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  • Post #81

quote:

These concepts will provide a framework for a discussion

of the informational nature of reality. I will argue that if the universe were

analog, then the world would likely be random, making it largely incomprehensible.

The digital model has, however, an inherent beauty in its

imposition of an upper limit and in the convergence in computational

power to a maximal level of sophistication. Even if deterministic, that it

is digital doesnt mean that the world is trivial or predictable, but rather

that it is built up from operations that at the lowest scale are very simple

but that at a higher scale look complex and even random, though only in

appearance.

end of quote

Analog meaning random, and incomprehensiblity side steps the question of where the information from prior universes comes from. If one has a million prior universes in some sense contributing to a present universe, the analog nature of reality would merely be a statement of chaotic mixing leading to a new reformulation of the universe.

No where would that imply randomness once the PRESENT universe is set up. I.e. that reformulation could be digital in its expression with an analog mixing of prew universe information added in, as the information base for emergent gravity

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    • Post #82

    Dr. Hector Zenil,

    Your messages have been very informative. I appreciate the time you have taken to explain your views. The use of bits in order to represent information was a puzzle to me. I understand how computers fundtion. My point has to do with the practice of referring to code as information. While code is certainly information, I get the sense that the word information has been redefined to possibly represent meaning yet I don't view code as having meaning. It points us to meaning after it has been organized into a given set of signs. The code is a sign. So, the information that a code communicates, from my perspective, is meaningless unless it has been assigned previous to the use of the code. Therefore, code is information without meaning. It is a collection of signs that point us to meaning. The meaning exists elsewhere. We know where that elsewhere is, so, when we see the signs we look up the meaning elsewhere. I don't think that I agree that an analog world requires more preconditions. However, you are the expert and I don't want to monopolize your time. It is something I would have to think more about. So, I will ask one simple question: Is Morse code digital?

    James

    Dear James,

    Interesting question. Concerning whether data is different to code perhaps it would help to bring up the contribution of Alan Turing embedded in his seminal contribution of universality unifying both data and programs. While one can think of a machine input as data, and a machine as a program, each as separated entities, Turing proved, as you may know, that there is a general class of machines of the same type (defined in the same terms) capable of accepting descriptions of any other machine, and simulate their evolution for any input, hence taking a program+data as data.

    This is, for example, why one can investigate the 'computational universe' (perform an exhaustive search) either by following an enumeration of Turing machines, or using one (universal Turing) machine running an enumeration of programs as data inputs. Because both approaches are equivalent. So, in my opinion, there is not an essential difference between data and code.

    I will think about your Morse code question. Thanks.

    Hi Andrew,

    Interesting remarks. I knew people may read me as if I were opposing digital to random or algorithmic to analog. However, my path I take is, as established from the title, opposing algorithmic to random. You are right, analog may not necessarily mean a completely random world just as I claim a digital world is neither trivial nor necessarily predictable (I can unpack this upon request, an extended version of this essay is in its way, to be available at ArXiv.com).

    The question, seems to me to be, whether one can associate randomness to the concept of analog. While the connection is not trivial, just as it is not the definition of analog, I think it has often been the case that analog is associated with lesser or higher degrees of uncertainty. Either in the form of true indeterminism or in the form of fundamental impediments of infinite precision of measurements, both which I would essentially link to properties related to both analog and randomness. For example, in dynamical systems, chaotic randomness is usually defined as the infinite possible trajectories for a system to diverge from very close initial configurations, over time and space. And if the world is analog one is also fundamentally unable to take measurements and always get the same value, as if there was some randomness involved (at the level of the measurement uncertainty one could even use measurements as a kind of pseudo-random number generator).

    Thanks for your comments, I will think further about them.

    Lawrence: I have difficulties seeing how the world could be digital and analog at the same time, but it might be.

    James: When one performs a computation, say on a desktop computer, it is with a purpose in mind, for example, to print a document or to play a game. When you think that the computer started computing from 'random' data by picking programs at 'random' one gets the feeling that if the universe is a computer it was not really necessary programmed.

    As you point out, if the universe is computing something a legitimate question is to ask who put the computer to run and what the universe is computing. While the answer to the first question is beyond my scope the second may be as simple as to believe that the universe is just computing itself, and sometimes we make it compute for ourselves (computers at the end are part of the universe, and when we compute with them we ask the universe to compute something for us).

    On the other hand, if someone or something ran the universe code, the algorithmic view tells how this was, if necessarily, only at the very beginning, because the structure one finds today all over the universe is neither the result of chance nor the result of design, but can be explained by computation without having to think that there is a purpose, nor to have someone to intervene at every step to get to where it is today. This worldview claims that the universe outcome is the result of computation in which the theory of algorithmic probability explains and predicts the distribution of random-looking and organized structures.

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    • Post #86

    Dear Hector:

    I liked your essay.

    Regarding the last line of your essay, "Our reasoning and empiri-

    cal findings suggest that the information in the world is the result of processes resembling computer programs rather than of dynamics characteristic of a more random, or analog, world."

    I wonder if "... processes resembling computer programs..." will be eventually be found to be, "energies or intelligences that we currently are unable to understand, but indirect evidence points in that direction?"

    Good luck!

    joseph markell

      Hector,

      Thank you for the helpful clarification. It makes sense that one can ignore the compiler when comparing program lengths.

      Regards,

      Tom

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      • Post #88

      Hi Hector, hihihi yes indeed I like laugh....I have cried too much in my young life...thus it's better to smile to life.Hihihi we are surprisings the belgians but we have a good heart , it's the most important, we are braves simply as says Cesar in the past.hhih a little pub for this beautiful small surealist country.

      for the film,no but some friends have seen it, it a very laughing film for them,I am going to see it soon I think, I love films.In fact here in Walloonia, we prefer laughing about our politicians than others things.But at this momment, they must create the government because there that becomes so ironic without government since 260 days...soon we shall be as Iran.The first country without government.The problem is that some people wants separate the country, and the others wan't change or improve their political systems.Thus they rest at their place.Thus you imagine the entrepreneurial mind and the creations of jobs, a catastrophe for walloonia.The youngs become very irritated and angry.They see their parents for example without job and without hope.All is very expansive and the majority is very limited here in monney.The cost of life is too much important and the salaries very weaks.It's really a problem of politic.We aren't numerous in Belgium, 11 millions and 4 millions of walloons.

      Regards

      Steve

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      • Post #89

      Hector,

      I agree that an analog (undiscretized) world would be "largely incomprehensible" - it would be seen as a super symmetric void with an unbroken symmetry (essentially "the nothing").

      But we evidently have the obvious cosmos (the organized existence) and the less obvious chaos (the unorganized existence). This is the all-encompassing differentiation of reality. There is the differentiated, discretized corporeality and there is the undifferentiated, undiscretized void. There is the one and there is the zero.

      Like the many, I agree with "the notion that the universe is digital" in "the way it unfolds" - because that is the idea of the cosmic or ordered existence. But your sidestep of the foundational question regarding "what the universe is made of" dampens your essay.

      I think the big question regarding the existence includes both the 'what is discretized' and the 'how that is discretized'.

      As for information, it is obvious that people forget what they forget - so, perhaps the all-encompassing existence also forgets in the super-symmetric entropic voidness...

      Hector, perhaps you can also read and rate my essay. It would be interesting to find us together in the essay finals.

      Rafael

        Hector (and James),

        going back to the remark by James -- if the universe is a computer (or, better, a computation), it needs power supply, and needs to be programmed -- I agree with the reply that there is no need to program it for a purpose, and not need to inject information during the computation. A lot of interesting things emerge in computations that are not the result of a purposeful design, and are 'closed', that is, not interacting with the outside, as many experiments have shown.

        But we are left with the question of the 'power supply'. As a supporter of the digital/computational universe conjecture, I like to assume that everything must emerge from the universal computation (i.e., from spacetime): particles, matter, energy, up to life, and whatever else is going to emerge next. But don't we need some sort of energy to keep the computation running, step by step? How do we avoid the circularity of energy requiring energy to exist?

        Perhaps a possible answer would be: we don't need energy to run the Computation because there is no actual, physical, Digital Computer that runs it, in the same way as we do not require power for an Analog Computer to run, say, the Navier-Stokes or Einstein equations, under an analog-based understanding of the universe.

        An alternative answer, along the lines of Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, would be that the Computation does not unfold step by step: it is already all there, time being a sort of illusion (I wonder whether the fact that time and energy are conjugate variables plays a role here).

        In any case, if we insist that the computational steps 'really happen', and that they require some non-null effort, hopefully not from metaphysical entities like angels (after all, angels don't sweat), it would be wise to keep it to the bare minimum. In this respect, a prefix-free universal Turing machine (as suggested by Hector), or a Turmite, or a network mobile automaton (as discussed in my contribution), all based on the operation of a simple, localized control head, are preferable to a cellular automaton, with its global operation mode. (By the way, to my knowledge, the first to push for the localized control head idea in a physical context has been S. Wolfram.)

        Hector, James, what do you think?

        Hector, I added a remark here, but a bit up, in the Crowell-Putnam posts of Feb. 22. In the absence of an automatic notification service, I just wanted to let you know. Tommaso

          Hi Tommaso,

          I had already found your other message. Thanks.

          Yes, it is a pity there is no an automatic notification service. However, on the left column there is a useful 'most recent first' sorting checkbox that I recently found.

          I will answer your other message. Btw, I also wrote you something a week ago or so in your own discussion section concerning the question of taking data and code as different kind of entities, which I argue shouldn't be the case after Turing's work.

          Cheers.

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          • Post #93

          The power supply of the universe is already given by E = mc^2. Matter, as observation so far informs us, makes up only a tiny portion of what we see but accounts for all of what we measure. Interaction among mass points is the engine of change in particle states. Programming? There is no physical principle that prevents the universe from programming itself, with itself. Nor is there a physical principle that prevents the universe from being its own algorithm and thus entirely random.

          Tom

          Tommaso,

          I think I would need time to think more about it. But indeed, the question of the power supply is a very interesting one. My feeling is that one only needs a first (strong enough) push (e.g. the Big Bang), then symmetry breaking does the rest, and eventually the initial power fades perhaps delimiting a maximal complexity (i.e. distribution of patterns under my algorithmic view).

          For example, take a gas in a room. Thermodynamical stability is not the state in which every particle can remain still (at the same distance of every other) because a motionless state is an unstable configuration. In our reality, it requires more energy to keep everything still than just let things to collide. Now I have to accept that an analog world here would made me think that explains better why that happens, because if the underlying space were something like a grid I could not imagine why particles could not just remain still each in its own discrete cell, but in an analog world I would think that one can more easily explain why the least imperfection would break everything out. But it would suffice to start from a biased initial condition to avoid falling into an analog view to explain this because it is only necessary to explain the first symmetry breaking. At the end, even if in our minds an analog world would more likely explain this instability of particles perfectly uniformly distributed over the room space, I don't see why not one would expect also perfect equilibrium in such an analog world just as it would be the case in the digital to make an unstable motionless configuration a stable one.

          Of course one can ask about the cause of the first symmetry breaking just as one can ask about the cause of the Big Bang and the causes of it's causes. I think at the end we will end up giving up on the first cause simply because either there is a first uncaused cause or because we cannot go indefinitely backwards in time looking always for the cause of the cause. My speculative position in this regard is that there is something because it is not the case that nothing is simpler than something, I think they are equally likely, but if you start with something and run an algorithmic process on it you end up pretty much with a universe looking like the one in which we live today. The first part of this argument is mere speculation but the second part, I argue, is not.

          Thanks.

          I think Tom remark is fair. The question of the power supply can be reformulated thanks to Einstein, to the question of matter supply, that is why there is something rather than nothing, which is the question at which I arrived in my previous post in this thread. As Tom suggests, I think the universe feeds itself of power. What is the origin of the power supply may be therefore tantamount to asking the cause of the Big Bang, and perhaps the best answer today is the same answer that cosmologists provide, we don't (yet) know. The algorithmic view answers, however, much of it from that time on, or at least the question of why there are structure in our universe rather than having remained in the original state.

          Thanks Joseph,

          Actually what you mention is close, I think, to Wolfram's concept of intelligence. In Wolfram's view of intelligence it is a matter of identification rather than of sophistication. This is because of his Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE). His PCE says that most non-trivial computations turn out to be of equivalent sophistication. That may explain why we are unable to, for example, master the task of weather forecasting, because at the end weather is as sophisticated than us (our minds) and we have no way to shortcut the computation of the weather (despite using supercomputers to forecast at most a couple of days, and often still wrong for the next day). So in Wolfram's view the weather is an intelligent system with which we cannot interact because we are an intelligence of a different type.

          PCE is interesting for artificial intelligence, because it means we are surrounded by intelligence, yet we are trying so hard to create 'intelligent' systems when in fact what we are trying to create is intelligence that we recognize as such, i.e. intelligence of our same type. But the interesting conclusion is that one do not really need to try that hard designing an intelligent system, one can just go an use one of the many around in the computational universe, and then perhaps make it behave as you want (if what you want is to have it to behave like a human being) for which one would only need to have the system somehow to interact with us (and therefore have sensorial experience of the same type).

          Thanks for your comment.

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          • Post #97

          Dear Hector:

          Thanks for your nice and detailed response. I can meld your ideas with the "portal" in my own essay.

          Good luck!

          Joseph Markell

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          • Post #98

          I don't want to stray too far off-topic. However, I was reminded by the talk of weather and intelligence, of a few points about the integrity of science that I made on a blog back in 2008 in defense of my friend and collaborator Pat Frank in connection with the global warming debate. The fireworks begin at post number 27.

          Tom

          Dear Hector Zenil,

          You say above that "certain phenomena can be modeled assuming that matter and space exist as a continuum, meaning that matter is continuously distributed over an entire region of space. [but] matter is composed of molecules and atoms, separated by empty space."

          Then you say to Lawrence: "I have difficulties seeing how the world could be digital and analog at the same time, but it might be."

          I argue in my essay that the primordial gravity field is distributed over all space. But the continuous field is not initially composed of molecules and atoms. Maxwell taught fields have energy, and Einstein that energy has mass. Because gravity interacts with mass, it interacts with itself, in Yang-Mills fashion, producing fundamental particles that lead to molecules and atoms.

          These particles are discrete and stable enough to last forever [protons] in a 'low temp' environment, while the 'hi temp' of colliders restores the local mass to the 'field state' as in the 'perfect fluid' seen at RHIC and LHC when heavy ions are collided. Upon re-cooling the field again 'condenses' to stable particles, although not necessarily the same mix as pre-collision.

          This is one way that the world could be analog and digital at the same time, and my essay describes experiments to prove this.

          You also respond to James Putnam by saying that it: "may be as simple as to believe that the universe is just computing itself", then say, "if someone or something ran the universe code,...".

          My essay assumes that only one thing exists [the primordial field] and so evolution of the universe must proceed by self-interaction, which reasonably leads to our current reality. But a continuous field, interacting with itself, is essentially an analog computer.

          If the field itself is a 'real' analog computer, neither 'program code' nor 'digital computer' concepts are required. David Tong states that "no one knows how to formulate a discrete version of the laws of physics," and also that "no one knows how to write down a discrete version of the Standard Model" and so we cannot simulate the known laws of physics on a computer. And as I noted in Brian Whitworth's 'VR' essay, if the "computer" is analog, there need be no "program code" since analog computers may simply be designed via the connections. In that sense analog models are compatible with Tom Ray's remark that E=mc^2 'powers' this universe.

          Tommaso Bolognesi seems to agree when he states that "Perhaps ... there is no actual, physical, Digital Computer that runs it, in the same way as we do not require power for an Analog Computer to run, say, the Navier-Stokes or Einstein equations, under an analog-based understanding of the universe."

          The field equations are analog and the field itself is the actual physical 'analog computer' that 'executes' the 'code' for our universe. I can see how those concerned with simulating reality on a digital computer might be concerned with 'algorithmic processes', but I don't believe that the idea of replacing a real analog computer [field] capable of explaining today's reality with an imagined 'digital computer' that exists in some other dimension, if not some other world, is a step forward.

          Nevertheless, you have written a very interesting essay.

          Edwin Eugene Klingman