You raise an interesting point about the finitude of information. In an idealist philosophy my reality is determined only by the finite amount of information in my mind. The external world is an ensemble of possible worlds consistent with that information. I dont allow that there is one external physical reality for the state of the whole universe around me because that would require an infinite amount of information, but each possible state of the universe would require a large or infinite amount of information to describe it. What this provides is an illusion of an external reality described by more information than I really possess in my mind.

I think that symmetry is important to how this works. Suppose that all objects in the universe were distinguishable so they can be labelled in some way. If the universe is infinite and I know that the object with label X is in the room with me then I have an infinite amount of information about it. This can't be right. The paradox is resolved because elementary particles are indistinguishable. All I can really know is that there is an object in the room made up of elementary particles in some configuration. This requires only a finite amount of information. The indistinguishability of particles is a permutation symmetry.

You are right that I have identified information entropy with action, even if I did not say it explicitly. It is an interesting conclusion, and not one that I would have expected.

At least I am not alone in linking action to entropy

https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0106081

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239614590_The_concept_of_entropy_Relation_between_action_and_entropy

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/483580/is-it-there-any-relation-between-an-action-and-entropy

etc

Philip,

philosophy has always been discussed along contemporary hot topics and of course by using contemporary vocabulary. The only constant I can find in it right from its start is:

- Time versus Time-lessness (not eternity!)

- a posteriori versus a priori

- empiricism versus rationalism

which all mean the same.

The other point I want to address is that REAL progress has been made when a scientist cannot decide whether he has discovered or invented something. Then what he discovered/invented is Absolutely free from contradiction. The formal description of this state of 'universal validity' exceeds the capacity of logic, but not the capacity of the scientific metaphor.

Heinz

Phil,

Thanks for clarifying the difference between yours and MUH. And thanks for pointing out that your approach is "indistinguishable from the'multiverse' of wavefunctions in QM which is really just one field." I'm actually glad to hear that as I like your ideas, but felt they were the extreme opposite of mine. I do believe that good ideas should generally converge to a "correct" idea.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

In the light of some of the great comments above, I want to clarify the philosophical position in this essay.

When physics students learn quantum mechanics they often feel unsatisfied with the formulation. I know I did. In-determinism is not the problem. The real difficulty is the role of the observer. In the standard interpretation the wave function collapses when an observer makes a measurement. The problem with this is that our traditional philosophy of science is materialism. Everything is made of particles and fields which exists independently of us. we are just configurations of these material structures that happen to have a highly evolved brain capable of self-awareness. How can we even define what we mean by an observer that is consistent with this philosophy? This is the question that leads to the famous statement by Feynman that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Different people come to terms with this in different ways. Some people claim that the wave-function does not collapse and it is just decoherence. This is nonsense. Others look for an underlying deterministic hidden variable theory to eliminate the probabilistic part altogether. Some develop a pluralistic philosophy where consciousness is something more than just high level brain power so that the observer can be counted as something special. For me it was the many worlds interpretation that allowed me to accept a more comfortable materialistic view where the wave function collapse is an illusion of our own experience.

I now think that all these ideas are wrong.

The only viable solution to the measurement problem is to replace materialism with idealism. The observer is not just something different, it is everything. Before quantum theory philosophers proposed various types of idealism: subjective idealism, objective idealism, transcendental idealism, etc. what we are considering now is best termed quantum idealism. This is not some religious or spiritual philosophy. It is pure science.

In this view our reality is determined by the information we have in our mind. This is a slightly fuzzy quantity because we are not conscious of everything at once and the boundary of our mind is not absolute but we can allow for that. Our brains can only hold a hundred terabytes of information which is tiny compared to what is required to determine the physical position of all the particles around us, and yet it is everything.

In a sense the detail in the world around us is an illusion. There are really many possible worlds. All the worlds that are consistent with the information we possess. The real amount of information out there is no more than the amount in our head. It is as if a giant quantum computer is continuously computing all universes consistent with what we know, not just in the present but also in the past and future. New information from these worlds comes back into our mind through our senses when we make observations providing the illusion of a world containing much more information than is really there. This computer is not a real thing. That would be a materialistic interpretation. It is not part of our mind either. Our brain is not powerful enough. It is just the force of consistency which makes our reality operate in this way.

I know this will not be a popular view, just as my views on causality and many other things are not popular, but if I am right then the very nature and structure of reality must be determined by the mathematics of the information calculus required to describe this process. In my essay I tried to show that we can get to the emergence of quantum mechanics, space, time, particles and fields just starting from an algebraic analysis of information and how it works in a self-referential system. Obviously there is more work to do but lie to think that I have made a promising start.

    Thank you for your kind words and encouragement.

    For the FLRW metric with k = 0 the spatial surface of the Hubble frame is R^3. A similar situation occurs with how one defines coordinates in de Sitter spacetime. There is no serious problem I see with that sort of infinitude. The limit to observing an infinite amount of stuff, first pointed out by Olber in his paradox, is the expansion of the universe and cosmological horizon. The expansion factor e^{Ht} in the FLRW, or cosh(Ht) in de Sitter, defines a limit for the expansion of a Planck length at the earliest quantum gravitation stage to the scale of the CMB or cosmological horizon. This is an enormous factor e{Ht} = 8Г--10^{60}, but Ht = 140. This gives r = 140Г--в€љ{3/О›} ≈ 1800 light years.

    The hunt for B-modes in the CMB is a form of this. Graviton production or gravitational waves produced in inflation should leave a polarization signature on the CMB. In this way the most distant and earliest quantum information we may receive or observe is on the CMB as a sort of cosmic quantum gravitation detector. Anything beyond this scale is sealed off from view. As a result, any observer can access only a finite amount of information.

    There is a curious sort of renormalization of scale with information. As we observe further outwards the number of qubits available decreases, until at some final scale of the Planck wall there may only be one qubit. Of course, observers, or we, find themselves in a local world filled with information. The cosmological horizon at the time of inflation has an area of around 10^{15} Planck units of area. This is the amount of information potentially available from this epoch. Pushing further back to the Planck era this approaches one unit.

    Cheers LC

    erratum, r = 140Г--в€љ{3/О›} ≈ 1800 light years is meant to read r = 140Г--в€љ{3/О›} ≈ 1800 billion light years.

    LC

    Feynman was right about Fredkin. He is an original thinker who appreciated the importance of computation in physics long before others. He has inspired a number of people including myself. I also know him personally and have heard many of the incredible stories of his adventures first hand.

    I have cited his work in some of my other essays. There are many lessons to be learnt from his approach that have affected mine, even if I do not agree with his deterministic vision of reality.

    "The real amount of information out there is no more than the amount in our head." If it is only "out" there, then it is not "in" our head. Where did your "information about physics" come from, if it was not in papers, books and the minds of your professors, before it got copied into your head, and probably had to overwrite older information stored there, in order to make room for it?

    "Our brains can only hold a hundred terabytes of information which is tiny compared to what is required to determine the physical position of all the particles around us" - Or in us. The information content of either a computer or a brain, is not just that stored in its "memory". It requires much more information, to specify how to construct the computer, or brain, in the first place.

    "This computer is not a real thing." That is your illusion. The universe merely "computes" itself, by simply being itself, just like every other computer, brain or being; things can only be whatever they are, and can only do whatever it is that they do. Humans do not have enough information storage capacity, to ever store all the information contained within all these other beings. That is no cause to believe that such other things, do not exist.

    Information has nothing to do with consciousness, thought or life. As Shannon stated on the first page of his A Mathematical Theory of Communication: "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." In other words, his conception of "information" has nothing to do with "meaning", it is simply a "quantifiable", observable pattern, encoded into an observable, physical "substance", waiting to be correctly recognized, by some other entity in the future. The fact that such an entity may not have appeared yet, and correctly copied and "decoded" that information into its circuitry, or brain, has no bearing on the existence of the information "out there"; if I write a note on a piece of paper, and cast it into the wind, the fact that some other being does not yet know that it exists, much less know what I wrote on it, is irrelevant to the fact that the paper, with its writing, does exist, and may be eventually discovered and "correctly decoded", by something.

    You seem to be totally ignoring the fact that the key word in the title of Shannon's paper, is the word communication - thus, Shannon's "information" is entirely concerned with a possibility, the potential, to transfer (AKA communicate) "information", from one inanimate entity to another, without any "thought" or "meaning" entering into the process - such as the process embodied in an inanimate radio receiver. Some other entity, like a human being, may subsequently come along and attempt to attach some "meaning" onto this acquired "information", but as Shannon stated, that is "irrelevant to the engineering problem", involving the "information transmission" itself.

    Rob McEachern

    "Some people claim that the wave-function does not collapse and it is just decoherence. This is nonsense."

    If I recall correctly, someone else called even the wave-function collapse itself a nonsense. Don't get me wrong. I don't support the two "nonsensical" opinions. I just dislike the word nonsense in a scientific discussion.

    Eckard Blumschein

    Your mini-prolegomena has ideas I too have pondered. I am not quite as disposed to this idea of idealism. However, locality and realism are dual constructs and Frauchiger and Renner showed how the observer of observers can have disparate reports to the observed outcomes. This illustrates how this duality can have a non-realism wing. Thus, nonlocality can give way to some element of locality if realism is weakened or dropped.

    The thrust of my paper is there is no computable or dynamical reason for how outcomes of measurements obtain. What are quantum interpretations are then auxiliary postulates that share properties similar to what happens in geometry when Euclid's fifth axiom is negated. Nagel and Newman illustrate how this is an undecidable axiom, and if one includes this as an unprovable statement you get a consistent system, whereas the negation leads to a bouquet of geometries that are not consistent with each other. In QM, as I see it, there is a similar situation, where one can do the Mermin "shut up and calculate," or one can decide between whether QM is ψ-epistemic, Bohr CI or Qubism, or ψ-ontological, such as MWI. There is then a branching of various interpretations, which if they are not inconsistent with QM are workable.

    I am not certain what role to give mind. I am not sure about "all idealism," but on the other hand QM has this idealism prospect. Trying to eliminate idealism might be a sort of "whack-a-mole" exercise. Penrose has in his Road to Reality a suggested triality between physical reality or materialism, mathematics and consciousness. Of course, Penrose is at an age with the stature that he can propose something like this. I am not entirely certain about these ideas. It is evident the universe existed long before biology, at least on Earth, and certainly long before intelligent life or consciousness. There are many reasons and evidences that force me to not completely throw my lot towards idealism. This is even if the door for idealism is slightly open.

    Cheers LC

    Nature in a sense computes itself. QCD has roots that tell us how color charge is flipped between quarks and gluons in three-vertex diagrams. A QCD gluon is then a complicated statistical computer of sorts where color charge, a form of quantum information, is exchanged. Along with that of course spin is flipped. The idea the universe is a computer is a sort of human imposed model. There is an old and long tradition of considering the world according to technology of the day, from pumps as models in the renaissance, clocks then steam engines and so forth.

    We really do not know what consciousness is. I am not an exponent of panpsychism that is growing in popularity. Consciousness does have some connection to information, for if the underlying neural system closes down consciousness either lapses or ends. At least our outward measure of what it is to be conscious goes to zero. We do not have a lot of information about this and Monty Python did a sketch on interviewing dead people that made light of this. We all will subjectively get to experience this at some time.

    LC

    "... Fredkin .. deterministic vision of reality ..." Do you have an opinion concerning the following?

    Viewpoint 1. Electrons travel through spacetime. Electrons are wave-like when they are not measured. Electrons are particle-like when they are measured.

    Viewpoint 2. Electrons and spacetime are approximations generated by Wolfram's cosmological automaton. Electrons do not travel through spacetime. Measurement is a natural process that separates the boundary of the multiverse from the interior of the multiverse. The multiverse is mathematically isomorphic to a 72-dimensional holographic, digital computer. An electron is an approximate pattern of Fredkin-Wolfram information, and the electron's pattern is computationally and holographically propagated through the interior of the multiverse. The electron approximately consists of discontinuous displays of Fredkin-Wolfram information that are psychologically merged together in the minds of those electromagnetic fields called the "minds of physicists". How might Viewpoint 2 be tested?

    Prediction 1: dark-matter-compensation-constant = (3.9±.5) * 10^-5 .

    Prediction 2: The Riofrio-Sanejouand cosmological model is empirically valid, i.e., the radius of our universe is a constant, and the speed of light in a perfect vacuum steadily decreases as our universe ages.

    "As Shannon stated on the first page of his A Mathematical Theory of Communication: "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.""

    This is not correct. Shannon's theory is about a transmitter and a receiver which have agreed upon a certain symbol alphabet. So there is lots of meaning (semantics) in it. Only past this meaning stage the above quote holds (only then it does't matter what meaning is communicated). Hence it does not make any sense to say that the universe computes itself, if no one is able to pick up that information.

    The philosophical problem behind this discussion is Kant's famous thing-in-itself, the thing as it is independent of what we think about it. Does it exist? Kant does NOT claim that it exists in some certain form, which humans are just too limited to ever grasp. What he says is that the question after the thing in itself is non-sensical. For any answer to what the thing in itself is, would make it into a thing for us.

    "This is not correct. Shannon's theory is about a transmitter and a receiver which have agreed upon a certain symbol alphabet."

    As Shannon states on page 44, each "symbol" will be little more than "samples of white noise", for a system operating at the maximum capacity. So any meaning that might be attached to such noise samples, cannot be deduced from any observation of them; any meaning, if such exists, must be extrinsic to any such message/observable. Upon detecting the existence of any such "noise sample", the receiver merely decodes it, by replacing it with some agreed upon binary number, which remains as meaningless to the receiver, as it was to the transmitter.

    There never even has to be any meaning - the original message to be transmitted, may itself be nothing more than a meaningless noise sequence.

    "Hence it does not make any sense to say that the universe computes itself, if no one is able to pick up that information"

    "picking up information" involves nothing more than picking up an oak leaf (and regarding it as an alphabetic symbol). That is the point. Because this makes the recipient of the information, free to associate (by accident, chance, or any other mechanism) any possible meaning, or behavior, with that "picking up" - thereby enabling the "emergence" of a previously non-existent, cause-and-effect relationship. If you decide to slap your face with your right hand, every time you pick-up an oak leaf, but pat your head, every time you pick-up a maple leaf, an observer watching you, might reasonably suppose that an oak leaf means "slap your face" and a maple leaf means "pat your head" and the same observer, seeing every person doing the same thing, might even suppose that there is some "law of nature" necessitating the behavior. The fact that the oak tree, did not intend its leaf to serve that function, is of no consequence. Any repeatable behavior, that becomes associated with "picking up information", becomes the "meaning" of that information, and may take on the appearance of a "law of nature", to any observer witnessing such repeatable behaviors. The law did not cause the behavior, rather, the behavior caused the observer to suppose the existence of a law.

    Rob McEachern

    I think it is worth pointing out that my essay only mentions Shannon once. His focus was on communication which is not a central part of my essay. He is cited only because he produced some theory on the quantity of information in random variables. This is the only part of his work that is directly relevant to what I am trying to say.

    Robert,

    ""picking up information" involves nothing more than picking up an oak leaf (and regarding it as an alphabetic symbol). That is the point."

    How can you know that what Shannon wrote (for example on page 44) isn't also merely meaningless noise?

    What you really are exemplifying is (when one logically deciphers your lines of reasoning) either that you

    1. do not know that you don't know what you are talking about

    or

    2. you know that you don't know what you are talking about

    In any case I think you wildly mix up various categories like meaning, information, laws of nature and human conditional learning.

    Robert,

    ""picking up information" involves nothing more than picking up an oak leaf (and regarding it as an alphabetic symbol). That is the point."

    How can you know that what Shannon wrote (for example on page 44) isn't also merely meaningless noise?

    What you really are exemplifying is (when one logically deciphers your lines of reasoning) either that you

    1. do not know that you don't know what you are talking about

    or

    2. you know that you don't know what you are talking about

    In any case I think you wildly mix up various categories like meaning, information, laws of nature and human conditional learning.

    Philip,

    You stated that "Information is the basic material of reality, but the processing of information raises paradoxes...", but the paradoxes only arise, when an inappropriate conception of information is being employed.

    Your statement that "because he produced some theory on the quantity of information in random variables" indicates that you have yet to comprehend the significance of his theory; he has proven that there is a finite, often small, amount of information, that can ever be measured, with certainty, from any set of physical measurements whatsoever. That means that any entity manifesting just one such bit of information, can never be measured in any manner, capable of producing two uncorrelated measurements, even when the measurements might otherwise have been independent, orthogonal variables.

    This has direct relevance to the validity of Bell's theorem - it is only valid for entities that manifest more than one bit of information. In other words, classical, deterministic entities that manifest only one bit, will behave just like quantum entities. You do not have to understand Shannon's paper to prove that. You can simply run the short code (available on this website) that will produce such objects and perform a Bell test on them, right in front of your very eyes. You can do it on your own computer, in your own home, within an hour, then ponder why it works (and violates the 1987 Garg/Mermin claim that no classical system, can ever reproduce Bell's correlations, with a single detector efficiency above 83%) for as long as you like. And if you feel up to it, you can completely rewrite the code, to convince yourself that it really does work, as Colin Walker did (replied on Sep. 12, 2016)

    Stefen,

    "How can you know that what Shannon wrote (for example on page 44) isn't also merely meaningless noise?"

    Because, I have personally designed and constructed real systems, that do exactly the types of things he is describing. So have legions of other communications engineers. Almost all the modern, wireless communications devices you use, are based on these concepts; so they are not just "idle talk", as quantum information theory is.

    "(when one logically deciphers your lines of reasoning)" try logically deciphering the code noted above, after your own, inanimate, classical computer violates Bell's theorem right in front of you - no "quantum computer" required. Then, you too will know.

    Rob McEachern