This is a response to Dr D’s comments on the prior post.
Response to a Question on Twitter Concerning Creatio Ex Nihilo
I’ll quickly note where we seem to agree:
We are fundamentally quantum beings in quantum relationship with the rest of reality.
This enables free will as a function of quantum indeterminacy
Our universe is actualized through an observer out of fundamental quantum reality.
Our consciousness is a reversal of entropy. (You stated that life itself was the reversal, but I see life as a limited and temporary self-organization of energy, the same as all other events, that eventually dissipates into the general environment. It is our consciousness that decreases entropy in the event of decoherence as the first in a series of reductions.)
The core of our disagreement comes about where you wrote:
– The onset of creation is akin to a blueprint, a conceptual framework based on a transcendental function.
– The universe unfolds according to this virtual fractal template (think Mandelbrot)”.
– The next creative step requires energy and specific motion to become actualized.
– The observer required by the Copenhagen interpretation (collapse) is a specific limitation.
– It is actualized through the observers described in “creation”
– we interact with a quantum interface at the cellular level continuously. 👇🏼
Our original question concerned creatio ex nihilo, to which I responded with a clarification of “thing” and a model from which things emerged through decoherence as self-organization of energy that precedes things. Reality is divided by the impenetrable wall of decoherence into classical and quantum realms. We can never conceive of quantum reality because it denies our evolved categories of understanding: time, space, reason. We can only “know” what appears to us after decoherence. Information theory is one viable approach to understanding our decohered universe, but tells us nothing about origins, which stubbornly lie on the other side of the wall. This eliminates the possibility of appeal to a “transcendental function”.
If such a blueprint or conceptual framework exists, it only does so after decoherence, as it depends on mathematics which cannot exist without spacetime. It also leaves open the question of its ontology – whether is is an order we subjectively impose on reality or is an actual feature independent of our consciousness. I contend that any question of origins not only lies forever beyond our grasp, but is a nonsensical question. Absent spacetime, origin is not a valid concept. Speculation transcending our representations of the decohered universe will never rise beyond ungrounded metaphysical assertions. They can never be true as they all rely on our imposition of evolved conditions of thought onto the quantum realm which denies them. This is true for Mutliverse, Multiworlds, gods, and even the current attempts to look for geometric order in the chaos of quantum reality. The Copenhagen Interpretation of no interpretation at all remains the most intellectually honest, if eternally unsatisfying. I stand with Feynman that we need to accept ultimate incomprehensibility of fundamental reality and focus on what is present in our decohered environment.
From a philosophical perspective, this forces us into the mystery of decoherence as the presentation of things in the world, whether as Heidegger’s Golden Horizon or Zurek’s density matrices, pointer states, and redundant copies of information. Either can tell us important things as long they resist metaphyisical speculation attempting to transcend our decohered environment. Any attempt to describe fundamental quantum reality by means of our innate conditions of thought can only result in error – Kant’s transcendental illusion.
Information theory can have value as a mathematical and metaphorical explanation of mechanics within our decohered environment, but also has serious problems as you present it. The first is that it contradicts the most fundamental reality we have discovered within decoherence: quantum fields. Quantum fields exist as wave energy upon which particles appear and disappear into our environment like foam bubbles on the wave of the sea. You presuppose a metaphysical blueprint preexisting these waves. There is no ground for this assertion. Rather, all we can start with is energy waves and particles that exist as local points of quantum increases in energy. It is from this chaotic quantum foam that things emerge as events of self-organizations through the interplay of the quantum fields. It is more likely that the inherent possibilities in each chance encounter of fields (event) determines what appears to us, not a predetermined blueprint.
The term “information” is itself problematic. It can be used in multiple senses, but originates with a sense of learning by a consciousness observer. Uses other than that are metaphors that play on that sense. Generally, physicists use it in the sense that events among entities (or systems) leave traces that can be read. Therefore, information can arise as relations among systems, not the entities themselves. This blurs the role of consciousness in information, as seen in the continuing disagreement over the role of our consciousness in decoherence. To assert information without our observation is to propose the ungrounded metaphysical assertion that things can have an awareness; or to merely describe a physical event metaphorically.
Here I’d like to expand Donald Hoffman’s metaphor of consciousness as a graphic interface, which is really a grossly simplified version of Kant’s epistemology cloaked in contemporary imagery. The incomprehensible stream of 1’s and 0’s are reduced through a logic analogous to our innate conditions of thoughts to pixels on a screen, which we intuit as icons analogous to representations. The icons have no real existence outside the representation, but also are not totally arbitrary – they are determinations from real information – the 1’s and 0’s. Human consciousness is thus a highly reductive adaptation for the purpose of simplifying our environment to something we can manipulate and predict to our advantage. It has proved useful within a very thin sliver of reality, but wide enough to allow us to avoid predators, capture pray, and plan for future events such as rain or cold. It knows nothing, however, about the ultimate realities of 1’s and 0’s.
Those curious beyond mere survival, however, have the opportunity to study the screen itself and discover the fundamental pixels. In so doing they can map out relationships, measure and label shapes, discern colors, etc. And from that they can even begin to derive some of the logic that creates these measures and patterns, analogous to our deriving mathematics and logic. But we can also see the error of going beyond that to projecting onto the 1’s and 0’s themselves, whose existence we know nothing about. (A point of breakdown in this metaphor is that the computer code has a designer, whereas there is no ground for assuming this in reality).
At the core of this is reduction, which defines our universe. Perhaps, as Penrose speculates, consciousness itself is created at the moment of entanglement and reduction to Eigenstate. That moment of decoherence is the initiating reduction of quantum chaos to an entity in our decohered universe. Going further, this massive sea of quantum foam must be processed through our understanding through further reduction as icons or representations. And it is the relationships among these that we represent to ourselves as systems, and time as the eventual disordering of these systems. As more entities enter the environment in Eigenstate, the more entropy increases. Further, the more events taking place within our perceived system, the more “information” is introduced and entropy increases.
As Rudolf Clausius demonstrated with his deck of cards, the order of a system is arbitrary, and each arbitrary system has its own degree of entropy and its own time. In all of this there is one common factor: our reductive consciousness. The implication is that what we think of as the universe is really the analog of the computer screen. Only real in our imaginations, but representations stemming from a real physical reality with which we entangle. We are at the same time that with which we entangle and the inhabitants of our representational universe that can elicit the illusion of separation – the error of subject/object metaphysics that underlies our understanding yet today. With this realization, there is no valid reason to think our representational universe actually changes coherent quantum reality, just as the icons cannot change the code. Fundamental existence remains as it is outside time, causality, space, beginning or end. Entirely incomprehensible to us representationally (scientifically or metaphysically). To posit multi-worlds, or multi universes, for instance, is to misunderstand what a universe is. It is transcendental illusion to posit another world like ours splitting off at an orthogonal at decoherence because the universe only exists as such as our representation. Perhaps there are other reductive beings representing their own universes, but not as an orthogonal, as even Hilbert Space is confined to a study of our own pixels.
Too Late for the Gods 