Information-Based Physics and the Influence Network by Kevin H Knuth

Late-in-the-Day Thoughts about the Essays I've Read

I am sending to you the following thoughts because I found your essay particularly well stated, insightful, and helpful, even though in certain respects we may significantly diverge in our viewpoints. Thank you! Lumping and sorting is a dangerous adventure; let me apologize in advance if I have significantly misread or misrepresented your essay in what follows.

Of the nearly two hundred essays submitted to the competition, there seems to be a preponderance of sentiment for the 'Bit-from-It" standpoint, though many excellent essays argue against this stance or advocate for a wider perspective on the whole issue. Joseph Brenner provided an excellent analysis of the various positions that might be taken with the topic, which he subsumes under the categories of 'It-from-Bit', 'Bit-from-It', and 'It-and-Bit'.

Brenner himself supports the 'Bit-from-It' position of Julian Barbour as stated in his 2011 essay that gave impetus to the present competition. Others such as James Beichler, Sundance Bilson-Thompson, Agung Budiyono, and Olaf Dreyer have presented well-stated arguments that generally align with a 'Bit-from-It' position.

Various renderings of the contrary position, 'It-from-Bit', have received well-reasoned support from Stephen Anastasi, Paul Borrill, Luigi Foschini, Akinbo Ojo, and Jochen Szangolies. An allied category that was not included in Brenner's analysis is 'It-from-Qubit', and valuable explorations of this general position were undertaken by Giacomo D'Ariano, Philip Gibbs, Michel Planat and Armin Shirazi.

The category of 'It-and-Bit' displays a great diversity of approaches which can be seen in the works of Mikalai Birukou, Kevin Knuth, Willard Mittelman, Georgina Parry, and Cristinel Stoica,.

It seems useful to discriminate among the various approaches to 'It-and-Bit' a subcategory that perhaps could be identified as 'meaning circuits', in a sense loosely associated with the phrase by J.A. Wheeler. Essays that reveal aspects of 'meaning circuits' are those of Howard Barnum, Hugh Matlock, Georgina Parry, Armin Shirazi, and in especially that of Alexei Grinbaum.

Proceeding from a phenomenological stance as developed by Husserl, Grinbaum asserts that the choice to be made of either 'It from Bit' or 'Bit from It' can be supplemented by considering 'It from Bit' and 'Bit from It'. To do this, he presents an 'epistemic loop' by which physics and information are cyclically connected, essentially the same 'loop' as that which Wheeler represented with his 'meaning circuit'. Depending on where one 'cuts' the loop, antecedent and precedent conditions are obtained which support an 'It from Bit' interpretation, or a 'Bit from It' interpretation, or, though not mentioned by Grinbaum, even an 'It from Qubit' interpretation. I'll also point out that depending on where the cut is made, it can be seen as a 'Cartesian cut' between res extensa and res cogitans or as a 'Heisenberg cut' between the quantum system and the observer. The implications of this perspective are enormous for the present It/Bit debate! To quote Grinbaum: "The key to understanding the opposition between IT and BIT is in choosing a vantage point from which OR looks as good as AND. Then this opposition becomes unnecessary: the loop view simply dissolves it." Grinbaum then goes on to point out that this epistemologically circular structure "...is not a logical disaster, rather it is a well-documented property of all foundational studies."

However, Grinbaum maintains that it is mandatory to cut the loop; he claims that it is "...a logical necessity: it is logically impossible to describe the loop as a whole within one theory." I will argue that in fact it is vital to preserve the loop as a whole and to revise our expectations of what we wish to accomplish by making the cut. In fact, the ongoing It/Bit debate has been sustained for decades by our inability to recognize the consequences that result from making such a cut. As a result, we have been unable to take up the task of studying the properties inherent in the circularity of the loop. Helpful in this regard would be an examination of the role of relations between various elements and aspects of the loop. To a certain extent the importance of the role of relations has already been well stated in the essays of Kevin Knuth, Carlo Rovelli, Cristinel Stoica, and Jochen Szangolies although without application to aspects that clearly arise from 'circularity'. Gary Miller's discussion of the role of patterns, drawn from various historical precedents in mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, provides the clearest hints of all competition submissions on how the holistic analysis of this essential circular structure might be able to proceed.

In my paper, I outlined Susan Carey's assertion that a 'conceptual leap' is often required in the construction of a new scientific theory. Perhaps moving from a 'linearized' perspective of the structure of a scientific theory to one that is 'circularized' is just one further example of this kind of conceptual change.

Esteemed Prof. Knuth,

I found your essay fascinating. I also read the comments in your blog, especially your discussions with Mikalai Birukou. I find it strange that I wrote about a similar sort of events/processes and their interweaving threads of causality in the end of my own essay. But that part was not premeditated at all. Now I suspect that I was influenced by your essay -? I probably read it late at night while writing my last-moment entry.

I learned a lot reading your replies to Mikalai Birukou and am amazed at your depth of knowledge and originality of your view on things. Because of this, I would value very much your opinion of another essay that speaks of emergence, in an entirely different context: it is by Carolyn Devereux, PhD IT from BIT considering fluctuations in a quantised space Unfortunately she is not around to answer the questions, but I found her essay very interesting and would like your opinion on it. Please.

And could you please also elucidate how your idea of emergence differs from cellular automata (CA) proposed by Prof. D'Ariano (and also Maria Carrillo-Ruiz, whose is a very short essay).

Thank you very much for all your feedback and your great ideas,

-Marina

Dear Prof. Knuth,

What a lovely essay -- both beautifully written and to the point. It's great to see a new, straightforward perspective used to obtain relativistic symmetries. It demonstrates that the underlying symmetries in nature are ubiquitous and quite often unexpected. (It reminds me of why spectroscopists can get into trouble when they try to use sums and differences to assemble energy levels -- those are not random numbers, and intricate, unanticipated relationships can easily crop up.)

I was wondering about your example of an electron having two attributes, one that it displays and one that we can't see. Could anything be done along this line with the Uncertainty Principle? (I realize that you deal with the Uncertainty Principle later on in your essay.) Maybe get time involved in a sequential uncovering of the properties?

I have downloaded your arXiv papers and will study them thoroughly, so perhaps we can continue a worthwhile discussion later on. I also made a few additional comment when answering you under the thread for my essay.

Congratulations and keep up the great (and from your bio, varied) work.

Bill McHarris

Kevin - I just noticed, I hadn't rated your essay yet. This is a gem, and I rated it highly.

The issue with being unable to tell different (pink?) electrons are exhibiting a different behavior from its repertoire is at the heart of physics. Boltzmann indistinguishability and Liebniz's indiscernability have given us great insights. I loved the way you have developed your theory of coordinated chains as Hasse diagrams.

I anticipate some resonance here and would appreciate your comments on my essay, particularly regarding the way I have extended Boltzman's indistinguishability of particles in phase space from the indistinguishability of states in an evolution of an entangled system. If I am correct, the principle of retroactive indiscernability brings a fresh perspective to the subject.

My conclusion: the photon is the carrier of time and the universe is a network automaton.

I have tried using both Feynman diagrams and Hasse diagrams (Lattices) but without success, because I need a way to describe a dynamic reordering of the nodes on the graph.

What I enjoyed most about your essay was the notion of an embedded observer. Clearly, there is a relationship here with decoherence theory and the measurement problem.

You can find the latest version of my essay here:

http://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/Borrill-TimeOne-V1.1a.pdf

(sorry if the fqxi web site splits this url up, I haven't figured out a way to not make it do that).

Lets connect when the contest is over.

Kind regards, Paul

paul at borrill dot com

Dear Kevin,

As per particle scenario, information is the transfer of energy with photons or ions. Electron as a matter has mass, but as described as point like zero-dimensional particle, it unlikely evolves three-dimensional structures.

Thus by string-matter continuum scenario, we ascribe all particles that have mass as coupled tetrahedral-branes of eigen-rotational string-matter segments as building blocks. Thus lattice of simplexes of eigen-rotational string-segments have collective gravitational influence in that gravity emerges as a tensor product on eigen-rotations of string-matter segments.

With best wishes,

JayakarAttachment #1: 2_Spin_simplex.pdfAttachment #2: Collective_gravity.pdf

Dear Kevin H Knuth:

I am an old physician and I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics. maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other, the so called "time".

I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay "The deep nature of reality".

I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don't understand it, and is not just because of my bad English).

Hawking in "A brief history of time" where he said , "Which is the nature of time?" yes he don't know what time is, and also continue saying............Some day this answer could seem to us "obvious", as much than that the earth rotate around the sun....." In fact the answer is "obvious", but how he could say that, if he didn't know what's time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be "obvious", I think that with this adjective, he is implying: simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn't explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure "time" since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure "time" from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental "time" meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls "time" and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the "time" experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the "time" creators and users didn't. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein's "Ideas and Opinions" pg. 354 "Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought" he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about "time" he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect "time", he does not use the word "time" instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or "motion", instead of saying that slows "time". FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that "time" was a man creation, but he didn't know what man is measuring with the clock.

I insist, that for "measuring motion" we should always and only use a unique: "constant" or "uniform" "motion" to measure "no constant motions" "which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of "motion" whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to "motion fractions", which I call "motion units" as hours, minutes and seconds. "Motion" which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using "motion"?, time just has been used to measure the "duration" of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand "motion" is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.

With my best whishes

Héctor