#it from bit

[ladyfingerpress]

#107 How to Create a Cosmos

#107 How to Create a Cosmos with Conservation : Morgan Stern : Internet Archive

[i-just-want-to-destroy]

Information, physics, quantum: the search for links, John Archibald Wheeler

[teledyn]

John Wheeler was fond of illustrating his vision with a variant of the twenty questions game. In this game, a group of colleagues are seated in a living room after dinner. One is sent out. In his absence, the rest decide to play the game with a twist: They agree not to settle on a definite word but to act as if they had agreed upon a word. When the questioner returns and poses his “yes/no” questions, each respondent answers as he pleases, with the one condition that his response should be compatible with all previous ones. So at each stage of the game, everyone in the room has in mind a word that is consistent with all the answers that have been given before. Naturally, successive questions rapidly narrow down the options until both the questioner and the respondents are taken by the hand, as it were, and guided toward a single word. What that final word is, however, depends on the questions the questioner asks and even on the order of the questions. In this variant of the game, Wheeler said, “No word is a word, until that word is promoted to reality by the choice of questions asked and answers given.”

[blabluebliss]

every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications

John Archibald Wheeler

[witchesbetripping]

(1) Quantum events, "the jiggling of atoms", make decisions for the future universe via quantum decoherence. (2) The universe is at the bottom level of qubits a generator of differences; hence of informational novelty. (3) Accordingly, information tends to grow with the history of the universe. (4) Entropy is reinterpreted as a measure for the "invisible information" (not as a loss of information); that is, the information that we are not able to harvest (although the information necessarily exists because quantum events continue to occur and generate differences). (5) Since the universe is indistinguishable from a quantum computer by making steps and instructing further steps, the universe is continually computing itself, whatever the consequences may be for large-scale systems (which is of concern to living beings). - Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics, Paul Davies & Neils Henrik Gregersen

[witchesbetripping]

"...these considerations lead us at the end to ask if the universe is not best conceived as a self-excited circuit." - John Wheeler, Beyond the Black Hole

[witchesbetripping]

Ultimately, Leibniz argued, there are only two absolutely simple concepts, God and Nothingness. From these, all other concepts may be constructed, the world, and everything within it, arising from some primordial argument between the deity and nothing whatsoever. And then, by some inscrutable incandescent insight, Leibniz came to see that what is crucial in what he had written is the alternation between God and Nothingness. And for this, the numbers 0 and 1 suffice.

David Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm