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 Your essay has made me think that the traditional realist view of objects creating the Universe is no longer valid but that there is a new realist view that space and energy and quanta exist.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

          Dear Professor D'Ariano,

          In your view, as I understand it, the fundamental existents are neither particles nor fields. Even space-time is not ultimate. Instead, reality would seem to be a type of abstract mathematical structure. You emphasize, however, that the base of reality is a particular structure which follows precise and definite rules, as opposed to a generic structure.

          This picture of things raises the following question: Is reality at bottom only a mathematical structure, or is reality a non-mathematical thing which exemplifies this structure? If reality is only a mathematical structure, then it is natural to wonder what distinguishes the one real structure from the infinitely many structures which are unreal. On the other hand, if reality is a thing-in-itself, or things-in-themselves, exemplifying these structures, then there is a different question, but still an important one. In this case, it would be reasonable to ask what else we could infer about the thing-in-itself, beyond the fact of its existence. Perhaps even the word "existence" would be too definite a term here. It would be uncomfortable, although perhaps unavoidable, to have to postulate something so unknowable. These questions are not really objections to your view, but they nonetheless would seem to be puzzling consequences.

          Laurence Hitterdale

            Hi Mauro,

            > 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.

            Yes exactly.

            > 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.

            I think the important thing for now is to show that the computational paradigm is feasible and has explanatory power. Once we have such a model for how the physical world arises, then we can see if it answers questions about what lies underneath the physical.

            Hugh

            "One can ask: what is the minimal field vector dimension s of a nontrivial automaton quasi-isometrically embeddable in R3 and isotropic?"

            Did you read about the part in the introduction that the essay should be interesting to the educated public along the lines of an article in Scientfic American? I'm MIT educated and that's total word salad to me. Am I supposed to know what "R3" is?

            These essays are to be rated according to relevancy and interest. I have plowed through several essays this evening hoping to find one which was relevant and had something to do with whether reality can be represented digitally or whether reality doesn't rely on digital bits. I have also been hoping to find one that was interesting enough that it would deserve more than a skim through. I have yet to find one. They are all like this essay - which seem to have something vaguely to do with "information", but nothing to address Wheelers dream of a completely digital representation of the world.

              Greetings Giacomo,

              I greatly enjoyed your essay. I find the notion of a quantum cellular automaton quite compelling, and your formulation shows great promise. Simple and elegant. I first heard the term "It from Qubit" attributed to Paola Zizzi (isn't she also at Pavia?) by Lloyd and Ng in a Scientific American article, and this certainly makes more sense than "It from Bit." Her work inspired me and she encouraged me to pursue my Physics studies, a number of years ago, and I'm wondering if she was one of your inspirations as well.

              I'll ask you the same question I asked Gerard 't Hooft about his CA based Quantum Gravity theory at FFP10 - as recounted in my essay - in your theory "What does the computing?" And based on what came out of that conversation I should also ask "Is your Quantum CA Lorentz invariant?" because Gerard said this is very difficult to achieve with CA based theories. In any case; I have rated your essay highly, and I wish you the best of luck.

              Have Fun,

              Jonathan

                Best of Luck for the Magnificent Eight !

                I am throught the 180 essays, all rated. For me 2/3 of them were poor and other 1/6 curious. The rest (1/6) have I rated over 4/10.

                You are among the authors of the top essays from my sight - alphabetically :

                Corda, D'Ariano, Maguire, Rogozhin, Singleton, Sreenath, Vaid, Vishwakarma,

                and I hope one of you will be the winner. (Please, don't rate my essay.)

                David

                Yuri

                I read your essay. Yes, I found your empirical law for masses interesting, but we need at least a rough reasonable motivation for it. Don't you think?

                My best regards

                Mauro