Algorithmic information theory's QM view of reality

[sayetsu]

TL;DR

How can I learn more about it? "New Scientist" article quoted

MarcusMüller...wanted to see where that reasoning leads in a world with nothing else to shape it. He represented each individual’s experience at every instant as a string of bits of information – 1s and 0s, like binary computer code. Each observer’s history then consisted of a walk through the various possible bit strings, and the probability of going from one to the next would be random but conditional: it must take the history of experiences into account. The idea, says theorist Giulio Chiribella at the University of Hong Kong, “is to think of our experience as a movie made of many frames and to ask the question, given the frames I have seen so far, what frame will I see next?”

You would think that such a picture could hardly be less likely to give rise to what we experience: a universe governed by laws and producing facts that are, as far as we can tell, the same for you as for me. But when Müller used the methods of algorithmic information theory to figure out what sequences of bit strings are likely, he found something remarkable.

As these random experiences stack up, the conditional probability of the next experience, as described by a string of bits, tends to be higher for simpler bit sequences than for complex ones. This makes it look as if there is a fairly simple algorithm generating the bit strings. So the observer deduces a simple “model” of reality, characterised by regular and comprehensible laws that smoothly connect one experience to the next.

This seems deeply odd: how can randomness give rise to this apparently law-bound behaviour? It’s a little like the way we understand a gas. Although in principle all possible configurations of its molecules are allowed, the probability distribution of particle speeds we see has a simple bell-shaped curve, and the particles are distributed in space with bland uniformity. Out of that come simple laws relating to things we can easily measure: pressure, temperature and volume. Those laws aren’t written into the gas particles themselves; they are an emergent property of the probabilities of different configurations.

Read more: Reality guide — How everything fits together

“The remarkable thing is that a notion of an objective external world emerges automatically in the long run,” says Müller. What’s more, “different observers will tend to agree on properties of that external world”. That’s because according to algorithmic information theory, the probabilities of bit strings for different observers will tend to converge on the same distribution – so they will agree on what the “laws of the world” are. “Overall, the ‘movie’ is likely to be simple and different observers can generally agree on some aspects of the plot,” says Chiribella.

The surprises don’t stop there. This emergent reality should have just the qualities we see in quantum physics, where objects can show wave-like properties and behave in “non-local” ways, when a measurement on one particle can seem instantaneously to influence the state of another separated in space.

The upshot is that from the most minimal assumptions about the probabilities of what our personal experiences will contain, you can recover a world like the one we know. “The world could still look something like how we experience it, even though in truth it would be mind-bogglingly different,” says Müller.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/articl...m-how-you-make-everything-real/#ixzz6H4oWSZpv

Where can I learn more about this conception of reality?

 

[PeterDonis]

Where can I learn more about this conception of reality?

Since, as is typical for New Scientist, they don't give any actual references to textbooks or peer-reviewed papers (at least not in the part I can read, I'm not going to sign up for a subscription), it's hard to tell exactly what "conception of reality" they are talking about.

You might try searching for papers by Muller on arxiv.org.

 

[PeterDonis]

Moderator's note: Moved thread to quantum interpretations and foundations forum.