Last week I unveiled Swarm Theory, my practical theory of everything which I intended to “build in public” in the hopes of reconnecting mind, matter, life, technology, everything into a coherent framework accessible to anyone of ordinary intelligence. It’s not a replacement for religion or ideology. Not a retreat to older frameworks, but an attempt at a new path forward that integrates with those belief-systems which used to give our lives meaning.
The Core Axiom
Reality is constructed by nested swarms of information processing nodes.
While creating information theory to solve the problem of noiseless communication, Claude Shannon discovered that information and physical reality share the same underlying structure. It was not a coincidence that it was study of communication that would lead to arguably the deepest insight in human history.
The Year Matter Disappeared
The year is 1909. Life expectancy is 47 years. Only one in seven homes has electricity. There are 130,000 horses in Manhattan alone—and fewer than 200,000 cars in all of America. The world population is 1.7 billion. World War I is five years away, and most physicists ascribe to the “plum pudding” model of the atom; blobs of positive charge with electrons scattered through it like raisins in pudding.
In a laboratory at the University of Manchester, Ernest Rutherford (widely regarded as the father of nuclear physics) is being shown what he would later call, “the most incredible event of [his] life.” One of his students is showing him the result of an experiment that would go on to disrupt all of theoretical physics.
The student was shooting “alpha particles” at a thin sheet of gold foil expecting them to pass through the “plum pudding” relatively unaffected. But that’s not what happened. Every once and a while, the particles would bounce back. As Rutherford would later explain, it was as if “you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”
The implication was a tectonic shift in our understanding of the building blocks of reality. Atoms were not solid, precisely the opposite, they were almost entirely empty space...
The Prodigy
Two years later, the same year Rutherford published his results, John Archibald Wheeler was born. 21 years after that Wheeler received his PhD from Johns Hopkins. Eight years after that he was collaborating with Niels Bohr to explain nuclear fission. He would go on to popularize the terms “black hole,” “wormhole,” and “It from bit.” He worked on the Manhattan Project and single-handedly revived Einstein’s Relativity after WWII. He was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal, the Enrico Fermi Award, the National Medal of Science, and more.
Wheeler not only deeply understood theoretical physics, he applied that understanding to a degree few have. And in 1989, at 78, he summed up all of that knowledge and experience into one paper: Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links.
After a lifetime of thinking about the nature of reality at the highest level (and the lowest), he was able to boil down his revolutionary world model to just three words: It from bit.
It from Bit
But what do those words mean? The answer lies in a cryptic paragraph from that same paper:
“Revolution in outlook though Kepler, Newton, and Einstein brought us, and still more startling the story of life that evolution forced upon an unwilling world, the ultimate shock to preconceived ideas lies ahead, be it a decade hence, a century or a millennium.”
“It from Bit” has seen a renewed surge in interest due to Simulation Theory, the Holographic Principle, and a general evolution in academic thought toward a more information-theoretical view of reality. Information theory is now being applied in neurobiology, perception, linguistics, biology, philosophy, epistemology, and more. It’s almost as if the idea is infecting every discipline. The applications of information theory (computer hardware and software) have arguably been even more pervasive and disruptive. Technology companies now account for a larger share of the global economy than any other industry. The “FAANG” companies alone (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) are worth more than the GDP of the entire United States.
But this was exactly what Wheeler predicted would happen “a decade hence, a century or a millennium.” In that paragraph he is saying that the revolutions ushered in by the world’s greatest astronomers, physicists, and biologists were mere precursors to the upcoming revolution—the information revolution. Not just “the internet.” The very idea;
“… that every item of the physical world has at bottom ... an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”
It may sound like a leap to assume that the physical world is “immaterial, " but it wasn’t. It was the result of an entire lifetime grappling with the discovery Rutherford published the year Wheeler was born. He said as much himself;
“Rutherford and Bohr showed that a solid table is 99.9% empty space—yet it’s still solid. Reality might be built on something that seems like nothing.”
Rutherford’s experiment opened a frontier that would take a century to explore. The harder they looked “inside” the atom, the more it seemed to disappear. They even found that prior to observing a particle, it exists only as a “wave function.” A probability cloud that “collapses” into a particle only when observed.
The closer you look inside matter, the more that matter disappears leaving what appears to be nothing. That was the challenge Wheeler had spent his life working on and the answer he came up with was that there was, in fact, nothing material there--just information.
The Participatory Universe
But what is information and how does it “add up” to the reality we observe? I find that Wheeler’s most inaccessible paragraphs often contain the deepest insights. At one point he retells the story of imprisoned nuclear physicists in Stalinist Russia who would work with their fellow prisoners to craft their forced confessions. They would all collaborate to minimize how many others were implicated.
“Existence as confession? Myopic but in some ways illuminating formulation of the demand for intercommunication implicit in the theme of it from bit!”
His point is that information only exists once it is communicated and, as such, that is the moment that reality comes into existence.
In Sum
It was Wheeler’s view that at the bottom of reality lies an immaterial source which we make material by creating and communicating information or, processing information.
But how do we get from that to the complex reality we observe? How do we get from that incredibly low level to our level? How does information organize itself into the rich, layered, complex reality we experience?
Nice to see this latest post on Swarm Theory and It from Bit. I like how you set up the history of how Wheeler formulated It From Bit from his lifetime of studying Physics. Looking forward to the next chapter in this series!
Thanks!
That's quite the brain wrecker, but super interesting for me. I'll have to read the first article then, I had it on my read list but forgot. This one made me quite interested.
If I understand correctly, the answer that Wheeler would give to "If a tree falls and nobody is there to listen, does it make a sound?" Would be 'no, since nobody is there to process the information. There is the potential of that information (sound), but since nobody is there to receive the information, it never becomes existent'. Is that more or less right? I'm sorry if I dumb it down too much 😅
Oh, and I believe that N stands for Nvidia, not Netflix. Yet.
Thanks for reading and I appreciate the thoughtful comment! Believe it or not the N is for Netflix, not Nvidia. Believe it or not, Nvidia only surpassed Netflix's market cap 5 years ago (after the term was invented).
Regarding the tree in the woods. The only way you can know if there is a tree in the woods is if someone was there to observe it. The same goes for it falling. If nobody is there to observe a tree falling then there is no way to say it has fallen. But I think the deeper point is that the tree is just a higher level expression of an underlying reality that information-based. You see a tree, but when you look at the atoms that make up that tree you find mostly empty space. So what is a tree and what does it mean for it to fall if it is mostly empty space? I think the key takeaway which has been well articulated by Donald Hoffman is that the objects we perceive as real are more like representations on a computer screen or virtual reality headset. They are how we evolved to interact with reality, but that doesn't mean they are actually real. They are representations of reality in our minds.