Knowing One from the Other by Jonathan J. Dickau

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for a lovely essay. You wrote:

> Does life descend to play in or with form, bestowing consciousness and creativity? Or does form rise and evolve to acquire these attributes, so it may play in the heavens? Science favors the latter view, and relegates the former to Religion, but because "It from Bit" makes information more primal than form, this changes things profoundly.

In my essay Software Cosmos I describe the simulation paradigm and construct a model for a computable cosmos. Taking the view that the material cosmos we observe is the result of software allows us to ask questions about the software architecture, and its layers. Defining the properties of these layers has the potential to answer your question.

> Perhaps to catch the universe as form and information at play, we need to see reality as a play. Information as author, forces as director, and objects as actors may be the metaphor we seek.... While we can identify the script as 'Bit' with the author as its generator, and the character as 'It' with the actor as its generator, there is a third personage who helps to guide the process to its completion, called the director.

I have been using the term "animator" for the agents at one level that make possible the operation of a higher level of reality. In the software model of the cosmos you can have a multi-level architecture. Each level "animates", or implements the foundational constructs, of the level above. Agents at each level do not know how they are implemented, as from their perspective, each primitive operation "just happens". It is the lower levels that know more what is going on.

> As I stated earlier; possibilities lead to actualities, in general, but any specific condition or environment leads to new possibilities... General information and open possibilities lead to actualities, then specific conditions engender new possibilities - and this cycle repeats - without end.

Joseph Brenner (who is also an essayist here) has prevoisly written a paper entitled "The philosophical logic of Stéphane Lupasco (1900-1988)" that describes Lupasco's alternate "Logic of the Included Middle" and argues that it better applies to reality. You may find Lupasco's view consonant with your own.

> The key observation here is that information is more real or fundamental than substance, which is much like saying that things are comprised of mind-stuff - on a deeper level than the physical... In fact; it demands we tackle what David Chalmers refers to as the 'hard problem' of consciousness, defining what constitutes conscious perceptual experience.

If we can build only on top of the material world, then what we get when we try to create consciousness is a "zombie", not a consciousness as we experience it. But a computational cosmos does not have to start at the material level. It could be composed of several levels, only the most obvious top level one being material. In the sense defined above, the cosmos may consist of Mind animating Life and Life animating Matter. This, I think, more closely models what we actually know of the world.

Hugh

Dear Jonathan,

After reading your essay :

« As I stated in a previous essay;

I think that both discrete and continuous aspects of reality

must be simultaneously accepted as real,

to understand the universe as it is. » by Jonathan J. Dickau

You can take a look also to essay of JOSEPH E. BRENNER

« Finally,

a picture of the universe as fundamentally either continuous or discontinuous

may be usefully replaced by one in which

both continuity and discontinuity are jointly and dynamically instantiated. », by JOSEPH E. BRENNER

You'll be surprised one day to discover how your views are right.

Good Luck!

Dear Jonathan,

After reading your essay :

« As I stated in a previous essay;

I think that both discrete and continuous aspects of reality

must be simultaneously accepted as real,

to understand the universe as it is. » by Jonathan J. Dickau

You can take a look also to essay of JOSEPH E. BRENNER

« Finally,

a picture of the universe as fundamentally either continuous or discontinuous

may be usefully replaced by one in which

both continuity and discontinuity are jointly and dynamically instantiated. », by JOSEPH E. BRENNER

You'll be surprised one day to discover how your views are right.

Good Luck!

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your scintillating dance of ideas!

I very much agree with you that there is an "interplay between information becoming stuff, and stuff becoming information". It is possible frame your idea terms of quantum information theory. The stage and place for the audience arise from the conditional knowledge of the observer, the director is quantum potential and the material objects are the reciprocal action between the two. (See my essay "A Complex Conjugate Bit and It".)

Best wishes,

Richard

Dear Jonathan,

My best acknowledgements for the boost. I appreciate that the technicalities do not discourage you. I hope that the infection will propagate!

You are right that the octonions lurk around the examples I selected. Not all dessins are feature quantum contextuality. The simplest case given here is Mermin's square and can be seen as an archetype (in the language you use in your essay). The next case is Mermin's pentagram, there are 12096 of them with three qubits and 12096 is also the size of the automorphism group of G2(2) (related to the octonions as John Baez explains in his famous note). This is discussed in our recent papers on ArXiv.

My kind regards,

Michel

Dear Jonathan,

I much appreciate your dialectic attitude and your analogies as principles of general value.

Let me tell you what might be worth a scrutiny too:

Variations of temperature in data from Planck telescope are in good agreement with predicted ones for small values of angle but not for large ones. Didn't the spectrum of a black body also fit well to a formula (of Rayleigh and Jeans) for not too high frequencies? In case of Planck's law, I suspect the background in the non-equality of mathematical representation in terms of either an integral or an infinite sum.

Do you agree on that the relationship between Wheeler and Einstein resembles the relationship between Hilbert and G. Cantor? Didn't Hilbert's program possibly fail because of flaws in Cantor's aleph_2?

When I looked as a layman on CMBR I got aware on at least one cold spot. May this spot be the Lockman hole, a window that permits us to more realistically look outside the dust of our galaxy and beyond current models of universe?

Admittedly, I do not quite share your sometimes a bit exaggerated "Hegelei". Nonetheless, I will rate your essay 10 and hope that your higher scores can attract more attention.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Jonathan,

'1' from another '1' is true when information is considered as physical transfer, while '0' is non-physical. Whereas, information in particle scenario is the transfer of energy and it is the transfer of matter with energy in string-matter continuum scenario.

Thus this cause-effect cycle expressed in 'Knowing One from the Other', indicates that the universe is cyclic with nonzero conditions and thus the universe is non-inflationary in entirety; with Homeomorphic Segmental-fluctuations in Cyclic-time in that a top-to-bottom holarchical organisation of string-matter continuum is expressional. Whereas, the basic form is three-dimensional tetrahedral-brane that emerges on eigen-rotation of string-matter segment and transfer of such form is information, in that the realm of observable is the holarchical segment, the observer belongs.

With best wishes,

Jayakar

Dear Jonathan (foolowing your comment ion my thread),

As far as dessins d'enfants are concerned, the members of the triple (0, 1, /infty) have well defined meaning. Sorry that I just copy my earlier post:

The Belyi theorem (see the step 3 in my Sec. 2 giving the definition of a child's drawing) and the property that the child's drawing D itself is the preimage of the segment [0,1], that is D=f^-1([0,1]), where the Belyi function f corresponding to D is a rational function. All black vertices of D are the roots of the equation f(x)=0, the multiplicity of each root being equal to the degree of the corresponding vertex. Similarly, all white vertices are the roots of the quation f(x)=1. Inside each face, there exits a single pole, that is a root of the equation f(x)=\infty. Besides 0, 1 and \infty, there are no other critical value of f.

In experiments you will have 0 or 1 as the result of the experiment (in the single or multiple qubit context) but the unobserved \infty is needed in the explanation. The way the black points (bit 0) and white points (bit 1) ly on the dessin (a graph on the oriented surface such as the sphere S2, or a Riemann surface with holes) is such that sigma(0)*sigma(1)*sigma(infty)=id, where

sigma (0) is the permutation group attached to the black points 0 (how the edges incident on the black points rotate) and sigma (1) is the permutation group attached to the white point 1 (how the edges incident on the white points rotate).

It is still binary logic but in a more clever way (may be this has to do with Grothendieck's topos, I have not thought about this aspect).

Thanks again for your interest.

I intend to write you again about the Hopf fibrations.

My kind regards.

Michel

Hopefully a joint work in perspective. You are familiar with so many concepts I still not met. I admire that you have interdisciplinary talents. In the past, I was a kind of artist in photography but lost my ability after I switched to knowledge.

Dear Jonathan,

I absolutely agree with your words "Determining unambiguously whether a system is creating information or is created by information is thus virtually impossible - as the two modes are so deeply intertwined".

I think that both "It" and "Bit" are basic reality to us and "information" is image of that reality to observers like us who are also part of those "It" and "Bit". So "It", "Bit", observer and obviously "information" are 'inseparable' in my essay (http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1855) too.

Since all those are conceptually quantized/digitized,the observers like us unable to see the nature other than quantized/digital ways, that's our basic limit what has imposed by the nature to us. So we can only model our observable range of that nature and never define anything out of that part of it even if there anything. So, all the mystic things in our perceptions: spirit,ether,absolute vacuum in space, probabilities and so on are always stay out of our that observable sphere of reality.

I am a very slow reader and at this very end hours of this essay contest. But fortunately (or unfortunately) I'm seeing that we are almost at the same position of community rating scenario. I like to give you full rate for your good presentation. So can we think for some mutual rating? Because, I think, we are talking about something very nearer and even positioned there as well!

However I wishing good hope for you in the contest.

Regards

Dipak

Hi Jonathan,

I've been looking for your essay for a couple of weeks now. I actually began reading it on my cell phone (something I had never done before, and probably won't try again for a while . . .) while waiting for a lunch appointment and wasn't able to finish it at the time and then promptly forgot to write down your name or the title of your essay. However, I did not forget what you wrote.

Jonathan, I have to say that your essay is one of the best I have read. The points you make, the issues you raise - I found myself nodding in agreement the entire time. I also found your writing style so enjoyable, engaging and absorbing. I was so interested in your perspective that I actually Googled your name and have started reading some of the other things you've written.

I know it's nearing the end of the community voting, but I just had to find your essay again and vote on it. I truly think you deserve the utmost consideration, and so I have given you the highest rating and wish you the very best.

Perhaps, if you are so inclined, we could keep in touch in the future.

Best to you, Jonathan.

Sincerely,

Ralph