Jul 9, 2015 05:33 PM
http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/the-code-...s-auid-531
EXCERPT: [...] For a start, that information is an element of the physical world is itself rather hard to grasp and counterintuitive! This is because information does not look like the usual objects that physics uses to explain reality. Information is not an observable [...] Indeed, one key property of information is that it can be copied from one such system to any other [...] This is a counterfactual property – about some transformation (i.e. , copying) being possible. All these facts about information suggest that it be an abstraction. Indeed it was thought for long that it be a-priori, just like, say, natural numbers are.
In contrast, we also know that information can only exist if it is physically instantiated; that it can be processed by physical systems – such as computers, ribosomes and brains. We can quantify how much information a particular physical system has [...]
So, we have many clues that information must be an attribute of the physical world. But how can one express that fact within fundamental physics, if there one only finds space for predictions about the trajectory of particles through space-time?
Constructor theory offers an elegant, powerful new way of doing so. It is a new mode of explanation in which one can reformulate the whole of physics in radically new terms. Instead of expressing everything in terms of predictions about where a particle will go – as one would do in the prevailing conception of physics - one expresses everything in terms of which physical transformations (or tasks) are possible, which are impossible and why – given the other laws of physics.
In this way one can express all the properties that the laws of physics must have in order for information to be possible, in the form of principles. These reveal some regularities in nature which had not been explicitly expressed before....
EXCERPT: [...] For a start, that information is an element of the physical world is itself rather hard to grasp and counterintuitive! This is because information does not look like the usual objects that physics uses to explain reality. Information is not an observable [...] Indeed, one key property of information is that it can be copied from one such system to any other [...] This is a counterfactual property – about some transformation (i.e. , copying) being possible. All these facts about information suggest that it be an abstraction. Indeed it was thought for long that it be a-priori, just like, say, natural numbers are.
In contrast, we also know that information can only exist if it is physically instantiated; that it can be processed by physical systems – such as computers, ribosomes and brains. We can quantify how much information a particular physical system has [...]
So, we have many clues that information must be an attribute of the physical world. But how can one express that fact within fundamental physics, if there one only finds space for predictions about the trajectory of particles through space-time?
Constructor theory offers an elegant, powerful new way of doing so. It is a new mode of explanation in which one can reformulate the whole of physics in radically new terms. Instead of expressing everything in terms of predictions about where a particle will go – as one would do in the prevailing conception of physics - one expresses everything in terms of which physical transformations (or tasks) are possible, which are impossible and why – given the other laws of physics.
In this way one can express all the properties that the laws of physics must have in order for information to be possible, in the form of principles. These reveal some regularities in nature which had not been explicitly expressed before....