Note that I am not entirely certain that I caught some of the words in this section despite listening to them more than once. If you have a better idea of what those were, let me know.
DBH: You know, I have been fascinated in recent years by . . . Is it Paul Davies, the fellow who wrote The Demon in the Machine? This desire to find a way of writing information into the fundamental laws of physics.
But always with the presupposition - think I mean, I can't speak for him - the presupposition - what they're hoping to do is write the laws of information into physics according to the paradigm of mechanism, still,
RS: Yes
DBH: So that in some sense you can get from information theory to the information, itself. And, of course, information theory contains only bits, transmission of information.
RS: Yes, it's very limited.
Right. They would call syntactic instead of semantic. I wouldn't even call it that because it's a misuse of the idea, syntax is already an order of symbolic relations, rational . . . what they're talking about is more paratactic, and, of course, I think that's a fundamental error. They realize there's something missing from the picture that explains the propensity towards order, that seems even mega-trophic [?]order which you see everywhere in life. But they want to do it in a way that's still continuous with the seventeenth century scientific revolution, the basic premise that everything is a mechanistic relation.
RS: Well, I think it's doomed to failure because what I think, what I think anyway- obviously I'm not going to represent the majority view - the key word is "form" not "in-form-ation." What information means is puts form into something. It just mystifies the whole thing by creating another mathematical font because then you think information theory, quantifying bits and all that kind of thing. Whereas the plain English word "form" helps to explain, you know, the form. The sun is roughly a sphere and so is the Earth and the form of these bar magnets are long, thin things and they join up into an elongated form. All these things are playing and our minds work in terms of recognizing forms and it's what we do. "Information" merely obfuscates the issue, in my opinion.
DBH: No, you're speaking to the converted, actually. In fact the book that I have coming out in August has at least in part an argument just to this effect. And I also agree it's doomed to failure to understand the ordered relation of things such as you see in a magnetic field or arising from a magnetic field or imposed or impressed by any field in terms of information theory. Anything that wants to quantify it in terms allowing it to be dissolved into relations between discrete quanta of energy or mass is not going to succeed because form is inherently a top-down structure.
RS: Yes.
DBH: Even when you're talking about semantic and syntactic information in terms of information theory one of the more nonsensical suppositions that one gets, both, I think in evolutionary theory but in things as diverse as linguistics and physics and any number of differing spheres of concern, the notion that one can move from the quantification to what is clearly a qualitative relation or qualitative state of ordered relations that does not emerge naturally from mechanistic juxtaposition or the exertion of one force on another is NEVER going to work. You're never going to be able to demonstrate how the one arises from the other because it's precisely the opposite, isn't it In fact in information theory this should be obvious, of course, information theory tells us that the greater the order at a semantic or formal level, the greater the disorder at what they call the syntactic. That you can create an algorithm that repeats a limited pattern of numbers, say, in a periodic way, you know 1, 2, 7, 3 which repeats infinitely, but that's a very impoverished, very little information that's actually contained in it. It can be done but the more orderly this syntactic, I'd say "paratactic" is the more confined, constrained the level of what they'd call "information" let's say "syntactic content" or "formal content"is.
So you could never come up with an algorithm that generates Anna Karenina.
RS: No.
DBH: Because the causation works in the other direction. It's the semantic content which exists primarily at the level, well, in that case, an intending intellect that is already related to the future imposing an order on what would, otherwise, be simply random, in one sense, it's a random sequence at the paratactic level but the more determinate it is at the higher the more random it is at the lower. And it is in another sense totally deterministic if it were simply mechanistic relations. So you'll never be able to get from the latter to the former, there must be there has to. . . And I never thought of applying this to fields before. And, of course, you talk about morphic fields so it should be obvious, I suppose, but it seems sort of obvious, doesn't it.
RS: Yes. Well, it wasn't obvious to me until recently that it applies to all fields because all fields are top down causes. The gravitational field of the universe, according to Einstein, contains the entire universe and is that through which the interrelations of all planets, galaxies, everything, is ordered through this field. It's a top-down field, it doesn't emerge from matter it's there to start with. It's there right from the beginning of the universe according to big-bang theory. According to big-bang theory there's a primal. . . well M-theory and super-string theory. there's a primal 10 or 11 dimensional fields at the very moment of the big-bang which then splits up or bifurcates into the other fields of nature. But the whole thing is within a field right from the beginning, it's not that the field somehow emerges from informational process, somehow, It's there from the beginning and the magnetic field is there from the beginning. The electro-magnetic field with light and its presence in matter. And the fields that organize the quantum-matter fields that organize electrons in atoms and atoms in molecules and things are there from the beginning. Or at least from the beginning of the molecule.
So all fields, it seems to me, are top-down causes and all of them are formative. And I'm still thinking about this but nearly all of them work through attraction or repulsion. The strong nuclear field, for example, which is the field that's responsible for what's called the strong nuclear interactions, keeps the quarks together inside a proton or neutron and then helps shape the whole nucleus of the atom. And these are very localized fields, they only operate on the scale of an atom. And the weak nuclear interaction keeps atoms together and through changes in it you get radioactive decay. But these are fields that are incredibly localized but nevertheless organize the nucleus of very atom. And then you've got very localized fields that are still top-down because the strong interaction keeps the quarks together and they're either a proton on neutron and without this strong interaction they'd fly apart. And when you put them into a particle accelerator with enormous energy you can break up this interaction and you can get these separated particles briefly and then they assemble again. So all of these fields seem, to me, to have this top-down quality. And I think one of the problems of the philosophy of science and, indeed, in the thinking of scientists just in practical working in science is exactly that this kind of causation, they've tried to shoe-horn this into a mechanistic model.
And I've just been reading a book of the history of theories of fields in the ether, a history of fields in the 19th century. You know when Faraday thought that the whole of space was permeated by forces and matter was produced by forces that were non-localized they came together in kind of knots in atoms and things but they spread through all of space, And then Maxwell tried to think of the electromagnetic ether, the luminiferous ether. And a lot of 19th century physicists liked the idea of ether as subtle matter and to explain its properties mechanically. Maxwell's model was a vortices of fluid whizzing around tubes for the lines of force. But then what relativity theory, Einstein 1905, showed that you don't actually need this mechanical ether, the field is self-sufficient, self-subsistent. But, then, what are they? And, you know as Sir Lawrence Bragg said, in wonderful historic footage from the Royal Institution talking on magnets, you know giving demonstrations of magnets picking things up and so on. He says the magnet is the ultimate explanation, the field of the magnet can't be explained in terms of anything but magnets and electromagnetic fields. And he said what is a magnet made up of, it's made up of little magnets inside it. And, so even in super-string and M-theory which try and explain magnetic fields in terms of other fields is basically fields all the way down.
I don't have time to insert comments on this because it's turning out to be a far busier week than I'd expected. I will give you another recent discussion on the topic between Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon which has another version of the magnet demonstration and a discussion from a somewhat different angle.
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