Information basis of reality

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I don't know how well this conversation will go but I'm willing to try it, just because I get the sense that a lot of dialog that happens 'on the fence' between physicalism and other systems of thought gets awkward and probably unnecessarily so. The biggest issue I think it's not what's 'physical' but what's 'natural', ie. if it's natural it's real, whether it's 'physical' seems like it possibly could break from what's natural and while for the most part - at least now - they seem to be the same I don't know for sure how much or when the way we use these terms might branch more in favor of the 'natural' being how we assign the full container of reality, with the way physics is going it seems to be the case.

A few videos I'll at least share to get the conversation started. The first is Lawrence Kuhn talking to different physicists and philosophers of science about the 'imfamashin' basis of reality that at least some prominent members of their ranks are moving toward:




Donald Hoffman's most recent interview on 'The Case Against Reality' on Buddha at the Gaspump where he did a good job of unpacking his ideas better in their context. I'm going to say that the most important thing in his theory, at least for my understanding of it, is the notion that quantum entanglement chains are Markov chains (you've seen that sort of thing to some degree at least if you did matrix multiplication back in high school) where Markov chains create self-organizing systems that reach dynamic equilibrium after enough iterrations of process and where, again - I *think* I'm understanding this properly but perhaps not completely, he's looking at basic units like subatomic particles as bits, ie. a relationship between two agents (he has a mathematical diagram of Markov chains and kernels for this), you have a building of physical reality not as panpsychism in the sense of particles being conscious (particles, like anything in space-time are emergent not fundamental) but rather that the smallest units spinning up spacetime are themselves in some very minimal way in possession of that and that the universe of possibilities, which through evolution we've honed to an extremely narrow window - based on Darwinian selection for fitness maximizing (ie. game theory).

The one thing he does that I don't like - he too often talks about this as being a 'virtual' reality but being pressed on it he'll admit that it's a metaphor for really something much more like such a narrow extrapolation of reality, and that extrapolation built by our brains to such a degree, that it has more in common with a virtual reality than what we're used to thinking of. Maybe the best way to phrase that - a bit like you can't simply make whatever you want happen in a video game because you didn't write the code the same can be said here, however I think that's where the associations break down because in his terms it's a hierarchical social network of conscious agents rather than anything 13th Floor or Matrix, ie. it's something that arose organically by organic processes.




I get that the above is a lot to chew on but it's really opening the question of how soon we might be significantly altering or expanding what we consider as 'natural'.

A good tack-on question to go with that, if we go with Nima Arkani Hamed's take, and many other physicists at this point (I'd say it's at least near consensus and much less controversial than the steps Donald Hoffman is taking) then would we want to still use the word 'physical' to describe those primitives that space-time is underwritten by or would we rather just use 'physical' to explain things that we can observe in space-time and just extend the word 'natural' to these objects?

I'm struggling a bit with what you mean by natural, which makes it hard for me to even understand the question.
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Directly integrated with what we'd consider natural processes, part of the natural world. Admittedly both natural and physical get used quite a bit, if anything I think the term 'natural' has less to stop it's expansion because the term 'physical' has more non-neutral content which, to some degree, might have already been violated any step past particles.

Isn't information really just a perspective? We perceive things as information, but that doesn't mean they are created for this purpose. Likewise, we can find things in the world to eat, but that doesn't mean they are made to be our food.

This is sort of like the question of 'isn't probability just human heuristic planning based missing human knowledge or impossible data collection?' in which case it can be argued in one sense that yes, that's true in places like meteorology where we attempt to project forecasts of chaotic system behavior, at the same time Sean Carroll would swear up and down, as many physics would, that electron valence shells and the placement of an electron is an actual probability cloud or vector rather than a simple lack of human knowledge. As far as I can tell that dual purpose of the word information would likely fit in a similar context to the dual purpose of the word probability just described.

I'll dig a bit more to see if I can get a more precise fix on that though, because I'd like to think I can get an answer relatively quickly - ie. how is information in this sense different from simply saying that you have chemical bonds or entanglement chains.

So some articles and conversations, nothing quite satisfying what I was hoping for which was a delineation of information in the context of physics from information in the colloquial sense:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/i ... ndamental/

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1 ... 6/1/015010

https://physics.stackexchange.com/quest ... atabase-or

Something that looks to be a bit more robust for examination, the No-hiding theorem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem

Thanks! I started checking these out.