Contextuality: Wheeler’s universal regulating principle by Ian Durham

Dear Sir,

Your authority and expertise in the 'wonderful world of quantum mechanics' shows brilliantly in this essay. Not that I am fully in agreement.

Based on snippets from your essay, I will equally like to put you in the dock and pose a few questions:

Your statements (?under oath) with slight modification:

- "what is a `thing' and from whence does it arise? Several approaches to this problem have been proposed"

- "The concept of a discrete physical reality is a very old idea. The early atomists ...theorized that nature consisted of two fundamental concepts: ..., the presence of something, AND ...the presence of nothing. The former represented physical reality in its most basic form. In the context of modern physics, ... anything that is physically real occupies space and time, while the complete absence of any such occupation (I.E. ANOTHER STATE, CLASSICAL OR QUANTUM as stated in footnote).

The charges against you:

1. Now from the assumption that the universe itself, if our cosmology is correct, started from NOTHING (i.e. in your words, 'complete absence of any occupation of space') and is now a THING ('occupying space and time' as you say), which indicates that it obeys a binary choice: existence/non-existence, are you denying this binary choice to other ITs?

That is, must this binary choice be included in our list of binary choices, such as spin up/spin down? If not, why not since this choice is available to the universe as a whole? If yes, would it not be the most fundamental BIT, occupying the "very, very deep bottom" (Wheeler) or the "ontological basement (Paul Davies)?" Again, if yes, how is this manifest at the discrete level, say at the Planck scale?

2. If IT is not from BIT, then from what will IT ultimately come from? If you continue asking, as you ask, 'from whence does IT arise?, we get the scenario: from human observer to molecules, to atoms, to sub-atomic particles, etc and you must eventually come to the most fundamental IT. From what else do you allege that this fundamental IT can come from? Certainly, not another IT! Leibniz in paragraph 6 of his Monadology, has testified against you, suggesting fundamental ITs emerge from nothing, which according to the ideas expressed in last lines of page 2 in your essay, is also a BINARY DIGIT.

3. Then, your statements that, "the matter-energy content of the universe is known to be constant", and "... In other words, if `it' truly literally comes from `bit' and the number of bits of information in the universe is always increasing, why doesn't this result in the creation of at least some new matter-energy? In other words, even if not every new bit of information necessarily led to some new `it,' it seems reasonable to assume that at least some would ..."

Though, very logical, but perhaps, you may have boxed yourself unwittingly into a corner with the first part of the two statements? Suppose that first statement is false, will not the latter become true and the second law of thermodynamics preserved? As a matter of fact in an amateur paperamateur paper, I suggested that if the matter-energy in the universe now 10^52kg was there at the early era, the energy density at that epoch would be above 10^174Jm^-3 translating to a temperature 10^47K and not the modelled ~10^32 K. In contrast, if the matter-energy was about 10^-8kg then, the thermal history will be as modeled.

Judgement:

*As a respected member of FQXi and a first offender, not a serial one and provided you are ready to plea-bargain, you will be discharged and acquitted :).

Very nice essay. Really, tickled my brain and that's quite a pleasure.

Best regards,

Akinbo

Ian,

I have sent an email requesting that FQXi extend to those of you who had their essay posted on July 5, 2013, be allowed additional days to compensate for the days of not being able to rate these essays.

My experience in conducting the online Tempt Destiny (TD) experiment from 2000 to 2012 gave me an understanding of the complexities involved in administrating an online competition which assures me that the competition will be back up and running soon. Ironically, the inability of not being able to rate the essays correlates with the TD experimental findings, as presented in my essay, which show how the acts of selection are fundamental to our physical existence.

Anyway, I hope that all entrants will be allocated the same opportunity to have their essay rated when they are posted, and if not possible due to technical difficulties, will have their opportunity adjusted accordingly. Best wishes to you with your entry.

Manuel

PS I will be reviewing and rating your entry after this function has been turned back on.

Hi,

I have a question on the notation of contextual logical symbol. While I am so sorry, I have first time seen this notation. Does this logical symbol construct the algebra?

Best wishes,

Yutaka

Ian,

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 Ian,

This is a very interesting essay.

I especially like the connection you make between contextuality and increasing entropy. It has certainly given me food for thought!

And how can I not appreciate the fact that you involve posets.

Cheers

Kevin

PS I appreciate your very sensible fear of zombies. Perhaps sometime over beers you can explain to me where this fascination with them has come from because I really don't see it. ;)

Dear Ian,

I red your essay with interest. I agree with the goal summarized in your title.

Starting with a categorical language, you are presenting interesting thoughts about the nature of contextuality and its potential link to the increase of entropy. These are very innovative ideas I should think about in the future. I wonder if your concepts may become constructive and be able to discriminate sets of observables (or states) that are contextual in the standard definition (I refer to the Kochen-Specker methodology).

Best wishes,

Michel

Dear Ian,

Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon. So you can produce matter from your thinking or from information description of that matter. . . . ?

I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The main stream community people want magic from science instead of realty especially in the subject of cosmology. We all know well that cosmology is a subject where speculations rule.

Hope to get your comments even directly to my mail ID also. . . .

Best

=snp

snp.gupta@gmail.com

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/

Pdf download:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/essay-download/1607/__details/Gupta_Vak_FQXi_TABLE_REF_Fi.pdf

Part of abstract:

- -Material objects are more fundamental- - is being proposed in this paper; It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material. . . Similarly creation of matter from empty space as required in Steady State theory or in Bigbang is another such problem in the Cosmological counterpart. . . . In this paper we will see about CMB, how it is generated from stars and Galaxies around us. And here we show that NO Microwave background radiation was detected till now after excluding radiation from Stars and Galaxies. . . .

Some complements from FQXi community. . . . .

A

Anton Lorenz Vrba wrote on May. 4, 2013 @ 13:43 GMT

....... I do love your last two sentences - that is why I am coming back.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 6, 2013 @ 09:24 GMT

. . . . We should use our minds to down to earth realistic thinking. There is no point in wasting our brains in total imagination which are never realities. It is something like showing, mixing of cartoon characters with normal people in movies or people entering into Game-space in virtual reality games or Firing antimatter into a black hole!!!. It is sheer a madness of such concepts going on in many fields like science, mathematics, computer IT etc. . . .

B.

Francis V wrote on May. 11, 2013 @ 02:05 GMT

Well-presented argument about the absence of any explosion for a relic frequency to occur and the detail on collection of temperature data......

C

Robert Bennett wrote on May. 14, 2013 @ 18:26 GMT

"Material objects are more fundamental"..... in other words "IT from Bit" is true.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 14, 2013 @ 22:53 GMT

1. It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material.

2. John Wheeler did not produce material from information.

3. Information describes material properties. But a mere description of material properties does not produce material.

4. There are Gods, Wizards, and Magicians, allegedly produced material from nowhere. But will that be a scientific experiment?

D

Hoang cao Hai wrote on Jun. 16, 2013 @ 16:22 GMT

It from bit - where are bit come from?

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on Jun. 17, 2013 @ 06:10 GMT

....And your question is like asking, -- which is first? Egg or Hen?-- in other words Matter is first or Information is first? Is that so? In reality there is no way that Matter comes from information.

Matter is another form of Energy. Matter cannot be created from nothing. Any type of vacuum cannot produce matter. Matter is another form of energy. Energy is having many forms: Mechanical, Electrical, Heat, Magnetic and so on..

E

Antony Ryan wrote on Jun. 23, 2013 @ 22:08 GMT

.....Either way your abstract argument based empirical evidence is strong given that "a mere description of material properties does not produce material". While of course materials do give information.

I think you deserve a place in the final based on this alone. Concise - simple - but undeniable.

===============

Please try Dynamic Universe Model with some numerical values, give initial values of velocities, take gravitation into consideration( because you can not experiment in ISOLATION). complete your numerical experiment.

later try changing values of masses and initial values of velocities....

Calculate with different setups and compare your results, if you have done a physical experiment.

I sincerely feel it is better to do experiment physically, or numerically instead of breaking your head on just logic. This way you will solve your problem faster.....

Best

=snp

Dear Ian, what a wondeful essay and i am learning new things from it. but may i differ with your premise that bit from it. i argue that bith it from bit and bit from it are correct but a better way is that bit is it and it is bit or bit = it. You wrote: "Condition 1 (Physical determinism) Let u ≡ s be the ideal element on the domain of physical measurements that provide information about the universe. Then, if u is static and either N is finite or u is predictable then, vmin ≤ v ⇒ v → u.

A hypothetically omniscient being who happens to be in possession of qmin ≤ qn bits, where qmin : u → vmin (i.e. possesses enough bits of information about the universe to fully predict its future states), is known as Laplace's demon." Now if It comes before bit, or bit from it, then how It as this static It (u) generates v(non-static It)? Static it as in the perfect thermodynamic equilibrium will not generate work or any activity at all by definition. But of course you can bring QM that says by quantum fluctuation as Wilczek pointed out in his "time crystal" invention that even in a perfect "heat death" scenario his time crystal still ticks! Wait a minute, this implicitly imply that nature is a Qbit because it generates "quantum fluctuation" that means it is in the state of superposition until observed and it will take a position as Schrodinger's dead or alive cat or simply as u or v. This shows QM is hopelessly Qbit(00,1,-1) in its nature. It cannot be a static it. A static it cannot exist even in principle. Even if It can exist by itself as it alone, dead as dead means non-existence then by its very definition of being non-existence that this It alone ranger by itself does not exist by even in Aristotlian logic of A = A or Plato's Form/Copies or by its nemesis non-linear logic that A ≠ A of Heraclitus or Protagoras or Fu Xi I-Ching, Laozi and Zhuangzi. Therefore, any Existence must be digital bit/qbit in its very nature that cannot be reduced further than one Qbit as the It: bit = it. In other words, it is necessarily, bit is it and it is bit. As yourself pointed out that u cannot be static, then if it is not static, it is necessarily more than one It in existence, this can only lead to Holmes' one conclusion that this It is Qbit!: "Hence, contextuality directly leads to an ever-increasing entropy for the universe, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics is a direct consequence of quantum contextuality12 and, because u is not static, the universe as a whole must not be physically deterministic!". If I may put forward my KQID theory to paraphrase Phytagoros: all things are one Qbit. This Qbit is one singularity Qbit Multiverse rather than Wheeler's one electron universe. Finally, yes, there is no extra bits or its in our universe. But, we have so much more qbits ≥ 10^1000 qbit/second in our Multiverse that has a beginning but no ending to obey the Second Law ΔS ≥ 0. Please if I may request you to look at and rate my essay Child of Qbit in time. KQID is so simple and so obvious under our nose literally but as the great Lord Keynes observed to escape from our own accepted worldview is extremely hard to do even by having an open minded set of mind. Sorry to write a such long comment, I really enjoyed and be simulated reading your profound thought. Best wishes, Leo KoGuan

Hi Ian,

Nice essay! Higher-level than the other ones you've written for this contest, but I think you've framed the more technical parts in a nicely accessible manner.

"The universe as a whole must not be physically deterministic!" Hear, hear! (Although I'm not fully persuaded by your argument, I agree with your conclusion...)

Some nitpicks: I'm not convinced that it makes sense to assign Shannon information to actual physical *signals*, rather than to the source itself. Sure, in certain special cases you can do it, but it hardly seems generally possible.

For example, you write:

> As Schumacher and Westmoreland note, "Information is the ability to distinguish reliably between possible alternatives" [16]. In this sense, information is encoded in the properties of the particles.

In the quote, they're talking about subjective distinction, which is in turn defined by *possible* alternatives, and therefore depend on the properties of the *source*, not any particular message. How do you conclude from this that information is now objectively encoded in physical particles that are themselves the signal? (Although I suppose you recognize this when you start talking about domains later... ) Still, my point is that "information content" is a dangerous notion, as it might lead one to falsely conclude that Shannon Entropy is a localized physical property that propagates with signals, like charge or mass.

I think you could have bypassed the seeming mismatch between Shannon entropy and classical thermodynamical entropy by simply pointing out they're somewhat different concepts. (Our uncertainty of classical systems *would* decrease if we kept track of past measurements and used a correspondingly finer-grain description; but that's not what we do when we define thermodynamic entropy.) As you discuss, the quantum analog is much stronger.

Now, of course I know that you have a research program to establish a connection between these two types of entropy, but I suppose that made me even more surprised that this issue never really came up. After all, what makes your research interesting is that these *are* inherently different notions and you're finding connections between them. If you assume they're the same from the outset, your research conclusions won't seem as strong.

Finally, even though I agree with your ultimate "bit from it" conclusion, I wonder how you'd address the orthodox-QM argument that unitary evolution implies that fine-grained "entropy" (in at least one of the above senses) never really increases at all. I guess one way would be to put in some formal indeterminism, as I do, but I've never seen you advocate that explicitly.

PS -- If you ever find yourself thinking of entropy as associated with spacetime regions rather than instants, please let me know -- I think there might be some overlap between our programs if you start going down that road.

Dear Ian Durham:

Hi Ian, I am an old physician that does not know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing in physics I am writing you just because you are a physicist and you can be interest to know about the experimental meaning of "time" I think can help to better understanding of "space-time" and find out about the Einstein short verbal "space-time" description. We have something in common I like fishing and I spend a week in the Maine coast which is beautiful, I was at a couple hundred meters from Rockefeller place, but I didn't do fly fishing, I remember I fished lots of mackerel.

I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay "The deep nature of reality".

I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don't understand it, and is not just because of my bad English) "Hawking, A brief history of time" where he said , "Which is the nature of time?" yes he don't know what time is, and also continue saying............Some day this answer could seem to us "obvious", as much than that the earth rotate around the sun....." In fact the answer is "obvious", but how he could say that, if he didn't know what's time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be "obvious", I think that with this adjective, he is implying simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn't explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure "time" since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure "time" from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental "time" meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls "time" and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the "time" experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the "time" creators and users didn't. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein's "Ideas and Opinions" pg. 354 "Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought" he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about "time" he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect "time", he does not use the word "time" instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or "motion", instead of saying that slows "time". FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that "time" was a man creation, but he didn't know what man is measuring with the clock.

I insist, that for "measuring motion" we should always and only use a unique: "constant" or "uniform" "motion" to measure "no constant motions" "which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of "motion" whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to "motion fractions", which I call "motion units" as hours, minutes and seconds. "Motion" which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using "motion"?, time just has been used to measure the "duration" of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand "motion" is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.

With my best whishes

Héctor