Is everything information? If yes, then we need new kind of physics, informational physics.
Everything we know about the Universe is information, but why are most physicists blind to that?
Dear Lev,
I am intrigued by your approach. I am interested in the event as the currency of reality, with both a 'physical dynamic' and a mental description applicable. I draw a lot on Leibniz for general framework but Whitehead specifically for the event concept. What concerns me about Rovelli's account is the symmetrical treatment of two 'systems'. To my mind events are asymmetrical in crucial respects. One is the causal sequence, which you emphasise, which has no more to do with metric time than metric space - it is a separate issue. The other is the distinction between a mode of excitation and the fields of potentials that determine the mode's progression (or perhaps connection or in your structure top to bottom relation). To my thinking every event is, in Leibnizian terms, a relation of a monadic mode to its universe, or perhaps simply the history of a monadic mode's existence in its fields. It is the mode that makes the event a non-arbitrary dynamic unit rather than an arbitrarily ringfenced 'system'. These interests may be tangential to yours but I sensed some common ground.
I worry about information as a term because to actually inform about anything we need a complicated inference machine to interpret a signal in terms of a distal event. A pulse of potential does not inform about the position of an electron unless there is a vast apparatus plus a nervous system to associated the pulse with some 'initial conditions' some clocks and rulers and whatever. Pulses may be 'the stuff of information' but I am not sure they are actually information. This need not be a fatal objection to a particular use of the word but it worries me. I also agree that strings are not where representations should start. In my own view brains do not use strings. Humans are clever because they can convert natural computation into strings for talking words and math but they do not compute with strings. Strings allow meanings to be transported in space but inside brains meanings are encoded in space - in fact in little events like your diagrams (only more complicated!).
Physicists are blind to this because physics started as a science concerned with forces and motion in space and not with information, which didn't even have any meaning at the time.
So the "information physics" will not look anything like the present physics.
Take a look at my answer at http://www.cs.unb.ca/~goldfarb/FQXi_5.pdf .
Information is logical interpretation of observations/data or processing of observations/data into information. When information id verified universally it becomes knowledge or actuality as some put it. Please, let me know any branch of investigation that is not dependent on information and its extension into theories and models.
Information physics in my view will not be more than physical truths proved or to be verified, it will be general awareness on the part of students or people at large, not physics itself.
I would not be so confident in saying that Information is a further entity [or interpreted at a higher level] compared to the Reality of Data. That is, I would not be so sure, at an hermeneutical level, that Information is to be understood according to the criteria that Plato and Aristotle used to overcome the atomistic information model suggested by Democritus.
Better than me, Carlo Rovelli recently demonstrated how Physics, especially the Quantum Theory, is inherently based on a pair of non-classical principles [# 1. "The information contained in any finite region of the phase space of any system is finished", and # 2. "It is always possible to acquire information about a new system"], and that the Information structure of the consistency of a physical system is intrinsically inherent at an aprioristic level — or at least ubiquitous in every period of its existence.
Pls, check CR's paper: http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Rovelli_information.pdf
g
Giuseppe,
Carlo Rovelli is still interpreting information in a trivial, or conventional, sense, while it has to be interpreted in the new structural way (the modern version of the Plato and Aristotle forms).
Ciro,
Just repeating the word "information" as some kind of mantra will not help to clarify its role in the Universe. We have been doing it for the last half a century.
We need to find a problem solution to which can clarify the role of information in Nature. I proposed the ubiquitous problem of induction.
Well I think Information as well as knowledge is not a physical entity (but I may be wrong here).
Information and knowledge takes place only at the level of thoughts (this in a non-strict sense).
I cannot imagine (but I am open to learn) that the information is out there floating in the air (or blowing in the wind as Bob Dylan would say) waiting for us to catch it.
I will also read both Lev and Rovelli's contributions and may get a better view after that.
Dear Arnes, I think that more and more physicists are coming to the position that information has to be taken as a fundamental notion in physics. The problem is that the rigorous way to do it is still unclear or not universally accepted. One way to approach physical processes as information processing routines is proposed in these papers that I co-authored:
http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v81/i6/e062348 and http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v84/i1/e012311, in which we introduce the notion of "operational probabilistic theory", a theory where events are identified with logical gates in a circuit.
I want to emphasize that although "more and more physicists are coming to the position that information has to be taken as a fundamental notion", they are not formally equipped, or prepared, to deal with it in a 'structural' as opposed to the numeric setting.
Dear Lev,
I am intrigued by your approach. I am interested in the event as the currency of reality, with both a 'physical dynamic' and a mental description applicable. I draw a lot on Leibniz for general framework but Whitehead specifically for the event concept. What concerns me about Rovelli's account is the symmetrical treatment of two 'systems'. To my mind events are asymmetrical in crucial respects. One is the causal sequence, which you emphasise, which has no more to do with metric time than metric space - it is a separate issue. The other is the distinction between a mode of excitation and the fields of potentials that determine the mode's progression (or perhaps connection or in your structure top to bottom relation). To my thinking every event is, in Leibnizian terms, a relation of a monadic mode to its universe, or perhaps simply the history of a monadic mode's existence in its fields. It is the mode that makes the event a non-arbitrary dynamic unit rather than an arbitrarily ringfenced 'system'. These interests may be tangential to yours but I sensed some common ground.
I worry about information as a term because to actually inform about anything we need a complicated inference machine to interpret a signal in terms of a distal event. A pulse of potential does not inform about the position of an electron unless there is a vast apparatus plus a nervous system to associated the pulse with some 'initial conditions' some clocks and rulers and whatever. Pulses may be 'the stuff of information' but I am not sure they are actually information. This need not be a fatal objection to a particular use of the word but it worries me. I also agree that strings are not where representations should start. In my own view brains do not use strings. Humans are clever because they can convert natural computation into strings for talking words and math but they do not compute with strings. Strings allow meanings to be transported in space but inside brains meanings are encoded in space - in fact in little events like your diagrams (only more complicated!).
The CMB power spectrum is there and has information about the age of universe. But, the CMB data are to be processed and analysed to find out more precise estimates that those from Hubble constant.
What is information?
The Possible Dimension, Additional to Space-Time, which
Physicists Ignore
Arie S. Issar, Shaul Sorek
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Israel, Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Israel
Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, Environmental Hydrology & Microbiology
E-mail: {issar, sorek}@bgu.ac.il
Received February 23, 2010; revised March 25, 2010; accepted March 25, 2010
Abstract
In response to Wheeler’s challenge to find an element that is: “something that itself has no localization in
space and time…pure knowledge … an atom of information” we suggest to account for Information as a dimension.
Its degrees of freedom are arithmetical (+-) and logical (if-then) forward and backward steps.
While Space refers to gaps in distance, Time refers to change in instances, Information refers to a sequence
of notions measured by the number of steps made (or bytes used) by a computer in order to perform (describe
or solve) a certain logical sentence or a sequence of logical sentences.
In physics and cosmology, digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is, at heart, describable by information, and is therefore computable. Therefore, according to this theory, the universe can be conceived of as either the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program, a vast, digital computation device, or mathematically isomorphic to such a device.
Digital physics is grounded in one or more of the following hypotheses; listed in order of decreasing strength. The universe, or reality: is essentially informational (although not every informational ontology needs to be digital) is essentially computable (the pancomputationalist position) can be described digitally is in essence digital is itself a computer (pancomputationalism) is the output of a simulated reality exercise. Not every informational approach to physics (or ontology) is necessarily digital. According to Luciano Floridi, "informational structural realism" is a variant of structural realism that supports an ontological commitment to a world consisting of the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other. Such informational objects are to be understood as constraining affordances.
Digital ontology and pancomputationalism are also independent positions. In particular, John Wheeler advocated the former but was silent about the latter; see the quote in the preceding section.
On the other hand, pancomputationalists like Lloyd (2006), who models the universe as a quantum computer, can still maintain an analogue or hybrid ontology; and informational ontologists like Sayre and Floridi embrace neither a digital ontology nor a pancomputationalist position.
Biocentric universe (from Greek: βίος, bios, "life"; and κέντρον, kentron, "center") — also known as biocentrism — is a concept proposed in 2007 by American doctor of medicine Robert Lanza, a scientist in the fields of regenerative medicine and biology,which sees biology as the central driving science in the universe, and an understanding of the other sciences as reliant on a deeper understanding of biology. Biocentrism states that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos — life creates the universe rather than the other way around. It asserts that current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness. While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism claims that scientists will need to place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.
Critics have questioned whether the theory is falsifiable. Lanza has claimed that future experiments, such as scaled-up quantum superposition, will either support or contradict the theory. Biocentrism argues that the primacy of consciousness features in the work of Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Bergson. He sees this as supporting the central claim that what we call space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects. Lanza argues that biocentrism offers insight into several major puzzles of science, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the double-slit experiment, and the fine tuning of the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe as we perceive it. According to Lanza, and Bob Berman, “biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago.”
Seven principles form the core of biocentrism. The first principle of biocentrism is based on the premise that what we observe is dependent on the observer, and says that what we perceive as reality is “a process that involves our consciousness.” The second and third principles state that “our external and internal perceptions are intertwined” and that the behavior of particles “is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer,” respectively. The fourth principle suggests that consciousness must exist and that without it “matter dwells in an undetermined state of probability. ” The fifth principle points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life. Finally, the sixth and seventh principles state that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding. Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells. ”In biocentricity, the universe consists fundamentally of information. The world of objects, space, and time emerges out of this information. Read more about this interesting theory here: http://www.biocentricity.net
Dear Arnes,
Dr Robert Lanza has a website www.robertlanza.com which is advertised (sic) as the site of ‘one of the leading scientists in the world’. Yet I have never heard of him. Surely this is an invitation to ridicule? Who would call themselves that?
From what you say he promotes an empty nineteenth century fashion called vitalism. ‘Life’ is not very interesting because it has no clear demarcation and includes trivial pestilences like the agents of mad cow disease and AIDS. What is wonderful is not life, we have a pretty clear idea of how that clunks along (it is called biology by the way). What is wonderful is being here and knowing, and there is no particular reason to link that to the ‘life’ that is a prion protein. There may be especially wonderful dynamic patterns that inhabit human brains and know in a unique way but way muddle that with 'life'.
Repeatedly in second rate philosophy there is an attempt to relate the wonderful in this world to ‘life’. Varela trod this track. The last respectable proponent was Descartes, who made a simple mistake on that count but had a lot of other very important things to say. The wonderful aspects of the world permeate everything, surely. They were wonderful in pre-Cambrian times before life. If you want an anthropic principle in which we can only know the wonders of a world that contains human beings wondering at it then it is all sorted in Leibniz. We do not need somebody who has not progressed beyond the stage of ‘adjunct professor’ to claim to have invented the idea. Berkeley toyed with the idea that the world is just an idea of ours and gave a more interesting analysis, as did the others you mention. But they all concluded that there was something more - more wonderful. You could call it God but nobody knows what anyone else would think they mean by that, so I just think of wonderful reality.
Ridicule is impolite in most cases. But I think the exception is where it is invited!
“Is everything information? If yes, then we need new kind of physics, informational physics.”
- yes, the everything in our Universe and in the absolutely infinite region outside all/everything is/are some informational patterns that are elements (members) of the ultimately fundamental absolutely infinite Set “Information”. Everythings are “the words and sentences”, including –any material objects and their interactions in our Universe.
- see “the Information as Absolute” conception: http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.3712 .
And there exists now a first attempt to built the future physics, which will be in depth the informational physics – the informational model, see and http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.4657 (The Informational Conception and Basic Physics), and http://vixra.org/abs/1311.0190 “To Measure the Absolute Speed is possible?” Besides see http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0003 (Space and Time)
Cheers
What is information? This is the question! I think we are heading towards defining it properly and uniquely and consequently incorporating it into existing physics. Yes, incorporating, as I don't see the place for two separated kinds of physics. For now we only feel what it is. Some are identifying it with various forms of entropy, others try to determine its mass. Such an activity is going on all the time, this is easy visible even in examples proposed in this discussion. For this reason I don't think it is proper to say that "most physicists are blind to it". No, they are not. They only still don't have at their disposal (don't see) neither equations nor inequalities unambiguously describing information and its fundamental properties. Many believe it cannot be destroyed (but cloning is fine) - is this true? How about Landauer's erasure then?
A lot of work is ahead.
Sure, "everything" in the universe, in the physical world, addressed by the physical sciences can be reduced to information.
I would suggest that "Reality" is more than that, more than the universe, physics and information. Reality is what the information is about.
You can tell I am not a philosopher because my post is short. I don't reference other people's work and I endeavor to address the actual topic "Nature of Reality".
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