In one of the more recent active exchanges in the thread Naturalistic Spirituality & Increasing Complexity, Split from Ken Wilber thread, the discussion of reality as being a self-perpetuating sel-organizing pattern of increasing complexity, brought many interesting comments on the possiblity of the existence of 'god' and the nature of reality itself.
In this article from the July issue of Scientific American I was pleased by the synchronicity presented to me by the presence of an article which dealt with two kinds of entropy. The one described by the classical Second Law of Thermodynamics (the disorder in a physical system) and another kind of measure of disorder or perhaps more appropriately, order, in an information system, called Shannon entropy after the mathematician who formulated it in 1948.
Though certainly no physicist, I found the article to be a provocative glimpse at how changing perspectives are giving way to a new way of thinking about the nature of reality.
From the beginning of the article some thoughts which echo those given in the above thread..
Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told "matter and energy."
Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell's nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.
and from the conclusion...
Holography may be a guide to a better theory. What is the fundamental theory like? The chain of reasoning involving holography suggests to some, notably Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, that such a final theory must be concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather with information exchange among physical processes. If so, the vision of information as the stuff the world is made of will have found a worthy embodiment.
go here...Information in the Holographic Universe... to get all the good stuff in between.
As an afterthought... doesn't this all sound suspiciously like a modern movie plot?
More afterthoughts... If we are just projections from another universe with different physical laws and dimensions, where did that universe come from and can our own holographically projected universe form the basis of another further on... 'further on' of course probably being meaningless in this case. Can we ascertain the fundamental informational pattern from which our universe is derived and manipulate the pattern/change the code and thus alter reality? What brings our reality into being and serves as the energy source for the 'holographic projection' of our universe?
hmmmmm.....
Edited by kperrott, 30 July 2003 - 02:59 AM.
