What is the relationship between matter and information?

[bohm2]

If you end up with a disconnected dualism that makes no sense to anyone, surely it is time to retrace your steps to discover where you went wrong?

Nobody is claiming this is the final picture. It's the model we currently have. In QM, it's the wave-particle duality, in neuroscience/cognitive sciences it's the mind-body problem and quantum gravity is another area that awaits some unification between QM and gravity. What exactly needs to be done to allow for unification is an open question. There's nothing that excludes the possibility that nature is dualistic or monistic, etc. This assumes that a linguistic/symbolic chimp like us has the cognitive powers to probe nature deeply enough.

So the OP poll needs a fourth option - the holistic story of "It from bit and bit from it" that covers such a fully relational, strongly emergent, view of the causality.

Option 3

 

[apeiron]

What exactly needs to be done to allow for unification is an open question.

Yes, so we need to be considering answers that could possibly work.

Monton points out the Liebnizian absurdity that results from standard thinking - you end up with two realms that must be completely in correlation, but with no possible causal connection. Once you are up the cul de sac that leads to windowless monads, time to back up and see where your thinking took a wrong direction.

There's nothing that excludes the possibility that nature is dualistic or monistic, etc. This assumes that a linguistic/symbolic chimp like us has the cognitive powers to probe nature deeply enough.

On the contrary, we should be smart enough to recognise a no go theorem when we run up against it.

Dualism has to be excluded on the grounds of logic if we find ourselves saying that there both must be an interaction, and there can't be an interaction. Calling this impasse "mysterious" is just avoiding the issue.

 

[bohm2]

Dualism has to be excluded on the grounds of logic if we find ourselves saying that there both must be an interaction, and there can't be an interaction. Calling this impasse "mysterious" is just avoiding the issue.

It kinds of depends on what one means by interaction. And not that I'm necessarily suggesting that there's a connection in the problems listed above, but consider quantum entanglement. You have what seems to look like an invisible, seemingly instantaneous wire/hidden signal between two particles. As some physicists have described it:

...whatever causes entanglement does not travel from one place to the other; the category of “place” simply isn't meaningful to it. It might be said to lie *beyond* spacetime. Two particles that are half a world apart are, in some deeper sense, right on top of each other.

Of course, one doesn't directly "see" any entanglements, just the correlations but then what is responsible for such instantaneous correlations? They are not the normal classical "interactions" as traditionally understood. All I'm saying is that we should not set apriori limits on some metaphysical reasons of what type of -ism (monism/dualism) there is. With respect to mysterianism/cognitive closure, , I'm not saying that we should abandon hope but be open to the possibility, as many have argued, that like all other animals we have cognitive limitations. There may be stuff that we will never know. Areas where we seem to have little or no progress (philosophical questions like free will, MBP/"hard" problem, etc.) may be beyond our capabilities.

 

[ConradDJ]

I argue that the communications structure is ultimately fundamental -- but not in the sense that physical things should be eliminated from theory and replaced by what Coryat calls "standalone information".
...
But I don't think there's any logical basis for assuming there have to be well-defined things-in-themselves at bottom, as you and Barbour suggest.

I thought you would agree with this, as it’s for the same reasons (if I understand you) that you don’t buy the “standalone information” view. I just can’t see how something can consist of nothing but “relational structure” all the way down to the "bottom"

I agree with you in part... in general, wherever there’s “relational structure” there are also things of some kind IN the relationships. I don’t believe in “standalone information” for the same reason I don’t believe in “standalone things”.

Though it’s intuitively obvious to us that relationships imply things, it’s not intuitively obvious that things imply relationships. It’s very easy for us to imagine objects existing in and of themselves, with intrinsic properties, independent of anything else in the world. (In fact, that was Ockham’s criterion for the “reality” of a thing – that you could still imagine it as existing even if everything else in the universe were no longer there.) My thought is that the notion of things-in-themselves is nonsense, apart from a system of relationships that communicates information about them. That's why I like Rovelli's Relational QM.

This debate tends to be framed – Either the world is made of Things, Or the world is made of Relationships. But I believe relationships only exist because of things, and it’s equally true that things exist only in and through their relationships. The latter part of that sentence is what needs emphasis, against our “common sense” intuition.

As to the foundations – I tend to imagine the low-level physics in terms of graph theory. There we have nodes and edges, but a good deal of structure needs to evolve before we have anything that resembles a physical thing (particle) in dynamic spacetime relationships with other things. So the lowest level may have a kind of “duality” that’s a precursor to the thing/relationship dichotomy. That’s what I had in mind by bringing up chickens and eggs in the previous post.

Thanks again – Conrad

 

[apeiron]

It kinds of depends on what one means by interaction. And not that I'm necessarily suggesting that there's a connection in the problems listed above, but consider quantum entanglement. You have what seems to look like an invisible, seemingly instantaneous wire/hidden signal between two particles. As some physicists have described it:

Yes. And surely this proves my point? It illustrates the conviction that ontic dualism cannot possibly be the case and so there must be some "hidden" non-local interaction.

So if we accept dualism is a no go, then that means we can get on with considering the alternatives.

Holistic causality also recognises contextual causation - global or top-down acting constraints. And that at least fits generally with QM and decoherence type interpretations.

To get back to the OP, I very much like Davies arguments which you cited right at the start.

See also the paper which was the basis for that chapter... http://arxiv.org/ftp/quant-ph/papers/0703/0703041.pdf

He makes clear the consequences for theory of the fact that the universe's information is materially constrained by holographic bounds. It from bit presumes an interactive ontology. It is about the questions the universe, as a globally decohering context, can ask of its specific space time locales. So, the universe may be "made of bits", but it is also forming those bits. And there is thus a material limit to the crispness of those bits.

 

[chiro]

So, the universe may be "made of bits", but it is also forming those bits. And there is thus a material limit to the crispness of those bits.

One thing that I think is good to note, is that all information is isomorphic to a binary representation: in other words, you take any information in one representation and you can then create an isomorphism to convert that to base-2 and back to it's original representation.

It's a very basic idea, but when people argue about information, it seems that sometimes this fact is lost.

 

[bohm2]

Yes. And surely this proves my point? It illustrates the conviction that ontic dualism cannot possibly be the case and so there must be some "hidden" non-local interaction.

I don't follow how this proves your point. Explain how a hidden non-local "interaction" shows dualism to be false. In fact, in the dualist ontology (e.g. wave in configuration space + particle in 3-D space) that is the mechanism of explanation. Wave guiding a particle via non-local "interaction"/guiding/informational field. Dualism occurs because one cannot project configuration space unto real space. By projecting configuration into real space, we lose information because that information was stored in the extra dimensions of configuration space. And I'm not saying dualism is true. All I'm saying is that there is no strong evidence whatsoever that it false. In fact, if one prefers an ontological interpretation, dualism is almost necessary (Albert's monistic Bohmian interpretation is an exception), unless one prefers MWI (which is anything but monistic).

 

[apeiron]

Wave guiding a particle via non-local "interaction"/guiding/informational field. Dualism occurs because one cannot project configuration space unto real space. By projecting configuration into real space, we lose information because that information was stored in the extra dimensions of configuration space.

Remember, it was you who cited Monton on this point...

Monton: We have two disconnected spaces, with presumably no causal connection between the particles in the one space and the field in the other space, and yet the stuff in the two spaces is evolving in tandem.

So in what sense is there "interaction" or guidance going on? You can't just smuggle in this kind of suggestion of a material connection between configuration space and real space while also apparently accepting Monton's argument.

 

[bohm2]

One can accept that both spaces represent some "real" physical structure (dualism) but not Monton's insistence of a local causal (material) connection. The Bohmian interpretation is an example (at least in some of its varieties). As long as one is willing to accept non-locality or in Bohm's ontology an information wave guiding the particle. It seems to me that the Bohm interpretation is an obvious example of a dualistic ontology? Even the Bohrian/Copenhagen is dualistic, in some sense but for different reasons. So I still don't see how you can argue that:

It illustrates the conviction that ontic dualism cannot possibly be the case

Maybe you can elaborate what you mean that dualism cannot possibly be the case. This is not to say that there are no problems with a dualist ontology or that at some "deeper" level the two may involve some type of monistic model as pointed out by Hiley:

Bohm draws attention to what he calls 'a serious problem' that confronts us when the theory is extended to deal with more than one particle. The problem with N particles is that the wave function is not in ordinary 3-dimensional space, but instead, in an abstract 3N-dimensional configuration space. While of course this space is logically consistent, the concept of a wave in a 3N-dimensional space is far from physically obvious. At this stage Bohm simply regarded his proposals as an artifice that could be used provisionally until a better theory emerges "in which everything is expressed once more in ordinary 3-dimensional space". This problem of configuration space was eventually resolved by introducing the notion of 'active information' . However there remains a deeper problem as Bohm points out:

Finally, our model in which wave and particle are regarded as basically different entities, which interact in a way that is not essential to their modes of being, does not seem very plausible. The fact that wave and particle are never found separately suggests instead that they are both different aspects of some fundamentally new kind of entity which is likely to be quite different from a simple wave or a simple particle, but which leads to these two limiting manifestations as approximations that are valid under appropriate conditions.

Some Remarks on the Evolution of Bohm's Proposals for an Alternative to Standard Quantum Mechanics.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/tpru/BasilHiley/History_of_Bohm_s_QT.pdf

 

[apeiron]

One can accept that both spaces represent some "real" physical structure (dualism) but not Monton's insistence of a local causal (material) connection.

Again, it was you who cited Monton's definition of dualism in post 27 in support of your belief in "some form of "dualism" at the bottom level as currently understood (e.g. wave function in configuration space and particle in 3D space)."

Monton was illustrating why dualism is a dead-end. And now you appear to be agreeing because you are arguing that some kind of causality must connect that which seems separate. The "relationship" cannot be just nomic.

There are two ways out of the impasse of ontic dualism. One is to seek some kind of local monism - for instance, a dual-aspect theory of reality such as panpsychism where reality has its material properties, but then also its "immaterial" ones such as mind.

Though not sure how that kind of monism could apply to QM. Unless this is how you view particles and pilot waves in BM. But then, that would be reducing the non-local aspect to a local aspect, making the pilot wave somehow an intrinsic property of the particle.

Then the other route out is the systems or triadic route where you have the two things, plus the thirdness that is their interaction.

So, as you quote Hiley:

The fact that wave and particle are never found separately suggests instead that they are both different aspects of some fundamentally new kind of entity which is likely to be quite different from a simple wave or a simple particle, but which leads to these two limiting manifestations as approximations that are valid under appropriate conditions.

Wave and particle are the global and local limits on what can be the case, and the reality is the emergent interaction.

Monton also appears to be arguing something like this kind of triadic story:

That’s how the wave function fits into my picture: the wave function doesn’t exist on its own, but it corresponds to a property possessed by the system of all the particles in the universe (or whatever closed system you’re interested in).

http://spot.colorado.edu/~monton/BradleyMonton/Articles_files/qm%203n%20d%20space%20final.pdf

So the wave function would be a global property of the system (and the particles the complementary local property?).

Of course, Monton only argues on the basis of a pure state closed system, which is not itself very realistic.

Anyway, my point was that dualism does indeed keep rearing its ugly head in physical models. People want to be good reductionists and have only monism, yet they keep ending up in duality. "It from bit" is yet another example. And then the obvious route out of this impasse is triadism, or systems causality, where it becomes about complementary limits on existence and then what emerges in the middle from the resulting interaction.

The alternative is dual aspect thinking, but this is just an attempt to shrink the problems of dualism so small that they seem to have been disappeared from the discussion.

 

[bohm2]

As I'm sure you know, there are monistic QM ontological models (GRW) but they have other problems. Not sure if you've read the piece but Maudlin's Ch. 4 in this link hi-lites some of the problems of wave function monism. Some interesting quotes:

The first is the widely cited formulation of the measurement problem by John Bell: ‘Either the wavefunction, as given by the Schrodinger equation, is not everything, or it is not right’ . Bell’s dilemma appears to offer us two quite distinct routes to solving the problem: either add to the ontology, so that the wavefunction is not everything, or change the dynamics, so that the linear evolution does not always obtain. Like many others, I took the first option to be the way to understand deBroglie–Bohm, and the second to be the way to understand GRW.

In sum, any theory whose physical ontology is a complete wavefunction monism automatically inherits a severe interpretational problem: if all there is the wavefunction, an extremely high-dimensional object evolving in some specified way, how does that account for the low-dimensional world of localized objects that we start off believing in, whose apparent behavior constitutes the explanandum of physics in the first place?

Can the World be Only Wavefunction?
http://bacon.umcs.lublin.pl/~lukasik/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Many.Worlds.EverettQuantum.Theory.and.Reality.pdf

There are two ways out of the impasse of ontic dualism. One is to seek some kind of local monism - for instance, a dual-aspect theory of reality such as panpsychism where reality has its material properties, but then also its "immaterial" ones such as mind.

Well some of the links above do argue for a type of ontology kind of like that but it can't be local and it wouldn't really be true panpsychism but panprotopsychism. Where the pan-proto stuff is really "information". This was also Bohm's metaphysics although he felt that at the deepest level there was 1 kind of stuff that goes beyond this. So, I'm guessing he would be sympathetic to Russell's neutral monism view. There is also experimental stuff at the macroscale (see thread I started before) that does show some aspects of this dualistic ontology seen in QM but even here at the bottom level both involve one kind of stuff (e.g. the silicon oil):

Wave-particle duality at the macroscale?
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=550729

 

[apeiron]

As I'm sure you know, there are monistic QM ontological models (GRW) but they have other problems.

Yes, I agree that monism has its deep problems too. Many try to make some kind of monism work because that seems like the correct reductionist thing to do. But it is hard to get away from all the evidence pointing towards some kind of concrete dualism - as for example between entangled and decohered states. But this in turn is what requires the third thing of the interaction - the causal machinery connecting the wavefunction to its collapse.

There is also experimental stuff at the macroscale (see thread I started before) that do show some aspects of this dualistic ontology seen in QM but even here at the bottom level both involve one kind of stuff (e.g. the silicon oil):

The walking droplet is a nice illustration of a triadic story. There are the two sources of action - the bouncing droplet and the vibrating surface. Then there is the emergent interaction which is the "reality" of the droplet that also walks. And the two-way nature of the causality is explicitly represented in the model. The "lean" on the motion of the droplet shapes the pattern of the waves, which in turn reinforces the lean of the droplet.

So maybe you would be happier with a distinction between nomic dualism and causal dualism here?

Monton was making the case against the nomic variety (which is what dualism normally ends up being, from Plato's forms down to Descartes res cogitans/res extensa). But maybe we agree that it must be duality + causality?

I am then arguing for a particular brand of dualism with causality. It has a bunch of particular features, such as a grounding in vagueness (or indeterminism), the assertion that the duality is about complementary limits rather than separate ontic realms, etc.

Coming back to the OP, an undiscussed issue is the role that temperature plays in all this. QM indeterminacy rules when the universe is small and hot, classical decoherence rules when it is large and cold. So the idea of counting the total number of bits - degrees of freedom - at the big bang is rather a fiction. Everything was melted into a vague quantum foam back then. It is only with hindsight, a frame of reference, that we can look back and say something about the number of crisp bits that "existed" within the original undifferentiated it-ness.

This is why I think more attention should be paid to Davies and his co-workers (like Davis and Lineweaver). Information theory has been too Platonic - based on fantasies of infinite computability and perfect crispess. They are now highlighting the material limits on information in any real world.

 

[bohm2]

I am then arguing for a particular brand of dualism with causality. It has a bunch of particular features, such as a grounding in vagueness (or indeterminism), the assertion that the duality is about complementary limits rather than separate ontic realms, etc.

I'm having trouble understanding causality? Do you think that QM can still allow us to claim that science is governed by a law/principle of causality? I'm asking because there are some previous papers that question this premise:

Causation as Folk Science
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod...olk-science.pdf?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0003.004

And recently there are some interesting papers that also seem to question our "normal" notion of causality/causal order. This is really interesting and yet confusing.

Quantum correlations with no causal order
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n10/pdf/ncomms2076.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121002145454.htm

Entanglement Between Photons that have Never Coexisted
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.4191v1.pdf
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=637454

The walking droplet is a nice illustration of a triadic story. There are the two sources of action - the bouncing droplet and the vibrating surface. Then there is the emergent interaction which is the "reality" of the droplet that also walks. And the two-way nature of the causality is explicitly represented in the model. The "lean" on the motion of the droplet shapes the pattern of the waves, which in turn reinforces the lean of the droplet.

It's interesting that in the QM version of the pilot wave, one of the differences is that such bi-directional "interaction" does not occur as the wave function acts upon the positions of the particles but, evolving as it does autonomously via Schrödinger's equation, the wave function is not acted upon by the particles.

 

[apeiron]

I'm having trouble understanding causality? Do you think that QM can still allow us to claim that science is governed by a law/principle of causality?

But you are talking about just the reduced definition of causality - the mechanist model that reduces Aristotle's four causes to simply an account in terms of local efficient/material cause.

So in the philosophy of physics, people talk about it as the principle of locality. The idea that all change is mechanically triggered by one body acting on another. The cause precedes its effects. Dynamics are constructed. Complexity is built bottom-up.

By definition, this is a model of causality that discards top-down acting global causes - Aristotle's formal and final cause.

So yes, quantum mechanics does create a severe problem for this simplified model of causality. It's interpretation demands a larger model that includes global (ie: non-local) causation.

Atomism, Newtonian dynamics, statistical thermodynamics and other physics models have proved very powerful because they do radically simplify the description of the world. They create a view in which there are localised particles with properties, and that is all you need to measure or know about.

The background or context is averaged away to become a void, an a-causal backdrop. Space and time become globalised degrees of freedom. There still has to be a global causality of course. The material atoms are ruled by inviolable laws of nature. So formal/final cause is still part of the picture in fact.

But these global causes, these fundamental laws, are mysterious in their workings. They somehow constrain all local material action, yet how they do that is not made clear. It is just "what happens". And also, unlike a fully interactive systems view of causality, the laws are not themselves developing or evolving as a result of what occurs locally.

So you are talking about a very particular brand of causality - one that is highly successful for certain kinds of modelling, but hardly what philosophers or those concerned with complexity would consider the whole story.

Quantum theory does require a larger model of causality to "make sense". But that is only the interpretation issue. The theory itself "works" because it reduces things as much as possible to a simplified mechanical account of reality - the deterministic evolution of a wavefunction. It is only the collapse (treated as a further level of triggering material cause, the action that makes the indeterminate aspects now definite) that has to be inserted into the story by hand.

So yes, QM does ultimately challenge an overly-simplified modelling of causality. But equally, it is also a supremely successful example of the mechanical approach - being all the better because it is so clear where the working model ends and the "metaphysics" of interpretation begins.

It's interesting that in the QM version of the pilot wave, one of the differences is that such bi-directionality does not occur as the wave function acts upon the positions of the particles but, evolving as it does autonomously via Schrödinger's equation, the wave function is not acted upon by the particles.

Yes, and this would be a big reason for rejecting it as a possible interpretation.

The idea of an unmoved mover is just very unnatural, whether we are talking about gods, Platonic forms, laws of nature, dualistic theories of mind, or BM pilot waves. This is top-down causality without the matching bottom-up half of the story.

Can you see the irony here? The more people insist that reality is mechanical - a story of local efficient causes acting bottom-up - the more this gets matched by an equal need to smuggle in a mysterious form of top-down causality into the story.

They find they have to treat mind as a further variety of substance, or the laws of nature as some kind of Platonic truth of unexplained origin. They insist there is no such thing as top-down causality - because no interaction is being modeled - and yet somehow an interaction is also happening. The mind does move the body. The laws of nature do determine the motions of a particle.

Philosophically, this dualism is incoherent. But scientifically it works OK because scientists can get by on pragmatically treating reality as an arrangement of local efficient causes - a bunch of bits, a collection of atoms, the parts of a machine, etc - and leave all the global questions (like who designed the machine, who made the atoms, who extracted the bits from the it) outside of the working model.

 

[bohm2]

The idea of an unmoved mover is just very unnatural, whether we are talking about gods, Platonic forms, laws of nature, dualistic theories of mind, or BM pilot waves. This is top-down causality without the matching bottom-up half of the story.

What about a catalyst in a chemical reaction?

 

[apeiron]

What about a catalyst in a chemical reaction?

Do catalysts exist in some Platonic sense as necessary ideas that create a material effect without being in turn affected by the fact there is that successful effect?

Life invents catalysts (enzymes) to exert top-down control over cellular chemistry. Industrial chemists do likewise to control some industrial process. There is thus a clear causal interaction here between the global purpose and local effect. If something didn't work, you couldn't even define it as a catalyst. If something was only working weakly, you would have reason to want to improve on its design.

I see that you are focusing on the fact that catalysts are "unmoved" as a result of "moving" someone else's reaction. But that is a classical reductionist POV. You are framing "catalysis" in terms of the local materials and ignoring the global purposes. And yet it is the ability to achieve a purpose that is crucial to distinguishing a chemical as also a "catalyst" in the first place.

 

[bohm2]

I see that you are focusing on the fact that catalysts are "unmoved" as a result of "moving" someone else's reaction.

Yes. Personally I still can't think of any reason why one should reject a particular model simply because of no back-reaction or bi-directionality. Same with dualism and I'm not sympathetic to it myself. I suppose one can hope/strive for some unification but must also recognize that this is at most a hope that might not be realized, either because nature really is not unified/monistic, or because human cognitive capacities are not capable of discovering that unity. Either alternative is a possibility.

 

[apeiron]

Yes. Personally I can't think of any reason why one should reject a particular model simply because of no back-reaction or one-way interacion. Same with dualism and I'm not sympathetic to it myself. I suppose one can hope for some unification but must also recognize that this is at most a hope that might not be realized, either because nature really is not unified/monistic, or because human cognitive capacities are not capable of discovering that unity. Either alternative is a possibility.

That response would be a lot more convincing if you could offer concrete examples of well-understood systems in which there is in fact a one-way interaction with no back-reaction.

Newton's third law alone would seem to suggest that this cannot be the case.

You keep using "we are just dumb chimps" as if it is a get out of jail card. But we are quite capable of criticising our models on the basis of what has worked, what hasn't.

Newton's laws clearly work. And they rule out an unmoved mover at the material level of causality.

A materialistic theory of life clearly works - to the extent we all now agree there is no need for a dualistic ontology.

The dumb chimp keeps working things out, taking one ontological route rather than another one. The job of philosophy - as the meta-level of the scientific discussion - should be to focus on the general principles of that continued proven success. There are alternatives now - like dualism, or other varieties of causal mysterianism - that we can safely consign to history.

 

[bohm2]

Newton's third law alone would seem to suggest that this cannot be the case. Newton's laws clearly work. And they rule out an unmoved mover at the material level of causality.

A lot of these arguments hinge on what the nature/ontology of the wave function is. Even within the pilot-wave camp, some like Goldstein don't regard the wave function as "physical" (whatever that means) but as nomological (a component of physical law). Others (Bohm/Hiley) as an objective informational field. Others treat the wave function as dispositional. Valentini and Maudlin somewhere in between and not very clear:

Quantum States for Primitive Ontologists
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8468/1/DemiChesterFinal.pdf

All models have strength and weaknesses. Same with non-pilot-wave models. You still haven't offered your explanation of the double-slit experiment, etc? Then there's the question about the applicability of third law in QM. Riggs who offers another pilot wave scenario makes this argument:

...the Schrodinger wave field is not a mediated field and therefore there is no familiar means to carry a classical reaction from the quantum particle to the wave field. The lack of a classical reaction on the wave field should not be viewed as a flaw in deBroglie–Bohm Theory as has been suggested by some commentators. It has also been mooted that a source term should be added to the Schrodinger equation in order to rectify the ‘problem’. This, however, would lead to a non-linear wave equation which would produce predictions in conflict with well established empirical results...Instead of viewing the absence of a classical reaction as a defect, it should be seen as a new insight into the quantum domain. Indeed, the late James Cushing argued that our intuitions about classical action-reaction might not be reliable in the quantum realm.

He then offers this suggestion:

It would seem suitable at this juncture to consider whether we might be looking at this problem from the wrong perspective. The discussion so far has been treating wave field and particle as separate but interacting entities for the purposes of the Third Law (like a charged particle in an external electric field). They are not, of course, separate entities and this needs to be taken into account. Equations 13 and 15 together indicate that the energy exchanges between particle and wave field are related to changes in the shape of the wave field. One part of a quantum system merely responds to changes in another part of the system without this being of a classically expected kind. It must be remembered that what is occurring in the quantum case are changes in a single entity.

Reflections on the deBroglie-Bohm quantum potential
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/riggs_2008.pdf

 

[Pythagorean]

I've just skimmed the four pages, but I voted "none of the above". Sorry if I'm rehashing old arguments.

Firstly, it depends on how you define "information". If you define it only as the geometric configurations of matter then it is an important, fundamental property of space that objects can be separated at varying distances. In a more abstract space, objects can vary in charge, mass, etc, and they can do so over time. If you consider information to be the geometric vector space of all these properties for each object, then information is arguably fundamental. But is it more fundamental than the physical properties themselves?

In modeling in science, we generally call something fundamental if it can't be broken into more parts. But that depend on what level we're modeling. We don't want to practice "greedy reductionism" or we begin to have more information than we need (nobody can currently model cannon balls as an ensemble of quantum particles).

Regardless, we can't break phase space up into smaller concepts (other than smaller pieces of phase space), but we also can't break "charge" or "mass" up into some contributing parts of an emergent phenomena.

One could equally argue that, as human concepts, both are somewhat emergent conceptually in our minds; something we've put in a box and considered as some isolated event of significance, some result of how we process and understand information.

 

[apeiron]

Then there's the question about the applicability of third law in QM. Riggs who offers another pilot wave scenario makes this argument:... One part of a quantum system merely responds to changes in another part of the system without this being of a classically expected kind. It must be remembered that what is occurring in the quantum case are changes in a single entity.

It seems to be BM which has the problem with the third law according to Riggs. And he has to invent some recoil-less energy swapping going on between a particle and its pilot wave as a way of getting out of the bind.

At least it is not as crazy as the active information story I guess. But it is still just an epicycles approach of inventing further levels of unobservable mechanism to avoid having to ditch realism.

 

[bohm2]

It seems to be BM which has the problem with the third law according to Riggs. And he has to invent some recoil-less energy swapping going on between a particle and its pilot wave as a way of getting out of the bind. At least it is not as crazy as the active information story I guess. But it is still just an epicycles approach of inventing further levels of unobservable mechanism to avoid having to ditch realism.

It's a problem for Riggs. There are also problems with Rigg's solution as this paper argues:

The Causal Theory revisited
http://itf.fys.kuleuven.be/~ward/documents/review-riggs.pdf

Most others are willing to agree with James Cushing that "our intuitions about classical action-reaction might not be reliable in the quantum realm." Moreover, you have criticized a lot of the models but still haven't responded how you explain stuff like quantum double-slit experiments, quantum steering, entangement and non-locality in your system? If you did, post the link. How did/do you explain such correlations? And I still don't understand what you mean by "materialistic theory". What is your definition of "materialistic"?

 

[apeiron]

Most others are willing to agree with James Cushing that "our intuitions about classical action-reaction might not be reliable in the quantum realm."

Remember why I mentioned the third law. You said you couldn't think of a reason to reject a model without a back-reaction. Yet most people would agree that the third law is indeed a problem for mechanistic models - hence the concern in BM over answering this issue in the papers you cited.

It would seem to me that BM imposes a closed energy reference frame over the quantum realm - it claims the concrete entities of particle and pilot wave in interaction. So a lack of a back-reaction immediately becomes mysterious. For regular QM, without this internal machinery, the third law only has to be classically emergent behaviour surely?

Moreover, you have criticized a lot of the models but still haven't responded how you explain stuff like quantum double-slit experiments, quantum steering, entangement and non-locality in your system? If you did, post the link. How did/do you explain such correlations? And I still don't understand what you mean by "materialistic theory". What is your definition of "materialistic"?

I don't have a personal theory. But thermal decoherence is the QM interpretation that I most favour. Though I think the retrocausality of the transactional interpretation is going to have to be an ingredient of any complete interpretation. And consistent histories has attractive aspects.

From a systems science point of view, decoherence has the same logic - global context acting top-down to constrain local indeterminate freedoms. The whole emerges from its local possibilities.

As for "materialistic", this is just the standard definition - the argument that all causation has a material basis (and there is no other spooky stuff going on).

There are then different models of materialism of course. Most materialists are reductionists - there is some fundamental substance, and all forms are weakly emergent. But I take the systems view where materialism is emergent (from vagueness) and so the causality is complex - it involves all Aristotle's four causes, not just the two of material and efficient cause.

 

[bohm2]

Yet most people would agree that the third law is indeed a problem for mechanistic models - hence the concern in BM over answering this issue in the papers you cited.

The Bohmian model isn't a mechanistic model. Non-locality and contextuality is a necessary feature. And holism is a central feature or so it's been argued. While I have come across some papers that question the holism in Bohmian, I'm not sure how non-locality and contextuality can be seen as "mechanical". Bohm's book was titled "the undivided universe". Having said that I do agree with you (if I understand you) that Bohmian versus Copehagen do have two different ontologies (in my understanding):

Copenhagen: conceptual dualism but ontological monism but the problem with this scheme is that it is vague because it's not clear why the basic entity in the monistic ontology cannot be determined simultaneously under both concepts.

Bohmian: gets rid of the vagueness in one sense by embracing precise ontological dualism (wave-particle) but what is still left vague is the nature of the wave since it isn't a wave in 3-space but a wave in 3-N space/configuration space.

 

[apeiron]

The Bohmian model isn't a mechanistic model. Non-locality and contextuality is a necessary feature. And holism is a central feature or so it's been argued. While I have come across some papers that question the holism in Bohmian, I'm not sure how non-locality and contextuality can be seen as "mechanical".

The interaction between particle and pilot wave was being treated as a mechanistic issue in the Riggs paper you cited surely?

But this is way off the point of your OP. What is relevant to the OP is how various interpretations might apply to "it from bit".

My general answer on that is that "it-ness" would be defined in the systems view as the "realm" of indeterminate potential or vagueness. And "bit-ness" is the information - the classically present local degrees of freedom - that the system decoheres through its holism.

This is a complex model of causality that is triadic (hierarchical) rather than dualistic or monistic.

So if it-ness = vagueness, and bit-ness = classical/decohered local degrees of freedom, then the story requires the third thing of the global decohering structure - the constraints that act top-down to decohere the bits from the it. This is where holographic principles for example become important as they are now giving us a way to model global material constraints, removing any spookiness in the story.

 

[bohm2]

I think the Bohmian interpretation, tends to to favour a dual-aspect monism. Thus, information (bit) as represented by the wave function and matter (it) as represented by the particle are on equal footing like 2 sides of a coin. And neither is reducible to the other and neither supervenes on the other. And neither reduces to a more fundamental entity. At least, that is my understanding. I think this dual-aspect monism carries all the way to the macroscale so that the mental and physical can be seen as two equiprimordial aspects of a single underlying reality. But I'm not sure how anyone can make any such commitment since the concept of "physical" isn't well defined.

 

[apeiron]

I think the Bohmian interpretation, tends to to favour a dual-aspect monism. Thus, information (bit) as represented by the wave function and matter (it) as represented by the particle are on equal footing like 2 sides of a coin. And neither is reducible to the other and neither supervenes on the other. And neither reduces to a more fundamental entity. At least, that is my understanding. I think this dual-aspect monism carries all the way to the macroscale so that the mental and physical can be seen as two equiprimordial aspects of a single underlying reality. But I'm not sure how anyone can make any such commitment since the concept of "physical" isn't well defined.

Even granted dual aspect monism - which explains nothing, simply states something to be in a way that contradicts our instinct for reality to be reducible via its interactions - I can't see how you would map the concept of information to the pilot wave. The position of the particle is not also information - an uncertainty we can limit?

And the "inside" of a wavefunction seems the opposite of information, as only uncertainty (indeterminacy) exists inside of it. Except in the pilot wave ontology where there is all this hidden structure, all these grooves, that would certainly be informational, but not in any way we could access (unlike measurements of the particle)?

 

[bohm2]

And the "inside" of a wavefunction seems the opposite of information, as only uncertainty (indeterminacy) exists inside of it. Except in the pilot wave ontology where there is all this hidden structure, all these grooves, that would certainly be informational, but not in any way we could access (unlike measurements of the particle)?

I don't understand this part. Do you mean this point as argued by Harrigan and Spekkens:

There is a different way in which ψ could be an incomplete description of reality: it could represent a state of incomplete knowledge about reality. In other words, it could be that ψ is not a variable in the ontic state space at all, but rather encodes a probability distribution over the ontic state space. In this case also, specifying ψ does not completely specify the ontic state, and so it is apt to say that ψ provides an incomplete description. In such a model, a variation of ψ does not represent a variation in any physical degrees of freedom, but instead a variation in the space of possible ways of knowing about some underlying physical degrees of freedom.

Einstein, incompleteness, and the epistemic view of quantum states
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0706/0706.2661v1.pdf

Also note that in the macroscopic pilot wave model that I linked, the pilot wave does carry information (but not information for us):

The waves emitted earlier and having propagated faster than the walker itself, come back towards the droplet carrying information on the geometry of the borders. The walker avoids the nearing obstacle as a dolphin or a bat would do, even though it has no brain to process the signal.

Walking Droplets: a form of wave-particle duality at macroscopic scale
http://users.df.uba.ar/dasso/fis4_2do_cuat_2010/walker.pdf

This information is stored because each bounce generates a sustained localized state of Faraday waves. The information being stored in waves, the data about the trajectory are cumulated in an interference pattern due to the waves’ linear superposition. Later, as the drop collides again with the interface, it ‘reads’ this cumulated information and the local slope of the distorted surface determines the direction and amplitude of the next jump.

Information stored in Faraday waves: the origin of a path memory
http://stilton.tnw.utwente.nl/people/eddi/Papers/Walker_JFM.pdf

As a result the wave field is the linear superposition of the successive Faraday waves emitted by past bounces. Its complex interference structure thus contains a memory of the recent trajectory. Furthermore, since the traveling waves move faster than the drop, the wave field also contains information about the obstacles that lie ahead. Hence, two non-local effects exist in the wave-field driving the motion of the droplet: the past bounces influence directly the present (direct propulsion) and the trajectory is perturbed by scattered waves from distant obstacles in a kind of echo-location effect. This interplay between the droplet motion and its associated wave field makes it a macroscopic implementation of a pilot-wave dynamics.

Probabilities and trajectories in a classical wave-particle duality
http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/361/1/012001/pdf/1742-6596_361_1_012001.pdf

Similar arguments are represented in the other papers linked in that thread, so I don't find you arguments at all convincing.