John Archibald Wheeler advocated the idea of "It from Bit". Everything in the universe, including mid, is made of information, and information consists of sequences of binary alternatives 0 and 1. More on this subject can be found here: "IT FROM BIT: WHAT DID JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER GET RIGHT—AND WRONG?". The article contains the view of an American mathematician, philosopher and theologian Willian Dembski. More about his views can be found in the article "HOW INFORMATIONAL REALISM SUBVERTS MATERIALISM". Let me quote just two paragraphs from this last article:
Informational realism does not deny the existence of things (i.e., entities or substances). But within informational realism, what defines things is their capacity for communicating or exchanging information with other things. Things are inferred from the information they communicate. Information, as the relational glue that holds reality together, thus assumes primacy in informational realism.
In informational realism, things make their reality felt by communicating or exchanging information. Thus, things that are not in immediate or mediate informational contact with other things might just as well not exist and so, in fact, don’t exist within informational realism. Informationally isolated or disconnected entities thereby become nonentities.
This sounds to me as more reasonable approach. There is information and there are "things" that communicate this information What is this "communication"? For bits of information to be considered as a "communication" they need to be "meaningful". And what that means? It is the role of the mind and of consciousness to decide what has a meaning and what doesn't. The main problem here is, as far as I can see, the ability to distinguish between order and chaos. These are two fundamental concepts: ORDER and CHAOS. Intelligent creation is the ability to crate order out of chaos. Thus not 0 and 1 are the fundamental elements of Being, but O and C. Both order and chaos must include in their description infinite sequences of bits, and infinitely complex algorithms for creating these bits. And there is no reason for supposing that Nature is scared of infinities. Exactly the converse might be true: Nature effortlessly operates with infinities, and of any order. With our finite means we can only approximate in our description the true workings of the Universe.
Concerning Order and Chaos, let me quote from the recent book I decided to study what a clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson has to say in his "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos"
Order is where the people around you act according to well- understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively —as masculine. It’s the Wise King and the Tyrant, forever bound together, as society is simultaneously structure and oppression.
Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens. Chaos emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering. Chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover. As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction, the source of new things and the destination of the dead (as nature, as opposed to culture, is simultaneously birth and demise).
Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.
meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair.
In the future posts I will deal with this "border" or "boundry" - using simple algebra.
P.S. Saturday's entertainment:
