“It From Bit”… What About God?

• How come existence?
• How come the quantum?
• How come “one world” out of many observer-participants?”loc.cit. p.310

 Wheeler’s answer to the first question is

“…every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices…, bits.” ibid.

That statement seems to be implicitly based on a physicalist view of reality — that only those things measured or tied to a physical picture of the world are real. What about all those important things that can never be quantified as a binary choice?  

I’ll mention just three in which degree, rather than “yes” or “no” enter as qualifiers:  love, faith, happiness. You, dear reader, please supply some others.

Wheeler gives three examples to support the claim that information theory — “it from bit” — is a foundation for quantum theory:

• The Wootters-Zurek demonstration that the photon can not be split, can not be cloned;
• The Aharanov-Bohm experiment in which a magnetic field, negligible in the neighborhood of an electron, nevertheless affects its trajectory;
• The Beckenstein entropy of dark holes, in which the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the area encircled by its horizon, and thus contains (lost?) information.

The “no laws” assertion denies that the universe is a machine built on law, a machine that would entail a multiverse, “universes in infinite variety and infinite number”. Rather, Wheeler envisions a “world self-synthesized”:

“…the notes struck out on a piano by the observer-participants of all places and all times, bits though they are, in and by themselves constitute the great wide world of space and time and things.” loc.cit, p. 314

The “world self-synthesized” by “observer-participants of all places and all times” is, presumably, the answer or part of the answer to the third question above. But more questions are raised than answered here.  

Would an annelid worm, an eagle, and a human synthesize the same world, or is it only “intelligent beings”? If the last, what about the world synthesized by a Cro-Magnon man, an Australian aborigine, and Helen Keller?  I don’t see a coherent scheme here.

But I do have a different answer–see below.

By stating there is “no continuum”, Wheeler denies the reality of transcendental and irrational numbers. He uses quotes from the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the philosopher Willard Quine. to support that claim. One should also note that the “no continuum” condition requires that space and time must be discrete (but see below).

Wheeler’s “no space, no time” condition is perhaps the most unappealing intuitively. He claims that space and time are man-made inventions, and that at the beginning of the universe, “The Big Bang”, quantum behavior would override General Relativity — there would be no connectivity in space and before and after would have no meaning.

The Five Clues

“I shall assume as a basic principle that the universe we live in bears witness to the Creator who created it  [emphasis added]…let us generalize Berkeley’s philosophical principle to a ‘neo-Berkeleyan point of view’ in which God is the Observer of the universe, in the quantum sense of ‘observer’. This generalization starts from small systems…in which an observer created reality is seen to occur upon every elementary act of observation, and ends up with large systems–in particular with the entire universe.

In this viewpoint, every elementary, individual quantum event…is a result of a creative act of the universal Observer, in which all properties of all particles come into existence on their observation, in continual acts of creatio ex nihilo, which constitutes a kind of creatio continua  occurring everywhere at once. Thus the existence of the universe itself is contingent upon the continual observations of the Creator. The idea of contingency of existence, in the sense of the utter dependency of the universe for its properties and existence at each moment upon its Creator, is thereby introduced via quantum physics into philosophy and theology…

…Furthermore, this viewpoint suggests a new meaning of the immanence  of the Creator with respect to creation, since God is acting everywhere at once in the universe. Thus God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent…The neo-Berkeleyan viewpoint introduced here suggests not only a continual creatio ex nihilo qua creatio continua by an immanent Creator, but also a singular creatio ex nihilo by a transcendent Creator.

Moreover, the above Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effects imply a quantum non-separability, which ties together the universe non-locally as a whole. This reminds one of the words of the Apostle John,’All things come into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being that has being’ (John I:3) and of the words of the Apostle Paul,’All things have been created through him and for him…and to him all things hold together.’ (Colossians I:16,17)…We infer that ‘all things’ refers to the universe.  Not only are all distant parts the universe woven together throughout space, but also its future and its past are entangled throughout time, as if the universe were one seamless garment.” (Raymond Chiao, “Quantum Non-Localities: Experimental Evidence” in Quantum Mechanics–Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, V.5**)

So, to summarize: the Anglican theologian Bishop George Berkeley gave us the dictum, “esse est percipi”–to be is to be perceived, which we can invert: percipi est esse. In this Wheeler’s Participatory Universe stands, but it is God who is the participating observer. And to reinforce this point, what could be better than Monsignor Ronald Knox’s limerick about Berkeleyan idealism:

“There was a young man who said, ‘God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there’s no one about in the Quad.’

REPLY–

‘Dear Sir:

Your astonishment’s odd:

I am always about in the Quad.

And that’s why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by

Yours faithfully,

GOD.’ “

NOTES