On 6/30/2014 9:35 PM, LizR wrote:
ISTM...
In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information
is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of
these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or
whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved.
There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would
indicate that the real picture is something like "it from bit" or what might be called
"primitive informationism". Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the
black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the
holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing
a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other
things I don't know about ... perish the thought).
That's the Landauer limit, which isn't really relevant at a fundamental level. It's a
thermodynamic law which is reducible to statistical mechanics.
PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary
consequence of comp, which would give the "ontological chain" arithmetic ->
consciousness -> information -> matter (I think ... this is all "ISTM" of course).
OK, except I think the chain is:
arithmetic -> information -> matter -> consciousness -> arithmetic
and I'm not so inclined to take it as more than another possible model of the world. I
think of it as a way to describe and predict and think about the world; but without
supposing that it's possible to prove or to know with certainty the world must be that way.
As for A Garrett Lisi, I was under the impression that his particles were something like
a "point in a weight diagram" - or something - which sounds to me at least like some
form of information theoretic entity. But I have to admit my understanding of how birds
and flowers could emerge from the E8 group or whatever it's called is, well, about like
this...
In a way, all of fundamental physics posits information theoretic entities. "Particles"
are nothing more than "what satisfies particle equations". Bruno complains about
Aristotle and "primitive matter", but I don't know any physicists who go around
saying,"I've discovered primitive matter." or "Let's work on finding primitive matter."
They just want a theory that is a little more comprehensive, a little more accurate, a
little more predictive than the one they have now. And they couldn't care less what stuff
is needed in their theory - only that it works.
Brent
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