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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Heinrich Päs
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January 31 - April 30, 2023
The authors found a novel way to efficiently describe particle interactions with the help of an abstract geometrical object, the “amplituhedron,” which has been described as resembling a “jewel in higher dimensions.”
“Constructor Theory,” as characterized on the research group’s website, “is a new approach to formulating fundamental laws in physics. Instead of describing the world in terms of trajectories, initial conditions and dynamical laws, in constructor theory laws are about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible, and why.”
“The purest question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ seems out of reach; we, instead, attempt an answer to: ‘Why does there appear to be a multitude of things?’”
Contemporary physics doesn’t start with space and time to continue with things placed in this preexisting background. Instead, space and time themselves are considered products of a more fundamental projector reality.
“I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.”
“Adopting entanglement as the world making relation comes at the price of giving up separability. But those who are ready to take this step should perhaps look to entanglement for the fundamental relation with which to constitute this world
If now, according to quantum monism, there is only one thing left, there is nothing left to arrange or order and eventually no longer a need for the concept of space on this most fundamental level of description. It is “the One,” a single quantum universe that gives rise to space, time, and matter.
rather than sticking to Bohr’s pragmatic interpretation that reduced quantum mechanics to a tool, we would be further on the way to demystifying the foundations of reality.
In order to find out how we ourselves, by simply looking at the universe, are creating it, we need to discuss how the universe is experienced consciously.
What we experience in our daily lives, or better, what we can experience at all, is an on-screen reality displaying our specific view on the underlying quantum reality.
How do space, time, and matter emerge from an underlying “One”? We know that decoherence plays a crucial role in this process. When an observer—be it ourselves, our pets, a measurement apparatus, or a faraway alien—is observing something, he, she, or it gets entangled with the observed object. As we, as macroscopic beings, are in constant interaction with the rest of the universe, the information about quantum superpositions of the observed object leaks into our environment in next to no time. The result is a quasi-classical object with clearly defined specifications regarding the concrete
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The reason we experience the things around us in concrete places is that we ourselves, our senses, and our measurement devices exist in concrete places.
Could there, for example, be “quantum aliens” that aren’t located in space but in wavelengths and frequencies and who are experiencing the universe as a conglomerate of spread-out waves instead of localized objects? This question, closely related to the preferred basis problem and known as the “quantum factorization problem,”
“The causal diamond is the largest spacetime region that can be causally probed” and “leads to a natural, observer-independent choice of environment,” Bousso and Susskind argue, to arrive eventually at “the global multiverse as a patchwork of decoherent causal diamonds.”6 Yet the individual causal diamond is still centered around a local observer.
“Real” means, Zurek argues, that different observers will agree about a certain property of a quantum system.
In his scheme, the environment becomes a “monitor” of the quantum system, and the information about the quantum system is stored redundantly in the memory of the environment.
First, we split the universe into quantum object, observer or apparatus, and environment. Then we adopt the frog perspective for the apparatus or observer, implying he, she, or it is ignorant about the exact state of the environment. This implies that—from his, her, or its perspective, quantum superpositions (such as a particle residing in different places at the same time) are suppressed, and the observed quantum object is perceived in a well-defined state having, for example, a specific location.
a property becomes more “objective” or “real” the more subsystems of the environment have recorded it. “Repeatability is key.
In other words, “the redundancy of information transferred from the system to many fragments of the environment leads to the perception of objective classical reality,”
reality that introduces a selection process about which information can be replicated most efficiently.10 Musing about the other extreme, Zurek wonders, “If there is no record of an event, has it really happened?”
quantum Darwinism.
According to Zurek, this survival mechanism explains why nature chooses locality over spread-out waves, combined with the characteristics of suitable environments: “Not all environments are good witnesses.
the redundancy of copies promotes this perception to a common truth that exists, “as was the case in the classical world we once thought we inhabited… objectively, untouched by our curiosity and oblivious to our indirect monitoring,” as Zurek writes.
Are the workings of our minds somehow related to how quantum mechanics works or how it produces the Hollywood movies we live in?
“I see the preference for a particular basis as being rooted in the nature of consciousness, rather than in the nature of the physical world in general.”20 If true, this implies that before we really can understand quantum mechanics and the universe, we first have to understand ourselves.
If it is hard to imagine a world without time, space, or matter, it is virtually impossible to imagine a world without consciousness.
From a monistic perspective, consciousness, spirit, or mind cannot be simply conceived of as something different that bears no intimate relation with matter, space, and time. If everything is merged into an all-encompassing One, consciousness is too and has been understood from there, just like space, time, and matter.
For physicists, “a conscious person is simply food rearranged,”
“I think that consciousness is the way information feels when it’s been processed in certain complex ways,”
Consciousness, in this view, comes first.
arguably including the emergence of space, time, and matter) would be a feature of our perspective or how we perceive the universe rather than of the universe itself.
This procedure would unveil the preferred basis again as an artifact of our perspective: “What one would normally think of as the state of anything, at a given time, should really be thought of as merely its state relative to the given designated state of oneself; and this goes for the state of the universe as a whole,” Lockwood explains.
“The universe is to be thought of as a seamless whole that evolves smoothly and deterministically in accordance with the Schrödinger equation,” whereas, “to the extent that there are correlations between the subsystems, no subsystem can be thought of as being in any determinate quantum state at any given time,”
the person’s consciousness will interact locally with the outside world, and decoherence will produce a universe where cats and pebbles, stars and planets exist in well-defined conditions and places. This, in my view, is as close as we can get to Wheeler’s U, to the notion that we have by our “act of observation a part in bringing that universe itself into being.”
The notion that a classical world is an illusion emerging from a conscious mind’s perspective onto the quantum universe may help to solve the preferred basis and quantum factorization problems. Yet, according to neuroscience, the conscious self itself is an illusion, produced by a classical brain.
one may speculate whether the local algorithm constituting the conscious self gets so strongly coupled with the environment as a consequence of hallucinogenic intoxication that it is lifted to a less local perspective and in this way is able to experience some kind of “quantum holism.”
one can conclude that the hypothetical bird perspective onto quantum reality shares striking similarities with psychological conditions known as altered states of consciousness.
Individuation and temporality came to be understood as illusionary features of an imperfect perspective, as artifacts of our perceived, on-screen reality. The true, foundational reality hidden behind our fleeting experience got conceived as a timeless, unified whole, symbolized by goddesses and gods such as Isis or Pan.
there is still no consensus about what quantum mechanics actually is about. If this book is right, quantum mechanics deals with “the One,” an ancient philosophical concept that integrates all that possibly could happen—a three-thousand-year-old idea that has accompanied humanity from its earliest steps, through its darkest ages of science denial and religious persecution, in some of its greatest cultural accomplishments all the way to the development of modern science and quantum gravity.
“We’ve got to understand this thing… because otherwise in every fundamental branch of physics it’s as if we were planning an expedition to the moon while still thinking that the earth is flat.”
physics “tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations… but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure.”
Lloyd believes that the universe is properly characterized as a quantum computer:4 “The
Wheeler’s slogan “It from Bit,” advocating that “every particle, every field or 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 underlying hardware becomes meaningless, and what has meaning is how this hardware is organized, what information it actually stores and processes.
conception that everything we experience as outside reality is produced by informational patterns imprinted in the “midwife of being.”
“In the beginning was the bit,” Lloyd explains and goes on to flesh his idea out as follows: “As soon as the universe began, it began computing. At first, the patterns it produced were simple, comprising elementary particles and establishing the fundamental laws of physics. In time, as it processed more and more information, the universe spun out ever more intricate and complex patterns.”
“Decoherence together with the standard chaotic behavior of certain non-linear systems will make the universe appear extremely complex to any self-aware subsets that happen to inhabit it now, even if it was in a quite simple state shortly after the big bang.”
But do these arguments really imply that “information comes first”? After all, information acquires its meaning only if we possess the proper software and operating system to extract this information from the hardware and process it.
Information has to be physically incorporated to become effective.
It thus appears to be more correct to think of information not as coming first but rather as a convenient way to speak about how the underlying hardware, how “the One,” is organized.
