[Fis] Pedro on "It from Bit"

[Malcolm Dean]

Pedro, thanks for mentioning Vladimir Lerner's work :
How Information Creates Its Observer (Lerner 2019)
A PDF will be sent on request.

Wheeler's aphorism comes as a cosmogony, and hence, a metaphysical burden.
It was meant to point to the most fundamental physics, in the context of
his universal Observer-Participator. Most of this has been carefully
avoided in the literature, in my opinion, because it demands a hierarchical
monistic worldview.

To leave "it" for physicists and "bit" for computerists, or as many do, to
conceive Information in the sense of Shannon, is to frame the investigation
in a way which excludes Wheeler's view. McLuhan (1974) [
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Vkl7FlWlpcF3bSYLz1dPMOWxfTtnFVpsQynamYgo6oO5UKvN-TCyEgObl5Ygjx44Xx45TtnnOEvQUMTKLuIamlc$  ] observed "my kind of study
and communication is really a study of transformation, whereas information
theory and all the existing theories of communication I know of are
theories of transportation."

Perhaps a better way to translate Wheeler is to use the term "interactant"
(instead of the problematic "observer"). Interaction applies to any scale
and any medium. I think one of Vladimir's contributions is to show
mathematically how the Observer _follows from_ interactions. As processes
interact, they model their world, eventually becoming intelligent and
possibly self-aware. It from Bit leads to Objects from Bits.

The "adjacent possible" has long been studied in Bejan's Constructal
Theory, which has a large literature and regular international conferences.
I relate Constructal Theory to Lerner's Information Path just as
Thermodynamics relates to Information processes. Both are universal
observations which describe the cosmos from fundamental distinctions to
self-aware agents.

I brace myself for the usual excoriation.


Malcolm Dean
Los Angeles

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