Many physicists and computer scientists, from John Wheeler to Google Deepmind's Demis Hassabis, have argued that reality is fundamentally made of information. Wheeler called this "it from bit". But this is mistaken, argues Boston University physicist and philosopher of science, Gregg Jaeger. Information supposes a relation between the information itself and its physical encoding. Reality cannot be made of information, because without already existing physical objects to encode it, information does not exist. 

Is the universe made of bits of information? Physicist John Wheeler took this radical idea extremely seriously. His interest in it can be traced at least as far back as his time as a post-doctoral scientist in Copenhagen under one of the founders of quantum theory, Niels Bohr. Wheeler supported Bohr’s view of quantum events and later summarized it with the statement “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.’’ Bohr emphasized that the conditions of an object’s measurement not only offer experimental questions but also make a difference as to what is found upon quantum measurement. Wheeler advanced this perspective throughout his career, arguing that phenomena also have an essential informational aspect: the elementary quantum phenomenon “has a pure yes-no character—one bit of meaning.” Noting that what happens in an individual, non-trivial measurement is not predetermined, Wheeler supposed that the observed object itself is the information gained when a quantum state is measured for. He expressed this idea by the phrase: “It from bit’’. Here, I will argue against this idea because, according to well-confirmed physics and cognitive psychology, all observational information is acquired from the properties of existing physical objects, however indeterminate those measured properties may be beforehand.

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Wheeler supported Bohr’s view of quantum events and later summarized it with the statement “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.’’

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Wheeler’s “Meaning Circuit”

Wheeler had already begun wrangling with quantum phenomena when he joined the Manhattan Project, where his project colleague John von Neumann worked out the algorithmic theory of classical computers, long before there was any notion of the quantum computer or computer networking. But by the end of the 1970s, after the first substantial computer network (ARPAnet) had been established (in 1969), Wheeler had formulated the idea that the universe is a “meaning circuit”, a “system self-synthesized by quantum networking”. Wheeler’s “networking” is the communication of data by observers whom he calls “quantum participators” because their observations, which he calls the “iron posts” of reality, are the basis of further experimentation and scientific theorizing. This “meaning circuit’’ is of two sides, one of meaning and information and another of physics and engineering, and is supposed to give rise progressively to existence itself. Given that knowledge of objects increases with experience, it might appear that Wheeler has done well by having conceived of this Meaning Circuit.

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