Is it a digital world?

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

I was going to de-rail Paul's thread with this, but hese really are too disparate a set of thoughts to sit comfortably in the middle of an existing thread. I just pitch them up for comment.

1. At the heart of physics there are serious ideas that physical reality is information.

2. In daily life we seem to exist in a world that merely is. Mere being seems to me different from being digitally encoded. Contrast a 35mm photographic transparency with a digital photo of the same scene (please note that I am interested in the photo itself here not the relationship of the photo to the object that has been photographed). The traditional photo can be manipulated by optics or chemistry, but intuitively it seems as if there is more information in the digital image. The digital image can be 'known' and handled intellectually in ways that a physical image cannot. This seems to highlight a difference between the analogue and the digital that has some fundamental meaning and is not just a happenstance of human technology.

3. Channel 5 (UK television) had a programme last night about a savant, Daniel Tammet, who is like a Rosetta stone for the mind of these amazing people in that he can, to a degree, explain what he does. One of his remarkable talents is to be able to handle large arithmetic problems in an intuitive way: the numbers are represented in his mind as shapes, colours and landscapes. If he manipulates these representations by mixing or blending or subtracting them he yields a representation of the number that is the answer to the arithmetic problem. Now here's the odd bit. It seems reasonable to me to suggest that he may have arrays of neurones that physically embody numbers, like an abacus or the transitors on a chip in a calculator. Thus, when he calculates he does so unconsciously by making those arrays interact. In this sense, his amazing skill is actually less amazing than the normal process of consciously working the sum out in your conscious mind. Really, for all that it is so foreign to the rest of us, his method of processing would be no more amazing than that an abacus or a calculator. (I don't think it matters whether this idea of neurone arrays is really what underlies the process in that particular savant the idea is enough for this thought-experiment.)

So, in what sense does Daniel 'know' Pi when he recites it to 22,500 decimal places by running his mind's eye over an internal landscape representing Pi.

4. Are there are limits to what can be usefully 'known' in a digital representation? Conversely how many meaningfully different representations can exist in a digital model of reality? Consider a moving image on a screen, say a film or television programme. If I change one pixel on the screen from blue to yellow, or one bit in the soundtrack from 1 to 0, has the film been changed in any meaningful way? I have created two films now, but they are not usefully different from each other. If I cut out a whole frame, maybe 1,000,000 pixels, is the film meaningfully different? What are the limits to this? If I set the parameters as being a 1hr film at 25fps with 1M pixels per image, how many different films can exist in total and how few are meaningfully different? Can this same calculation be applied to reality?

I think I need a lie down!

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

p.s. Last year, I read a New Scientist article about the idea that the Universe is digitally encoded. Does anyone have a link so I can refresh my memory?

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

I think another set of concepts bearing in this is the conscious competence learning model (http://www.businessballs.com/consciouscompetencelearningmodel.htm).

There are certain tasks that I have become unconsciously competent at: driving a car, some surgical procedures. But doesn't unconscious competence mean I have delegated these routines to an unconscious level, which means that in some way I no longer 'know' them consciously?

Unconscious competence is generally regarded as a Good Thing, but is it always? I am learning the piano (at a very early stage) and am aware of the 'don't look down effect'. I can play some practice pieces quite well, but that means I have become unconsciously competent at them: if I turn my conscious attention to the task it all falls apart.

Definitely time for a lie down.

[Ziggurat]

Originally posted by Badly Shaved Monkey
The digital image can be 'known' and handled intellectually in ways that a physical image cannot. This seems to highlight a difference between the analogue and the digital that has some fundamental meaning and is not just a happenstance of human technology.

No, it does NOT reveal anything other than the happenstance of human technology. The format of digital photographs is particularly handy for manipulating, but the information in it is ultimately no different, and certainly no more meaningful, than traditional photography.

4. Are there are limits to what can be usefully 'known' in a digital representation?

There are limits to what can be usefully known in ANY representation. This has nothing to do with digital. And in fact, the loss of information in a representation is WHY we use representations: most of the information contained in any real system is not of interest. As the saying goes, the map is not the territory, but that is precisely why it is useful.

Conversely how many meaningfully different representations can exist in a digital model of reality? Consider a moving image on a screen, say a film or television programme. If I change one pixel on the screen from blue to yellow, or one bit in the soundtrack from 1 to 0, has the film been changed in any meaningful way? I have created two films now, but they are not usefully different from each other. If I cut out a whole frame, maybe 1,000,000 pixels, is the film meaningfully different? What are the limits to this? If I set the parameters as being a 1hr film at 25fps with 1M pixels per image, how many different films can exist in total and how few are meaningfully different? Can this same calculation be applied to reality?

No, it cannot be applied to reality. In fact, it cannot even be applied unambiguously to representations, because the way you define "meaningfully different" is completely subjective.

I think I need a lie down!

You should also probably quit drinking.

[Soapy Sam]

1. At the heart of physics there are serious ideas that physical reality is information. - BSM.

This is exactly what it seemed to me Paul was hinting at in his OP in the other thread. It's an idea which makes no sense to me at all.

Indeed, it seems such obvious nonsense, that I'm worried I'm totally wrong- as is often the case when I feel a gut certainty about something.

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Originally posted by Badly Shaved Monkey
1. At the heart of physics there are serious ideas that physical reality is information.

All I can say is that what we think the universe is is just an idea. If the time dictates that "physical" equates "material" most people will applaud. But, it is just a preference...

I have no problems equating "physical" with "information", but I think that, in the end, it is just another human model, no more, and no less.

Oh well... I forgot what I was going to say in the first place... :p

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

Originally posted by Ziggurat
No, it does NOT reveal anything other than the happenstance of human technology. The format of digital photographs is particularly handy for manipulating, but the information in it is ultimately no different, and certainly no more meaningful, than traditional photography.

If the ideas that reality are information encoded in some substrate are true then I still think there is more to it than you suggest.

Does measurement have a role in this? If I ask you what the hue or intensity are at a certain point in the scene, with the trad photo you would have to go and measure it, whereas in the digital photo it has been measured and can then be reported or acted upon. This is analgous to Paul's consideration in the other threads about when the tableness of a table is revealed. Is it implicit in the object itself or only via interaction with an observer?

Originally posted by Ziggurat
There are limits to what can be usefully known in ANY representation. This has nothing to do with digital.

But there are also limits to the information content of raw reality and what I am interested in is the ways in which that content is lost as it is abstracted into representation.

Originally posted by Ziggurat
No, it cannot be applied to reality. In fact, it cannot even be applied unambiguously to representations, because the way you define "meaningfully different" is completely subjective.

I don't disagree about the subjectivity. What I was hoping for was a discussion of the parameters of that subjectivity, to make my comments more objective. Simply slapping the idea down doesn't advance the discussion.

Originally posted by Ziggurat
You should also probably quit drinking.

Quite sober. Just the end of a long day!

[Ladewig]

Originally posted by Badly Shaved Monkey
2. In daily life we seem to exist in a world that merely is. Mere being seems to me different from being digitally encoded. Contrast a 35mm photographic transparency with a digital photo of the same scene (please note that I am interested in the photo itself here not the relationship of the photo to the object that has been photographed). The traditional photo can be manipulated by optics or chemistry, but intuitively it seems as if there is more information in the digital image.

Be careful with intuition, it can be wrong very often.
The finest grained films, like Fujichrome Velvia as ISO 50, will deliver much more detail than current top end cameras like the 6.3 megapixel Canon 10D.

[Soapy Sam]

Also in the cntext of digital photography, the response of the CCD is inherent in it's design. Then the file (even in RAW format) is saved by the camera with a given compression ratio and contrast. No two cameras will deliver exactly the same image.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

BSM said:
The digital image can be 'known' and handled intellectually in ways that a physical image cannot. This seems to highlight a difference between the analogue and the digital that has some fundamental meaning and is not just a happenstance of human technology.

You can certainly make a reasonable argument that DNA stores information digitally. I think you can also make an argument that atoms bind digitally, given the structure of electron shells. What's the real difference between digital and analog?

~~ Paul

[Hellbound]

Actually, there may be something to all this, in my opinion. I don't think the analog/digital difference is unrelated to reality or simply a human artifact, at least not entirely.

And yes, I'm about to mention quantum mechanics, so I expect to be jumped on by those who know more about the field than myself ;)

But anyway, the difference between digital and analogue is the encoding method. Digital takes samples that are made of discreet units, while analogue flows along a range. The easiest representation is with thermometers. Your digital thermometer, for example, can only read temperature at, say, a tenth of a degree. It may read 96.5 or 96.6, but it can't read 96.543. It moves in discreet "jumps". An analogue thermometer, on the other hand, can have the mercury level at any point along the scale, and changes fluidly rather than in jumps.

The existence of quanta seems to support the idea of a digital nature to the universe. Light can be increased only a photon at a time; mass increase an atom or particle at a time; electrical charge a Coulumb (sp?) ata time, etc. Even time and space have certain limitations on the smallest possible unit (Plank time and Plank length).

Now, I'm not saying anything one way or another, but the digital idea seems as if it might have something going. Whether it's all information or not seems more a philisophical question than a scientific one, though. Information requires a physical structure of some sort to exist...without a structure to represent information (whether electric, light, matter, or whatever), there is no information.

[Interesting Ian]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
1. At the heart of physics there are serious ideas that physical reality is information. - BSM.

This is exactly what it seemed to me Paul was hinting at in his OP in the other thread. It's an idea which makes no sense to me at all.

Indeed, it seems such obvious nonsense, that I'm worried I'm totally wrong- as is often the case when I feel a gut certainty about something.

You ask to ask yourself whether physics tells us anything more than information. Obviously not. It tells us nothing about the substantiality of the world. Physics tells us how the material world interacts via laws written in the language of mathematics. The material world which is describes is only known through our sense experiences or qualia. Physics simply tells us the patterns in our sense experiences or qualia. Do our qualia/sense experience stand for a material world beyond? Well that's a philosophical question, but I suggest not.

[Soapy Sam]

Ian is there a typo in the first line of that post? If so, would you edit it?
I'm a bit puzzled about what the sentence means.

[TheBoyPaj]

01011001 01000101 01010011

[Ziggurat]

Originally posted by Badly Shaved Monkey
If I ask you what the hue or intensity are at a certain point in the scene, with the trad photo you would have to go and measure it, whereas in the digital photo it has been measured and can then be reported or acted upon.

You seem to be presuming that there's something profound here, but there isn't. If you encode the picture as a GIF, for example, then in a sense you DO have to measure the position (with entropy encoding, you need to decode preceding information in order to determine where in the file any particular bit of information is located). Conversely, if you take your physical photo chop it up into tiny little bits and write numbers on the back, and then shove all those bits into a filing cabinet in order, you've got the same thing as your digital photo. It's just a lote more time consuming to do it by hand. While the digital picture is handier to index positions, keep in mind also that if you want to turn those numbers into a color, you've got to run it through a conversion process (generally a digital to analogue converter which powers some sort of light source, be it a computer screen or a printer) to get back a color, but your physical picture has that color already.

In other words, there's less here than you seem to think.

I don't disagree about the subjectivity. What I was hoping for was a discussion of the parameters of that subjectivity, to make my comments more objective. Simply slapping the idea down doesn't advance the discussion.

But that's my point: you CAN'T parameterize them unless and until you decide what criteria you want. And THAT is a subjective choice. For example, consider sound recognition. I was playing around with a language learning program demo, which had a feature where it would play the sound of a word being spoken in whatever language you were studying. You would then repeat the word, the computer would record you, compare your spoken version to the prerecorded version, and grade how well you spoke the word. I tried it out for a while with some Chinese words, and it seemed to be helpful in getting me to pronounce it correctly. I'm not sure exactly how the speach recognition worked, but clearly it involves throwing out a lot of information to get some sort of essential representation of what you say that should be constant across different speakers, which is exactly what the human ear does. The amount of information in a few seconds of spoken sound contains a LOT more information than just the information of the word - we throw out the rest because it's not useful, and condense it down to the essential information.

For the hell of it, I tried out the English language section. The first word was "ball", and that went fine - I'm a native English speaker, so no surprise, I was able to reproduce the sound of the word "ball" quite accurately. But then something wierd happened. I got to the word "cat", and for the life of me, I couldn't get the computer to recognize my pronunciation of "cat" as even mildly resembling that of the speaker. Something was wacked. I don't have any speach impediments, people can undertand me perfectly well. But for some reason, the computer speach recognition couldn't tell that I was saying the same word. Whatever internal representation it was creating for my spoken word, it wasn't capturing the important parts of the word "cat", it was keeping unimportant information that made my version seem fundamentally different than the pre-recorded version.

My point in telling you this is that quantifying representations is tough business, it's easy to screw up, and even if you get it "right" you're still going to have to make subjective choices (for example, words spoken with a foreign accent can be easily recognized by some people but not by others - the choice of where to draw the line on whether or not the spoken word is intelligible is always going to be subjective to some degree). There are no hard and fast rules. Any in-depth discussion is going to have to be either very specific (and hence won't apply to anything beyond that specific question), or it's going to be beyond the scope of this message board.

On a lighter note, a joke:

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
those who can read binary, and those who can't.

[Soapy Sam]

" I don't have any speach impediments, people can undertand me perfectly well. "- Ziggurat.

I can't help noticing a rather apt self referential example of information being thrown away by the reader here, just as Ziggurat mentions in the post. I read that sentence twice , understanding it perfectly each time, before even noticing the two typing errors.
If we are too nice about accurate reproduction, the sentence is meaningless- to a computer it might seem that way.

In context, and to any human following the context, the meaning is 100% clear.

We are immensely error tolerant in our communication. We have arbitrary / historical conventions of "correct" spelling , yet communicate complex concepts like the above, (non digital) , using highly imperfect digital media.

I think it's rather kewl.

ETA- I'm assuming, of course, that they are typos.
I'm not sure if it would be cooler , or less cool, if intentional.

[Interesting Ian]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
Ian is there a typo in the first line of that post? If so, would you edit it?
I'm a bit puzzled about what the sentence means.

Sorry, it won't let me. I put ask instead of have. Should proof read I suppose.

You have to ask yourself whether physics tells us anything more than information. Obviously not. It tells us nothing about the substantiality of the world. Physics tells us how the material world interacts via laws written in the language of mathematics. The material world which is describes is only known through our sense experiences or qualia. Physics simply tells us the patterns in our sense experiences or qualia. Do our qualia/sense experience stand for a material world beyond? Well that's a philosophical question, but I suggest not.

[Ziggurat]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
I can't help noticing a rather apt self referential example of information being thrown away by the reader here, just as Ziggurat mentions in the post.
...
ETA- I'm assuming, of course, that they are typos.
I'm not sure if it would be cooler , or less cool, if intentional.

:D Unfortunately, I can't claim to have done it intentionally - while I have no speach impediments, I'm not a good typist or speller. But yeah, it does kind of follow my point.