Dr. Dreyer,
Hi. I liked your essay a lot, and your points about solids representing positions and information needing an external entity in order to give it meaning struck a chord with me. Some comments are:
1. In regard to your point that
"information should be seen as the basis of our description of the world [9, 10]. Our analysis shows that there is something fundamentally wrong with this suggestion. Naked bits require a dictionary that gives them meaning. Such a dictionary is necessarily external to the bits themselves and a description of the world that focuses solely on the bits will be incomplete."
this suggests to me that anything that requires an external dictionary to give it meaning or to define it cannot be the most basic building block of existence. This then suggests that a thing that is the most basic building block of existence must be self-defining. Something in its properties must give itself meaning, and existence. In the previous analog versus digital contest, I suggested one situation that I think is self-defining and whose very nature defines an existent entity.
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/824
2. When you say that a solid represents a position, I also agree with this but phrase it a little differently. My view is that there is some most fundamental existent entity that is at the heart of our reality and that it has the ability to generate additional instances of this fundamental entity all around it. Each of these entities is a position of space/volume. Only an existent entity can have a position. The collection of these existent entities defines the space we live in, with each entity representing one location within that space.
3. Your idea of a solid representing a position also prompts me to throw out an idea I've been thinking about for awhile that I propose may relate to the quantum superposition stuff.
A. Suppose that there is in existence only one instance of the most fundamental existent entity, named A. A is an existent entity and represents a position. This also means there is only one position in existence. There are no entities or positions outside of A.
B. As above, suppose that this most fundamental existent entity, A, has the ability to generate additional existent entities, each named B1, B2, B3, etc., in order to cover its surface. Once created, these new B entities would be new positions. One can't say why these new entities were created in the positions they're in because there were no positions until after they were created.
C. Now, suppose a human mind looks back on this situation after the B entities were created. Given that it seems natural in our minds to think that space is infinitely divisible (e.g. continuous), we might think that the B entities could have been in any of any infinite number of positions around the A entity. That is, there would be a superposition of possible locations for B to have been in. This seems reasonable, but it's not correct because there were no positions other than A until after the B entities were created. So, our after-the-fact imposition of a probability distribution for the possible locations of the B entities is incorrect because there were no locations other than A until after the B entities were created.
This is just an idea I've been thinking of that I wonder if it may have some relationship to the quantum superpositioning stuff.
Any feedback you may have on my current FQXi essay and on my ideas at my website
sites.google.com/site/ralphthewebsite
would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for listening!
Roger Granet