Thank you MG, for a mass of words that were not yours, and that may not have even been read by you.
In the jumble that your A.I. provided (unless I missed something), it appears that no one is willing attach their names to the idea that Information Theory is a new Theory of Everything. So why did you make a claim that “there are those that support information theory as being the theory of everything”?
What am I missing?
Paul Davies, director of BEYOND: The Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, frames the question: "Historically, matter has been at the bottom of the explanatory chain, and information has been a sort of secondary derivative of it," Davies said. Now, he added, "there's increasing interest among at least a small group of physicists to turn this upside down and say, maybe at rock bottom, the universe is about information and information processing, and it's matter that emerges as a secondary concept. https://www.space.com/29477-did-informa ... perplexity
It might be well to have PhysicsGuy check in on this. He would be the most well informed of anyone here I would think.
I'm simply positing that it is interesting that there may be possible correlates between information theory and Mormon teachings in regards to intelligence(s) and spirit.
Regards
MG
From MG 2.0’s “Paul Davies link”
Alan Guth, one of the founders of contemporary cosmology and a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at MIT, the notion of information as fundamental is not convincing — at least not yet.
"I don't see justification for the claim," Guth said, "although maybe I could be convinced in the future. Unless those bits are doing something different from the laws of physics, I don't really see that there's a question here. If two things are equivalent, I don't think there's any valid way to talk about which is more fundamental, and I see the two as equivalent."
What intelligence (“The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge”) do the beans that made my coffee this morning have? They obey the laws of nature, they obey the laws of physics, but they cannot make informed decisions. For that you need a brain.
Premise 1. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
Premise 2. The best evidence for the Book of Mormon is eyewitness testimony.
Conclusion. Therefore, the best evidence for the Book of Mormon is notoriously unreliable.
I know you're saying this with a touch of hyperbole but nonetheless there may be a kernel of truth in that statement.
No reason to read hyperbole in my post. Mormonism is a belief system that is willing to change its beliefs which is in my view a positive not a negative.
I think it's going to be interesting over the next few years to watch just how advanced A.I. becomes in the field of robotics. Let's say in 20 years A.I. becomes so advanced we find ourselves walking amongst robots that are imbued with human-like qualities, personhood, they had a creator just like we do, then logic bears that those creations would also be in the image of God.
The fact that we now have the ability to create robots that walk as we do, talk as we do and in the near future they will think and process information as we do, we are infringing on acts of creation that according to many religious traditions, only belong to God.
If robots become so human-like in the future, will there ever come a time when we find ourselves as a race asking ourselves if owning robots for our benefit to clean the house or cut the grass, is a form of slavery?
Then there's a question about the three O's. As it stands today, most of Christianity is monotheistic, but what if A.I. becomes so advanced that these A.I. beings are viewed as omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent because they can be everywhere and know everything? Will it cause people to question if there's multiple Gods?
A.I. has the potential to create beings so advanced that it will cause even the most strident atheist to question if there's a possibility that we humans might just be a less advanced race of created being that possibly began our existence on another planet where our creator or creators expiremented with making us more advanced with every knew model.
Think about it, maybe homo heidelbergenisis was the first model that our creator came up with. Then there was Homo neanderthalenis, then Homo erectus, homo floresiensis, homo naledi, and finally us model homo sapien.
To tie this to Mormonism and the belief that there's infinite Gods out there in the universe, if God is real, then the possibility that there's more than one is far more likely than the Christian belief that there is only one. The early teachings of Mormonism that talk about there being infinite numbers of intelligences out there somewhere in the universe makes sense when taking into account the fact that we now have the potential to produce an infinite number of beings that in the near future have the possibility to be even more intelligent than their creators.
There are different ways in which "information" has been suggested to be fundamental, but wow, talk about following it down to the last turtle with the same bad reasoning.
Why would "information" have anything to do with a persons volition, thinking, or awareness anymore than dirt? Panpsychism is the best Mormon possibility, and probably a better guess for Ms. Harris's idea also.
Incidentally, another tidbit of Mormon turtle logic: Genesis says that God formed Adam out of clay and then breathed upon the clay the breath of life and it became a living soul. Joseph Smith's Abraham or Moses (can't recall) changes that to God putting a spirit into the body, then breathing the breath of life upon that concoction, and it becomes a living soul.
Social distancing has likely already begun to flatten the curve...Continue to research good antivirals and vaccine candidates. Make everyone wear masks. -- J.D. Vance
It might be well to have PhysicsGuy check in on this. He would be the most well informed of anyone here I would think.
I'm simply positing that it is interesting that there may be possible correlates between information theory and Mormon teachings in regards to intelligence(s) and spirit.
It's okay. And thank you for following up. I hope your new theory provides you comfort.
I don't think that interest in information is a new trend in physics. Everyone just wants to be able to say that their pet project is a new trend.
The idea is there. The slogan "It from Bit" is a good forty years old. J.A. Wheeler used to push it: he was a distinguished theoretical physicist in his day (1911-2008) but is best known now for having coined the name "black hole" (he didn't discover the phenomenon) and for having been doctoral advisor to Richard Feynman. Within physics he's also still known for some other things. He was an influential guy, but also a bit of a salesman. The fact that Wheeler liked to talk about something isn't strong evidence that it is actually true or important or even widely popular.
Information crops up in a few important places in physics. For instance, there are some things that can perfectly well move faster than light. If you swing a laser pointer around, the red spot that it makes on a wall can zip across the wall at any speed, if the wall is far enough away from you. In a similar way, a shadow can move faster than light. So can the contact point between the two blades of a pair of scissors. The reason some things can move faster than light is that they are not really things, exactly—or else what they are doing is not really moving, exactly. It's a pain to have to thresh through, in every case, exactly what is or is not a moving thing. The neat formulation that people use, that covers all cases, is that it is impossible to send information faster than light.
If you swing a laser pointer across a distant wall, any information in the light has been determined by you, and it travels away from you only at the speed of light. The red spot might sweep from the left to the right side of the wall faster than light, but nobody at the left side of the wall had any control over the light spot. It just came to them as a sudden surprise, and zipped away right away. So the spot cannot be carrying any information from them to the right side of the wall. And you can resolve all of these relativity puzzles this way. If something would in principle let you send information faster than light, then that something's impossible. If it will never allow superluminal communication, then it might still be possible even if it in some way seems to involve something moving faster than light.
So information figures in a basic physical law. It's a bit weird. Electrons aren't really all spamming each other with SnapChat posts, or anything, so it's kind of surprising that physics would care explicitly about information. But information does seem to be a convenient concept for expressing the rule about the speed of light.
Information also kind of appears in thermodynamics, in that the mathematical formula for entropy, according to statistical mechanics, is exactly the same as Claude Shannon's 1948 formula for the information content of a long string of symbols. The entropy formula had been established for decades when Shannon came up with his information formula, without knowing about its existing role in physics. Some people interpret this as meaning that entropy is really some kind of information, but I reckon you could just as well conclude that information must be some kind of entropy.
That's about it. Entropy and the speed of light are both pretty important, but they're not all of physics by any means. And these connections between physics and information have been around for quite a few decades now. Paul Davies is nearly eighty years old: no Young Turk. Ideas about information in physics are cute, and maybe suggestive of something, but they've never really gone anywhere, and nothing particular about them is taking off now. Nobody knows what to do to make them concrete. As my postdoctoral advisor Wojciech Zurek would probably say, the idea that "everything is information" is not really an idea, but only an idea for an idea. Nobody has any new insight about information in physics. A few people are just saying, as they've been saying for decades, "Hey, let's try to have a new insight about information in physics!"
It's also important to realize that when people say "information" in connection with physics, they don't mean "meaningful information". Even random noise can count as information in this context. So getting from information to intelligence would be a further big jump.
It might be well to have PhysicsGuy check in on this. He would be the most well informed of anyone here I would think.
I'm simply positing that it is interesting that there may be possible correlates between information theory and Mormon teachings in regards to intelligence(s) and spirit.
It's okay. And thank you for following up. I hope your new theory provides you comfort.
More or less it's interesting that from a very early date the CofJCofLDS taught concerning premortal existence and the concept of being coeternal with God. And that we had 'intelligence' and had the ability to make certain choices and progress. For most Christians today, along with many others, that would seem to be a radical thing to promote and believe.
I wouldn't expect that information theory of 'all things' would be a confirmed and widely accepted concept in science. I mean, heck, we're getting down to the nitty gritty. Pretty hard to prove it.
Some fairly smart and well respected people have proposed the idea though and it's just one other thing to consider as we think about what makes the universe tick.
Its kind of cool that Mormon theology is adapted to or can be adapted to certain scientific surmises and theories.
That's essentially all I'm saying. I'm not particularly interested in trying to prove anything.
Because I can't.
Years ago I had an affinity for exploring the views of an LDS scientist named David Bailey (not sure if he's still alive). His writings may still be available online. His belief was that modern science and Mormonism are compatible.
I agree.
I'm reading a book by Francis S. Collins called The Language of God detailing his journey from agnostic/atheist to believer. He headed the Human Genome Project.
I find Mormonism wildly interesting in the fact that one doesn't have to turn off their brain in order to believe in Christ and to further believe in the restoration.
There are things about Mormonism that I find very hard to square with a scientific attitude. I have to concede, though, that there are also things that do seem to fit surprisingly comfortably.
I think particularly of Clark Goble, here, who was a thoughtful fellow physics guy as well as a faithful Mormon who took his faith seriously. I could never quite grasp how he managed that, but somehow he did, and I couldn't point to any clear failure in either his physics or his faith. I wish that he were still with us.
There are things about Mormonism that I find very hard to square with a scientific attitude. I have to concede, though, that there are also things that do seem to fit surprisingly comfortably.
I think particularly of Clark Goble, here, who was a thoughtful fellow physics guy as well as a faithful Mormon who took his faith seriously. I could never quite grasp how he managed that, but somehow he did, and I couldn't point to any clear failure in either his physics or his faith. I wish that he were still with us.
David Bailey has been another LDS scientist that has had a fair amount of influence on thinkers within the church. I'm not recalling whether or not he had the same online presence (message boards) as Clark Goble did. I also enjoyed reading Clark's posts for many years. If I remember correctly he goes back to ZLMB. And even farther to one of the first list serves to come out of BYU (I can't remember what it was called now). Maybe it was Mormon-l.
physics guy wrote:Information also kind of appears in thermodynamics, in that the mathematical formula for entropy, according to statistical mechanics, is exactly the same as Claude Shannon's 1948 formula for the information content of a long string of symbols.
You physicists are in a fork. Either accept intelligent design as essentially valid, or demote thermodynamics to an engineering principle rather than keeping it a law. ID argued that SETI says design ('information') can be quantified. If SETI can determine a signal is designed, then why not determine an object is designed? I can't say it isn't a good point. The bottom line for me was that there is nothing special about a royal flush -- any hand you've ever been dealt has the same probability as a royal flush, it's a totally subjective determination that certain patterns are better than others. While it's true that un-mixing a bucket of equal parts of white and black sand grains would take forever, so would achieving any specific configuration of white and black grains within the bucket.
(ok, bracing).
Social distancing has likely already begun to flatten the curve...Continue to research good antivirals and vaccine candidates. Make everyone wear masks. -- J.D. Vance
The reason ID is silly is not that it's a priori impossible to detect meaning in any signal of any kind. It may never be completely certain, but one can imagine signals for which meaningfulness would be a darn good bet. When the first pulsar signals were detected, people did wonder whether they could be artificial, but the extreme regularity of the signals pointed to a natural source. And there are still various kinds of powerful radiation bursts being detected occasionally, whose origins are uncertain. The possibility that they could be alien transmissions is not high on the list, because it doesn't seem as though the bursts could be saying much other than, "Hey!" But the possibility is not off the table. If we ever see signals that seem to be reciting lists of prime numbers, for example, we'll be pretty sure that SETI has finally scored a hit.
No, the problem with ID is not that it is looking for intelligence at all, but that the particular things that it wants to see as unambiguous signs of intelligence simply do not actually look at all like that to an unbiased observer. On the long spectrum of how clearly phenomena can be signs of intelligence, there is one end where intelligence does seem clear, but there is also a very broad range of complex patterns that are completely consistent with natural systems unguided by anything like human design. ID advocates mostly don't understand that. They make false dichotomies between intelligent design and pure randomness.
Thermodynamics:
Thermodynamics itself does not mention information at all, strictly speaking. It's a closed system of axioms dating from the 19th century and unchanged since then. Within thermodynamics the definition of entropy is perfectly clear: you add entropy to something when you add heat to it, and the amount of entropy that you add is the amount of heat you add, divided by the thing's temperature. Taking away heat is just adding negative heat, so this definition also covers decrease of entropy. There's no good way to pin down the starting amount of entropy, because this definition only describes entropy changes, but it turns out that we never need to know the absolute amount of entropy in anything. Just keeping track of entropy changes is enough to resolve any practical questions.
If everything always kept the same temperature, there would be no point at all in defining entropy, because it would just be a trivial renaming of a certain kind of energy. The point is that temperatures can change and be different, and so natural laws about entropy can indeed tell us things that we wouldn't know just from laws about energy. There is really only one such law in thermodynamics: the second law says that total entropy cannot decrease. That has strong implications for how heat can move between things. For example, one big thing that it normally means (but not always!) is that heat can only flow downhill in temperature.
The problem with thermodynamics is that it's kind of like a traditional tribal chieftainship operating within a modern republic. Like the constitutional and statute law of the republic, we have a complete set of natural laws outside thermodynamics—the microscopic laws about force and motion, electromagnetic fields, and so on. Those laws don't leave room for any additional laws. They already completely prescribe anything that can happen, for any given initial conditions of the universe. And thermodynamics and the microscopic laws do not talk to each other. Neither of them even mentions the other.
Nevertheless we're pretty darn sure that thermodynamics is true. Physicists are happy to contemplate new microscopic theories that would turn our current theories into mere approximations, while radically revising the whole picture of what everything really is. Nobody can take seriously any revisions of thermodynamics, though. It's settled law.
One of the biggest outstanding questions in physics today is the relationship between thermodynamics and microscopic natural law. There are two alternatives. One possibility is that thermodynamics is a constraint on the range of possible initial conditions of the universe. Since the microscopic laws make no assumptions at all about the initial conditions, reining in that enormous freedom to have many different possible universes is at least an open job, that thermodynamics could do. Initial conditions are the Wild West; thermodynamics could be its sheriff. This is an unsatisfying kind of resolution, however. It's a shame to have nothing better to say, about why such a big and basic pattern as thermodynamics is true, than that the initial conditions just happened to be that way. Go ask your mother.
It might be okay if we could articulate a specific rule about initial conditions, which is itself simple and elegant enough to be plausible as a basic rule of nature along with the microscopic equations, but which would also logically imply thermodynamics as an inevitable consequence. So far no-one has found any such rule about initial conditions; the hypothesis that people have made is only that there might be some such kind of a rule. Trying to come up with a specific one involves digging deeply into exactly how thermodynamics relates to microscopic causality, and so this quest ends up merging into the second option for thermodynamics: that it could be an as-yet-unproven theorem within the microscopic laws of nature.
So people have tried, for more than 150 years now, to derive thermodynamics as a necessary consequence of the other, microscopic laws of nature. I'm one of those people—this is my main research topic. The oldest and most successful branch of this quest is called statistical mechanics. It looks for thermodynamics to appear as a set of consequences that come out whenever we have large enough numbers of particles interacting under the microscopic laws. Statistical mechanics has had a lot of successes, to the point where it is a workhorse theory throughout all of physics, but it still hasn't clinched the title with a proof of thermodynamics as a theorem.
The relationship between entropy and information is a central hypothesis of statistical mechanics. Or rather, a certain formula with probability logarithms is the candidate offered by statistical mechanics for the microscopic definition of entropy, in modern physics terms of distributions of particles and fields rather than in terms of 19th-century engineering concepts like heat and temperature. Statistical mechanics itself doesn't care at all about information as such. It's just that its formula for entropy happens to look exactly like Shannon's formula for information.
Shannon's quantitative measure for the amount of information in a sequence of symbols really does make sense for what it's supposed to mean. It's not just an academic definition. And the statistical mechanical formula for entropy really does seem to work, in a vast range of cases, to explain thermodynamics in microscopic terms. So maybe this is not just a coincidence and there really is a connection between entropy and information. Even if there is, though, we have to remember that the kind of information that we're discussing is just a measure of potential bandwidth—how much data could be represented in a signal—and has nothing to do with whether any given signal actually does in fact mean anything, to anyone.
The common issue is the range of different things that are available to happen. The statistical mechanical hypothesis about thermodynamics is, roughly, that the more different ways a thing has of happening, the more likely it is to happen. So, in statistical mechanics, entropy is a measure of the number of different ways something could be, while still counting as the same thing. And communication is similar, in that we can send more data if we are allowed to use a wider range of possible signals. If every time you send a 0 it has to be followed by 99 other zeroes, then people are going to be waiting through a lot of zeroes, knowing that they'll have to wait through 99 of them before they get any fresh information. They may as well go for coffee each time they see a zero. If you're free to send zero or one every time, on the other hand, people had better listen carefully to each signal. You're sending a lot more information this way.
Information and entropy may just both happen to be about ranges of possibilities, rather than actually being about each other.
