What is Information by John Brodix Merryman

John

Re Cristi blog exchange. I never said anything about blocktime. The point was about discreteness.

"You seem to see it as a series of distinct presents, while I see it as what is present is energetic and thus constantly changing"

This is contradictory. So what is present? Answer: something discrete. What is continuous? Answer: something discrete which does not alter. The word energetic is superfluous. There cannot be existence and difference in that existence unless there is something discrete.

"Since it is what exists that is the constant, not the forms it takes"

This is irrelevant. Whether there is something which of itself does not change, ie is in effect inert, or whether the something is whatever alters, makes no difference to the point. Though it obviously is what physicists need to find out. Physical existence at any time (ie whatever is present then) is a function of the physically existent state of whatever comprises it. There is a natural tendency for humans to think in terms of 'it changes', rather than different, which is the ontologically correct depiction.

"it is these forms that come and go, ie. the events going future to past"

Again this is contradictory. Forget the detail re form or not. The events are not "going" anywhere. The event occurs, ie that is the present. Then a different one occurs and is the present. None of these co-exist. There is no physically existent future or past, just the present state is a sequence of states.

"Now since our actions are every bit as real as the insensate activity occurring around us, they are part of what forms these events"

No. All that is happening is that a different present occurs from what would have otherwise occurred. You do not affect the future, because it is not physically there. But that is true of any present, ie it is a function of the immediately preceding state. There were countless possibilities for this state, but that is irrelevant, because it was that one which occurred, which then lead to the next present. Somewhere on Cristi's blog, Robert countered this false concept with a car collision example. The point being that the car collision happened because of the preceding situation, had any aspect of that not occurred, then the collision (the present which did occur) would not have happened. The collision is not some pre-existent event.

"if we think of time as a sequence of events"

It is not a matter of "if" or thinking. It is. It relates to the rate of turnover of realities, ie presents.

"It is only when time is an emergent effect of action, do our actions have effect"

Well time is not that, so we don't.

Paul

Paul,

Having to run, but it's not that I don't see the need for discreteness, but that there is the need for both discreteness and continuity. Both action and statis, to provide balance and change.

John

" but that there is the need for both discreteness and continuity"

Exactly, though I would not call it continuity, it is difference. And the only way this can happen is sequence, a definitive discrete physically existent state at a time, the successor replacing the predecessor.

Paul

Paul,

I understand the need for discreteness and sequence. How would a movie function if the shutter was just left open and the film run through it. Yet that sequencing of still images is a mechanism for extracting information from the larger reality, where the light is constantly flowing, even if it is as photons. They don't travel instantaneously, but at a constant rate. You seem to accept the need for this mechanism to create the form of information, yet insist there is no underlaying process from which this information is extracted.

John

The movie functions because it is a sequence of discrete states, known as frames. It has nothing to do with the shutter, which just needs to be left open, otherwise you will not see it. It is "extracting information from the larger reality" because it is a movie, it is not physical existence. Reality is reality, it exists, it is not information.

Paul

Paul,

I was referring to how the movie is made, not how it is shown. When it is shown, the projector light flickers on and off, as each frame moves by, or you would see the transition between frames.

John

So was I, because that is how what we see as existence is made. The speed and degree of alteration is so vanishingly small that we will never 'see' it. But it must be there, otherwise there would be no existence and difference, in the same way that there would be no movie without the frames.

Paul

Paul,

At its most basic, much of reality is composed of light radiating about, or bound up in the atomic relationships of mass. So how do you see it as "moving?" As a sequence of dots blinking on and off?

Paul,

As I see it, one reason for discretion is that when polarities bounce against one another, the resulting reflections create distinctions. Then this gets multiplied billions of times in normal mass environments.

John

"much of reality is composed of light radiating about"

No it is not. Reality comprises an existential sequence, and as that progresses, interaction with other physically existent entities, particularly photons, which are not inherently part of the sequence, creates existent representations of that sequence, eg light. There is also noise, vibration, temperature, etc, etc.

You know light moves because you receive photon based representations of spatially separate occurrences. The real question here is how light and whatever comprised the existential sequence being represented, interacted. That is, to what extent the light, as a representation of the occurrence, is accurate and comprehensive. Light, or more precisely that which conveys light, is existent, so itself occurs as a sequence. But what sight utilises seems to, more or less, maintain its physical configuration whilst in existence. Otherwise, it would be a bizarre world, and indeed, the use of light would not have evolved. The discreteness is in the existential sequence.

Paul

John

Because without going beyond a point I do not understand, what constitutes light, in the sense of what the eye utilises, is not the entirety of the physical entity. That configuration, or whatever it is, somehow moves and exists over time in the same, or more or less the same, physical format. I did ask once but never got an answer. There are two basic possibilities, either the light (narrow terminology) literally moves, or it is effectively moved by a chain reaction.

Paul

John,

I greatly enjoyed your essay. I do have reservations regarding your last statement "So we exist as manifestations of this dichotomy of energy and information, as medium and message."

If you imagine physical objects being physically constructed from the same type of information represented by the spreading energy (local and global) you can have your cake and eat it too. Afterall, ALL the information you will ever obtain in your concious life span comes from the spreading energy, and, this same information is encoded into those solid objects we collect information from.

That above implies that what we, as a living race of people, may have lost over time is the physical location of our place and direction in the scope of ALL that we physically measure (what we hear, see, etc.,). We are each at the centers of our own measured universe of information, and this universe intersects (subsets) with the measured universe of ALL other living things. Just as we are built from the physical information in our gene coding, all life is coded within an ecosystem ... and so on.

Someday we may finally settle in on the idea that our physical measures place each of us at the very center of everything measurable in the universe. We are physically central to top/down and bottom/up measures. We can then begin to calcualte, measure and predict life physiology to astounding accuracy, etc., by knowing that information from the singularity characterizations sought (black hole information)is a duel to that information gained by a concious, living, observer. The singularity provides information that is a mere reflection of ourself and our physical measures exist on the surface of entropy (the ADS/CFT 4 surface of the 5D sphere - We are here! ... well ... this is where we measure from!). ALL we measure woould naturally have a "life connection!!"

Regards,

Tony

John,

Information being the one and the same 'information used to gain knowledge" appears to weigh heavily on the "context" that embodies the information. Bits of data are nothing in themselves until something living gives the data - or data rate - a context to correlate with. We as a living. breathing, thinking life entity supply information with context, therefore, it may be context that is missing in science today - and NOT that we do not have the information ... we do not have the proper context to apply (correlate) this information to.

If we adopt a context "to aid life" we open the door to a new way of thinking that places life in the center of the universal arena surrounded by information ... and giving the surrounding information context is how we live - we build context in knowledge, ie., to gain knowledge requires us to apply the proper context to information. I believe this is where our ego steps in and disallows us to perceive ourselves at the center of all creation - and if we do not see this - we loose the most important context to gain a quite measurable physical knowledge. We can invent bogus contexts (false idols) and correlate small, distinct measures of information, however, these will always fail to unite in a grandiose connection without a proper context to apply this information to.

You say we loose information, but, I believe what we loose (are missing) is the proper context to apply this information to!

Best regards,

Tony

John,

I have read your essay and I must say that is was very refreshing. Thank you. I do have reservations regarding your ~ final sentence:

"Civilization is ultimately bottom up."

If you speak about the physical, measurable actions of civilization, it may be 50% top-down and 50% bottom-up..... these two avenues are believed required to superimpose to create our measurable actions. This would be akin to a standing wave being a localized energy formed by the superposition of two opposing waves. When making a discreet, local energy packet (in 4 dimensions) then we require a full Fourier build up of waves (with a distinct bandwidth of wave numbers) waves coverging from all directions in space (and from both directions in time as Feynman concludes). This wave packet would be the localized energy created from a "not so randomized" spread of moving energy (all being measurable information in disguise). With this, you can build a localized soliton that can physically manuever in its physical enviornment ... unchanging due to how it handles it's non linearities in physically coupling with it's enviornment (your Newtonian, non linear opposite force returns mentioned in your article). We (solitons) are a time evolving, localized source of energy ... created from back to front, top to bottom, left to right, future to past, and past to future (think to - time and - to time if "future" alarms you).

Bottom up can't explain everything we measure - especially when it comes to biology (life). This is why "life" may very well be at the very center of everything measurable and what it lacks is the proper context to attribute all measurable information as conforming to this very "one" distinct context (contexts like your correlations of artery blockage and a failed bank... raising pressure - a excellent correlation of a physical occurance in an individual life to that of the soceities civilized life). We should be able to continue these "scaled life" analogies right back to the functioning of an auto immune system, and to how the brain functions, etc, etc. All information has a direct path back to a context surrounding life at some scaled level ... cell...organ..soceity....ecosystem....solar system... etc., and all having varying information transfer time constants ... ie., your Newtonian "equal and non-linear opposite return forces." We (as a solid object) require this non-linear "force feedback" to sustain our physical form (just like the soliton).

Regards,

Tony

Tony,

I agree it is a fundamental dichotomy of top down/bottom up. They are like two views of the same situation, like left/right. It is just in the context of that essay, I need to make the point that structure necessarily grows bottom up, even if it might be organized top down and the top down view cannot sustain a structure with a corrupted foundation.

I think in many ways we are still at a very primitive/embryonic stage and that life on this planet is forming into a conceptually singular organism, with human civilization as the medium of the central nervous system. Intellectually though, we are more into the cell division, rather than the network connections. I think alot of this has to do with the fact that rationality is based on making distinctions and then making the connections between them. So in the meta-process, we are now very focused on units, particles, nodes, individuals, quantization, etc. While we certainly recognize the connectivity, contextuality, etc, there is the impression it is emergent from this underlaying discretion, rather then they are two sides of the same coin, like top down/bottom up.

Alot of this goes to the fact that it is more politically and tactically effective to take a singular, action philosophy, rather than trying to see the more dualistic, contextual big picture, as that tends to cause indecision. Now we are at the point this forward drive has gone parabolic and the whole world is in a frenzy of environmentally destructive activity, which will result in the very natural feedback of the resulting blowback.

In this situation, there is very little one can do to affect the course of events, so it is a matter of seeding ideas that might take root after the storm passes.