Compression, Entanglement and a Possible Basis for Morphic Fields

[From a  June 26, 2014 draft of a letter to Rupert Sheldrake:]

So the universe is analogous to a class of computational processes, some more efficient than others,

 ... at which point I'd like to pause and point out that this doesn't mean that the universe is a computation, or that it isn't, but that it obeys certain rules of consistency that are just like those in some computations, and equally that some computations are also exactly analogous to the rules of the universe, so that if the most efficient way of doing the computational process has certain methods or characteristics, then the operation of the universe will also have analogous characteristics. 

Compression is the essence of the operation of the computational processes that are analogous to the universe. 

Back to the presentation:


So the universe is analogous to a class of computational processes, some more efficient than others, with the most efficient being heavily favored as representations, which compress natural patterns of evolution of matter and fields so that required resources are minimized to model or instantiate the universe. These compressed representations of patterns have a supra-physical, informational component which is encoded in the thermal radiations of all matter and fields, which cause a cascade of entanglements which in turn have the history of the universe's changing patterns encoded within them. The entanglement of the particles in new patterns with those of past patterns requires the new pattern to be consistent with all the quantum informational constraints of the past patterns. The only consistent universes are those where all the past information from all past patterns is still implicit in each and every new pattern, sub-pattern and interaction. So the past patterns can serve as templates for later patterns, with a size-dependent degree of clarity, as with parts of a hologram, and allow effective compression of all similar situations in the past to each local region of the universe. The thermal radiation information field compresses all similar past situations because it is not truly possible to erase information, but only to turn it into “heat” which is basically just information that one has decided to ignore. Everything in the universe that “stays happened” (as opposed to quantum eraser-type situations) is on the permanent, ineradicable record.


These templates are patterns in both space and time, allowing for example the progressive elaboration of structures in the development of embryos, and so can most effectively be modeled by generative programs which produce the evolving state of the simulation or instantiation, rather than just static data, that is, efficiency implies not just compressibility but minimizing the Kolmogorov complexity of the computational processes analogous to the physical situations. This allows not just physical structures but patterns of behavior and modes of development to be optimized for their analogous computational processes' equivalents of memory space and processing power, and thus gives not just a memory but a super pattern-recognition capability in every part of the universe, which can read a developing situation and compare it with everything in the past light-cone, thus compressing it to effectively require only the new, original information content it embodies to be added to the thermal motions and radiations that communicate past interactions and patterns among the parts of the universe through quantum phases and entanglements' implications. The past patterns it embodies are already in the information field, but each repetition and close variation makes them “stronger”, or more compressed and efficient.


Effectively this is like compression with unlimited side information available. The information capacity of thermal radiation is enormous given it has about 10^19 to 10^21 photons per joule. Even the milli-atto-joules characteristic of the smallest molecular motions give rise to photons. To see the potential power of this sort of compression, movies would be very easy to “compress” to send over a wire if the sender and all viewers already had a copy of every movie ever made as “side information” – only a serial number or tag code would need to be transmitted to “transmit” gigabytes of movie. (But in such a large data set as the the universe's information field there probably is a shortage of short tag codes, codes shorter than the patterns they represent, even though the codes be context-dependent.)


The information field, being in its heat diffusion the same as the wave equation with time replaced by imaginary time, implies that its dynamics occur in imaginary time, which is like a small cylindrical manifold with a particle that changes phase as it spirals along it helically, as in electron zitter motion, rather than staying at one angle on the cylinder as in normal time. (See Zitterbewegung comment on the article on “time crystals” on the Simons Foundation site, reposted here.) It is recurrent time, cyclical time, perhaps not time but eternity. And among the compressed patterns in the information field are all the people who ever lived and every thought and action they ever had or did. Not just the dead ones, either, nor just the distant past, but the past that starts a nanosecond ago, even a yoctosecond ago. In fact, the parts of the future that are implied by the past are already in the field, so it's really somewhat atemporal or eternal.


So the afterlife, precognition, remote viewing and telepathy are implications of this view. It even suggests how it is possible to give a remote viewing target with only an arbitrary code number. The code and the target are physically associated on the envelope or in the computer and the target information is sent via the code in the same way that the movies were “sent” in the example of compression with unlimited side information.

See Daniel Burfoot's book: “Notes on a New Philosophy of Empirical Science” (arXiv:1104.5466v1 [cs.LG] 28 Apr 2011 ) for more down-to-earth applications of the idea of treating science as a data compression problem, compressing vast quantities experience and experiment down to pithy theories and equations.

Notes Toward a Theory of Eternity

Yet more from November 2013, this time some unfinished notes I intend to come back to later:

Notes for expansion:

• Shell of thermal radiation expanding from Earth during and following a life. 
• Rotating searchlight of a life's radiation as the Earth rotates,
• Holes in the radiation pattern, shell due to absorption by Sun, planets, stars; re-emission, scattering, gravitational lensing; 
• Transactional interpretation of QM demands both an absorber for every emitted photon and a potential for re-emission, thus literal eternity.
• “Omnia sunt, lumina sunt.” “All that is, is light”
• All that can be known is information.
• Probability is always and only a measure of ignorance.
• Choices must be real to be real choices – morality cannot coexist with determinism, but requires multiple potential realities, universes.
• Internal dimensions for each entity are rotated by relative motion (Lorentz boosts), but quantum-correlated through all occurring in the same overall 4-space (pseudoscalar).

Thermodynamics, Information and the Afterlife

This was written around the end of November 2013:


The 2^nd law of thermodynamics states that in any closed system, entropy never decreases. The two apparent loopholes in this law, that entropy can decrease in open systems and can remain the same in either type of system are not of interest here.


Entropy is equivalent to both information and disorder. Attempts to define information as negative entropy are wrong, as is defining information as order. The more orderly the arrangement, no matter what the context, the less information that can be embodied in the arrangement. Information is a measure of improbability, as is entropy. The term “entropy” is often abused to mean not the information embodied in a specific arrangement, but the class of all possible arrangements which look similar from a distance, or averaged together by coarse measurements. Nevertheless, all real cups of hot tea, even those indistinguishable to any macroscopic measurements and composed of absolutely identical constituent molecules, are at the molecular level entirely different in their components' positions and velocities, just as much as two identical pieces of paper with identical amounts of ink, one showing a humorous picture of a cat and the other a budget summary for the Wolverhampton waterworks.


Every event at the molecular (or any other) level which has lasting consequences creates information. That information is almost always encoded in heat. It gradually diffuses, becoming more and more entangled with other bits of information so that one would have to know about more and more to have any hope of determining the original causes behind the motions. Creation and transmission of information require no energy dissipation in general, but erasing information does. The entropy of the information “erased” is not really destroyed, but moved to the outside environment, in the same way as heat is moved to the outside of a refrigerator. Even dropping information into a black hole does not destroy it, but instead it is very gradually re-emitted in a scrambled form as the black hole evaporates All molecular events with consequences that are in principle distinguishable from some other hypothetical course of events leave a permanent but increasingly scrambled record in thermal motions and thermal radiation. This permanent record is the physical substrate for what has been called the “Akashic Records”. There is a potential for long-range correlations to emerge in the detailed patterns of thermal motion which in turn could lead to macroscopic correlations of pattern through a type of chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions which leads not just to variations in the location of systems on a given attractor, but to correlations of the type of attractor. [Perhaps, but I now think a sort of consistency filter arising from quantum entanglements is a more likely mechanism.]


Fourier is now best-known for his “Fourier series” which allow representing anything as a sum of sinusoidal waves of varying frequencies, amplitudes, and phases which is the basis of essentially all digital audio-visual techniques, but during his life he was known best for his work on heat diffusion. It turns out that the equations for heat diffusion are exactly the same as for quantum mechanics, except that heat diffuses in euclidean time while relativistic quantum mechanics demands a Minkowski space, meaning that time has a square opposite in sign to the squares of the spatial dimensions. The two can be converted by using “imaginary time”, that is, time multiplied by the square root of -1, i. (Or some other entity that squares to -1, of which it turns out there are several in Geometric Algebra / real-valued Clifford Algebras.) This procedure known as a “Wick rotation” converts the Schrodinger equation to the Boltzman equation. This only makes sense for massive particles – for light-like particles, time has no independent meaning apart from the distance traveled, time is the hypotenuse in the Pythagorean theorem. (x² + y² + z² = t²) (There are experimental results indicating that massive particles, or at least electrons, have no real mass but move in light-speed helices which give them the appearance of having mass. This is David Hestenes' Zitterbewegung interpretation of QM.)

The relation between the eternal time of the thermal record and the Minkowski time of everyday experience is thus a Wick rotation.

A First Approximation to Mindspace

The first few posts will be from past writings of mine. Here is most of a letter I wrote to a friend who had moved from being a pillar of the counterculture to espousing ultra-traditional Christian / Calvinist theology and young-Earth Creationism:

Imagine Indra's net, filling all space and time with a web whose intersections are jewels, each reflecting all of the others. The jewels may also be seen through other schemata – Leibnizian monads, vertexes in Feynman diagrams, atomic perceptions/ perceivers of varied potentialities and probabilities. What seem from the physical point of view as particles (interactions) are seen from another point of view as perceptions whose collective patterns are thoughts. God is immanent in the totality of the net, these atomic perceptions are collectively a basis (in the mathematical sense) for the power set of all their possible permutations. This power set can be viewed in turn as the total mindspace, which has all possible perceptions and thoughts implicit in it. Parts of it are human thoughts (all the possible human thoughts), thoughts of particular groups, individuals, etc. Most of it is outside the region of human thought. Most of it is far less than God, the totality of the mindspace (plus parts of which we cannot speak) – yet also far more than human. A given jewel/interaction may be parts of beings at all levels: God, gods, angels, humans, animals, plants and cells. Because mindspace is not like physical space, these entities which are categorizations of sets and power sets of jewels may overlap like Venn diagrams.


Viewing the net as Feynman diagrams expressing physical reality, in particular thermodynamics/information theory (which are the same thing), a direction of time emerges from the tendency of information (entropy) to accumulate in the form of heat (2^nd law). Viewed as a process in time the net expands from a low entropy state to fill more and more of the implicit unfilled space of possibilities. It never contracts again, it can only expand. It seems in physics that information cannot be destroyed, only scrambled, turned into heat and diffused across the universe, but any event which has had even a microscopic effect is on the permanent record of the universe. This heat/information diffusion is mathematically the same as Schrodinger's equation, but with ordinary time replaced by imaginary time. (turning t into it is called Wick rotation). The equivalence works both ways. By rotating our view of the imaginary time of the universe considered as heat diffusion into the ordinary time of the wave equation, the scrambled record of the universe, including all the people who have ever lived, is translated back into ordinary time. This is the basis for the reality of the afterlife. The permanence of information in the heat diffusion/ imaginary time view is eternity.


Morality does not enter on a particle level but in the aggregates. Morality, ethics, emotions, thoughts and so forth exist in the mindspace schema, not the physical schema, in the same way that my words exist in the application layer of the OSI model; on the physical layer there are only patterns of charges and spins suitable for interpretation by the higher layers. The difference is that in the physical view of the net, interactions/particles are not only atomic perceptions but equally atomic acts of will. The universe is alive down to the lowest level, not only alive but perceptive and willful. From these more complicated and subtle patterns are composed which are the thoughts and wills of more complicated and subtle beings. Their perceptions and intentions are of varying likeness to other, more general regions of human mindspace which we label imperfectly as “good”, “evil”, etc. These regions of mindspace itself are not changed by our labels on our maps of it, they exist objectively, yet our perceptions of them are necessarily subjective. Our perceptions of them are not the things themselves, though the “things” are ultimately made of atomic perceptions. Other levels of being have their own accordingly larger or smaller regions of mindspace that they perceive as good or evil. There are other categories beyond the basic two, and higher beings are more able to discern them as well.


God, I suspect, finds these limited regions of mindspace that humans regard as good and evil as being not particularly more interesting than the rest of Himself, and scarcely a drop in the bucket of his All. On the other hand, God the absolute can have no experience in the way we do; being All, with nothing outside himself, there can be no separation of subject and object. To have such experiences, he must limit his point of view, and to that extent he becomes less than absolute. The full range of experiences demands all possible types of splits between self/selves and other(s). Thus all our and others' views of the net and each other are a consequence of God's need to limit himself so that he can be not only everything but each thing. No matter what we do or don't do as our limited selves, for God nothing is undone, all is complete.