Thanks Olaf - now that you explain it, I agree there is a difference. For Adler the emergent statistical thermodynamics is equivalent to a nonlinear quantum mechanics [= linear quantum mechanics nonlinear fluctuations]. When the fluctuations are negligible, the emergent nonlinear quantum mechanics reduces to standard linear quantum theory. When the fluctuations are significant, the nonlinear quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics. In this sense both quantum mechanics and classical mechanics are emergent from the matrix models.

In your work, can one form a mathematical picture as to how emergent randomness is responsible for the quantum to classical transition?

Best,

Tejinder

ciao Olaf

so here it is!!

Reading it through I find your thesis even more intriguing than when you explained it to me before you started working on the essay.

I would claim that your line of reasoning here on it from bit is to some extent similar in spirit (in spite of the many difference in context and perspective) to the thesis put forward on time in the recent book by Lee Smolin.

And I think the complementarity between your essay and the one by Mauro D'Ariano is one of the most interesting aspects of this essay competition.

Congratulations!!

Giovanni

    Dear Olaf,

    Nice approach. Defining Bit is difficult as you suggest and I think you've re-categorised it well. When you look at it this way, it does indeed suggest It is more fundamental. It also seems to she'd light on the measurement problem of Quantum Mechanics, as you say.

    My essay concludes that Bit and It are equally fundamental perhaps revealing the Fibonacci sequence as an entropic arrow of time - hope you take a look.

    Well done and best wishes for the contest,

    Antony

      Dear Dreyer,

      I am absolutely in agreement with your arguments. Absolutely so, because I think I have secured some data that back them!

      Will you agree with me that your six characteristics of meaning is capture naturally by defining the "bit" as I have done namely:"...the "bit" is by definition no more than the harmonics (perturbation or amplitude or inverse-length) of the "it" while by definition the "it" is in turn only the fundamental frequency or namely phase-space of any spectrum/path/amplitude of "bits". And in being so the fundamental is not in fact a frequency, it is rather by definition the period (i.e. wavelength) if "superposition". This little difference is most crucial. It follows we can now call a fundamental the entity. The harmonics we call the observables (information) specific to it."

      In other words: "...information (in the sense of a "meaning") is not actual the physical material exchanged; information consists in the interference pattern that an exchange forms on/with the observer/exchange points (possibly why conventionally it is not directly the amplitude of a wave function that counts but the squares, and we add now also the logs, of the amplitude that counts). So consciousness (the mind) might as well be thought of as Huygens's wave fronts or as the "phase velocity" from/on which Huygens's wavelets (wave packets) emerge as per se the information."

      In fact I argue that all "symmetries" break forth from the "observer" ("observer" signifying in fact the "superposition" if "uncertainty" or Markov property).

      If you can spare your precious time to actually read through What a Wavefunction is as I have read through your fine essay I will be most grateful to have your questions.

      In the spirit of collaboration please investigate meanwhile if Philip Gibb's Necklace Lie Algebras and Iterated Integration (in "An Acataleptic Universe") might fit your idea of an "emergent computation".

      All the best,

      Chidi

        Olaf,

        I have received word that although it was unfortunate that there was a delay in conducting the ratings, no extensions to the final deadline will be made. I will keep this in mind when I get a chance to review your essay later this week.

        Best wishes,

        Manuel

        Dear Olaf,

        What a beautiful essay you have written! The six characteristics of meaning could have been fleshed out some more, but I realize that the length requirement puts a limit on how much you can say about each.

        In the caption for fig. number 3 you wrote:"The tower of layers. The arrows indicate the direction of emergence. We pose the following question: How does layer 0 look like to someone who's lowest level meaningful objects are from layer 1?"

        This is essentially the question with which I have occupied myself the last few years. I mention a principle that guides an answer to this question in the second half of my contribution to this contest. I really hope that you will take a look at it, and if you find it sufficiently interesting to want to know more, would be willing to discuss further.

        All the best,

        Armin

        Dr. Dreyer,

        I thought that your exceptionally well written essay was fascinating to read and absorbingly interesting. As a decrepit old realist, I would like to comment on it, however, I fear you might take my comment the wrong way, I do hope you are as gifted in tolerance as you are in writing skill.

        In my essay BITTERS, I emphasize the importance of real uniqueness,once. Unfortunately, abstraction is not unique. All information is abstract.

        Interaction is not unique, once.

        Dynamic is not unique, once.

        Internal is not unique, once.

        Approximate is not unique, once.

        Random is not unique, once.

        Layered is not unique, once.

        Wheeler ought to have asked:

        Is the real Universe simple? Yes.

        Is the abstract universe simple? No

        I wish you luck in the contest,

        Joe

          Dear Olaf,

          I'm confused, but my best wishes to your road. It will be a long one.

          Ideas in your foregoing articles were brilliant, but bit from it I think is a way to hell.

          David

          PS What about cogitation - there are no informations involved ?

            Dear Olaf,

            You have been off your blog for a while, but no matter. I commented above. Nevertheless...

            As the contest in Wheeler's honor draws to a close, leaving for the moment considerations of rating and prize money, and knowing we cannot all agree on whether 'it' comes from 'bit' or otherwise or even what 'it' and 'bit' mean, and as we may not be able to read all essays, though we should try, I pose the following 4 simple questions and will rate you accordingly before July 31 when I will be revisiting your blog.

            "If you wake up one morning and dip your hand in your pocket and 'detect' a million dollars, then on your way back from work, you dip your hand again and find that there is nothing there...

            1) Have you 'elicited' an information in the latter case?

            2) If you did not 'participate' by putting your 'detector' hand in your pocket, can you 'elicit' information?

            3) If the information is provided by the presence of the crisp notes ('its') you found in your pocket, can the absence of the notes, being an 'immaterial source' convey information?

            Finally, leaving for the moment what the terms mean and whether or not they can be discretely expressed in the way spin information is discretely expressed, e.g. by electrons

            4) Can the existence/non-existence of an 'it' be a binary choice, representable by 0 and 1?"

            Answers can be in binary form for brevity, i.e. YES = 1, NO = 0, e.g. 0-1-0-1.

            Best regards,

            Akinbo

            Hi Dear Olaf,

            I welcome your essay not for only it is written well and in attractive form, but mostly because you saying - ,,something is wrong here!,, Personally, I think the wrongness is too much that just enough to stop examine such topics at all. It is easy to realize if we go a little bit ahead and put next question. Let say the majority of people have voted ,,it from bit,, (or vs.) then what next? I mean nobody have seen actually ,,it,, and ,, bit,, waking himselfs separate each from others, but these are together always. The ,,it,, is a physical reality, which is characterized by some group of information (as example: value of mass, coordinates, impulse, forms, colour, laws of its behavior, and many others) I.e. we have actually the physical object with its attributes/properties, which is meaningless to divide each from others. The concept of ,,information,, (and its binary encoded form ,,bits,,) it is a abstract human's creations only (as well as the ,,language,, ,,mathematics,, and other abstract tools that can have the significance for us only, destined to use by our brains and not as himself existing kinds of things.)

            My dear, in nowadays reality the physicists are confused so deeply; they already have just mixing totally different concepts and categories each with others (that is why we plying now such ,,it - bit,, games!) I have trying to show in my works that the problem has began much early and the way - how to solve it. Check please link text, if you find time! I am hopeful when I saw the some of professionals are doubtful and they thinking already that ,,something is wrong!,, I hope get your comments in my forum. I inclined to count your work as one valuable for me.

            Regards,

            George k.

            Dear Olaf,

            Delightful reading. We particularly agree with the statement:

            "Naked bits require a dictionary that gives them meaning. Such a dictionary is necessarily external to the bits themselves and a description of the world that focuses solely on the bits will be incomplete."

            And this:

            "One of the perennial problems in philosophy is the problem of consciousness. One reason consciousness is puzzling is that there seems to be an in finite regression present."

            If we simply accept this infinite regression as the necessary condition in which all meaning in the external "dictionary" is compressed into a continuum of meaning, all internal meaning invested in ordered bits of information maps 1 to 1 as uncompressed meaning that we can identify with measured phenomena.

            Thanks for a great essay, and I do hope you find time to visit my essay as well.

            Tom

            Olaf,

            Excellent essay, beautifully presented with some very important insights compatible with an ambitious ontology I build in mine.

            Your six part description is well considered, in fact although I agree and use that; "meaning arises through interaction" in particular I propose may be reduced to "action" as you can then have the acronym "RADIAL".!

            Far more important for me is the characteristic of your new notion of information; "that it is layered", and I have not only agreed but I hope shown that; "some of the puzzling features of quantum mechanics can be understood with our new view of information."

            I'm truly sorry I didn't get to yours earlier as our agreement on such important issues has lifted my spirits. I am scoring yours very high and I prevail on you to read, comment on and score my own apparently radical essay which I hope you will agree confirms the power of your proposal. I discuss the 'layers' mainly as as higher order 'sample spaces' and degrees of freedom in a hierarchical model. I even identify analogies to Kalusa's additional spaces.

            Very well done, thank you and good luck in the final run in.

            Best wishes.

            Peter

            Dear Olaf,

            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

            Dear Olaf

            I looked in the archives of the titles and summary of your works.

            I liked your clear lapidary style.I suggests that you are close to the truth.

            Cheers

            Yuri

            Dr. Dryer

            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.

            With regards,

            Than Tin

            Dear Olaf

            I read your essay and found it interesting. I'd like to comment about your idea that we observe reality by layers. It seems to me that this view is appropriate for the sake of organizing our thoughts. For instance, one can say that classical mechanics is one layer and quantum mechanics is a deeper layer and so on. We don't have any idea of how the world is at scales smaller than 1e-18 m. And perhaps we would find even a lower layer where the rules of QM don't apply. But I also think that our view is based on principles and assumptions and in this sense there are no layers, because principles are usually out of experience. For instance, classical mechanics disregards the effect of the measurement on the system under consideration. QM teaches us that for certain systems, the measurement affects the system and therefore we cannot determine the position of a particle with great precision without affecting its momentum. So, the fact that the measurement screws up the determination of the position (or momentum) doesn't mean that the particle really doesn't have a position. But for practical matters we say that particles don't have a position because we cannot determine it as we wish. We should recognize that nature is conspiring against us and forbids us to let her know. I hold that particles have a well defined position and momentum, but the measurement screws them up. Then we physicists turn the argument over and say that there is no reason to talk about the position of a particle if we cannot measure it. So, my point is, is this a matter of layers of reality? I don't think so. We are sure that the particle has a position, and we are also sure that the measurement destroys the position. Since what we measure is what matters and the measurement destroys the position we argue that the particle has no position. This is in relation to your comment:

            We discovered objects that do not seem to have such fundamental properties as position.

            You: Such a dictionary is necessarily external to the bits themselves and a description of the world that focuses solely on the bits will be incomplete.

            I agree, information has no meaning without the object. But objects by themselves do not create the reality. The reality emerges by the interaction of objects and evolution of objects, so definitely information is crucial.

            I'd like to invite you to read my essay where I present a bird eye view of this topic. At the end I support the idea that the it is fundamental. The key to get out of the present conundrum is to consider space as a material medium in contradiction to the current view. I remember that last year you discussed that objects should not be seen as place IN space but that they are part of space. My view of space paves the way for particles to be seen as excitations of space and fields as states of space. I hope you have some time to comment on my essay.

            I wish you the best

            Regards

            Israel

              Dear Dreyer,

              That was a bit beyond me! So having random positions is a way of describing asymmetry? It seems that cells or molecules must be governed the same as the bigger materials like the box, that is the emergent properties. Also, what precedes the symmetry breaking or switching from one to another in a lattice? Is it possible instead of having a symmetric model that needs to be broken to fit sometimes, to rather just have asymmetry form the get go? I see why it looks plausible, and surely is mathematically supported, yet I'm not convinced that it makes a rosy picture.

              About the moth and flower example, one has to infer something wants the nectar. My thinking goes along the lines of looking just at the flower, there is not evidence of anything else. Yes, it has a deep nectar tube which is unusual, if one knows some botany (I don't but would like to), but the picture says nothing of evidence for anything else. The mental activity of linking plant to animal is needed, and is indeed made with knowledge applied to the picture after the flower is looked at. Take a person who is raised in confinement without an encyclopedia or any natural interaction with the environment. Consider a person raised in a ward with no windows for example. They, when presented with the flower, will not come to the conclusion that there is a moth rarity out there (actually the case). The orchid is not used alone.

              Another point, I would think that whatever new level is reached would present the large objects as well. Otherwise, I could imagine being given a map of my street and address when locating a new place, and still have no hopes of finding the doormat.

              Sincerely,

              Amos.

                Dear Olaf

                I've downloaded your essay and will read it again before rating it.

                My take on Bit and It is that they must be correlated by the presence of an evolving observer in any observation. This is one of the conclusions in my essay, and I'd be curious to see how you resolve this to your decidedly 'Bit from It' conclusion. (I think our view show some potentially common ground when you mention a computation that will be founded upon a 'dynamic evolution of emergent objects').

                Best regards,

                John