Hi Conrad,
''There's no such thing as information without a context that actually defines it.''
Yes: If there would be only a single charged particle among uncharged particles in the universe, then it wouldn't be able to express its charge in interactions. As it in that case it cannot be charged itself, charge, or any property, must be something which is shared by particles, something which only exists, is expressed and preserved within their interactions. If particles, particle properties (its) are both cause and effect of their interactions, of the exchange of bits and particles only exist to each other if and for as long as they interact, exchange information, then you cannot have one without the other nor can one be more fundamental than the other.
If the information as embodied in particle properties and the associated laws of physics (rules of behavior) must be the product of a trial-and-error evolution, then information only can become actual information if it manages to survive: when molded into particles and particle properties and tested in practice, in interactions between 'its', between actual, physical, material particles. So I agree that
''there exists here a self-defining information-structure of a very special kind - one that can define all its own facts, parameters and principles in terms of each other. This sort of system is as remarkable in its own way as a living organism''
If real particles are virtual particles which by alternately borrowing and lending each other the energy to exist, force each other to reappear again and again after every disappearance (according to the uncertainty principle: the smaller their distance, the higher the frequency they exchange energy at, pop up and disappear to pop up again, the higher their rest energy is), then they create and un-create each other over and over again. As the energy sign of a particle alternates, it is a wave phenomenon. If the energy, the rest frequency of a particle is the superposition of all frequencies it exchanges energy at with all particles within its interaction horizon, a frequency which depends on their mass, distance and motion, then the particle in its properties carries all relevant information about its entire universe, information which is refreshed in every cycle of its oscillation. The inertia of a particle, its opposition to an acceleration (its manifestation as a tangible, material object) is powered by this continuous exchange of energy, of information. If we could cut off this exchange, it would vanish without trace, just like an image on a TV screen vanishes when we pull the plug. Though the universe indeed in many respects is a living 'thing', it is not something which lives, exists as seen from without, something which has particular properties as a whole, something we may imagine to look at from without. If the universe is to obey what to me seems the most fundamental and most obvious law of physics, the conservation law which says that what comes out of nothing must add to nothing, then it doesn't exist, has no physical reality as a whole, as 'seen' from the outside, but only exists as seen from within.
In the seemingly innocuous assumption that we can regard the universe as an ordinary object which has certain properties and changes, grows older in time, big bang cosmology unwittingly but implicitly asserts that there's something outside the of it the universe interacts with, owes its properties to: that it has been created by something outside of it. Evidently, this attitude can be justified only if particles only are the cause of interactions, not also their product. As big bang cosmology describes the physics of a fictitious universe, it is science fiction, not science.
''What role do laws of physics play? And if at a deeper level things aren't fully determinate, if they turn out to obey laws only on average, then why does the world we observe end up looking so precisely factual and deterministic?''
According to the Uncertainty Principle, the smaller the distance between particles is, the higher the frequency they exchange energy at, pop up and disappear to pop up again, the higher their rest energy is. The farther apart two particles are or the lower their energy is, the less it matters where the other particle is or how it moves, what properties it exactly has, the less definite the properties of one particle are according to the other. The lower the energy of a particle, the weaker its interactions are, the greater its freedom of behavior, the less strictly it obeys laws of physics, rules of behavior. If we may associate a low energy with an early evolutionary phase, then we might say that the laws of physics evolve together with the particles the behavior of which they describe, so are, like the particles, the product of a trial-and-error evolution. It isn't so much that particles and associated laws ''aren't fully determinate'' that laws work ''only on average''; it is because the behavior of particles is less related as their energy is lower and/or they are farther apart, as the energy, the properties of one particle are less definite according to the other. The farther apart they are and/or the smaller their energy is, the less their interaction horizons overlap, coincide, the weaker their interactions are, the less they can force each other behave in a coordinated manner. That the laws particles are observed to obey enable us to predict their behavior to some extent doesn't mean that the world is deterministic, predetermined, that it can be understood in terms of cause-and-effect. If when the mass of particles are both cause and effect of their interactions, then then mass cannot causally precede gravity nor the other way around: as I argued in my essay, causality has nothing to do with science but everything with religion.
Regards, Anton
