Dear Marina,
Sorry I didn't get back to you right away. Before I comment on your essay, I just want to say thanks for your support in the debate I had with Ken. I was flattered when I saw you mention that in your discussion with Israel above, and even moreso by your response to me here. It means a lot that you read through all of that, and even more that you agreed with me. I'm not sure even Ken read through all of it, so I'm glad to know that someone did :)
With that said, did you see the discussion further down on Ken's page, in the thread that was started by Ian Durham? I kind of took over that one, eventually getting Ian's stamp of approval that after a brief skim of the comments he thought I had nailed his concerns with Ken's idea of reality. The reason I bring this up, is that I want to lead into my comments on your essay by first stating what was most clarified for me through the course of this contest, a lot of which I worked through in writing my essay, but which has become even clearer since then, through discussions like the one I had with Ken.
What's become clear for me is how central the distinction between "to exist" and "to happen" is to this essay topic. To me, the question of whether "it from bit or bit from it?", seems largely to come down to a question of what is more fundamental, existence or happenings. Commonly, we think everything exists, and at every instant of that existence, everywhere, events happen to take place. In contrast, I think Wheeler's 'it from bit' proposal is that things happen, and existence emerges through those happenings. The descriptors are supposed to be taken as fundamental, rather than the things they describe. To me, the idea is incoherent, because I can't see how anything can happen--that information can be produced and transmitted throughout space, to be received and assimilated at a later event somewhere else, etc.--if there is not existence a priori. The idea that events occur, hence things can be said to "exist", seems to be just a backwards attempt to describe reality, which I think can only be seen as plausible by someone so used to describing events, that they've gotten all caught up in their work and lost sight of what those events were supposed to represent in the first place--that the sequence of those events is really the description of everything that happens in reality, and that they happen as things exist in reality.
I'll come back to the discussion I had with Ken, and how that factors into what I want to say about your essay, at the end. I first want to connect this last point with what I liked the most about your essay.
What I liked best in your essay is the way you so nicely presented this most natural and obvious viewpoint, e.g. in the four starred points at the top of page four--and how in doing so, you were able to clearly highlight this very significant issue in the way specialised research often tends to be done: i.e., people get caught up in special projects and tend to lose sight of the bigger picture, which leads them to pursue totally unrealistic proposals which, from a very narrow point of view, seem less unreasonable than they actually are. The discussion at the top of page seven I think spoke wonderfully to this, ending with "Not so in sciences - and not just physics - where expanding on the idea, in a learned manner, may earn you a Ph.D. instead.
"Members of the lay public huddling outside the temple of science willingly suspend their disbelief, some shaking heads, some muttering gee."
One criticism I've got of your essay, though, is that for most of it you seem to have Wheeler's idea of a participatory universe, as I understand it, all wrong. You finally mention his idea of reality emerging retroactively through observer participation in the paragraph I've just quoted from, which you rightly present as one of those crazy ideas that might land someone a PhD if they expand on it in a learned manner.
That one point--that very crazy notion--is really the point of debate in this essay contest. It's the notion that happenings cause existence, rather than happenings taking place as things exist, which is the more natural picture that you present. Put another way, the world consists of "beables" (i.e., "be-ables") that send and receive information; that information is received in a process known as "perception"--i.e., it is "observed"--and the information that's assimilated through "observation" is thought to correspond to some "observable" event. Whether the "observable" corresponds accurately to the "beable" in the way it is perceived--i.e., whether the perception is misleading or not--is another story. A very good example is our daily observation that the Sun "rises" in the east and "sets" in the west. The Sun--rather, an image of the Sun that's travelled 8 minutes through space--is observed to "move" across the sky, whereas the beables are the Sun and the Earth, and the observed motion of the Sun really results from the daily rotation of the Earth.
Anyway, this leads back nicely to your point that there's way more information in the Universe than is ever observed. As you put it, "Now is a good time to be reminded that It is the unknown delivered to our senses, and sensors, via bits; and that whatever information we are getting is always only a subset of what is to be [had] out there." I agree. But Wheeler doesn't. Or at least the idea behind his participatory universe was that maybe there isn't any real information until it's been observed--by a person or a rock or whatever,--and that objectively well-defined reality emerges retroactively through this process of observation.
(I wanted to make sure I had Wheeler's idea right before stating this criticism of your essay, so I ended up reading this article, which I think confirms what I've stated here about Wheeler's idea of a participatory universe, as opposed to the natural view that I think you've described).
Now, what did I want to say about Ken's view? I suppose it was that my criticism with Ken's view is really very similar to my criticism of Wheeler's. Both are so used to working with events, that they've come to think of them as the fundamental elements of reality, rather than the accidental aspects that they obviously are, to anyone who takes a step back from the physics and comes to think of what our physical descriptions are supposed to be about. In Ken's view, the entire space-time continuum 'is' real. He's okay with the fact that he has to re-define the verb 'to be', to mean non-existential 'being' (whatever the heck that is?), and actually thinks it's unfair of us "friends of passage" to think we have a monopoly on verbs--that it's unfair for us to say that "exist" has to have existential meaning. He thinks he should be able to define 'exist', along with all other verbs, to have non-existential meaning, so he can say things like all of eternity--the 4D block universe--'exists'.
Rather than admitting the existence of something that isn't explicit in physical theory, he wants to redefine the word exist so that it fits with the explicit elements of the theory, which he wants to be fundamental things. Much the same, Wheeler's participatory vision stands opposed to Bell's vision of a world full of beables interacting at events that eventually happen to be observed.
Anyway, I should probably end with that for now. I hope I haven't misrepresented any point you were trying to make in your essay, or assumed you'd agree with something that you don't. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on all of this, particularly if there is something you disagree with. As I said, I've been learning through all of this--and I'm always ready to correct my misunderstandings.
Best, Daryl
