Unification of \"Life\" and \"Information\" by Anthony DiCarlo

Hello Anthony,

Good to meet again in these fqxi pages! You write,

"...unifying life with the fundamental rules of what constitutes measured information."

and also,

"The simplicity in the underlying concepts of the theory must also be deemed evident by many and not just by a selected few. How can anything at all be deemed grand when the "grandness" is a judgment call in the eyes of the beholder and beholders are merely a few scientists?"

I couldn't agree with you more! Though I realize your essay is much more than these quotes. As you suggest,

"... we can use string theory physics to model the physical sensory information that sustains a conscious life form that interacts with the universe."

This is a bold and insightful idea. It may also be correct! In my last FQXi essay I write,

"... if the view leads to physical explanations [based on mathematics] which are counter-intuitive and defy common sense, or become too abstract and too removed from life and not supported by life, than we must not confuse mathematical deductions with physical realism. Rather, we should change our view!"

We both agree that physics must make sense to ordinary people and not just to the few experts. Thus, the final arbiter of a physical theory is the collective mind of a culture. And in this sense (as well as many other) Physics is akin to Metaphysics!

My current essay, "The Metaphysics of Physics", builds on this theme and takes it further. I think you will find it enjoyable and agreeable to your own thoughts on modern physics.

Best wishes!

Constantinos

Anthony,

May I offer a simpler description of how life models physics?

Information defines energy and energy manifests information. Animate, mobile organisms developed complimentary systems to process both. We have a central nervous system to process information and a respiratory, digestive and circulatory system to process energy. The processing unit of the nervous system, the brain, is divided into two hemispheres. The right, parallel processor is essentially a form of thermostat, in that it processes multiple environmental and hormonal cues, as to their levels of intensities. The left, linear, rational side is a serial counting function, a clock, primordially tasked with navigating an effective route through the environment, as well as biological responses to it. With billions of years of evolved feedback into these primary systems, the layers of complex interaction are significant.

One must note the logical fallacy of the current most popular spiritual paradigm, monotheism, is that absolute is basis, not apex, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of awareness from which we rise, not a moral and intellectual ideal from which we fell. Good and bad are the primal biological binary code of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken yet there is not clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins. Between black and white are not just shades of grey, but all the colors of the spectrum. The intellect is a process of distinction and judgement and the lessons learned. The fallacy of monism is that a universal state would be neutral, ie. zero, not one. Oneness(connectivity) and one(singular set) are not the same, even though it is easy to slide from the former, since it expands to infinity, and the latter, which tends to collapse into an entropic singularity. Radiation expands, mass contracts.

The main problem with physics is that it treats time as a measure from one event to the next, which only re-enforces the events as fundamental and not the underlaying process. It is not the future moving from past to future, but the changing configuration turning future into past. Not the earth traveling a fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but tomorrow becoming yesterday because the earth rotates. This makes time an effect of motion, similar to temperature. One the rate of change, the other, the level of activity. Affect the level of activity and it will affect the rate of change. That's why time can vary according to different conditions. These two primary effects of action are the basis of the hemispheres of the brain; sequential order of time and degrees of energy of temperature.

The passage of time is not sequential but cause and effect. Yesterday doesn't cause today, anymore than one rung on a ladder causes the next. Yet my tapping on these keys does cause letters to appear on the screen, because there is a transfer of energy creating effect from cause. What causes days are the energy of the sun shining on a rotating planet. The future is where the energy flows. The information is simply the configuration that will be replaced. Thus energy goes to the future, while information goes to the past. The sun shines on and the earth continues to spin, as the days recede into the past.

Without motion, nothing exists. With motion, nothing exists forever.

That's my thumbnail sketch of how life emerges from physics.

lousy proofreading;

yet there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins

since it expands to infinity, to the latter,

It is not the present moving from past to future, but the changing configuration of presence, turning future into past.

You could also say that hot systems overtake cold systems, and that heat itself can cause mutations in systems, which would ultimately bring about the dominance of hotter and hotter systems -- so life is great at converting useful energy into heat, and life is very likely to get better and better at it. We exist to break stuff up in order to scatter about the binding energy, and by doing so we set ourselves up for evolution.

note how the fractal physics of optimized charge compression / fusion;

www.fractalfield.com/mathematicsoffusion

match the physics of measurement of life force

pyraphi.com

www.goldenmean.info/biophoton

www.goldenmean.info/architecture

Constantinos,

It is good hearing from you again. I must admit that your essay last year influenced me to give this another go. I did like your essay again this year also. It appears we have similar views in many respects. Grand unification must include the observer in a way that even the observer is clueless too ... and why ... probably because it provides the utmost in elegant simplicity.

Best Regards,

Tony DiCarlo

Anthony,

Interesting that you mention the zeta function in this context. I know of several physics applications of the zeta function, the Riemann hypothesis, etc., but I had never seen in mentioned in a biological context.

A question I have is the following: given your emphasis on the observer, what is your view of the principle of covariance? The reason I ask is because I am interested in alternate descriptions of covariance myself; I describe this in my essay

On the Foundational Assumptions of Modern Physics

Also interesting to see that you were at SLU. Did you know Zach Teitler? He was doing algebraic geometry there a few years ago. Take care,

Ben Dribus

In response to John Merryman:

I believe that when you equate energy to information, you are doing the equivalent of knowing a measure, but, leaving out the detailed reasons for why you received the measure.... like knowing the answer and having to work backwards for the physical meaning. Instead, if we call every degree of freedom an information network, invoke the 2nd law of thermodynamics to evolve the system to follow the entropy gradient, while invoking Feynman's rules to combine .... this is Constantino Ragazas's"accumulation of energy period" which is actually much more interesting then the energy measure outcome. Recall where energy usually lands up in unification and how it combines with the "time of accumulation." We can't unify because the unification comes in the story that comes before the measured energy...plain and simple. This is the place where the 2nd law is driving the combinations that sample Fewnman's possibilities.... this is the thinking period .. the accumulation of energy period .... the thought that transpires prior to causing a physical, measurable action.

Therefore, your measure of energy is not mine .. THE paramount issue in unification is we all have our own story and this does not come with synchronization into what drives the entropy gradient in the decision making step in the thought process ... a reasoning period that results in performing the physical action that is soon, later, etc., to eventually transpire (tackyons that assure your future). It is when we unite on other grounds that we unify..... not with energy.... with the reasoning that led to the energy measure... that's it.

Best regards,

Tony

Anthony,

I'm not equating energy to information, but relating energy to information. Information is the map of the territory of energy. Our perception of reality is a form of measure and we are trying to work backwards, as to how the reality behind that perception came to be. Meanwhile the reality is in constant flux, which gives us more information, but often distorting what we thought we previously knew. There is an adaptive tendency to stick with what has worked and brush aside other views. From religion to politics, our frameworks often go from being definitive to defensive.

I would say I fully agree with Constantino's accumulation scenario and voiced similar concepts in my digital vs. analog essay; Comparing Apples to Inches

"It seems to me, that when those early physicists were deciding what a photon was,

they were counting when they should have been measuring. They counted the clicks of

the detector, when they should have been measuring the spaces in between.

Not an irreducible little particle, but the smallest measurable quantity.

An inch, not an apple.

Benjamin,

On Zeta..

I think more of the Zeta function in the context of the space of all Holonomic functions (all can be built from elements on the critical strip).. the mathematical model of the space of information. r=0 being the electron (smallest) and r=1 being the outer edge of the volume containing information (the universe in the limit and including all other manifolds).... so the r measure is a representative measure of the information from that specific location in the universe in the limits for r (or manifold). Converging functions at r>1 solves Casmir force models... and there are many more quantum Sums that have converging solutions in the space beyond infinity (outside the manifold ... a space where there is convergence of information that leads to an accurate energy measure at r>1. With that being said (I'm rather long winded on occasion where I have the freedom of keystrokes w/ no interruption, so please forgive me!) biology may fall into the r>1 space in where models of the immense number of quantum #'s coming from the exact chemical concentrations that produce entropy gradients (2nd law) to drive thermodynamics ... that must all be summed to produce a measurable outcome... an immense convergence that supplies information on the biological levels (maybe driving measurable cell potentials.. local ionic concentrations....all physical measurables).

Covarience..

Hmmm, to be honest w/ you I just Googled the term. Would have to sit on this a bit and do a bit more thinking (following entropy gradients w/ Feynman rules) prior to hitting keystrokes.

Also, I did not know Zach. I left my Associate Professor role at Southeastern LA University in 1995.

Best regards,

Tony

John,

Agree!

Thanks for your informative replys.

Tony

Tony,

You're welcome. We are all trying to figure out the same elephant, it just seems like different beasts on occasion.

John,

It may be that "we ourselves" are the beast that is being modeled in unification.

Take care,

Tony

Tony,

I see life as a game where the goal is to figure out the rules. Like any game, it starts off easy, but gets tougher, the better you get at it, until eventually it beats you, or consumes you. Whenever you think you may have won, really you have just gone to a tougher game. Unification creates pressures that.....

Regards and Good luck,

John

To S Halayka,

You state that "hot systems overtake cold systems." How about saying this: "Information spreads throughout the degrees of freedom offered?" If each life form represents your "systems" they then provide independent degrees of freedom to disseminate this information (the information being your heat). This would then imply that over time there will be a dominance of "informed" life forms over "un-informed" life forms. A "smarts vs. time" distribution moves towards making life forms a bit smarter over time, and therefore, they become aware that heat dominance is also a form of information dominance and do things like .... locally reverse entropy (refrigeration) ... etc,.

It's all about life and information!

Regards,

Tony

..... that what? I really hope that someday mankind will refocus efforts in unification to better explain all the physical aspects of life ... leaving out the metaphyscal. Who really cares about a Higgs Boson? Can it cure cancer ... can it repair an auto immune system? If we focus on life ... life information wins and things like "wholistic body repair" will take on a new meaning because we will be armed with the correct modeled information! Who knows? You must admit though, thinking about this stuff is addictive!

Regards,

Tony

A closing from the author of this essay:

A famous man once said:

"It would probably be enough to understand the electron"

Being a student of David Hestenes at ASU, I became fascinated in the geometrical interpretation of electron spin and the utility in visualizing this spin plane as "acting" like a tiny mirror. Essentially every information measure in space-time comes from elements perpendicular or parallel to the surface area of this plane. In Dirac's geometrical description of the electron, we see this spin plane again appear, and again we can imagine it taking on the role of extracting information regarding the "electron's doings" in a reflective mirror like fashion, in the plane and out of the plane information - all measurable information extracted from Dirac's modeled description of the electron includes this spin plane in some way/shape/form.

What was realized was that understanding the electron meant "understanding what the electron does for supplying measurable information" rather then "what is the electron?" We get to know something by measuring what it does for supplying information, and NOT for what it is! Where have we heard this before - you will know ME by my works? Anyway, this simply implies that it is metaphysics to ask what the electron is, and, measurable physics to ask what it measurably does. We must therefore train our thought to only think about the measure because measurable stuff is what builds all of our accepted theories, implying that reproducible experiments regarding measured information can either confirm or deny each prediction derived from the modeled information. I believe we call this "Doing Science."

That mentioned above ( MUCH more) led me to create the simple double mirror model proposed to represent the 4 dimensional information provided by the electron's ability to reflect (not to mention that my bathroom vanity mirror is parallel to my wife's mirror and I view a string of early morning and late night images every day!). I was also likely influenced to create this reflective model for representing measurable information by my line of work. My team and I have shrunk "very tiny mirrors" four times in efforts to build very high quality reflective arrays, each array consisting of millions of moving tiny mirrors ... each mirror physically driven by a lightening fast electrical input in order to generate a precise mirror motion. Two static angle reflective mirror states separate the mirror plane angle to the axis of the objective lens to project a bitmap stream of images on a screen at a rate that is mind boggling. Scaling the size of this mirror smaller and smaller became a natural thing and one gets a first hand look of the wealth of information that comes with each smaller sized scale. Both the physical nature of the individual Mirror & groups of Mirrors effect imaging information that comes with the optical reflections and mechanical oscillations of the millions of tiny mirrors. The ultimate mirror shrink must end at the electron!

I guess that what I am saying above is that we all have our own life story for why we do what we do, hear what we hear, see what we see, .... think what we think, etc. One day, more measurably accurate information that connects ALL of our particular "life stories" will surface (pun intended .. spin surface... the mirrors...). Can't wait!

Once again, cheers to the FQXI coordinators

Tony DiCarlo

hi Anthony

I thoroughly applaud the main stream of your essay, which goes so much beyond the narrow confines of physics that dominates most essays. You say "Information connects life's physical conscious state of being to the surrounding environment that is suitable to the particular life form (environments immersed in air, in water, etc., for the many distinct living species identified)." Agreed. This is a top-down effect from the environment to life forms - and that is fully in consonance with my own essay.

Where I part with you is the nee dot involve M-theory in this. While information may well play a role in that theory, as is suggested by all the stuff on the holographic principle, ordinary everyday physics will handle what you are talking about. The brain is essentially based in electromagnetism, biophysics, and molecular biology; it does not need M-theory.

George Ellis

type: need to involve