Brent,
That's an interesting explanation of a zero-information universe, which you suggest is implicit in the MWI of QM - yet (like me) you don't necessarily buy MWI. In your view, are there other explanations for quantum mysteries that are more credible?
Norman Samish
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent Meeker" <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
<snip>
Well, if 'experience' is the fact of *being* differentiable existence, and 'the physical' is the observable relations thereof, then both ultimately 'supervene' on there being something rather than nothing.
No. There being something rather than nothing is only 1 buit of information: not enough for a universe to supervene on.
This may not be the problem you think it is. In quantum mechanics there can be negative information and there are some (speculative) theories of the universe that have it originating from at state with only one bit of information.
It would still have to generate localised information, and complex supervenient properties would still need something complex to supervene on. A supervenience-base is more than a necessary precondition.
Then complexity we see is due to the separation of entangled states by the inflation of the universe. Unitary evolution of the wave-function of the universe must preserve information. In these theories, as my friend Yonatan Fishman put it, "The universe is just nothing, rearranged."
But entanglement must generate localised information.
It's a somewhat beyond my expertise, but as I understand these theories of cosmogony it's analogous to Hawking radiation: Pair production produces a virtual quantum particle/anti-particle pair. Inflation is so rapid that it pulls them apart and provides the energy to make the virtual particles real particles. They are entangled but they are now separated by billions of lightyears. So the information (complexity) of the world we see can in principle be cancelled out (net zero information as well as matter) as in a quantum erasure experiment, but in practice we cannot access the entangled particle to do so.
I think this idea of a zero-information universe is implicit in the MWI of QM. Whenever a random event happens it provides information (per Shannon's defintion), but in MWI everything happens and that provides no information (not that I buy the MWI).
Brent Meeker
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Received on Mon Aug 14 2006 - 10:15:36 PDT