2009-01-09, by John Ringland
Following is a collection of quotes from leading
thinkers that variously point towards an emerging paradigm that
challenges many of our deepest assumptions about what is real and
what is reality.
Responses to the question: “What is your
dangerous idea?”
http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_index.html
PIET
HUT Professor
of Astrophysics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
A
radical reevaluation of the character of time
Copernicus
and Darwin took away our traditional place in the world and our
traditional identity in the world. What traditional trait will be
taken away from us next? My guess is that it will be the world
itself.
We
see the first few steps in that direction in the physics, mathematics
and computer science of the twentieth century, from quantum mechanics
to the results obtained by Gödel, Turing and others. The ontologies
of our worlds, concrete as well as abstract, have already started to
melt away.
The
problem is that quantum entanglement and logical incompleteness lack
the in-your-face quality of a spinning earth and our kinship with
apes. We will have to wait for the ontology of the traditional world
to unravel further, before the avant-garde insights will turn into a
real revolution.
Copernicus
upset the moral order, by dissolving the strict distinction between
heaven and earth. Darwin did the same, by dissolving the strict
distinction between humans and other animals. Could the next step be
the dissolution of the strict distinction between reality and
fiction?
For
this to be shocking, it has to come in a scientifically respectable
way, as a very precise and inescapable conclusion — it should have
the technical strength of a body of knowledge like quantum mechanics,
as opposed to collections of opinions on the level of cultural
relativism.
Perhaps
a radical reevaluation of the character of time will do it. In
everyday experience, time flows, and we flow with it. In classical
physics, time is frozen as part of a frozen spacetime picture. And
there is, as yet, no agreed-upon interpretation of time in quantum
mechanics.
What
if a future scientific understanding of time would show all previous
pictures to be wrong, and demonstrate that past and future and even
the present do not exist? That stories woven around our individual
personal history and future are all just wrong? Now that would be a
dangerous idea.
JOHN
ALLEN PAULOS Professor
of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia; Author, A
Mathematician Plays the Stock Market
The
self is a conceptual chimera
Doubt
that a supernatural being exists is banal, but the more radical doubt
that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally
integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle"
and "Oscar," is my candidate for Dangerous Idea. This is,
of course, Hume's idea — and Buddha's as well — that the self is
an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes,
that it is not an essential and persistent entity, but rather a
conceptual chimera. If this belief ever became widely and viscerally
felt throughout a society — whether because of advances in
neurobiology, cognitive science, philosophical insights, or whatever
— its effects on that society would be incalculable. (Or so this
assemblage of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes sometimes thinks.)
CLIFFORD
PICKOVER Author,
Sex,
Drugs, Einstein, and Elves
We
are all virtual
Our
desire for entertaining virtual realities is increasing. As our
understanding of the human brain also accelerates, we will create
both imagined realities and a set of memories to support these
simulacrums. For example, someday it will be possible to
simulate your visit to the Middle Ages and, to make the experience
realistic, we may wish to ensure that you believe
yourself
to actually be in the Middle Ages. False memories may be implanted,
temporarily overriding your real memories. This should be easy to do
in the future — given that we can already coax the mind to create
richly detailed virtual worlds filled with ornate palaces and strange
beings through the use of the drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine). In
other words, the brains of people who take DMT appear to access a
treasure chest of images and experience that typically include
jeweled cities and temples, angelic beings, feline shapes, serpents,
and shiny metals. When we understand the brain better, we will be
able to safely generate more controlled visions.
Our brains
are also capable of simulating complex worlds when we dream.
For example, after I watched a movie about people on a coastal town
during the time of the Renaissance, I was “transported” there
later that night while in a dream. The mental simulation of the
Renaissance did not have to be perfect, and I'm sure that there were
myriad flaws. However, during that dream I believed
I
was in the Renaissance.
If
we understood the nature of how the mind induces the conviction of
reality, even when strange, nonphysical events happen in the dreams,
we could use this knowledge to ensure
that
your simulated trip to the Middle Ages seemed utterly real, even if
the simulation was imperfect. It will be easy to create seemingly
realistic virtual realities because we don't have to be perfect or
even good with respect to the accuracy of our simulations in order to
make them seem real. After all, our nightly dreams usually seem
quite real even if upon awakening we realize that logical or
structural inconsistencies existed in the dream.
In the
future, for each of your own real lives, you will personally create
ten simulated lives. Your day job is a computer programmer for IBM.
However, after work, you'll be a knight with shining armor in the
Middle Ages, attending lavish banquets, and smiling at wandering
minstrels and beautiful princesses. The next night, you'll be in the
Renaissance, living in your home on the Amalfi coast of Italy,
enjoying a dinner of plover, pigeon, and heron.
If this ratio
of one real life to ten simulated lives turned out to be
representative of human experience, this means that right now, you
only have a one in ten chance of being alive on the actual date of
today.
DONALD
HOFFMAN Cognitive
Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, Visual
Intelligence
A
spoon is like a headache
A
spoon is like a headache. This is a dangerous idea in sheep's
clothing. It consumes decrepit ontology, preserves methodological
naturalism, and inspires exploration for a new ontology, a vehicle
sufficiently robust to sustain the next leg of our search for a
theory of everything.
How
could a spoon and a headache do all this? Suppose I have a headache,
and I tell you about it. It is, say, a pounding headache that started
at the back of the neck and migrated to encompass my forehead and
eyes. You respond empathetically, recalling a similar headache you
had, and suggest a couple remedies. We discuss our headaches and
remedies a bit, then move on to other topics.
Of
course no one but me can experience my headaches, and no one but you
can experience yours. But this posed no obstacle to our meaningful
conversation. You simply assumed that my headaches are relevantly
similar to yours, and I assumed the same about your headaches. The
fact that there is no "public headache," no single headache
that we both experience, is simply no problem.
A
spoon is like a headache. Suppose I hand you a spoon. It is common to
assume that the spoon I experience during this transfer is
numerically identical to the spoon you experience. But this
assumption is false. No one but me can experience my spoon, and no
one but you can experience your spoon. But this is no problem. It is
enough for me to assume that your spoon experience is relevantly
similar to mine. For effective communication, no public spoon is
necessary, just like no public headache is necessary. Is there a
"real spoon," a mind-independent physical object that
causes our spoon experiences and resembles our spoon experiences?
This is not only unnecessary but unlikely. It is unlikely that the
visual experiences of homo sapiens, shaped to permit survival in a
particular range of niches, should miraculously also happen to
resemble the true nature of a mind-independent realm. Selective
pressures for survival do not, except by accident, lead to truth.
One
can have a kind of objectivity without requiring public objects. In
special relativity, the measurements, and thus the experiences, of
mass, length and time differ from observer to observer, depending on
their relative velocities. But these differing experiences can be
related by the Lorentz transformation. This is all the objectivity
one can have, and all one needs to do science.
Once
one abandons public physical objects, one must reformulate many
current open problems in science. One example is the mind-brain
relation. There are no public brains, only my brain experiences and
your brain experiences. These brain experiences are just the
simplified visual experiences of homo sapiens, shaped for survival in
certain niches. The chances that our brain experiences resemble some
mind-independent truth are remote at best, and those who would claim
otherwise must surely explain the miracle. Failing a clever
explanation of this miracle, there is no reason to believe brains
cause anything, including minds. And here the wolf unzips the sheep
skin, and darts out into the open. The danger becomes apparent the
moment we switch from boons to sprains. Oh, pardon the spoonerism.
RUDY
RUCKER Mathematician,
Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, Lifebox,
the Seashell, and the Soul
Mind
is a universally distributed quality
Panpsychism.
Each object has a mind. Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper,
flakes of skin, molecules — each of them possesses the same inner
glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and
sensations.
I'm
quite comfortable with the notion that everything is a computation.
But what to do about my sense that there's something numinous about
my inner experience? Panpsychism represents a non-anthropocentric way
out: mind is a universally distributed quality.
Yes,
the workings of a human brain are a deterministic computation that
could be emulated by any universal computer. And, yes, I sense more
to my mental phenomena than the rule-bound exfoliation of reactions
to inputs: this residue is the inner light, the raw sensation of
existence. But, no, that inner glow is not the exclusive birthright
of humans, nor is it solely limited to biological organisms.
Note
that panpsychism needn't say that universe is just one mind. We can
also say that each object has an individual mind. One way to
visualize the distinction between the many minds and the one mind is
to think of the world as a stained glass window with light shining
through each pane. The world's physical structures break the
undivided cosmic mind into a myriad of small minds, one in each
object.
The
minds of panpsychism can exist at various levels. As well as having
its own individuality, a person's mind would also be, for instance, a
hive mind based upon the minds of the body's cells and the minds of
the body's elementary particles.
Do
the panpsychic minds have any physical correlates? On the one hand,
it could be that the mind is some substance that accumulates near
ordinary matter — dark matter or dark energy are good candidates.
On the other hand, mind might simply be matter viewed in a special
fashion: matter experienced from the inside. Let me mention three
specific physical correlates that have been proposed for the mind.
Some
have argued that the experience of mind results when a superposed
quantum state collapses into a pure state. It's an alluring metaphor,
but as a universal automatist, I'm of the opinion that quantum
mechanics is a stop-gap theory, destined to give way to a fully
deterministic theory based upon some digital precursor of spacetime.
David
Skrbina, author of the clear and comprehensive book Panpsychism
in the West,
suggests that we might think of a physical system as determining a
moving point in a multi-dimensional phase space that has an axis for
each of the system's measurable properties. He feels this dynamic
point represents the sense of unity characteristic of a mind.
As
a variation on this theme, let me point out that, from the universal
automatist standpoint, every physical system can be thought of as
embodying a computation. And the majority of non-simple systems
embody universal computations, capable of emulating any other system
at all. It could be that having a mind is in some sense equivalent to
being capable of universal computation.
A
side-remark. Even such very simple systems as a single electron may
in fact be capable of universal computation, if supplied with a
steady stream of structured input. Think of an electron in an
oscillating field; and by analogy think of a person listening to
music or reading an essay.
Might
panpsychism be a distinction without a difference? Suppose we
identify the numinous mind with quantum collapse, with chaotic
dynamics, or with universal computation. What is added by claiming
that these aspects of reality are like minds?
I
think empathy can supply an experiential confirmation of
panpsychism's reality. Just as I'm sure that I myself have a mind, I
can come to believe the same of another human with whom I'm in
contact — whether face to face or via their creative work. And with
a bit of effort, I can identify with objects as well; I can see the
objects in the room around me as glowing with inner light. This is a
pleasant sensation; one feels less alone.
Could
there ever be a critical experiment to test if panpsychism is really
true? Suppose that telepathy were to become possible, perhaps by
entangling a person's mental states with another system's states. And
then suppose that instead of telepathically contacting another
person, I were to contact a rock. At this point panpsychism would be
proved.
I
still haven't said anything about why panpsychism is a dangerous
idea. Panpsychism, like other forms of higher consciousness, is
dangerous to business as usual. If my old car has the same kind of
mind as a new one, I'm less impelled to help the economy by buying a
new vehicle. If the rocks and plants on my property have minds, I
feel more respect for them in their natural state. If I feel myself
among friends in the universe, I'm less likely to overwork myself to
earn more cash. If my body will have a mind even after I'm dead, then
death matters less to me, and it's harder for the government to cow
me into submission.
CARLO
ROVELLI Professor
of Physics, University of the Mediterraneum, Marseille; Member,
Intitut Universitaire de France: Author, Quantum
Gravity
What
the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be
true
There
is a major "dangerous" scientific idea in contemporary
physics, with a potential impact comparable to Copernicus or Darwin.
It is the idea that what the physics of the 20th century says about
the world might in fact be true.
Let
me explain. Take quantum mechanics. If taken seriously, it changes
our understanding of reality truly dramatically. For instance, if we
take quantum mechanics seriously, we cannot think that objects have
ever a definite position. They have a positions only when they
interact with something else. And even in this case, they are in that
position only with respect to that "something else": they
are still without position with respect to the rest of the world.
This is a change of image of the world far more dramatic that
Copernicus. And also a change about our possibility of thinking about
ourselves far more far-reaching than Darwin. Still, few people take
the quantum revolution really seriously. The danger is exorcized by
saying "well, quantum mechanics is only relevant for atoms and
very small objects...", or similar other strategies, aimed at
not taking the theory seriously. We still haven't digested that the
world is quantum mechanical, and the immense conceptual revolution
needed to make sense of this basic factual discovery about nature.
Another
example: take Einstein's relativity theory. Relativity makes
completely clear that asking "what happens right now on
Andromeda?" is a complete non-sense. There is no right now
elsewhere in the universe. Nevertheless, we keep thinking at the
universe as if there was an immense external clock that ticked away
the instants, and we have a lot of difficulty in adapting to the idea
that "the present state of the universe right now", is a
physical non-sense.
In
these cases, what we do is to use concepts that we have developed in
our very special environment (characterized by low velocities, low
energy...) and we think the world as if it was all like that. We are
like ants that have grown in a little garden with green grass and
small stones, and cannot think reality differently than made of green
grass and small stones.
I
think that seen from 200 years in the future, the dangerous
scientific idea that was around at the beginning of the 20th century,
and that everybody was afraid to accept, will simply be that the
world is completely different from our simple minded picture of it.
As the physics of the 20th century had already shown.
What
makes me smile is that even many of todays "audacious scientific
speculations" about things like extra-dimensions,
multi-universes, and the likely, are not only completely unsupported
experimentally, but are even always formulated within world view
that, at a close look, has not yet digested quantum mechanics and
relativity!
Responses to the question: “What do you
believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html
ANTON
ZEILINGER What
I believe but cannot prove is that quantum physics teaches us to
abandon the distinction between information and reality.
The
fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to
make an operational distinction between reality and information. In
other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about
any object, about any feature of any object, we always make
statements about the information we have. And, whenever we make
scientific predictions we make statements about information we
possibly attain in the future. So one might be tempted to believe
that everything is just information. The danger there is solipsism
and subjectivism. But we know, even as we cannot prove it, that there
is reality out there. For me the strongest argument for a reality
independent of us is the randomness of the individual quantum event,
like the decay of a radioactive atom. There is no hidden reason why a
given atom decays at the very instant it does so.
So
if reality exists and if we will never be able to make an operational
distinction between reality and information, the hypothesis suggests
itself that reality and information are the same. We need a new
concept which encompasses both. In a sense, reality and information
are the two sides of the same coin.
I
feel that this is the message of the quantum. It is the natural
extension of the Copenhagen interpretation. Once you adopt the notion
that reality and information are the same all quantum paradoxes and
puzzles disappear, like the measurement problem or Schrödinger's
cat. Yet the price to pay is high. If my hypothesis is true, many
questions become meaningless. There is no sense then to ask, what is
"really" going on out there. Schrödinger's cat is neither
dead nor alive unless we obtain information about her state.
CARLO
ROVELLI Physicist;
Institut Universitaire de France & University of the
Mediterraneum; Author, Quantum
Gravity
I
am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist. I mean that
I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about
nature, that makes no use of the notions of space and time at the
fundamental level. And that this way of thinking will turn out to be
the useful and convincing one.
I
think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful
only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like
"the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we
describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air:
if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface
down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the
water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and
insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality.
In
particular, I am convinced that time is an artifact of the
approximation in which we disregard the large majority of the degrees
of freedom of reality. Thus "time" is just the reflection
of our ignorance.
I
am also convinced, but cannot prove, that there are no objects, but
only relations. By this I mean that I am convinced that there is a
consistent way of thinking about nature, that refers only to
interactions between systems and not to states or changes of
individual systems. I am convinced that this way of thinking nature
will end up to be the useful and natural one in physics.
RUDY
RUCKER Mathematician,
Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, Infinity
and the Mind
Reality
Is A Novel.
I'd
like to propose a modified Many Universes theory. Rather than saying
every possible universe exists, I'd say, rather, that there is a
sequence of possible universes, akin to the drafts of a novel.
We're
living in a draft version of the universe—and there is no final
version. The revisions never stop.
From time to time it's
possible to be aware of this. In particular, when you relax and stop
naming things and forming opinions, your consciousness spreads out
across several drafts of the universe. Things don't need to be
particularly one way or the other until you pin them down.
Each
draft, each spacetime, each sheet of reality is itself rigorously
deterministic; there really is no underlying randomness in the world.
Instead we have a great web of synchronistic entanglements, with
causes and effects flowing forward and backwards through time. The
start of a novel matches its ending; the past matches the future.
Changing one thing changes everything. If we fully know everything
about the Now moment, we know the entire past and future.
With
this in mind, explaining an given draft of the universe becomes a
matter of explaining the contents of a single Now moment of that
draft. This in turn means that we can view the evolution of the
successive drafts as an evolution of different versions of a
particular Now moment. As Scarlett's climactic scene with Rhett is
repeatedly rewritten, all the rest of Gone
With The Wind changes
to match.
And this evolution, too, can be deterministic. We
can figure we think of there as being two distinct deterministic
rules, a Physics Rule and a Metaphysics Rule. The Physics Rule
consists of time-reversible laws that grow the Now moment upwards and
downwards to fill out the entire past and future of spacetime. And we
invoke the Metaphysics Rule to account for the contents of the Now
moment. The Metaphysics Rule is deterministic but not reversible; it
grows sideways across a dimension that we might call paratime,
turning some simple seed into the space-filling pattern found in the
Now.
The Metaphysics rule is...what? One possibility is that
it's something quite simple, perhaps as simple as an eight-bit
cellular automaton rule generating complex-looking patterns out of
pure computation. Or perhaps the Metaphysics rule is like the mind of
an author creating a novel, searching out the best word to write
next, somehow peering into alternate realities. Or, yet again, the
big Metaphysics rule in the sky could be the One cosmic mind, the Big
Aha, the eternal secret, living in the spaces between your thoughts.
DONALD
HOFFMAN Cognitive
Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, Visual
Intelligence
I
believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists.
Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of
the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the
humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very
being.
The
world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars
and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is
a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a
realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the
contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the
usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not.
For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a
computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because
this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of
software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures
dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily
experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not
for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics
of survival.
If
this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be
surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of
minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no
theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could
be, or cause, conscious experience. There are, of course, many
proposals for where to find such a theory—perhaps in information,
complexity, neurobiology, neural darwinism, discriminative
mechanisms, quantum effects, or functional organization. But no
proposal remotely approaches the minimal standards for a scientific
theory: quantitative precision and novel prediction. If matter is but
one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect
that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from
matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what
black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its
heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession.
The
heroic defense will, I suspect, not soon be abandoned. For the
defenders doubt that a replacement grounded in consciousness could
attain the mathematical precision or impressive scope of physicalist
science. It remains to be seen, of course, to what extent and how
effectively mathematics can model consciousness. But there are
fascinating hints: According to some of its interpretations, the
mathematics of quantum theory is itself, already, a major advance in
this project. And perhaps much of the mathematical progress in the
perceptual and cognitive sciences can also be so interpreted. We
shall see.
The
mind-body problem may not fall within the scope of physicalist
science, since this problem has, as yet, no bona fide physicalist
theory. Its defenders can surely argue that this penury shows only
that we have not been clever enough or that, until the right mutation
chances by, we cannot be clever enough, to devise a physicalist
theory. They may be right. But if we assume that consciousness is
fundamental then the mind-body problem transforms from an attempt to
bootstrap consciousness from matter into an attempt to bootstrap
matter from consciousness. The latter bootstrap is, in principle,
elementary: Matter, spacetime and physical objects are among the
contents of consciousness.
The
rules by which, for instance, human vision constructs colors, shapes,
depths, motions, textures and objects, rules now emerging from
psychophysical and computational studies in the cognitive sciences,
can be read as a description, partial but mathematically precise, of
this bootstrap. What we lose in this process are physical objects
that exist independent of any observer. There is no sun or moon
unless a conscious mind perceives them, for both are constructs of
consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface. To some
this seems a patent absurdity, a reductio of the position, readily
contradicted by experience and our best science. But our best
science, our theory of the quantum, gives no such assurance. And
experience once led us to believe the earth flat and the stars near.
Perhaps, in due time, mind-independent objects will go the way of
flat earth.
This
view obviates no method or result of science, but integrates and
reinterprets them in its framework. Consider, for instance, the quest
for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). This holy grail of
physicalism can, and should, proceed unabated if consciousness is
fundamental, for it constitutes a central investigation of our user
interface. To the physicalist, an NCC is, potentially, a causal
source of consciousness. If, however, consciousness is fundamental,
then an NCC is a feature of our interface correlated with, but never
causally responsible for, alterations of consciousness. Damage the
brain, destroy the NCC, and consciousness is, no doubt, impaired. Yet
neither the brain nor the NCC causes consciousness. Instead
consciousness constructs the brain and the NCC. This is no mystery.
Drag a file's icon to the trash and the file is, no doubt, destroyed.
Yet neither the icon nor the trash, each a mere pattern of pixels on
a screen, causes its destruction. The icon is a simplification, a
graphical correlate of the file's contents (GCC), intended to hide,
not to instantiate, the complex web of causal relations.
Quoted from an interview with Anton
Zeilinger
http://www.signandsight.com/features/614.html
You said that for example the velocity or the location of a
particle are only determined at the moment of the measurement, and
entirely at random.
I maintain: it is so random that not
even God knows the answer.
Ultimately that implies
something monstrous: namely that the particle had absolutely no
characteristics before it was measured. The great Danish physicist
Niels
Bohr once said: no one has ever seen a chair. There is no
objective reality. Only that which is measured exists. We construct
reality, and only in the moment of measurement or observation.
I
think you have to make a distinction: in my view there is something
that exists independently of us – in physics we call that the
singular event. For example the activity of a particle detector.
Or the activity of a certain cell in my eye, which registers a
certain number of light particles and then provokes a chemical
reaction that is then registered in the brain. The images that we
form on the basis of this are our constructs. Bohr's chair or on a
much more abstract level, the quantum mechanics equation of states,
are our concepts of an object. Of course they are very
purpose-oriented, because they've been corroborated with repeated
use.
So there is in fact something that exists
independently of us. And the moon is also there when I'm not looking
at it.
Something exists, but it is not directly accessible
to us. Only indirectly. And whether this thing must really be called
the "moon" is another question. That is also a
construct.
But there is something up there...
...
the word "there" is yet another construct. Space and time
are concepts aimed at giving meaning to our world of appearances. So
they are entirely reasonable constructs. By no means do I want to
give the impression that I believe everything is just our
imagination.
The world as a huge theatre that only plays in
our heads.
That is certainly not my view of things.
Then
what would you call it, this something that you can't call moon or
space or time – this something that exists independently of
us?
Wouldn't I be making another qualification if I tried
to give it a name? Isn't it enough if I just say it exists? As
soon as you use words like "world" or "universe",
you start lugging about all that conceptual ballast
again.
But you defend the thesis that there is an "original
matter of the universe": information.
Yes. For me
the concept of "information" is at the basis of
everything we call "nature". The moon, the chair, the
equation of states, anything and everything, because we can't talk
about anything without de facto speaking about the information we
have of these things. In this sense the information is the basic
building block of our world.
But just now you spoke of a
world that exists independently of us.
That's right. But
this world is not directly ascertainable or describable. Because
every description must be done in terms of the information, and so
you inevitably get into circular reasoning. There's a limit we
can't cross. And even a civilisation on Alpha Centauri can't
cross it. For me that's something almost mystical.
In your
last book you wrote: "Laws of nature should make no distinction
between reality and information." Why?
We've learnt
in the natural sciences that the key to understanding can often be
found if we lift certain dividing lines in our minds. Newton
showed that the apple falls to the ground according to the same laws
that govern the Moon's orbit of the Earth. And with this he made the
old differentiation between earthly and heavenly phenomena obsolete.
Darwin showed that there is no dividing line between man and animal.
And Einstein lifted the line dividing space and time. But in our
heads, we still draw a dividing line between "reality" and
"knowledge about reality", in other words between reality
and information. And you cannot draw this line. There is no
recipe, no process for distinguishing between reality and
information. All this thinking and talking about reality is about
information, which is why one should not make a distinction in the
formulation of laws of nature. Quantum theory, correctly interpreted,
is information theory.
And can you explain all
these strange quantum phenomena conclusively with your information
concept?
Not all of them yet, but we're working on it.
With limitation it works excellently.
How?
I
imagine that a quantum system can carry only a limited amount of
information, which is sufficient only for a single measurement. Let's
come back to the situation of two particles colliding like billiard
balls, and in so doing entering a state of limitation. In
terms of information theory that means that after the collision the
entire information is smeared over both particles, rather than the
individual particles carrying the information. And that means the
entire information we have pertains to the relationship between both
particles. For that reason, by measuring the first particle I can
anticipate the speed of the second. But the speed of the first
particle is entirely random.
Because the information isn't
sufficient.
Exactly. Its randomness is ultimately a
consequence of the finiteness of the information.
Also see the article by Zeilinger...
In the beginning was the
bit
http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/links/newscientist/bit.html
Also
see a video lecture given by Zeilinger on
Quantum
Information And The Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics
http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/watch/3260-Anton-Zeilinger-Quantum-Information-And-The-Foundations-Of-Quantum-Mechanics
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