A theory of everything must explain all phenomenon and how everything relates to each other. By its definition,
that it is about everything it can not be reduced to only explaining phenomenon
in one discipline. This article argues that understanding information will lead
us to a theory of everything.
Is it possible to understand to explain all phenomenon?
All phenomenon is not just particles, atoms, and physics, all phenomenon must
include the housefly, human beings, otherwise it can never be a theory of
everything. Everything is everything, you can not limit it. The wonders of the
internet is that information is not far away, going to dictionary.com, the
definition of everything is “everything or particular of an
aggregate or total; all.” Given this
definition, can any concept fulfill this role or is the concept to big.
A theory of everything must explain what is common to
everything, if it does not then we are giving a grand title to a concept that
is misleading because it does not explain everything. What is everything? How
do we know something, how do we know a thing? We know a thing because we have
investigated it, or simply because we have by some means come into contact with
it. How do we come into contact with this thing, we could be walking and we
bump into it, a different kind of soil, a different kind of shrub or plant?
Without even investigating we have bumped into something new.
We therefore know things because they essentially tell us
what they are, a red stone tells us it is different from the white stones, it
does not even have to speak, but it tells us it is different. Even with the
familiar, when we get into our living rooms, we know that is a television, that
is a chair, that is a fridge, that is food inside the fridge, everything tells
us what it is, everything informs us of what it is, everything is information.
Everything is information because everything informs us of its nature and
characteristics even at the most basic level. Everything is therefore
information, a theory of everything must deal with this concept of information,
it must speak the language of information.
For philosophy’s sake, philosophers like to argue which
is good, it improves our arguments, but one could argue that information is a
human construct, that information comes from the thing, and not the thing from
information, after all the stars and galaxies existed long before humans came
into existence. This seems like a valid argument at first but completely falls
apart because the fact is that those very laws of existence, the very laws that
created the sun billions of years ago deemed fit to create human beings a few
hundred thousand years ago. That means if human beings did not exist right now,
the laws of the universe would be different, if life did not exist the laws of
the universe would be very different because the fact that life and human
beings have evolved in the galaxy means that the laws deemed that if such and
such happens, billions of years later you will get life. Human beings can not
ever be taken out of the equation because it would be a totally different
universe, it might not have gravity, or the electromagnetic spectrum.
Life and humans are part and parcel of everything, you
can not have a theory of everything without including life, then it is not the
theory of everything but something else. That thing one talks of is merely
information to a human being and to a large extent of life. A snake knows it
must catch a mouse, it does not do it by instinct it hunts mice and rats. Therefore,
a snake itself everything is merely information, it knows it can eat this and
it can not eat that. This idea that only humans can think is a Western idea
coming from the believe that only humans have a soul and this idea has been
culturally placed into science, figure that out. Grizzly bears understand the
patterns of their surroundings, they know when the salmon is coming, they have
learnt how to hunt. Even crocodiles who are not taught how to hunt understand
they must eat what is living, they don’t eat rocks by instinct.
We are humans, we are what could be considered an
advanced life form built on the same structure of life as plants, genes. To a
human, that thing is information, it informs us of its nature, the sun informs
us it is a star, not a planet, a gnat or a television. A human being informs us
that this is a human being, not a star, or leopard, or a galaxy. Everything is
information, everything informs us about itself in many ways besides physical
nature, location, speed, these are all part of information, differentiating
information, even when it seems similar, for example no two electrons are the
same, they occupy two different locations, just as no two humans or viruses are
the same. You cannot study something and pretend you are not there, you will by
principle miss the whole picture.
To say you want to study something as if humans don’t
exist, why not study something as if nothing exists, the laws of the universe
still operate in a vacuum, if you pour matter into a vacuum it will behave
according to the laws, so at the end of the day one can say even the
information is not important, the thing is not important, only the laws are,
but the thing is there, the humans are there.
What is Common to
all Information
A theory of everything must unite what is familiar to
everything, what is familiar to information. A core similarity of information
is that all information comes in packages from the smallest piece of
information, the most basic of particles, to the largest information packages
in the universe, galaxies, and everything in-between. That includes stars,
planets, humans, asteroids, viruses.
All information is discrete, that means a thing is a
whole, dividing it would mean it is no longer that thing but something else.
How do we know a thing is a thing? We know because
information can be isolated. Looking at a dinner table, we know that this is a
table, this table cloth, that a plate, and these utensils. There is a galaxy, it
can be isolated to individual solar systems, to planets, to the elements that
are the composition of those planets. The elements can be isolated to atomic
structure, that can be isolated to sub atomic particles. Thus a galaxy can be
isolated from the galaxy itself to the sub atomic particles.
As information is discrete and can be isolated, this is
what allows us to learn. If information could not be isolated, how could it
ever be possible to learn, we would not be able to tell the difference between
a table and the utensils. We would not be able to learn this is iron and this
is gold, all information would be just a continuous muddle. Luckily this is not
the way things are, otherwise learning would be impossible, one would have to
know everything or nothing at all. That is why we need to be careful of those
who want to take the human out of the picture and say what if, there is no what
if, they have never asked themselves how do they know what they know, as if
televisions occur in nature without human beings, it’s because information can
be isolated and with the isolation exploited. Things can be isolated from other
things.
People do not learn in the same manner, one can learn
addition first up to 10 + 10 = 20, or one could learn addition first up to 5 +
5 = 10, and then learn subtraction, 5 – 3 = 2. This points to another crucial
factor of information, all information is independent, it exists because of the
laws of the universe, a thing is because it has been deemed to be so by the
laws of the universe, because of its nature. This allows discoveries to be made
by taking different paths, there is no set path, what is important is that
information is extracted, this extracted information becomes an individuals or
societies knowledge base.
If this quality of a thing being what it is was not true,
this quality of independence, all societies would have to behave in the same
manner to progress, every society would continuously have to reinvent the wheel
to progress, this is obviously not so.
A not so obvious feature of information is that all
information can be used to compute. I first learnt of this whilst listening to
a discussion on youtube entitled “The Physics of Information: From Entanglement
to Black Holes” featuring four Western scientists Leonard Susskind, Sir Anthony
Leggett, Christopher Fuchs, Seth Lloyd, and Bob McDonald, a good video out of
many that agree that information is everything.
Everything can be used to compute, you can use an abacus,
you can use galaxies, you can use cows, pastoral societies in Southern Africa, Shepherd
learnt to count by counting cows, whilst ancient far East people used an
abacus, today we use electrons in microchips, but you can use bottles of beers
even though it will be might tedious. If life did not exist would it be
possible to use everything for computing, in that sterile world, what is going
to find it necessary to compute, but life exists, you can never wish it away,
it will end when the laws of the universe say it is time to end because of whatever
factors that shall arise, but the factors that arise can not break any laws of
information.
Relationships and
Information
How is it that information can be isolated, what is it
being isolated from? Information when talking in the physical sense is isolated
from other information, it is isolated from a relationship. Everything is
related to something, atoms, particles, lions, humans, trees, stars, planets,
everything is related to something. It takes energy to have a relationship. All
relationships involve a loss of freedom; all relationships take energy to
sustain them. Can we truly put down a physical law, that is the law, all
relationships take energy to maintain? How else can one possibly put this?
The first law of information, the first law of everything is that every relationship has a loss of freedom. We can put it at
it’s most crude as every relationship has a cost.
It is how we think, if we think as things being separated
it will be difficult to see, accepting this simple reality, that all
relationships are a commitment therefore involve a loss of freedom and take
energy our whole perspective changes. This affects all information, and
information in reality will be found in a relation with other information. All
elements involve the relationship between electrons, protons and neutrons. It
takes energy for this commitment to be maintained, and all the participants,
the electron, proton, and neutron have loss of freedom and must give energy for
this relationship.
Difficult to comprehend, a man meets a woman in a
library, they fall in love and get married, a relationship takes place, both
parties must give something to the relationship. This something is in terms of
energy. Time that could have been used for another activity is now used to maintain
the relationship.
Why are we talking of energy, because energy is what
allows things to transform into something else. That same single woman is
transformed when she enters a relationship, she is now married. But energy is
also what allows things to do things. That single man when he is married in the
strictest sense should not have relationships outside that arrangement,
relationships that are meant to be between a man and a woman, there are
restrictions.
A theory of everything therefore must accept the fact
that all relationships in the universe restrict freedom, any relationship
results in an increase in complexity. What is complexity? There really is no
clear definition one will find even on the world wide web. We can think of
complexity as a package made up of dissimilar information. Thus an atom is more
complex than its constituents. The more variables involved, the more complex.
Take a human being and a star. A human is far more complex than a sun, a sun is
just a big ball of hydrogen, one element. A human on the other hand is a hydro
carbon that also needs various minerals like zinc, iron, potassium to survive,
a human is highly complex. The earth is far more complex than a star.
The more complex means several relationships between
information take place, each stage resulting in more and more energy and less
and less stability. A human even in mythological biblical times lived for a
mere 800 years, a star can burn for billions of years, it is less complex, a
proton which is even less complex will be around for 2 x 1029 years,
that is a very very long time, nobody knows how that is calculated.
This ratio of the amount of energy that holds the system
together, and there is still energy left for transformation, once we get that,
we will understand the universe better as we will know how much energy is used
up each time there is a relationship. These ratios have to be there, our best
bet is to find them in computer simulations, why? Because everything is
information, the ratios should be there, a computer simulates information, once
we understand those ratios, even computer simulations will be better as we will
purposely put this information in algorithms. This is another idea, needs
working.
A theory of everything comes from accepting everything is
information and therefore will not come from one discipline, if it only comes
from physics, it then negates all other disciplines, if it comes from
chemistry, what about biology they are also dealing with understanding
information, what about psychology or zoology, they are all dealing with
information, it is a comprehensive term, a theory of everything.
Our Everyday Lives
Humans are social animals, we survive and thrive on
relationships. It is therefore important to be aware of how relationships work,
all relationships are the same. Take a simple metal bar, heat it up, we have a
relationship, the excess energy is lost as heat, light and other phenomenon of
the electromagnetic spectrum as the two systems combine in this relationship.
The electromagnetic spectrum is a fancy word for different types of radiation,
light is radiation. What happens when 2 corporations come together in a merger,
there is excess energy, people get laid off as the two systems get into a
relationship. This in physics is known as the conservation of energy. A system
can not deal with more energy than it needs. Having got rid of this energy what
is left is energy that binds the system, but there is still more potential for
mergers, this potential is the free energy of the system.
When we consider trade deals we need to consider how
relationships will be affected, this disregard for how relationships occur has
to be a major factor why people are now rejecting trade deals. This is nothing
against trade deals but we need to understand things before just jumping in,
understanding relationships will allow people to ask, is this relationship
beneficial to a large number of the society or only a few, if not, they are
immoral, human lives must come down to what is moral or not. But to answer the
question is something moral we need to understand the process, and when dealing
with humans, or any relationship we must understand information and what is
common to all information.
If relationships are not handled properly, we are asking
for chaos, we are asking for bloodshed, why should people who are cheated
accept the status quo. Society should be such that all can achieve maximum
potential in the relationship with each other understanding that we are all
human beings. If we had understood 20 years ago that everything is just
information, these trade deals would have been less troublesome today than they
are, this is a major global problem of our times, haste and lack of knowledge
has caused massive social upheavals, giving us demagogues and nationalists
everywhere.
We are all dealing with information, all research is
about extracting information, be one a sociologist, an engineer, a physicist, a
chemist, a vet, an economist, all research is dealing with understanding the
relationships between information, no need for anybody to be arrogant towards
others, all information basically behaves the same. Knowledge is just
information that we know, we probably know less than we think, hopefully we do
at least understand a theory of everything can not logically be reduced to one
discipline, then it is not a theory of everything, a theory of everything has
to encompass all disciplines by its very definition that it is dealing with
everything.
Bhekuzulu Khumalo
This was added two weeks after original article on 9 November 2017, it is a comment from Google +, it is worth sharing.
This was added two weeks after original article on 9 November 2017, it is a comment from Google +, it is worth sharing.
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