Is the mind a reliable mirror of reality? The marriage of physics and information theory

 This post is the fifth installment of my passing on to both MindBlog readers and my future self my idiosyncratic selection of clips of text from O’Gieblyn’s book ‘God, Human, Animal, Machine’ that I have found particularly interesting. Here are fragments of Chapter 7 from the  fourth section of her book,  titled "Paradox."

Is the mind a reliable mirror of reality? Do the patterns we perceive belong to the objective world, or are they merely features of our subjective experience? Given that physics was founded on the separation of mind and matter, subject and object, it’s unsurprising that two irreconcilable positions that attempt to answer this question have emerged: one that favors subjectivity, the other objectivity. Bohr’s view was that quantum physics describes our subjective experience of the world; it can tell us only about what we observe. Mathematical equations like the wave function are merely metaphors that translate this bizarre world into the language of our perceptual interface—or, to borrow Kant’s analogy, spectacles that allow us to see the chaotic world in a way that makes sense to our human minds. Other interpretations of physics, like the multiverse theory or string theory, regard physics not as a language we invented but as a description of the real, objective world that exists out there, independent of us. Proponents of this view tend to view equations and physical laws as similarly transcendent, corresponding to literal, or perhaps even Platonic, realities.

The marriage of physics and information theory is often attributed to John Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who pioneered, with Bohr, the basic principles of nuclear fission. In the late 1980s, Wheeler realized that the quantum world behaved a lot like computer code. An electron collapsed into either a particle or a wave depending on how we interrogated it. This was not dissimilar from the way all messages can be simplified into “binary units,” or bits, which are represented by zeros and ones. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, had defined information as “the resolution of uncertainty,” which seemed to mirror the way quantum systems existed as probabilities that collapsed into one of two states. For Wheeler these two fields were not merely analogous but ontologically identical. In 1989 he declared that “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.            
            
In a way Wheeler was exploiting a rarely acknowledged problem that lies at the heart of physics: it’s uncertain what matter actually is. Materialism, it is often said, is not merely an ontology but a metaphysics—an attempt to describe the true nature of things. What materialism says about our world is that matter is all that exists: everything is made of it, and nothing exists outside of it. And yet, ask a physicist to describe an electron or a quark, and he will speak only of its properties, its position, its behavior—never its essence.

Wheeler’s answer was that matter itself does not exist. It is an illusion that arises from the mathematical structures that undergird everything, a cosmic form of information processing. Each time we make a measurement we are creating new information—we are, in a sense, creating reality itself. Wheeler called this the “participatory universe,” a term that is often misunderstood as having mystical “connotations, as though the mind has some kind of spooky ability to generate objects. But Wheeler did not even believe that consciousness existed. For him, the mind itself was nothing but information. When we interacted with the world, the code of our minds manipulated the code of the universe, so to speak. It was a purely quantitative process, the same sort of mathematical exchange that might take place between two machines.            

While this theory explains, or attempts to explain, how the mind is able to interact with matter, it is a somewhat evasive solution to the mind-body problem, a sleight of hand that discards the original dichotomy by positing a third substance—information—that can explain both. It is difficult, in fact, to do justice to how entangled and self-referential these two fields—information theory and physics—have become, especially when one considers their history. The reason that cybernetics privileged relationships over content in the first place was so that it could explain things like consciousness purely in terms of classical physics, which is limited to describing behavior but not essence—“doing” but not “being.” When Wheeler merged information theory with quantum physics, he was essentially closing the circle, proposing that the hole in the material worldview—intrinsic essence—could be explained by information itself.

Seth Lloyd, an MIT professor who specializes in quantum information, insists that the universe is not like a computer but is in fact a computer. “The universe is a physical system that contains and processes information in a systematic fashion,” he argues, “and that can do everything a computer can do.” Proponents of this view often point out that recent observational data seems to confirm it. Space-time, it turns out, is not smooth and continuous, as Einstein’s general relativity theory assumed, but more like a grid made up of minuscule bits—tiny grains of information that are not unlike the pixels of an enormous screen. Although we experience the world in three dimensions, it seems increasingly likely that all the information in the universe arises from a two-dimensional field, much like the way holograms work, or 3-D films.
            
When I say that I try very hard to avoid the speculative fringe of physics, this is more or less what I am talking about. The problem, though, is that once you’ve encountered these theories it is difficult to forget them, and the slightest provocation can pull you back in. It happened a couple years ago, while watching my teenage cousin play video games at a family gathering. I was relaxed and a little bored and began thinking about the landscape of the game, the trees and the mountains that made up the backdrop. The first-person perspective makes it seem like you’re immersed in a world that is holistic and complete, a landscape that extends far beyond the frame, though in truth each object is generated as needed. Move to the right and a tree is “generated; move to the left and a bridge appears, creating the illusion that it was there all along. What happened to these trees and rocks and mountains when the player wasn’t looking? They disappeared—or no, they were never there to begin with; they were just a line of code. Wasn’t this essentially how the observer effect worked? The world remained in limbo, a potentiality, until the observer appeared and it was compelled to generate something solid. Rizwan Virk, a video game programmer, notes that a core mantra in programming is “only render that which is being observed.”
            
Couldn’t the whole canon of quantum weirdness be explained by this logic? Software programs are never perfect. Programmers cut corners for efficiency—they are working, after all, with finite computing power; even the most detailed systems contain areas that are fuzzy, not fully sketched out. Maybe quantum indeterminacy simply reveals that we’ve reached the limits of the interface. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek once made a joke to this effect. Perhaps, he mused, God got a little lazy when he was creating the universe, like the video game programmer who doesn’t bother to meticulously work out the interior of a house that[ “the player is not meant to enter. “He stopped at a subatomic level,” he said, “because he thought humans would be too stupid to progress so far.”