Biology Goes Digital by Karl Coryat

Jim -- It is, in the sense that I am arguing that "reality" is exclusively digital, created and experienced exclusively by biological (and in some cases technological) systems. In other words, nature -- that which these systems perceive -- is analog, but reality for one of these systems consists exclusively of digital information. That is what my essay asserts.

Now if you define reality as being the same as nature, then no, I am not asserting that.

Karl

Thanks for a very enjoyable essay, and even the end notes. Sensible, logical and clear thinking. I hope you may be interested in mine if you have time, non technical but conceptually testing.

Best of luck

peter

Just musing:

I disagree that all physics is continuous; there is presently no indication universally of that. Though I suspect that it is true. If the systems chosen to be considered have continuous properties, but this does not mean all physics is continuous.

Consider quantum entanglement as it relates to duality. The fringe patterns appear to exist despite individual photons being used. There is an un-modeled coupling between fringe patterns and photon emissions.

Nothing can be said concretely that determines why one photon travels differently than another; discretely differently.

Observable photons only exist at a terminus. En-route in any media a photon is not detected nor observable. Only when the photon finds a pathway to our eye/detector does it become observable. Yet experimentation repeatedly shows that remote influence by things like quantum entanglement are natural and pervasive. This is non-linear because it is inconsistent actions not accounted for in known physics.

Almost all physics modeling is only consistent within tight constraints. Therefore, the models are not linear outside of those constraints.

Two photons from the same source in a distant galaxy can be detected at varying incremental lateral spacings and have different energies; undisturbed until a terminus is reached, even when passing through billions of light-years of varying gravity fields. Yet for other photons there is observable gravitational lensing. Why one set of photons, and not others?

Based upon gravitational lensing, the observable sky should be a blotchy grey from gravity induced scatter.

I happen to support the concept of quantum causality and the related physics to consider time separately from space (warping space/time relationships). The instantaneous processes associated with the decoherence of quantum entanglement supporting the systems of causality involved with a single entanglement.

I find it troubling that the speed of light can change over time (would have to look up reference). That means physics is non-linear and physics constants evolve. At what point does physics constants evolve (entropy) to the point of becoming a different dimensional state?

Do we flux out of our dimensional state and become the source of a Big Bang into a dominantly different dimensional state?

If so, what are the other systems of quantum causality that we cannot observe that we are influencing, and influenced by, as the dimensional states evolve as indicated by entropy.

Measurements mostly seem to be different recursions of meters/second, i.e. space/time. So what is different in the foundations of speed, energy, power, ....? What controls the ratios and recursions to create different observable artifacts?

This is why building relativity from quantum causality is attractive to me. There is no requirement for linearity related to relativity, yet can have a linear foundation.

How Should Humanity Steer the Future based on this article? Not with a specific narrow path based in theoretical physics. Had the proposal addressed broadly encompassing pathways that allows for current and alternate perspectives...then I think it would have substance.

This is like throwing three 12-sided dice and betting the best option comes up.

But I did like the article, and it was educational.

From Paul Cohen's 1964 proof that Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis is undecidable, at least per the Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) axioms of set theory. If so, it would then seem that there should be no process that could take us from the (ideal) analog to our "present" digital reality.

Even if the ZF axioms don't apply here, still would not the analog take us back into the fundamental problems elucidated by Zeno's paradoxes?

In short, would not such an ultimate ideal analog be identical to an absolute unity that would have to be above existence as we understand it--a transcendent root rather than a part of existence itself? If so, would this correspond to the concept of Frank Tippler's Omega Point--only transcending physics (even in the model of pure information, Platonist pure mathematical) rather than being an end result of it as per Tippler's theory? [Physics of Immortality, 1994.]