So if reality exists and if we will never be able to make an operational distinction between reality and information, the hypothesis suggests itself that reality and information are the same. We need a new concept which encompasses both. In a sense, reality and information are two sides of the same coin.
I feel that this is the message of the quantum.
–Anton Zeilinger
6 Comments
October 9, 2008 at 11:46 pm
That’s a beautiful picture, and makes me long for home. I can’t remember the last time I saw that kind of brittle smooth ice on standing water – it’s not something you get a lot of in Australia… The contrasting and complementing flurries of light around the dogs are, well, fantastic. Where was the picture taken ?
“Reality and information are two sides of the same coin” – so anything that ‘provides’ information is a form, or a version, of reality- it’s own form or version, confluent with/contiguous to all other forms or versions. Maybe. I guess I need to read more Zeilinger…
About a certain title: “The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling—things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking.” Is that where you got it from ?
October 10, 2008 at 10:19 am
Hi Rob
I snapped the dogs in Ashton Park, Bristol, last Christmas.
I suspect Zeilinger means something simultaneously more literal & more unthinkable. In the same passage he warns that if you’re “tempted to believe that
everything is just information” the danger is “solipsism and subjectivism”; it’s not the same, he says, as “understanding that reality and information are the same”. I think you have to be very careful about the meaning of the word “information”; and keep in mind that the order of the words is important–ie all reality may be information, but that doesn’t mean all information is reality… I’m ready to be corrected on this by any passing quantum mechanic.
As for the title: I think you’re the first to suggest this.
October 10, 2008 at 3:04 pm
When Zeilinger uses the word “information” here, he’s referring to quantum information, right? Either way, when it comes to the more literal meaning of the passage, I think he’s writing about information much the same way that Andrew Sayer writes about knowledge:
“…if the defining feature of realism is the belief that there is a world existing independently of our knowledge of it, then that independence of objects from knowledge immediately undermines any complacent assumptions about the relation between them and renders it problematic. What reason have we for accepting this basic realist proposition of the mind-independence of the world? I would argue that it is the evident fallibility of our knowledge – the experience of getting things wrong, of having our expectations confounded, of crashing into things – that justifies us in believing that the world exists regardless of what we happen to think about it. If, by contrast, the world itself was a product or construction of our knowledge, then our knowledge would surely be infallible, for how could we ever be wrong about anything?”
In any case, I wonder about the notion that operational distinctions between reality and information are impossible or even impracticable. But I barely understand quantum mechanics on a conceptual level, much less a technical level, so I could easily be misinterpreting.
October 12, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Elsewhere (http://www.signandsight.com/features/614.html), Zeilinger puts it this way: “We’ve learnt in the natural sciences that the key to understanding can often be found if we lift certain dividing lines in our minds… in our heads, we still draw a dividing line between “reality” and “knowledge about reality”, in other words between reality and information. And you cannot draw this line. There is no recipe, no process for distinguishing between reality and information… Quantum theory, correctly interpreted, is information theory.”
I’ve just read that for the sixth time and I still don’t know if it helps.
October 15, 2008 at 8:16 am
Imagine a computer simulation of a brain – detailed and complete as you like, down to the level of mathematically modelling the particle interactions if you want – and shine a simulated coloured light down through the modelled optic nerve.
Freeze the model.
You can inspect the state of any component at any level in the model. You have all the information about what’s going on in there.
Are you any wiser about what (if anything) the model’s experience is like?
That’s one way in which reality might seem to be slightly “larger” than the information which represents it, imho. It’s almost as if the additional factor is the tokenisation of the information!
October 23, 2008 at 4:04 pm
http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html is a couple of pages long and condenses the history of the issue pretty well.
“What we think of as empty space is not really empty, but it is filled with pairs of particles and anti particles.”