Abstract
The Meaning Circuit Hypothesis (MCH) is a synthesis of ideas providing John Wheeler’s outline of ultimate physics, which he fine-tuned over several decades from the 1970s onward. It is a ‘working hypothesis’ in which ‘existence is a ‘meaning circuit”’ that portrays the world as a “system self-synthesized by quantum networking.” It was strongly advocated by him for roughly two decades and since then has had an increasingly strong impact on the approach of many investigators of quantum theory [1,2,3]; in particular, elements such as the quantum participator and ‘it from bit’ are now considered by others as candidate components of a foundation for quantum theory in which information is involved essentially; cf., e.g., [4,5,6]. Therefore, it is worthy of review and critique.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper is written on the occasion of the 60th birthday of Andrei Khrennikov, whose scientific life has included the service to the international physics community of organizing and running a continuous series of similarly interdisciplinary yearly conferences on the foundations of quantum theory that has spanned two decades, held in Växjö, Sweden, not far from Copenhagen, Denmark where Wheeler carried out his own postdoctoral studies with Niels Bohr. The Växjö quantum foundations conference series, which began with the new millennium, has been singular in its openness to a broad range of intellectual perspectives ranging from mathematical physics to the philosophy and history of science, all of which relate to this analysis and its fostering connections between quantum information studies and the foundations of quantum theory. It has been a privilege to participate in these meetings during which, as it turns out, my own work has run much of the gamut of areas touched on by the ideas of Wheeler’s synthesis.
- 2.
The “It from bit” slogan has been since been taken up by others, for example, Jeffrey Bub arguing “assuming the information-theoretic constraints are in fact satisfied in our world, no mechanical theory of quantum phenomena that includes an account of measurement interactions can be acceptable, and the appropriate aim of physics at the fundamental level then becomes the representation and manipulation of information” [12, 13], something extreme in that most physicists accord with the view of John Bell that measurement should be understood as just another physical process—most processes having nothing obvious to do with information—despite the quantum-mechanical measurement problem; cf. [14].
- 3.
This is in direct opposition to the position held by many physicists, for example, John von Neumann, that physical theories are required to accommodate a physical correlate to subjective perception according to the principle of psycho-physical parallelism: “it is a fundamental requirement of the scientific viewpoint—the so-called principle of psycho-physical parallelism—that it must be possible to describe the extraphysical process of the subjective perception as if it were in reality in the physical world—i.e., to assign to it parts equivalent physical processes in the objective environment, in ordinary space” ([20], pp. 418–419).
- 4.
As he was later to describe this, in the mid-1980s, one finds “an unbelievable maze of light-like connections running backward and forward in time. Nevertheless, when the number of particles is sufficiently great to guarantee absorption of all radiation, the maze translates itself into the familiar full-strength pure retarded electromagnetic interactions, plus the familiar radiative reaction. No contradiction with everyday notions of causality is to be seen. No less has to be expected of an information-theoretic account of physics;” [22], p. 31.
- 5.
One should take care not to accept this statement of Wheeler as a correct understanding of the views of Bohr and Heisenberg themselves, which often differ from those of their interpreters like Wheeler; cf., e.g. [25].
- 6.
Indeed, Wheeler repeatedly admits that it is precisely the nature of cognition located in the meaning circuit which is inadequately understood, as shown below.
- 7.
And this would be so even if he were understood to considering primarily cognitive.
- 8.
The event horizon of the black hole is implicitly considered here identical with the area.
- 9.
Again, however, this is as a matter of fact dependent on the circumstances of preparation and encoding/decoding assumed and would be rather at most one bit.
- 10.
It is noteworthy that Wheeler’s views in the 1990s which brought quantum potentiality into consideration, appear to recognize this.
- 11.
It is noteworthy that photons are special in that the have minimal self-interaction and are able to travel exceptionally long distances without disturbance, unlike ordinary matter composed of electromagnetically charged particles such as electrons and protons.
- 12.
For an analysis of the associated complementarity relation cf., e.g., [32].
- 13.
Broader conclusions aside, what this example does clearly illustrate is that complementary properties are complementary, that is, the more definite is one the less definite is the other.
- 14.
Less dramatically, one can imagine the distant, future detection event at the far side of the rectangle involved to “determine” what happened at the first beamsplitter. However, such retrodiction is not sanctioned by standard quantum mechanics and, notably, it is suggestive of a species of retro-causality in that it suggests that what takes place in quantum measurement determines what has already happened in its past.
- 15.
And, as seen in Sect. 3 above, Wheeler was ultimately to back away from any necessary role for consciousness in measurement itself.
- 16.
Wheeler makes use of the term reality in his writings without provide a fixed definition, but he does refer his readers to books of Bernard d’Espagnat for “a survey of many sides of the quantum principle as one knows it today” and “what one already knows from quantum mechanics” about its central notions such as non-separability [18], p. 599; d’Espagnat discusses the relationship of physics to existence and summarizes it a way consistent with Wheeler’s usage of the term. In his In Search of Reality, d’Espagnat writes “As regards physics, it seems quite clear that its present stage of development is sufficient to justify considering it to be the universal natural science—a science of that very ‘nature’ that, apparently at least, it seems appropriate to identify with reality. Even though this latter view should be corrected to some extent...it is certainly quite a good working assumption” [40], p. 2. As shown here in previous sections, various statements by Wheeler suggest that his view of the realm of science as reducible to physics, albeit one which is psycho-physical.
- 17.
The manner in which this understood to take place is discussed in Sect. 3 above. Note that it would have been far less controversial for Wheeler to have written “...definer of physics” or “...definer of our physical world view” rather than “...definer of reality”, but it appears that the goal of the MCH is exactly to transcend traditional physics to provide a basis for all of existence so far as it is empirically knowable. Nonetheless, Wheeler also argued that the central role played by the community of observer-participators precludes solipsism, as discussed Sect. 5.2 below.
- 18.
“The past is not really the past until it has been measured. Or put another way, the past has no meaning or existence unless it exists in a record in the present” ([7], pp. 67–68).
- 19.
As one commentator on Wheeler’s model in relation to biology put it, “Wheeler’s dictum, as applied to the biological realm should therefore read more as ‘it from bit from it’, where lower of levels of matter dictate the informational state of a system which then in turn dictates its future evolution” ([38], p. 264).
- 20.
The reduction of classical physics to quantum physics has proven problematic and has not been accomplished, if it ever will be; cf., e.g. [39].
- 21.
Regarding the meaning of “macroscopic” here, see [44].
- 22.
This is much like an example from Hilary Putnam: For a key to be understood, there is no need to have a ultimate fine-grained, physical explanation of its actions in the opening of a lock, because its geometry and, I would add its impenetrability, suffice to understand its propriety and ability to function.
- 23.
Consider, for example, Heisenberg’s position regarding elementary particles: “Because particle number is not conserved in high-energy interactions it may be meaningless to ask about the constituent parts of elementary particles; perhaps the central question is dynamics” [45]. There are other reasons besides lack of particle-number conservation per se for holding this that are also evident in the results of quantum field theory, including “virtual-particle clouds” [46].
- 24.
Others have recently continued pushing on with ways of continuing the meaning circuit program beyond physics proper; cf., e.g., [47].
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Jaeger, G. (2023). On Wheeler’s Quantum Circuit. In: Plotnitsky, A., Haven, E. (eds) The Quantum-Like Revolution. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12986-5_2
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