The it from bit (or qbit) hypothesis is fascinating, so is the information paradox, so is quantum mechanics, but I don’t think there is any empirical nor theoretical evidence supporting “awareness”—what may it be—of the universe in any of this. No more than evidence supporting god(s) or a flying spaghetti monster. Creating a narrative does not constitute evidence (edit : even if gedankenexperiments are valuable). We are free to speculate, and it is very respectable, however an extraordinary affirmation needs an equally extraordinary amount of proof and I think we are really far from it. We are actually struggling to understand if, how and why humans have consciousness, not speaking of animals and LLMs. Let’s solve these cases before we speak of the awareness of rocks or the whole universe.
Some people.think that an information ontology must be some sort of idealist ontology because they think of information as a mental thing. But you can ponens/tolens that: inasmuch as physics can deal with information, it’s not something that exists in only minds.
I think what gives you this idea in the double slit experiment is that depending on how you observe or measure the object, it seems to exhibit different behavior. How is this possible? Isn’t it mysterious? To resolve this mystery, you appeal to an explanation like awareness. But although it feels like an explanation, it actually explains nothing. Putting a word on something is reassuring, but behind the word we’re not sure what we’re talking about—we don’t know how it’s supposed to function; there is no actual explanation. It purports to explain everything, thus explains nothing. You don’t know how it works and can’t make any predictions. It’s just as mysterious as the initial mystery itself (just like explanations implying gods or other supernatural causes).
Sometimes mystery must remain. But in this case, that needn’t be so. The initial mystery may not be such a mystery after all. An observation or measurement implies an interaction with the measured/observed object. The double slit experiment involves a protocol that interacts with the observed object and constrains its behavior, thus producing different outputs when you slightly change the protocol and the interaction. The same applies to all measurement/observation—it is never absolutely neutral. So if the rock behaves slightly differently when you’re around observing it, this is fundamentally no different from the reason why the rock moves if you push it. It doesn’t imply that the rock is aware of anything, unless by “awareness” you simply mean “physical interaction.”
The it from bit (or qbit) hypothesis is fascinating, so is the information paradox, so is quantum mechanics, but I don’t think there is any empirical nor theoretical evidence supporting “awareness”—what may it be—of the universe in any of this. No more than evidence supporting god(s) or a flying spaghetti monster. Creating a narrative does not constitute evidence (edit : even if gedankenexperiments are valuable). We are free to speculate, and it is very respectable, however an extraordinary affirmation needs an equally extraordinary amount of proof and I think we are really far from it. We are actually struggling to understand if, how and why humans have consciousness, not speaking of animals and LLMs. Let’s solve these cases before we speak of the awareness of rocks or the whole universe.
Some people.think that an information ontology must be some sort of idealist ontology because they think of information as a mental thing. But you can ponens/tolens that: inasmuch as physics can deal with information, it’s not something that exists in only minds.
I think what gives you this idea in the double slit experiment is that depending on how you observe or measure the object, it seems to exhibit different behavior. How is this possible? Isn’t it mysterious? To resolve this mystery, you appeal to an explanation like awareness. But although it feels like an explanation, it actually explains nothing. Putting a word on something is reassuring, but behind the word we’re not sure what we’re talking about—we don’t know how it’s supposed to function; there is no actual explanation. It purports to explain everything, thus explains nothing. You don’t know how it works and can’t make any predictions. It’s just as mysterious as the initial mystery itself (just like explanations implying gods or other supernatural causes).
Sometimes mystery must remain. But in this case, that needn’t be so. The initial mystery may not be such a mystery after all. An observation or measurement implies an interaction with the measured/observed object. The double slit experiment involves a protocol that interacts with the observed object and constrains its behavior, thus producing different outputs when you slightly change the protocol and the interaction. The same applies to all measurement/observation—it is never absolutely neutral. So if the rock behaves slightly differently when you’re around observing it, this is fundamentally no different from the reason why the rock moves if you push it. It doesn’t imply that the rock is aware of anything, unless by “awareness” you simply mean “physical interaction.”