[It from bit in process physics] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

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It from bit in process physics
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Posted by: Tam Hunt

I've been reading with great interest the work of Reginald Cahill and his colleagues, who have developed a potentially paradigm-shifting model of physics known as "process physics." This physics is based explicitly on the process philosophy of Whitehead and others, which is how I came across it.

A major problem I have with both process philosophy and process physics, however, is the notion that "substantialist" ontologies simply got it wrong by focusing on stuff instead of process, and positing matter as ontologically fundamental instead of process. The problem I have comes from a real difficulty in seeing how process or information (it from bit, as Wheeler termed it) can make the ontological leap into substance.

This argument is completely analogous to the materialist's problem of explaining how inert matter produces something that is clearly ontologically dissimilar: experience/mentality/subjectivity. This is of course the mind/body problem.

The generally satisfying solution (to me) for the mind/body problem is panexperientialism, as developed by Griffin, a follower of Whitehead's who has refined Whitehead's process philosophy into what Griffin terms "panexperientialist physicalism."

But process physics and Whitehead's version of process philosophy seem to continue to have a major problem with the ontological transition from process/information to matter, substituting one type of unconvincing ontological leap for another.

I'm pasting below an exchange I recently had with Cahill on this topic and I welcome anyone else's thoughts on this topic.

Prof. Cahill,

Clearly definitions are important here. If you define information as patterns of connectivity, I agree that this is different than my definition of information as the structure of matter or the content of experience.

However, if you are using information in an ontological sense to build a system that explains how reality is constructed I think you may face a serious ontological problem. How can "patterns of connectivity" produce anything solid? Patterns of connectivity are abstractions and require a mind to contain them (as is the case with all abstractions). Minds, to the best of our knowledge, require matter as a substrate.

I'm having the same difficulty with Whitehead's works that posit process as fundamental. Again, process requires some thing as a predicate. Without some thing that is being processed there is no process. Process itself is, again, an abstraction.

Whitehead attempts to skirt this problem by stating:

"[T]he process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation." (Process and Reality, p. 7).

It is not clear from this passage, however, how the solidarity of the world is explained if process is ontologically ultimate instead of matter itself.
Where do the first actual entities, which are the precursor for the next set of actual entities, ad infinitum, come from?

Similarly, it is not clear how information itself can make the leap into matter.

I came across your work, in fact, in trying to find a solution to this problem. From what I understand of your process physics, it seems to support a neutral monist ontology (which makes sense b/c that is what Whitehead's is) by substituting the gebit network structure for Whitehead's "creativity." The network of gebits represents the potential to produce either space or matter - and matter has a number of fundamental properties, including experience, thus supporting the panexperientialism of Whitehead and Griffin.

Are you suggesting, then, that there is an underlying structure to the universe, which is neither space or matter, but is instead "mere" potentiality and that this structure consists of the holonic gebit network and your process physics attempts to describe the rules by which this neutral "stuff" behaves and manifests as either space or matter. Is this a fair description?

If this is the case, it would seem to be more accurate to eliminate the "bit" from bit > gebit > qubit > it because bits are just abstractions and don't have any ontological significance in themselves.

Tam

On Jan 2, 2008 4:33 PM, <cahi0014@flinders.edu.au> wrote:

Hi Tam

Your assumption that information requires a matter substrate is naive. In
particular you don't attempt to account for matter. I use the word
`information' to mean patterns of connectivity, with such connectivity
happening at all levels - i.e. a fractal system - with no bottom level.
Matter is then a particular mode of connectivity - so the proposition is that
matter requires an information substrate - this is the oppsite of your
suggestion. One must not be too mechanical or conventional is thinking about
these issues.

Reg Cahill

Quoting Tam Hunt <tam.hunt@gmail.com>:

> Prof. Cahill,
>
> I am reading with great interest your work on process physics. First, bravo
> for such a comprehensive and revolutionary theoretic construct!
>
> I am, however, having some trouble with your notion of bit > gebit > qubit >
> it in that I just don't see how information as an ontological *thing* can
> lead to matter as an ontological *thing. *It seems clear to me that
> information requires matter as a predicate. In other words, all information
> requires a physical substrate - with the possible exception of qualia, which
> may not be completely correspondent with physical states of the matter
> giving rise to the qualia. In yet another formulation, information can be
> viewed as simply the structure of matter or the contents of experience -
> both requiring matter as a substrate.
>
> My difficulty with your variation of Wheeler's it from bit argument is
> analogous to the similar hard problem of consciousness: how does
> experience/consciousness arise from inert matter? How does one ontological
> category produce another?
>
> Of course, your process physics and its precursor process philosophy -
> particularly in its panexperientialist version as developed by David Ray
> Griffin in Unsnarling the World-Knot and other works - provides a very nice
> solution to the mind-body problem by simply positing experience as a
> fundamental property of all matter. But whereas Griffin/Whitehead assume
> experience as fundamental, they don't take your further step of positing
> information as the basic ontological stuff.
>
> Or am I mis-reading your works?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Tam Hunt
> Santa Barbara, California

Posted by: Tony Smith

Tam, as a relative local, I've visited and corresponded with Reg a bit and believe he brings some strong points to what has become a very speculative or even confused table, though I still have reservations about the likelihood of it all coming together quite the way he sees it.

I originally found myself on that track because I became (and remain) convinced that what we traditionally think of as empty space must be an active production process, with a consequent tendency for the production to concentrate (relatively) in the voids, but that too is another story.

The one thing your post screamed to me was that you (and the vast majority along with you) need to try to see beyond the status you are granting to "solid matter". In the total scheme of things, solid matter is a vanishingly small component. It would be insulting detritus to even suggest a comparison. The world we find ourselves in is a gigantic interplay of process from big bang to whimper and even that apparent whole is most likely but a bubble in a seething multiverse. That finest dusting of solid bodies is only of interest for the patchy record it retains of passing processes.

Those driven by their reluctance to see humanity relegated even further from the centre of affairs by dark matter and dark energy, to say nothing of the multiverse, just show their ignorance of the basic history of ideas about our place in the world. (That doesn't mean we may not have potential.)

Posted by: Tam Hunt

Tony,

Thanks for your thoughts. I actually am inclined to agree with the general ontology you outline - one which Whitehead supports in terms of our universe, with its order, springing from underlying chaos, and who knows how many other universes elsewhere, prior or after.

However, my basic question is: how can information have any fundamental reality? Doesn't information, at its most basic level, require some underlying physical substrate?

I'm fine with positing the gebit nodal structure as the "neutral monist" stuff of the multiverse, representing the potentiality of either space or matter manifesting at every point in the multiverse.

However, I think it confuses things to attempt to go further, as Cahill does, and posit information as an even more fundamental reality. Information, it seems to me is just an abstraction. And abstractions reside in minds, which as far as we know require matter to support their existence.

Can you give me an example of how information could have any independent existence?

Posted by: Tony Smith

Tam, while it may not be exactly Reg's meaning, I expect serious advocates of the information as fundamental view come from an information-theoretic perspective which insists that information exists de facto at the most micro levels as evidenced by standard formulae for quantifying entropy, a concept I'm happy to stay no more than vaguely aware about.

Personally I see such a use of "information" as potentially equivalent to Wolfram, Smolin et al's idea that a graph theoretic network of nodes and links is the best candidate for the bottom level of existence, i.e. the level at which it becomes meaningless to ask "but what's it made of?" Or monads (almost). Maybe its just ok to reify the elements of that bottom level while we are still guessing. Discussion seems to demand it.

I'd be a lot happier if the rest of the world could go back to your understanding of information as representation, but I don't really expect that to happen any time soon. Even then, I've long discussed information as having the strange property that no matter what identifiable subclasses of information you hive off, what you are left with is still information.

As an IT professional and sometime graduate student of history an philosophy of science, I'm unsurprised that the rise and rise of IT has catalysed the parallel rise of the fantasy that information is somehow fundamental.

Posted by: MikeHelland

I have some ideas on how information can separate itself into two sets with their own ontological and epistemological qualities.

I think those ideas may be relevant here.

Posted by: Tam Hunt

Mike, please share your thoughts!

Posted by: MikeHelland

It's rather complicated.

Consider a NKS style model.

You have initial conditions and you have rules.

Once the program starts running, there is information in the physical resource of the computer.

We can describe that information as being real in the sense that I made it in the computer.

That's an ontological quality.

So all the information in the computer is ontologically similar.

In modern physics, you could try to implement hidden-variable theories, the wave equation with superstates and states, or even string theory.

In these theories, some information is regarded as "hidden" and some as "visible".

But those are new ontological distinctions, and they're rather artificial/ad-hoc.

What I mean by that is though all the information is all ontologically similar, we try to change it after the fact with some linguistic hand-waving to create new axioms of ontological quality.

For the purpose of understanding my ideas, we shall regard:

1. the hand-waving as INvalid
2. all the information still ontologically similar

With me so far?

(Editted to include "INvalid")

Posted by: MikeHelland

Well, assuming there's no questions on the first part.

So, back to that NKS model, here's one written in Visual FoxPro, it should look familiar to anyone who knows Visual Basic.

My apologies for not being able to format it correctly.

* Setup Initial Conditions

public oAbsoluteMatter
oAbsoluteMatter = createobject("collection")
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 10, 20, 10, 20, 0, 0))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", 1, 20, 10, 10, 0, 2, 0))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 10, 20, 10, -10, 4, 1))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", 1, 20, 10, 10, 1, -2, -1))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 5, 30, 40, -20, 35, 0))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 605, 30, 25, -10, 2, -1))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 100, 2, 10, 20, 50, 70))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", 1, 21, 10, 10, 4, 2, -10))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 12, 20, 10, -1, -40, 1))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", 1, 2, 10, 10, 1, -2, -1))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 5, 6, 40, -20, 65, 0))
oAbsoluteMatter.Add(createobject("absoluteMatter", -1, 0, 4, 25, 10, -2, -1))

do while .t.

clear

for each oA in oAbsoluteMatter
oA.DoStuff()
endfor

wait window

enddo

* end of program

*class definitions
define class absoluteMatter as Custom
nType = 0
nX = 0
nY = 0
nZ = 0
nDx = 0
nDy = 0
nDz = 0

procedure Init(tnType, tnX, tnY, tnZ, tnDx, tnDy, tnDz)

this.nType = tnType
this.nX = tnX
this.nY = tnY
this.nZ = tnZ
this.nDx = tnDx
this.nDy = tnDy
this.nDz = tnDz

endproc

procedure DoStuff

* draw us visuall on the screen
?str(this.nType) + str(this.nX) + str(this.nY)
_screen.FillStyle = 0
_screen.FillColor = iif(this.nType = 1, rgb(255, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 255))
_screen.Circle(2, 100 + this.nX, 100 + this.nY)

* move inertially
this.nX = this.nX + this.nDx
this.nY = this.nY + this.nDy
this.nZ = this.nZ + this.nDz

* see if there's anything to interact with
for each oB in oAbsoluteMatter
lnDx = oB.nDx
lnDy = oB.nDy
lnDz = oB.nDz
oB.nDx = this.nDx
oB.nDy = this.nDy
oB.nDz = this.nDz
this.nDx = lnDx
this.nDy = lnDy
this.nDz = lnDz
endfor

endproc

enddefine

If you run this here's what a few of the states look like:

http://www.cloudmusiccompany.com/programlist.gif

All the information is always going to be ontologically similar because it exists in the physical resources of the computer.

See the group of dots moving together in the image?

I think with the help of a multi-disciplinary research team this kind of model could be developed into something that demonstrates complexity that appears roughly similar to the fundamental particles and fundamental forces.

From there the goal will be to arrange the monads into atoms and molecules and cells and organs and then eventually, a human being with a functioning brain.

The human being will be made of monads, which the absoluteMatter class represents in the code.

All the information is contained in the qualities of the monads (and the computer's physical resources), and all that information is ontologically similar.

But in the virtual human being's brain there are neural path ways made of monads.

These neural path ways create a virtual resource, a new resource for information different from the qualities of the monads and the original physical resource that created it.

Also in the neural path ways are the human beings ideas about things. What are things? Which things are real?

The new virtual resource stores new information about what the virtual human being thinks is real.

That is a new unique ontological quality for a second set of information.

And this isn't linguistic hand waving, this is the mathematics speaking. We just have to listen.

To answer your question, the bits arrange into a neural path way that has the meaning "it".

If anyone could help me start that research time I'd be really appreciative.

I think it would change how quantum mechanics is looked at.

Here is a web page that formats the code correctly:

http://www.cloudmusiccompany.com/paper.htm

Posted by: Tam Hunt

Mike,

You're using the term "ontological" in a different way than I am.

For something to be ontologically fundamental, in the sense that I am using the term and most others use the term, this something must not be explicable through an appeal to anything more fundamental.

To claim that information is ontologically fundamental is to claim that it there is no more basic "stuff" of which information is formed or can be explained. And this is my problem b/c it seems clear to me that information is an abstraction and as such is, by definition, NOT fundamental.

When you talk about "information in the computer," that information exists only insofar as the storage media in the computer contain the physical imprints of that information. So that set of information is predicated on matter.

And I think this holds for any type of information, which leads to the conclusion that information is not ontologically fundamental.

Posted by: MikeHelland

I agree with you.

The point of my message is that:

1. You could begin with a set of information, ontologically fundamental or not

2. That through the method I described, a second set of information can arise

You said:

"When you talk about "information in the computer," that information exists only insofar as the storage media in the computer contain the physical imprints of that information. So that set of information is predicated on matter. "

Well, that's true of the information in the first set.

But that's not true for the second set.

For the second set, it exists insofar as the storage media in the COMPUTER inside the COMPUTER contain the imprints of that information.

The topic I'm bringing up isn't whether information is ontologically fundamental.

The topic is whether information can give rise to new information with different ontological qualities.

I feel this topic is the same as the difference between "monad" and "atom".

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