Spacetime as Information – An Ordering Principle for Living Systems?

The predominant scientific paradigm does not regard the Universe as a Living System. This stems from a perspective that the Universe is unconnected, and mechanical. What is the difference between a mechanistic concept of the universe (acting like gears and cogs in a machine) versus a dynamical self-organizing system? Information.

Information is the connecting fabric of our Universe. What are dynamic processes? Systems with information feedback operations (such as a fractal), which results in nonlinear evolution and local unpredictability. Interactivity (intercommunication) of such a system with generative and innovative elements results in exponential integration and syntropy. Far removed from the random and mechanical processes envisioned as the law of entropy – which in itself is a highly theoretical case scenario of isolation and disconnectivity. The unconnected and mechanistic worldview does not perceive the potential for nonlocal intercommunication (a universal information network) that may engender specific ordering influences underlying all physical processes. Such powerful deterministic orchestration is largely beyond the purview of such a myopic worldview. The stochastic nature of quantum mechanics – the consensus theory of the fundamental behavior of matter – is a reflection of the fragmented, isolationist worldview. However, even in this theory, it is acknowledged that a measuring device of infinite size could ascertain with complete deterministic certainty the quantum state and spacetime coordinates of every particle in a room. Alas, such a device is impossible, because it would collapse into a black hole. Yet, there is a black hole of that magnitude that is measuring the state of every fundamental quanta in every moment – and that is the Universe, since when the mass of our observable Universe is considered in the current measured radius – our Universe obeys the Schwarzschild condition or the condition of a black hole.

“It from bit”
– John Archibald Wheeler

How is information the connecting fabric of the cosmos? Is this just an abstract – unphysical statement? Hardly. John Archilbald Wheeler, one of the preeminent physicists of the 20th century and colleague of Einstein, developed geometrical equations that described the origin of the most fundamental characteristics of matter – such as a particle’s charge and mass – one of the most active areas of research even today (with contrived notions of a Higgs Boson). His formulations produced these characteristics purely from the geometry of spacetime, therefore deriving ‘charge without charge’, and ‘mass without mass’ – as emergent characteristics of the structure and dynamics of spacetime. While Wheeler is one who, alongside Einstein, understood the primacy of geometry – he later realized there is an even more fundamental source, and that is information – thus coining the term ‘it from bit’. As in ‘it’ all comes from ‘bits’ – base units of information.  (coincidentally, Wheeler also formulated a solution to quantum gravity, called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation – but since it did not require time physicists regarded it as unreal – not yet realizing that what we experience as time is a localized evolution of a subsystem through the structure of space, but not a change in the structure of space at the global scale of the Universe –time from quantum entanglement).

The geometrical structure of spacetime is an information encoding medium – planck pixels. The dynamics of spacetime transmit and process information. And the structure and evolution of spacetime determines and engenders the physical characteristics of matter and force in the Universe. Physically, what are planck pixels? That is, what is spacetime physically made of? The answer is zero-point electromagnetic quanta. It is an electromagnetic field filling all conceivable modes.  What does this have to do with biology? Other than the obvious inference that we are fundamentally made of electromagnetic quanta (space itself) – it has direct bearing on the nature of biological information processes (self-organizing systems) and most likely on the source of consciousness. Because we are each a functional unit of an information processing medium that is the connecting fabric of the Universe.

What is this a picture of? A brain slice showing the microscopic view of neurons? A computer simulation of the distribution of matter and galaxies in the Universe (based on the observed values of the so called dark matter and dark energy)? Or maybe the quantum foam of the vacuum (spacetime)? Take your pick. Does form recapitulate function at these scales (which happens to scale across all 4 spatial dimensions of the observable Universe)?

The above image gives a sense of the Planck-scale network of spacetime. Much like the filaments of “dark matter” that connect galactic superclusters together, or the dendrites that connect billions of neurons – lattice-like nodal points (The Planck-Kleinert World Crystal) are connected by filaments comprised of Planckian-Einstein-Rosen bridges (Building up Spacetime with quantum entanglement). And much like the electrical propagation of signals through the synaptic network of the brain – bundles of intense lines of electric and magnetic flux course through the Planckian network of spacetime (Poynting vortex fields).

There is a fractal reiteration across the magnitude of dimension. Just as a transistor can function as a binary unit (via the presence or absence of an electrical charge), so too can a single atom, or a subatomic particle – or, as Wheeler posited – the Planck harmonic oscillators of the quantum vacuum, space itself. This is nothing new, it is known as the Holographic Principle. However, what is being emphasized here is that this information encoding medium may be connected in a continuous wormhole network – allowing nonlocal, i.e. superluminal, transmission of information. This means that all sectors of spacetime are acting as one information encoding volume – they are not isolated – it is a manifold information processing network.

What the reader can retain from this discussion, is that our biological structure and the environment of our  biosphere, is emerging to be something else than an isolated result of some random fluctuation (a fluke) and much more part of an incredible network information highway that connects all points in our Universe and the multiverse generating highly advanced, complex, self-organizing structures from which information is continuously driving the transformation across all scales in a coordinated and astonishingly rapid evolution. In that view then, not only are the physics  of our Universe unified with the biological complexity we are a part of, but the whole of the structure is a manifestation of what we have come to describe as consciousness, or if you’d like a feedback of information across all scale producing self-awareness.

By: William Brown & Nassim Harameinfrom:    http://resonance.is/spacetime-as-information-an-ordering-principle-for-living-systems/