Chapter VI: Information | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “Whereas the complexity of an object measures how complicated it is to describe, its information

        content measures the extent to which it describes the rest of the world... What I am casually calling

        the information content of an object is in technical terms called the mutual information between

        the object and the rest of the world.”

        – Max Tegmark^I

        “The rule that dynamical laws must be deterministic and reversible is so central to classical

        physics that we sometimes forget to mention it when teaching the subject... what is undoubtedly

        the most fundamental of all physical laws—the conservation of information.  The conservation of

        information is simply the rule that every state has one arrow in and one arrow out.  It ensures that

        you never lose track of where you started.”

        – Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky^II

        An interesting place where epistemology and ontology meet is information science.  Originally associated most closely with computer science and communications technology (and thinkers such as Claude Shannon), the field takes the view of how information is transmitted.  But a broader view, taken up especially by physicists, has begun to think of information as a foundational aspect of the cosmos, like energy.  Energy and geometry (or arrangement) are information's substrate (in fact, one can begin to see this in the very word “in-formation”).^III  Science itself is dependent on information content—that is what empirical evidence is: the information signature left by some law (initial conditions are themselves information content).  When we look at competing hypotheses, we look for ways in which the similar information signature each mechanism would leave on the world nevertheless differs, that is, what different predictions the competing hypotheses would make, so that empirical measurement of that information can help falsify one (or both), and confirm the other (or neither).^IV

        The reason for this information science view is that when one's epistemology recognizes ontology, one must realize that there has to be an interface between the world and the people trying to figure that world out, and that interface is information.  Where as mass is the energy-content of an object, the amount of mass, or the amount of energy is part of the information content associated with that property.  From a fully ontological perspective, information is not all that important because you have all of it right in front of you: you know the world is the that way it is, if you are in full possession of all its facets.  But the fact that there are patterns between things in the world, similarities and differences in ontology that allow one to measure and understand some laws about its structure is essential, epistemologically, for one to get at that ontology in the first place.  Information signatures are really a consequence of ontology: one has to be able to measure the world, and when one does so, one is really observing patterns of information in the world, and it is these different patterns being predicted by different hypotheses which empirical evidence is adjudicating between (this is how one decides which hypothesis is to be taken as provisionally true, or which has been falsified).

        Lately, there has been a big debate in modern cosmology about whether or not there exists a multiverse (or even multiple multiverses), whether or not we would be able to know if there did exist a multiverse, and whether or not we should believe there is one based on indirect suggestive evidence.  At the heart of modern cosmology's falsification debate is actually information science: many multiverse proponents have a bad habit of claiming their hypotheses will show no in-practice accessible information signature (because, for example, the hypothesis also predicts infinite space-time between that adjudicating information signature and ourselves, forever out of reach of our measurement apparatuses).  But most scientists believe that any serious hypothesis will leave at least one different signature that may be measured (the general theory of relativity, for example, leaves many different predictions than Newtonian gravity imprinted on the cosmos—so far, all of which have been confirmed).  One (or many!) just needs to be clever enough (theoretically and experimentally) to figure out what to look for, and where to look (one example that has been proposed for some multiverse hypotheses is to look for evidence of possible collisions between them).

        Nevertheless, many scientists who have jumped on the information-bandwagon go too far.  One will hear this group speaking about information from more of an ontological standpoint, rather than an epistemological one, in naive ways: they attempt to “informationize” physics much like Tegmark attempts to “mathematize” physics.^V  Such thinkers commit this mistake when they say things like, 'information is as much a fundamental property of objects in the universe as their mass or energy content,' as though information were some kind of real stuff.^VI  Perhaps the dominant reason this group is so easily led in this direction is cultural: physicists have largely eschewed philosophy of science when it comes to quantum physics, and as a result, they believe themselves to be in possession of an actually fundamental, foundational theory which is in part random!  Instead of emphasizing innate physical features, particle physicists speak of “quantum numbers”—what they believe to be the only knowable features of elementary particles, and while some of these “numbers” such as mass are fairly classical, other quantities such as “spin” become far more difficult to conceptualize the ontology of than they are to quantify and use in the theory's calculations.  What's more is that these quantum numbers and the known laws of quantum physics can only ever give one partial predictive power over the future state of such a particle (or system of particles): hence the belief that there is something random or “chance-y” about reality at its lowest level.^VII  In truth, this is hubris: in other contexts, particle physicists readily admit that their standard model of particle physics is incomplete—but while they recognize that it has little-to-nothing to say about gravity (one of the four fundamental forces of nature), and while many are even keen on there being a more fundamental theory below it, puzzlingly few would tell you that what's hiding fulfills the scientific duty to deterministic, mechanical philosophy.^VIII  As a result in their belief (sometimes bordering on fetishization) of “quantum weirdness”, many of these thinkers have been brought to the idea that information is almost a new “quantum number”, something that is an integral part of objects.  But just as I believe it more likely mathematics will be “physicalized” than vice versa, I believe that information will need to be understood in the reverse of the way that this group speaks about it (in both cases, the implications are far less mystical in the direction that I favor).  Information is merely to be found in the differences between objects and there arrangements in space-time.  This book is written in ink on paper (or different photons firing from a monitor)—the information content of the book (hopefully an education in the philosophy of science!) is not somehow made up of some kind of “essence of information” in the matter-energy itself (as I just showed by giving two examples of the book's form, the information seems to be substrate-independent), it is contained in the data structure of how that matter-energy is arranged into glyphs (or letters) and comprehended by the algorithm in your brain which understands how to interpret this data structure (due to your understanding of the English language).  Ontology is a world of stones that that needs to be explained, and mathematics and information, insofar as they are facets of this world, are more like patterns within it, and languages describing it, than they are realer than it.  It would be a misunderstanding to take this epistemology-first view that information is as real as that which it describes.

        Recall in the “Computation” chapter that I wrote about “symbology”, and what I meant by that is really what the information scientists mean by “information”: one can create a data structure which stores, in some physical medium, information and then an algorithm (be it running on a CPU or a human brain) can interpret that information based on the rules of the data structure, and when one does so, one can convert an image, sound, or video game to a number and back.  In-between the picture one sees when one interprets the number, and that number—that data-structure-algorithm pair is called information.  There is information contained both in the ontology (when objects are arranged into a data structure), and information contained in the epistemology the computer uses when it has to read that number and display it as, say, an image (algorithm).  There must be a lock-and-key fit between these two for the relationship to be actionable because a number isn't obviously an image; it's not inherently obvious which way to interpret a number (as an image, or as English text, for example).  The general theory of relativity makes the prediction of a certain information pattern, as examples, the precession of Mercury's orbit close to the sun, the existence of black-holes, and gravitational waves emitting from objects (none of which are predictable from Newtonian gravity).  Whereas both theories largely agree on the information signature of, say, Earth's orbit around the sun, they differ greatly on how empirical measurements of other phenomena should turn out.  So it is with, say, different image file formats on a computer—it is likely that a Portable Network Graphic (.png) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (.jpg) have much overlap in their data structures (the same image saved in both formats certainly contains almost the exact same information content in each)—but the differences are crucial when it comes to using an algorithm to actually display the image on-screen, or otherwise print it (as anyone who has had file format compatibility issues in the real world will tell you).  In a sense, the file (with its given data structure, or file format) is like the empirical reality, and the algorithm is like a theory making predictions about that reality: if they line up, the image displays true.

        In fact, the correct view of information sheds light on the philosophy of mathematics—abstract mathematics is information: the modern view of mathematics as the description of mathematical structures could as easily be seen as collections of information.^IX  Mathematics, then, is really how to quantify and precisely describe the information content of the cosmos.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See Our Mathematical Universe by Tegmark (pp. 294).

II. See The Theoretical Minimum by Susskind and Hrabovsky (pp. 9-10). See also the “Determinism” and “Mechanical Philosophy” chapters.

III. J. B. Peterson points out that piece of etymology in “Take Aim, Even Badly” by Jordan B. Peterson (2018) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGDnSWmqhM) (6:20 – 6:55).

IV. This will be a central theme throughout this work, but see especially the “Empiricism” and “Laws And Facts, Theories And Data” chapters.

V. See the “Mathematics” chapter.

VI. Famously, John Archibald Wheeler endorsed this viewpoint with the catch-phrase “it from bit”, see Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, And The Future Of The Cosmos by Michio Kaku (Anchor Books) (2005) (pp. 171-172).

VII. One can find this position taken in nearly every popular book on physics or astronomy, and even a lower-resolution version permeating other fields and popular culture. As one example: aside from a genuine exploration of the controversy at the end of the book, this fundamental-weirdness stance is endorsed in Quantum Physics: What Everyone Needs To Know by Michael G. Raymer (Oxford University Press) (2017). Skepticism towards this answer (or lack thereof) to the measurement problem is in the air, in recent years, see for example What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest For The Meaning Of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker (Basic Books) (2018).

VIII. See especially the “Determinism” and “Mechanical Philosophy” chapters.

IX. See Our Mathematical Universe by Tegmark (at least pp. 259, 263-265).