Thanks Alfredo for your kind remarks. As you say, this essay was our first survey of what phenomena an 'explanatory theory' must be able to derive, tackling the question holistically from a natural science stance. We certainly consider developing our ideas further in the future, where we can profit from your ideas.
Best,
Jesse
Thank you William for your interest in reading our essay. We certainly are in agreement in thinking there's something more to information in addressing the question at hand, though our approaches differed. Of course, we argued that information must ultimately obey the laws of physics in contrast to what you propose in your intriguing 'information dimension' idea. I suppose one might argue the fact our human imagination has the ability to invent new hypothetical situations or laws of physics that may or may not be realised in the universe as some loose way of arguing some abstract/emergent structure encodes these ideas. Call it our imagination - facilitated by the richness of information we can hold in our natural language - certainly helps with our agency. You present interesting ideas for me to ponder over so thanks again!
Best,
Jesse
Hi Natesh, Thank you for your very kind comments. Goldenfeld and Woese is a fine read and we thank you for your reference. Having a quick look at it, it certainly looks consistent with our argument. Yes I came across your extremely well-written essay some weeks ago on the minimal dissipation hypothesis (but have yet to digest the details!) for manifesting learning like phenomena and enjoyed your engineering perspective.
From my particle physics background, the use of 'top-down' confused me at first (as it means underlying microscopic theory in my field) whereas in this context it is quite the opposite. The ideas of top-down causation certainly appear in some of the literature we surveyed, but my understanding is that it is a feedback mechanism of the macroscopic structures imposed on the microscopic, when the reductionist would usually study the inverse. I would personally have to read and think about it more to appreciate it, but the approach is usually very absent in particle physics so I was quite intrigued.
I'm glad you agree with our stance that consciousness is a distinct phase transition. While we do not develop this idea very deeply or concretely given the constrained scope, it does not seem far-fetched. And yes we thought quite a bit about how we wanted to distinguish consciousness from 'lower intelligence'. We used the Legg-Hutter definition of intelligence, which seems somewhat independent to perhaps the integrated information theory of consciousness, so we settled for now on them being separate concepts. One might imagine a somewhat sophisticated AI on our phone, but at least intuitively it doesn't seem conscious. I think this is far from unambiguous though.
And thanks for your suggestion to that question - we'll certainly think about it!
Best,
Jesse
Hi Jesse
I think your essay is written to high scholarly standards and moreover, unlike many other essays in this contest, it is dealing with the topic of this contest in a fairly direct manner. I rate your essay very highly as a consequence.
Do you think a work on Constitutional Democracy can be supported by Conant's Good Regulator Theorem or Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety? I tend to think so. For instance, Good Regulator Theorem was created with the brain as a case study. If you disagree and it is not too much trouble, please do let me know why it can't be used in the social domain.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Conant_Ashby.pdf
Regards, Willy
Jesse and Sonali,
Thank you, Jesse, for your kind comments regarding my essay. It is a special treat when someone reads your work and comments rather than rate w/o reading.
My thoughts on your essay is a well-thought-out process analysis with roles of information, evolution, natural law, and humans. Some notable thoughts include "Life begins as a phase transition when information gains top-down causal efficacy over the matter that instantiates it." Matter giving instance to life and its cognizant causes has meaningful fluency.
Somehow I think other sciences are left out when you say, "One speculates that we are witnessing the start of a profound informational unification in the natural sciences. Certainly biology and quantum biology involve agents in the process, and consider the blossoming role of quantum biology, the importance of quantum coherence in the high efficiency of photosynthesis and the migration of the European Robin. New discoveries seem to feature situations where even environmental noise fails to cause decoherence in some processes like photosynthesis, " Neural processes typically arise on time scales of order 100 ms and there is consensus that quantum effects decohere too quickly for any relevance" Is this true regarding the human brain, utilizing a type 0 civilization technology?
Jim Hoover
Dear Jesse and Sonali,
Very interesting and ambitious essay --- and quite "concentrated" too, as you seem to bring forth a new idea every few lines! I agree with you that information is a key concept that must be better understood if we hope to come up with a complete theory of the Universe. By the way, I really like the way you define the two "hallmarks" of information, "1) substrate independence --- we regard information without referring to its medium of instantiation; 2) interoperability --- we move information across media and its properties are unchanged." It is by reasoning along similar lines that I have come to the conclusion that deep down, everything can be understood in terms of abstract structures --- even more than that, EVERYTHING is an abstract structure! To Lorraine Ford's objections above in your essays' thread, I would say that indeed, information is physical, but to be physical is to be observed by a conscious observer, and consciousness, in the end, is nothing but an idea --- an abstract structure.
One thing is for sure: since information can be understood in terms of entropy and thermodynamics, it turns out that thermodynamics is as central as quantum mechanics and general relativity to the big, fundamental questions of existence! I will reread your essay and ponder these issues further. Meanwhile, I've bumped you higher in the ratings so that your essay gets more well-deserved exposure!
Good luck in the contest,
Marc
Hi Marc,
Thank you very much for your very kind comments.
Yes, we definitely agree with you that thermodynamics is as central as quantum mechanics and general relativity, in fact, this was one of the issues we were pondering while writing up the essay. A brief literature survey reveals that even blackhole structures and interiors are being probed in terms of thermodynamic quantities now (the whole field of blackhole thermodynamics) and there is much discussion on how to define thermodynamics consistently in both the quantum and the classical regimes.
One of the ways in which we deemed this going forward was to look at information theories at each level as an EFT and perturbatively connect the various energy scales. But in order to carry out this process seamlessly, there is so much more scope of work to be done. In fact, contructor theory of information (which we have referred to in our essay), tries to look at similar ideas.
Thank you very much once again and good luck on your essay to you as well!
Regards,
Sonali
Jesse and Sonali,
As time grows short, I have a practice of returning to essays I have read to determine if I have rated them yet. I discovered that I hadn't rated your very well-done essay and rated it today.
Hope you enjoyed the interchange of ideas as much as I have.
Jim Hoover
Dear Sirs!
Physics of Descartes, which existed prior to the physics of Newton returned as the New Cartesian Physic and promises to be a theory of everything. To tell you this good news I use «spam».
New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.
New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.
Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return. Can put me 1.
Sincerely,
Dizhechko Boris
Dear both,
I really enjoyed your essay. It was recommended to us by Willy K.
I agree with you as the conclusion in our essay seem to align with your proposal and moreover you seem to further extend our conclusions by proposing information as the underlying concept which can link language and consciousness.
I would like to ask you if you also see mathematics as part of natural language or it may be interpreted as another phase transition. Or if this is not the case where is mathematics place in your discussion?
Once, again brilliant essay.
Kind Regards,
Yafet
Hi Yafet,
Thank you so much for your kind comments. I am glad you enjoyed our essay.
The question of mathematics, that you raise, is indeed a very interesting question.
I would naively imagine mathematics to develop hand in hand with the development of language as the underlying language for developing physical theories and a way to encode them for bookkeeping. Thus, in my view I would see mathematics as maybe the conscious development of a high-level language. I am not sure whether to see it as another phase transition, but maybe that can only be answered if we manage to write down the critical parameters of information which drive phase-transition in our theory.
Would you agree?
Sincerely,
Sonali