"It from Bit" and the multiverse?

[Suekdccia]

TL;DR Summary

Is Wheeler's "It from Bit"/"Participatory Universe"/"Pregeometry and Law without Law" and the Multiverse related?

Did physicist John Archibald Wheeler propose the existence of multiple universes through his "It from Bit" or "Participatory Universe Principle" or "Law without Law and Pregeometry"? Is the multiverse related to Wheeler's ideas?

I've been told that It can produce multiple universes, obviously, just take different arrangements of "bits"

Or physicist Andrei Linde in this article (https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0211048.pdf) says:

(Talking about building a multiverse model)

"(...) One may consider other models of evolution, based, e.g., on cellular automata. One can go even further, and consider all possible mathematical structures (Tegmark, 1998), or, following Wheeler, consider all logical possibilities and the concept of ‘it from bit’ (Wheeler 1990)"

But also, I contacted with a biographer of Wheeler and he told me the contrary

"There are a few hundred essays that Wheeler wrote from the 70s to the 90s where he built up his ideas. If you can find something in his essays about how his approach to quantum theory is the same as the multiverse approach, I will stand corrected. But I have looked over these for years, and have not seen anything other than his complicated relationship with Hugh Everett's Many Worlds. I have seen many physicists just guess what Wheeler was talking about, without citing anything that he actually wrote When you ask them their source it is usually "Well that is what my colleagues think" and when you ask their colleagues, they were just giving an interpretation of the phrase "it from bit" without reading any of the essays."

Also he cited Wheeler
"Its [MWI/Everett] infinitely many unobservable worlds makes a heavy load of metaphysical baggage."

He said that His approach (It from Bit) was meant to alleviate this philosophical issue


So, I am very confused. Are Wheeler's ideas compatible with some kind of multiverse or not? Do you know of any "evidence" that indicates this (e.g a quote from Wheeler indicating that his ideas could be compatible with some kind of multiverse)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregeometry_(physics)

 

[Klystron]

I noticed after several months no replies to this thread not from lack of information perhaps but from a surfeit? Your references are intriguing, providing much food for thought.

Excerpt from Linde

Instead of denying the anthropic principle or uncritically embracing it, one should take a more patient approach and check whether it is really helpful or not in each particular case.

I have read, enjoyed and contemplated physics and cosmology books that I encountered written by your cited authors including Weinberg, Everett, Wheeler and Tegmark among many others without arriving at a clear relatable model of the 'multiverse'. Given the title of the thread and the penultimate citation concerning Wheeler's digital physics, I found the concepts of discrete and continuous data measurements very useful in my work as a computer scientist; possibly relevant.

Tasked with coding near-time data collection systems for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) experiments, the requirements indicated two essential forms.

1. Analog -- continuous -- streamed real-time data.
2. Digital -- discrete -- near-time measurements.

Given practical limitations of then current PDP and VAX computer systems including limited information storage ability, "continuous" devolved to streaming samples as rapidly as possible during critical periods of the experiment with minimal pre-filtering until some portion of allocated space became full or other parameters met, downloading the data from the front-end processors ASAP, repeat. Continuous data collection benefited greatly from parallel processors, high-speed connections and large data buffer sizes.

Discrete data collection allowed more time for filtering and pre-computation of selected benchmark values to help guide the experiment in near-time. Many different measurements were performed always including internal and external time hacks and synchronization signals to recreate experimental conditions. Discrete data collection benefited from on-the-fly computation, sparse matrix and database concepts, and even data compression.

The consensus from your references indicate that the physical world appears continuous at the limits of our measurements. The "digital world" within our computer systems appears discrete.

So far there is no experimental confirmation of either binary or quantized nature of the universe, which are basic for digital physics. The few attempts made in this direction would include the experiment with holometer designed by Craig Hogan, which among others would detect a bit structure of space-time.[36] The experiment started collecting data in August 2014.
A new result of the experiment released on December 3, 2015, after a year of data collection, has ruled out Hogan's theory of a pixelated universe to a high degree of statistical significance (4.6 sigma). The study found that space-time is not quantized at the scale being measured.