The Macrodynamics of Digital Excitation

Masakazu Shoji

Masakazu Shoji

Vladimir S. Lerner, Malcolm Dean

Vladimir Lerner’s Information Macrodynamic (IMD) formalism is the first full application of John Archibald Wheeler’s “It from Bit” approach to physical Information processes. The IMD formalism accounts for the evolution of Information physics from quantum to classical regimes, showing how intelligence and Wheeler’s Observer-Participator are naturally emergent. Distinct from “digital physics” or simple coding-decoding schemes, the IMD formalism presents a continuous step-by-step physics of natural Information processes, from the first distinction to the emergence of the self-aware Information Observer.

D. Grischkowsky

Michael te Vrugt

Abstract Explaining the emergence of stochastic irreversible macroscopic dynamics from time-reversible deterministic microscopic dynamics is one of the key problems in philosophy of physics. The Mori-Zwanzig (MZ) projection operator formalism, which is one of the most important methods of modern nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, allows for a systematic derivation of irreversible transport equations from reversible microdynamics and thus provides a useful framework for understanding this issue. However, discussions of the MZ formalism in philosophy of physics tend to focus on simple variants rather than on the more sophisticated ones used in modern physical research. In this work, I will close this gap by studying the problems of probability and irreversibility using the example of Grabert’s time-dependent projection operator formalism. This allows to better understand how general proposals for understanding probability in statistical mechanics, namely (a) quantum approaches and (b) almost-objective probabilities, can be accomodated in the MZ formalism. Moreover, I will provide a detailed physical analysis, based on the MZ formalism, of various proposals from the philosophical literature, such as (a) Robertson’s theory of justifying coarse-graining via autonomous macrodynamics, (b) Myrvold’s problem of explaining autonomous macrodynamics, and (c) Wallace’s simple dynamical conjecture.