On 16 Mar 2012, at 18:43, Guy A Hoelzer wrote:
Greetings All,
While I like to think that I am not limited to reductionistic
thinking, I find it difficult to understand any perspective on
information that is not limited to physical manifestation. I would
appreciate further justification for a non-physicalist perspective
on information. How can something exist in the absence of physical
manifestation?
If you are realist about elementary arithmetic, that is if you agree
that elementary arithmetical proposition like "17 is prime" are true
independently of you, then, by arithmetic's Turing universality, you
can show that the numbers exchange information relatively to universal
numbers, which are playing the role of relative interpreters.
I am not interested in a metaphysical perspective here, which might
have heuristic value even if it is not 'real'. The issue of
'content' and 'meaning' strikes me as entirely physical, so
mentioning those issues doesn't help me understand what non-physical
information might be. I would say that if information is physically
manifested by contrasts (gradients, negentropy, …), then content or
meaning refers to the internal dynamics of complex systems induced
by interaction between the system and the physically manifested
information. If there is no affect on internal dynamics, then the
system did not 'perceive' the information. If the information
merely causes a transient fluctuation of the internal dynamics, then
the perceived information was not meaningful to the system. At
least this is a sketch of my view that I hope illustrates why the
notions of 'content' and 'meaning' does not depart the physical
realm for me.
I can prove that if we are machine at some description level, then the
physical is both ontologically and epistemologically emerging from
numbers relation. The hypothesis of mechanism can be shown logically
incompatible with very weak form of materialism. Physics can not be
fundamental, it emerges from mathematics, indeed from what has been
called the sharable part of mathematics (sharable between classical
logicians and intuitionist logicians, it is basically arithmetic or
something recursively equivalent). We can already derive propositional
quantum logic from classical number self-reference. Arithmetic is full
of life at the start, and matter appears to be arithmetical truth as
seen from "inside".
Poetically, to be short, numbers dreams, and physical realities are
dream sharing. The quantum emerges, if mechanism is correct, from a
statistics on all computations. This makes both matter and
consciousness NON Turing emulable. In particular digital physics can
be shown self-contradictory. Those (actually old) results are not well
known but have been verified by many people. I don't think there is a
flaw, but we never can be sure, of course.
Bruno Marchal
PS see below for a concise version of the proof:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
Regards,
Guy
From: Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es<mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
>>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 04:19:31 -0700
To: Foundations of Information Science Information Science <fis@listas.unizar.es
<mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Physics of computing
Dear discussants,
I tend to disagree with the motto "information is physical" if taken
too strictly. Obviously if we look "downwards" it is OK, but in the
"upward" direction it is different. Info is not only physical then,
and the dimension of self-construction along the realization of life
cycle has to be entered. Then the signal, the info, has "content"
and "meaning". Otherwise if we insist only in the physical downward
dimension we have just conventional computing/ info processing. My
opinion is that the notion of absence is crucial for advancing in
the upward, but useless in the downward.
By the way, I already wrote about info and the absence theme in a
1994 or 1995 paper in BioSystems...
best
---Pedro
walter.riof...@terra.com.pe<mailto:walter.riof...@terra.com.pe>
escribió:
Thanks John and Kevin to update issues in information, computation,
energy and reality.
I would like point out to other articles morefocused in how
coherence and entanglement are used by living systems (far from
thermal equilibrium):
Engel G.S., Calhoun T.R., Read E.L., Ahn T.K., Mancal T., Cheng
Y.C., Blankenship R.E., Fleming G.R. (2007) Evidence for wavelike
energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems.
Nature, 446(7137): 782-786.
Collini E., Scholes G. (2009) Coherent intrachain energy in
migration in a conjugated polymer at room temperature. Science,
vol. 323 No. 5912 pp. 369-373.
Gauger E.M., Rieper E., Morton J.J.L., Benjamin S.C., Vedral V.
(2011) Sustained Quantum Coherence and Entanglement in the Avian
Compass. Phys. Rev. Lett., 106: 040503.
Cia, J. et al, (2009) Dynamic entanglement in oscillating
molecules. arXiv:0809.4906v1 [quant-ph]
Sincerely,
Walter
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es<mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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