Dear John, Dear Sören and All, I think John is basically correct in starting from a physical basis for the origin of information in the universe, but Sören is also correct in that something "more" is needed to get to meaning. My view is, however, that the latter's cybersemiotics is based on a Peircean view of the properties of the universe, and that this view is crtitically incomplete, especially with regard to partial determinism, discontinuity and the operational nature of signs.
Logic in Reality provides the missing link between the physical and "non"-physical positions by relating them to the synergetic/antagonistic interactions between the actuality and potentiality of energy and energetic processes at all levels of reality, between presence and absence (cf. Deacon), etc. In my opinion, this is what "gets us to experience". Floridi has criticized my position since he assigns only epistemological value to levels of reality, whereas I try to show that the epistemology and ontology of levels cannot be totally separated. The nexus of the debate is thus here, but it would require some "actualization" of understanding of the relevance of LIR (or lack of it!) to continue along these lines. Any takers? Best wishes, Joseph ----- Original Message ----- From: Søren Brier To: John Collier ; joe.bren...@bluewin.ch ; Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez ; fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2013 11:08 PM Subject: SV: [Fis] Information and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology Dear John I think the discussion you have here, no matter how qualified it is, shows that it is doubtful strategy to want to explain our world, meaningful communication and our own consciousness from the physical view of reality alone. In my cybersemiotic model I suggest that we cannot reduce the physical to the biological and that to the experiential psychological and the social communicative and cannot expect to produce one unified story of the world based on natural science. For those interested I give a PhD-course in Cybersemiotics at CBS in Copenhagen 12-16. of August with invited speakers explain the idea. Information here http://www.cbs.dk/en/node/254737 . Best wishes Søren Brier Fra: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] På vegne af John Collier Sendt: 16. maj 2013 20:20 Til: joe.bren...@bluewin.ch; Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez; fis@listas.unizar.es Emne: Re: [Fis] Information and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology Joseph, fisers, I have been busy with teaching (250 students in an environmental ethics course I have never taught before), so I set this aside to look at later. I am getting 250 essays in tomorrow, less laggards, so I decided to get this out now. At 02:42 AM 2013/03/17, joe.bren...@bluewin.ch wrote: Dear Pedro, Dear FISers, In our search for the "foundations of information" two years ago, we looked at Michael Conrad's fluctuon model of the universe. We came to the conclusion, I think, that 1) any coupling of fluctuations in the quantum vacuum to thermodynamic entities (biological macromolecules) has not been confirmed and 2) the concept of information as energy does not apply to the "timeless" vacuum background. The vacuum background is random, and hence contains no information in the negentropy sense (see my "kinds" at Kinds of Information in Scientific Use. 2011. cognition, communication, co-operation. Vol 9, No 2 ). However "it from bit" information appears and disappears. It can be magnified in principle, but I know of no detected cases. David Layzer, in his Cosmogenesis, argued that our branch of the universe got a "cold start" from a large fluctuation, at least part of which we reside in. In this case we get both an information and an energy bulge, which produces negentropic information as the expansion rate exceeds the relaxation rate. This happens as the universe expands, and relaxation takes longer. Before that we have undifferentiated energy. After that we have at least a phase separation between matter and energy that is not just fluctuations in the background. I plan to present some stuff on the relation between information and energy at the China meeting, and hope to have things better worked out by then. Roger Penrose's 2011 book, Cycles of Time, which I have just read, presents a new view of the universe as described by a conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). It makes some remarkable statements about information which I believe are worth discussion. His key point is to make information loss in black holes the condition for the reduction in the phase-space volume of the universe to permit geometrical matching between a De Sitter "end" of one universe or aeon and the smooth transition to an Einsteinian Big Bang in a new aeon, both involving massless particles. Penrose thus goes back to Hawking's original theory, as he finds it difficult to see how any real structural information can be maintained outside the black hole by the photons leaking through. Deterministic unitary "Schroedinger" evolution must be accompanied by probabilistic processes, as is also clear from Lupasco. Also clear is that as matter evaporates, the associated space (and time) collapses to the necessary conformity for which Penrose gives good mathematics, without violation of the 2nd Law as in other cyclic models. Mass reappears in the new aeon under the influence of something like a Higgs field. The idea that black holes reduce information in the universe is not the most widely accepted view, to say the least. Smullyan explains why this idea is wrong in his Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. I think his account is correct. Seth Lloyd takes up similar issues in Progamming The Universe. I was pleased to see that he did not make the elementary error of adopting the "collapse of the wave-packet" view of measurement, but sees decoherence as producing diversity, which I think is right. I believe it is an entropic process, following the work of Tony Leggett and Hank Stamp on the implications of now observed reversible measurements on quantum macrosystems. In an expanding phase space this can create both negentropy and entropy together if the expansion is faster than the relaxation time. Penrose had a screwy idea about the origins of irreversibility from QM itself. My colleague Steve Savitt debunked these ideas in the intro to his edited volume, Time's Arrows Today. I was visiting him when he worked this out, and we discussed Steve's doubts about Penrose's arguments extensively. Frankly, I don't trust Penrose's work, though that does not mean that he doesn't sometimes get things right. The other remarkable statement is in the text of Fig. 3.1, page 142, which reads as follows: "Photons and other (effectively) massless particles/fields can propagate smoothly from an earlier pre-Big Bang phase into the current post-Big Bang phase or, conversely, we can propagate the particle/field information backwards from post- to pre-Big Bang phase (italics mine)." This seems correct to me. Any particle that is massless moves at the speed of light (ignoring deviations that can reduce the average speed), so its proper distance travelled is 0. It's trajectory is on the light cone, not across space. It is neither a time-like or space-like trajectory. This means that there is no point where it makes the transition, except from some other external frame of reference. The only thing that worries me is potential interactions of photons at very high densities. I would need help with that one. Taken at face value, this might tend to confirm that particles/fields, that is, energy, are different from the information about them but inseparable from it, as some of us have argued. I would be very interested to know how some of you interpret these concepts. There is a formal resemblance to Feynmann's concept of anti-particles being normal particles moving backward in time. However, I am not at all sure that the analogy helps because it refers to thermodynamic time and this is exactly what disappears in the cosmological framework. As I said above, I am working on this, but how far I will get before October is not predictable right now. Maybe I could use some of that reverse photon information :-) Best, John ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
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