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On Fuzzy Thinking.
[note: The prior article, "Aristotle, Fuzzy Logic, and The Urantia Book" introduces the reader to Fuzzy Logic.]
In the previous issue of Innerface we reviewed the work of David Bohm on quantum theory. Bohm believed that the Schrodinger wave function really determines a quantum potential representing active information which gives form to the motion of particles moving under their own energy. Physicist John Bell is the well known originator of Bell's theorem, a 'break-through' step that provided the basis for empirical testing of non-local effects at the quantum level. Bell stated that Bohm's papers (1952) were a revelation that helped him grasp the implications of quantum theory. In a recent review, David Albert said that Bohm's theory accounts for all the unfathomable-looking behaviors of electrons every bit as well as the Copenhagen interpretation (Bohr). Moreover it is free of any of the metaphysical perplexities associated with quantum-mechanical superposition.
How can a wave supply the information to guide particle behavior ? The Urantia Book has these words: "The interelectronic space of an atom is not empty. Throughout an atom this interelectronic space is activated by wavelike manifestations which are perfectly synchronized with electronic velocity and ultimatonic revolutions." (478) A strange statement indeed compared with 1935 thinking about Schrodinger's wave function.
It is interesting that Bart Kosko, whose expertise is in computer logic, mathematics and electrical engineering should come up with this comment: "The universe is information. Something like a computer chip. I think that someday we will find that energy connects with information. There may be information waves or particles or infotons. Information may be quantized in smart little infinitesimal particles like Liebniz's monads." Kosko's book has a very extensive bibliography but no mention anywhere of Bohm. Presumably he came to his conclusions independently of Bohm. Impressed by the power of mathematics to reveal and predict reality, in the final chapter of his book Kosko writes:
The more we look at nature, the more information we see in the structure. The structure is the information. Our DNA is just genetic information made flesh. The neural networks in our brain and spine code and store information. Our cultures and economies are just stores and flows of information. In the 1940's Claude Shannon at Bell Labs found the first "laws" of pure information theory. The world seems to obey them. The entropy of thermodynamics is the same as the entropy of abstract information theory. What we call a "pattern"--a face or a star or a galactic cluster--tends to be a local point of maximum information or minimum entropy. In 1957 physicist E.T. Jaynes at Stanford showed that the basic math law of statistical quantum mechanics (the Gibbs probability distribution) follows from maximizing the entropy of information theory.
What we seem to be glimpsing is information. Now fuzzy logic, fuzzy maths, fuzzy physics and fuzzy machine intelligence are taking us further. We can replace probability and relative frequency with the subsethood of fuzzy logic. We can turn loose ever bigger neural nets and computers and linked neuro-computer networks to see more math and find more structure and gain more information. And this will be only the start.
That raises the next question: Is God information? That may not be as strange as it sounds. We have made Him just about everything else: love, power, mind, energy, nature, maximum probability. But I don't think God as information is right or even makes sense. The universe is information. The physical structure is information. The universe is to God as the eye is to sight.
I think God has to do with how science tracks math when it does not have to. There I think we recognize Something we cannot define. We recognize a blueprint. Or Blueprint. With each new math insight and each new fuzzy fact we estimate a blueprint or math structure. This may all change in the next second. The science bush may stop tracking the math bush. Fact may stop tracking logic. But suppose it does not. Suppose science keeps tracking math for humdreds or thousands or millions or billions of years. The blueprint hypothesis will grow in fuzzy truth. The Pythagorean theorem and all the other theorems will still give orders and we will still take them. The sense of shadow, the glimpses, the pattern we recognize but cannot define, will pass into clear view: There may be no God but the Mathmaker, and Science is His Prophet.
God is He who wrote the math. Or She who wrote the math. Or It that wrote the math. or the Nothingness that wrote the math. The Mathmaker.
Reference
Kosko, B. (1993) "Fuzzy Thinking" (HarperCollins, London)
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