Trust is a word that is commonly applied to many situations and consequently has many shades of meaning. The following discussion focuses on one precise intersection of coherent meanings in the concept of trust -- in life, in the context of communication engineering, and physics.
In life, trust might be the first emotion we feel, indicated by priming in animals and humans.
More specifically, in the context of the engineering problem of Internet communications, we already [1] began by defining the same notion of trust as "that which is essential to a communication channel, but cannot be transferred from a source to a destination using that channel."
We cannot use the same channel for both the information and the trust for that information, neither sending nor receiving. A decision to trust a set of bytes (such as someone's name, a source of a communication, a name on a certificate, a digital signature, or an electronic record) must be based on factors outside the assertion of trustworthiness that is contained in that same set of bytes. Likewise, a decision to trust someone (e.g., in priming) must be based on factors outside the assertion of trustworthiness that the person (or animal) makes for himself.
At the same time, we demonstrated why trust is needed in this context, as qualified reliance on information [1]. Trust in communication theory is already considered as independent, and as something essentially communicable. We discussed specific rules that can be used for trust communication, from human to machine, machine to machine, and machine to human.
Now, the basic dimensions in physics do not (yet) include consciousness, but the difficulty in defining consciousness suggests that it might be as fundamental as space and time. If that is the case, we can add its measure, trust, as a next dimension, to the Minkowski 4-vector spacetime description, forming a new fusion at least with 5 dimensions, and similar to time in some aspects.
In this context, trust has nothing to do with priming, knowledge, or meaning, which are overly variable concepts. Trust is simply that which cannot be transferred through a particular communication channel, the same channel. It obeys a no-communication rule.
This might offer a bridge to physics, representing with trust a natural, physical unit that cannot be represented otherwise.
This is not a matter of activism, primate behavior, measuring (we can measure), or introducing psychobabble into physics, but of describing trust as a natural quantity that occurs in nature but cannot be described just by space and time, nor their fusion, in spacetime. Can we do that in physics? We already can do that in communication engineering.
[1] Technical Report Trust as Qualified Reliance on Information, Part I
A private comment that reached me compares what we wrote above, that “we cannot use the same channel for both the information and the trust for that information, neither sending nor receiving,” with consistency. That, the comment proposes, “this is basically a restatement (of sorts) of Godel's second incompleteness theorem, which says that a consistent system cannot be used to prove its own consistency.”
But trust is not consistency, this is a misconception, a false comparison -- quite independent of consistency, a source or receiver can be trusted on matters of X. Or, by being totally inconsistent, a cipher can be trusted to a larger extent. Those are two different concepts, trust versus consistency.
I could give other counter-examples. For example, consistency is not necessary for a communication process, as well-known in noisy situations, but trust is, as we showed in ref. [1] above.
Cheers, Ed Gerck
Andrei Linde asks "Is it not possible that consciousness, like space-time, has its own intrinsic degrees of freedom, and that neglecting these will lead to a description of the universe that is fundamentally incomplete?"
This questions connects with, and helps explore the discussion here, and is discussed by Andrei in [1].
Cheers, Ed Gerck
[1] https://andrei-linde.squarespace.com/s/universe-life-consciousness.pdf
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