Philip,

''A conservative view would be that temporal causality is fundamental but ontological causality is just reductionism and is not what science is about. I take the opposite view.''

In the reductionist view the universe is just the sum of its parts. However, if particles have to create themselves, each other, so particle and particle properties must be as much the cause as the effect of their interactions, where particles only have a physical reality to each other if, to the extent and for as long as they interact, then the part(icle)s cannot exist without each other so have no autonomous, independent existence. A universe can only be the sum of its parts if particles, particle properties would only be the cause, and not also the product of their interactions, in which case the question as to the why of their properties never can be answered, explained ontologically nor (temporal) causally even in principle.

If the most fundamental law of physics says that what comes out of nothing must add to nothing, then this 'sum of its parts' must be nil (so everything inside of it, including space and time somehow must cancel so it has no physical reality as a whole, as 'seen' from without, so to say), then it obviously doesn't make any sense to make statements about the universe, to assert that it has a particular entropy. Moreover, by saying that its entropy changes in time, we in fact say that the universe lives in a time realm not of its own making, so Big Bang Cosmology (BBC) in fact represents a reductionist, i.e., an essentially religious view on the universe. To speak about the properties of the universe can be justified only if and when the inside objects, their particles, only are the cause of interactions, not when they are both cause and effect of their interactions.

As to ''The arrow of time emerges as a macroscopic effect from thermodynamics which tells us that entropy always increases in one time direction'', no, I still disagree with you, and not only because to do so would presuppose an initial low-entropy state of the universe, something which cannot be explained ontologically nor (temporal) causally. Such initial low-entropy state would make the universe an automaton which, once winded at (or just before?) the mythical bang, only can unwind in a preordained fashion so implies the intervention of something outside of it to wind it up, to provide it with a low entropy in the first place.

If particles cause, create one another, then real particles can be thought of as virtual particles which have managed to set up a continuous energy exchange, which by alternately borrowing and lending each other the energy to exist, force each other to reappear again and again after every disappearance. According to the Uncertainty Principle (UP), the smaller their distance is, the higher the frequency they exchange energy at, pop up and disappear to pop up again and again, the higher their rest energy is, the smaller the areas are where they keep popping up, the less indefinite their position is. It is clear that in this scenario particles owe their existence to each other, that they exist to each other only if and for as long as they keep interacting, exchange energy: as they cannot exist as autonomous, independent objects, the universe clearly is (much) more than the sum of its parts.

The fallacy of reductionism, the flaw at the heart of BBC is that it imagines to look at the universe from without, like we imagine God to look at His creation, so is even worse a 'theory' than creationism which at least is honest in stating that, yes, the universe has been created by some Outside Intervention.

My objection to (temporal) causality is that it confuses cause and effect, or, to be more precise, that, if particles indeed are both cause and the effect of their interactions, we can no longer say that their mass precedes gravity between them, so instead of saying that particles contract because they have a certain constant rest mass (they somehow, mysteriously have been provided with) and gravity is attractive, we can as well say that they acquire mass only if and when they contract (agreeing with the UP), that in doing so they power time, so the ''arrow of time'' has nothing to do with entropy whatsoever. The idea of temporal causality, that cause precedes effect, only would make sense if we could determine what precedes what in an absolute sense, if we could look from outside the universe in, which Big Bang Cosmology (BBC), in the concept of cosmic time, wants to make us believe is justified even though we cannot actually step outside of it. Sorry if this has again turned into a lengthy reply.

Regards, Anton

Hi Phil,

I enjoyed reading your essay, and I wish you luck. I got mine in on the last day, so I do not expect it to appear immediately, but you can expect a good rating from me once it does. I don't see an essay from Tom Ray yet either, and I know he submitted his a couple of days before mine.

I shall likely have further comments or a question, but for now I'm just skimming.

All the Best,

Jonathan

    James, thanks for your question.

    I dont claim to have all the answers about building space and time from information but I have presented one idea of how it might work by mapping discrete necklace lie algebras to continuous space and time using iterated integrations.

    Some solutions of string theory fit the braneworld idea. It is a possibility but I dont think that is how the world works. It would be hard to keep conserved energy contrained to the braneworld if it is embedded in a higher dimensional space with its own dynamics.

    I have read your essay, good luck

    Dear Gibbs,

    Going through your entire essay we seem to agree, essentially. Though I don't have your expertise.

    The idea in my essay is that if we take any observer as the first quantisation (i.e. as the fundamental frequency or phase space or "non-locality") then his observables follow as the harmonics (i.e. second, third etc quantization or phase-points or "localities"). In my view this means simply that certainty or determinism (Heisenberg's "position" notion) emerge from uncertainty (the "momentum" notion). Essentially this picture is Pythagorean, like you get an octave frame a keynote. Any de facto observer is then the de facto key (perhaps what you called the redundancy) from which one may get observables as the Pythagorean harmonics. And this is not mere speculation, I show values that define man as the key[note] for quantum gravity.

    Now when we see any observer as by definition the superposition (non-locality; fundamental frequency) does not it amount to your holographic principle namely: "The amount of information in any volume of space must be limited by the area of a surface that encompasses it,"? In my opinion this area of/or surface signifies the observer as the natural unit and limit of physical information.

    If you don't mind I will love to have your no-holds-barred comment on my [/essay], Mr Gibbs, but only after you have actually read through. Probably my essay simplifies yours, sort of like a String Theory idiot's version. Meanwhile, thanks for creating virxra.org and kind of adopting the academically orphaned.

    Chidi Idika

    Phil,

    Very nice article. My argument for why the black-hole information paradox is not true would rest largely on the idea that the orthogonal states of the density matrix are at best approximate in nature. So while the density matrix can be defined as a collection of pure states of a statistical ensemble, the pure states are at best approximations of the system itself. The underlying uncertainty ensures that there is a retention of information even when that system is thought to "collapse" into a definite state. It is only at the limit of measurements of single particle systems that we can be definite about the purity of states.

    In other words, the nature of the yes/no questions are always hampered with a distribution. We can say they are mostly true or false based on observation, but only with including a confidence interval about those mean states.

    On Constrained Perception

      This is the only essay I have read so far that required me to look up word definitions in the English (Oxford of-course) dictionary. Leave it to a Scot to keep an American informed about the proper use of English. Well written. Introduce me to the notion of bi-geometry. A strong attempt to further relate Lie-geometry to (super)string theory.

        Mauro, the digital vs analogue question was the topic of the essay two years ago so it is not my emphasis in this essay. There as here I take the view that quantised information made of qubits has analogue as well as digital features. It has never been my position that the foundations of physics are based on pure digital information in the form of bits.

        The analogue side comes from the uncertainty which is realised through quantisation or multiple-quantisation. I think I could not have made the importance of this clearer given the title of the essay. If I had to give my own short slogan it would be more like "it from qubit" or even "it from ...quququbit"

        The "It from Bit" question is not so much about digital vs analogue as about emergence. This has also been a common theme in all my previous essays where I have discussed emergence of locality, causality, space and time. My contention is that the foundations of physics take an purely algebraic form where space and time are emergent. I have argued in this essay that the holographic principle implies a large redundancy of information when physics is viewed as a theory in space and time which suggests that a "complete" symmetry plays a role in the emergence. My fundamental formulation is therefore in terms of pure algebras defined by multiple quantisation but independent of space and time. These are infinite dimensional Lie-algebras defined over the complex numbers so there is an analogue nature to physics already at this level. I do not expect the analogue nature of physics to be purely emergent.

        As for the reference to string theory you should be aware of the modern view that string theory is just part of the larger framework that includes quantum field theories. It is of interest because of its ability to bring gravity into the picture. I do not adhere to the view that it will provide a conveniently unique formulation of particle physics. I think that is a view which is fading in popularity. We now have to accept that such a theory is a long way off and concentrate instead on the underlying principles to understand the relationships coming from dualities and how these lead to emergence. Hoefully when new experimental BSM data is forthcoming we will be in a position with the theory to understand it.

        I have been looking at necklace lie algebras in this way for nearly twenty years and have seen many new ideas appear in the mainstream that follow the same principles. Permutations of the qubits extend to larger infinite dimensional symmetries which should resolve to diffeomorphism invariance as space and time emerge. You can compare this to what happens in quantum graphity for example. More recently we have seen new work on scattering theory in planar 4D SYM where permutations of states are of fundamental importance. The super conformal symmetry in space-time is joined by a new dual superconfirmal symmetry in momentum space and the completion of these symmetries defines an infinite dimensional Yangian symmetry which is similar to a necklace lie algebra. It is natural to turn this round and assume that the Yangian symmetry is the fundamental idea and that space and time are emergent along with locality, causality and unitarity. In the last few years this has become a very active field of research which is philosphically and mathematically very similar to what I have been looking at for many years.

        Iterated integration also arises in scattering theory as a process that recursively generates the polylogarythmic amplitudes. I have recently learnt that the free Lie algebra is a simple form of necklace algebra that can be mapped to a continuous space using iterated integrations. This is what I have described in my essay. It is just a small part of the whole picture which is too big and as yet incomplete to describe in more detail. The hope is that similar mappings could be used on my earlier necklace lie algabras in the same way.

        I hope this gives you a better picture of how my ideas fit in to the bigger picture. I am sorry that you seem to have gotten a completely upside down impression of what I was trying to say. Others have graciously complemented me on the clarity of my exposition so perhaps you just need to read it again more carefully.

        Dear Philip

        thank you for your thorough response. I believe in the value of simplicity of the starting principles of a theory. It seems to me that the Lie algebras are not good starting principles: they relate to continuous symmetries of something else. But I surely miss the conceptual points within the math. Also, we have too different background and motivations.

        My best

        Mauro

        Mauro, yes we seem to have different approaches. I do not place a high value on simplicity. I like consistency arguments where we try to put known theories together to form a new theory consistent with both in places where they clash. The maths this generates is not always simple but the constraints of consistency can be strong and lead to mathematical structures you would not find by any other means.

        Sorry I missed this earlier as the post was collapsed in the thread.

        I thank you for your train of thought but I think I am tuned into a different frequency from you where philosophy goes. For example I dont invoke God in my reasoning either for or against. This means I differ on too many fundamental points to try and address them.

        One thing I will say is that this essay is about emergence in general and causality is just one small part of that mentioned only briefly. It was much more important in my previous essay where these discussions would have been more relevant. They are still of some relevance here but the emergence of space and time is the bigger issue.

        best, Phil

        Philip,

        I have had physicists contact me about the holographic principle for they feel that the findings of a 12 year experiment I have recently concluded has provided empirical evidence to validate it. I find your statement, "Sometimes the most brilliant step towards a great discovery is asking the right question to begin with." is indeed the issue at hand.

        I hope you find time to review my findings to see if they coincide with your conclusions:

        http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1809

        Best wishes,

        Manuel

        Phil,

        I am digging deeper into your essay, and getting a better understanding of the necklace algebra you are proposing: "it can be interpreted as the emergence of

        string field theories in continuous space and time from algebras based on quantised information,"

        I think I am in agreement with the general idea. In my definitions, I associate information with uncertainty (which is consistent with Shannon). I am associating knowledge with what most people view as information, which is the sense of Wiener. In any case, the relative information, e.g. shared knowledge is what we are interested in. That is limited by quantum mechanics. In my interpretation of what you are saying, the idea is that we could build algebras based on the quantization of mutual information, which must be limited, which I am taking to mean there is a least element that can be defined. I like the idea of algebra building in general, so I find your essay to be very helpful.

        On another note, what are your thoughts on the apparent similarity of ideas that seem to be popping up from different corners?

          I must add one more response. You say that symmetries relate to something else. This is not necessarily the case. A Lie algebra can act on itself via the adjoint representation. This is what I have called complete symmetry. It means that the field that generate the symmetry are the same as the fields they act on so it is simply a principle of unification. It also implies that the degrees of redundancy match the degrees of freedom. This is exactly what is required for a holographic principle.

          Notice that I am following a train of logic to draw a conclusion (with assumptions that are reasonable but not watertight) I think this is better than just looking for something that is simple according to our tastes.