[Fis] Black Hole Notes (reply to John & Krassimir)

[John Collier]

I was perhaps a bit abrupt because I have been fighting this battle to take a view of information that includes physical properties and that has a dynamics of its own. This started at least with Maxwell’s demon, was made more clear by Szillard, and developed in more detail by Brillouin. My belief is that a unified approach to information is possible that ties together the various ways it has been used in science. Kinds of Information in Scientific Use<http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/278/269>. 2011. cognition, communication, co-operation. Vol 9, No 2<http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/view/22>. Anyway, I am a bit sensitive about the issue.
In the black hole case, the issue is boundary dynamics. These are also important  in biology, and tend to take precedence there over energy dynamics. In general the dynamics of information has to do with the dynamics of constraints (which Shannon, rightly in my opinion, pointed out were equivalent to information). Similar issues to black hole boundary dynamics can be found in the dynamics of other physical systems, as Seth Lloyd pointed out in his book arguing that the world is best understood as a quantum computer (I am not quite willing to go that far yet, as I don’t yet know how to reduce energy transformations to information dynamics). In any case, I don’t see any way to state the problem Hawking raised without referring to information or something that is effectively an equivalent notion. In the past I have posted some reports of experimental work that involves doing work by manipulating information rather than energy. Laws governing energy just aren’t sufficient to analyze some basic physical processes, and we need to consider boundary condition dynamics. I see this as indistinguishable from information dynamics, but one can split hairs if one wants to, and keep information and boundary system dynamics separate in a principled way. I see little advantage in doing that.
I agree with some of your concerns about the article, and I think it does not show nearly enough imagination with respect to alternatives to the “soft hair” view, which doesn’t fit my understanding of the issue very well, such as it is, me not being an expert in GRT let alone black holes. Most of my work is in the area of the dynamics of boundary conditions in biology.

I think that to understand how information can get meaning it is necessary to understand first its function in terms of boundary condition dynamics. My own preferred approach is via semiotics, but there are a number of other approaches that I see as reasonable. But I don’t think that information has meaning just by itself. The difference is that my approach sets up common properties across all of the sciences, and then sees meaning as a further restriction on the more general case of boundary condition dynamics. This is a matter of perspective rather than truth, I think, but I do tend to get annoyed when my perspective is ruled out a priori.

John Collier
Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate
University of KwaZulu-Natal
http://web.ncf.ca/collier

From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Marcus Abundis
Sent: Monday, 04 July 2016 2:11 PM
To: fis at listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] Black Hole Notes (reply to John & Krassimir)

John – thank you for the intriguing article on the back hole information paradox. But I was surprised you saw Krassimir's note as insulting that at "the same time he/she has no [idea] what is 'information'”. This caused me to take a closer look at the article, which seemed to affirm Krassimis's view.

The reported progress relies on "information-preserving massless particles known as 'soft hair', which they say should surround black holes." This sounds fairly speculative, and it is called "research"?

Then "Hawking's colleague Andrew Strominger<https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/strominger> of Harvard University explains . . . 'People find it very hard to accept that in the quantum world, momentum and position are not absolute quantities,' he says. 'But that *pales into insignificance* compared with what we would have to accept were Hawking's contention true. We would have to accept that there are no laws of physics."' [emphasis added]
This implies some radically new view of physics (or whatever we might call it) is needed to frame the matter . . . but now they are merely positing "soft hair" and various "hairdos"?

A noted figure suggests the "idea to be 'worth pursuing', but points out that it can only account for a part of the information that enters a black hole. " And . . . what idea is not worth pursuing?

An yet another figure says the "authors fail to spell out exactly how the information in the hair becomes encoded into the Hawking radiation." I imagine even some of the study's authors might agree with Krassimir's statement.

THE PUNCH LINE . . .
In a priori modeling (the focus of this session) I carefully name *at least* three types of meaning (paper #2) – the only three of which I am CERTAIN. Still, your article and other explorations into QM imply the possibility of other types of *meaningful information*. But such ideas have not been researched, or posited by me, I only see them as vague possibilities. Perhaps *you* would care to comment on *meaningful information* in those contexts. I would find that interesting.

As for Krassimir's comment . . . I thought it was very mild compared to what might have been said about this admittedly interesting news.

Again, thank you for sharing the article.

Marcus
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