Marina,

please look also at my reply to your post of Aug. 3!

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Marina

I'm happy that you had a personal backup of your very nice post. I answered to your previous post that you kindly copied here. Please, look up in this blog, I will be looking for your answer.

Here I just dare confess a personal curiosity about you--a computer scientist that worked in the industry and has a not just the understanding, but the genuine curiosity, of a true scientist. Your activity looks fascinating: what can be more interesting that the history of ideas? And pursued by somebody who loves puzzles? Are you a science writer? I am left with the mystery of a pair of green eyes and bright-red lipstick of a woman living with her family in the woods of Pennsylvania. What also makes you special is that you are probably the only author in this contest who makes publicity to others, not to herself.

My best regards

Mauro

Marina

the system manager re-astablished your old post. Please look at my answer to your post of Aug. 3rd.

My best regards

Mauro

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.

    Dear Mauro,

    Do you find any empirical evidence for producing matter from information...?

    Best

    =snp

    I enjoyed your essay. A last minute comment about the blur between realism and idealism. If a quantum is some function of space and energy and time it therefore exists, it is real. This is what I have understood to be a realist view. I agree with you that information is the interaction between 2 objects and I assume that those 2 objects can be bits of space. Therefore if space is real then information is emergent rather than fundamental. Is an abstract notion of information creating the real universe (the idealist view) or is information emergent from the interaction of objects such as quanta of space (what I have taken as a realist view)? Your essay has made me think that the traditional realist view of objects creating the Universe is no longer valid but that there is a new realist view that space and energy and quanta exist.

    Carolyn Devereux

      Dear Carolyn

      thank you for reading my essay and for your kind compliments. I also enjoy reading your essay, and commented about it answering to Marina Vasilyeva. You can make a search of your name on this post. However, I couldn't find any reference to a technical paper of yours about the ideas expressed in your essay. Can you give me a one?

      Regarding your points on realism, I hardly follow your post. To me space (empty space) cannot have any real connotation, if not in the negative. The point is: what do you mean for "real"? In my view information is fundamental--not emergent--and definitely cannot emerge from interaction between "objects" (half of my essay is devoted to dismantling the notion of "object"). Energy is a far-from-fundamental notion. There are only quantum systems in interaction: and from this the whole physics emerges. And systems are "qubits", namely pure information. And this (systems and interactions) is the minimal set of "entities" starting from which a physical theory can be constructed.

      Please, provide me a technical paper of yours, so that I may be able to better understand your point of view.

      My best regards

      Mauro

        Dear Carolyn

        thank you for reading my essay and for your kind compliments. I also enjoy reading your essay, and commented about it answering to Marina Vasilyeva. You can make a search of your name on this post. However, I couldn't find any reference to a technical paper of yours about the ideas expressed in your essay. Can you give me a one?

        Regarding your points on realism, I hardly follow your post. To me space (empty space) cannot have any real connotation, if not in the negative. The point is: what do you mean for "real"? In my view information is fundamental--not emergent--and definitely cannot emerge from interaction between "objects" (half of my essay is devoted to dismantling the notion of "object"). Energy is a far-from-fundamental notion. There are only quantum systems in interaction: and from this the whole physics emerges. And systems are "qubits", namely pure information. And this (systems and interactions) is the minimal set of "entities" starting from which a physical theory can be constructed.

        Please, provide me a technical paper of yours, so that I may be able to better understand your point of view.

        My best regards

        Mauro

        Dear Prof. D'Arino,

        I am agree with you that "It" is emergent from pure information, an information of special kind : quantum." Of course, "It" is from "Qubit" but if we can able to observe the same suppose from any opposite (say a mirror), why that "Qubit" would not be from "It"? I think that the factor of observation as well as observer (like us) would have some definite role. So I invite you to read and rate my essay "It from bit equally bit from it".

        I think quantization property in nature is the basic origin of 'pure' information.

        Your essay is really convincing and impressive. So I rate you full.

        Regards

        Dipak

        http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1855

          Dear Charles,

          thank you for your beautiful compliments, and for your post that makes the point on the statistics about the different points of view. Clearly, as you say, the "Bit from It"--the realist point of view--is the most popular. Unfortunately we cannot infer any useful information from such statistical fact. Centuries ago it was the same with "is Earth flat or round"? The "immediate evidence" is the easy way: but unfortunately it has little to do with logic. In addition, we have the "sociological" side of physics, with its own lobbies, of which the historical ones have had the opportunity of collecting more power and more popular consensus through a publication systems that is business oriented.

          I also enjoyed reading your essay, I rated it and wrote a short post in your blog. The scientist who is closest to my point of view is von Weizsaecker. Unfortunately, in those old years both him and J.A. Wheeler had not yet sufficiently sharp tools to work out their revolutionary ideas.

          My best regards

          Mauro

          Dear Dipak

          thank you for your very nice compliments, and thank you very much for your rating. I will read and rate your essay soon.

          I don't believe in the specularity between It and Bit. As you have seen in my essay, for me Bit is fundamental, and It is emergent. In order to put the It to the same level of the Bit, one should precisely define what is the "elementary It", and we know that it cannot be the elementary particle.

          My best regards

          Mauro

          Dear Janko

          thank you for your interesting post. Yes, my approach is close to that of Fotini, in the sense that we reach the same conclusion, namely that, as she says:

          "the problem of time is a paradox, stemming from an unstated faulty premise. Our faulty assumption is that space is real. I propose that what does not fundamentally exist is not time but space, geometry and gravity. The quantum theory of gravity will be spaceless, not timeless. If we are willing to throw out space, we can keep time and the trade is worth it. "

          The supporting technical material you are asking is given in the following Refs. in my essay:

          [7] G.M. D'Ariano and P. Perinotti, arXiv preprint 1306.1934 (2013) http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.1934

          [8] M. Kapovich, Cayley graphs of finitely generated in- finite groups quasi-isometrically embeddable in R3, http://mathoverflow.net/questions/130994 version: 2013-05-17

          To say something more Alice and Bob and how space emerges from systems, the logic is the following. You start from relations between systems. If you assume that they are homogeneous, then they are described by a finitely-generated infinite group. From that group you get the manifold that embeds it quasi-isometrically. Therefore the manifold emerges from relations. The striking thing is that the quantum cellular automaton achieves the embedding "physically", in the sense that all the continuous symmetries are recovered from the discrete in the limit of small wave-vectors (the relativistic limit). It is the quantum nature of the related systems that allows this, and this is exactly the idea that I wrote in my previous essay in an embryonic stage, namely that the quantum superposition of paths solves the Weyl-tiling issue of recovering continuum geometry from the discrete one. Therefore, the quantum nature of systems and relations is crucial for the emergence. This new way of having space-time as emergent from a purely relational framework is amazingly interesting, since it also opens crucial new problems (e.g. if there are QCA that are quasi-isometrically embeddable in non euclidean spaces!). I'm now in Chicago where I will meet some mathematicians expert in the field, and I hope to find answers soon.

          As regards consciousness, I never seriously addressed this problem. I saw your essay, and it looks interesting, but I need time to read it. I will doit, hopefully in time to rate the essay.

          My best regards

          Mauro

          Dear Kyle

          I am sorry if I alarmed you. Please, consider that you will be perfectly safe in a digital universe!

          My best wishes

          mauro

          Dear Amazigh

          thank you for your post. I also rated your essay.

          Good luck to you.

          Mauro

          Mauro,

          Your essay is readable. I have seen many essays that were far from clear. You tied together the topics of this contest into one theme. I felt the topic of the contest was not clear, but you did you best to put it in a presentable form. You explore knowledge from the information side, but not from the physics side.

          Thank you for your essay,

          Jeff

            Thank you Jeffrey for your compliments.

            In writing my essay I've been especially concerned with its readability, and with being myself convincing. It will take time to make my quantum cellular automaton framework more popular, but I've already witness a large increase in popularity from the last year, whereas in the academic environment it immediately got much interest since the very earliest ideas.

            Thank you for your post. I really appreciated it. And I also enjoyed reading your essay on robots.

            My best regards

            Mauro

            Dear Hugh,

            I thank you for your beautiful compliments and your appreciation of some of the main points in my essay. I think that the simulation paradigm is taken very seriously in my essay, in the sense that reality should be in all sense indistinguishable from its (quantum) simulation. What you call the "explicate" order is the classical information that we can tap from the quantum automaton, whereas the "implicate" order is the secret quantum information precessed by the automaton. I also had a read of your essay, and I found it very clearly written and with interesting ideas inside (and I rated it high), though I'm not completely sure for the moment that I share the "Bit from Us" part of your thesis.

            Thank you again

            My best regards

            Mauro

            Dear Satyavarapu,

            not "production", but "emergence", of matter from information. This is very different.

            There are phenomena that can confirm the quantum cellular automata theory, such as blurring of images at (with increasing frequency) of ultra-deep space quasars. The whole phenomenology of "relative locality" that is implied by the distortion of Lorentz covariance at high momenta should produce observable consequences. We are studying the phenomenology with other more expert authors.

            Cheers

            Mauro