Comment: Tegmark is right about the importance of information, but his formulation is the epitome of what is wrong with scientific abstraction: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. As R.G. Collingwood wrote in Speculum Mentis:
For it must be borne in mind that the abstract concept is nothing but the abstract structure of the sensible world, and therefore if the concept alone is real the world whose structure it is will be mere appearance and not reality, and therefore the concept will be a class whose members are not real.
... Mathematics is nothing but the assertion of the abstract concept, and it can give us no account of the presuppositions of this assertion. Mathematical logic is only the shadow of science itself. It is the truth, but the truth about nothing: it is the description of the structure of a null class. Hence, though the hypotheses of empirical science must have some kind of categorical basis, they cannot find this in mathematics, which is the very distilled essence of hypothesis itself. The abstract cannot rest upon the more abstract, but only on the concrete.
This abstract notion, called information realism is philosophical in character, but it has been associated with physics from its very inception. Most famously, information realism is a popular philosophical underpinning for digital physics. The motivation for this association is not hard to fathom.
Indeed, according to the Greek atomists, if we kept on dividing things into ever-smaller bits, at the end there would remain solid, indivisible particles called atoms, imagined to be so concrete as to have even particular shapes. Yet, as our understanding of physics progressed, we've realized that atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as "energy" and "fields" - abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.
Comment: Only if we commit ourselves to believing solely in our own abstractions.
To some physicists, this indicates that what we call "matter," with its solidity and concreteness -is an illusion; that only the mathematical apparatus they devise in their theories is truly real, not the perceived world the apparatus was created to describe in the first place. From their point of view, such a counterintuitive conclusion is an implication of theory, not a conspicuously narcissistic and self-defeating proposition.
Comment: But it can also be both, i.e. the theory itself can be self-defeating.
Indeed, according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind - psyche, soul - is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation. But in such a case, what exactly is meant by the word "information," since there is no physical or mental substrate to ground it?
Comment: Exactly. What if the 'information' in information realism is a derivative of mind, the expression of intelligence?
You see, it is one thing to state in language that information is primary and can, therefore, exist independently of mind and matter. But it is another thing entirely to explicitly and coherently conceive of what - if anything - this may mean. By way of analogy, it is possible to write - as Lewis Carroll did - that the Cheshire Cat's grin remains after the cat disappears, but it is another thing entirely to conceive explicitly and coherently of what this means.
Our intuitive understanding of the concept of information - as cogently captured by Claude Shannon in 1948 - is that it is merely a measure of the number of possible states of an independently existing system. As such, information is a property of an underlying substrate associated with the substrate's possible configurations - not an entity unto itself.
Comment: Even that is too much of an abstraction. Real information is not just potential meaning; it is meaning itself.
To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat's grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such.
Comment: Which is precisely Collingwood's point in the quotations above.
One assumes that serious proponents of information realism are well aware of this line of criticism. How do they then reconcile their position with it? A passage by Luciano Floridi may provide a clue. In a section titled "The nature of information," he states:
"Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory.... Information remains an elusive concept." (Emphasis added.)Such obscure ambiguity lends information realism a conceptual fluidity that makes it unfalsifiable. After all, if the choice of primitive is given by "an elusive concept," how can one definitely establish that it is wrong? In admitting the possibility that information may be "a network of logically interdependent but mutually irreducible concepts," Floridi seems to suggest even that such elusiveness is inherent and unresolvable.
Whereas vagueness may be defensible in regard to natural entities conceivably beyond the human ability to apprehend, it is difficult to justify when it comes to a human concept, such as information. We invented the concept, so we either specify clearly what we mean by it or our conceptualization remains too vague to be meaningful. In the latter case, there is literally no sense in attributing primary existence to information.
The untenability of information realism, however, does not erase the problem that motivated it to begin with: the realization that, at bottom, what we call "matter" becomes pure abstraction, a phantasm. How can the felt concreteness and solidity of the perceived world evaporate out of existence when we look closely at matter?
To make sense of this conundrum, we don't need the word games of information realism. Instead, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behavior of that world, not in the world itself.
Comment: And that's not to deny the 'reality' of abstractions - only to point out that they are, fundamentally, products of mind.
Where we get lost and confused is in imagining that what we are describing is a non-mental reality underlying our perceptions, as opposed to the perceptions themselves. We then try to find the solidity and concreteness of the perceived world in that postulated underlying reality. However, a non-mental world is inevitably abstract. And since solidity and concreteness are felt qualities of experience - what else? - we cannot find them there. The problem we face is thus merely an artifact of thought, something we conjure up out of thin air because of our theoretical habits and prejudices.
Tegmark is correct in considering matter - defined as something outside and independent of mind - to be unnecessary baggage. But the implication of this fine and indeed brave conclusion is that the universe is a mental construct displayed on the screen of perception. Tegmark's "mathematical universe" is inherently a mental one, for where does mathematics - numbers, sets, equations - exist if not in mentation?
As I elaborate extensively in my new book, The Idea of the World, none of this implies solipsism. The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality - with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness - once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism.
Bernardo Kastrup has a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology and specializations in artificial intelligence and reconfigurable computing. He has worked as a scientist in some of the world's foremost research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories. Bernardo has authored many academic papers and books on philosophy and science. His most recent book is "The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality," based on rigorous analytic argument and empirical evidence. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com.
Reader Comments
The map is not the territory (math is not the things it describes).
All this either or nonsense is only in service to self/ego and therefore self-limiting/defeating. Self or Paramatman is secondless, the one and the many, and is irreducible.
infinity=1=0 all represent the same whole but simply seen from a different perspective, and perhaps moving from gross to subtle to causal, i.e. finer and finer grained being.
It make for a nice mathematical trinity. Maybe nothing so cosmically special about the notion of trinity, except perhaps from a 3D perspective through which kaleidoscope divinity appears as a trinity.
Back to Pierre's book, I recall he made reference to a kind of trinity: matter, energy, information. Note that it also has the appearance of finer and finer granularity moving from matter (below) up to information (above). As above, so below.
Co-emergence.
Can it also be physicality that presents itself to us (itself) as a field of mentation?
What's the difference?
And
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Thing
“You create your reality according to your beliefs and expectations; therefore it behooves you to examine them carefully. If you do not like your world, then examine your own expectations. Every thought in one way or another is constructed by you in physical terms.”“Your world is formed in faithful replica of your own thoughts….
Certain telepathic conditions exist that we call root assumptions, of which each individual is subconsciously aware. Using these, you form a physical environment cohesive enough so that there is general agreement as to objects and their placement and dimension. It is all hallucinatory in one respect, and yet it is your reality, and you must manipulate within it. The world in which your parents live existed first in thought. It existed once in the stuff of dreams, and they spawned their universe from this, and from this they made their world.”
“If you sell yourselves short, you will say, ‘I am a physical organism and I live within the boundaries cast upon me by space and time. I am at the mercy of my environment.’ If you do not sell yourselves short, you will say, ‘I am an individual. I form my physical environment. I am a part of all that is. There is no place within me that creativity does not exist.’”
“Because I say to you that you create physical matter by use of the inner vitality of the universe, in the same way that you form a pattern with your breath on a glass pane, I do not mean that you are the creators of the universe. I am saying that you are the creators of the physical world as you know it.”
“Chemicals themselves will not give rise to consciousness or life. Your scientists will have to face the fact that consciousness comes first and evolves its own form… All cells in the body have a separate consciousness. There is a conscious cooperation between the cells in all the organs, and between the organs themselves… Molecules and atoms and even smaller particles have condensed consciousness. They form into cells and form an individual cellular consciousness. This combination results in a consciousness that is capable of much more experience and fulfillment than would be possible for the isolated atom or molecule alone. This goes on ad infinitum… to form the physical body mechanism. Even the lowest particle retains its individuality and its abilities [through this cooperation] are multiplied a millionfold.”
“Matter is a medium for the manipulation and transformation of psychic energy into aspects that can then be used as building blocks…. Matter is only cohesive enough to give the appearance of relative permanence to the senses that perceive it. … Matter is continually created, but no particular object is in itself continuous. There is not, for example, one physical object that deteriorates with age. There are instead continuous creations of psychic energy into a physical pattern that appears to hold a more of less rigid appearance.” Physical matter makes consciousness effective within the three-dimensional reality. As individualized energy approaches your particular field, it expresses itself to the best of its ability within it. As energy approaches, it creates matter, first of all in an almost plastic fashion. But the creation is continuous like a beam or endless series of beams, at first weak as they are far off, then stronger, then weak again as they pass away.”
Matter of itself, however, is no more continuous, no more given to growth or age than is, say, the color yellow.”
Statements are stagnating.
An open query lends itself to discovery, whereas conclusions are terminal.
To their great astonishment, atheistic particle physicists found that the smallest quantifiable 'particle' of observable matter was being projected into existence from an un-quantifiable background source.
The scientist could have taken a clue encoded in John 1:1, a plausible decipherment of which might be: In the beginning was consciousness, and consciousness emanates from God and consciousness is God. This has been so from the beginning a conscious holographic projection of God. All things are made of this conscious projection from God; and without this conscious projection from God nothing would exist. God is the source of all life which he has consciously and with intent projected in the form of mankind. And this conscious projection of life exists within the void from which nothing can emanate.
Existence is a holographic projection from the I AM. The atheistic scientific community is scrambling like cockroaches looking for cover.