Dear Folks,
Julian Barbour wrote a paper entitled "Bit from It" for the 2011 FQXi Essay
Contest, readily accessible on-line at Bit from It - FQXi. It won only 4th
prize, but it shows pretty clearly that the It-from-Bit position mistakes
abstraction for reality. As Barbour puts it, just because we can observe dots
on a screen in a carefully prepared experiment is no proof that at root the
world consists (or is constituted by) immaterial single-digit information.
Barbour errs, however, in drawing the conclusion that continuity is an illusion
and that nature is fundamentally digital. Reality can only be, in my logic,
continuous and discontinuous. It is this "fact" that supports the proper
meaning of John Collier's metaphysics that every /thing/ must go. Every /thing/
in the bad old sense must go, but not things as properties and relations, which
go "all the way down".
I would really hope that all of you read this short article and that we return
to the discussion subsequently. Note that the subject of this year's Contest is
It from Bit or Bit from It . . .
Best,
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Logan
To: Bruno Marchal ; fis ; John Collier
Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 6:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Collier's Metaphysics
Bruno - An interesting definition of God, omnipresent, omnipotent and
omniscient. And equally mysterious. Turing emulable and Robinson Arithmetic.
How does one derive an understanding of the real world (the acoustic world)
from axioms. The scientific method of observation, generalization, hypothesis
building and testing seems something worth emulating. Let's call it science
method emulable. You cannot derive science from math or logic and prove
anything with math or science about the real world. And I can prove it if you
accept Popper's axiom that for a proposition to be scientific it has to be
falsifiable. Well if you prove anything is true then it cannot be falsified and
hence is not a scientific proposition. I think the trouble with your fallacy,
Bruno, is that it is wrong (this is a Marshall McLuhan gag that he used all the
time and made famous in his cameo appearance in Annie Hall.) Bruno, do not take
this playful approach to your post as a personal attack. I am just playing with
the ideas you put out there for our enlightenment. And as McLuhan said, if you
don't like these ideas I have others. With kind regards and thanks for your
stimulating post - Bob
On 2013-05-26, at 11:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Jerry,
On 26 May 2013, at 16:58, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:
John:
I have followed your writings for many years - perhaps more than two
decades now.
Frankly, from the perspective of a hardcore realist, I find much of your
written work to be highly metaphysical in nature, including the sentences which
I cited in the post of May 17, 2013.
Your notion of metaphysics appears to so extremely narrowly restricted
that you can exempt your own highly metaphysical writings from your definition
of metaphysics. In fact, the traditional usage of the term "metaphysics" is
not narrowly restricted.
On numerous occasions, you assert your views as a MIT trained physicist.
Yet in this immediate exchange, the responsibility for the assertions are
attributed to others. Puzzling.
Have you every given any serious metaphysical thought to the scientific
meaning of the phrase "it from bit"?
Perhaps the dichotomy of your perspectives is amply illustrated by the
title of your book:
"Every Thing Must Go"
This title itself is a simple logical assertion. It expresses logical
necessity.
If this assertion is true, what would remain?
Life?
Matter?
Mentation?
John Collier?
MIT style physics?
Mathematics?
Philosophy of science?
Metaphysics?
Nothing?
This title alone expresses a deep and profound metaphysical perspective.
At heart, I am a simple man, in love with nature, logic and mathematics.
From my perspective, your voluminous metaphysical writings tend to be contrary
to my experience of nature, logic and mathematics.
"It from bit"? Really?
My question of May 17, 2013 remains open:
How would a rational realist distinguish this metaphysical perspective
from witchcraft or magic?
Cheers
If we assume that there is a level of description such that we are Turing
emulable, then ontologically everything can go except some term of a first
order Turing universal theory. I use Robinson Arithmetic to fix the things.
Then nothing does go, as it can be shown how the appearances of the
physical laws can be explained in that theory (with computationalism at the
metalevel, or not). This leads to a derivation of physics from the additive and
multiplicative theory of numbers, making the theory testable (comp + classical
theory of knowledge). Then, thanks to Gödel, Löb and Solovay makes it possible
to distinguish what is true for the subject and what the subject can justify.
It saves us form reductionism, as it shows that the universal machines can
defeat all complete theory about them. It shows that numberland is already full
of life, and where the information fluxes are born. Eventually it makes us more
ignorant, as the "arithmetical truth is big and beyond the computable. And the
computable lives there, surrounded by the non computable.
Information is a key notion, but, imo, not as fundamental than the
universal machine, or the universal number, which can interpret that
information, and react to it: not always in a predictible way, though. Another
key is the distinction between first person and third person views, singular
and plural. A simple notion of first person indeterminacy explains why the
psycho-brain identity can't work, and suggest precise formulation of the
mind-body problem.
This approach generalizes to arithmetic what Everett did for quantum
mechanics. It shows that Church thesis rehabilates a Pythagorean form of
Neoplatonism. It is counter-intuitive, but it explains why.
It from bit? Yes. Even already some shadows of the qubit can be explained
from bit.
(See my URL for papers and references which explains all this in details,
... sometimes in French).
I might be with John on this, perhaps. If we are Turing emulable,
everything emerges in a precise and informative way from "2+2=4". So we can
test if we are Turing emulable, and computationalism is made scientific, not
philosophical.
The few tests already done fit well with the quantum reality up to now.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Jerry
On May 23, 2013, at 2:45 AM, John Collier wrote:
Jerry, I don’t think I have a metaphysical position on information. I
was classifying the way that active scientists use the concept (or concepts). I
really don’t know what you are talking about. If you want to know the empirical
basis for the uses of information I suggest you read the original authors I
refer to. I use the concept as it has been introduced by others. Some concept
I don’t find useful, so I ignore them, but all of the use of information I have
made over the years has been in the context of its use in scientific theories.
So I really don’t see what your concern about metaphysics is. I don’t think the
issue is very important, if there is one. We detect information, we interpret
it, we process it, we hypothesize it and its properties in order to explain our
observations. It doesn’t seem much different from energy that way, at least to
me. I am not even really clear as to what having a metaphysical position on
information would be. I suppose that there are several: it is a “stuff”, it is
an illusion, it is constructed by us, and so on. I don’t really see much
advantage in pursuing these issues, and they have been applied in the past to
energy without any gain in understanding.
The part you pasted you can find the basis of in work by David Layzer
as the earliest. Negative entropy was introduced by Schroedinger in the context
of explaining how living systems reproduce and maintain themselves, and related
explicitly to information in by Leon Brillouin in his studies of measurement.
Wheeler introduced the it-from-bit view, and it has been used to study black
holes and to explain why they don’t destroy order in the universe (See Leon
Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity). Scientific sources relating
information, order and entropy are too numerous to list, but they have been
sued to explain how order and disorder can increase together in the universe. I
don’t see anything especially metaphysical in any of this work.
In general, as in the book I participated in, Every Thing Must Go, I
prefer a minimalist metaphyiscs that only commits to the kinds of things that
are required by our best science. I am not prepared to say to a scientist, “You
can’t use that concept; it violates my metaphysical preconceptions.” I don’t
really have metaphysical preconceptions except that I believe that there are
things in the world that we didn’t make or construct, and that we can have
fallible knowledge of them using fallible methodology, and that our best guide
to what there is is scientific investigation (pretty much like Peirce, or more
recently Sellars, or my sometime coauther C.A. Hooker, or the other authors on
the book I just mentioned).
And that is why I didn’t understand what you were asking when you asked
about metaphysics, especially given your quoted section.
John
From: Jerry LR Chandler [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2013 11:10 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: John Collier
Subject: Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 571, Issue 5
John:
Which does "this" refer to, Jerry?
My response was to the section of your post that I pasted / cited in my
post.
Your further assertion that:
Since the scientists involved are among the top in the respective
fields, I take that what they are doing with information concepts is
reasonable. I can't judge that as I am not a specialist in their fields.
is really astounding to me!
As you are well aware, numerous philosophies and metaphysical concepts
of information exist in the published literature.
Given your extensive list of publications in the information sciences
over several decades, I find your stance with respect to your judgments to be
remarkable.
Finally, I do not feel that I have a quarrel with anyone.
As a natural scientist, I merely asked a provocative question about
your metaphysical position.
I use the term "metaphysical" as I do not find a relationship with
either mathematics or the sciences of information as I understand them.
Does the tone of these posts suggest that you would like to change your
position?
Cheers
Jerry
On May 22, 2013, at 3:26 PM, John Collier wrote:
Which does "this" refer to, Jerry? My paper is about scientists who use
information concepts to explain things and make predictions. And then I
organized them into a nested hierarchy. Since the scientists involved are among
the top in the respective fields, I take that what they are doing with
information concepts is reasonable. I can't judge that as I am not a specialist
in their fields. If you are, then any quarrel you have is with them, not me. I
assume, prima facie, that scientists know what they are doing. I have found
Smolin, who uses the it-from-bit view to explain conservation of information
around a black hole, very approachable.
John
At 05:42 PM 2013/05/17, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:
John:
On May 17, 2013, at 5:26 AM, [email protected] wrote:
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.
How would a rational realist distinguish this metaphysical perspective
from witchcraft or magic?
Cheers
Jerry
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Robert K. Logan
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Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
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