Processes and variety maximization#
“It’s a theory about processes, about the sequences and causal relations among things that happen, not the inherent properties of things that are. The fundamental ingredient is what we call an “event.” Events are things that happen at a single place and time; at each event there’s some momentum, energy, charge or other various physical quantity that’s measurable. The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re taking the universe as constituted of relations among events. The idea is to try to reformulate physics in terms of these views from the inside, what it looks like from inside the universe.”
“There are many views, and each one has only partial information about the rest of the universe. We propose as a principle of dynamics that each view should be unique. That idea comes from Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Two events whose views are exactly mappable onto each other are the same event, by definition. So each view is unique, and you can measure how distinct one is from another by defining a quantity called the “variety.” If you think of a node on a graph, you can go one step out, two steps out, three steps out. Each step gives you a neighborhood — the one-step neighborhood, the two-step neighborhood, the three-step neighborhood. So for any two events you can ask: How many steps do you have to go out until their views diverge? In what neighborhood are they different? The fewer steps you have to go, the more distinguishable the views are from one another. The idea in this theory is that the laws of physics — the dynamics of the system — work to maximize variety. That principle — that nature wants to maximize variety — actually leads, within the framework I’ve been describing, to the Schrödinger equation, and hence to a recovery, in an appropriate limit, of quantum mechanics.” - Les Smolin