Ask A Genius 943: From the Top of the Informational Charts
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what if at the lowest level, the world, lowest magnitudes, time doesn’t exist? While at the higher levels, higher magnitudes, time begins to emerge and, in fact, becomes a major factor in the general business of the universe, the general informational processing of reality. There is self-interaction between the universe at all of these different magnitudes. What information could be conveyed at these higher scales through time, through this arrow of time, to lower levels where there is no time that would be relevant to the business of the universe? Since it’s one system and there is ubiquitous though incomplete self-interaction, there must be some relevance to the optimization of information.
Rick Rosner: I don’t know because, in my current understanding, without time, there’s no existence. Well, you can imagine the simplest quantum system that you’re taught in the first week of a class on quantum mechanics or just a regular physics class towards the end of the year when you finally get to quantum mechanics is a single particle in a potential well. It’s just a particle bouncing around in a well. There’s no time for that particle because there’s no way to keep track of anything. It’s always in basically the same state.
So, there’s no time with that, but I don’t think that’s how time works. I think that there’s information pressure that is built into the emergence of matter and information that what happens is the information in a rudimentary consciousness that is acquiring information takes place along the unfolding of time. One way of looking at it is that it’s a bunch of matter that’s been crushed into total degeneracy into a black hole. The black hole offers the opportunity for new information to emerge as all that matter that’s been collapsed into degeneracy can emerge into a new reduced scale structure within the matter itself. It begins to differentiate and go from having no information to having increasing amounts of information as the matter differentiates. I call that information pressure. The matter doesn’t want to remain degenerate, or it just can’t. It differentiates, and the differentiation is time itself. So, in a sense, time nearly acts as a reshuffling of the ground state of information.
Jacobsen: Well, time is the differentiation and generation of matter and the associated increase in information. That matter goes from a low information state and, by interacting with itself and defining itself, increases the information in the system.
Rosner: The playing out of this is time, the steps of this. Going from zero information, though it’s probably not zero, but going from each step in the increase of information is time. Now, I guess at some point, you could have a sufficiently developed universe, or maybe even just a poorly developed universe, where it can go from state to state, from allowable universe to allowable moment to allowable moment, without increasing information or even with decreasing information. Causality says that this moment is linked. You can still have time where information increases and that’s the more likely situation. But I guess you can also have situations where you can have subsequent moments with the loss of information.
Time is just the succession of quantum events. And for early universes, there’s a lot of pressure to differentiate, to go from low information to higher information situations. You wanted to talk about top-down systems. We’re looking at information from the top down instead of the bottom up because the bottom up is that base level definition of information, which is just picking one state out of a set of possible states. But when you look at information from the top down, we think of information within consciousness, or knowledge within consciousness, which to us seems like the pinnacle of information, the most highly developed manifestation of information. Knowing stuff consciously. It probably turns out that you can’t have the bottom stuff without the top stuff. A lot of the definitions you sent me of information say that information can’t exist without a context. And the highest level context is consciousness, what we consider to be the arbiter of everything.
Jacobsen: That’s right. Maybe it’s not about highest magnitude or greatest magnitude to lowest or least magnitude into self-interaction, but more about emergence out of that. Of a non-existent or quasi-existent virtual state to the medium and larger scale magnitude objects and processes in which the self-interaction really happens only on a medium to massive scale. It doesn’t happen at the lowest magnitudes. That might be something peculiar and nuanced about the ways in which the universe’s information is structured.
Rosner: Well, the recursion that you’re talking about is kind of weird. The way that we exist consciously, the way that any conscious being exists, at least an evolved conscious being, is by modeling the external world. The world is out there, and now to survive in the world. You have to build that world within your awareness. You have to understand the world to survive in it, which means building a replica of the world within your awareness, which is a weird recursion. Any conscious system is modeling something.
Is it possible to have a conscious system that senses something and analyzes it with enough different modes of analysis and enough density of moment-to-moment information that it feels real? Of course, a conscious system could be conscious of something that is completely false, but it’s still modeling something. It could be modeling something that doesn’t actually exist, but it’s still building an awareness of something, whether that thing exists or not. The recursion is weird in that the only way things can exist, if we think consciousness is kind of a requisite for having a system that contains information, but that consciousness is itself a model of something else, is a weird recursion.
This leads to the question of why recursion is required for existence. We know that self-consistency is required for existence. Universes that exist, that are possible, have to be self-consistent. I don’t know, where was I going with this? I was trying to relate recursion to this other requirement of self-consistency. In a way, you’re requiring the universe to know itself. Because if it can’t specify itself, then it can’t exist and it can’t avoid destructive contradictions. When you say “know itself,” we don’t know what we’re talking about.
Jacobsen: I do not mean “know” in terms of a conscious self. I depart from you in that interpretive frame. I take it more in terms of a general meaning of operators as anything sufficiently distinct in reality to interact with anything else sufficiently distinct in reality. Any operator defined in that way would amount to something from the minimal level to a higher level of magnitude and scale. In other words, that would allow for different styles of self-interaction. Those forms of self-interaction themselves would amount to a type of information creation or maintenance. In that sense, it still goes back to the original claim that our mental structures have an incompleteness about them informationally. Epistemological processes to understand the world also have an incompleteness about them in the terms and structure of the world. Similarly, the universe’s own self-interaction also has that nature of being incomplete.
Rosner: The incompleteness is okay. It’s unavoidable; it’s just part of the math of things. You can’t have infinities. Quantum mechanics characterizes how incompleteness works. People 150 years ago, even 100 years ago, would have had a problem with that. The fuzziness of quantum mechanics is just built into the way things are.
Jacobsen: When you see something, there’s a union between what you’re seeing and what your internal processing is, in a similar way, mathematical principles discovered and derived have a similar isomorphism, a similar symmetry in process and structure. It might be less a question of mathematical principles and physical laws in the world, and more a happenstance of coincidence of a similarity of structural process at some recursive scale. That’s an organism or processor, and some not-so-conscious external-to-that-processor function. It’s like a frayed shoelace, where there’s a certain delimited universe where the math just runs out.
Rosner: I don’t know. I don’t think the math runs out. I think the math is lurking there in the implications of the principles of existence. The principles of existence unavoidably lead to the inverse square law of gravitation. Inevitably, they lead to a universe that locally has three spatial dimensions, that has linear time. The laws that we’re dealing with are emergent but unavoidable. You could probably design a toy universe that could operate in different numbers of spatial dimensions, but it would be a universe that would constantly have to be manipulated externally, one that doesn’t flow as directly from the principles of existence and information. Similarly, every possible universe has to follow a lot of the same laws. All the possible universes that I can think of, which is obviously not every possible universe because I’m just some dumb person in 2024, but they all have three dimensions of space and one of time, just at vastly different scales. One universe might have 10 to the 80th particles, and another universe might have 10 to the 10 to the 80th particles. You can stack as many 10s as you want without limit, we’re assuming. But all those universes, maybe not all, but all the ones I can imagine, have that three-in-one structure and have gravitation and all that. Physics is emergent, but it’s emergent in the same way just about every time unless you’re getting in there and manipulating your universe to be some kind of toy universe embedded within the universe that you’re making the toy in. I don’t know anything else.
Jacobsen: That should be good for now.
[Recording End]
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