Essence Precedes Existence?

Gregg Jaeger, "The universe is not made of information"

Why observering quantum events doesn't make them real

Many physicists and computer scientists, from John Wheeler to Google Deepmind's Demis Hassabis, have argued that reality is fundamentally made of information. Wheeler called this "it from bit". But this is mistaken, argues Boston University physicist and philosopher of science, Gregg Jaeger. Information supposes a relation between the information itself and its physical encoding. Reality cannot be made of information, because without already existing physical objects to encode it, information does not exist.

Is the universe made of bits of information? Physicist John Wheeler took this radical idea extremely seriously. His interest in it can be traced at least as far back as his time as a post-doctoral scientist in Copenhagen under one of the founders of quantum theory, Niels Bohr. Wheeler supported Bohr’s view of quantum events and later summarized it with the statement “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.’’ Bohr emphasized that the conditions of an object’s measurement not only offer experimental questions but also make a difference as to what is found upon quantum measurement. Wheeler advanced this perspective throughout his career, arguing that phenomena also have an essential informational aspect: the elementary quantum phenomenon “has a pure yes-no character—one bit of meaning.” Noting that what happens in an individual, non-trivial measurement is not predetermined, Wheeler supposed that the observed object itself is the information gained when a quantum state is measured for. He expressed this idea by the phrase: “It from bit’’. Here, I will argue against this idea because, according to well-confirmed physics and cognitive psychology, all observational information is acquired from the properties of existing physical objects, however indeterminate those measured properties may be beforehand.

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Wheeler supported Bohr’s view of quantum events and later summarized it with the statement “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.’’

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Wheeler’s “Meaning Circuit”

Wheeler had already begun wrangling with quantum phenomena when he joined the Manhattan Project, where his project colleague John von Neumann worked out the algorithmic theory of classical computers, long before there was any notion of the quantum computer or computer networking. But by the end of the 1970s, after the first substantial computer network (ARPAnet) had been established (in 1969), Wheeler had formulated the idea that the universe is a “meaning circuit”, a “system self-synthesized by quantum networking”. Wheeler’s “networking” is the communication of data by observers whom he calls “quantum participators” because their observations, which he calls the “iron posts” of reality, are the basis of further experimentation and scientific theorizing. This “meaning circuit’’ is of two sides, one of meaning and information and another of physics and engineering, and is supposed to give rise progressively to existence itself. Given that knowledge of objects increases with experience, it might appear that Wheeler has done well by having conceived of this Meaning Circuit.

What makes the Meaning Circuit a rational thought product for its time—and note that Wheeler himself considers it merely a hypothesis—is that new notions of the mind-matter relation were then in the air. Before its proposal, novel mind-matter hypotheses had appeared, for example, in conversations between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychologist Carl Jung regarding the Synchronicity concept dealing with the human witnessing of any coincidental events connectable by meaning. And a role for consciousness in the occurrence of quantum events had been increasingly contemplated by others in the face of difficulties in solving the so-called measurement problem: Can quantum mechanical law explain how experimental results arise? In 1961, the mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner had already considered the idea that consciousness, the receiver of information, might be required for a quantum measurement to take place, and offered the following thought experiment. Wigner is to ask a friend about the friend’s measurement of an object in a quantum superposition state (for some quantity of interest). According to quantum mechanical law, the friend’s actions before Wigner’s query result in two, apparently contradictory physical descriptions of the quantity of interest: that of the friend, which appears to the friend as definite for the quantity, and that of Wigner, which for him, is not definite for its value (for Wigner, the friend-object system enters a quantum superposition of states for differing values of the quantity). This difficulty might be resolved by supposing, for example, that the consciousness of the friend directly brings about the definitive value in the world for both these scientists.

The Physicality of Measurement

In our era of the Internet and quantum computer research, the Meaning Circuit world picture may appear plausible, and it might appear even more so if a quantum-mechanical Internet is established in the future. But the existence generated in the Meaning Circuit resembles an all-encompassing virtual reality rather than the physical universe, and the meaning circuit idea is abstract, physically vague, and scientifically unsupported. No matter how much human planning and choice may be involved in experimentation, there is no evident process, however long and complex, describable by physical laws and/or cognitive psychology such that the data of the mental world could give rise to the physical world. In physics, if a law does not explain some process either completely or correctly, then there must be something wrong with the law, or with how it is being applied to the conception of measurement. And, according to cognitive psychology, we obtain knowledge of physical events by becoming aware that they have taken place, however much we may be involved in the design, construction, and carrying out of experiments.

Tempting though the idea that information or consciousness itself could create physical events or objects may be as a means to resolve the measurement problem, the postulation of a novel, but physically irreducible mental cause of physical events or objects is not explanatory because it has no empirical basis. In the absence of such a basis, all physical events, including measurements, must be explained independently of consciousness, and mental events related to them can be explained as cognitive processes associated with the activity of the brain and nervous system. Any observer’s mind can only bear witness to physical processes via the senses, which react in a way for which there is detailed evidence: The mind gains information about physical events by reference to cognitive maps and other mental representations. And any knowledge so gained can only be communicated to others via language. It is evident, then, that the physical universe was not and is not created by information because the physical bodies of observers, their experimental tools, and the objects of observation must all first exist physically for anyone to be informed of any measurement or to communicate knowledge of it. Indeed, the observation of physical measurement processes gives rise to new mental states of which the observing subject may initially not even be consciously aware.

It and Bit

Consider a simple quantum measurement of the sort Wheeler brings into his discussions of the “It from bit” hypothesis: finding the polarization of a light particle. If a photon begins in a quantum superposition of two orthogonal polarization states and is then measured for them, just one of those polarization values is found. (The value can be found, for example, by noting the direction in which the photon is detected after it has entered a polarization-selecting beamsplitter.) A perfectly designed such measurement makes exactly one bit of information available to the senses via a signal, such as a click from a photon detector, a mark on paper, or an illuminated pixel on a computer screen, according to a coding scheme. This signal can then cause neural excitations in a brain (a neural state, via the senses) that are nearly perfectly correlated with the found polarization value, allowing an observer to gain information about it by conscious attention and inference from previous knowledge of the circumstances and coding scheme. No bit concerning the world is inherently objective; at best, it can be meaningfully related to objective reality by reference to an intersubjectively agreed-upon scientific description of the world.

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Wheeler had formulated the idea that the universe is a “meaning circuit”, a “system self-synthesized by quantum networking”.

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Although a piece of physical hardware such as an orientable magnetic region is sometimes called a “bit”, such an object itself is not information. Any given bit of information can in principle be encoded via any robust two-valued property of any sort of physical object—for example, instead of a click sounding from a particular photon detector as considered above, one of two pixels or regions of a computer display could be lit. And if a process physically identical to a measurement takes place but there is no agreed-upon encoding of the final state of the apparatus, or if there is ‘encoding’ in some unknowable code (say, its designer dies without providing a `Rosetta Stone’ for it), then no measurement information is present. Any supposed information attributed to an event without an agreed-upon encoding is just that: supposed information created by the mental imposition of a code on a physical state. Information cannot constitute the physical universe or any part of it, but every bit of information about the universe depends on at least one physical object.

Further Reading:

Jaeger, G. (2023). On Wheeler’s Quantum Circuit.

In: Plotnitsky, A., Haven, E. (eds) The Quantum-Like Revolution.

Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12986-5_2

Jaeger, G. (2018). Clockwork Rebooted: Is the universe a computer?

In: Khrennikov, A., Toni, B. (eds.) Quantum Foundations, Probability and Information.

Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74971-6_8

J.A. Wheeler, W. Zurek (eds.) (1983) Quantum Theory and Measurement.

Princeton University Press, Princeton.

"Existence precedes essence!" 

- Jean-Paul Sartre

Essence being a description (information vis) of what is/ was "necessary" to establish and then maintain "existence" (subsistence)?

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Marx and Engels on Historical Materialism (Broad Overview):

The German Ideology

"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature....Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

"The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.

"It's just Incomplete" (Goedel)