Intelligent Re-Design

Intelligent Design is one of those memes that have infected physics blogs and produced amazing amounts of cognitive noise. What surprises me that theoretical colleagues so often argue at single bit (good/bad) level without attempt to a real analysis. Lubos Motl discusses the issue more analytically in his recent posting Distasteful Universe and Rube Goldberg Machines ID and the option of Susskind that no-one can blame for intelligence.

Lubos characterizes the options in the following manner.

1. The theory that God has skillfully engineered our world, or has carefully chosen the place for His creation among very many possibilities.

2. The theory that there are uncontrollably many possibilities and "ours" is where we live simply because most of the other possibilities don't admit life like ours.

There is also a third option besides these two. This option might be called Intelligent ReDesign: briefly IRD. This option is rather democratic and does not leave all responsibilities for God: every conscious entity redesigns universe in time and length scales characteristic for it. IRD is also consistent with the laws of physics unlike ID.

Quantum consciousness briefly

IRD has developed from the need to resolve the paradoxes of quantum measurement theory and is behind TGD inspired theory of consciousness.

In TGD framework the arena of quantum dynamics is the "world of classical worlds" understood as the space of certain 4-D space-time surfaces in certain 8-D imbedding space. These surfaces are analogous to Bohr orbits and their classical dynamics obeys certain variational principle which is not completely deterministic if determinism is understood in the conventional sense of the word. This makes space-time dynamics capable of providing classical correlate for quantum non-determinism and intentionality. This is necessary if one wants to speak of re-design assuming quantum- classical correspondence.

Quantum states are superpositions of classical worlds. Simplifying unashamedly, the building brick of conscious experience is moment of consciousness and is identifiable as a recreation of the Universe in quantum jump replacing the quantum state of the Universe by a new one. Self is second basic notion: using equally unashamed over-simplification, self is to quantum jump what molecule is to atoms meaning that sequences of quantum jumps can integrate to selves.

Self hierarchy corresponds very closely to the hierarchy of bound states having the entire universe at the top: if one wishes, one can call this highest level self God. There are selves below us and above us, each of them being able to perform IRD in the length and time scale characterizing the self.

This picture conforms with the determinism of physical laws since the non-determinism of quantum jumps does not interfere classical space-time dynamics nor the quantal "Shroedinger" dynamics in the world of classical worlds. Non-determinism is in the quantum jump replacing deterministic world with a new deterministic world and thus outside the space-time and state space. Fractal "Quantum God" is like a theoretician hopping around in the space of solutions of field equations.

NMP makes RD IRD

What makes RD IRD is that this process is governed by a variational principle guaranteing evolution: quantum jump by quantum jump quantum universe becomes more complex and more information rich. Negentropy Maximation Principle states that the information contents of conscious experience is maximized.

The notion of information is needed in order to speak about intelligence

In order to speak about intelligence one must have a notion of information. Ordinary Shannon entropy is not very useful in this respect. However, for rational (algebraic) probabilities the Shannon entropies defined by replacing the arguments of logarithms with their p-adic norms, is well-defined and can be negative, and there is always a prime p for which negentropy is maximal. This prime characterizes the state.

Positive information is associated with rational (more generally) algebraic bound state entanglement: this conforms with the idea that rationals (algebraic numbers) correspond to islands of order in the chaotic sea defined by the continuum of reals. The interpretation is that the positive information is due to the conscious comparison of the entangled state pairs.

Genetic code as application of new concept of information

This information measure has applications also outside consciousness theory. For some time ago I constructed a model reproducing correctly genetic code from the maximization of the net information of the code using the above information measure. Integers 0,..,63 label DNA triplets and since the number of the numbers 0,1 together with primes smaller than 64 is 20 it is natural to identify code as a map assigning to codons 0,1 aminoacids 0,1 and to the codon n>1 the prime p(n) which maximizes the negentropy of n in the thermodynamics for the partitions of n. Which by the way can be interpreted in terms of breaking of conformal or Kac-Moody symmetry when n is interpreted as a conformal weight. This leads to ideas about quantum physics behind the genetic code.

Matti Pitkanen