[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: In IC we believe that the interactions among all the particles in the universe define all the particles and the space and I guess time, just everything in the universe is an embodiment of the interactions and the history of interactions among its constituent particles. So the more particles you have the more exchanges they have among themselves. The more information is generated the more tightly grained is the universe. So our universe with 10 to the 80th, 10 to the 85th observable for particles is pretty tightly defined. The plank wavelength or blank’s constant is tiny. The uncertainty and position of macro particles for sure is like just nothing. It’s not nothing nothing but it’s minuscule because of the amount of information about where everything is generated by the gazillions of interactions among the particles in the universe.
But under quantum mechanics which defines this, I think QM is considered the most perfectly confirmed and perfectly accurate model, mathematical model in physics. Quantum mechanics is pretty bulletproof. General relativity kind of fails at the margins once you start going down black holes or more when you try to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics you run into problems but quantum mechanics itself is like it’s a perfect little big ass theory. Under quantum mechanics a bunch of stuff is undefined and people who are around for the early days of quantum mechanics particularly Einstein hated the uncertainties, the undefined raw probabilities in quantum mechanics.
People of Einstein’s generation had grown up and previous generations had all grown up with the idea of the perfectly determinate clockwork universe that if you knew all the parameters of the universe at any given time you could predict the rest of the lifetime of the universe like clockwork. And then quantum mechanics did away with that with its probabilities, its unavoidable probabilities and Einstein hated it and I’m sure a lot of other people did too and he came up with experiments to try to show that it was bullshit. After Einstein by the ‘50s like there was the Bell equation, maybe the early ‘60s which showed that it’s mathematically impossible to have hidden variables in the universe to remove the randomness, the probabilities and replace them with certainties that you can’t do it. It’s not consistent with quantum mechanics. You can’t have hidden information that tells you what is going to happen in open quantum situations.
However, if the universe really is a model of something outside of the universe the same way our minds are models of ourselves and the world around us you can sneak in a shitload of information I believe because the information is coming from outside the system and thus isn’t information in the sense that is prohibited by quantum mechanics. Einstein wanted everything to be kind of correlated within the universe that the whole universe tells you how the universe works. The universe is correlated with itself, it has all the information it needs to determine every subsequent moment like clockwork. But information from outside the universe is not information of that type. It doesn’t correlate anything within the universe. If the universe is modeling out an external world based on information that enters via the hardware of the world; the sensory apparatus, that information is random with regard to the information the universe uses to define itself. It’s information coming from outside the universe; it doesn’t correlate anything in the universe and in the instances where it does that becomes information that’s incorporated quantum mechanically into the universe.
So you can plug in all sorts of information that appears arbitrary and random to the universe under the rules of quantum mechanics. You can plug in all the random outcomes you want. It’s the randomness that is allowed by quantum mechanics but if the randomness is actually non-pre-determinate information coming in because the universe is modeling an external world that the universe can’t predict because the universe can predict subsequent states of its self given the information it has but that prediction is limited leading to the quantum randomness. You can fill in that, from moment to moment you can plug in random results.
I mean that’s what time does; it plugs in the results to these open quantum situations that you don’t know what’s going to happen and then time passes and something happens. You didn’t know which thing was going to happen but one of those possible things happened and that new information is entered into the universe that way, it’s not correlated. It didn’t come from the structures within the universe, it came from outside and if the universe is modeling something outside that’s fine to admit that new information without violating the rules of quantum mechanics.
So, that’s one thing. Another thing is does the universe really have the bandwidth or the wherewithal to hold this new information; to not only hold all the information but the universe defines itself with? But beyond that this information that is a model of the external world and my guess is maybe the universe’s ability to hold on to X to information above and beyond the information that defines itself and maybe to hold on to… certainly the our guess is that the universe can’t just exist on its own but needs an armature, needs a hardware; the way our minds can’t really exist on their own, they need a brain to contain the mind, but the universe needs hardware to hold on to the information that the universe consists of. There’s a movie from the I think the late ‘70s called Scanners where people have telekinetic power and if somebody can like beam like power at your head and make your head blow up if they’re a scanner assassin. And if somebody did that to you; made your head blow up; your mind would disappear because there’s nothing left, no structure left to support your mind.
Similarly we in IC think that there must be a hardware structure that is holding on to the information that the universe consists of and perhaps in addition to the information that the universe consists of, the structure can I guess… I don’t know this is really half-assed, I haven’t thought this out very well… given that you’ve got to support an external support structure that maybe that structure allows the universe to contain information above and beyond just the information that defines the universe. So, the question that prompts this whole discussion is, is there enough room in the universe, in quantum mechanics. Is there enough room for the various types of information that we think the universe contains? A – The information that the universe defines itself with, and B – the information that is the universe modeling an external world. And two and a half or three the information that defines us.
We as evolved beings have arisen from the physics of the universe. So, I don’t think you necessarily need any extra information for us to exist because everything that happened to make us has happened according to the rules of physics of quantum mechanics which underlie biology and chemistry and evolution and everything. So I think that part, there’s certainly enough information for us to have arisen and to exist.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 