Bits and Co-bits by Chris Fields

Hi Chris,

Welcome to the contest. I do not think we agree a lot but one of the contest's goals is to get acquainted with new concepts. I do not feel competent to comment your essay body but in the introduction you ask how "it" actually follows from "bit" in this conception, however, also remains mysterious: it is unclear what, if anything, anchors the processing of information to an objective physical world.

My short essay is focused at the same mysterious connection between these three worlds.

I have also found "W. H. Zurek. Quantum Darwinism" in your essay's references so I think you may be really interested.

Best regards

Chris, I am sorry I forgot to login. I am not anonymous.

Hello, Chris,

I was very interested in your post that seems to "clear the air". I came to similar conclusion, much less expertly expressed, that bits are abstractions at least as defined in the standard It-from-Bit position. I would much welcome that you look at my essay, and the "logic of reality" that underlies it and tell me if you think your formalism could be applied to the REAL dualities it implies: Thank you and best regards,

Joseph Brenner

Chris,

Your conclusion, "Its and bits are duals; its are co-bits and bits are co-its. Its and bits are both results of the process of tensor-product decomposition and hence of observation, not inputs to it. Its and bits are, therefore, model-theoretic entities, not physical entities." is very profound as well as your comment, "If its are to be inferred from bits, some of the bits must come not from observation or even memory, but out of thin air."

Your statement that some of the bits must come from thin air, I found to be a factual statement of causality for something that is truly causal cannot exist until it does. These findings have led to reveal how causality unifies gravity with the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces as one super-deterministc force. I invite you to rate my essay when you get the chance:

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

Good luck with your entry of which I have rated highly.

Regards,

Manuel

Dear Chris,

I discern a number of truths in your essay but I think the problem you may have that makes you say

RE: "'it' actually follows from 'bit' in this conception, ...remains mysterious ..."

is a likely narrow view of what states can be codified by 1 and 0. Suppose two-states, existence and non-existence can be thus codified?

Then, your statement,

RE:... Advancing "it from bit" as a theory requires saying how the its that compose the world, whatever they turn out to be,...

Wheeler has asked, "What else is there out of which to build a particle except geometry itself?". The Pythagoreans believe also that their unit of geometry, the monad is the fundamental substance. Leibniz concurs and says "So monads are the true atoms of Nature--the elements out of which everything is made". And finally, Newton opined, ..."And my account throws a satisfactory light on the difference between a body and a region of space. The raw materials of each are the same in their properties and nature, and differ only in how God created them". By this meaning the only difference is that while body was created by God, the other, space was eternal and not created.

So don't search too far for the fundamental "it".

Then lastly, you said

RE: "If its are to be inferred from bits, some of the bits must come not from observation or even memory, but out of thin air".

I take your thin air as "nothing", i.e. not composed of any 'its' or substance. Again, let me quote Leibniz: the only way for monads to begin or end--to come into existence or go out of existence--is •instantaneously, being created or annihilated all at once. Composite things, in contrast with that, can begin or end •gradually, through the assembling or scattering of their parts.

All these being extracted from your essay, indicate you are closer to the truth than you probably realize, without the need for too much math. I have my own humble efforts here and you can get the references to the quotes above therein.

Best of luck,

Akinbo

Dear Chris,

Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon. Its and Bits are same.

So you can produce material from your thinking. . . .

I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The main stream community people want magic from science instead of realty especially in the subject of cosmology. We all know well that cosmology is a subject where speculations rule.

Hope to get your comments even directly to my mail ID also. . . .

Best

=snp

snp.gupta@gmail.com

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/

Pdf download:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/essay-download/1607/__details/Gupta_Vak_FQXi_TABLE_REF_Fi.pdf

Part of abstract:

- -Material objects are more fundamental- - is being proposed in this paper; It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material. . . Similarly creation of matter from empty space as required in Steady State theory or in Bigbang is another such problem in the Cosmological counterpart. . . . In this paper we will see about CMB, how it is generated from stars and Galaxies around us. And here we show that NO Microwave background radiation was detected till now after excluding radiation from Stars and Galaxies. . . .

Some complements from FQXi community. . . . .

A

Anton Lorenz Vrba wrote on May. 4, 2013 @ 13:43 GMT

....... I do love your last two sentences - that is why I am coming back.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 6, 2013 @ 09:24 GMT

. . . . We should use our minds to down to earth realistic thinking. There is no point in wasting our brains in total imagination which are never realities. It is something like showing, mixing of cartoon characters with normal people in movies or people entering into Game-space in virtual reality games or Firing antimatter into a black hole!!!. It is sheer a madness of such concepts going on in many fields like science, mathematics, computer IT etc. . . .

B.

Francis V wrote on May. 11, 2013 @ 02:05 GMT

Well-presented argument about the absence of any explosion for a relic frequency to occur and the detail on collection of temperature data......

C

Robert Bennett wrote on May. 14, 2013 @ 18:26 GMT

"Material objects are more fundamental"..... in other words "IT from Bit" is true.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 14, 2013 @ 22:53 GMT

1. It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material.

2. John Wheeler did not produce material from information.

3. Information describes material properties. But a mere description of material properties does not produce material.

4. There are Gods, Wizards, and Magicians, allegedly produced material from nowhere. But will that be a scientific experiment?

D

Hoang cao Hai wrote on Jun. 16, 2013 @ 16:22 GMT

It from bit - where are bit come from?

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on Jun. 17, 2013 @ 06:10 GMT

....And your question is like asking, -- which is first? Egg or Hen?-- in other words Matter is first or Information is first? Is that so? In reality there is no way that Matter comes from information.

Matter is another form of Energy. Matter cannot be created from nothing. Any type of vacuum cannot produce matter. Matter is another form of energy. Energy is having many forms: Mechanical, Electrical, Heat, Magnetic and so on..

E

Antony Ryan wrote on Jun. 23, 2013 @ 22:08 GMT

.....Either way your abstract argument based empirical evidence is strong given that "a mere description of material properties does not produce material". While of course materials do give information.

I think you deserve a place in the final based on this alone. Concise - simple - but undeniable.

I greatly enjoyed your essay.

It was fun to learn how category-theoretic inference and tensor decomposition results in Korzybski's "The word is not the thing, and the map is not the territory." I'll have to revisit it, to fully digest what was said, but you made a highly technical description quite readable - and it made me feel smart.

Good luck in the contest.

Have Fun!

Jonathan

Chris,

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

Chris,

Great essay! The sort of relationship between functions and forms (vectors and covectors etc) is interesting. I am not sure if you essay is commensurate with my essay , as I mention at the end there is some form of Grothendieck theory or topos that may be involved. Your approach seems to have the flavor of that sort of category theory.

I agree that the classical world is virtual. I have thought for some time the measurement of a quantum state is a sort of epiphenomenology. This may have some bearing on whether consciousness or self awareness is also of this nature.

The essay contest appears to be currently closed! I was going to give your essay a high score. I don't know if this is permanent, but if not and your essay does not get a boost rattle my cage.

Cheers LC

"If its are to be inferred from bits, some of the bits must come not from observation or even memory, but out of thin air." -- this is similar to ideas I've seen expressed in other essays including Dr. Boroson's and Mr. Neil Bates' and Dr. Corda's. I also feel that its outnumber, or at least out-express, bits.

Chris,

A well written and argued essay, a pleasure to read. In particular it was so nice to find clear logical thinking such as;

"Hilbert-space decompositions have no effect on the physics: what's happening is not dependent on how it is described."

Rarely I found no proposals unsupported, and very few arguable.

I hope you do well and that my score will assist. Best wishes

Peter

Hello Chris,

Nicely written, illustrated and great flow to your essay. I agree that neither It or Bit has ontological priority. I reach a similar conclusion in my essay. Please take a look if you get the time.

Best wishes for the contest,

Antony

Dear Chris,

Thank you for attention to my work.

I am fully agree when you say - ,,When the sciences began seriously to diverge in the 19th century, physicists lost the idea that they needed to figure out how they worked. I do not believe that we will ever understand how electrons work until we at least address the question of how we work,,

And I am saying in my work: ,,We must to comprehend beforehand - what we are doing and what we have calculating ...,,

Einstein, Schrodinger and many luminaries has came to analogical/similar conclusions, however ... they has ,,pushed out,, from official science!

There are a lot of weighty arguments on this direction, and anybody, who has the healthy brain, may to came to this idea. So, you and me can be happy - with correctness of our viewpoints and (with our healthy brains too!) I have rating your work on high core, and I thinking suggest it to my attherants also.

Best wishes,

George

Hi Chris -

Though I'm not in a position to follow the technicalities of your argument, your conclusions make sense to me. But I think what your answer shows is just that the question about the priority of "It" or "Bit" isn't really the key issue here.

You say, "...all observations necessarily impose classicality on the quantum world... observation, by definition, imposes a classical semantics..." And "Wheeler's self-observing universe is a fully-entangled universe, a pure quantum state, that simultaneously encodes... all possible observations by all possible observers."

I have no problem with that - but then, we still need to know what an observation is, in physical terms, since that's what takes us from this primal state of no information (i.e. all possible information at once) to the many kinds of specific structure we find in our universe.

I'm willing to believe that "decomposition" plays a role in the "semantic process" that gives definition to the world. But establishing boundaries and identifying objects is surely a complicated business, that depends (as you note) on other complicated processes to store data, define communications channels and provide spacetime measures. The point of my essay is to suggest that such a complex of interdepent information-defining processes could have arisen through a process of natural selection.

The motivation for this approach is that the usual attempts to reduce the complexity of physics to some simple, minimal unified structure tend to set aside the whole issue measurement-dependence in QM. I think we need a different way to address the "open question" you framed in your essay last year -- "How theories are physically implemented by collections of degrees of freedom that constitute observers..." Or as I would put it, how information-defining contexts can emerge in an environment of other such contexts.

If you come up with a less technical way of describing what's involved in object-identification, I'd be very interested.

Thanks - Conrad

Dear Chris,

I greatly enjoyed reading your essay as well as the one your wrote last year.

Building good theories of observations is a challenging question.

You write

"Decisions are semantics, not physics".

Following Wheeler, I am not sure that something else that our decisions exist at least we never have a direct access to the world as it is, only convenient representations, a convenient semantics as you would write."

As a past experimentalist I met the problem of understanding the low frequency noise ot the most (ultra)stable quartz and Caesium clocks and finally found that the mere act of observation here, that is aproximating a real number with an irreducible fraction was the key point of the noise in the measurements. Why, just because one measures one clock synchronized to another one (the two clocks are either frequency or phase locked to each other, hence there is an irreducible rational number p/q produced). You are right, this is semantics in the observation.

The corresponding quantum observation challenge is known to be more paradoxal.

At the moment, I think that quantum contextuality is what matters.

You may have some interest in my essay

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1789

I hope you will take time to read and rate my essay.

Best wishes,

Michel

Chris,

I see you're not answering posts. I hope you're ok.

Peter

Dear Chris,

We are at the end of this essay contest.

In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.

Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.

eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.

And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.

Good luck to the winners,

And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.

Amazigh H.

I rated your essay.

Please visit My essay.

Chris - I'm pleased to see you use category theory to make your case.

And your conclusion was in line with my current thinking...

"Its and bits are both results of the process of tensor-product decomposition and hence observation ; not inputs to it. Its and bits are therefore, model-theoretic entities, not physical entities.

Very nice.

Kind regards, Paul

I read, enjoyed, rated...

I liked reading what you had to say about the tensor product decomposition, and may have more to say later.

Good luck!

Jonathan