Ask A Genius 902: A Relational Information System
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/06
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’ve had several ideas come up amid informational cosmology. One of them has to do with the degrees of freedom in a system and how we frame the universe as a relational system, and so I was thinking about the degrees of freedom in a relational system of information. The idea of a physics of relational degrees of freedom of information would be distinct from digital information where this digital information is distinctive and singular, and then you have a matrix or matrices of information networks. That’s a different idea than the sort of emerging components of the system becoming the information in so far as they relate to one another, and that relation happens through time where time is emerging…
Rick Rosner: So, to preface what we’re talking about, we need the definition of information, which is the definite choice of an outcome among a set of possible outcomes. So, that outcome contains information, and the amount of information is the fraction of outcomes that occurred, which is, if you throw a coin, you have two possible outcomes, and you get one of the two that contains less information than if you rolled dice with 100 sides. One out of a hundred contains more information than one out of two, and that’s the basic definition of information, right?
Jacobsen: Yes, that’d be a baseline definition of information. However, if you’re dealing with relationships amongst parts, it adds different layers to the definition.
Rosner: The issue is when you say information within a system, you have to talk about what a system is. For example, one system might be the entire universe, and every durable quantum event should add information to the system. So, to be informed, the event has to leave a durable record. For instance, I might determine how many quantum events occur per second in a star. It has to be 10 to the 30th or some crazy number, but most events don’t leave a durable trace. One durable event within a star might be fusion in a couple of deuterium nuclei coming together to form a helium nucleus. Maybe that’s hard to undo, but just exchanging heat photons at the sun’s center where the temperature is super crazy hot, none of those photon exchanges leave a traceable event. You can assume they’re going on because the sun is super-hot and photons are carrying the heat, but unless a photon makes it to the surface of the sun and escapes, most of those photons aren’t traceable. Does all that seem reasonable?
Jacobsen: For the system to have any information, it has to be the distinctive representation of the system. In a way, virtual things that don’t have a durable existence but have existed for a sufficient amount of time to impact the system can then change that system’s informational net content.
Rosner: Yeah, we have human information systems where we get sensory information, and we have thoughts, and somehow, information is processed within our awareness. We live in a world where many events are at least temporarily durable that what we experience leaves traces in our memories until we die and our brains break up and then, like all that information, are lost because our brains, which held the information, can no longer have information. So, you need some general or unified theory of information that ties all information in all relevant systems together and explains the whole ecosystem of information and how those various information-containing systems impinge on each other informationally. Does it matter to the information processing system that is the universe when humans experience events in our awareness that generate information for us? Inny information-generating events in our awareness are irrelevant to the overall information-processing system, which is the universe. At the same time, if there are gigantic civilizations that are millions of years old that interact with the universe, that engineer the universe for their survival long term over billion years spans, then what those systems or these civilizations do does impinge, but I don’t know. Can civilizations within the universe affect the information processing of the entire universe? A unified theory of information, which would likely also be a unified theory of the universe, would clarify that.
So, what you’re suggesting is a program of inquiry. When we talk about the universe, it’s a relational system in that the universe perceives itself via quantum interactions, and that’s relational in that everything in the universe defines itself and everything else via a history of interactions. How does that relate to a digital system where all it is from bit people like Wheeler and all those guys who have been pushing the universe as a computer since the 60s? All those guys naively; naively is like a snotty term, but naturally, the first attempts to do this would be the universe as a computer, and maybe quantum events correspond to zeros and ones in a computer. By poking at it, you and I, we think perhaps that’s and also because people have been talking about that for 60-70 years now, and I don’t think that’s delivered a whole lot in terms of results, but I’m not informed enough. What do you think?
Jacobsen: Yeah, I mean, my general idea is that you have a framework of emergent properties, and the information can be defined as that those properties emerge more distinctly, but that would replicate sort of a digital infrastructure that we see in modern computers where they’re stacked or just a two-dimensional processor. At the same time, the emerging property is still information; there needs to be more definition. So, there has to be a way in which you can define the parts of the universe relationally being emergent while including a factor or some variable in the equation for the fuzziness of that information as things become more distinct, and so that degree of fuzziness should decrease as the scale increases…
Rosner: We know it does, just like the wavelengths of matter are teeny because there’s a ton of matter; there’s 10 to the 80th, 10 to the 85th particles all shoot other particles at each other. So, things are tightly defined, so the fuzziness is at this very microscopic scale. There’s another thing, which is that the universe is entangled with itself. I guess the universe is a quantum-entangled entity, and you can call it a quantum computer, though it doesn’t look like our primitive quantum computers because our quantum computers are still manipulating bits. There’s still a bunch of zeros and ones, just the processing of them is more potent because it’s massively parallel and entangled, but it’s not to say that the universe is information processing; it’s still hard to find the zeros and ones in what the universe is doing if there are zeros and ones at all. There are distinct quantum events.
When a Quantum event happens, you can characterize it with exact numbers. Even though the particles involved are all fuzzy, at a later point in time, the universe reflects these distinct and precise quantum events having happened. Though the precision might be limited again, you can arrange the universe by doing experiments so that you can know with a high degree of certainty that a quantum event has happened. Though you never get 100% certainty, each quantum event you think happened has an exact mathematical description and a mathematical name. This event happened and is precisely what would have happened if this event had occurred, and we can know that this event occurred with a super high degree but not 100% certainty. Does all that make sense?
Jacobsen: So, there will be an overarching property of how leaky a particular event is, whether it’s an object or a world line or large section of the universe depending on size, so it’s a sliding scale of how defined things are. That would be one variable certainly included in that, so the relational degrees of freedom that variable probably would be defined straightforwardly by some mathematical symbol, the degrees of freedom for this particular event and worldwide out of the universe.
Rosner: So, for people who don’t know a lot of quantum mechanics, the first example you learn when learning quantum mechanics is the particle in a well or a box. Here’s a particle; it’s fuzzy; it’s in a box; it’s in a place where it can’t get out of because there’s a potential it would have to climb out of the box or it would have to break through the walls of the box. But in that particle description, the particle is fuzzy, and there’s a high probability it’s here and a low probability that the particle exists as a cloud, a probability cloud that is precisely located here. Well, the center of that cloud is here, but the particle can be any place within the cloud with a given probability of any place within the cloud, and the cloud extends to infinity. So, you get quantum tunnelling where you got a particle in a box, say it’s an electron and say the probability that the electron is an inch away when you detect it, that it’s an inch away from the center of that probability cloud is one in 10 to the 20th, but that’s not zero. So, if you had 10 to the 20th electrons in boxes, one would appear outside the box because of probability. So, that’s what leakiness is that you just talked about.
Quantum leakiness is that you can’t pin everything down precisely.
Jacobsen: In some technical sense, we are constantly leaking out to the edge of the universe.
Rosner: Right, but the universe, by its interactions, holds itself together. This isn’t the Big Bang expansion in the universe. Say the universe is flying apart all the time, but if all the particles are expanding and everything’s expanding at the same rate, then the universe can’t perceive that and is not very sensible. It’s the difference between a photograph and an enlargement of a photograph; if it’s the same photograph, it doesn’t matter how much you enlarge it because the relations among the things in the photograph remain the same. It’s only when the relationships change that you get perceptible changes. So, regardless of what overall frame you put on it, the universe manages to define itself and provide its frame even though there might be mathematical frames that make it convenient to think of the universe as this thing that’s flying apart. If everything’s flying apart to the same extent and none of the relationships among the elements of the universe change, it becomes meaningless, etc., except maybe a mathematical convenience to talk about the size of the frame changing as long as everything within the frame stays the same.
[Recording End]
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