X-Message-Number: 13337
From: 
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 22:47:22 EST
Subject: Digital Mechanics

One or two readers may recall that from time to time I have said I 
hypothesize that there is a law of conservation of information.

Eugene Leitl gave a reference (thanks) to a paper by Fredkin

http://cvm.msu.edu/~dobrzele/dp/Publications/Fredkin/Finite-Nature

I was pleased to note that Fredkin also postulates such a law. 

I started from a much simpler and vaguer premise, mainly philosophical or 
intuitional or experiential. Lack of a conservation law for information would 
mean that information can appear and disappear--but that would leave the 
questions, whence and whither. If by "universe" we mean all there is, then it 
is hard to see how there could be anything outside the universe, or before 
it, or after it. It is also hard to see how the current interpretation of  
quantum mechanics, with uncertainties built in, could be correct. (Quantum 
rules, as usually interpreted, seem to imply an "ordered randomness," which 
is pretty close to gibberish.) And Fredkin also suggests that digital 
mechanics may underlie quantum mechanics and make it deterministic, albeit 
unknowably deterministic.

Of course, it is conceivable that there could be one-way interactions, with a 
higher-order universe acting on ours without ours acting on it--but this is 
unsupported by anything we know. (Yet, if I read him correctly, Fredkin does 
envisage something like this--something "outside" of physics that 
nevertheless shapes physics.)

Fredkin naturally has gone much further than I have, and lays out some 
fascinating consequences of his ideas, which are or will be capable of 
experimental proof or disproof. For example: 

There must be a reference metric in nature.

Most microscopic things cannot be computed on an ordinary computer faster 
than real time. In general, physics is computing the future as fast as it can.

(This appears to be related to my contention that no simulation can be as 
"efficient" as the system simulated--for example, nothing can simulate a 
molecule of water, with complete isomorphism and in real time, in a space as 
small as that occupied by the molecule of water. The map must always be 
"bigger" and slower than the territory.) 

Lots of fun, and maybe some day practical importance. 

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org 

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