III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

C. The Information Computation Turn

Padmanabhan, Thanu and Hamsa Padmanabhan. Cosmic Information, the Cosmological Constant and the Amplitude of Primordial Perturbations. arXiv:1703.06144. A father-daughter team of a Pune University, India, theoretical physicist, and an ETH Zurich post-doctoral cosmologist contribute to realizations of an informational quality as the fundamental, distinctive essence and arbiter of physical evolutionary spacetimematter.

A unique feature of gravity is its ability to control the information accessible to any specific observer. We quantify the notion of cosmic information ('CosmIn') for an eternal observer in the universe. Demanding the finiteness of CosmIn requires the universe to have a late-time accelerated expansion. Combining the introduction of CosmIn with generic features of the quantum structure of spacetime (e.g., the holographic principle), we present a holistic model for cosmology. We show that (i) the numerical value of the cosmological constant, as well as (ii) the amplitude of the primordial, scale invariant, perturbation spectrum can be determined in terms of a single free parameter, which specifies the energy scale at which the universe makes a transition from a pre-geometric phase to the classical phase. For a specific value of the parameter, we obtain the correct results for both (i) and (ii). This formalism also shows that the quantum gravitational information content of spacetime can be tested using precision cosmology. (Abstract)

Guided Self-Organisation. www.prokopenko.net/IDSO. These quotes, c. 2010, are from the author’s web postings, a Principal Research Scientist for Information and Communication Technologies at CSIRO, Sydney, Australia. They pose another instance of budding efforts to articulate and understand what is going on, whereof it seems such an informational feature is a crucial clue.

Information-Driven Self-Organisation (IDSO) is a specific instance of GSO, where the guidance places constraints on information dynamics. Many evolutionary and self-organisation pressures can be characterised information-theoretically not only because it's an approximation useful in designing biologically-inspired systems, but also because numerous optimal structures evolve/self-organise in nature when information transfer within certain channels is maximised - i.e., evolution operates at a certain error threshold.

The strong IDSO view maintains that if such "lingua franca" is possible then it is likely that the evolution/self-organisation (and eventually human designers) discover it, and put to use. According to this view, maximization of information transfer through certain channels is one of the main evolutionary pressures.

Roederer, Juan. Information and its Role in Nature. Berlin: Springer, 2005. A volume in the Springer Frontiers Collection which considers the many aspects of a programmatic self-organization of life and complexity. The quote is from its web page. And how might we appreciate such a quality as genetic in kind? For a 2016 update by the University of Alaska geophysicist see Pragmatic Information in Biology and Physics in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (374/2063, 2016).

Information and Its Role in Nature presents an in-depth interdisciplinary discussion of the concept of information and its role in the control of natural processes. After a brief review of classical and quantum information theory, the author addresses numerous central questions, including: Is information reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry? Does the Universe, in its evolution, constantly generate new information? Or are information and information-processing exclusive attributes of living systems, related to the very definition of life? If so, what is the role of information in classical and quantum physics? In what ways does information-processing in the human brain bring about self-consciousness?

Roederer, Juan. When and Where did Information First Appear in the Universe? Seckbach, Joseph and Eitan Rubin, eds. The New Avenues in Bioinformatics. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004. An example of how researchers are trying to fathom an endemic informational activity. To this geophysicist, information is a real quality which emerges gradually as the physical universe grows more complex. But it is not “pre-existing,” nor is evolution goal-directed or purposeful. So a confusion of terms and interpretations persists.

Rose, S. P. R. Communication: From Neurons to People; From Present to Future. Biochemical Society Transactions. 31/1, 2003. On the significance of information and signaling as a salient organizing factor at every level of the biological hierarchy from microbes to societies.

Rovelli, Carlo. Relative Information. www.edge.org/response-detail/27074. An answer to the 2017 annual question posted by John Brockman’s Edge website by the Aix-Marseille University physicist and author. We note because it evinces a shift by a leading theorist to recognize material reality as fundamentally distinguished by an informational content and conveyance. For a sample of other responses: Networks Sheizaf Rafaeli, Complementarity Frank Wilczek, Non-ergodic Stuart Kauffman, Reciprocal Altruism Margaret Levi, Common Sense Jared Diamond, Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics Frank Tipler, Power Law Luca de Biase, The Anthropocene Jennifer Jacquet, DNA George Church, Included Middle Melanie Swan, The Big Bounce Paul Steinhardt, and Cumulative Culture Cristine Legare.

Since the world is a knit tangle of interacting events, it teams with relative information. Twenty-four centuries ago Democritus suggested that the atoms are “like the letters of the alphabet”: There are only twenty or so letters but, as he puts it, “It is possible for them to combine in diverse modes, in order to produce comedies or tragedies, ridiculous stories or epic poems.” So is nature: Few atoms combine to generate the phantasmagoric variety of reality. But the analogy is deeper: The atoms are like an alphabet because the way in which they are arranged is always correlated with the way other atoms are arranged. Sets of atoms carry information. What occurs in the atoms of your brain is not any more independent from what is happening in the atoms of mine: we communicate. The world isn’t just a mass of colliding atoms; it is also a web of correlations between sets of atoms, a network of reciprocal physical information between physical systems. (Rovelli edited excerpt)

Rovelli, Carlo. Relative Information at the Foundation of Physics. Aguirre, Anthony, et al, eds. It From Bit or Bit From It?: On Physics and Information. Berlin: Springer, 2015. A prize winner in this 2013 Foundational Question Institute essay contest by the Centre de Physique Theorique, Marseille, physicist and philosopher. In just a few pages are woven a profound natural synthesis that joins discrete atomic and integrative network phases by way of their content and conveyance of information. By this perception, it is worth notice that the physical universe to us emergence becomes understood in textual, narrative terms.

In fact, Democritus's idea was more subtle than the fact that everything is just atoms. Democritus says that three features are relevant about the atoms: the shape of each individual atom, the order in which they are disposed, and their orientation in the structure. And Democritus uses then a powerful metaphor: like twenty letters of an alphabet can be combined in innumerable manners to give rise to comedies or tragedies, similarly the atoms can be combined in innumerable manners to give rise to the innumerable phenomena of the world. (2)

This is why, I think, from the basis of genetics, to the foundation of quantum mechanics, to the basis of thermodynamics, all the way to sociology and to quantum gravity, it appears that the notion of information has a pervasive and unifying role. The world is not just a blind wind of atoms, or generally covariant quantum fields. It is also the infinite game of mirrors reflecting one another formed by the correlations among the structures formed by the elementary objects. To go back to Democritus metaphor: atoms are like an alphabet, but an immense alphabet so rich to be capable of reading itself and thinking itself. (3)

Sebeok, Thomas. Global Semiotics. Rauch, I. and G. Carr, eds. Semiotics Around the World. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997. The leading thinker in the field finds life to be most distinguished by a ‘semiosis’ manifest in its various genetic, immune, metabolic and neural codes.

If the universe is perused with signs, is there a cosmic ‘semiophysics’ concerned with a broader quest for significant forms, a general theory of intelligibility transcending life? (118)

Seife, Charles. Decoding the Universe. New York: Viking, 2006. A science writer plumbs quantum and relativity theory to argue that information and its processing is really what material and celestial nature is about. However these deliberations are stuck within the old mechanical, physicalist, reductive paradigm. The opening line is: Civilization is doomed. Life and human beings are seen as computer-like in an arbitrary, expiring, multiverse bubble. Such negative conclusions, along with those of Leonard Susskind in The Cosmic Landscape, can seem to border upon reckless for they convey our existence as quite devoid of meaning or hope. Incidentally Seife’s index lists 97 men and 2 women, while Susskind’s cites 145 men and 2 women. An entirely different vista awaits via a bicameral humankind looking toward whom a genesis universe might become.

Semetsky, Inna. Information and Signs: The Language of Images. Entropy. 12/3, 2010. A University of Newcastle philosopher and wise woman (see personal website for interests and writings) endorses the general movement to a computational, semiotic cosmos, while advising that its digital emphasis needs to be balanced and leavened by analog visions. In such regard, the archetypal Tarot seen much as a self-organizing system can offer a luminous exemplar.

Sharov, Alexei. Functional Information: Towards Synthesis of Biosemiotics and Cybernetics. Entropy. 12/5, 2010. By function is meant interrelations. A National Institute of Health NIH geneticist joins these two discursive modes, along with autopoiesis theory, to dialogue with an inherently communicative reality. Which altogether with other neighbor postings struggles to name and explain what is seems in fact a cosmic to child genetic complementarity.

Biosemiotics and cybernetics are closely related, yet they are separated by the boundary between life and non-life: biosemiotics is focused on living organisms, whereas cybernetics is applied mostly to non-living artificial devices. However, both classes of systems are agents that perform functions necessary for reaching their goals. I propose to shift the focus of biosemiotics from living organisms to agents in general, which all belong to a pragmasphere or functional universe. (1050)

Sowinski, Damian and Marcelo Gleiser. Information Dynamics at a Phase Transition. arXiv:1606.09641. In this of cosmic and scientific convergences, Dartmouth College physicists propose to join nature’s informational propensity with statistical physics and nonlinear complexity phenomena.

We propose a new way of investigating phase transitions in the context of information theory. We use an information-entropic measure of spatial complexity known as configurational entropy (CE) to quantify both the storage and exchange of information in a lattice simulation of a Ginzburg-Landau model with a scalar order parameter coupled to a heat bath. The CE is built from the Fourier spectrum of fluctuations around the mean-field and reaches a minimum at criticality. In particular, we investigate the behavior of CE near and at criticality, exploring the relation between information and the emergence of ordered domains. We show that as the temperature is increased from below, the CE displays three essential scaling regimes at different spatial scales: scale free, turbulent, and critical. Together, they offer an information-entropic characterization of critical behavior where the storage and processing of information is maximized at criticality. (Abstract)

The informational narrative of phase transitions presented here sheds light on the computational properties of systems at criticality. The same way that biological mechanisms such as the entire genetic apparatus are encoded in an information storage and transfer narrative, so too we hope that the continued application of information-theoretic techniques will illuminate the emergence of complex behavior in physical systems in a way that the traditional mechanistic narrative has been unable to do. Our work has shown that the storage and processing of information is maximized at criticality so that large and long-lived structures can form, limited only by scales where the utilization of that information becomes turbulent. Our approach points toward and eventual synthesis of statistical physics with complexity theory, with wide applicability across a variety of physical and biological phenomena. (7-8)

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