[Fis] Fw: Information Conservation in black holes

[Bruno Marchal]

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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Fis mailing list
> Fis at listas.unizar.es
> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
> _______________________________________________
> Fis mailing list
> Fis at listas.unizar.es
> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20160202/c5cd8641/attachment.html>