Dear All,
The usual lack of thinking time, plus the more than usual accumulation of
small things to do, have precluded me of participating in these fascinating
exchanges. Let me make a few brief points:
-- The qbit versus the bit (central matter in Jonathan's recent
reflections): does the former reduce to the latter? I think so. The
difference stems more of the "processing side" (Laws) than on the extant
information (states). Thus, some microphysical laws of QM could be singled
out as not having any counterpart in classical (and statistical) mechanics.
-- "Reality of the laws": as it seems we only care about the "truth" of
theories, and cavalierly assume they exist only in our heads or when we
encode them somewhere else---Michel D. Why do we treat so differently the
"realism" of natural objects/entities versus the realism of natural laws
which "handle" them? Otherwise, how are they capable of efficient action
without a "reality" --is not the world "causally closed"?
-- Exploring more seriously the notion of information as "distinction on
the adjacent" could take us to minimalist assumptions on "physical"
implementation of such laws at the microphysical level. Thus, some parts of
Stephen Wolfram's program (his pretended New Sience) on cellular automata
might rightly conceptualize in a minimalist way the Planckian granularity
of space time in its "processing" capabilities to lawfully handle those
qbits & bits.
-- I much like Karl's original ideas on counting (notwithstanding some
differences on how to count multidimensional partitions). Indeed the
counting problem in maths has required the invention of several types of
numbers, which have been devised beyond natural numbers: integers,
rationals, reals, complex, transfinite, hypercomplex, quaternions, etc. I
wonder whether that proposed type of counting would make sense handling
the logically of "distinctions" in those elementary Planckian automata.
-- Physics has to change a lot. The problems it has in very strategic
corners, some of them concerning information (and symmetry!), might be
crucial places to work out both for physicists & information scientists...
best wishes
Pedro
PS. By the way, reductionism and reductionist programs look fine, if
accompanied and complemented by similarly robust "integrationism" and
integrative programs. That's not the case nowadays.
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Received on Wed Jul 5 12:57:04 2006
