Posts: Science and Nature / Well This Is Random

I am trying to get through it now. Noticed the article stated, "There is a growing sense among physicists that all physical processes can be thought of in terms of the information they store and process; by some accounts information is the basic unit of existence in our cosmos." but they failed to mention the popularity of this theory has always been strong among computer geek, gaining it's greatest acclaim after the first Matrix movie. In fact, there is an insanely high correlation of believers in the information universe and the amount of lines one can recite from the movie.

yeah sure everything is information in the sense that nothing is static. Everything in the universe is constantly moving, electrons are always jumping orbits, and on and so on. Even if something is directly above our ability to directly measure it we can still infer its effects on objects within our capability of measuring. It seems like stating the obvious to suggest that everything is information.

What does this information really mean?

If I could collect every insect living on this entire planet, accounting for every last single one. Gather them all together and measure every piece of variation amongst every single insect both with and across species. Took all of this information and ran it into SPSS and generate the greatest metatheory about bugs every created. Is this possible? Probably but we would need to invest all of our resources into collecting these bugs.

Aside from that, what if we collected all of these bugs gathered all of this data and then put all of these bugs back to to original locations. Now we have a metatheory on bugs generated from all of the possible information on bugs and to control for environment, all of this information was taken over a year period. Then replicated across subsequent generations. Will all of this information provide us with any sort of predictability powers? Do we now know what any given bug would do at any given time?

My answer is simply no. I am sure if anyone is still reading they may disagree with me on the following observation. Perhaps you call this chaos but mutations occur during replication process that may not be accounted for. Selection pressures may arise from changes in environmental pressures emerging from increased social complexity. The interactions of this dyadic relationship can create further selection pressures, new mutations are selected for, etc.

Playing devil's advocate what if we were then able to account for all of this, it is only  information? All mutations occur from changes in gene expression, which is influenced by the environment. So theoretically all of this information could be collected. Would we now have the ability to predict a particular bug’s future behavior?

Not unless we understood why these systems developed in the first place? The evolution of these components would need to be understood if one wanted to make sense of this information obtained from these systems.

What if instead of insects it was all of the information in the universe? If in breaking down this information there came a stopping point in which the why no longer exists. If one takes the null hypothesis that there is no God, would this be the case? While some may argue that is no reason why life forms evolved on earth that would be erroneous since the particular interaction of the varying components existed and these components existed because of the Earth, the Earth exist because of the solar system, etc etc. This may be getting too religious in nature but if there was no God would we ever get to that point? Would we cease to reach the why therefore default to describing as "just because" and in doing so would we ultimately be unable to account for some function based on this lack of information. Ergo perhaps something else is occurring, a randomness or chaotic aspect of the function. Although we can account for the estimate of error within the function we could ever account for why that error was occurring. If we never know why an error was really occurring, then even if we had all of the information, at least to our knowledge, about the universe we would still have an error rate in predictability? Thus a theory of everything would never really be of everything, it would be of what is most likely occur given f,w, & z.

I suppose my comments were never really heading in any tangent direction. The above statement was a series of thoughts on the subject, which I clearly need to read more about.

"...not so much random as just a pattern they don't have enough information about to currently comprehend."

You should read about Random Matrix Theory. I think you'll enjoy it.

In a very loose nutshell, RMT can show existence of (meaningful) patterns in seemingly random (or chaotic) systems.

i think the argument is valid, i just also think its wrong. while we may not ever be able to account for everything, everything is everything and can be accounted for.

Well, spaz, Bell's inequality suggests (heavily) otherwise, so what reasons do you have for believing what you do?

I use random matrix theory when running factor analyzes on my data. Granted I do not do it by hand nor do I really understand exactly what SPSS is doing as it calculates all of these variables, but it does allow me to figure out how much any one factor loads relative to my other variables, which I then take and determine whether there are any significant differences between these loadings.

you saw the miracles video. what more proof do you need? but seriously though, i think the universe is a system and all its entropy can be decoded. not all that interested in proving myself wrong i didn't want to look up bells inequality but i did and its inline with what i believe about the universe. on par with schrodinger's cat or the tree in the forest, i believe it is a performance optimization to not produce results until observation occurs but leads me to ask, "what if all things were observed at once" even if by different observers a snapshot of the universe at an particular instant could be eventually concatenated. as for hidden variables. i don't believe in them. i obviously don't have the education to fortify my position so feel free to enlighten us all with your nerdiness.

If you "observed all things at once," you inherently violate the uncertainty principle. In a simple example: you can't observe an electron's velocity state and position state simultaneously. Since these two quantities are observables, and would be included in "all things," your question of observing all things at once is invalid.

Unless I am misunderstanding your position.