[Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?

Fri Nov 4 18:04:40 CET 2016

Dear All,

I agree with the consensus I see emerging. Andrei shows the problem of trying to pin down a complex process with a single term - information. And I agree with Rafael that information must have a valence. On the other hand, as such, information cannot be completely defined mathematically, pace Karl, any more than anything living can be.

It is discouraging to see how reductionist theories like 'It-from-Bit' get reproduced and disseminated by Scientific American, which used to be a good journal. One cannot simply ignore the reactionary sub-text of such 'science', even if a product of the "Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics".

One could say rather that quanta, not quantum information, are the basis for spacetime. At the sub-quantum level, I think we have already said that whatever the way in which energy is exchanged, nothing is gained by calling it information. (We may make an exception for the case of non-locality defined by Bell inequalities.) 

The only nuance I would add is that although we can speak of biotic and Shannon information (better, today, Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin as in Terry's explication), the properties of information_as_process have not been completely described. I would like to see the concept of information as an operator, causally effective because of its being energy, explored further.

Thank you and best wishes,

Joseph

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Rafael Capurro 
  To: Bob Logan ; Andrei Khrennikov ; Gyorgy Darvas ; John Collier ; fis 
  Sent: Friday, November 04, 2016 3:47 PM
  Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?

  Andrei, maybe the concept of message as already used by Shannon and Weaver in specific engineering contexts (this must not be always the case) is more appropriate and also able to speak about 'information' as what is 'in' a message 'for' a receiver. Best. Rafael

    Hello Andrei - I am with you - sharing you sentiment. Information only pertains to living organisms and entails some signals that help them make a choice. A black hole makes no choices - it is ruled by the laws of physics. Abiotic systems have no information. A book is a set of signals that a reader can convert into information if they know the language which the book is written. A book written in Urdu contains no information for me other than this appears to be a set of signals that contains information for a reader in the language in which this book was written. Who reads a black hole. How does it contain information that makes a difference. When we launch a satellite to orbit the earth we do not say that the sun is informing the satellite how to behave. The satellite is just following the laws of physics. It has no choice and so it is not being informed. There are many different forms of information (biotic and Shannon as found in the 2007 paper Propagating Organization: An Inquiry by Kauffman, Logan et al. in Biology and Philosophy 23: 27-45)      so we do not need to complicate things even more by ascribing the laws of physics as the communication of information. 
    ______________________

    Robert K. Logan 
    Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto  
    Fellow University of St. Michael's College
    Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD 
    http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan 
    www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
    www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications

    On Nov 4, 2016, at 4:17 AM, Andrei Khrennikov <andrei.khrennikov at lnu.se> wrote:

         Dear all, 
    I want to comment so called information approach to physics, by speaking with hundreds of leading experts
    in quantum foundations, I found that nobody can define rigorously the basic term "information" which is so widely 
    used in their theories and discussions, the answers are as "information is the basic entity" which cannot be defined 
    in other terms. Well, my impression is that without novel understanding and definition of information all these "theories" 
    are practically empty, well very good mathematical exercises. May be I am too critical... But I spent so much time by trying 
    to understand what people are talking about. The output is ZERO.

    all the best, andrei        

    Andrei Khrennikov, Professor of Applied Mathematics,
    Int. Center Math Modeling: Physics, Engineering, Economics, and Cognitive Sc.
    Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
    My RECENT BOOKS:
    http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/p1036
    http://www.springer.com/in/book/9789401798181
    http://www.panstanford.com/books/9789814411738.html
    http://www.cambridge.org/cr/academic/subjects/physics/econophysics-and-financial-physics/quantum-social-science
    http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783642051005

    ________________________________________
    From: Fis [fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] on behalf of Gyorgy Darvas [darvasg at iif.hu]
    Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2016 10:23 PM
    To: John Collier; fis
    Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?

    John:
    The article describes very really the conflicting attitudes. Interesting to see the diverse arguments together.
    I agree, some think so, some do not. I do the latter, but this does not make any matter.
    Gyuri

    On 2016.11.03. 19:52, John Collier wrote:
    Apparently some physicists think so.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tangled-up-in-spacetime/?WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20161102

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

    _______________________________________________
    Fis mailing list
    Fis at listas.unizar.es<mailto: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

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

-- 
Prof.em. Dr. Rafael Capurro 
Hochschule der Medien (HdM), Stuttgart, Germany
Capurro Fiek Foundation for Information Ethics (http://www.capurro-fiek-foundation.org)
Distinguished Researcher at the African Centre of Excellence for Information Ethics (ACEIE), Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Chair, International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) (http://icie.zkm.de)
Editor in Chief, International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) (http://www.i-r-i-e.net)
Postal Address: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
E-Mail: rafael at capurro.de
Voice: + 49 - 721 - 98 22 9 - 22 (Fax: -21)
Homepage: www.capurro.de

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  _______________________________________________
  Fis mailing list
  Fis at listas.unizar.es
  http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20161104/81ab1052/attachment.html>