Lev,

The "desire to see something 'mental'...emerge as the principal element in the structure of the Universe" is as old as the theistic religions. See my paper to see how Bishop Berkeley hoped to accomplish just that as he placed physics on the path of merely describing the contents of the observer's consciousness, as if no physical Cosmos existed. That path led to Relativity and QM. The Cosmos was replaced by the observer's information.

You ask, "Which new non-spatial form(s) of 'data' presentation will reveal the recently invisible and allow us to understand adequately the formative processes in Nature?". We already have it, it is called "natural philosophy". It is the use of our full intellectual capabilities to reach beyond the "information" of your conscious experience and create theories about what the Cosmos is made of, what causes all its processes, and how it evolves its complex structures including ourselves.

Your ETS formalism may prove to be a useful tool of philosophy. It will still, like mathematics, require human philosophical intelligence to abstract from reality and produce the symbolic representation, and then again to apply the representation to any particular real situation.

Henry

Dear Henry,

Thanks for dropping in to my essay forum!

1. I don't think that the "desire to see something 'mental'...emerge as the principal element in the structure of the Universe" "led to Relativity and QM." The "mental' is not really the "principal element' in their structure.

2. "You ask, "Which new non-spatial form(s) of 'data' presentation will reveal the recently invisible and allow us to understand adequately the formative processes in Nature?". We already have it, it is called "natural philosophy".

I'm afraid, you are confusing "natural philosophy" with science: they are complementary but not identical.

3. "Your ETS formalism may prove to be a useful tool of philosophy. It will still, like mathematics, require human philosophical intelligence to abstract from reality and produce the symbolic representation, and then again to apply the representation to any particular real situation."

I certainly hope that ETS "may prove to be a useful tool of philosophy", but philosophy is not its main orientation. Also, the whole idea of ETS is to try to move away from "requiring human philosophical intelligence to abstract from reality and produce the symbolic representation".

Best wishes, Lev

Obviously, somewhere closer to the end I missed some sores and hence made some mistakes. But, somehow, I don't want to give up with this experiment. ;-)

Dear Lev

Your analysis is very good, but no specific conclusions and further develop so many questions. Do you think:

Information is defined as : The absorption and transmission the impact of material.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1802

    Dear Hoang,

    Please refer to section 2 in my essay, in which this question is addressed.

    Thank you!

    5 days later

    Dear Lev Goldfarb,

    Your diagrams look somewhat similiar to the ones that appear as pictorial representations of dagger-compact monoidal categories. Is there a connection between your ideas and the work of Bob Coecke on understanding fundamental physical structure in the language of category theory?

    Best,

    Alexei Grinbaum

    Hi Alexei,

    Thanks for dropping in!

    I'm afraid, the answer to all your questions is "No".

    I have looked earlier into the links with the category theory but have not found any of interest.

    Please note that at the beginning of section 3 I have a warning:

    "Warning: The main difficulty for a scientifically mature reader is not to fall into the trap of the powerful habit of automatically interpreting the information presented (of necessity) n the pictorial form in a "familiar" way, independent of the main text."

    My main motivation in developing the formalism was to try to formalize the idea of *structural object representation*. This *very* gradually led me to the realization that one cannot rely on anything in the present mathematics to get some help. It appears that we have to start from the very beginning. ;-)

    Dear Lev Goldfarb,

    I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Mean while, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

    Regards and good luck in the contest.

    Sreenath BN.

    http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

      Dear Lev Goldfarb,

      I am working on somewhat different direction than your work is. However I find in your essay some approaches close to me and have decided just to ask you to check my work. Particularly, there are some short description about of drama that become share of Einstein and other luminaries of physics.Dumayu Vi vladeete russkim?

      I hope on your response.

      ESSAY

      Sincerely,

      George

        Dear Lev,

        You are right when you say that 'mind' is the primary source of knowledge but at the same time you cannot deny the 'objective' existence of both It and Bit. For, otherwise, this becomes just 'solipsism' and science being objective wants to avoid it at all costs. Although both It and Bit are objective, they have meaning if there is mind to comprehend them. This is just like the absolute view of space and time, and in themselves both have no meaning without reference to change. That is why relative view of space and time is preferred. I hope this point makes my stand clear. We can have more discussion on it, if you like.

        I will post my comments on your essay soon.

        best regards,

        sreenath

        Dear Sreenath,

        You speak of "the 'objective' existence of both It and Bit." This is true, but the issue is the precedence among them. As you can see from my essay, I was gradually led to the view where the 'informational' defines the 'it' (or the 'spatial'). The logic of the new formalism has gradually led me to this tentative conclusion. This 'logic' does not come from conventional physical considerations but from the area of my expertise, pattern recognition or machine learning.

        Dear Lev,

        Your essay is quite innovative and in which you try to comprehend reality (It) from information (Bit) through computer generated simulation. How far you succeed in this endeavor only time will tell. But, I have some problems regarding predicting scientific observations from your stand point. For example, according to QM, same kind of experiments (Bit) may give different results (Its) as it is the nature of reality in the quantum world; so every time you feed the same Bit as input, you are likely to get different It as output.

        Secondly, in the classical world, It (reality) is having many facets and this corresponds to different Bits (information); so there is 'no' one to one correspondence between It and Bit as different Bits may point to the same It.

        The above two views are, obviously, apposite in nature. Now the point is, how do you explain both on the same platform; i.e., on the basis of your ETS formalism and also 'Struct' concept?

        I hope you succeed by finding an amicable solution to this problem.

        Wishing you best of luck in the contest,

        sreenath

        5 days later

        Lev,

        If given the time and the wits to evaluate over 120 more entries, I have a month to try. My seemingly whimsical title, "It's good to be the king," is serious about our subject.

        Jim

        Well, I didn't want to give up but . . . I had to, especially after the latest continuous string of "1"s.

        What a mess, the biggest one in all of the five contests!!

        It appears that some people are thick-skinned enough not to be bothered.

        Lev,

        after talking to you in Brendan's blog, I naturally wanted to read your essay again. I skimmed it in mid. June and was very impressed by it. Last night I welcomed the opportunity to escape the bustle of bbqs to read it carefully (happy holidays by the way!) I finished this morning and then read the comments here.

        Oh how I understand your frustration! Without a doubt --and grumblings of the old guard notwithstanding-- yours is the most pertinent essay in this contest. Have you brought it to the attention of Prof. D'Ariano? I read his beautiful essay only once and have not had a chance to look at the posts there. He should be able to fully appreciate your revolutionary approach. Citing from memory, he too advocates the use of computers in order to advance our understanding of nature -- and not just as tools for data processing, but to actively adopt and build upon the algorhythms already developed in computer science.

        If I may share my first _raw_ impression of your work, I wrote back in June in my notes, 'wow he wants to program the universe in C++!' After the initial shock I was struck by realization: indeed, why not employ the advanced methods already developed in computer science to analyse and structure information in physics. Suddenly, a new vista opened up and I could not help noticing how _sophisticated_ these methods are indeed in comparison to even the most advanced 'numerical' approaches used in physics today.

        I have to run now but will return with more soon. By the way, your essay has the most.. true definition of information I've ever seen (by Arlychev):

        "the information process can be defined as a free movement of an invariant structure in the material carriers of various nature, and the information can then be thought of as this invariant structure circulating through the communication channels"

          Hi Marina,

          Based on your comment, I want to mention something right now (regarding the relations with CS) that might help you to see the ETS proposal in a more appropriate light.

          As far as CS is concerned, I would suggest to view the proposed structure ("struct") not as motivated by the conventional CS considerations but rather the other way around: they could and should be viewed as the *universal* data structure and the development of a universal programming language should rely on it, since it is expected that all data should be represented in this form (numbers are just a very special case).

          As you can read in the essay, the real expectation is that the Nature herself relies on such informational representations to store and process the "information". Moreover, another major hypothesis is that such representations serve as the blueprints for the familiar to us spatial instantiations (of those blueprints). In other words, this is consistent with the informational version of the Plato's and Aristotle's views.

          Well, I thought you may not take my allusion to C++ kindly. Sorry. But why hide from the fact that the origins of your proposal lies in it? I understand that you are concerned about how traditional physicist may receive your idea and do not want it to be trivialized as 'programming'. In your place, rather than trying to veil this fact or taking an apologetic stance for infringing with CS into the physics' territory, I would simply adopt the straightforward stance based on the fact that the future of physics lies with CS.

          I tried to find that quote from Prof. D'Ariano but now think that I must have read it elsewhere. That day I also read his 2011 essay, where he says, "Recovering the whole Physics as emergent from the quantum information processing is a large program: we need to build up a complete dictionary that translates all physical notions into information-theoretic words." Isn't this where you come in?

          The idea that algorithm is mightier than equation is certainly not new. D'Ariano speaks openly about the value in translating traditionally 'physical' terms into a computer-programming language. Your shyness in this regard only weakens your position.

          The other weakness is that you propose that "structure of ETS events allows a uniform treatment of all events in Nature, including physical, chemical, biological, and mental events" -- and then fail to demonstrate it on one simple, well-understood, familiar example and go with poorly understood duality and entanglement instead -?

          Then you pose several intriguing questions but then leave a reader disappointed:

          "This brings up the key questions: How can we plan an experimental verification of the ETS formalism? And in particular, how do we approach the verification of the structure of (instantiated) events for photons, electrons, etc.?"

          oops! it appears that I used an 'illegal' character and the sys truncated the end. So:

          ".... electrons, etc.?" -- indeed, how?

          "Finally, some of the other big questions are: How are the structs stored and retrieved in Nature, and what is the physical nature of instantiated events?" -- and?

          "If this structure will be experimentally corroborated, the scenario captured in the title of the essay is not that outlandish." -- anything concrete yet?

          I also could not help noticing your post to Akinbo above: "I intentionally avoided the issue of the nature of space, since if the latter is __secondary__ to the informational representation" (emphasis is mine). Space secondary to informational representation? I'm not talking about space here in simplistic terms of distances. I talk about spacetime as emergent as a result of processes underlying what we call reality.

          In view of the above, I cannot give your very interesting and pertinent to this year contest idea the high rating it otherwise deserves. In my notes back in June I tentatively rated your essay as 8, thought to up it higher this morning, but now will stay with my first impression.

          (I invite you to retaliate in my thread ;))

          kstati, pochemu vy mne dali tol'ko chetverku?

          Dear Marina,

          Thank you for your feedback!

          However, I'm afraid, you missperceived the proposed formalism; it has very little to do with CS as we understand it now.

          By the way, the questions at the end of the essay are for theoretical and applied physicists, since they concern the very foundational concepts in physics.

          I will also comment on your essay in the forum space for it.