Dear Joseph,
On 30 Jan 2016, at 19:31, Joseph Brenner wrote:
Dear John,
Sorry you have been ill.
I agree fully with your statement: All of these explanations, and
even stating the problem, require information notions, not just
energy as in classical physics.
What I object to are statements or implications that information,
whether in boundaries or not, is ontologically prior to and/or
independent of energy.
I beg to differ on this. I consider Shannon information as given
freely by the numeration of natural numbers in base two or higher, or
sequence of them.
The interesting things is not information/number, but the
interpretation of such information, and this can be defined at first
by what the universal machines do when given such information/number.
This is how the positions of people like Lloyd and Tegmark come out,
giving 'computation' an agential, anthropomorphically flavored role
at the ground of the universe.
Lloyd and Tegmark seem not really aware of the importance of the
discovery of the universal machine, by Emil Post, Alan Turing, Alonzo
Church, and some others. That is mainly a discovery in arithmetic, as
a very weak segment of arithmetic is already Turing universal, and so
emulate all Turing universal system.
This is not anthropomorphically flavored, it is Turing-machine, or
universal number-morphically flavored. A concept definable in
elementary arithmetic. That concept generalizes both human, bacteria,
and the physical computer.
It is also a theorem of arithmetic, accessible to the universal
machine themselves, and once they "believe" in enough induction axiom,
they get the cognitive ability to deduce their own limitation, and to
begin to measure the gap between provable and true. A gap which
entails many modal nuances in the ways the machine can refer to
itself, and what she can prove and expect, and hope or fear with
respect to some universal goal (like "help yourself").
The establishment by Wu Kun and others of information as a
categoryimplies separation only in classical logic and category
theory, which are just as limiting as the classical physics John
refers to.
Classical logic is the simplest logic, and so the more polite to use
to describe the other logics.
None of the internal logics of the universal machine is classical
logic. It oscillates between intuitionist logic and quantum logic,
with some intuitionist quantum logic and quantum intuitionist logic.
A basic problem is the inability of people to keep in mind the
operation of two aspects of phenomena, cooperative and antagonistic,
at the same time.
I can agree with this. My favorite exemple is that intelligence is
needed to develop competence, but competence has a negative feedback
on intelligence.
Computers work according to algorithms.
Not really. They work according to data, number, information, that
they interpret at some level like an algorithm, or like data.
The ground of the universe, in my view, is in the tension, not the
separation, between being and non-being, and no algorithm can handle
that (now who is being anthropomorphic?!)
Tegmark and Lloyd miss that elementary arithmetic is Turing complete.
So we don't know really if there is a physical universe.
We know only that there is an infinitely complex reality of all
computations, in arithmetic. Complex, as most relations between form
and function are not algorithmically decidable.
Yet, the self-reference ability of the universal machine suggests to
define the physical reality by what makes some number dream stable and
sharable, and apparently it is not much more than self-referential
correctness and consistency.
The (full) arithmetical reality, the one which contains all prime
numbers and "can decide" the Riemann hypothesis, is also full of
relative number experience/dream, some stable and sharable. In a
testable way, at least for precise version like classical
computationalism.
Mechanism predicts the multi-verse apparent empiric structure by a
more general multi-experiences structure. But it is not human
experience, it is the universal machine experience.
If we are not machine, this provides the tool to measure the degree of
(local) non-computationalism. In that case I would bet we are in a
(physical, in the computationalist sense described above) simulation.
Best,
Bruno
Cheers,
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
From: John Collier
To: fis
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2016 4:58 PM
Subject: [Fis] Information Conservation in black holes
List,
Sorry I haven’t been able to respond to the interesting remarks on
my last post, but it took a while to digest them, and my current
health concerns take up a lot of my time, so I haven’t had time to
come up with responses that are properly thought out.
In the meantime, here is an interesting Nature news report about
Hawking’s (and Strominger’s) recent proposal for how information can
be preserved in black holes (which his 1976 paper set up as a
problem for the laws of physics, which imply information
conservation at the most basic level. The solution involves a way
empty space can carry information in QM via “soft particles”. The
answer is apparently not completely worked out as yet, and there are
critics.
http://www.nature.com/news/hawking-s-latest-black-hole-paper-splits-physicists-1.19236?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20160128&spMailingID=50572206&spUserID=MTc2NjY1MTQ2NQS2&spJobID=843774519&spReportId=ODQzNzc0NTE5S0
Seth Lloyd described a different possible explanation in his book
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the
Cosmos, Knopf (2000) that involves taking into consideration the
information in boundaries, which I found plausible, since the
information preservation in physics follows from consideration of
basic laws together with the constraints of boundary conditions,
neither alone.
Perhaps the two approaches are not really distinct. They may
eventually cast light on each other. For the time being the Hawking/
Strominger proposal also looks like it can solve the “firewall”
problem as well, which has the Black Hole boundary being very hot
(again, contrary to physical expectations), because information can
be transferred into radiation instead of energy, so the information
transfer doesn’t require a high temperature at the black hole
boundary, unlike other forms of radiation production. All of these
explanations, and even stating the problem, require information
notions, not just energy as in classical physics.
John Collier
Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate
University of KwaZulu-Natal
http://web.ncf.ca/collier
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