“Paradox, noun:
a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory: a potentially serious conflict between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity known as the information paradox.” -- Apple Dictionary, Copyright © 2005–2014 Apple Inc.
In Eskimo, Inuit culture, wolves and caribou were seen as one animal, interdependent one part to another. The wolf winnows the sick and the weak making the caribou stronger, the caribou feeds the wolf. This apprehension arose through indigenous observation.
Is it is useful to consider energy and information in Inuit fashion, not as some literary conceit, but rather a pragmatic description of physical mechanics? Are energy and information best seen as part of a single dynamic? Do they constitute the basic plastique from which physical form emerges? Do they arise complementarily at a fundamental physical level? Rather than attribute, is there utility in viewing information as an active agency and integral counterpoise to energy in physical dynamics?
From here it is difficult to know if this notion is already somehow implicit in current theory. It is also difficult to determine the point at which legitimate natural philosophy morphs into some variety of cargo cult physics.
Nevertheless, one thing does rest upon another. In a proper physics the observable ability of the universe to reach a highly improbable consensus should arise from and rest upon something in the theory. Is that the case?
Consider that 7.46 E+29 proton/neutron masses have traveled diverse paths over interstellar distances to finally coalesce in the form of a 2003 Toyota Tacoma pickup, gold in the color with matching camper shell. Given gas diffusion as statistically normative, this is a hugely improbable concurrence. Surely no physical law has been violated, but does the possibility of such a phenomenon arise from and rest squarely upon physical theory? Should that be the case?
Of course this Toyota is simply a human artifact and surrogate for the larger question of why life itself. How so this rolling wave front of intricate, adaptive consensus with its integral waste removal? Do we recognize where the possibility of life written on the wall of the standard model?
The notion of energy and information being one entity may have little immediate appeal, but it may become more palatable if we differentiate between the two broad species of information – the domestic and the feral. Our expectations of information are based upon our experience with the former and the data points do not fully reveal the latter. It is with feral information that the notion gains traction.
A very rough look at the simple premise here is that domestic information is a reflection of feral information within the boundary of a sufficiently complex stateful system. It is “bit from it” and arises through a kind of Midas touch phenomenon wherein, in one instance, some feature of the lively world is touched and frozen in the glowing digits of an LED readout and thus converted to coinage of unchanging value. For example, the statement from your (Bee’s) earlier post on the information loss paradox - “That what you need to specify the precise state I will call information.” - is pragmatic and also confined to the domestic use of the term.
And again roughly as to feral information, consider the familiar illustration of Maxwell’s Demon’s workplace, the large rectangle hypothetically divided into two chambers by the line through its center. Now anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested that, “information is the difference that makes a difference.” By that reckoning the most significant information in the picture is that line which makes the difference between the chambers. Moving from a hypothetical to a physical laboratory setting, as the difference in thermodynamic potential between the two chambers increases so must the thickness of the plate steel maintaining that difference.
Be it chemical gradient across a membrane, or the four inch plank between the sailor and the sea, all physical structure is built upon instances of making a difference. And as one thing rests upon another, there is somewhere root cause for making a difference.
In Ridgeway Colorado, about fifty meters from the Tacoma, there is an enclosed natural hot spring pool with morning sun coming through the windows, reflecting off the surface of the water and casting dancing patterns of light on a shaded wall. They look like overlaid audio waveforms on an oscilloscope or perhaps like a score of children waving sparklers on a foggy night. No matter how we chose to characterize them, the light patterns are what they are.
This scene is a variation on a classic theme. Here the dancing light is a facet of the physical universe that includes the enclosed hot pool, the Toyota Tacoma and us, the sufficiently complex stateful systems, with our own enclosures and shaded walls.
Here though, the morning sunlight and water’s surface represent something else, an imagined proto-physical level of reality that may be inferred, but not physically accessed. And note that here there is a difficulty with the prefix “proto” since at this level all prefixes are equally undefined. It could be co-physical. But it is at this level that what we come to call energy and information arise.
Perhaps venturing further in some variety cargo cult physics we have axioms:
Axiom #1: The universe is whole, unbroken and of apiece entire.
(I have heard this from a number of sources.)
Axiom #2: The universe is divided, one part different from another.
(This seems most evident.)
Axiom #3: One thing rests upon another.
(The scientific premise.)
Axiom #4: What you get depends on how you slice it.
(Conic Sections, Wave-Particle Duality, Heisenberg Uncertainty, Gödel Incompleteness)
If axioms one and two are both true then it follows that any differences in nature are basically topological in nature; that all boundaries have at least one end and that for any difference across a boundary there is equally a similarity.
Three sandbox, scale free equations.
1) Change + Constraint = O
2) Movement + Stillness = O
3) Continuous + Discrete = O
Wherein “O” is a symbol indicating any of the species of recursive dynamics including chaotic, and further, the qualities on the left side of the equations are conserved on the right. Given the prevalence of recursive behavior at all scales one might think it arises at a fundamental level.
So what I am grasping at is the following:
“Andrew Truscott and his team showed that if you offer a speeding helium atom two possible paths, the route it takes appears to be retroactively determined by the act of measuring the atom at the end of its journey. The team reported the strange discovery in Nature Physics in May.”
Thanks.
a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory: a potentially serious conflict between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity known as the information paradox.” -- Apple Dictionary, Copyright © 2005–2014 Apple Inc.
In Eskimo, Inuit culture, wolves and caribou were seen as one animal, interdependent one part to another. The wolf winnows the sick and the weak making the caribou stronger, the caribou feeds the wolf. This apprehension arose through indigenous observation.
Is it is useful to consider energy and information in Inuit fashion, not as some literary conceit, but rather a pragmatic description of physical mechanics? Are energy and information best seen as part of a single dynamic? Do they constitute the basic plastique from which physical form emerges? Do they arise complementarily at a fundamental physical level? Rather than attribute, is there utility in viewing information as an active agency and integral counterpoise to energy in physical dynamics?
From here it is difficult to know if this notion is already somehow implicit in current theory. It is also difficult to determine the point at which legitimate natural philosophy morphs into some variety of cargo cult physics.
Nevertheless, one thing does rest upon another. In a proper physics the observable ability of the universe to reach a highly improbable consensus should arise from and rest upon something in the theory. Is that the case?
Consider that 7.46 E+29 proton/neutron masses have traveled diverse paths over interstellar distances to finally coalesce in the form of a 2003 Toyota Tacoma pickup, gold in the color with matching camper shell. Given gas diffusion as statistically normative, this is a hugely improbable concurrence. Surely no physical law has been violated, but does the possibility of such a phenomenon arise from and rest squarely upon physical theory? Should that be the case?
Of course this Toyota is simply a human artifact and surrogate for the larger question of why life itself. How so this rolling wave front of intricate, adaptive consensus with its integral waste removal? Do we recognize where the possibility of life written on the wall of the standard model?
The notion of energy and information being one entity may have little immediate appeal, but it may become more palatable if we differentiate between the two broad species of information – the domestic and the feral. Our expectations of information are based upon our experience with the former and the data points do not fully reveal the latter. It is with feral information that the notion gains traction.
A very rough look at the simple premise here is that domestic information is a reflection of feral information within the boundary of a sufficiently complex stateful system. It is “bit from it” and arises through a kind of Midas touch phenomenon wherein, in one instance, some feature of the lively world is touched and frozen in the glowing digits of an LED readout and thus converted to coinage of unchanging value. For example, the statement from your (Bee’s) earlier post on the information loss paradox - “That what you need to specify the precise state I will call information.” - is pragmatic and also confined to the domestic use of the term.
And again roughly as to feral information, consider the familiar illustration of Maxwell’s Demon’s workplace, the large rectangle hypothetically divided into two chambers by the line through its center. Now anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested that, “information is the difference that makes a difference.” By that reckoning the most significant information in the picture is that line which makes the difference between the chambers. Moving from a hypothetical to a physical laboratory setting, as the difference in thermodynamic potential between the two chambers increases so must the thickness of the plate steel maintaining that difference.
Be it chemical gradient across a membrane, or the four inch plank between the sailor and the sea, all physical structure is built upon instances of making a difference. And as one thing rests upon another, there is somewhere root cause for making a difference.
In Ridgeway Colorado, about fifty meters from the Tacoma, there is an enclosed natural hot spring pool with morning sun coming through the windows, reflecting off the surface of the water and casting dancing patterns of light on a shaded wall. They look like overlaid audio waveforms on an oscilloscope or perhaps like a score of children waving sparklers on a foggy night. No matter how we chose to characterize them, the light patterns are what they are.
This scene is a variation on a classic theme. Here the dancing light is a facet of the physical universe that includes the enclosed hot pool, the Toyota Tacoma and us, the sufficiently complex stateful systems, with our own enclosures and shaded walls.
Here though, the morning sunlight and water’s surface represent something else, an imagined proto-physical level of reality that may be inferred, but not physically accessed. And note that here there is a difficulty with the prefix “proto” since at this level all prefixes are equally undefined. It could be co-physical. But it is at this level that what we come to call energy and information arise.
Perhaps venturing further in some variety cargo cult physics we have axioms:
Axiom #1: The universe is whole, unbroken and of apiece entire.
(I have heard this from a number of sources.)
Axiom #2: The universe is divided, one part different from another.
(This seems most evident.)
Axiom #3: One thing rests upon another.
(The scientific premise.)
Axiom #4: What you get depends on how you slice it.
(Conic Sections, Wave-Particle Duality, Heisenberg Uncertainty, Gödel Incompleteness)
If axioms one and two are both true then it follows that any differences in nature are basically topological in nature; that all boundaries have at least one end and that for any difference across a boundary there is equally a similarity.
Three sandbox, scale free equations.
1) Change + Constraint = O
2) Movement + Stillness = O
3) Continuous + Discrete = O
Wherein “O” is a symbol indicating any of the species of recursive dynamics including chaotic, and further, the qualities on the left side of the equations are conserved on the right. Given the prevalence of recursive behavior at all scales one might think it arises at a fundamental level.
So what I am grasping at is the following:
- There is somehow a twist in the fundamental topology of the universe making one part lie cross-grained with another.
- That the physical universe emerges as a result of this fundamental tension between topologies.
- That what we recognize as energy and information arise complementarily from and are rooted in this fundamental topology.
- That the comprehensive efficacy of physical law in the universe arises from a co-physical level.
- That the universe is fundamentally adaptive at a level where neither time nor space has metric.
“Andrew Truscott and his team showed that if you offer a speeding helium atom two possible paths, the route it takes appears to be retroactively determined by the act of measuring the atom at the end of its journey. The team reported the strange discovery in Nature Physics in May.”
Thanks.
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