Is Information the basis of Reality in the Universe?
In the recent past, physicists believed the basis of the universe was subatomic particles, or even energy. But now, leading edge physicists believe it is most probably information.
According to a study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain – with the electrical firing between brain cells ‘mirrored’ by the shape of expanding galaxies.[1]
The classical Information Theory first put forward by Claude E. Shannon in 1948, and the new discipline of Quantum Information Science now under construction, suggests that information is the most basic element of the universe and even the cosmos.
A growing number of scientists like James Gleick who goes into an in-depth biography of Shannon’s information theory in The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
This notion has inspired other recent books, including Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos
Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes
Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information (Oxford Landmark Science)
Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Canto Classics)
The fundamental question each physicist is asking is: What are the basic building blocks of the cosmos? Atoms, particles, mass, energy? Quantum mechanics, forces, fields? Space and time — space-time? Tiny strings with many dimensions?
And the current answer to this fundamental question chosen by a growing number of physicists is “information”. As many as 20% of modern-day scientists are now claiming information is the basic foundation of reality.
The it from bitJohn Archibald Wheeler(July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008)
The late distinguished physicist John Archibald Wheeler originally characterized the idea as “It from bit” — “it” referring to all the stuff of the universe and “bit” meaning information, back in the 1980s.
Wheeler pointed out deep resonances between Quantum Mechanics and Information Theory. An electron, Wheeler noted, behaves like a particle or a wave depending on how we interrogate it. Information theory, similarly, posits that all messages can be reduced to a sequence of “binary units,” or bits, which are answers to yes or no questions, which he summarized in the koan-like phrase: “the it from bit.”
In a paper that he delivered at the Santa Fe Institute in 1989, he postulated that “every it – every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, it’s very existence entirely – even if in some contexts indirectly – from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.”
To Raphael Bousso, a string theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, information is not just a tool of measure — it is a primary constituent of what is happening in the world. Information, Bousso said, is not so much “modeling the system” — it is the system. Reality won’t work, he stressed, unless information is, in some sense, real.
To Alan Guth, one of the founders of contemporary cosmology and a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at MIT: matter, energy and information are almost the same thing. He stresses that since the laws of physics and information are the same thing – so they are equivalent. This means the notion of information as fundamental is not convincing for him — at least not yet, he says. (Is this a case of splitting hairs?)
Quantum Information Superposition – Qubits
Quantum information has different basic properties from classical information. The bits that make up classical information can be either one or zero. But the “qubits” that make up quantum information can exist in a superposition of the “one” and “zero” states; in a sense, they can take on both states at once. To maintain this superposition, though, qubits must exist in perfect isolation. As soon as that isolation is disturbed, the superposition crumbles.
“Quantum information is like the information in a dream,” explained Charles Bennett, a quantum information scientist at IBM Research, in a recent talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “In describing it, you change your memory of it.”
Reality = Information
According to physicists like Thomas W. Campbell (December 9, 1944) lecturer, and author of the My Big T.O.E. (Theory of Everything) trilogy, Reality = Information.
Starting from just two assumptions viz. that consciousness exists and evolution exists (evolution being a process by which complex systems modify themselves in order to meet environmental demands) then the only reality is Consciousness or the Larger Consciousness System (LCS), he has stated.
My Big TOE is a work that offers scientific evidence which unifies general relativity, quantum mechanics, and metaphysics along with the origins of consciousness as being a digital information electromagnetic field. The Larger Consciousness System (LCS) is all that is real, according to Campbell, which means we live in a virtual reality, he believes, and has garnered Kickstarter funding in the hope of demonstrating that as being valid. The logical progression of that for me is that if our reality is virtual then so is everything else in the Cosmos.
Consciousness = Information
Consciousness is information riding on an electromagnetic wave in space.
Consciousness is made up of information which forms the LCS. The LCS is what each hemispheric brained individual receives from the Electromagnetic Information Field into its right hemisphere. If the information received is accepted, i.e. matched and processed successfully by the left hemisphere, then all is well with that Individuated Unit of Consciousness. Otherwise a problem occurs when a hemispheric miss-match or dis-symmetry occurs as shown by fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) PET and brain SPECT, which results in mental illness.
When the Unified Field Theory is finally written down, love will be either the verb or the subject.John Archibald Wheeler, Astrophysicist (1911-2008)
.
But the LCS also electromagnetically enters and directs single cell organisms, and although there are binary choices made by all living organisms, albeit limited in the case of single cell organisms, there is however, no choice between good and evil possible except in those entities who have evolved with their genes altered and passed down from those who “ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. The rest of creation is evolved and conscious, but not conscious of good and evil – only of Consciousness or good.
The Universe is made up of Process Fractals
We are here because of evolution and evolution is the most fundamental of all process fractals. Process fractals are self replicating creators.
In 1975, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” in the first published paper on fractal geometry, and despite some resistance from the mathematical community, it was soon discovered that fractal geometry is unparalleled at measuring and modeling the world of natural phenomena, and including the universe.
To put the Simple Explanation in fractal terms, our universe is populated by simple, recursive, self-similar structures of consciousness at arbitrarily small scales. (A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, Cyd Ropp)
A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything by Ph.D., Cyd Ropp (2015-04-09)
Bruce Harold Lipton an American developmental biologist, best known for promoting the controversial idea that genes and DNA can be manipulated by a person’s beliefs, concurs with this idea that the only reality is the Larger Consciousness System (LCS), but comes from a physical rather than philosophical standpoint.
Lipton understands from an empirical standpoint that a cell has no behaviour if it is disconnected from the environment, and what is more, if you cut the receptors off the cell it becomes comatose.
Once the receptors are back on the surface again, which the cell itself will replace if it is returned to an environment, the cell again expresses behaviour.
The cells become a compliment to the environment, and the behaviour of the cell is a reflection of the environment. And the environment was what was responsible for the cell selecting the genes at any given moment.
Nucleus is a disc with programs – the DNA genes.
The cell membrane is an access device to select the programs from the nucleus and engage the function of the system.
Each cell has a receptor which picks up a certain band from the environment which is specific to each person, so it is not possible to transplant another person’s cell to someone else without the fear of rejection.
Cells from one person will be rejected by another unless the receptors are cut off and replaced with the other person’s receptors. Unfortunately, instead of attempting this mammoth undertaking, doctors think that life long immunosuppressant drugs like Prednisone and many others, is an acceptable work-around, while at the same time being the way to help out the drug companies because of the life long need to take them, presumably.
Conclusion
The double slit experiment, first performed by Thomas Young in 1801, has always suggested that matter down at the electron level and even lower, is not solid but indeterminate and depends on whether data is collected on it or not. It appears to be about data more than whether light is a wave or a particle. Is that the clue that everything is information?
References:
[1]https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/11/27/physicists-universe-giant-brain_n_2196346.html?guccounter=1