Relational Degrees of Freedom With Rick Rosner
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/27
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Here we – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about some co-developed ideas that originated with Rick decades ago as a child prodigy in physics and mathematics, which has a further precedent in Digital Physics with Edward Fredkin.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What have you been thinking about recently regarding informational cosmology?
Rick Rosner: We were discussing Ed Fredkin and digital physics. I first came across the concept of digital physics around 1972, when a physics professor, the father of my brother’s basketball teammate, lent me the book “Gravitation” by Wheeler and others. It was a monumental work on gravity, a massive, 1000-page book I barely understood. However, it introduced me to Wheeler’s concept of “It From Bit,” his vision of a computational universe, which was the prevailing idea in digital physics at that time, around 1977. I’ve been contemplating it for quite a while, and looking at the universe, I don’t see a clear computer-like correlation. The bits of information don’t seem to be stored in proton-electron pairs or the arrangement of electrons around a nucleus. These don’t act as gates or bits in a computer. The state of an electron about its proton, or the state of protons linked via shared electrons, doesn’t seem to correspond to the binary states in a computer, as digital physics might imply.
If I delved deeper into digital physics, someone would clarify that this isn’t exactly what they mean. But without that deeper understanding, I think the information in the universe is more about the interactions among particles. It’s not holographic or holistic, terms I dislike, but rather aggregate information held among the entirety of matter.
Jacobsen: I prefer the term ‘relational.’ It differentiates between digital physics and informational cosmology; whether it’s the 1972 version, 1978, or 1992 version, it’s more about relational physics versus digital physics.
Rosner: I think that’s a good term.
Jacobsen: It doesn’t confine us to discrete versus continuum.
Rosner: Yeah, I like it. This talk was meant to discuss what to call this concept and how much credence to give it. We know that the information we observe in the universe, which includes every part’s interactions with every other part, defines all matter. This shared information prevents the universe from being too fuzzy despite its quantum mechanical fuzziness. It’s unfuzzy due to the sheer number of particles, yet fuzzy in quantum terms. This setup requires widespread information sharing, with geographic locality playing a role. Things in one part of the universe have more information about each other than about distant parts.
Laws govern interactions among matter, like the inverse square force law and the inverse square law for waves such as light and gravity. Simply put, things closer to each other have more effect on each other than things far apart. The information is both shared universally and localized straightforwardly.
Jacobsen: But the localization is representative of the tightness of the information’s association with each other. So, it’s not thinking because the way you’re phrasing it almost has an intuitive grasp of Newtonian Mechanics in it. It’s sort of like it’s out there, and things are kind of distant apart from one another as opposed to informationally related, and informational relationship determines the tightness of themselves in space-time in terms of distance.
Rosner: Yeah. So you’re just taking what you see with gravitation and all the forces that work over a significant distance: gravitation and the electromagnetic force. They have the inverse square, and when you’re talking about being down a potential, well, it’s one over X instead of one over R. But that’s a straightforward thing that everybody who studied physics knows, and if you say well, extend it to how every part of the universe is defined. The particles in it are to be found relationally; it may not work exactly as inverse squared, but it’s what’s behind Mach’s principle. However, a lot of physicists will say, “Yeah, but Mach’s principles have never been adequately mathematically integrated.” It’s never been proven or substantiated in any way except intuitively to be the deal behind inertia. So, your term relationally seems to apply that, at least when you’re talking about how everything in the universe is defined as everything else; it’s right in that sense.
Jacobsen: Here’s an analyst conversation in philosophy; is it being or non-being? Is that the split of everything in existence? I take the same perspective on whether it is discrete or a continuum. I don’t think those are adequate. So, in the same way, you’d have to sidestep being and not being to get to a proper answer, to question properly. It is similar to discrete or continuum; I think it’s “neither is the answer.” It’s relationally.
Rosner: Also, I think you can put it on… You just said continuum; I think you can put it on a dial or a continuum where you can kind of set up for discussion on how distributed the information is in a strictly digital universe. All the information is, at least according to my naive understanding of it, strictly localized. Every bit of information is in one place in the hardware.
Jacobsen: So, maybe, it’s relational degrees of freedom; in a sense, the looser the relationship, the more distant and the tighter the relationship, the closer?
Rosner: We don’t need to solve it now, but we can just say that there’s this up for discussion or up for trying to figure out where along the continuum between completely local information and completely distributed information, where are different forms of information in the universe? We know that gravity and electromagnetism work according to this inverse square deal, which is fairly strictly geometrical, and that maybe something in with regard to inertia or the universe defining itself quantum mechanically via the whole history of exchanged particles over the entire lifespan of the universe. That may be at a different point on the local versus distributed dial.
Then, there are two questions: how and why the information is distributed. Question two is: is the information in the universe just about the universe itself, or is it also about this other thing being modelled in the universe the same way our minds model the external world? Our mind is a thing that can be itself modelled geometrically, we hope, but it is modelling; the information that we work with in our minds is about a world external to our minds. And we know that our universe has all the information that needs to define itself. So, on the one hand, you have a self-defined universe; on the other hand, you have our minds, which define and model an external reality.
One’s entirely internal; the Universe is defining itself. And one’s entirely external; the mind is modelling external reality, including the brain and mind. One’s external and one’s internal, and then there is a dial or a continuum as to whether those two things are perfectly equivalent, which is IC as we understand it or whether the mind is completely distinct from and in function and form from the universe and the intuition that they’re probably equivalent and each working on two different levels; one defining itself as the universe does and the other defining something that it’s modelling that’s external, whether both the mind and the universe do both or not.
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