Transcript of the Video:
Richard Feynman a famous 20th century physicist had a way of gaining an original perspective using the example of ants and martians, he would ask himself the question how would ants – or martians, view a specific concept – thinking outside the norms and perspectives of human condition we are able to imagine a vantage point that attempts to remove human subjectivity with pure abstract thoughts or what Feynman describes an esoteric thought process.
I asked myself the same question once regarding the substance of reality, except I did not use ants or martians but instead I imagined abstract sentient beings that exist in another universe or plane of existence. I imagined these beings having the ability to observe and study our universe – its the ultimate thinking outside the box analogy.
Since these beings exist outside our universe they are not affected by our universe’s forces of nature – like the concept of space and time – for them space and time are simply dimensions to view our universe. They are able to view and examine any point in space at any time during the course of our universe – for them our universe is like a DVD containing a movie, they are able to watch the movie at any point they wish – skipping forward and rewinding is no different then examining a different location.
We on the other hand are sentient beings existing inside our universe, we are like the movie characters on the DVD movie, we experience the passing of time because we are part of the movie script which defines time – time for us has a meaning and we are able to experience it – but to outsiders time is simply another dimension to view our universe, a dimension that describes the process of what we experience that of change, after all if nothing ever changed in our universe time would become meaningless and this dimension would be flattened.
Let us imagine now how these beings are able to examine our universe, are they using some advanced probes and scanners? or perhaps even they’re using they’re own senses. Let’s think about for a second what is happening here, there is an observer, a method of observing which captures some perspective about the thing that is being observed and then it is transferred to the observer to interpret. Well this is exactly how we currently experience our existence – your consciousness is the observer – the sensory organs that collect streaming information about our environment include touch, smell, sight, taste, and hearing – this information is then filtered and compacted so our brain can make sense of it and interpret it. Suppose for a moment that all your senses including your sense of touch, the sense of smell, the sense of sight, the sense of taste, and the sense of sound would all the sudden cease to send information to the brain, can you even begin to comprehend how this would feel like? what would you think about in that state? – I imagine in that state there is only pure thought, no distractions no environment, the universe as we know it does not exist – your complete universe is your thoughts and your consciousness, like you are floating in pure void with no concept of measurement or observation or physicality.
As you can see the intermediary between our senses and our brain is the passing of information. So it appears the only medium by which the observer (whether inside our universe or outside) is able to sense and interpret is information. So isn’t it that far fetched to assume that simply everything that can ever exist and will ever exist inside our universe and any possible universe is pure abstract information at its essence?
So what exactly is information? what is the essence and form of information? If I give you a piece of information what have you gained? how different would you be if you didn’t have this information. The essence of information has one distinctive fundamental property as it seems – it collapses possibilities and increases entropy or the degree of disorder in a system. If you look outside your window to check how the weather is you are gaining information, you are collapsing all the possibilities of weather conditions into one specific one – your model view of the world is a more specific one now, as before your view of the weather was a wild-card – all possibilities were possible, you do not need information to describe the all inclusive case of all possibilities. Its like existing in a universe where only numbers exist, and then I give you a number that can equal to any number – I have not given you any information, I have not collapsed or even reduced the wave function of possibilities.
So perhaps it seems that underneath it all there is only information and the relentless change of information (or the emergent computation) that we experience during the course of a lifetime. As radical or profound this may seem it is quite simple and elegant. We have a chance to embrace and champion information, and use everything we know about information to realign our existence to become truly something extraordinary and magnificent in this spectacle we call the universe.
