Matter as Information — the Foundation of Science and Technologies of Life
Everything our mind deals with is information. Information can take the form of images. Images of material objects are very different from images of immaterial ones. One could even say they obey different laws, but both still remain information.
Classical physics, like many other sciences that followed its example, studies images of material objects as if they were matter but not information. This approach has proven very productive. It also fits well with our everyday perception of the world around us as a collection of material objects interacting with each other in various ways.
The culmination of the viewpoint that information behaves as matter was information theory, which holds that immaterial objects obey the same laws as material ones.
However, all attempts to apply this approach to the world of atoms and elementary particles were unsuccessful. Quantum mechanics changed this approach. First, Werner Heisenberg, with his matrix mechanics, completely uncoupled information from matter. For him, working with pure information made it possible to predict observations of matter. Erwin Schrödinger’s wave mechanics partially restored the coupling, but now matter behaved as information but not information as matter.
Paul Dirac captured the essence of this reversal very well, recognizing the reality of negative energy and negative probabilities and constructing a hypothetical world based on them that enabled predicting observations of matter and even helped to predict the existence of antimatter. Dirac didn’t align quantum mechanics with special relativity, but rather translated a small portion of relativity theory into the language of quantum mechanics, according to which matter behaves as information, and not vice versa, as it was in Einstein’s approach.
For this reason quantum information theory has no future. It couples two diametrically opposed approaches. The result is not a complementarity but an annihilation of them. The combination of two potent theories turns out to be weaker than either one is taken separately.
Free energy principle and active inference theory, when applied consistently, are based on the approach to matter as if it were information. Karl Friston brilliantly envisaged that understanding how our mind works modelling information as if it were matter is as impossible as predicting the behavior of elementary particles with such an approach. This aligns his theories with the original quantum mechanics and, at the same time, diminishes their potential when coupling them with theories based on the information-as-matter approach.
The information-as-matter approach is the science of dead matter, which leads to the creation of technologies of death. The matter-as-information approach is the science of living consciousness. Technologies of life will be createdIt on its basis.
