The universe may be more than only information
John Wheeler was a strong believer that the universe is information. Famously, he stated that we get “it from bit”. At a 1989 Sante Fe…
John Wheeler was a strong believer that the universe is information. Famously, he stated that we get “it from bit”. At a 1989 Sante Fe Institute lecture he said,
every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.
The question is whether the universe can be represented entirely in this way or whether there is something deeper that no set of bits could hold.
On this rests not only our understanding of the true, fundamental nature of reality but also whether a perfect simulation of reality is possible. Can a species develop a universe that is purely information containing conscious beings?
Wheeler’s assertion can be cast as a realist’s hypothesis that the universe is discrete, made of individual bits of information. Quantum theory demands that these bits not be ordinary bits but quantum bits or qubits. The answer to a yes-no question in the quantum realm is never just yes or no but yes and no with probabilities assigned to each.
Qubits are represented by quantum properties and each quantum particle typically has both discrete and continuous properties.
Things tend to get a little messy, however, when trying to measure quantum properties because, although the values we measure tend to be discrete, they are not represented that way. An electron spin, for example, can take on any value within the x, y, and z directions. It is only when we try to measure one of them that we get a binary answer, up or down.
Hence, we can only say that the electron has binary spin (in each dimension) if we leave out the fact that we set up our measuring apparatus in a particular orientation. If we take the measuring apparatus and the particle as a single system, we have instead a continuum of spin values.
The above realist interpretation is far from Wheeler’s point however. Rather, he means that the apparatus is asking the yes-no questions and the electron is answering them. In later interviews, he compared reality to a guessing game of 20 questions. When we interrogate the quantum world, all it is willing to give us are yes-no answers regardless of how we ask them.
It is as if I were to ask an astronaut floating in space far from any planet “are you going left or right?” and they answered based on my own orientation. The answer makes perfect sense but only tells me something about the astronaut in the context of myself.
A realist might conclude that I am simply asking a question and getting a relative answer about a deeper reality, but an anti-realist might conclude that the answer is all there is, left or right.
The same is true with the quantum experiment. It answers my questions not based on some intrinsic reality but based on my own perspective.
Wheeler was often accused of being an anti-realist because of this point of view. I.e., the universe has no intrinsic reality, it just answers the questions we ask: yes or no based on how we ask them.
From this perspective, the universe is binary information because all we are allowed to know about the universe are bits, and those bits are always relative to how we asked for them. There is no reality beyond.
Wheeler was absolutely brilliant and his position is entirely tenable from a certain point of view, but it far from the only one.
His anti-realist perspective conflates scientific hypotheses with the reality that the scientist is trying to understand.
This isn’t necessarily a realist alternative but a recognition that physical apparati that are constructed to answer a particular yes-no question are not equivalent to that question. We are happy to have the apparatus represent that question, but the apparatus itself is completely unconcerned with what question we are trying to answer. Rather, it is a physical entity that is operating in a myriad of ways that are little concern to us. Nor is the particle at all concerned with questions we are trying to ask.
We believe we are beings interrogating the cosmos — and this is embedded in the very concept of “question and answer”.
This concept is a useful skill for survival. We evolved to interrogate animal tracks, answering questions about where the animals went and what they are, plants and fruits, answering questions about their edibility, and other people, their friendliness and clan or tribe membership.
Yet consider a species that did not ask questions at all but saw themselves as being one with the cosmos. A species that had no concept of being separate from anything might have no understanding of extracting information from the universe because they already contain all the information there is.
Any experimental outcome, hence, is a tautology, telling the species something they-as-the-universe already know. A tautology contains no information because information can only exist when there are alternatives in data. (From this perspective, mathematics contains no information because it is all tautological. There are no choices in the derivation of a proof as to what is or is not true.)
If there is no information, then how can the universe be made of it?
It can’t be. Instead, our own species evolved the perspective that we are interrogating the cosmos and extracting information from it and hence invented information as a way to quantify a concept that is so intuitive that we aren’t aware of any alternative any more than we can conceive of 1+1=3.
You might ask: well, what about qubits? Isn’t the universe making a choice when we observe something? Doesn’t it add information then? But we really don’t know that. No one has ever seen a 0 and a 1 in a superposition, both 0 and 1. We only infer its existence based on some assumptions about reality. Violate those, and superposition ceases to exist.
This hypothetical species would almost certainly conclude something very different about quantum events. Perhaps they would lean towards a superdeterministic interpretation which violates the assumption that our decisions and physical reality we measure are separate. A species that does not see itself as separate from the universe would surely have no problem with that. Superdetermism does not have to be “true” for the argument to work, only that it is consistent with quantum experiments.
One is forced to conclude from this that the universe is far from being made of information. In fact, it contains no information at all. It is purely physical, and our experience of physical reality is not an informational one but a physical one: one of sensation, not of bits.
Our brains have evolved to add the 1’s and 0’s on top of sensation, and thus learned to confuse the bits with the sensation itself.
The representation confused with the reality, we become like a child trying to draw a picture of their parents with circles for heads and sticks for arms and legs. We confuse our stick-figure reality with the true reality of pure perception, which is beyond all interpretation. Reality is so much more and so much less than we think.
Wheeler, John Archibald. Information, physics, quantum: The search for links. CRC Press, 2018.