It, Bit, and Something More by Laurence Hitterdale

Dear Professor,

Your essay is written on properly/professionally level and honest polemical style. However I am afraid that I am understand it not well and fully. (Maybe because of my not so perfect English, and I am not philosopher) I need to read it more and to spend more time. However, I think that I find one important confirmation to my own conclusion. You says about important factor for the science: about dependence of its significance from initially accepted criterions of its construction. I.e. the science will too much depend from the brain constructing it. It is my point also. However, I come to confidence that there are other trivial factors also that we do not care usually. But those may have huge significance too. I have rated your work as a valuable for me (with nine point) And I hope get your opinion/impression on my work Essay, that will be valuable for me.

Best Regards,

George

You wrote:

> I think these two pictures [i.e. virtual/non virtual] are distinguishable, and I think we can at least explore the implications of each of them.

How might we distinguish them? One possible model system (or analogy) that occurs to me comes from the computer industry: There are several situations in which we simulate the operation of a CPU: that is, we create a virtual operational model of a computer and run the model rather than the actual hardware.

(1) During its development, before it is created as a hardware device, it is simulated in order to refine the design. (2) shortly after its heyday as a commercial product it is simulated so that new and cheaper hardware can provide seamless support for software originally designed for it, and (3) well after its commercial lifespan, it is simulated by nostalgic hobbyists.

The simulated versions differ from the actual product. In case (1) the simulation is slow and will have glitches, some form of error monitoring, and frequent restarts. In case (2) the simulation runs at basically the same speed as the original but there will be a kind of "emulation layer" that takes one form of operational information and transforms it into something basically equivalent before executing it. In the case (3) the simulation is fast and the input/output environment will seem oddly arbitrary (because it is dummied up by the hobbyist who does not have the time to also simulate the whole environment it used to run in, and wants to tinker with it anyway).

For this model system, the question is if any of these types of effects could be detected by software agents running on the CPU or its simulated counterpart. Case (1) might exhibit discontinuities in the clock that agents in different runs could find, if information from one run was used to initialize the next (as it often is in practice) Case (2) would show seemingly needless inefficiencies as information gets transformed before something happens with it. Case (3) would exhibit effects of powerful external forces with seemingly supernatural powers.

Turning from this toy model system to our world, one might make the case that (2) applies to DNA in biological systems and that (3) is confirmed by Biblical scholars. Solid evidence that our world is virtual? Hardly, but food for thought, anyway. :)

Hugh

Hi Laurence,

there is something available

David

Dear Laurence,

You have a briiliant essay taking us through an excursion to 'bit from it' or 'it from bit' territory. However, can you really get a satisfactory answer to this question without knowing what the fundamental 'it' is? If we take Leibniz by his words (especially the first 8 paragraphs of his Monadology) and I quote, "...So monads are the true atoms of Nature--the elements out of which everything is made".

Then again, that age old question, ...how come existence? You may find Paragraph 6 of that monadology and a few ideas in my essay of interest. My essay also has a dose of philosophy so your comments are particularly welcome.

Best regards,

Akinbo

Professor Hitterdale,

I thought that your essay was quite absorbing. Please do excuse me for I am a decrepit old useless realist. You wrote: " In order for there to be a genuine question here, we need to understand what a non-computational universe would look like. Unless we can describe an alternative to computation, then we do not know what we are trying to discuss."

Please behold the non-computational real Universe sir.

The real Universe only deals in absolutes. All information is abstract and all and every abstract part of information is excruciatingly difficult to understand. Information is always selective, subjective and sequential. Reality is not and cannot ever be selective subjective and sequential.

One (1) real unique Universe can only be eternally occurring in one real here and now while perpetually traveling at one real "speed" of light through one real infinite dimension once. One is the absolute of everything. (1) is the absolute of number. Real is the absolute of being. Universe is the absolute of energy. Eternal is the absolute of duration. Occurring is the absolute of action. Here and now are absolutes of location and time. Perpetual is the absolute of ever. Traveling is the absolute of conveyance method. Light is the absolute of speed. Infinite dimension is the absolute of distance and once is the absolute of history.

Good luck in the contest,

Joe

Dear Dr. Hitterdale

Richard Feynman in his Nobel Acceptance Speech

(http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html)

said: "It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. And example of this is the Schrodinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don't know why that is - it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature."

I too believe in the simplicity of nature, and I am glad that Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning famous physicist, also believe in the same thing I do, but I had come to my belief long before I knew about that particular statement.

The belief that "Nature is simple" is however being expressed differently in my essay "Analogical Engine" linked to http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1865 .

Specifically though, I said "Planck constant is the Mother of All Dualities" and I put it schematically as: wave-particle ~ quantum-classical ~ gene-protein ~ analogy- reasoning ~ linear-nonlinear ~ connected-notconnected ~ computable-notcomputable ~ mind-body ~ Bit-It ~ variation-selection ~ freedom-determinism ... and so on.

Taken two at a time, it can be read as "what quantum is to classical" is similar to (~) "what wave is to particle." You can choose any two from among the multitudes that can be found in our discourses.

I could have put Schrodinger wave ontology-Heisenberg particle ontology duality in the list had it comes to my mind!

Since "Nature is Analogical", we are free to probe nature in so many different ways. And each of us surely must have touched some corners of it.

Good luck and good cheers!

Than Tin

Dear Lawrence,

Very enjoyable essay, and a rare (this year) and refreshing philosophical viewpoint. Nicely organized, highly logical and a pleasure to read.

I could take issue on some points but it would greatly help communication if you could read my essay first. I make some radical points, mostly consistent with your views.

My high points from yours; "Nature does not in general operate computationally." and; "we usually talk about bits, but have we really determined that nature computes in the binary system?" (I give that concept a tight definition).

"The problem is to determine what coding scheme or schemes nature itself uses." I define one with empirical support, and on the basis that; "the experience and the underlying computation cannot be the same thing." ...which I find not as fully analysed as we assume. An EPR paradox solution without FTL emerges.

Well written and thank you, a suitable 'heap' of points being applied. I very much look forward to your views on mine (It's foundations in last years essay were well supported philosophically).

Best wishes

Peter

Laurence,

It is refreshing to read an essay that deals with Wheeler's aspects of "It from Bit," like consciousness. The attribute and behavioral ambiguities of consciousness, the subatomic world, and the macro world are not dealt with in many analyses of the "Anthropic Principle."

No one seems to analyze the nature of consciousness either -- "What we have learned, I think, is that consciousness is not a phenomenon of "bits" as you do and I do.

I would like to see your thoughts on my essay: "It's Good to be the King."

Jim

Dear Hitterdale,

I am sorry in the delay in replying you. I did not check the replies. You also did not intimate,

It was not mind body problem, Brain is Hard ware, Mind is software.

It was my proposition, it was not an inference to your essay. What I mean is that we should be more close experimental results for our propositions.

I think we form a picture of anything in our mind, and keep them in our memories. We communicate about that picture to others, which we call information. When we die we loose all these pictures and memories.

Now in this context, can we create material from information...?

You can discuss with me later after this contest closes also.

Best

=snp

snp.gupta@gmail.com

Dear All

A standard-issue big city all-glass high-rise stands across the street from my usual bus stop. When I look up the high-rise facade, I can see the reflections of the near-by buildings and the white clouds from the sky above. Even when everything else looks pretty much the same, the reflections of the clouds are different, hour to hour and day to day.

After I boarded the bus, I rushed to get a single seat facing four others on a slightly elevated platorm. From my vantage point, I can't help noticing the shoes of the four passengers across from my seat are not the same, by either the make , the design, or the style, and that is true even when the four passengers happen to be members of the same family.

I could change the objects of my fascination from shoes to something else, to buttons on the dresses for example, but I do not think the result would have been any different. Diversity or Uniqueness would still rule the day! (There is a delightful essay on the subject of uniqueness by Joe Fisher in this contest.)

I am pretty sure people are fascinated by the diversity and the uniqueness in the world, when the other side of it is the inevitable boredom of sameness every time.

However, we have a need to know where all this beautiful and enchanting diversity comes from. Borrowing Wheelerian phraseology of "How come the quantum?", I ask "How come the diversity?" A standard physics answer is "Entropy always increases." (I am not a physicist, and I don't know if that is the final answer.)

Whenever I'm out of my depth, I go back to my theory of everything (TOE), which is a mental brew of common sense, intuition, gut, analogy, judgement, etc. etc. , buttressed when I can with a little thought-experiment.

The thought-experiment is simple. Imagine cutting a circle into two precisely, identical, and equal parts. Practically, there is no way we can get the desired result, because one part will be bigger or smaller in some way.

Physics - especially quantum physics - says it don't matter, do the superposition!

But superposition is fictive, an invention like the Macarena dance, and it has given us a cat, alive and dead at the same time.

I have heard that angels can dance on the tip of the needle, and now I'm finding out some of us can too!

Cheers and Good Luck to All,

Than Tin

Having read so many insightful essays, I am probably not the only one to find that my views have crystallized, and that I can now move forward with growing confidence. I cannot exactly say who in the course of the competition was most inspiring - probably it was the continuous back and forth between so many of us. In this case, we should all be grateful to each other.

If I may, I'd like to express some of my newer conclusions - by themselves, so to speak, and independently of the logic that justifies them; the logic is, of course, outlined in my essay.

I now see the Cosmos as founded upon positive-negative charges: It is a binary structure and process that acquires its most elemental dimensional definition with the appearance of Hydrogen - one proton, one electron.

There is no other interaction so fundamental and all-pervasive as this binary phenomenon: Its continuance produces our elements - which are the array of all possible inorganic variants.

Once there exists a great enough correlation between protons and electrons - that is, once there are a great many Hydrogen atoms, and a great many other types of atoms as well - the continuing Cosmic binary process arranges them all into a new platform: Life.

This phenomenon is quite simply inherent to a Cosmos that has reached a certain volume of particles; and like the Cosmos from which it evolves, life behaves as a binary process.

Life therefore evolves not only by the chance events of natural selection, but also by the chance interactions of its underlying binary elements.

This means that ultimately, DNA behaves as does the atom - each is a particle defined by, and interacting within, its distinct Vortex - or 'platform'.

However, as the cosmic system expands, simple sensory activity is transformed into a third platform, one that is correlated with the Organic and Inorganic phenomena already in existence: This is the Sensory-Cognitive platform.

Most significantly, the development of Sensory-Cognition into a distinct platform, or Vortex, is the event that is responsible for creating (on Earth) the Human Species - in whom the mind has acquired the dexterity to focus upon itself.

Humans affect, and are affected by, the binary field of Sensory-Cognition: We can ask specific questions and enunciate specific answers - and we can also step back and contextualize our conclusions: That is to say, we can move beyond the specific, and create what might be termed 'Unified Binary Fields' - in the same way that the forces acting upon the Cosmos, and holding the whole structure together, simultaneously act upon its individual particles, giving them their motion and structure.

The mind mimics the Cosmos - or more exactly, it is correlated with it.

Thus, it transpires that the role of chance decreases with evolution, because this dual activity (by which we 'particularize' binary elements, while also unifying them into fields) clearly increases our control over the foundational binary process itself.

This in turn signifies that we are evolving, as life in general has always done, towards a new interaction with the Cosmos.

Clearly, the Cosmos is participatory to a far greater degree than Wheeler imagined - with the evolution of the observer continuously re-defining the system.

You might recall the logic by which these conclusions were originally reached in my essay, and the more detailed structure that I also outline there. These elements still hold; the details stated here simply put the paradigm into a sharper focus, I believe.

With many thanks and best wishes,

John

jselye@gmail.com

Dear Laurence,

We are at the end of this essay contest.

In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.

Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.

eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.

And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.

Good luck to the winners,

And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.

Amazigh H.

I rated your essay.

Please visit My essay.

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.