Contextuality: Wheeler’s universal regulating principle by Ian Durham

Dear All

Let me go one more round with Richard Feynman.

In the Character of Physical Law, he talked about the two-slit experiment like this "I will summarize, then, by saying that electrons arrive in lumps, like particles, but the probability of arrival of these lumps is determined as the intensity of waves would be. It is this sense that the electron behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave. It behaves in two different ways at the same time.

Further on, he advises the readers "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it. 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

Did he says anything about Wheeler's "It from Bit" other than what he said above?

Than Tin

I've lost a lot of comments and replies on my thread and many other threads I have commented on over the last few days. This has been a lot of work and I feel like it has been a waste of time and energy. Seems to have happened to others too - if not all.

I WILL ATTEMPT to revisit all threads to check and re-post something. I think your thread was one affected by this.

I can't remember the full extent of what I said, but I have notes so know that I rated it very highly.

Hopefully the posts will be able to be retrieved by FQXi.

Best wishes,

Antony

My pleasure Ian,

I've now rated it according to my comments!

Best wishes & well done!

Antony

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

Ian - truly outstanding. I loved your essay from beginning to end.

You have soundly connected so many interesting dots, and produced an impeccable argument for Bit from It.

My favorite statement:

"Thus contextually provides a means by which a quantum state can essentially be 'reset' ".

I think you hit the nail on the head, or at least one more nail in the coffin of it from bit. However, I believe the question of the continuum may still be up in the air.

Thank you for drawing my attention to Schumacker & Westmoreland's definition of information. (the ability to distinguish reliably between possible alternatives). A truly insightful find.

I would like to draw your attention to a point I made in my essay, which I believe is congruent with this definition of information, and which relates to figure 1 in your paper.

Your figure 1 assumes a single traversal of a quantum particle from one side of the apparatus to the other. Let me pose an absurd idea: what if we are staring at the truth in plain sight: that our confusions regarding quantum theory are all based on this simple unexamined assumption?

What if the particle goes backward and forward an uncountable number of times before it is detected? I describe this idea in detail in my essay.

Kind regards, Paul

Dear Ian,

I apologized for not getting to your essay sooner than I had planed. However, I am so glad I did for it was a breath of fresh air to read. I found your statement, "An object that is not ideal is said to be partial. So, given a domain that includes both Honus Wagner and his baseball card, Honus Wagner would be a maximal element while his baseball card would be partial... A measurement is then understood as a particular type of mapping on a domain that formalizes the notion of information content." to be true to the core and reflective of the findings of a 12 year experiment I have recently completed. Although you have a much different approach and analogy to the topic than I do, I found your essay to be enjoyable, insightful, and most worthy of merit.

I wonder how much the Honus Wagner baseball card is now worth? Priceless... like your essay.

Best wishes,

Manuel

Dear Ian,

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.

Hi, votes are vanishing again.

Ian,

We seem to agree on a number of points (It's Great to be the King) but this argument is quite compelling:

"But while the information content of the universe is constantly increasing with each new `measurement' (interaction), the matter- energy content of the universe is known to be constant. It would seem that if Wheeler were literally correct, this latter point should not be true."

Jim

Dear Ian,

thanks for the fascinating essay (which I gave a ten).

I agree with you about the problematic derivation of its from bits. But what about the collaps of the wave function? There you had in principle a reduction of the state (if it really happens, not like Landau who suposse no real collaps).

In my essay I considered a geometric model induced from the topological structure of the spacetime.

Hopefully you like my essay and will have a chance to have a look.

Best wishes and all the best for you

Torsten

Congratulations Ian,

Your high placement is well-deserved as your essay was excellent. I wish you luck in the finals.

All the Best,

Jonathan

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

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