The 2nd Law: Is Increased Entropy Stochastic (incidental) or Causal (intrinsic)?

Recent science news is dominated by the multi-trillion dollar experimental search for the Higgs boson particle. A definitive observation of the theorized, but illusive, Higgs will finally complete the verification of the Standard Model – the most respected mathematical model of the evolution of our universe, explaining the emergence of each of the known forces and all of the matter we can observe. In the Standard Model, the Higgs is responsible for gravity – surrounding the more pedestrian particles – lending them the property we call "mass". If the Higgs exists, it is important as the causal bridge between the quantum world of the small and the relativistic world of the large. How could a particle that causes gravity be so hard to find? Because it doesn't actually have mass. It is as a result, known as "weakly interacting". It is only when a whole bunch of Higgs get together and surround other particles that mass is detected, and then, only in the surrounded particles. The Higgs binds so tightly to other particles, that it takes an extraordinary amount of energy, to break it free so that its presence can be detected. This is what the "Large Hadron Collider" does – it smashes heavy atomic nucleus (stripped of their electrons) at energies equivalent to those of the first moments after the Big Bang when all of the matter and energy in the entire universe was still smaller than a single star.

But there is a far more fundamental question. Gravity is a property. It is domain-dependent. It is specific to and belongs to a class of objects of a particular makeup and composition. The existence or nonexistence of the Higgs has no effect upon other properties of the universe like electromagnetism.

But there is a candidate for a domain-independent attribute of any and all causal systems. This attribute has been labeled the "Causal Entropic Principle" – it is generally discussed within the context of the transfer of heat (at astronomical scales) – within the study of thermodynamics. It is the logical extension of the concept of increased entropy, as first postulated, measured, and later described as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. But now, a hundred and fifty years after the formalization the laws of thermodynamics (of the phenomena and parameters of the transfer of heat, of the ratio of potential energy and work) correlative investigations in the fields of information, communication, computation, language, energy/mass, logic, and structure have uncovered parallel principles and constraints.  It is reasonable now to understand the 2nd Law as a description of a fundamental constraint on any change, in any system, no matter what forces and materials are at play. We now understand the 2nd Law to describe the reduction in the quality (density) of the energy and or structure of the universe (or any part therein) as results any change at all. We have come to understand the 2nd Law as a constraint on the outcome of change in structure, which is to say "information", on its construction, maintenance, and or transfer. This insight has rendered an equivalence between energy and structure in much the same way that Einsteinian Relativity exposed the equivalence between energy and mass.

There is however a daemon lurking within our understanding of the 2nd Law, a daemon that threatens to undermine our understanding of causality itself, a daemon that, once defined, may provide the basis for an understanding of any self-consistent causal system, including but not exclusive of our own universe and its particular set of properties and behaviors.

The daemon of the 2nd Law is the daemon of stochastic – is 2nd Law dictated dissipation (entropy) statistical, or is statistics simply a tool we use in the absence of microscopic knowledge? Asked another way, is the reduction in the quality of energy or information that the 2nd Law demands of every action, a property of the universe or is it a property of the measurement or observation of the universe? Is action equivalent to measurement? Is there a measurement or stochastic class of action free of the entropy-increase demanded by the 2nd Law?

This question is of far greater consequence to the universe and the understanding of the universe than the mechanics of mass as it would describe and thus parameterize ALL action and ALL configuration and the precipitation or evolution of all possible action and configuration. Where the existence of the Higgs Boson may explain the source of mass and gravity in this universe, an understanding of the causal attributes leading to the behavior described by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics might just provide a foundation from which any and all causal systems must precipitate.

The implications and issues orbiting this problem are many and deep. At stake is an demonstrative understanding of change itself. We tend to think of change as exception. But, can a thing exist without change? If not, what is the difference between data and computation, between thing and abstraction of thing, and profoundly, an answer to the question, can data exist without computation? Can thing exist outside of abstraction of thing?

In thermodynamics and information theory, an effort is made to distinguish process and stochastic process. Heat is defined as an aggregate property describing the average or holistic state of systems composed so many interacting parts to keep track of all of them individually. Heat is a calculous of sorts, a system of shortcuts that allows mathematics to be employed successfully to determine the gross state of a huge collection of similar parts. There is a tendency then to assume that the laws that describe heat are laws that only apply to aggregate systems where knowledge is incomplete.

Are there non-stochastic systems? Are there discrete systems or dynamic changes within systems for which the laws of thermodynamics don't apply? Does the Causal Entropic Principle apply if you know and can observe every attribute of, and calculate the exact and complete state of a dynamic system?

Such questions are more involved than they may seem on first reading. Answering them will expose the very nature of change, independent of domain, illuminating the causal chain that has resulted from full evolutionary lineage of the universe.

Randall Lee Reetz

Note: The Causal Entropic Principle isn't a complex concept. It is the simple application of the 2nd Law's demand for increased universal entropy as a result of every change in any system. It says that every action in every system must be that action that causes the largest reduction in the quality of information or energy (the greatest dissipation). It says that a universe has only one possible end state – heat death – and that processes that maximize the rate towards this end state will be evolutionarily favored (selected), simply because entropy-maximizing processes and structures demand a higher throughput of energy and thus end up dominating their respective locality. Such entropy-maximizing schemes are thus more likely to determine the structure and behavior of the event cone stretching off into the future. An obvious extension of this principle is that complexity, or more precisely, the family of complexity that can find, record, and process abstractions that represent the salient aspects (physics) of the (an) universe, will help that complexity better predict the shape and behavior it must assume to maximize its competitive influence upon the future of entropy maximization. The "Causal Entropic Principle" thus represents a logically self-consistant (scientific) replacement for the awkwardly self-centered and causally impossible "anthropomorphic principle" (which lacks a physical or causal explanation and leans heavily on painfully erroneous macroscopic stretching of the quantum electro dynamics). Stretching circular logic to its most obvious and illogical end, the anthropomorphic principle borrows awkwardly and erroneously and ironically form the Heisenberg / Uncertainty Principle by asserting the necessity of "observers" as a precursor to the emergence of complexity. The Causal Entropic Principle explains the production of localized complexity without the need for prior-knowledge, and does so within the bounds of, as a result of, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, by showing that localized complexity can both come into existence as a result of the constant increase in universal entropy, and more specifically, that localized complexity has an evolutionary advantage, and will thus out-compete, less complex structures. In a Causal Entropic Principle universe, intelligence is the expected evolutionary result of competition to reach heat death faster. Falling down is enhanced by a particular class of complexity that can come into existence as a natural result of things falling down. Should one form of such complexity "understand" the universe better than another form, it will have an advantage and will be more likely to influence the shape of complexity in the future. The better a system gets at abstracting the dynamics of its environment the more likely it will be able to eat other systems than be eaten by them. Where the anthropomorphic principle requires an a-priori "observer", the causal entropic principle simply requires the 2nd Law's demand for increased entropy, for things falling down.

The Problem with Darwin…

Ya… how would you look as Darwin?

Darwin Darwin Darwin. Darwin is a problem. It isn't that he was wrong. In fact, it is very very hard to find any kind of mistake in his theory or his supporting data and arguments. What makes Darwin problematic is his myopic assignment of the process of evolution to the domain of biology. In doing so, Darwin has (inadvertently) misled generations of readers, who now confuse biology's "how" in evolution with big "E" Evolution in all domains. Big "E" Evolution is informative because it describes the more general "why" driving the direction of change in ALL domains.

When understood as a "how", the process of evolution is reduced to orrery – like the awkward clockworks that spin planets and moons around concentric bearings – substituting method where there should be cause. How is always specific to domain, but why, the ultimate why, is general enough to explain all of the how's. Armed with a robust understanding of the big WHY of evolution, one should be able to walk into any domain and predict and then map it's how. Again, it isn't that Darwin's evolution orrery doesn't accurately predict biological patterns of change, or even that Darwin's evolution orrery doesn't accurately abstract the salient causal aspects of biological change, it is that Darwin's how of evolution in biology leads people to the idea that evolution is specific and exclusive to biology, or that one can understand evolution in other domains by overlaying biology's how.

Darwin never generalized the process of evolution. Imagine had Newton and Einstein had not generalized dynamics and motion and that we had, as a result, built all of our machines on the principle that motion was caused by legs and feet.

The people who have come the closest to the generalization of evolution, the thermodynamisists, have never been able to or interested in the development of a generalization of the direction of change and the cause of that direction. I will get back to this absence of generalization in the understanding of evolution but right now will only hint at an explanation… in the aftermath of the all too human race and cultural superiority wars and atrocities, it has been socially dangerous to think of evolution as having a direction as such thoughts can be read as rhetorical arguments for superiority and pre-judgement, the likes of which were used by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and others as justification for mass exterminations and other exclusionary policies. That humans have the proclivity to exploit incomplete knowledge in the pursuit of ridiculous selfishness at absurd scales should be nothing new or noteworthy. But no one would advocate the cessation of the study of chemistry simply because arsenic is a chemical, or the study of high energy physics simply because the atom bomb can be built from such knowledge.

Or would we? Cautionary reactions to the self-superior pogroms that so blighted the 20th century have driven several generations of researchers towards the relativist rhetoric we see most prominently in the post-modernist movement, but which is evident in the works of less irrational and otherwise, empirical scientists like Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins. Both represent an interesting study in overcompensation. In their quest to irradiate the all-to-natural self-superiority that seems to cause humans to erect unfounded tautologies that place humans on top of pre-destined hierarchies, both argue and argue brilliantly, for a flat evolutionary environment in which change happens but without any directionality at all. Again, this is like saying that because metal can be shaped into swards and knives and guns it shouldn't be produced even should we need plows and trains and dynamos and bridges and buildings and printing presses and lab equipment and computers.

Of course, caution is its own form of rhetoric, as potentially dangerous as its more obviously tyrannous cousins.

And, yes! Evolution has a direction. There I said it! Say it with me. You won't be struck down by post-modernist lightning. Trust me. Trust your self. It is more than a little absurd that one would have to argue for direction in a process that explains directionality. They are of course correct in their assertion that evolution isn't pre-determined. Nothing is. Of course. But the "brilliance" of evolution is that it results in a direction without need for prior knowledge, plan, or determination of any kind. To toss this most salient aspect of the evolutionary process simply to make a sociological point seems reckless in the maximum.

Randall Lee Reetz

Causalism

Though I have been writing about "causality" for years, I continued to label myself an atheist.  I really thought the label fit, but that was before I attended to a few atheism events and talks and found that atheists are not, as I had understood, interested in rational thought.  The atheists I have met are simply and aggressively apposed to religion.  They have an axe to grind, are pathologically obsessed with, focused upon, and have a general need to work bad juju against – religion.  The single minded obsessive combativeness exhibited by the atheists that I have met, seems, well, in a word – religious.

Of course I will take responsibility for my mistake, my assumption, it is right there in the word:  "atheist", a-theist, anti-theist, against theism.  And though I am not a believer, my disinterest in belief does not define my self or my thoughts or more specifically, the way I choose to think things through.  Nobody who likes the color red describes this preference as anti-green.

The word "causality" describes a world view in which every system exists as a hierarchy of cause and effect.  Even though dictionaries don't yet list the word – a "causalist" is a person who "believes" that all structure and action is the result of physical causality.  That describes my way of thinking perfectly.    

I am a causalist!

There, I said it.  It is now a word.  That is what makes the english language so dynamic and alive.  If you need a word.  Go out and build one.  In this case, anyone who understands the word causal will immediately understand the word causalist.  'Wish I could say the same of my spell checker.

I believe that the universe is what it is and acts like it acts solely as a result of physical properties and the way these properties are effected by and effect each-other.  No back doors.  No end-arounds.  No special cases.  No miracles.  No exceptions.  No preferential treatment.  Simple.  Expectable.  Demonstrable.  Regular.  I believe that thoughts are built of atoms, not the other way around.  That atoms and their properties effect thought but that thoughts can't effect the basic fundamental properties of atoms.

Causality is a description of a system as a hierarchy of the things that influence it.  Causality strongly implies an asymmetry between cause and effect.  A causal system is a system in which some parts and attributes have more influence over the shape and behavior of that system than do others (which are more effect).

A causalist assumes that all systems exist as the result of a history and that this history defines a linearity of construction – first this happened, then this, and finally this.  A causalist assumes that this history of a system, exposes a hierarchy of the energies that were required to built it.  The most energetic processes shaped the earliest subsystems, and the most recent additions were laid down in much less energetic environments.  This makes for stable structures – strongly associated foundations upon which more delicate subsystems are layered.

And, low and behold, when we pick systems apart, we always find this hierarchical strata of causally deposited layers.  Always!  No exceptions have ever been found.

The other key aspect to the causalist's cosmology is the fact that earlier systems are more similar and systems added later are more diverse.  This means that everything shares and is built upon the same past. So no matter if you have gills or feathers, hands or tentacles, eyes or echo-location – you will all be built of cells and these cells, muscle or neuron, blood cell or phagocyte will all be made of atoms and these atoms helium or hydrogen, led or plutonium will always be made of protons, neutrons and electrons, etc. etc.

A world or universe built up from ever more shared and similar parts is a universe that can be known.  It is a stable universe that has expectable patterns that exist within the boundaries of limits defined by their own causally stacked history.  Everything shares the same history.  Everything is built of the same history.  Though the present may look diverse and confusing, further inquiry will always reveal patterns and similarities at base, shared by everything.  Exceptions and difference is always an aspect of the surface or most recent manifestations of evolution.  The base gets more and more similar the deeper or further back you look.

This regularity is exactly why spiritualists and the religious have always been apposed to science and the causal view of reality.  It doesn't allow exceptions.  You can't win the race cause you prayed longer or to the right god.  You can only win the race if you have the physicality and the emotional drive to run harder than everyone else.  There are no exceptions.  There are no special cases.  There is no favoritism. There is no OZ pulling levers.  Nobody and no thing to assuage towards your interests.

We know that adding heat to a gas causes it to expand.  We know that compressing a gas causes it to get hotter.  We know the exact ratio between heat and pressure or volume.  With this ratio we can predict the exact changes that will result when we add energy or change the volume of a given amount of gas.  It always works the way the math says it should.  But of course the same can not be said for the spiritual arts.  In fact.  There has never been an event that has been shown to have been effected by prayer or thinking (no matter how concentrated, repeated, or "conscious").  Never once has the temperature of a gas or anything else been effected by anything spiritual or religious.  This is not just true of gasses and heat.  It is true of everything we can measure.  We know the entire electromagnetic spectrum.  We understand and have defined the parameters that show why this spectrum is bounded on both the cold and the energetic end.  We know how gravity is effected by energy, time and distance.  We know how quanta effect other quanta.  And in no system, caused by no dynamics, have we ever encountered any behavior that can not be explained by simple causality of the things effecting those systems.

It is easy to see why causality would disturb the anxious.  There is no way to play a causal system.  No way to gain advantage.  No free lunch.  No favoritism.  No exceptions.  No para-normal.  No meta-physics.  No magic.  No luck.  Just the awesome beauty and incomprehensible complexity that can't help but happen in a universe this big and this full of energy and stuff with this much time summing into an almost infinite number interactions and the constructs can survive.  In a causal universe, you get fit by working out – not by chanting mantras.  You live longer by taking care of your body and your mind, not by praying for longevity.  You gain advantage in sports, business, romance, academia, and culture, by understanding the causal influences effecting these systems, not by sleeping under a pyramid or praying to a 10 armed blue goddess or a sandal wearing guy nailed to a couple of wood beams.  You gain knowledge through measurement and building theories that abstract the greatest domain of measurements – not by listening reverently to some guy in a robe who slickly explains away your loneliness and fear of death with a 24 voice choir and 60 foot pipe organ as backup.

It may in fact be true that the human brain has evolved into a configuration that demands religious and spiritual thoughts and that these thoughts can result in a better sense of well-being and that the resulting sense of inner peace gives rise to physical benefits, but this itself is a causal (if Byzantine) system.  But any causal assessment of the human penchant for religious and spiritual thought would certainly give it a low score for effectiveness and a high score for self-delusion.  Thoughts that make you feel better aren't necessarily the thoughts that increase your knowledge of yourself or the universe.  This rift between reality and what our minds would like reality to be is the single most dangerous side effect of evolving a great big layer of grey matter over the top of our lizard brain within.  It is important to remember that the lizard brain, an emotion-to-action processing center, is still very much in charge of everything we do.  This is non-negotiable.  It is true because of physical wiring, not philosophy.  Adding to a sober assessment of our scary neural architecture is the fact that the inner brain, the old brain, the brain in charge, isn't sophisticated enough to understand any of the wonderfully sophisticated products (reason, logic, abstract mapping, systems modeling) our more recently acquired layers are able to compute.  Be you Einstein or Leonardo, Shakespeare or Confucius, Newton or Feynman, your inner brain is still as dumb as a lizard, and it, unfortunately, is both blind to your brilliance, and directing the actions you take.

A causalist isn't as depressed by this seemingly hopeless understanding as one might expect.   A causalist just accepts reality and looks for solutions that work with and are informed by it.  If humans have great big thinking machines that are hard to hear above the ruckus and clatter of emotions, the challenge is to build cultural solutions that protect and automate higher order knowledge from the vagrancies of low level emotions.  The playing field shifts with this shift in perspectives.  Instead of looking for solutions within the arena of emotional thought (meditation, mood music, a harmonic convergence, global conciseness, etc.) the cuasalist, looks for solutions outside of the lizard brain, looks for solutions that accept the lizard brain but work to lessen its control over policy and society.  A causalist looks to the infrastructure.  A causalist has noticed that people act more constructive when their environment takes care of the simple needs of the lizard brain.  A causalist has noticed that clean running water at every faucet, enough food, reasonable shelter, and reliable stability make people with the same lizard brain end up acting more like their grey matter ideas and less like a lizard. No amount of prayer or philosophy or yoga will yield the same productivity improvements and cultural growth as a reliable and supportive infrastructure.

Take the time to look at the statistics that compare a culture's confidence in its infrastructure and its per labor hour productivity or its crime rate.  Then try to find a better predictor of a culture's ability to build towards greater and greater progress of knowledge and opportunity.  Confidence doesn't build an infrastructure, infrastructure builds confidence.  Those of us confident enough to see this hierarchy for what it is must work constantly and vigorously against the grain.  We must build the infrastructure that will produce in tomorrow's masses the confidence we are lucky enough to feel today.

It is way way way cheaper to run clean water and nutritious food into every home than it is to deal with the chaos that ALWAYS results when people must live with the fear of thirst and hunger.  Going to church for an hour a week isn't ever going to have the same effect on productivity and stability.  Even the religious would surely rather pray for more interesting and complex goals than a bowl of rice and clear water.

Accepting the weird irrationality of the human thinking and emotional system doesn't mean that you have to be irrational about your acceptance of it or how you choose to go about building towards a better future.

Randall Lee Reetz (a causalist!)

Just Where is the Computer that Computes the Universe? (Steven Wolfram's invisible rhetoric)

Do Black Holes warp the universe such that it is self-computable? Kurt Godel famously proved that a computer has to be larger than the problem being computed. This places seemingly fatal constraints on the size of the universe as a computation of itself. Saying as it has become popular to do, that the universe is just one of an infinite set of parallel universe doesn't solve the problem. Even infinities can not be said to be larger than themselves.



TED talk by Stephen Wolfram on the computable universe.

Is it possible that black holes work as Kline bottles for the whole Universe – stretching space-time back around onto itself? If so, it may be possible to circumvent Godel's causal constraints on the computability of the self, as well as the entropic leaking demanded by the second law of thermodynamics. I admit that these questions are not comfortable. They certainly don't result in the kind of ideas I like to entertain. They spawn ideas that seem to be built of need and not logic. They are jokes written to support a punch line.

But something has to give. Either Godel and Turing are wrong, or there is a part of our universe in which they don't apply. There is no other option. If there is a part of the universe not restricted by incompleteness than black holes are obvious candidates if for no other reason than we don't know much about them. I am at once embarrassed by the premise of this thought and excited to talk openly about what is probably the core hiccup in our scientific understanding of the universe. Any other suggestions? At the very least, this problem seems to point to (at least) five options; 1. a deeper understanding of causality will derive Godel and Turning from a deeper causal layer that also has room for super-computable problems. 2. Godel and Turing are dead wrong. 3. the universe is not at all what it seems to be, rendering all of physics mute, and 4. the universe is always in some real way, larger than itself, and 5. evolution IS the computation of the universe, it happens at the only pace allowable by causality, is an intractable program, and can not be altered or reduced, (event cones, the only barriers between parallel simultaneous execution).

I am challenged by the first option, find the second option empirically problematic, am rhetorically repulsed by the third, simply do not know what to do with the fourth, the fifth is where I place my bets but I don't fully understand the implications or the parameters. Personal affinities aside, we had better face the fact that our understanding of the universe is at odds with the universe itself. That we have a set of basic laws that contradict the existence of the universe as a whole is problematic at best. Disturbing.

One of the unknowns that haunt our effort to understand the universe as a system is the ongoing confusion between what we think of as "primary" reality on the one hand and "descriptive" reality on the other. Real or just apparent, it is a distinction that has motivated the clumsily explorations of the "Post-Modern" theoretical movement – it deserves better. I am not so romantic to believe that this dichotomy represents a real qualitative difference between the material and the abstract (made up as it is of the same "real" materials), but this confusion may indeed hint towards a sixth option that, once explained and understood, will obliterate the causal contradictions that have so confused our understanding of the largest of all questions. When a chunk of reality is used as abstraction signifying another part of reality or a part the same reality of which the abstraction is built, does that shift in vantage demand a new physics, a new set of evaluation semantics? What modifications does one have to perform to E = mC^2 when one is computing the physical nature of the equation itself? What new term is to be added to our most basic physical laws such that the causal and the representative can be brought into harmony?

My own view is that the universe, like all systems, like any system, is always in the only configuration it can be in at that time. Wow, that sounds Taoist and I absolutely hate it when attempts at rationality result in assessments that are so easily resonant with emotionally satisfying sentimentality (What the Bleep, and such). But the Second Law clearly points to a maxed out rate as the only possible reading of process at all scales. Computation of anything, including the whole of the universe, is always limping along at the maximum rate dictated by each current configuration. The rate of the process, of the computation, accelerates through time as complexities stack up into self optimized hierarchies of grammar, but the rate is, at each moment, absolutely maxed out.

Are these daft notions chasing silly abstraction-bounded issues or do they point to a real "new [and necessary] kind of science"?

OK, as usual, Mr. Wolfram has expansive dreams – awesomely audacious and attractively resonant notions. Though, from my own perspective, a perspective I will say is more sober and less rhetorical, there are some huge problems that beg to be exposed.

Wolfram's declares: the universe is, at base, computation. Wow, talk about putting the carriage before the horse. That the universe and everything in it is "computing" is hard to dispute. Everywhere there is a difference there will be computation. So long as there is more than one thing, there is a difference. But computation demands stuff. What we call computation is always at base a causal cascade attempting to level an energetic or configurational topology. If you want to call that cascade "computation", well I won't disagree. But no computation can happen unless the running of it diminishes to some extent an energy cline. Computation is slave to the larger more causal activity that is the dissipation of difference. That a universe will result in computation an entirely different assertion.

When Wolfram says that computation exists below the standard model causality that is matter and force, time and space, I am suspicious that he is seeking transcendence, a loophole, access by any means out of the confines of the strictures imposed by physical law. That he is smart and talented and prodigiously effective towards the accomplishment of complex and practical projects does not in itself mean that his musings are not fantastic or monstrous.

Let's play a thought experiment. Let's start from the assumption that Wolfram is correct, that the universe is at base pure computation. His book and this talk hint towards the idea that pure computation running through computational abstraction space, will eventually produce the causality of this universe… and many others. Testing the validity of this assertion is logically impossible. But what we can test is the logical validity of the notion that one could, from the confines of this finite universe, use computation to reach back down to the level of pure computation from which a universe can be made or described. At this level, Turing and Godel both present lock-tight logic showing how Wolfram's assertions are impossible.

In his own examples, Wolfram uses a mountain of human computational space built on billions of years of "computation" (evolution) and technological configurations to make his "simple" programs run. There is NOTHING simple about a program that took a mind like Wolfram's to build (stacked as it is on top of an almost bottomless mountain of causal filtering reaching back to the big bang (or before).

To cover for these logical breaches, Wolfram recites his "computational equivalence" mantra. This is a restating of Alan Turing's notion that a computable problem is computable on any so-called "Turing Complete" computer. But the Turing Machine concept does not contend with the causally important constraint that run-time places on a program. Of course there are non-computable problems. But even within the set of problems that a computer can run and run to completion, there are problems so large that they require billions of times longer to run than the full life cycle of the universe. Problems like these really aren't computable in any practical sense – causality being highly time and location sensitive (isn't that what "causality" means?).

And then there is the parallel processing issue, its potentials and its pitfalls. One might (a universe might), in the course of designing a system that will compute huge programs, decide to break them apart and run sections of the problem on separate machines. Isn't that what nature has done? But there are constraints here as well. Some problems can not be broken apart at all. Some that can, break apart into an unwieldy network constrained by time sensitive links dependent upon fast, wide, and accurate communication channels. if program A needs the result of program B before it can initiate program C but program A only is only relevant for one year and program B takes 2 years to run?

A large percentage of the set of all potential programs, though theoretically run-able on Turing Machines, are not practically run-able given the finite timescales and computational material resource availability. If there is a layer of causality below this universe, and that layer is made of much smaller and much more abundant stuff, than it is conceivable that Godel's strictures on the size of a computer won't conflict with the notion that this Universe could be an example of a Turning Complete computer capable of running the universe as a program.

But Wolfram doesn't stop there. In addition to asserting that a universe is the result of a computation, he says that we humans (and, or, our technology), will be able to write a small program that perfectly computes the universe and that it will be so simple (both as a program and presumably to write it) that we will be able to run it on almost any minimal computer. His cites as example, "rule 30", the fractal equation variation that seems to produce endless variety along an algorithmic theme, as evidence that this universe describing meta-program, is as easy to discover. One has to ask: "Would the running of such a program bud off another universe, or is Wolfram's assertion intentionally restrained to abstraction space?" Given the boldness of his declaration that the universe is a computation, it is reasonable to assume that his statements regarding the discovery of a program that computes a universe is meant in the literal sense. Surely he can talk to the issue of abstraction space vs. causal space, the advantages and constraints of each, and how programs use this difference to compute different types of problems. If he does, he doesn't reveal this understanding to his audience. The distinction between abstraction and causality is slippery and central to the concept of computation.

I am convinced that Stephen Wolfram is so lost in the emotional motivations that push him towards his "computable universe" rhetoric that none of his considerable powers of intellect can save him from the fact that he didn't get the evolution memo. Evolution IS the computation. If it could happen any faster it would have. If he is simply saying that our new understanding of computation will increase the rate and reach of evolution, well then I agree. But if he is saying that our first awkward steps into computation reveal enough of the unknown to expose the God program, the program that will complete all other programs (in a decade), well I can only say that he is nuts.

Stephen is a smart guy. The fact that a mind so capable can overlook, even actively avoid the simple logic that shows terminal flaws in his thesis is yet another reminder of the danger that is hubris. That he never talks to his own motivations, or the potential fallacies upon which his theory depends should be worrisome to anyone listening. I suspect that, like religion, his rhetoric so closely parallels the general human rhetoric, that it will be a rare person who can look behind the curtains and find these logical inconsistencies (no matter how obvious).

I applaud Mr. Wolfram's work. The world is richer as a result. But none of his programming should be taken as guarantee that his theory, at the level of a computational universe is sound.

Randall Reetz

How Engineers Get Thermodynamics And Information Theory All Wrong

There is probably no other area of higher education where what is taught is so out of step with what is in fact valid. Engineering programs the world over, in the interest of simplicity and practicality, teach thermodynamics and information theory towards practicality and real-world solutions. What could be wrong with that? What is the negative side of practicality?

Well, usually, nothing. In most cases, cutting corners doesn't invert the causal bedrock upon which engineering is based. The field equations used to abstract relativity, do not usurp or demand a reformulation of E=mC^2. Neither do feynman diagrams mess with or disrupt an accurate understanding of quantum electro-dynamics. But in thermodynamics and information theory, the practical methods taught and used by engineers are based on assumptions that have resulted in an almost universal and wholesale misunderstanding of the base meaning and the causality that animates the bedrock of energy and information dynamics.

In thermodynamics, the problem is probably best described by the idea of "the perfect wall". To cut corners, engineers are taught arithmetic tricks that work in the usual atmospherically-dense and energy-conductive environments in which human's live. Unfortunately, these computational short-cuts do far more then introduce the usual errors of computational fidelity, they actually reverse the meaning of thermodynamics as a science. Thermodynamics as a science is about the way systems interact with the systems they are embedded within. But more than that, thermodynamics asserts the absolute necessity and inevitability of interaction and transference of energy that will result from ANY change within or without a system.

It should therefore be obvious that the teaching and use of practical methods that sidestep the central tenet of a field of science will have an unusually strong an adverse effect on the understanding of that science. Whole generations of engineers are being unleashed into the world with an absolutely backwards understanding of the very dynamic that universally informs all other dynamics. This is more than unfortunate. The growing population of scientists and engineers that march forward from universities with a backwards understanding of thermodynamics interferes with progress in all fields of science.

Same can be said of thermodynamics' sister, information theory. Because everything we do is increasingly keyed to progress in computation, the miss-map between the causal truths that inform information theory and the practical methods taught in their stead, may potentially have a much larger and deleterious impact on our potential as a species.

Where thermodynamics dictates the way energy leaks across the spacial dimensions, information theory dictates how information leaks across time. Purists will say that energy and information are equivalent. Ultimately, this is true. So when energy is measured in its more general form, as information, as bits, then information theory also dictates the lossy transfer of energy across time.

Because the two disciplines show how no system exists independent of other systems, we must concern ourselves with how systems are related through this leaking of energy and information. What can be said absolutely about the way information and energy set up directional relationships between systems with regard to space and time?

The Butterfly Effect; Isn't

In the none academic world, causality suffers a different abuse altogether. It is tempting for people to take notions of system interconnectedness to ridiculous and self-defeating extremes. We loose ground when the perfectly valid logic showing why a system can never act in isolation is illogically extrapolated to, "All systems effect all other systems equally". Making exceptions for speed of light (event cone) isolation, it can indeed be shown that all gravitational systems effect all other gravitational systems… the movement of a butterfly in South America will indeed effect (however infinitesimally) a dam in Montana. But if one were to rank, by degree of effect, all of the systems effecting the gravity fields surrounding a dam in Montana, a butterfly in Argentina would be very very low on the list. Even if one is butterfly obsessed, wants to ignore the one dog on the corner who has more mass than all of the butterfly's in the rocky mountains, there are tens of millions of butterflies closer, each of whom's infinitesimal gravitational pull would none the less have a larger causal effect on our poor dam's future.

This particularly populist breed of cause-and-effect miss-mappings is not the focus of my essay. As wacky as pedestrian notions become, they probably can't significantly derail scientific progress to any great degree. But when entire generations of science students are raised on incorrect understandings of basic science, we are all in trouble. This is especially devastating when the topic of delusion is as fundamental to the causal stack as is thermodynamics, energy and information.

"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

What determines the causal morphology and behavior of the hierarchy of influence (dictated by thermodynamics and information theory)? If we define the shape of causality we define process itself, and by extension, the shape of reality.

Information Theory specifies ways to measure the capacity of a storage matrix and the reliability of a communication channel. But all of it's metrics are agnostic to the meaning encoded and transmitted. Each bit and each bit pattern are treated as equal. Only frequency and order, not meaning, not saliency, not fidelity of representation.

What would you have to fold into or add to information theory and thermodynamics in order to measure meaning and saliency? Is it there already? Are we missing something in our approach to and use of an already semantically robust set of laws and equations?

Several years ago, the mathematician Stephen Wolfram (founder of the maths software "Mathematica") wrote a book called "A New Kind Of Science". It is a dense and repetitive work over twelve hundred pages long. I tried to get through it and gave up. Feels like a giant fractal, built of some obscure philosophy based on fractals. Not feeling OK with my initial critique, I forced myself to come up with a theory, any theory, that said or not, I could attribute to his work. The best I could do was to suppose that Wolfram was trying to say that science had historically used equations to understand the components of nature that could be accurately described by equations, but the really interesting things about nature were iterative, and open ended, they required logical descriptions that required continuous computation. To bad he couldn't have just said that.

At about the same time, the social biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote a book called "Consilience". He argued for a cross-discipline coming-together of the various branches of scientific exploration, a holism, for the advantages of looking at nature (and those who study it) as the one large and interdependent super-system it is.

Of course dynamic, ever changing, "evolving" systems are systems simple equations (calculated once) will never accurately represent. Traditional thermodynamics and information theory engineering maths and methods work best on simple systems that are or can be thought of as repetitive and isolated. The conditions (input energy, output work) might change, but the conditions of the conditions never do. At any sufficiently salient level, real systems are never that well behaved or that removed from their environments or situations.

Real systems are direction of time dependent. It is more than ironic that the one scientific law that defines exactly why causal systems are non-reversible is used primarily by engineers who choose to use it in ways that ignore the direction of time it demands. I can forgive newtonian or relativistic or quantum physicists for ignoring the asymmetry of time… their maths don't require it. But thermodynamicists? Information theorists?

[more to come…]

Randall Reetz