculations but I do not know that the majority of those scientists thought their models to be what was represented, rather than -a means- to make sense of the external reality. Richard Feynman explains, in his lecture series at Auckland University (available via FQXi resources), that quantum calculations are extremely accurate in corresponding with experimental results but why that is so is not known. -There has been an attitude that why it works does not really matter. That how this relates to nature is just unnecessary esoteric "icing on the cake"; that we would like to have but can do without. So the usefulness of a model or technique can be something quite different from how realistic. Bohr's model of the atom is another great example. That doesn't mean that scientists should not strive to find the -very best representations- in terms of similarity to nature -and- useful functionality.

Yours is one of several essays in the competition arguing for self organisation of the universe. I think you might find George Ellis' essay really interesting.He is arguing for top down organisation rather than a universe built exclusively from the bottom up as reductionists would have it.

You have written a really interesting an accessible essay, which is also very relevant to the competition question. Well done. Good luck in the competition.

Dan,

Thank you for an excellent essay which is both absorbing and accessible. I was especially pleased to read lines like "Mass then becomes like other macroscopic

thermodynamic variables, such as temperature and pressure, which disregard microstates". I have exactly the same problem with the assumed isotropy of 'mass' and the disregard for it's structure with relation to it's gravitational effect. I have made a discovery which shows how non-isotropic matter can explain the Ice Age conundrum in a problematic-free way which is superior to the Milankovitch sunlight-only models. I'd appreciate it if you would take a look: Newtons Isotropy and Equivalence Is Simplicity That Has Led to Modern Day *Mass* Misconceptions of Reality

"While an organism may need to model its environment, encoding it economically in its brain or elsewhere, there is no reason to think that physical reality at large registers or processes information, or has any need to encode or represent aspects of itself. Information is encoded, registered, or processed by intentional agents."

You need to account for the presence of isomorphisms, isomorphic structuration, in inorganic nature -- near-perfect parallels for which no causal connection can be demonstrated. A dramatic example is wave mechanics, both quantum and hydraulic. You can simulate the quantum double-slit in a pond of water. It's a stretch to deny the presence of purely informational content in that situation. Or not?

The Feynman Double Slit

Dear Dan,

You ask John for thoughts on 'time' in the universe before cyclical processes occurred. I address this in my last FQXi essay, along with the concept of a self-evolving universe as opposed to one "obeying laws".

The basic equation implied by such a universe, beginning with ONE field and evolving, is described on page one and the analysis follows on page two: In 1953 Eugenio Calabi essentially asked if our Master equation was valid: "Could there be gravity ... even if space is a vacuum totally devoid of matter?" He reasoned: "...being non-linear, gravity can interact with itself and in the process create mass", and he conjectured, "curvature makes gravity without matter possible". The Calabi-Yau manifold confirms our Master equation--based only on gravity--but his conjecture was based on special geometry in which "time is frozen". Meaning what? Newton's equation is time independent, but ... our Master field equation is seen to be scale invariant and Nottale has shown that the laws of scale can actually take the place of the laws of motion: that is, scale invariance implies motion invariance.

If scale invariant is motion invariant, time has no obvious meaning. But action orthogonal to a radial field vector can produce a vortex or cyclical phenomenon in a region of space, introducing duration or cycle time. So time appears when the G-field symmetry breaks and local oscillations, i.e. natural clocks, occur."

This cyclical field is of course the same C-field that my current essay analyzes as the basis of the physical wave function. There is of course more, and I draw conclusions based on the above, but I just wanted to say that I believe your question is a valid one, and share my take on it with you.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

A great theoretical biologist, Howard Pattee (still with us) asks the question: "How do molecules become messages in cells?" Because DNA-RNA clearly carries information while at the same time being observable only as a process of physical chemistry. So what makes life, or any autopoietic process, different from an advanced inorganic process like, say, crystal growth? Until you answer that question, and do so in convincing detail, you can rule out no possibility, even including panpsychism.

To say that something is not "a property of physical reality per se, but of our metaphors and models" is, however true, unhelpful if your goal is to do science. I say that as a sincere Bohrian. Here's a paper by a couple of neo-Copenhagenites, one of whom is on record as not liking to call the moon "the moon" because it ascribes properties to the whatever-it-is-up-there which are doubtless inaccurate and misleading; it's epistemologically and ontologically as well as scientifically sophisticated stuff:

Quantum Physics as a Science of Information

Dan, forgive me for jumping into your thread, but you keep generating interesting questions.

nmann asks: "How do molecules become messages in cells?" Because DNA-RNA clearly carries information while at the same time being observable only as a process of physical chemistry."

In my opinion, all information is contextual, and is not even information *unless* there is a codebook. In the case of RNA/DNA clearly the cell is the codebook and there is no meaning at all to RNA/DNA structure without the cell (or without conscious beings based on cells). The best way to understand information (again, in my opinion) is as process or event or processed structure that literally "IN-FORMs" or induces 'In'-'form'ation in some other structure, typically the brain, but, as noted, also in cells.

"Until you answer that question, and do so in convincing detail, you can rule out no possibility, even including panpsychism." Who's ruling out panpychism? Or an analogous interpretation of awareness.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

EEK,

Yes. I made the point back on the Ellis thread that no one should be conned into believing they're eavesdropping on the internal communications of DNA-RNA simply because we've identified some of the process and coded it in our own code.

It's like watching some fist fight in the Ukrainian parliament without sound or subtitles or even commentary. You can identify the big blond guy who's pounding on the big dark-haired guy whom you also recognize and you call them X and Y but really have no idea what the beef's about.

Dan,

The problem with the question is that unless we accept the "fabric of spacetime" as a causal agent and not just using the speed of light to correlate distance and duration, there is no theoretical foundation for the current cosmological model. Rather than go into my usual rant on this, here is an article by someone with firsthand knowledge of the situation.

That said, if we have a universe composed entirely of unbound electrons, the concept of temperature would be a more effective description of it. The concept of time really only comes into effective being when there is some degree of irregularity and complexity in those regular actions, otherwise there really is no sense of linear progression. The regular cycles are basically a method of fixing a ruler to this process of change. There would be no concept of past and future, only of spin. As you say, it's that background to the fixed cycle of a defined system, which gives the sense of the progression of time.

I think we under appreciate the concept of temperature, because as a statistical measure of non-linear processes, it is the noise out of which we try to detect the signal of the linear narrative of time(and thought). We overemphasize the nature of time, because it defines our reductionist understanding of life. We constantly try to distill everything into one descriptive narrative, then further reduce that to a bottom line result, but in trying to find that elusive quality, we loose contact with everything else and end up with nothing. Knowledge is inherently subjective, as I discussed in the essay. We are programed to focus in order to survive, not find nuggets of eternal meaning. The absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.

Sorry to get philosophical in a physics discussion, but the quest is for understanding and I follow where it leads.

Dear Dan Bruiger,

I think the definite information content of a quantum that is its entropy, is relative.

With best wishes

Jayakar

Another point to keep in mind about information is that the dynamic creation and destruction of information is also information. The current blocktime notion that information is somehow permanently stored in the four dimensional geometry of spacetime results in a static determinism that is a big part of the problem of explaining probabilities.

Thanks, nmann, for the references (Pattee and Zeilinger) which I will check out. And thanks to you Edwin for "jumping in". We three seem to agree that information is contextual. Further to that, here is a quote from something else I have been working on: "However biologists may objectify the genetic "code"--even to the extent of transmitting it by email--the organism's internal communications cannot be so objectified without losing the sense in which they form the basis of the agent's own point of view.

A message between human beings may appear to exist objectively. It can appear as text, with an indisputable number of characters, a definite information content. This appearance depends crucially on human intersubjectivity. It may not be taken for granted when dealng with other creatures. Even the objectivity of the 'information' in DNA is not independent of somatic and environmental factors. The extent to which it can be manipulated reliably by human beings depends on fortuitous constancy and control of such factors, even when we don't know what they are. Above all, it is information for the organism, which has been appropriated by the genetic scientist."

I can't agree that it is unhelpful to point to the subjective side of information. While information, like isomorphism (or structure in general), must be considered a feature of the real world, both must also be asserted by agents. It is always "information according to so-and-so", and similarly with isomorphism, which is the identification of a pattern or relationship. The agent is the aspect missing from treatment in physics so far. I hesitate to call it 'intentionality' because that term has so much baggage in philosophy. Same with the term 'panpsychism'. The concept of intentionality or agency must be broadened to include agency within organisms and nervous systems, not just the agency responsible for the molar behavior of the creature. Similarly, it must include agency within what is presently considered inert matter. I suspect this is key to further advances in cosmology, and perhaps to the resolution of conundrums such as the apparent and highly improbable fine-tuning of the universe to life.

cheers, Dan