Information, Numbers, Time, Life, Ethics by Lorraine Ford

Lorraine,

"we have already assumed that the interconnections in the equation, including the "=" sign, represent causation in physical reality"

Exactly the problem. It is a bad assumption. a(b+c)=ab+bc is a mathematical identity, but not a physical identity. The physical manifestation of one side of the equation requires two multipliers, the other requires only one. The math equation only equates the "result" of the computation, not the computation itself. This is a point that has confused so many physicists, that it has spawned this year's essay contest. That fact that a "result" of a mathematical physics computation may perfectly "equal" an observable measurement, provides *no* evidence whatsoever, that the underlying physical manifestation is even remotely similar to the structures in the mathematical theory. Many physicists have assumed otherwise, which is the source of the unending confusion. All the weirdness in modern physics, including decoherence, are manifestations of this bad assumption.

You are aware of the problem with reconciling a deterministic future, with free-will. And with the problem of having enough hardware to "compute the cosmos", and with the problem that the equations of physics do no distinguish between forward and backward time-travel.

You can kill-off all three of these problematic "birds" with one stone:

The cosmos computes itself, by simply being itself. An electron is employed both as itself, and as a symbol for itself. Hence, predictions of all events, are "physically" equal to, not just "symbolically" equal to the event itself. This "cosmic" computer employs all the available resources. Hence, no other computer is as powerful, since they cannot employ all the resources. But even for this most powerful of all possible computers, the amount of time required to compute/predict a future event, is exactly equal to the amount of time required for the event itself to unfold, precisely because they are one and the same thing. Consequently, even if the laws of physics are entirely deterministic *after the fact*, they can never be used to predict the future, except in cases "devoid of information", which is to say, events that do not depend upon knowing anything other that a tiny subset of the initial conditions required to describe the entire cosmos. Such a tiny subset *Can* be built into a computer, built, in turn, from a tiny subset of the matter in the cosmos. In other words, trivial events, devoid of information, like all those described by physics, may be predictable. But complex events, like living entities, remain unprediatable, even in a universe with fully deterministic laws.

Rob McEachern

Typo: a(b+c)=ab+ac

Rob McEachern

Dear Lorraine,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest,

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Lorraine,

The It from Bit, or Bit from It? question, presupposes, without any evidence, that a dichotomy exists. My point is, there is no dichotomy. That is why people cannot agree upon which it is. Bit==IT. The "thing" and the natural "symbol for the thing", are identical.

"There is no evidence of any type of computation infrastructure, which would have to underlie the normal physical reality that we observe and measure." I agree, the infrastructure does not underlie reality, it is the reality. There is no dichotomy.

Rob McEachern

Dear

I like how you focus on the 'real-world' aspect of information, and I agree with your broad-based, common-sense approach.

My view is that much of the confusion concerning information stems from physicists ignoring the role of the observer in the field of observation. This should not be the case - as you put it: 'We have physics at the level of the particle, and physics at the level of the cosmos, but the bit in the middle where living things reside is also the domain of physics.'

That's well said, and I agree with you that information is subjective experience: The persistent conundrum is to figure out how we can account for 'objective experience' - or facts and truths.

I show in my essay that the objective truth (or, at least, any significantly less subjective truth) only exists for a certain time, and relative to a particular group of evolving observers. The same applies to numbers - they only have significance relative to an observer - and as distant space, quanta, or great speeds become involved, the fundamental nature of numbers - and even law-of-nature equations - changes.

A Bit is not necessarily information - but something that can be perceived. Everything is positive-negative (and derived from the original proton-electron), but whether the observer perceives a Bit-structure, and how he perceives it at a given time and speed, and from a given location, is variable. Ultimately, whatever reading is taken, whatever information is considered as existing, will not be permanent - because what makes the cosmos 'fly' (or 'breathes fire' into things, as you quote Hawking) - is simply the observer's correlation with the inorganic realm of the cosmos.

This correlation is caused and maintained by the same energy-field force that defines a proton and an electron, and makes each separate from the other - therefore creating the original positive-negative charge that initiated the cosmos; it is the 'non-Platonic physical/information structure' that you mention.

This also means, if you agree, that there are other 'categories' besides those you mention - and that these must be the most fundamental: namely, the inorganic, organic, and sensory-cognitive realms that emerge from this correlated system. As you say: 'It seems to be clear that the evolution of complex life requires the evolution of new categories of information, and this in turn requires the construction of new categories interconnected to currently existing reality.'

Given your broad perspective, I'm sure you'll find many points of interest in my essay - as I certainly have in yours: it is a well-written, clear and focused work for which you should be congratulated. I have rated it highly, and wish you all the best in the competition -

John.

Hi Lorraine

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 you have touched some corners of it.

Best of Luck,

Than Tin

Hello Lorraine - thanks for commenting; yes, I do believe you'll find many points of interest in my essay - and I very much look forward to your insights.

Best Regards,

John

Hi Lorraine,

Right now I'm at the start of your essay, I like very much how you start with definitions and historical perspective. An yes Shannon did not deliver the goods philosophically, but he sure did in an engineering sense. He developed the science of how to get information out of noise. Very important when you are trying to transmit information over real transmission lines. Shannon may have not delivered the goods in philosophy, but he sure did in engineering and science.

I have just finished the essay and can say: Honestly, this is the best essay in the entire contest. I have done my best to raise your score.

You ended with: what physicists' say about information and the nature of reality will affect the attitudes of very many people: is the future "already written" or "does what we choose to do really matter?"

This category of question also contains Wheeler's (and anyone that thinks) "Why Existence?", This category of question is the category of question that is not legitimate to ask because the answers is at the level of being and not at the level of knowing.

Your fellow countryman (educated guess ?) Zoltan (who is also underrated) went into the philosophy of Emanuel Kant who said: The thing in itself (IT) is unknown and unknowable by the categories of the mind (BIT).

Visit my blog I think you will like it.

Sincerely,

Don Limuti

Hi Lorraine,

Lorraine has the best essay in the contest. This is either true or it isn't. Is there an excluded middle?

I rated you essay a 10 because I like how you expressed:

1. Information is representative.

2. Information is subjective depending upon context of individuals and the categories that they use.

3. That information has a moral ethical-dimension and subjects are not objects (my phrasing).

Yes, I really liked it. Does this help?

Don L.

Hello Lorraine,

Nice essay, well written and very interesting. I like that you've explored the "bit in the middle" with regard to our choices and whether we even have them. You have asked the right questions and it is nice to see ideas which challenge physicists.

Your bio caught my eye as an animal lover and particularly me being a big fan of cats! Same on Schrödinger ;)

I like the term "knowledge communicated" as my essay explores this. In fact the other old meaning you mention was knowledge gained. I prefer the former since my essay looks at information exchange, as I would consider Bit to be a two way process.

I think your essay is very well presented and you deserve to do well. Hopefully my rating helps. Please take a look at my essay if you get the chance.

Best wishes & congratulations,

Antony

Hi Lorraine,

Thank you very much for your comment, and a high rating!

Great song performed by Nikolay Noskov! Thank you very much!

I was lucky enough to meet the author of this song composer Alexandra Pahmutova in 1995. She wrote the song "LEP - 500." The song is about how to build a 500-kilovolt power transmission line in Siberia, where we lived. It was built by my father and mother ... I told her about it. She was very happy....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-4aOQ5tAD4

With best wishes and regards,

Vladimir

Lorraine,

Beautiful essay, thank you. It warmed me to read it. I particularly commend you for; "...to label this discontinuity a foundational "bit" is to give up on the search for the origin of the discontinuity which really does seem to represent something foundational about reality."

I hope my essay shows that you may be correct, by exploring that "bit in the middle" denied by mathematics and QM's assumption of 'point' and identical particles.

A really nice read, well organized and argued. Well earned top marks on the way. Perhaps you can comment on my similar proposition that (after also better defining 'observation') a 'computation' is required for the artifacts of emitted EM fluctuations to be turned into meaningful information and interpreted (and not always interpreted infallably!).

I hope you'll ignore my (too dense) abstract and go by some of the blog descriptions; "valuable", "wonderful", "thought provoking", "clearly significant", "deeply impressed", "philosophically deep", "groundbreaking", "nonsense" (OK I'm joking with that one)! I'm sure you'll like it heaps, (and it does need about that many points). Sorry about the promo but Georgina and others did not the abstract seemed a put-off at first.

Very well done and congratulations for yours.

Best of luck in the final stretch.

Peter

Dear Lorraine,

You have asked very important question: "is the future "already written" or "does what we choose to do really matter?" and you have shown that you are familiar with some Lee Smolin's publications.

My own view seems to support the view of Smolin in the meaning that the universe is a dissipative coupled system that exhibits self-organized criticality. The structured criticality is a property of complex systems where small events may trigger larger events. This is a kind of chaos where the general behavior of the system can be modeled on one scale while smaller- and larger-scale behaviors remain unpredictable. The simple example of that phenomenon is a pile of sand.

When QM and GR are computable (during Lyapunov time ) and deterministic, the universe evolution (naturally evolving self-organized critical system) is non-computable and non-deterministic.

Now, not being so technical, I would say that the future is not already written, because Lyapunow time is only a while in comparison to our life.

Best regards and successful pelargoniums' growing!

Lorraine,

Thanks. Don't be put off by the dense abstract. Georgina was, but then found it very readable. I hope the flattering blog comments give a better idea, including; "groundbreaking", "clearly significant", "astonishing", "fantastic job", "wonderful", "remarkable!", "deeply impressed", etc.

I've just checked you score stuck, and confirmed it did. I and others seemed to shoot down! I wonder if 'the origin of the discontinuity really does ...represent something foundational about reality'.!!

Very best wishes

Peter

Lorraine,

I found your approach to the topic at hand intuitive and would like to rate your essay highly. However, before I do may I run some questions by you via email? Please let me know at: msm@physicsofdestiny.com

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Manuel

Hi Lorraine - I replied here but the system bug has removed my comment - just so you know I didn't ignore you!

Hopefully it will return!

best wishes,

Antony

Hi Loraine,

your missing posts plight nudged me to read your essay. I'm glad I did. It is very readable and I can see a number of places where I agree wholeheartedly with what you have written.I tried to 'pin down' the subjective nature of meaning gleaned from information near the beginning of my essay but was relating it my earlier work and explanatory framework so the language might seem a little unusual to people unfamiliar with it.I think your explanation is much clearer.

In the end I'm not sure that you answered "it from bit or bit from it?", it was an enjoyable overview of the subject of information nonetheless. The question of morality is good and a profound question to end on.

By the way, I also think bearded irises are very beautiful especially the big flag irises. Regards Georgina.

Ha - he should have thought about himself in the box - at least I imagine falling into a Black Hole in my essay.

Best wishes,

Antony

Thanks very much Peter for your kind words about my essay, and for rating it well. I hope to read your essay before the 7th. I know what Georgina means - your ideas can be so densely packed in a sentence that the normal human brain can barely cope with them!!

Best of luck to you too, but I hope to get back to you later.

Lorraine

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

Hello Lorraine,

Thank-you for your kind appraisal - I am glad that you see some parallels between our work.

On your objection to DNA evolving from micro-organisms: Though there is simple DNA in microorganic life, these creatures nonetheless live in an environment that is dimensionally different from our own - ie: they are closer to the omni-dimensional fabric of the Cosmos than are the more complex organisms. The DNA of the latter - of creatures 'fully in space-time' - is what represents the Composite Particle in the Organic Vortex. Thus, complex DNA evolves from its simpler counterpart.

It was not possible to explain this in detail in the essay, because so much else needed to be said in the space allotted. But the subject is treated at length in my book - 'The Nature of Particles in the Unified Field' (Amazon). If you get a chance ....

Thanks again for getting back to me. I can't tell if you rated my essay, but if so - thank-you!

John

Thank-you Lorraine; and yes, there's a lot of off-site collusion going on. As soon as my score goes up two points, it goes down two or three. I can only hope the organizers know about it, and are deciding in some fair manner who will be among the finalists.

If not ... well, it is sometimes a greater honor to lose: Simple survival is not evolution, and evolution has been our true success through the ages, right?

John

Incidentally, the future is in my opinion both written and unwritten. Potential sensory data exists in the environment which may be intercepted and formed into a present experience.So with hindsight it can be said that prior to interception it was a -future experience- relative to the observer who will intercept it, (later on), and form an experience from it.

The unwritten future relates to observer choice, as what data will be selected, forming the individual world line has not been pre-written. The structure that allows this is uni-temporal space (same time everywhere) in which potential sensory data relating to different times (when it was formed) is distributed. This arrangement allows the Andromeda and barn pole paradoxes to be intuitive solutions of -what should be observed-, (ignoring motion blur) and the Grandfather paradox will not occur because though there can be movement through potential sensory data there can not be movement through time, back to the material sources of that data as all material things exist at the same and only time.

So in answer to your final question; yes there is a place for morality and ethics as choice has not been predetermined. (Unless one thinks about the subconscious mind, which can choose before the conscious mind is aware of making a decision but that is a different issue.)

Lorraine,

The questions I would like to run by you is not for public comment.

Best wishes,

Manuel

Dear Lorraine,

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.

Lorraine;

I apologize that my request so deeply offended you. My mistake.

Best wishes,

Manuel