Meaning and Intentionality = Information + Evolution by Carlo Rovelli

I'm not quite sure why the above comment doesn't show my name; I must've gotten logged out somehow. But anyway, anonymous above is me.

Dear Professor Rovelli.

As I have thoughtfully pointed out in my brilliant essay, SCORE ONE FOR SIMPLICITY, the real Universe consists only of one unified visible infinite surface occurring in one infinite dimension, that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light. There is no gap in any sensible person's "understanding of the world" providing he or she avoids abstract complexity and practices simplicity.

Joe Fisher, Realist

"We do not need something external to the workings of nature to account for the appearance of function and purpose." The preceding seems to me to be an important idea. "A signal is a physical event that conveys meaning." It seem to me that the preceding is a satisfactory definition for Einsteinian special and general relativity but not for the Copenhagen interpretation. I think that the definition should be: A signal is a physical event that conveys meaning or might convey meaning in a physical experiment long after the event. I say that that my 3 most important ideas are:

(1) Milgrom is the Kepler of contemporary cosmology.

(2) The Koide formula is essential for understanding the foundations of physics.

(3) Lestone's heuristic string theory is essential for understanding the foundations of physics.

I would appreciate any feedback concerning the 3 preceding ideas.

Dear Brown,

Natural reality is not composed of complex abstract ideas. One real Universe must have only one reality. As I have thoughtfully pointed out in my brilliant essay, SCORE ONE FOR SIMPLICITY, the real Universe consists only of one unified visible infinite surface occurring in one infinite dimension, that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light. Reality am not a conundrum.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Carlo Rovelli,

What you say is all very well, but you and other physicists like Kolchinsky and Wolpert have made a mistake in your most basic assumptions. Physics likes to claim that fundamental-level reality is mindless, but on the other hand physicists assumes that the universe somehow "knows itself": the universe in some sense "knows" the law-of-nature regularities, the universe in some sense "knows" the parameter numeric values that are the unpredictable physical outcomes of quantum randomness.

Physics contains a hidden and unacknowledged assumption: that the universe has information about itself; that the universe already knows the same aspects of reality that we humans represent with law-of-nature equations and parameter value numbers.

But what "knows" the most primitive levels of reality? The universe is seemingly not a single entity, but a collection of interacting entities: particles, atoms, molecules, cells and other living things. These entities are the only candidates that could know, that could have information about (i.e. subjectively experience) reality.

Then you get to the question of whether there are 2 aspects of reality (physical reality and experience of physical reality, and a relationship between the 2 aspects) or only one aspect of reality (subjective experience of reality).

This is interesting. I will reread your paper in a couple of days. I seems though you are arguing for a sort of selection mechanism for quantum states. Maybe this is a way of getting a form of "pink noise" from quantum fluctuations, by selecting certain fluctuations, to promote information into the future.

LC

Dear Ms. Ford,

Natural reality does not have abstract levels.

Simple natural reality has nothing to do with any abstract complex musings such as the ones you effortlessly indulge in. As I have thoughtfully pointed out in my brilliant essay, SCORE ONE FOR SIMPLICITY, the real Universe consists only of one unified visible infinite surface occurring in one infinite dimension, that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light. Reality am not as complicated as theories of reality are.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Carlo -

There are several things here that I find very good, e.g. your explanations of emergence and of signaling. It's a particularly important idea that physics is "modal" - about structures of possibility, not just structures of given fact. This needs further development from a philosophical point of view, since we still tend to think of possibilities as facts that just haven't happened yet. Your Relational QM paper took a different path by describing facts as answers, which can only exist where the physical context poses a specific question.

I think it's great to focus on the issue of how information becomes physically meaningful, and your argument makes good sense. But by taking meaning as dependent on biological evolution, I think you skip over something important. There certainly is a level of meaning that depends on the survival and replication of organisms - just as there are many further levels of meaning that only come into play in the human world. But the most basic levels of meaning are entirely physical - for example, it's meaningful that a body weighs 1kg rather than 2kg. It makes a crucial difference to the world that positive charges move in exactly opposite ways to negative charges, etc. etc.

I'll argue - in my essay yet to be submitted - that all the many kinds of significant differences in physics have meaning because they're all measurable, in terms of each other. Of course, there's no clear understanding of what that means, in quantum physics. I recall your position on this - from the RQM paper - that the only reasonable solution is to treat any correlation between two systems as a measurement. That won't really do though, since entangled systems are correlated whether or not a measurement is made. I think it's better to say that something is measured where there exists an interactive context that defines and communicates a specific result - Bohr's "entire measurement situation." A specific answer only appears insofar as there's an adequately-posed question.

The problem is that though we know very well what it takes to construct an adequate measurement-context, it's hard to define such a context theoretically. That's because there are so many different ways of measuring different physical parameters, and they're all quite complicated, and every way of measuring one thing depends on measurements of other kinds of things. However, all of this is true of biological reproduction as well. There are many different life-forms that replicate very differently; no reproductive process is in any respect simple; and all these different species depend in various ways on the survival and reproduction of other species.

Happily, Darwin showed us how to understand the hugely complex system of life. In physics, though, the classical mode of explanation still prevails - as in your statement, "Nature appears to be formed by a relative simple ensemble of elementary ingredients obeying relatively elementary laws." This is of course true down to a certain level, but there's hardly any empirical support for it in the Standard Model plus gravity. Which aspect of all these interaction-laws do we consider "relatively elementary"? I think we need to work toward a mode of explanation that, like Darwin's, doesn't rely on reduction to ultimately simple components.

The analogy between physical measurement and biological self-replication seems remote, since they accomplish such different things. But I hope to show in my essay that they're two very different instances of the same kind of dynamic structure, through which meaningful information is able to evolve. And also, that a third instance of this structure is at the root of human communication.

Nonetheless your essay is as usual very clear and insightful, and on the track of what seem to me the most fundamental issues.

Thanks - Conrad

Dear Prof. Rovelli,

Very interesting - perhaps a bit too technical however for the purposes here (in other words, it's well above what would be deemed Scientific American material.)

Sometimes as scientists we write for colleagues, and sometimes to draw in a more 'lay' audience - as you did in your recent 'Reality Is Not What It Seems'

very well done anyway

Kind regards

H Chris

Dear Mr.Rovelli,

I have liked a lot your papper and how you interpret these informations.One of my favorite,you are going to win a prize :)The technical method is relevant,I didn't know the works of Wolpert and others.I know the Shannon works a little.Thanks for sharing in all case,I learn in the same time these methods.

Good luck in this contest.

Regards

The idea comes from nonstandard analysis, in the works of Naval College Mathematics courseware instructor, Robert A. Herrmann, the great genius of a nonstandard world he calls "theNonStandardNatural" .model of the Universe, versus "theStandardNaturalNumber" Universe, where everybody else lives.

He writes about Relativity. I interpret him here.

There is a Universe of Time where everything in the Univese is an Object.

And then, there is the Universe where everything in the Universe is a Process.

Objects within the Universe of Objects speak a very different language from the language.spoken in the Universe of Processes.

Mysteriously, Einstein had correctly described an "infomorphism" between these two Universes.

And that, was his equation between "local Minkowski ProperTime," and "Coordinate Time."

But since it was an infomorphism, it was only half of the story.

Because an "infomorphism" has to connect to itself by two back and forth channels-- or functions-- or arrows. (Take your pick.)

The other half of the Infomorphism is the "Stream" that's the Universe of Time, where everything in that Universe is a "Stream."

And that's where I come from.

Seems there should be a lot more than just one equation involved!

Objects and Processes swim in the Stream.

The author proposes that correlation between objects is ground for meaningful physical information. Meaningful information nurtures aims and intentions experienced by the living. If we can describe mathematically meaningful physical information, we then have found at the very least a remote mathematical description to aims and intentions, as I understand. The author further proposes a variation of the formula for entropy for said mathematical formulation. I should add that the author has asserted several key aspects of a physical definition of the living. In my sense, this thesis should be well received although the argument is somewhat weak. Several flaws in style and grammar should be noted.

Dear Carlo Rovelli,

you made a nice effort to describe the first tender emergence of some 'meaning' on our planet, as you imagine it to have possibly happened, so i like to leave some comments about what came to my mind by reading your essay.

In your essay abstract you wrote „I discuss what makes a physical process into a "signal"." You also wrote in this abstract "I study a purely physical definition of "meaningful information", from which these notions can be derived."

By discussing what makes a physical process into a 'signal', you have tacitly correlated the term 'process' with a mindless physical process, whereas your term 'signal' should signal! to the reader that somehow there is an observer of that signal (bacterium) and knows how to interpret it.

So you have correlated 'process' with mindless matter and 'signal' with a kind of observer. You wrote that your definition of 'meaningful information' is a purely physical one. The question for me is how a mindless physical process can, via selection and reproduction, become an observer. Surely, if this would be possible, it would happen in small evolutionary steps, but i see no such steps existent other than an essay author correlating the term 'process' with the term 'signal'. But this would be only 'relative information', because there is no observer existent for the 'signal' to recognize it. I think the meaning of your 'meaningful information' can only come into play, because the reader projects her/his experience with hunger and death into the situation of a bacterium, *as if the reader himself would be that bacterium*.

As long as we do not define this bacterium to be conscious to a certain extent, i think one cannot speak of some food in front of a bacterium as a signal. This does not exclude that we assign a certain meaning to this signal, but by doing so, we *do* it, and surely not the bacterium. It is true, that whenever the bacterium finds its food, its chances to exist longer are increased. But we conclude this from our point of view. A mindless physical process, driven by chance, cannot meaningfully have any point of view. There is no meaning of death and hunger in a purely physical definition of that process.

Your attempt gives the impression that whatever 'survives' a certain selection process, must necessarily be able to discriminate between an advantage and a disadvantage. Surely, it is imaginable that the bacterium could have some rudimentary sense of advantage and disadvantage. But this would presuppose also some rudimentary state of inner awareness of what is going on out there. Unfortunately, for explaining how this rudimentary state of inner consciousness could at all come about in a purely physical universe, one had to begin with the whole inquiry from where one started it - because the emergence of this inner awareness would be left unexplained (unless one simply claims that it emerges and period). This is - in my opinion - part of the hard problem of consciousness. I really appreciate that scientists are concerned with these questions, but as you rightfully note at the end of your essay, the results should be received with cautiousness.

In the Kyoto lecture of 1922, Einstein said:

"There is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity."

Wikipedia states that: "The signal velocity is the speed at which a wave carries INFORMATION.

It describes how quickly..."

"...a MESSAGE can be communicated between two separated parties."

An "informationalist"-- as I understand it-- might read the above paragraphs in the following way:

In nonstandard analysis, Robinson taught us about languages and models.

Looks like there is a model in these paragraphs.

But it would be the first step in informationalism to think-- instead-- about languages and SITUATIONS.

As in: "situation theory" from Jon Barwise's book "The Situation in Logic."

(Robinson and Barwise were friends long ago at Yale.)

Back to "the situation":

"What type is it?"

If you ever read The Informationalist's Handbook, that is the very next question.

Well-- to support all this talk about "information," "message," "sender," "receiver," and so on, there clearly must be an "information channel" in this situation. It must be -that- type of situation. Otherwise, how would the information be transmitted, how would the message be carried?

The term "information channel" comes from Barwise's second to last book, the one with Jerry Seligman: "Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems."

On the cover, there are diagrams of information channels between pieces of office equipment.

Diagramming tools, of course, were in-scope for that workshop with Barwise--

"'Business Applications of Situation Theory:

Algebra, Relativity, Diagrams, and Situations' at Work"

You can imagine the T-shirts.

I've still got one around here somewhere. (A colleague had paid a friend to do the artwork. It's Alice in the Red Queen's race.)

To understand TIME in his own mind, Albert Einstein went outside himself to imagine clocks, situated on machine bases if you will.

It's always been opaque to me as to how this imaginary apparatus of clocks and rigid rods puts into operation anything like the most profound idea that Einstein had ever had about time:

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

If we only had just one more model of time!

Then we could compare it against Einstein's, above, and see which model comes closer to this deep, intuitive insight.

Here's how I found such a model--

There were millions of dollars at stake in a monster manufacturing line. Nobody could say for sure whether or not it would work. It did look great in blueprint form. And in those days, it actually was a blueprint!

So they did an RFP for a computer simulation from a local conveyor company. But I told them I could get it done in half the time.

So I wrote the purchase order for Smalltalk80, which had just come on the market no more than a couple of months previous.

Then I went to OOPSLA in San Diego, got another Smalltalk80 with every class for every queuing mathematics, semaphores, scaleable parallel computing system, everything you needed to write a multi-threaded, parallel simulation.

This became a diagramming tool I then used to draw the Petri net of the manufacturing system. Each Petri net transition would generate it's own code. I could just point and click, to add code to a transition here, a transition there. There were hundreds and hundreds of transitions. But really, it was just a small net.

Here's the problem I ran into:

Say I had a conveyor feeding parts into a press. In the real world, they can back up till everything stops. But in the very first stages, what my Petri nets would do is just keep feeding every part into the press as soon as it came along-- destroying all my simulated work!

So to every transition in the simulation, I added a "feedback loop." It was an INFORMATION CHANNEL.

The feedback loop held a place for a game coin.

When it finished its work, each transition in the net would place a coin in it's own feedback loop slot. It was the SIGNAL "ready for more work."

Only when that SIGNAL existed, could a part then move into the press.

(Moving a part into the press somehow "removes" the coin.)

Those were the rules.

I had to give the press some simulated TIME so it could do its work.

And to give it that TIME, I had to:

"Keep everything from happening at once."

*****

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

Now, we have another model for comparison.

So here are two models for saying some things about TIME:

1. Clocks on bases of rods sending signals

2. State transitions with feedback loops to "self," running an algorithm in a simulation that "keeps everything from happening at once." I.e, a STREAM.

It looks like #1 is better for a model to say things about "coordinate time."

While #2 is better for saying things about "proper time."

As I understand it, so far in GR, proper time is DEFINED based on coordinate time. Here, both would be "independent" processes.

That would pretty much be like Bohm and Hiley's statement about the Born rule-- that the two sides of the equation are two "independent concepts."

Here then, the two independent concepts are "coordinate time" and "proper time."

To an informationalist, the defining equation for proper time based on coordinate time now looks like an "infomorphism," like the Born infomorphism.

But an infomorphism can exist only if an information channel exists.

There needs to be an information channel so the defining equation of proper time from coordinate time can become a transmission of information.

Please see previous post-- objects (using language about coordinate time) and processes (using language about proper time) both swim in a stream. The stream affords the information channel.

Dear Prof Carlo Rovelli,

I very much enjoyed your essay and rated it very highly. I think you do an excellent job of narrowing in on the subject, as I have tried to do in my less formal entry. Perhaps you could take a look at this, I wonder what you think of Leslie Valiant's idea of ecorithms and there potentiall 'internal role'. You seem to present an alternative way in which meaning or intention arises from just physical relata. From my reasoning I couldnt determine a way in which this math of intention (information by your account) could be used to reveal consciousness.

Best,

Jack

"The definition of 'meaningful' considered here does not directly refer to anything mental. To have something mental you need a mind and to have a mind you need a brain, and its rich capacity of elaborating and working with information. The question addressed here is what is the physical base of the information that brains work with. The answer suggested is that it is just physical correlation between internal and external variables affecting survival either directly or, potentially, indirectly."

Carlo, although your essay is highly intricate, I fail to see any link or bridge between what you define as meaningful information and processes involving agency, purpose, or intentionality. Certainly, "downright crude physical correlation" can be compared with the cognitive interpretation of information, but to call a physical response to a stimulus a meaningful event, or to regard survival reflexes as purposeful behavior, is to trivialize what needs to be explained.

Intentionality involves a resourceful purpose to effect some end, which significantly, profoundly, does not yet exist - it precedes the end. The challenge here is to somehow reconcile intentionality with "mindless mathematical (physical) laws." The correlation of stimulus and response is not adequate even to ground such a task.

Mr Rovelli,

I see that you work about quantum gravity.I search also answers,I beleive in all humility that I found but of course I must formalise and test ,experiment.All this to tell you that we arrive so at what are the main gravitational codes of evolution.Of course we arrive at a debate about what is the meaning of informations and of our consciousness.The debate is also about what is the main cause,gravitational.So we arrive at a philosophical analyse.The sciences community is divided in two roads, a road considering a main cause creating an intelligent design if I can say and we have the atheists utilising the emergence of consciousness and lifes with others causalities.Personally I beleive strongly that a real understanding of what is infinite entropy above our physicality and gravitation is essential.We cannot encircle these steps of encoded particles waves énergies without this foundamental, but it is just my opinion of course.The main codes are gravoitational and our singularities are not approachables.The quantum gravitation does not seem to be an emergent electromagnetic force.The standard model is not sufficient in fact.We can so invent an AI but never a consciousness.It is due to our main gravitational codes.The electromagnetic encodings are just a step.We can try to formalise these informations and encodings with maths and variables but it is just electromagnetic.In all case it is a big puzzle, thanks still for sharing your work and good luck also in this contest.Best Regards from Belgium.

Dear Carlo Rovelli

A good essay nicely analyzing the information, meaning, signal, intentionality and these are not covered in Physics. And you are correct again...as in your words..."We are undoubtedly limited parts of nature, and we are so even as understanders of this same nature"

The real question is who programmed us to try to understand the nature itself........?