Essay Abstract
The debate whether it (matter) or bit (information) is more fundamental is the product of several millennia worth of human thought in one form or another and it will be resolved in much the same way that it was solved in the past. It is a just a new variation on the theme 'is reality the internal product of human mind or is it external to human mind in the material world?' The new information argument is alluring because it is relates questions on the ultimate nature of reality to other modern ideas concerning the human mind and consciousness. If the brain processes information like a computer, whereby mind is a mere epiphenomenon, then the internal and external worlds could be more easily reduced to a single model. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The argument for an information based reality is itself founded upon the faulty assumption that reality is discrete at its lowest discernible and most fundamental level. In this case, the physical concepts of matter and motion could be further reduced to two and only two physical variables or bits of information, as expressed in one or the other forms of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. However, reality is not discrete, whether in the form of bits of information or quanta, and the uncertainty principle gives an incomplete description of reality. The only possible answer to the paradox of describing nature using two extremely successful but mutually incompatible paradigms, the discrete quantum and continuous relativity, would be to find the point where their incompatibility breaks down and they become compatible, thereby merging them into a single theory. This new theory will be based on the concept of a single substantial field rather than an insubstantial field of information bits.
Author Bio
Professor Beichler taught Physics, Mathematics, the History and Philosophy of Science and European History for more than three decades before recently retiring. He earned his PhD in 1999 from the Union Institute and University in Theoretical Paraphysics. He is presently conducting theoretical research in Cosmology to explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy as well as Physics to explain the fundamental nature of life, mind, consciousness and matter, space and time in a theory based on a single quantized potential field that unifies the quantum and relativity in a five-dimensional Einstein-Kaluza model of space-time.