Closer to Truth is a “public television series featuring scientists, philosophers, theologians and scholars exploring the deepest questions of Cosmos, Consciousness and Meaning-the structure of the universe, the nature of the mind and the search for ultimate reality.”
What is information? Information is all the rage in science, changing how we think about fundamental questions. Information has many descriptions, some of them surprising. Why is Information so important to scientists and philosophers? Featuring interviews with Max Tegmark, Paul Davies, Seth Lloyd, Giulio Tononi, and Scott Aaronson.
The fact that anyone is taking information seriously is a big step forward.
Incidentally, Giulio Tonioni’s theory of consciousness is linked to panpsychism. See:
Why is science growing comfortable with panpsychism (“everything is conscious” )? At one time, the idea that “everything is conscious” was the stuff of jokes. Not any more, it seems. A recent article at New Scientist treats panpsychism as a serious idea in science. That’s thanks to the growing popularity of neuroscientist Giulio Tonioni’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which offers the opportunity for mathematical modeling, along with the implication that inanimate matter and/or the universe may be conscious. If IIT continues to gain a sympathetic hearing, panpsychism could become, over time, a part of normal science.
Max Tegmark: “Maybe information is even more fundamental than matter and energy and space.”
Nice to see folks finally catching up to where Bill Dembski was many years ago.
Depends on which version of information you’re using, doesn’t it?
As to trying to put some empirical meat on the bones for the claim made in the video, namely, “Maybe information is even more fundamental than matter and energy and space” it is first good to note that it is now proven that the universe itself, all matter and energy and space (and time), came into existence at the creation of the universe during the Big Bang approx. 14 billions years ago.
Thus since all space-time, matter-energy, of the universe were brought into being at the creation of the universe, then it necessarily follows that whatever brought the universe into being must itself be beyond all space-time, matter-energy. It just so happens that information itself, (as well as mathematics), is irreducible to space-time, matter-energy.
As I recently noted on another thread, “Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes…”
Likewise, mathematics itself, (which is reducible to information), is also profoundly immaterial and timeless in its foundational nature,
As David Berlinski states in the following article,“There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time…. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there.
This immaterial, timeless, mathematical world has traditionally been referred to as a ‘Platonic World”
As the following article points out, ‘Mathematical platonism enjoys widespread support and is frequently considered the default metaphysical position with respect to mathematics.,,, and that arguments for mathematical platonism typically assert,,, that mathematical entities are not constituents of the spatio-temporal realm.’
In fact, the fact that man himself can use this immaterial, timeless, world of information and mathematics offers fairly compelling evidence that man in not a purely material being but that man must also possess a transcendent, beyond space and time, immaterial mind and/or soul.
As Charles Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace himself stated, “Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation.”
But anyways, (although it is certainly very interesting that our use of information and mathematics is proof, in and of itself, that we must necessarily possess an immaterial component to our being, i.e. a ‘soul’,) we must get back to the main question of providing proof that information is the bedrock of reality.
In quantum mechanics it has now been proven that ‘realism’, which is the belief that a material reality exists apart from our conscious observation of it, is false.
The following violation of Leggett’s inequality found that “reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.
And the following Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment, which was done with atoms instead of photons, proved that “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
What is interesting about this, as far as information itself is concerned, is that in quantum mechanics, prior to measurement and/or observation, the photon and/or atom is mathematically defined as existing in an ‘infinite dimensional’ Hilbert space:
Moreover, it is an infinite dimensional state that is also mathematically required to take an infinite amount of information to describe properly.
Thus, since we ourselves are certainly not the ones who are ‘collapsing the wave function’ from its infinite dimensional and infinite information state into the classical state of 1 or 0, then we must necessarily appeal to a cause that has the causal sufficiency within itself to explain how it is possible for a infinite dimensional and infinite information state to collapse into the classical state of 1 or 0.
For me, as a Christian Theist, I have a more than sufficient cause that I can appeal to,
Saying something is in an infinite dimensional state to me, as a Christian Theist, certainly sounds very much like the theistic attribute of omnipresence to me.
And then saying something takes an infinite amount of information to describe, as a Christian, certainly sounds very much like the Theistic attribute of Omniscience to me.
Thus in conclusion, the universe is neither self originating, nor is it self-sustaining,, but the universe is instead dependent on a cause that must itself be beyond space-time, matter-energy. A beyond space-time, matter-energy cause which must also necessarily possess the attributes of omnipresence and omniscience in order to have the causal sufficiency within itself to explain the quantum wave collapse of a infinite dimensional, infinite information, state. Again, as a Christian, I readily have a more than sufficient cause that I can appeal to:
As Dr. Bruce Gordon explained when he refuted Stephen Hawking’s ‘irrational’ attempt to explain the existence of the universe minus God:
Supplemental notes:
Here is an interesting quote about the enigmatic infinite dimensional Hilbert Spaces in quantum mechanics, ” (Imagine reading off details about elementary particles from the rules of chess-castling. en passant-a la Lewis Carro;; in Through the Looking Glass.) No physicist today understands why this is possible..”
To say that the creation of the universe is antagonistic to atheistic materialism is an understatement
Dr. Craig laid out the argument for God from the creation of the universe in the “Kalam Cosmological Argument”
I’ve listened closely what all these brilliant people said about “information”. Not one of them said anything that contradicts Dr. Gitt’s explanation of information, and all of them accurately described some aspect of what Dr. Gitt says information is.
In the Beginning Was Information
Paperback – March 15, 2006
by Dr. Werner Gitt
$5.99 at Amazon in Kindle format
Save yourself (or your corporation) some money by not going to an exotic vacation place for a conference to listen to these great thinkers, and just read this $5.99 book. You will be further along than all of them in understanding what information is.
There are two irreconcilable opposite worldview positions: on one end those who believe that the ultimate reality is defined by matter and energy. In the other end those who believe that the ultimate reality is defined by the first few verses of the 4th book of the New Testament of the Christian Scriptures (the Gospel according to John): in the beginning was LOGOS.
It seems like gradually science is leading us to the confirmation of the latter.
In biology some DNA nucleotide sequences code for regulatory ncRNA, others code for pre-mRNA, others code for TF-binding sites, promoter regions, enhancers, etc.