Zenith Grant Awardee
David Wolpert
Santa Fe Institute
Project Title
A Semantic Information-Theory Model of Reality
Project Summary
Ever since Wheeler discussed \'it from bit\', there has been great interest in whether the ultimate nature of reality can be formulated in purely information-theoretic terms, and what insights such a formulation would provide, e.g., as a priori restrictions on the nature of reality. The mathematics of inference devices (ID\'s) – mathematical abstractions of any physical device that can be used for observation, prediction, or control – provides such an information theory. Already ID theory has provided a non-quantum-mechanical \'uncertainty principle\' that restricts the possible nature of reality. This suggests that we formalize reality as the information that a set of ID\'s have about one another and about other physical variables. A challenge with this approach is that the definition of ID\'s is too weak to fully capture the concept of semantic information, and contains no notion of distance. I propose to introduce extra structure into ID theory to overcome both of these shortcomings. This extension to ID theory may allow us to capture all testable aspects of physical reality in terms of ID theory, and the mathematics of this extended ID theory should provide very powerful a priori restrictions on the nature of reality.
Technical Abstract
Can physical reality be formulated in purely information-theoretic terms? Traditionally this question has been addressed using Shannon\'s information theory. But as Shannon emphasized, his theory concerns syntactic information, ignoring the semantic structure of what the variables mean. This suggests we need a semantic information theory to fully describe physical reality. The mathematics of inference devices (ID\'s) – mathematical abstractions of any physical device that can be used for observation, prediction, or control – provides such a theory. Moreover, there are connections between ID theory and physics, e.g., ID theory provides a non-quantum-mechanical \'uncertainty principle\'. This suggests that we formalize reality as the semantic information that a set of ID\'s have about one another and about other physical variables. A challenge with this approach is that the definition of ID\'s is too weak to fully capture the concept of semantic information, and contains no notion of distance measure. I propose to introduce extra structure into ID theory to overcome these shortcomings. This extended ID theory may allow us to capture all testable aspects of physical reality in terms of a semantic information theory, and thereby provide very powerful a priori restrictions on the possible nature of physical reality.
QSpace Latest
PressRelease: Shining a light on the roots of plant “intelligence”
All living organisms emit a low level of light radiation, but the origin and function of these ‘biophotons’ are not yet fully understood. An international team of physicists, funded by the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, has proposed a new approach for investigating this phenomenon based on statistical analyses of this emission. Their aim is to test whether biophotons can play a role in the transport of information within and between living organisms, and whether monitoring biophotons could contribute to the development of medical techniques for the early diagnosis of various diseases. Their analyses of the measurements of the faint glow emitted by lentil seeds support models for the emergence of a kind of plant ‘intelligence,’ in which the biophotonic emission carries information and may thus be used by plants as a means to communicate. The team reported this and reviewed the history of biophotons in an article in the journal Applied Sciences in June 2024.