On Defining Information in the Contemporary Period

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/12

 (Updated June 24, 2024)

*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*

According to some semi-reputable sources listed 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 Awardsnominations, winning one and an Emmy nomination, and was named 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory.

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 sent a cease-and-desist letter. (The commercial dramatized the results of a taste test in which Domino’s sandwiches were preferred over Subway’s sandwiches 2 to 1, but Subway and its lawyers claimed the taste test methodology was biased and flawed.) He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area by Westwood Magazine.

Rosner spent some of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and 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 profiled Rosner in the interview series First Person. He came in second (lost) on Jeopardy! and 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.) He has spent 40+ years working on a semi-time-invariant version of Big Bang Theory.

Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two dogs. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions or just give him shit on Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn. He has a crappy little show on PodTV.

Rick Rosner: So, you sent me close to a dozen definitions of information as defined by various disciplines.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes. Then I decided to take a broader, big-picture angle by examining the different levels of information. It fundamentally revolves around incompleteness. Our methods of understanding, such as the scientific method, rely on incompleteness. We must examine specific aspects of reality to obtain accurate information, which inherently limits our models. These mental models are incomplete, subject to degradation, and serve as shortcuts for understanding the world. Even the universe itself exhibits incompleteness in its interactions, as it does not interact with itself instantaneously. Thus, there’s a profound connection between information and incompleteness, regardless of how information is defined or analyzed.

Rosner: I found that the term “information” originated in the 14th century, but I didn’t have time to investigate its historical usage or when the world began seriously considering it. Information theory’s formal study began in 1948 with Shannon’s paper. Therefore, the mathematical and physical study of information is relatively young. I considered information even before receiving your email this afternoon and quickly found myself lacking clarity. One clear point is that, just as all sciences boil down to physics, all understandings of information likely reduce to a fundamental mathematical definition. Shannon’s definition, which involves selecting one choice from many, is a good starting point. The more choices available, the more information is conveyed. However, this may not be the ultimate definition of information.

I thought about Schrödinger’s cat, a cliché in popular physics references. It’s often used in TV shows or movies to signify complex quantum physics concepts. For example, the show “Dark Matter” begins with a lesson on Schrödinger’s cat. The cat, existing in a superimposition of alive and dead states until observed, illustrates our model of it. However, within the box, the cat is definitively alive or dead once the vial of poison is triggered. The universe can detect the cat’s state without our observation. Thus, superimposition does not occur in the actual world. The cat’s state remains unknown to us if placed in an isolated sphere, regardless of the scientists inside. This localization of knowledge raises questions about the necessity of knowing for existence. If matter is information in an information processor, the states of matter might not impact associated consciousness. We’ve discussed various levels of information and consciousness, yet confusion persists. Over the past decade, it’s evident that events in a star’s center leave no record. They must occur due to causality but transpire without a permanent record of particle interactions. This does not imply quantum superimposition governs these events, as they are causally determined.

Jacobsen: Physical laws, while fundamental, do not negate emergent properties like hot and cold. Emergent properties, such as sensations, exist in the world but not at a fundamental level. They simultaneously exist and do not exist based on the scale of observation.

Rosner: The sensation of hot and cold, or the concept of self, are emergent properties. They are artifacts of brain processes, with physical laws emerging from information principles. These laws, while nebulous, become less so as the universe accumulates more information, matter, space, and time.

Jacobsen: To fully understand existence and knowledge, we must consider interactions at a fundamental level.

Rosner: The universe defines itself through particle interactions, which may not always be known or leave a trace. Yet, these interactions are implicated by the matter’s behavior, forming a statistical structure based on historical interactions. It’s the traces of interactions that give solidity to the world. The implied existence of countless interactions in a star’s core, though unrecorded, is necessitated by physical laws.

Jacobsen: Perhaps a comprehensive theory of physical law is unnecessary for understanding the principles of existence. Interactions, even without leaving a detailed history, imply the events that must have occurred based on the behavior of matter.

Rosner: An understanding can be reached without delving into physical laws, focusing instead on the principle of non-contradiction. A thing cannot exist in a contradictory state. Superimposed states indicate possible states due to incomplete information.

Jacobsen: Emergent states and recursive structures in time and space may characterize the information structure of reality.

Rosner: Many things that make the universe solid are implied rather than explicitly known. This implied history of interactions gives rise to the emergent properties we observe. As emergent properties develop, they rely on increasingly stable frameworks, despite their shaky foundations.

Jacobsen: The duality of existence in information suggests that phenomena fundamentally do not exist but do so emergently, akin to wave-particle duality. Considering possible universes, each with exact quantum characterization, presents complexity. Moving from one possible moment to another, we carry forward only the necessary information. We are not dealing with existence in binary terms but with a continuum where things are more or less existent.

Rosner: Larger, shorter-lived entities have more prescient existence due to gravitational clumping and macro information processing. The universe, like our mind, processes macro information, with micro interactions often going unnoticed. Micro interactions are locally known, just as only people on Earth know about cats. The universe, understanding its constituents, cannot know specifics of micro interactions.

Rosner: We’ve identified pieces for discussion to arrive at an understanding, yet much remains to be figured out.

Jacobsen: I would like to schedule another session to focus on top-down, recursive structures rather than bottom-up construction. Maybe there is something about emergent states with a recursive facility as well. If you consider Chris Cole’s attempts to find all these recursive loops within various biological systems in the human body, there might be a larger framework in which to characterize the information structure of reality as recursive in time and space and emergent properties, which would include time and space.

Rosner: At the very least, many things that make the universe solid are tacit and implied, involving not just histories that leave a trace but also those that are implied. These things had to have happened given that there is this much matter performing various actions. We do not have an exact history of the events, but we know they must have occurred, given the behavior of matter.

Jacobsen: It is not only matter. I refer to each magnitude as it develops more and more emergent properties that, while fundamentally not existing, rest on an increasingly less probabilistic framework as things become more solid. I would include concepts like the self or the quality of experience in this category. These emergent properties do not fundamentally exist but nonetheless exist on a very shaky foundation. What I am suggesting is a dual principle that paradoxically views phenomena in the world of information as both fundamentally non-existent and emergently existent, this emergent duality is similar to wave-particle duality, depending on the perspective.

Rosner: Now that I consider it, especially in the context of all possible universes, there is some oddness because each member of this set has an exact quantum characterization. Information or histories are often only implied after events play out. When time passes, we move from one possible universe, one possible moment, to another. Each possible moment contains much more information, exactly specified, than survives the process and is transmitted from moment to moment. We specify one of countless possible states, but the wider universe does not require that much specification. So, I am confused.

Jacobsen: We are not simply examining existence or non-existence. It is like a radio dial, tuning things into existence more than tuning them out. The question for me is why larger, typically shorter-lived entities have a more prescient existence in the universe when the foundations are shaky and probabilistic.

Rosner: The business of the universe involves gravitational clumping, tied to much of the universe’s macro information. The universe functions as an information processor, similar to how our minds process information. It is the macro elements that impinge on our awareness, while the micro interactions often leave no trace. Micro interactions, even when they do leave a trace, are only locally known. For instance, only people on Earth know about cats. The universe, as macro information, imagines evolution occurring among its constituent information manifested as matter but does not know the specifics of these micro interactions. This topic is ripe for further thought and discussion and can be sorted out within 200 years but remains wide open. Is that reasonable to say? We have discussed some pieces that need to be debated to arrive at an understanding, but there is still a lot of room to figure this out.

Jacobsen: Yes. I want to focus on top-down, recursive structures rather than bottom-up, Lego block, Minecraft-style world-building.

Rosner: Okay.

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.

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.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.