

A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything - michael_dorfman
http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15949137

======
hga
From the most useful Amazon.com review of the book
([http://www.amazon.com/review/R15E7HO19A2FQF/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R15E7HO19A2FQF/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm)):

" _The core of the argument (on page 201) I will not spoil here, but it's not
wholly convincing on several grounds. First, although he does not further
dwell on it, the author favors the 'Copenhagen' (or observer effect)
interpretation of quantum physics, which is used to buttress & underpin his
argument._"

Oops. Or at least say I, not liking the Copenhagen interpretation at all.
(Perhaps the most frightening thing to me about quantum mechanics is that I've
found the many worlds interpenetration to be the best ... then again, in this
area I'm a chemist, so these issues are "above my pay grade".)

~~~
goodside
Whether a physicist (in modern times and below a certain age) espouses MWI is
quickly becoming a great litmus test for whether you should bother listening
to them on anything that isn't established textbook material. Copenhagen is
pseudo-scientific nonsense, and I'm amazed anyone can work on developing
quantum computers while simultaneously denying the existence of what they're
designing. I'd cut him some slack if this were just some tangential side
point, but if it's critical to his argument the whole of it isn't worth
anyone's time.

~~~
jessriedel
The reason people can get away with Copenhagen is that decoherence is absurdly
effective in all realistic cases, causing there to very little uncertainty
about whether and when a measurement happened. Insofar as we can all agree
when a measurement happened, physicists operating under Copenhagen are going
to be just as effective as those who understand MWI. And for most of the
_theoretical_ and especially _computational_ aspects of quantum computers,
this is the case. The only place where someone operating under the Copenhagen
interpretation is going to falter is when they have to think hard and in novel
ways about how to prevent decoherence.

So I really don't think interpretation is going to be correlated with advances
in the computational aspects (i.e., what kind of problems are quantum
computers good for once they are built, etc.) but I would predict that future
insights in how to build computers which are robust against decoherence will
be dominates by those who understand MWI.

~~~
goodside
"Insofar as we can all agree when a measurement happened, physicists operating
under Copenhagen are going to be just as effective as those who understand
MWI."

Agreed. If you're only worrying about the mundane medium-sized world we live
in and what QM predicts we'll see in it, MWI vs. Copenhagen won't matter.
Here, it does, as he's apparently using Cop. as a part of his argument.

------
gintas
I did my Masters thesis informational ontology. Here's the thing: Shannon's
information theory is a mathematical formalism, and is not enough to define
information. Furthermore, information can only be defined within bounds of a
model, and there are typically many ways and many abstraction levels available
to describe a phenomenon, so the question of objectivity of information is
still open.

If to assert objectivity you try to pick the lowest possible layer of
abstraction at the quantum mechanics level, you lose the whole layer of
_semantic_ information, i.e. information about something, which is actually
the primary concept of information, and "information" simply becomes a name
for a set of mathematical formulas, and as such it may not be treated as a
substance.

------
yafujifide
This article seems to imply that the author equates Shannon entropy with
information. Is that so? It has always struck me that Shannon entropy is a
good measure of information, but is not a good definition of information
itself. Like the difference between a vector and the magnitude of a vector,
information and its measure are not the same. What is information itself? If
this author actually has a definition of that, I would like to see it.

~~~
Anon84
"You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your
uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name,
so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one
really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the
advantage."

John von Neumann to Claude Shannon

------
wolfhumble
" _Unusually for a physicist, Mr Vedral spends a fair bit of time talking
about religious views, such as how God created the universe. He asks whether
something can come out of nothing . . . Mr Vedral makes a persuasive argument
for a third option: information can be created out of nothing._ "

Somehow this reminded be about this verse in the Bible: "In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God",
<http://bible.cc/john/1-1.htm>

~~~
helwr
.. and the heavenly spirits decided to set the Word free with a GNU license,
and released Open Office, and after fixing most of the bugs God saw that it
was good (or at least usable).

------
Qz
It's a book review -- doesn't really explain what the physicist is arguing in
any meaningful sense.

~~~
jamesbritt
"It's a book review -- doesn't really explain what the physicist is arguing in
any meaningful sense."

Indeed, the review ends with this:

"Mr Vedral makes a persuasive argument for a third option: information can be
created out of nothing."

That's a remarkable claim, and the review says zip about how it is presented.
It seems that it would also be the key concept of the book, making this a
pretty lame review.

~~~
Avshalom
Well it's not really remarkable at all, the argument is basically that
information and entropy are mathematically equivalent and so information like
entropy spontaneously increases.

~~~
frisco
Information and entropy are absolutely not equivalent; entropy describes the
upper bound on information content, but says little about the actual
information contained in a coding. The statement that information is
spontaeously created isn't based in any physics I know of.

~~~
Qz
How does the (conventional) big bang theory fit into that? At first glance it
seems like valid evidence for spontaneous creation of information.

------
T_S_
I doubt it. Maybe if he said "monetization the root of everything".

Most philosophy of science arguments remind me of old costume dramas. They
tend to say more about the times of the people who made them than about the
times of the people depicted in the story.

------
_delirium
I don't tend to find these varieties of ontological reductionism that
compelling, though it is interesting to read when people propose new ones.
Sure, you can construct a coherent account of how everything _really is just
X_ for a lot of X, and everything else is merely higher-level structure on top
of it. But picking the X always seems to be a bit arbitrary. Here he argues
for the primacy of information; traditional materialists argued for atoms;
some dynamicists argue for dynamics and state spaces; phenomenologists argue
for conscious experience; Cartesian dualists argue for both _atoms plus
consciousness_ (everything reduces to those two, but neither reduces to the
other); social constructionists argue for _human social relations_ ; some
mathematicians argue for _atoms plus math_ ; etc.

Although I don't like everything else they write, I sort of like the manifesto
of the Object-Oriented Ontologists, which is more or less that, while objects
like televisions undoubtedly are made up of atoms, can be analyzed using
information theory, are phenomenological entities, have a (perhaps socially
constructed) role in human society etc., those are each just methods of
investigating televisions, and televisions themselves "really" do exist as
well: <http://ooo.gatech.edu/>

------
dmfdmf
No surprise here... Edwin Jaynes called this the mind projection fallacy
whereas Ayn Rand called it the primacy of consciousness, an epistemological
error. If everything is "information" then what are the physicists studying?
To quote AR "A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a
contradiction in terms". Full quote here;
<http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html>

~~~
Qz
Consider a computer program with access to the memory in which the program is
running and no other inputs. The program is information, and only has access
to information. The information is embodied in some set of hardware, but the
computer program has no way of knowing or accessing this hardware (and we
assume the hardware is 100% reliable, e.g. no memory faults due to overheating
RAM or whatnot). So from the perspective of the program, everything is
information, including the program itself. Substitute 'conscious mind' for
'program' and you have a conscious mind in a world of nothing but information.
The fact that a 'hard' world exists outside of the 'soft' world is irrelevant,
by virtue of being unknowable.

------
Carcarius
I know nothing, but here are my thoughts...

What is information really? Does information exist without a conscious being
to interpret it? Are the laws that govern information simply laws that are
created by conscious beings for the purpose of interpreting the information?
Most laws that we are concerned with are derived from nature, through our
senses and experience of cause and effect. Our senses allow us to perceive the
changes in state of our surrounding environment. These changes in state is
information.

I guess the point I am finally making, is that the statement above concerning
information is expected in lieu of our current focus, reliance, and addiction
on information as a representation of reality. I am not sure what the
difference is between the laws that govern matter and the laws that govern
information. We're still working with information in either case. We have to
take measurements, interpret the data, make predictions, and build systems to
exploit the "laws" we've uncovered.

~~~
phaedrus
I think you're substituting some colloquial fuzzy/subjective definition of the
word "information" here as "a conscious being knowing something." But in the
context of the linked article, we're talking about Information in the context
of Information Theory. It is not subjective. The remarkable thing about
Shannon's information theory is that he does formulate real laws of
information on the same solid, objective footing as laws of physics.

But then, I could have stopped reading at your first line: it sums up your
entire post.

------
danbmil99
It seems quite strange if, as alleged 3rd hand in this thread, Vedral is
obsessed with quantum computing, but sticks with the antiquated and more or
less content-free Copenhagen interpretation. MWI seems to me to be critical to
quantum computing -- otherwise, where is all that extra computing power coming
from?

~~~
ars
That doesn't make as much sense as it sounds like it does.

From a macro point of view the multiple worlds are all identical. All. The
business with hitler doing something different in a different world is
nonsense, quantum uncertainty almost never has any effect in the macro world.

So when you are computing in your world, everyone is doing the same
computation in all the worlds.

Part of the MWI is that each world has a slightly different version of the
event, and you just see yours, which was effected by theirs. But in a quantum
computer you specifically set it up so that your get a single right answer -
but if you get just one answer, all the worlds are the same, so how do you get
multiple worlds each working on it?

------
unignorant
A link to the book in question (clean btw, no referral):
[http://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Reality-Universe-Quantum-
Info...](http://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Reality-Universe-Quantum-
Information/dp/0199237697/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0)

------
RevRal
Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it, since it comes to mind every time
I see an article like this. Let me know if I'm off track.

Isn't it more accurate to say that "description," rather than "information,"
is the root of everything? Information itself is pretty abstract, so it seems
far more useful to do it this way.

~~~
jey
They're using information in a technical sense, in the sense of "information
theory" and maybe "Kolmogorov complexity".

------
rhl
Does it mean everything is addicted?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293262>

;-)

------
Confusion
Mistaking the deepest abstraction you are capable of for the fundament of all
reality is hubris.

Philosophy is one of those subjects that most intelligent persons think they
can master pretty well. It all seems pretty simple and straightforward.
Especially physicists fall into that trap again and again, up to great string
theorists putting forward anthropocentric theories of the universe. These
people usually make trivial mistakes that any real philosopher spots in no
time. Intelligence is not a substitute for knowledge and this guy seem to have
fallen into the same trap as well. In this case you don't even need to be a
philosopher. He defines information based on the frequency of 'events'. This
means that both time and 'events' are more primal than his notion of
'information'. Consequently, 'information' is not at the root of anything. And
how could it be, if we need minds and language to discuss 'information' in the
first place?

~~~
Daniel_Newby
"He defines information based on the frequency of 'events'. This means that
both time and 'events' are more primal than his notion of 'information'."

True, but what do you expect for a popular review of a book that itself is a
popular review of some pretty abstract ideas.

The basic concept is not just that our universe can be described by
statistical measures, but that the foundational laws seem to be _governed_ by
statistics. At the small scale (individual particles), quantum mechanics
basically says that the universe runs itself by rolling dice in very
particular ways. Events involving these particles seem to simply be the
tangible embodiment of Shannon entropy. Even at the everyday scale of
refrigerators and gasoline engines, entropy calculations are the bread and
butter of thermodynamics engineers.

It is a major open question in physics whether entropy and statistics are
truly foundational, or whether they are simply the large scale average result
of a fine-grained deterministic foundation. The "Copenhagen interpretation"
takes statistics to be fundamental, and by gosh the calculations sure work
nice, but there is no evidence that it reflects a higher truth.

Re. the anthropic principle in physics, it is one approach to answering why
certain laws of physics seem to be balanced on a knife edge between chaos on
one side and stagnation on the other. If we posit that universes can be
created with nearly arbitrary physical laws, then naturally we find ourselves
in one that is neither too chaotic nor too stagnant for our existence. The
creation of such a universe might be unlikely, but given enough opportunity it
is inevitable. This allows for bizarre physical laws without requiring magic
or divine intervention. (There are even evolutionary approaches, where events
like black hole formation create a new universe similar to its parent. That
way if you find yourself in a part of the multiverse conducive to your kind of
life, neighboring universes are likely to be very rich in friendly
conditions.)

"And how could it be, if we need minds and language to discuss 'information'
in the first place?"

If the evolutionary approach were true, universes of pure thought could
potentially be created, where the very atoms were symbols grounded in some
reality. A mind there wouldn't pick up a pen to draw a symbol, it would just
think it into existence. Or such a parent universe could create a universe
like ours, to test whether symbol processing is a necessary law of physics, or
if it can spontaneously arise from semi-chaotic fundamental laws.

~~~
khafra
Well put. The one alteration I'd make is that universes of pure thought would
require a Tegmark Level IV type multiverse, not just a MWI or black-hole-
spawning type multiverse.

------
tybris
So close. It's actually math.

