Hi Marina,

> In this regard, have you read the beautiful essay by Prof. D'Ariano? What is your opinion on it?

I liked it a lot, and I see several parallels with my picture. I need to study it more, but I hope I might be able to combine his low level approach with my more high-level one.

> That's a good analogy/graphical representation of spacetime on quantum level. no? :)

I like the tapestry image. Have you read Kevin Knuth's essay? He has what seems a similar idea.

> Definitely, yours is a very interesting, stimulating and deserving a high rank essay.

Thank you so much!

Hugh

Dear Marina

Before I answered your questions on my essay, I wanted to read yours before the deadline...

And what a beautiful essay it is!

Acknowledging that plants smell the air and hear sounds! Few people know this.

And I LOVE the statement:

"Why, even a jagged rock rising from the surface of a lifeless planet absorbs sun's energy during the day, stores it, and then radiates as heat into its environment at night. How is this not a participation in the universe?"

I see this as a subtle jab at the measurement problem, which I see as a huge problem because the process of a photon being absorbed by a rhodopsin molecule in my eye cannot possibly be different than if I had dribbled some rhodopsin on the rock and the photon was absorbed there! Yet in QM, one case we have a measurement and in the other case an interaction.

You are right! The rock participates just as I do!

Now your view of information is different than mine. I do not see the rock as processing information about the photon. I agree that it participates, but not that it processes information. I have come to appreciate a definition of information that I heard from Ariel Caticha: "Information is that which changes one's beliefs". I have beliefs because I model the world, and my sensory input changes this model. The robots in my lab have beliefs and they process information. I don't know about rocks. I would suspect that they don't do this.

I really like the beautiful picture you paint:

"The recursive loop of the `participatory scheme' above implies that reality is a local phenomenon, perpetually generated anew, emerging as the result of exchange of information between all participants."

Your "democratic universe" is much more appealing!

And I appreciate that you move away from the universe as a computer. As you know, I think about it more like a network. But your idea of a cellular automata is not so different. I think the main difference is that a CA usually exists embedded within some pre-existing framework: the bits in computer memory, squares on a screen, or points in spacetime. I believe that the network generates spacetime. There is no need for a substrate.

I also loved this statement:

"In real life, openly professing the belief that you can make things happen by mere looking at them is enough to land you in a psychiatric ward. Not so in sciences - and not just physics - where expanding on the idea, in a learned manner, may earn you a Ph.D. instead."

And what are the laypeople to think on hearing this? Who precisely has lost their mind? Does the rock on your barren planet look at the sunlight? What about the rhodopsin molecule that actually does the work of absorbing the photon? Something is very wrong here --- perhaps someone should notify psychiatry.

And you continue with:

" It's more like being charged with the task of observing flies while blindfolded and with a swatter for the sensor."

This is a wonderful analogy for a QM experiment!

I have never heard this (very funny):

"As the popular Russian expression goes, `let us try and keep flies separate from hamburgers'."

You could just swat them with your QMical fly swatter! But then you would be left with both a physical mess *and* a conceptual mess!

What a wonderful essay!

I commend you for staying on task and discussing the role of information, and doing so both elegantly and with a unique perspective.

You mentioned in your comments on my essay that you were perhaps inspired by what you had read in mine. However, I do not quite see it. Whatever information you received from me, you have processed it and made it your very own. As my friend Carlos Rodriguez says "We do not live in a vacuum". In a very real sense, there are dense recursive interactions to the point where at times it becomes difficult to say "my ideas". I love your democratic universe where we all participate! Thank you again for a wonderful essay!

    Marina,

    I was just a little disappointed to have no reply to my above post, or comment on my blog. Georgina and others did point out the abstract was dense and offputting, but that the essay was very readable. Embarrasingly flattering blog comments include such as; groundbreaking", "significant", "astonishing", "fantastic", "wonderful", "remarkable!", "superb", etc.

    I hope they may temp you to bypass the abstract as I'd be interested in your opinions. I recall that your 'recursive loops' sounded like a beautiful description of my own very similar derivation, which I hope shows hope.

    I do find comments after the scoring deadline equally valuable to those before so please don't feel under any pressure at all for now.

    I do hope your essay survives the final 'shuffle torture'.

    Very best wishes

    Peter

      Dear Marina,

      I enjoyed reading your essay. You made a profound analysis of information, a compelling case for why "it" is more fundamental than "bit". A beautiful journey through Wheeler's "it from bit", participatory universe and "whence the quantum", pointed by original and interesting ideas.

      Best regards,

      Cristi Stoica

        Dear Marina,

        After reading some of your comments on the main FQXI blog just now, I feel it is necessary to add a few comments to yesterday's post I made regarding your essay.

        First, I want you to know that I stand by everything I wrote yesterday. I do wish I had read your essay sooner, I was and still am very impressed with your essay, and I did rate it accordingly, and I am very happy that I did so.

        However, today I read your comments to Lev, "All the unethical behavior here comes exclusively from the minority of the non-professional participants. I noticed Philip Gibbs flatly refusing discussing posts even mentioning ratings. That's a good policy to adopt."

        I was unaware that we had access to the behavior of the participants. However, because I am a non-professional participant and because I posted to you that I was very impressed with your essay and 'rated it accordingly,' I am now concerned that you may think I was being inappropriate in my comments. I am also quite frustrated with the obvious 'stealth bombing' of unidentified entrants and the thinly veiled 'blind date' requests. I also find it disheartening to observe the various alliances and warring factions that sometimes barely simmer below the surface, leading to both inflated and unreasonably low scores on both sides. Some non-professional entries such as mine end up being used for target practice by both sides or as collateral damage, because they have no allegiance to a particular camp.

        Personally, I think (quite strongly) that every vote cast by every participant should be completely open for all to see. I also think that each vote cast should be coupled with the voter's comment on why they voted the way they did. The rules of how the contest was to be judged were very specific and quite clear; requiring the entrants to explain their vote in light of the rules would create a much more level field surrounded by the boundaries of accountability.

        It was for this reason I stated to you what I did. I wanted you to know that I rated your essay based upon my honest and genuine evaluation of it. I have steadfastly avoided rating essays I didn't comprehend, although I could have rationalized a low score based on the parameters in the rules that essays were supposed to be written towards an audience aiming in the range of the educated general public who read Scientific American, etc. I also avoided rating essays containing conclusions I disagreed with, because I didn't want the fact that I was prejudiced against their conclusion to negatively influence my vote. But I felt (and still do) that it was appropriate to let an entrant know when I thought highly of their essay, what it was about their essay that I thought was good, and that I had rated it according to my evaluation. It was in this spirit that I posted to you what I did. It was also for this reason that I stated that I did not care whether you read or rated my essay in the next couple of days, but hoped that you would eventually read it.

        I also read your comment to Manuel, ". . . I saw people leaving comments in the blogs a month or even two after the final announcements. So, why would you want to discuss it elsewhere? Let others benefit from your insightful comments and maybe join the discussion with their input. This is the place to do it." Because I mentioned that, if you were so inclined, that we might keep in touch in the future, I want you to know that I am more than happy to limit any correspondence between us on the FQXI forum.

        I wish to make clear that I respect your views and in fact, find myself in agreement of much of what you have posted. I simply wanted to clarify my position to you.

        Again, I wish you the very best.

        Sincerely,

        Ralph

        Wow..

        Dear Professor Knuth,

        I can't relate how much I appreciate your positive feedback! Humbled, now I wish I began writing it much earlier and did a better job. Your encouragement set me up to aim for higher standards. Next time!

        It's true, not many people know about plants, how they 'perceive' the world around them. I did not have time to include the reference to 'What a Plant Knows' by the renown biologist Daniel Chamovitz. But I think many people here may be familiar with it, since it has been promoted by Scientific American. A wonderful book.

        And you are right, a rock does not process information but only contributes to its pool by generating it by the virtue of its participation. What is information is much clearer to me now, having read so many essays in the last weeks.

        You have robots in your lab? What did you program them to feel and want out of their robotic life? lol

        I'm relieved that you did not mind me poking fun at the Copenhagen interpretation and quantum measurement problem and actually found it funny. I was worried that people in academia may be put off by the very unacademic style with which my intended criticism was presented. Phew! It's good to know that physics professors have a good sense of humor :)

        Thank you again for your review (I will cherish it!) and for answering my question about the difference between your research and CA. I wish you good luck in your science career. You have very interesting ideas and unusual take on things.

        -Marina

        Dear Marina,

        I have now finished reviewing all 180 essays for the contest and appreciate your contribution to this competition.

        I have been thoroughly impressed at the breadth, depth and quality of the ideas represented in this contest. In true academic spirit, if you have not yet reviewed my essay, I invite you to do so and leave your comments.

        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).

        May the best essays win!

        Kind regards,

        Paul Borrill

        paul at borrill dot com

        Thank you Cristi for your positive review! I also enjoyed your essya and have replied in your bog :)

        Apologies,

        I posted on 5th. You are indeed correct. There was no ill intention. I nearly saw my previous comment was that date and thought the recent bug had caused a lost comment to you.

        Peter

        sorry I took so long to reply. There is so much going on, so many essays to read and discuss.. Naturally, I was mostly drawn to ones where I could find input for the ideas dear to my heart, and that is my 4D universe, which, we both know, you find out of touch with 'reality'. But reality is what we perceive, not necessarily what is -- that it vs bit thingy again :)

        But I read and rated your essay long time ago and am glad that, as usual, you're doing great!

        I don't expect my essay to survive the final 'shuffle torture' lol I am surprised that it's been bobbing at the cutoff boundary for so long and lately even advanced into the coveted by so many territory. But I'm glad that this served to bring some positive attention to my writing style, despite the haste with which I cocked up my entry. That's the part that is important to me. I do not see myself as a physicist but maybe only a promoter of interesting ideas. In any case, regarding the final shuffle, I am a strong believer in community's ability to always set things right in the end.

        Thank you for relating to me Georgina's sincere comments. It is very true, I always leave the abstract for last and this time there was simply no time to fix its many problems. She is absolutely right.

        Not sure what this refers to: "Embarrasingly flattering blog comments include such as; groundbreaking", "significant", "astonishing", "fantastic", "wonderful", "remarkable!", "superb", etc. " It's certainly has nothing to do with my essay lol so it must be yours. Perhaps I should give it another read, cause the first time I did not notice anything of the sort. But maybe this is because, invariably, reading your essays makes me feel as if I had too much coffee -- I just get mental jitters that culminate in a stiff headache lol.

        It's been a tradition to see your essay at the top throughout the competition and after the final shuffle and I congratulate you in this remarkable achievement also in this year.

        Bravo!

        -Marina

        Ralph

        thank you for your positive feedback!

        And don't worry. I read your essay but because its content lied outside my current main interest (that mainly consists of weird ideas concerning some aspects of 4D topology and up) I was fishing for input for these ideas in other blogs, while people who could help me with them were still here. From my past experience, most people vanish the very next day after the finals. So, selfishly perhaps, I was following my own interests. It should have had no bearing on you.

        I'll be glad to discuss your essay later,

        -Marina

        Marina,

        Thank you for your reply. I don't intend to vanish the day after the finals (however, if I succeed in doing so I will immediately apply for a patent . . .)

        Good luck in the finals!

        Ralph

        Dear Marina,

        I am truly sorry, and ashamed to say that I haven't yet read either of your essays in the two contests I've been involved in. I just read through a good chunk of the comments here, and tomorrow I'm going to read this essay and send feedback. Anticipating that I'm going to like it a lot, I'm disappointed in myself for not getting to it earlier.

        Best regards,

        Daryl

          Thanks Daryl

          not a big deal, it could have been better. It was an experiment. And I read your essay and all your comments on Ken Wharton's blog. I thought you were right.

          Now that ratings are over you can give me your sincere feedback, ah? I like sincere feedback :)

          Take care!

          Dear Marina,

          I'm glad the ratings are over too. As my reply above states, I found that a lot of comments I'd posted around the end of July to beginning of August had vanished. I panicked and wanted to let all the recent authors I'd commented on that I'd rated them with nice words, as I'd put a LOT of hard work in. So I typed a quick message or copy pasted from mine, hence the repeat "Dr" mistake! ;)

          I genuinely made a mistake from my notes as to when I rated you!

          Your response is understandable on your part, but upset me a little because this isn't in my nature. I have copied others by telling people that I've rated them highly, as I thought that was the general thing to do. I will not do this in future, as I agree we shouldn't talk about scores on here. As for group collaboration away from the site - that sounds pretty worrying and I agree that needs to stop. Perhaps future contests they should not show positions or ratings?

          Anyway, no hard feelings on my part, as I said I'm not like that. Also, I must disagree with your closing comment. I think both your essay and mine do deserve to be high up. After all our initial comments to each other are full of praise.

          I look forward to continuing to read and comment on essays in a more relaxing pace over the coming weeks.

          Very best wishes and kindest regards,

          Antony

          Marina,

          I'm really glad you made it in. I agree entirely your 4D view with subjective observed 'realities' indeed our last two essays are exceptionally consistent. I only had one point each year, disliking "branes" last year and suggesting 'refraction' as another boundary this.

          I was criticising my own abstract not yours, so citing the blog posts to try to tempt you beyond it! Of course you too got an "excellent" (July 8, me). I'm sorry if you still found it too dense, I had to build a solid ontological construction for a valid test of the discrete field model against QM and Bell.

          Did you know the peculiar 'orbital' anomalies in the EPR experiment the model predicts have now actually been found in the 99.9% of Aspect's data discarded as there was no theoretical explanation for it!! (then).

          I'm still not sure most have yet rationalised the full implications for unification the model seems to offer, (including yourself), but it does increase steadily each year, even if it's only glimpses. Nobody has a suitable 'pattern' in the cortex to hang it to. I'd really like to just pass it all over and go sail my yacht (I'm racing it all next week yippee!). But the real test is now of the judges, and how firmly they're wedded to old doctrine. Having been passed over twice from top ten places I have no confidence they'll pass! My original estimate of 2020 may still be close.

          Thanks for your kind comments. I don't know how your reading went but I only just managed the same as last year. Even if we had longer it's too much time, but a rich experience none the less.

          Best wishes

          Peter

          Hello Marina,

          I wish you luck in the finals. Your placement is well-deserved. Since there were so many clamoring for attention, I am only now getting to read your excellent essay, which certainly deserves kudos, and makes several points that resonate with me. I will want to read for detail before I comment further, but now there is no time limit - because you are already in the finals (as am I). The fractal time wave idea is especially compelling, though, and deserves immediate mention. I am a great fan of fractals myself.

          After seeing your comments on his page, I wanted to mention that Craig Hogan already did write an article about his experiment for Scientific American, which prompted me to correspond with him a few years ago. When I wrote more recently to inquire about answering some of the questions on his forum, or expounding about progress to date, he replied he was 'expounded out for now' but offered "The experiment is coming together well, it is fair to say that it's in the commissioning phase and we are crossing our fingers that we'll get to its design Planck sensitivity goal."

          I hope this helps. And again, best of luck.

          Regards,

          Jonathan

            Thank you Jonathan!

            I just returned to Prof. Hogan's blog and left another post there. I'm sorry I missed that SA article. Now I will try to find it online. His is a fascinating line of research. I guess this is as close to the matters of space as one can get, no?

            Thank you for your kind comments on my essay. Fractal time -- someone told me recently that this was Terence McKenna's idea but so far can find no reference. Did you think it was original?

            Congratulations on making the finals. I'm thinking of relinquishing my place to a more interesting entry.

            -Marina

            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