What are the fundamental information-processes in physics?

ConradDJ

Well, certainly much prior information is lost. This is also true in biological evolution, of course. To recap from my post above –

Not all past information needs to be preserved, only what’s “relevant” (Rovelli’s term) to determining what can happen in future.

As to “tough road” – right. But to me, it’s not so much that there’s a long list of issues... it’s that there are so many ways in which information gets physically determined / communicated – all of physics is involved.

As in the black hole issue you raised – we know how to discuss information as if it’s “just there” in the world... we can quantify it, we can break it down into information about particles, information about fields... But to approach information from the standpoint of how it gets to be physically observable, in each case... is like heading into an unexplored jungle.

For his limited purposes, Rovelli could avoid all that. But it also means that he offers no answer to basic questions like – how do all these different observers actually end up agreeing on what’s going on in the world? As he shows, the QM formalism says that indeed they all do... but we get no insight into what makes this work.

Again, I think the reason it’s hard to understand the basic information-processes is that there are quite a few of them, and none are simple, and they’re all interdependent. This is what we would expect, as the result of an evolutionary process... but that doesn’t make this kind of approach less daunting. So "good luck" is needed...thanks.

apeiron

I'm not too sure what even the question is here

But the standard lament in the systems science circles in which I move is that standard issue reductionist modelling - the modern information theoretic approach being its latest form - manages to leave out essential aspects of reality, such as meaning, observers, and other contextual or global factors.

So aim number one would be to provide an alternative model in which these kinds of things get represented again.

In practice, the standard view of information is that bits just exist. They are substantial locales just waiting to be counted. No meanings are implicit in their existence, no observers are required.

The systems view would then be - at least my version of it - that bits can only exist within bit-shaping contexts. So we have a dyadic or dichotomistic story. The existence of a bit implies the existence of a matching context. And the nature of this relationship can then be generalised mathematically in the language of symmetry, symmetry-breaking and asymmetry. Hopefully.