Voyage from Discovery to Invention; Information & Reality in Physics, Biology & Mathematics. by Sreenath B N

Dear Sreenath,

I like that you've considered the question of us as observers - it was an enjoyable essay to read! Also your conclusion that Bit may come from It is nicely explained.

Well done & best wishes,

Antony

Dear Sreenath,

As I promised in my FQXi Essay page, I have read your essay. I appreciated your idea to discuss the relationship between information and reality not only in Physics but also in Biology and Mathematics. I also find fantastic the aphorism "Bit comes from It, but mind can know of It only through Bit." Your work is very peculiar and I had lots of fun in reading it.

Thus, I am going to give you an high score.

Cheers,

Ch.

Dear Sreenath,

Thank you for the impact of your favorable appreciation. I did my best before on your essay. Reading you again, I realize that may be some questions regarding DNA/RNA and their three-dimensional embedding could be approached with dessins d'enfants or the related language. By the way, do you have any comment about the non-coding role of the genome.

Good luck,

Michel

Sreenath,

Hi. This was a good essay, and I liked how you discussed the view of information from three different perspectives, physics, math and biology. A couple of minor comments are:

1. In the conclusion where you mention:

Although Information & Reality (Bit & It) have physical origin, without mind they are in themselves

empty and blind. Bit comes from It, but mind can know of It only through Bit.

my view is that the mind is contained within and made of the brain. That is, all the "abstract" abstracts in our minds are actually composed of neuronal interconnections, ion gradients between neurons, etc. I can't rule out the possibility of a mind separate from the brain, but until someone can show me where it is and provide evidence for it, I'll go with the brain. So, in a way, even the information/bits in the mind are made of its.

2. I think it's theoretically possible to describe all of life in terms of physics, but it would require almost infinite amounts of time, complexity and computing power. So, for all practical purposes, the emergent properties of biology are much better explained in terms of biological properties than physical properties.

3. I agree with you that the human mind can eventually grasp everything about reality. It may not be able to prove everything because humans can't step outside reality but it can grasp everything. But, in millions of years when we can grasp everything, eventually there will be nothing left to grasp, and the growth of the human mind may plateau. This kind of flat growth at first, then exponential growth, then plateauing growth is very similar to the growth curve of microorganisms.

4. You're right about prebiotic evolution, but back then, there wasn't even DNA and RNA, there were just some molecules that could use the other molecules in the environment to make additional copies of themselves. Eventually, this became more complex, got enclosed in lipids (for a membrane) to become a cell, and on and on.

5. The study of information flow from the outside of an organism (cell, tissue, organism) to the inside is usually called signal transduction at least in the case of cells, and there are lots of studies being done on analyzing this not only biochemically but with information and signal processing theory. Also, even separate from cells, biomolecules like proteins can also respond to information such as the pH of a solution by changing their shape, and this is really a type of information sensing, too.

Anyways, very interesting essay! Thanks!

Roger

Dear Sreenath,

Thank you for your very nice comments on my essay. I have gone through your nice essay also, and conceptually your is similar to mine. I am giving account of both below. Your concluding words

- - - - Although Information & Reality (Bit & It) have physical origin, without mind they are in themselves empty and blind. Bit comes from It, but mind can know of It only through Bit- - - -

That is very nice, and in my opinion, we have physical 5 s-enses and a sixth sense called mind. We form pictures of all the real things around us in our mind from these senses. Mind interprets these real things around us for forming these pictures. All these information will be lost when we die.

We invented the communication to transfer these pictures to fellow humans.

This communication uses information which is nothing but description of our mental picture.

- - - -

Your comments - - - - The theme up on which your essay is based is having deep rooted meaning and you have aptly said that it is 'IT from Bit' - - - -

Here I mean to say, whatever the manner one describes the material or matter with words, mental thoughts, using information technology or computers, his descriptions will not produce matar bits or atoms. This explanation can give information describing the material bits only and nothing more.

Here I used words - -IT- - for: - -Information technology- - and - -Bit- - for : --a piece of material or a bit of material- -

Please reply in my thread so that I will get a communication from FQXi, and I can reply you. .

best

=snp

Hi Sreenath,

I just read your essay and noticed that of all the ones that I have read so far, yours is the closest in organizational structure to mine, although I did not cast my net as wide so as to include biology and mathematics.

As for whether reality can be really considered separate from it, I think it would have helped if you could have mentioned some quantitative relations that support your assertion. What equations in physics point to the existence of a reality apart from it or bit? I am genuinely curious because I believe that existence is not a binary concept, so it would be stimulating to see your idea tied more precisely to known relations in physics.

All the best,

Armin

Hello Sreenath

I rated you essay very highly (8). This may seem rather over the top, but I thought it was better than the other essays; at least in that it had an ordered structure and explained why you believe what you believe, and was about foundations of our disciplines and models of reality. I focused particularly on the mathematics. Von Neumann argued that mathematics actually finds it roots in empiricism, contrary to the assumptions of others (I guess including Kant).

In my essay, while there was not time to discuss it, the mathematics is entirely evolved from the GPE, and has no reliance on contemporary mathematics at all, for to do so would introduce errors leading to infinities and inconsistencies all over the place, as presently happens in physics. Because it is derived from a single indefeasible principle it is immune to Godel incompleteness (Godel confined his arguments to formal systems of axioms and the laws of thought). Maybe that will a subject for next year's contest.

Best wishes

Stephen

Dear Sreenath Garu,.

Thank you for your post on my essay

I did not rate your essay earlier. I am very much in need of Good ratings. People are down rating me! Congratulations! Now I gave 9 to you. Earlier your score is 3.9 with 29 ratings, now it jumped to 4.0 with 30 ratings. Please give me your e mail ID, I will send some my books published in Germany.

Best

=snp

snp.gupta@gmail.com

Dear Sreenath, To respond to your recent comment on my thread I made it a habit to rate an essay as soon as I read it. I usually gave scores of above 7 but did not keep a record of what I rated yours a few weeks ago.

I wish you all success in the contest, Vladimir

Dear Sreenath,

Your essay is very well written. In particular, I like the connections you make between it, bit, and mind.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Sreenath,

The breadth of your knowledge is so vast, this essay deserves book length treatment.

I know next to nothing of biology and little of physics -- where mathematics is concerned, however, I think you have well captured the attitude of most research mathematicians toward the meaning of their art. It is quite telling that you cite Paul Ernest (have you also read his work on mathematics as social constructivism?) as well as Brouwer. Your hypothesis -- that classical physics is discovered and quantum physics invented, and yet both are objective -- is deep, and I'm going to be pondering it for a while to come.

I agree with Dr. Corda that the statement "Bit comes from It, but mind can know of It only through Bit" is wonderful. It is an elegant way, I think, of getting to Murray Gell-Mann's (*The Quark and the Jaguar*) hypothesis of a continuum of consciousness from the very small to the very large, with which I agree without reservation. Recent research in the evolution of consciousness that combines computability with organic evolution includes Chaitin's *Proving Darwin: Making biology mathematical.* I have one semantic nitpick regarding " ... prerequisite consciousness and intelligence as inherent traits." I can accept conscioussness (represented as free will) as fundamental, which preempts intelligence (represented as adaptability) as fundamental. In other words, conscious organisms cooperate to form intelligent adaptive systems; we know that even a human body is at core a corporation of cooperating cells and organisms.

Yours is a wonderful essay to which I can lend my highest compliment -- I was compelled to read it slowly and carefully. It also made me feel good, which is another rarity.

Expect a high score from me, and all best in the compeitition.

Tom