Dear Manfred (if I may),

thank you for your kindness. I think indeed that investigating more the foundations of classical physics, which is regarded as a paradigm of perfect explanation, could teach us a lot about GR and QM as well.

All good wishes,

Flavio

Dear David,

admittedly, my knowledge of string theory is very limited and I am not sure I can comment on any of your questions right now. I will have a look at what you suggest.

Thanks for this.

All the best,

Flavio

Dear Shawn,

thanks for your comment, which I find interesting. I am not familiar with the distinction you make between data and information. Do you have a reference where I can look this up? Information is a well defined mathematical concept (defined by Shannon and others) and I used it in that sense in my essay. Intutively, in a physical sense à la Landauer, it can be related to the amount of distinct states of a system. However, this is somehow independent of the specific physical means of encoding. I would call data a specific way of encoding information.

All the best,

Flavio

Dear Flavio,

Thanks for reading my message with an open mind. I'm going to target my reply at those readers who don't yet know what we're talking about:

Information, in base-2 for mental simplicity's sake, is the average number of bits required to N states (e.g. log(N)/log(2)).

Information's a property of the data as a whole, not the actual data themselves; information's metadata.

Like, if you have 10 integers, and they're all set to the value of, say, 4, then the average information per datum is log(1)/log(2) = 0. The data are real, and the information is ephemeral.

Does that make any sense?

- Shawn

P.S. Sorry for the error in my earlier reply. It should read:

Information, in base-2 for mental simplicity's sake, is the average number of bits required to encode N states (e.g. log(N)/log(2)).

P.P.S. I have a PDF file explaining it more clearly:

https://vixra.org/abs/1107.0054

Shawn,

Re Shawn Halayka wrote on Mar. 11, 2020 @ 20:26 GMT and Shawn Halayka replied on Mar. 11, 2020 @ 21:12 GMT:

Your "information" is just another sign or symbol, not essentially different to binary digits or data. This "information" does not "emerge" from data: someone has to organise for a calculation to be done. This "information" only exists from the point of view of someone who know what the signs and symbols mean.

Dear Lorraine,

Thanks for your comments, even though we disagree on some parts.

I am a fan of Jung, who basically said that a symbol's meaning is unknown, whereas a sign's meaning is known.

IF you measure something 10 times, and it is the same value all 10 times, the entropy is 0. Do you disagree?

- Shawn

Shawn,

Known to whom? The supposed difference between a sign and a symbol is irrelevant because a sign from the point of view of one person is a symbol from the point of view of another person. Basically, signs/ symbols are not measured: they can be used to represent calculations or the results of measurement. You can also do calculations on (e.g.) a string of binary digit symbols, but its is all symbols. Who is doing the calculations or arranging for the calculations to be done? From whose point of view are the symbols information?

Dear Lorraine,

If you wish to continue this conversation, please first answer my question about entropy.

Better yet, please move the conversation to my essay page. :)

- Shawn

@ all,

i am not software-developer or mathematician, but i would make a picture like that:

A: if you build a 3-dim object-relational database with sql to cover reality and use only (1) and (0), then data is 3dimensional while information is a derived 2dimensional relational database of (1) and (0) (the old fashined Elon Musk playing in the Matrix to find out how matrix works)

B: if you build a 3-dim object relational database to cover reality and use only (1) and (-1), then you decoded matrix and information is 3-dimensional. a change of any bit would change the full content of the whole database (butterfly-effect-trigger)

security advice: this is potentially very dangerous AI and must be regulated global by governments as it will destroy earth if not.

Take care, Manfred

Dear Flavio,

you've presented an eminently readable and well-reasoned overview of the notion that classical physics can be interpreted in an indeterministic way. I think the point of view you suggest is a very intriguing one---with the 'orthodox' interpretation of classical mechanics being akin to a hidden variable interpretation, with real numbers obviously forever beyond experimental access.

From a larger point of view, I think this sort of project constitutes an important check on the intuition that, apart from quantum mechanics, which is 'weird' anyways, our physical theories simply tell us how stuff works. But they don't, and not just since the advent of QM: there is always an issue of interpretation, of matching the formalism to the world, so it's a good thing to point out that even if that interpretation appears obvious, one can suggest alternatives.

I also particularly appreciate the brief rundown of the history of indeterminism in classical mechanics; I was not aware of any dissent with the 'received view' of classical mechanics as a deterministic 'clockwork'. Although of course, such ideas go back to antiquity: Lucretius, in his poem De Rerum Natura, attributes to Epicurus the view that atoms sometimes 'swerve' in an unpredictable way while falling through the void, holding this swerve (the 'clinamen') as being responsible for any sort of creative coming-into-being whatsoever.

You're also right in perceiving some kinship between your approach to indeterminism in classical mechanics, and mine to quantum mechanics---or at least, our visualizations thereof: the figure I use to explain the origin of the uncertainty principle (see slide 9 in this presentation) is almost exactly your Fig. 2! :)

I've got a few questions, though. First of all, your main argument for indeterminism seems to be that the finiteness of information within a certain volume of (phase-)space entails that certain quantities are not perfectly determined. You appeal to the Bekenstein bound to substantiate this; however, this strikes me as a bit circular---after all, the Bekenstein bound is based on quantum considerations, and hence, already comes from a theory which we know can be interpreted indeterministically. What other reasons are there for believing in the finiteness of information?

Furthermore, even if I agree (as I actually do) that the amount of information is finite, it seems that one could 'save the phenomena' by just moving to the computable reals instead---one might then imagine basing classical physics on computable analysis, which also evades the somewhat troublesome use of---in your interpretation---unphysical limits in the definition of key quantities, as happens in ordinary real analysis applied in classical mechanics. Also, the computable reals lie dense in the real numbers, so to any---actually every---degree of accuracy, you can always assume that a given quantity is provided by a fixed, computable real number. Do you see any issues with this approach? (It's obviously fine, however, to just consider this as one possible interpretation of classical mechanics, you however having chosen another.)

Additionally, I'm not quite clear on how your requirement of intersubjectivity can be guaranteed, if certain quantities have a fundamentally random value until they're measured. For one, doesn't this imply a kind of nonlocal influence? If I measure the electron's charge to an unprecedented degree of precision in my lab, does that force the value that Joe Q Alien measures in the Andromeda galaxy to spontaneously agree with my measurement? Of course, if we're talking Newtonian mechanics, there is no obvious issue with this, as for instance gravitational influences are already taken to be instantaneous; but it would apparently make it harder to reconcile this view with relativistic theories, like Maxwellian electromagnetism. Then again, this sort of nonlocality would seem to be of the same kind as that in Bohmian mechanics, in the sense that one could not use it to actually transmit information.

Anyway, so much for my initial thoughts on your fine essay. I wish you the best of luck in this contest, and look forward to discussing with you!

Cheers

Jochen

    Dear Flavio:

    Thank you for a fresh interpretation of our deterministic problems.

    During reading your essay I had the following thoughts:

    I agree with your quotes of Rovelli and Born.

    Also, Landauers principle"Information is physical", is leading to the conclusion that information needs space. Space is restricted to the emergent phenomenon "reality", and there the smallest possible unit is a Planck sphere. Just as in your perception.

    "Real numbers can be physically meaningful in so far as their information content is almost always infinite" You are replacing real numbers by FIQ's and introducing "propensities", this is meaningful and helpful for the approach of determinism in our reality.

    An "agent external to everything" and the I in our emergent reality, in my perception this means an agent inside another emergent reality that has the ability to acquire information from our reality, however, this means that his "observations" make our reality part of his own. IF he is really external to everything he receives no information from our reality, so its past continues in its own deterministic way and Ei is not changing.

    "A theory Id is said to be causal if there is no signalling from the future". As we are experiencing only events from the past, choices are made in the relative future by our partial consciousness (linked with the entity Total Simultaneity), once the choice is made it becomes a cause in our emergent reality...

    On your note 8 (page 7) about the MWI, in my interpretation (Total Simultaneity Interpretation) I propose that ALL probable future realities and ALL probabilities that have led to the NOW limit of ALL deterministic pasts of ALL realities are forming a complete set of probabilities. No split-ups any more, just choices.

    I congratulate you with this well-worded essay. I hope that you will free some of your time to read my less well-worded and more philosophical essay that is also trying to find a new interpretation of our reality.

    Best regards

    Wilhelmus de Wilde

      Sorry, it appears the link to the presentation I alluded to didn't make it into the post... See here: https://www.academia.edu/37587972/Epistemic_Horizons_and_Reconstructions_of_Quantum_Mechanics

      Flavio,

      the answer to determinism/indeterminism is straight forward: the 'determinism' of classical physics is just the catastrophic result of the transposition of KOWLEDGE into the Humean domain of historicity, that is, the psychologisation of physics. Real progress in the natural sciences is halted by empiricism!

      Heinz

      Shawn,

      Entropy is not applicable to the situation you described.

      The problem is that the word "information" is used to describe 3 completely different things:

      1. Before human beings arrived in the world, with their languages mathematics and computers, and still today, the world runs on information.

      2. We represent the world with symbols e.g. letters, words, numbers, and the equations of physics. We re-represent these symbols with binary digit symbols. These symbols are also called "information", but more correctly they are symbolic representations of information.

      3. We perform calculations on these symbolic representations of information. The results of the calculations are also called "information", but more correctly they are a measure derived from symbolic representations of information. This is where Shannon information and ideas of information entropy belong.

      Dear Lorraine,

      Like Laplace said, it's all about the data.

      - Shawn

      Dear Manfred,

      Great observation on your part. They're called databases, not "infobases", for a reason.

      - Shawn

      Dear Jochen,

      thanks so much for your extremely kind comments and the interesting remarks.

      Let me address your valuable questions. You are somewhat right that Bekenstein bound brings along a huge amount of theoretical background from quantum thereory and gravity. I cite this just to prove that there exist formal arguments in support of what I want to tell, but, in fact, my ideas are more fundamental and try to be free of that theoretical baggage. My main argument is not as formal, but perhaps can be conceived as an operational approach that takes as a primitive the Landauer's principle.

      As for saving the finite information by appealing to "computable analysis" only instead of removing realm nummbers, I don't see any arguments against this at the moment. It looks to me as an alternative approach. However, I should think more about its consequences determinism in that case. I discuss some other alternatives in my paper with Gisin (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.03697.pdf).

      Indeed, you hit the nail on the head on your comment on intersubjectivity, if you are thinking of some supposed constant of nature. With my intersubjective requirement of measure I mainly had in mind two agents measuring the very same object in different moments. We have received several comments on what is the status of constants of physics (say the charge of electron) in the FIQ-based model of physics. While this is still object of our research, my current understanding is that -assuming that the Universe has been expanding from a very localized region- the peculiarity of constants of nature is that they have been determined with very high precision in the first instants of the Universe. So, even if they are now in space-like separated regions when the get measured, very many of their digits are already stable.

      All the best!

      Flavio