What is the relationship between matter and 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.