John Wheeler and Marshall McLuhan

Jul 01, 2023

A single question animates this report: Can we ever expect to understand existence? (Wheeler, 'Information, Physics, Quantum’, 1989)1

July 1911

John A Wheeler and H Marshall McLuhan were both born in July 1911 -- Wheeler on the 9th, McLuhan twelve days later on the 21st. Wheeler became an extremely influential physicist, working with both Bohr in Copenhagen and Einstein in Princeton, and included two Nobel prize recipients among his students, Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne. Research building on his work continues in many areas to this day.

McLuhan became an English professor who morphed into a communications guru. But although he became famous for a time, he had nothing like Wheeler's long term influence. Indeed, he might well have been describing himself when he wrote of his friend, Wyndham Lewis:

His [work] was an H-bomb let off in the desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. (McLuhan to Ezra Pound, June 22, 1951, Letters 227)2

“New” “View” of “Reality”

Wheeler’s 1989 paper, 'Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links',3 is very suggestive in multiple respects. But its suggestiveness often consists in ambiguous formulations that are left unresolved.4 The object here is to bring methods and insights in the humanities, particularly from Plato and McLuhan, to tease out potentially actionable leads from those ambiguities.5

For example, the first section of Wheeler’s paper is titled ‘Quantum Physics Requires a New View of Reality’. Although this seems clear enough, and even true enough, Wheeler at the same time repeatedly argues against “mere continuum idealizations” (309) since “there is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum” (309).

In brief, continuum-based physics, no; information-based physics, yes. (315)
no account of existence can ever hope to rate as fundamental which does not translate all of continuum physics into the language of bits. (315)

The question is, what is ‘a new view’ somehow aside from the “continuum” of old and new?6

A further problem arises in relation to ‘reality’. Wheeler uses formulations like

generating the “reality” of today (319)
to construct what we call “reality” (321)

But if “reality” requires scare quotes, and if Wheeler can even use the phrase “more real than reality” (320), the requirement of “a New View of Reality” becomes deeply problematic. Nor is this a difficulty only of what “reality” might mean in such a view. There is also the problem that any such view would presumably have to be real itself. But how?

Now questions like these have been posed explicitly since Plato. It may therefore be wondered, on the one hand, if the tradition following Plato7 can throw potentially helpful light on problems in physics. On the other hand, might physics throw potentially helpful light on that tradition in a time when it has manifestly lost its way?

Search for Links

Wheeler was known for his open consideration of anything, a willingness illustrated in his 1989 paper. For example, one reference in the paper is to “graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas” (p330, n79). In this context, bringing McLuhan into conversation with Wheeler hardly seems extravagant. Moreover, McLuhan identified the “information” component of Wheeler's title as the central fact of the post WW2 world (if not already of the post-telegraph world beginning a century earlier) and tirelessly researched that central fact through more than three decades of intense work beginning in the 1940s.

Wheeler's subtitle, “the search for links”, is strikingly apt in regard to McLuhan's most famous maxim, “the medium is the message”.8 For this maxim might equally be put, 'the link is the message'.9 The great question concerns the nature of links or media in the constitution of the worlds of human experience -- including those of quantum physicists. Wheeler's “search for links” might therefore be reworded as 'the search for the nature of links' or 'the search for a way to thematise links' or 'the search for the elementary structure of links'. As with 'the medium is the message', the goal is to bring links or media into open collective investigation and with them the entire field of human experience.

In fact, Wheeler, too, sees such specification of the nature of links as essential to the physics “agenda”:

Sharpen the concept of bit. Determine whether “an elementary quantum phenomenon brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification”10 has at bottom (1) the 0-or-1 sharpness of definition (...) or (2) the accordion property of a (...) number of (...) lemmas (321)

At stake in these alternatives — if Wheeler is correct in deploying the alternative ‘or’ here — is the question of the nature of the link-middle-medium: sharp division or “accordion”?

Elsewhere in his paper Wheeler uses the related image of a piano:

the notes struck out on a piano by the observer-participants of all places and all times, bits though they are, in and by themselves constitute the great wide world of space and time and things. (314)

Here a further “elementary” possibility suggests itself for Wheeler’s quest “to sharpen the concept of bit”. Namely, “the great wide world of space and time and things” might be considered as a soundscape of tunes (“lemmas”), but tunes generated by discrete keys (“the 0-or-1 sharpness of definition”). Not, or not only, ‘either-or’ — not, or not only, “sharpness” or “lemmas” — but perhaps also “sharpness” and “lemmas”, keys and tunes, ‘both-together’. In this vein, Wheeler speaks of the “unsplitable bit of information” (311) and over and over again of “complementarity” (309 and passim).

“Either-or’ and ‘both-together’ differ in their structural links or middles between the 0/1 poles of the “bit”, the first being exclusive — the classical bit — the second inclusive — the qubit. But both are “bits” and the nature of bits can never be derived from one of them!11

The relation within and between these differing bits is the essential question: “the search for links”, “the medium is the message” — the investigation required “to understand existence”.

Observer-Participancy

The question of the nature of the link implicates the question of the nature of the observer for many reasons that are specified by Wheeler:

No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, (...) the elementary act of observer-participancy.12 (309)
no alternative [to infinite regress] is evident but loop, such a loop as this: Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics. (313-314)
In microphysics, however, the information does not sit out there. (317)
We have traveled what may seem a dizzying path. First, elementary quantum phenomenon brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification [Bohr]. Second, the resulting information expressed in the form of bits. Third, this information used by observer-participants — via communication — to establish meaning. Fourth, from the past through the billeniums to come, so many observer-participants, so many bits, so much exchange of information, as to build what we call existence. Doesn't this it-from-bit view of existence seek to elucidate the physical world, about which we know something, in terms of an entity about which we know almost nothing, consciousness? (320)
except via those time-leaping quantum phenomena that we rate as elementary acts of observer-participancy, no way has ever offered itself to construct what we call “reality”. (321)

In sum: the observer cannot be excluded from the observed. In particular, all experiment and theorization in physics implicates “acts of observer-participancy”. The “bit” as the multiplex structure of “reality” grounds this correlation and its action is consequently characterized by Wheeler as “elementary” in the constitution of existence.

Similarly for McLuhan, the medium as the elementary structure of experience enables, or disables, as the case may be, access to existence. But — like elements in geometry, chemistry and genetics — in no case is it absent.

Quantum and Bit

At the outset of his paper Wheeler states that:

the supreme goal [of fundamental physics is to] deduce the quantum from an understanding of existence. (309)

This “supreme goal” is then variously restated and reshuffled in the course of his discussion":13

every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits (309)
To the question, “How come the quantum?” we thus answer, “Because what we call existence is an information-theoretic entity”14 [aka, a bit] (313)
No account of existence can ever hope to rate as fundamental which does not translate all of continuum physics into the language of bits.15 (315)

That is, the relation of the “quantum” and the “bit” is fundamental to existence. In this “it-from-bit view of existence" (320), an essential circularity is in play -- the quantum is to be understood from existence, but existence is to be understood from the quantum. Wheeler calls this sort of feedback looping “the principle of complementarity” (309) or “the demand for intercommunication” (318).16

the principle of complementarity (...) is [the] central idea of the quantum (309)
To endlessness no alternative is evident but loop17 (313)

It would therefore seem that the quantum and “existence" must be brought together in the question: how is “the principle of complementarity” to be understood ontologically? Or, as Wheeler has it, using “rules” verbally, how is it to be understood that “complementarity rules”? (317)

Complementary Relation to Non-Complementarity

Unstated in Wheeler's paper is the necessity that “the principle of complementarity” expressly include relation to the principle of non-complementarity. If it did not, “the principle of complementarity” would be non-complementary in this fundamental respect and would therefore not be a principle at all — and especially not a “principle of complementarity”. But the question of how to understand “the principle of complementarity” in essential relation to the principle of non-complementarity is a fateful question that has hung over western civilization at least since Plato 2500 years ago (and arguably since the Egyptians 2500 years before that).18

In Plato's Sophist, a gigantomachia or ‘battle’ (machia) of “ultimate significance” (309) (giganto) over ‘true reality’ is described between the gods, as defenders of the forms ‘somewhere in the heights of the unseen’, and the earth-bound giants (gigantes), who declare that only that is real which can be grasped by the hand. Each of the two wars forever against the other in the attempt to establish a monistic ontology, either of the ideational forms alone or of concrete matter alone. But the true philosopher, says Plato, must be like a child ‘who begs for both’. Where the gods and the giants assert the ultimate reality of non-complementarity and hence of a monism, Plato argues for the ultimate reality of complementarity and hence, not of a dualism, but of a more complicated structure of at least 3 equiprimordial ontological powers.

Ontology as the understanding of existence (dual genitive) must be One or Three (or more) and cannot be Two. For if ontology were ultimately dualistic, a third factor would have to be active between them, enabling the postulated dual Two to hold out forever with and against each other, despite their profound difference. Absent such a third factor — such a third ontologically fundamental factor — the Two would necessarily collapse at some point into One. As Stephen Hawking has observed in discussing the need for some kind of limiting intervention to the working of the second law of thermodynamics:

Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of complete disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature.19

But ontological monism has its own problems, of course, amongst which, especially for Wheeler, is the impossibility of deriving the quantum and its “principle of complementarity” from it. Such ontological monism is, indeed, nothing other than the principle of non-complementarity. It is the conviction that, despite appearances, in the fundamental absence of definitive ontological delineation,20 “everything [is] at the same temperature”

Now Plato's philosophical or childish position represents a third possibility to those of the gods and the giants, both of whom fight for an exclusive or non-complementary ontology of their own. But such a third position cannot combine the other two in some sort of new amalgam of its own. For this would produce a third monistic claim, which would be structurally identical to the claims of the gods and the giants: a singular “information-theoretic” structure would be asserted as the “ultimate significance” (309) of existence. For all three, reality would be One and any appearance to the contrary would necessarily be illusion or some sort of gigantic error. 21

Any such supposedly third possibility that would eclipse and cancel the monastic claims of the gods and giants would therefore be 'more of the same'. But as Wheeler sets out:

More is different. Not by plan but by inner necessity a sufficiently large number of H20 molecules collected in a box will manifest solid, liquid and gas phases. Phase changes, superfluidity and superconductivity all bear witness to [Paul W] Anderson's pithy point, more is different. (321)

To be genuinely more and different, the third position must preserve the other two positions of the gods and giants as they are. Indeed, as the 'both-together' or “complementarity" or superposition of those non-complementary positions, the third would cancel itself if it were to cancel them.

Wheeler's “supreme goal" — to “deduce the quantum [with its 'central idea' of 'the principle of complementarity'] from an understanding of existence” — might therefore be rephrased as: existence must be understood from the necessity that “the principle of complementarity" includes fundamental relation to the principle (or principles) of non-complementarity. As specified by Plato, this everlasting battle of fundamental claims constitutes an ontological knot, one that necessarily informs, exactly because ontological, that “supreme goal” of Wheeler. Hence Wheeler's agreement with Plato across 2500 years that “reality is theory” (318), that “what we call existence is an information-theoretic entity” (313) -- although 'entity' is plainly a mistaken term for what would cover all possible entities whatsoever.22

“Existence” itself is not another “entity” among all the rest exactly because "more is different”.23 (321)

Dynamic Manifestation

Wheeler can characterize the quantum as a “physical question” about “physical reality”:

the elementary quantum phenomenon (…) is the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question24 (309)
The overarching principle of 20th-century physics, the quantum — and the principle of complementarity that is central idea of the quantum — leaves us no escape, Niels Bohr tells us, from “a radical revision of our attitude as regards physical reality” (309)25

But the quantum itself is said to be an “an information-theoretic entity" (313) which is “immaterial” (311):

all things physical are information-theoretic in origin… (311)
It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom (…) an immaterial source and explanation (311)

But what is the meaning of “from” in “it from bit”? What is the relation of “physical reality" to its “immaterial source”? What if it names that phenomenological (self-showing)26 dynamic whereby chemical elements, laws in physics and DNA in genetics all inherently express themselves in and as particulars? In this case, wouldn’t “all things physical” and an “immaterial” “information-theoretic (…) origin” implicate each other in a complementary relation of “intercommunication” (318)?

Consider the element carbon. Is it only the “information-theoretic (…) origin” of diamonds and graphite? Or are diamond and graphite, along with an enormous number of other materials in which carbon is a component, just what carbon is?

Physical, chemical and genetic structures reveal themselves in particulars -- hence the interrogation of particulars in scientific experiments as unfailing indicators of underlying structure or law. Now these physical, chemical and genetic structures have of course always manifested themselves in this way, and particulars have always pointed back to those underlying structures. But it has been only recently — from Galileo through Lavoisier and Mendel to Crick and Watson — that we have learned to read these structures in their particular expressions. Prior to these discoveries the structures were just as active as they are today post-discovery, but they and their manifestations in and as particulars went unrecognized.

Activity is one thing, recognition of that activity another thing.

According to McLuhan the laws of media operate in all human experience27 whatsoever, but remain just as unrecognized there today as physical laws, chemical elements and genetic structures went unrecognized only a short time ago. The fundamental implication is that quantum physics originating in “the elementary act of observer-participancy” (309) must just as much accord with those media laws as does, unremarkably, any project at all in physics with the laws of chemistry.

Indeed, since laws of media are always already at work in any and every sample of experience, Wheeler’s paper must exemplify them itself. These comments are an attempt to expose them there — along with the allied attempts to show how close Wheeler came to specifying those laws and the necessity of accounting with them in quantum physics.

The Zero Boundary

That existence or ‘true reality’ is first of all the panoply of fundamentally different structural (or “information-theoretic”) possibilities — the superposition of complementarity and non-complementarity — may already be used to illustrate some of Wheeler's central contentions. For example, “the boundary of a boundary is zero”:

First clue: The boundary of a boundary is zero. This central principle of algebraic topology -- identity, triviality, tautology, though it is -- is also the unifying theme of Maxwell electrodynamics, Einstein geometrodynamics and almost every version of modern field theory. That one can get so much from so little, almost everything from almost nothing, inspires hope that we will someday complete the mathematization of physics and derive everything from nothing, all law from no law. (315)28

When existence or true reality is already plural, the boundary between any of its fundamental structures or elements cannot be another fundamental structure. There is no fundament between fundaments. Nor can such a boundary rest on anything deeper than existence because there is nothing deeper than existence. Hence, “the boundary of a boundary is zero” since the demarcation between fundaments must be a kind of black hole that is no fundament itself, but serves at the same time to structure or relate or demarcate fundaments in their essential plurality. In this way the formless zero boundary is essential to formation: “it from bit”.

As broached above, but as cannot be repeated often enough, decisive care must be taken not to consolidate existence into such a zero boundary on its own. This is required, first of all, because a boundary must have 'sides' in order to be a boundary at all. Then, too, such monistic (or monistic-tending) theories of existence, like those of the gods and the giants, contradict themselves in battling forever against a position they declare not really to exist. Why bother? How account for such a battle with a phantom? Furthermore, a singularized existence cannot be used to “deduce” (309) the quantum or to account for its fundamental “complementarity” and “intercommunication” (318). Then too, were a deeper level than existence a possibility, this would threaten (since such a possibility has no natural brake) the sort of infinite regress and “bottomless night” (Hegel's night in which all cows are black) that is specifically ruled out by Wheeler:

no infinite regress. No structure, no plan of organization, no framework of ideas underlaid by another structure or level of ideas, underlaid by yet another level, by yet another, ad infinitum, down to a bottomless night. (313)

Again, in the event of the “ultimate significance” of “bottomless night”, any structure to the universe would relate to the “bottomless night” only chronologically. It would arise, somehow, 'later'. But this, too, Wheeler will not have:

In brief, continuum-based physics, no; information-based physics, yes. (315)

And finally, as Nietzsche already specified more than a century ago in 1889:

The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we also have abolished the apparent one!!29

Taken 'on its own', any such “bottomless night” is self-canceling. If there is no real world, no apparent world can be derived from its absence. But Wheeler comes dangerously close to the bottomless-night-as-truth thesis when he asks approvingly: “Existence thus built on 'insubstantial nothingness'?”30 (314)

It from Bit

From the need to understand existence and the quantum via “the principle of complementarity” Wheeler goes on to introduce his neat formulation of "it from bit”:

every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits. (310)

Wheeler's point is taken from quantum dynamics where, as he says:

the elementary quantum phenomenon [is] “brought to a close”, as Bohr puts it, by “an irreversible act of amplification”, such as the click of a photodetector or the blackening of a grain of photographic emulsion. (315)

The abstract of Wheeler's paper augments the point as follows:

No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy. Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit. (309)

But what is an “it”? What is “it” in the first place? Is this a “physical question” (309) about a “physical quantity” (309)? In this vein, Wheeler writes of

every physical quantity, every it (309)

Or is “it” an

elementary act of observer-participancy (309, emphasis added)

Wheeler characterizes “very existence entirely” (310) in terms of “answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits” (310). This yes or no structure applies in Wheeler’s paper not only to “apparatus elicited answers” (310), but also to his exposition of fundamental physics itself, where over and over again he frames his points in terms of such options:

But how come existence? Its as bits, yes; and physics as information, yes; (...) In the consideration of these issues we adopt for guidelines four no's. (313)
continuum-based physics, no; information-based physics, yes. (315)
It from bit, yes; but the rest of the world also makes a contribution, a contribution that suitable experimental design can minimize but not eliminate. Unimportant nuisance? no. evidence the whole show is wired up together? yes. (316)

Wheeler’s use of yes-no formulations for “information-based physics” illustrates how they are not confined to the “device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question” (309). The bit, which exactly therefore may be seen to be essentially plural, is variously active at many levels of exposition — “level upon level upon level of logical structure” (320) — including that of the most “elementary act of observer-participancy” (309).31 Indeed, a great many of Wheeler’s formulations repeatedly point to this further possibility beyond that of “posing a yes-no physical question”: “complementarity”, “participancy”, “intercommunication”.

Who Is Meant By “Who”

At the quantum level, at the level of the “elementary” (309) genesis of all reality and experience whatsoever, there is a selection among possibilities that serves to instantiate the type of fact under consideration. As Wheeler has it in regard to “the information-theoretic source” (309):

all things physical are information-theoretic in origin [in] a participatory universe32 (311)

McLuhan tirelessly reiterated that this is the lesson as much of linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis, indeed even of modern painting, music and poetry, as it is of quantum physics. Wheeler himself speaks of “the language of continuum” and “the language of bits” (321, emphasis added) and notes:

The line between the unconscious and the conscious begins to fade in our day as computers evolve and develop — as mathematics has — level upon level upon level of logical structure. We may someday have to enlarge the scope of what we mean by a “who". (320)

“What we mean by a who” becomes loopy and problematic as soon as it is seen (by whom?)33 that also the “who” is “information-theoretic in origin” (311). The “who”, too, is an “it from bit.” Hence the fundamental link between physics and cultural disciplines like linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis, for the “who” unavoidably deployed in physics is explicitly at stake in them.34

Whole Shows

In the phrase used above, ‘the type of fact under consideration’, ‘the type’ may be taken as an “information-theoretic” entity, or “bit”, while the resulting ‘fact under consideration’ may be taken as an “it". Hence, “it from bit”. In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Wheeler's Princeton colleague, Thomas Kuhn, formulated this relation between ‘type’ and ‘fact’ in terms of the paradigm regulation of ‘normal’ scientific research and, therefore, of the exceptional ‘paradigm shifts’ that drive scientific revolutions. Wheeler gestures in the direction of Kuhn's paradigms when he notes:

The quantum, h, in whatever correct physics formula it appears, thus serves as lamp. It lets us see… (313)
In brief, the choice of question asked, and choice of when it's asked, play a part — not the whole part, but a part — in deciding what we have the right to say35 (316)

Nor is this an individual matter:

How does the vision of one world arise out of the information-gathering activities of many observer-participants? (313)

It from bit, yes; but the rest of the world also makes a contribution, a contribution that suitable experimental design can minimize but not eliminate. Unimportant nuisance? No. Evidence the whole show is wired up together? Yes. (316)
Meaning is the joint product of all the evidence that is available to those who communicate. (318)

But as seen in paradigm shift, “the whole show” of such a “joint product” is no singular and the deepest question implicated in “the search for links” has to do with the complementary middles or media or links between ‘whole shows’ in their fundamental plurality.

The ‘Many Worlds’ of Experience

Wheeler writes of “the initial conditions of the universe specified within quantum theory itself.” (317) But can the “the universe” properly be said to be singular if “the elementary act of observer-participancy” (309) is not singular? If a fundamental plurality of links or media is first of all in play?

On Wheeler’s terms, however, “the universe” cannot mean ‘physical universe’ (as it seems to do in most or all ‘many world’ and ‘multiverse’ theories) since, as Wheeler has it, “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin”. (311) And, as he further specifies:

There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum." (309)
In microphysics (…) the information does not sit out there. (317)

Instead, “universe” would name the ways in which “the whole show is wired up together”. (316) Or, rather, since “the whole show” is no singular, the ways in which the whole shows, plural, are wired up together, individually and collectively, in the myriad of ways humans have experience of existence.

How does the vision of one world arise out of the information-gathering activities of many observer-participants? (313)

“Wired up” would name the many ways according to which the “information-theoretic” bits — each having a role in some or other “universe” of experience (dual genitive) — are linked together, both internally between their 0/1 poles and externally with other bits. Just as in chemistry, where the internal disposition of electrons also determines the external disposition or valence, so here: internal and external structure would be mutually implicating: “the medium is the message”.

The Observer-Participancy Nexus

Wheeler had a “vision of a world self-synthesized” (314):

Will we someday understand time and space and all the other features that distinguish physics — and existence itself — as the similarly self-generated organs of a self-synthesized information system? (321)

Just as the material atom is nested in an enormous vertical series of environments, from the most local with other atoms to the planet, galaxy and universe, and just as this enormous vertical series extends from moment to moment to moment in a horizontal modulation of these multilevel spaces and times, so as well with

the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary (…) intermediated act (…) of observer-participancy. (309)

This is the “world as system self-synthesized by quantum networking” (319):

billions on billions of sites of observer-participancy (319)
from the past through the billeniums to come, so many observer-participants, so many bits, so much exchange of information, as to build what we call existence (320).

The workings of the material universe were little understood 200 years ago and even 100 years ago much we now know was utterly unknown — DNA, for example. Just so, the “elementary” quantum universe envisioned by Wheeler remains unknown today even while its understanding is a — or the — condition both of scientific advance and of practical application. And while its unknown operation behind our own backs threatens our survival as a species.

The Bit-Level Question

Plato saw that the key to ontology — the key to the “single question [that] animates [Wheeler’s] report: can we ever expect to understand existence?” (322) — lies in what might be called the knotted power of superposition. Somehow, the principles of complementarity and non-complementarity are complementary — without destroying non-complementarity! Plato’s great insight — arguably from the Egyptians — was that the complementary position of the childish philosopher must include the non-complementary positions of the gods and the giants as they are, and not, or not only, as they are comprehended by it. But in the 2500 years since Plato, no dialectic as the path to such ontological understanding has succeeded in bringing it to collective investigation and to practical application.

McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message” represents another attempt at such a dialectic.36 It allows a reformulation of Plato’s ontological gigantomachia by focusing on the middles or media of its combatants. Here all three may be taken as having the elementary structure of gods/giants — or mental/physical, ideal/real up/down, etc — where the great question concerns the nature of the intermediating middle, ‘/’.

The position of the gods = Gods/giants, where the / medium is non-complementary and where, therefore, one of the sides (here the Gods) must be more powerful and therefore more real than the other (since the battle of the two sides concerns ‘true reality’ and their equality is fundamentally denied).

The position of the giants = gods/Giants, where the / medium is non-complementary and where, therefore, one of the sides (here the Giants) must be more powerful and therefore more real than the other (since the battle of the two sides concerns ‘true reality’ and their equality is fundamentally denied).

The position of the childish philosopher = Gods/Giants, where the / medium is complementary and where, therefore, the two sides must be equally powerful and real (since the battle of the two sides concerns ‘true reality’ and their equality is fundamentally asserted).

The claim is that the variable relation of the gods and giants — usually called figure and ground by McLuhan — is the “elementary” structure of the “information-theoretic” universe. The claim is testable through the question: does focus on the complementary and non-complementary variations of this structure allow definition, and collective investigation, of the field of human experience? If so, what is the result of applying the findings of that investigation to, say, fundamental physics?

A paradigm shift is needed where a beginning in made through the assumption of a new field constituted by a set or table or spectrum of such elementary relations or media:

no bit-level question, no bit-level answer (315-316)

Too Simple?

How can it be that the vast extent of human experience is rooted in a few “bit-level” relations? Well, how can it be that the vast extent of the physical universe is rooted in the quantitative relations of only two particles, electrons and protons, constituting the table of elements? And how can it be that the vast extent of genetics is rooted in the relations of only four bases comprising the gigabytes of information in every DNA strand?

Furthermore, it is the usual ‘thinking’ about the types of human experience that is in fact far too simplistic. One speaks of ‘Platonic’ or ‘Marxist’ views. But what if any sample of human experience is more like a protein or a weather front or a galaxy?

Blindness and Insight

Wheeler sets out his hope for physics as follows:

someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, “Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind so long!” (322)

Imagine what “we will all say to each other” when we finally learn that the “central idea” has been known all along! That we have been “so blind so long” — to what we have long seen!37

John A Wheeler, 'Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links', 322. See note 3 for the complete reference.

McLuhan termed his work a “survival strategy”. The observation that “we (...) compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities” reflected his contention that, absent a new generation of sciences based on “laws of media”, humans will continue to be exposed to the consequences of their ignorance about their own actions in ways that threaten civilization and, perhaps, the survival of the human species entirely.

Proc. 3rd Int. Symp. Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Tokyo, 1989, pp.354-368. Wheeler’s paper amounts to a kind of summary presentation of his decades of work on quantum physics going back to the 1950s — it references 40 books and papers authored by him over this roughly 35-year period. The online link does not go to the original publication of the paper, but to one of its many reprintings -- apparently the one in Feynman and Computation: Exploring the Limits of Computers, edited by A. J. G. Hey (1999), pp. 309–336. All page references without further identification are to this online version of the paper.

For example, Wheeler does not directly address the crucial relation between “bit” and “quantum”, although their identity or, at least, their mutual implication often seems to be assumed by him: “The yes or no (…) constitutes an unsplitable bit of information. A photon cannot be cloned.” (311, emphasis added). But if a “bit” can take not only a “yes or no” form, but can also an “unsplitable”, “complementary” and “participancy” form — as, or like, quanta — a great deal follows. Furthermore, Wheeler employs a series of terms — ‘reality’, ‘existence’, ‘primordial’, ‘origin’, ‘principle’, ‘fundamental’ — which have long histories and, not incidentally, are deeply equivocal.

This post will not be concerned with the documentation of the understanding of McLuhan that motivates it. That is a separate matter that is unimportant to the questions of fundamental physics at stake here. Any interest in such documentation may look into my McLuhan blog where it is set out in detail. As regards fundamental physics, no claim is made to anything more than rudimentary knowledge. The suggestion to be proffered is only that when McLuhan considered some of Wheeler's topics and came to different conclusions about them, those different conclusions may be of interest to researchers following in Wheeler's wake by opening potential new avenues for theoretical and experimental exploration.

Paul Davies in ‘The nature of the laws of physics and their mysterious biofriendliness’ (euresis journal, vol 5, summer 2013) describes Wheeler’s position on ‘law without law’ as follows: “Wheeler maintained that the laws of physics did not exist a priori, but emerged from the chaos of the quantum big bang — coming out of higgledy-piggledy was the way he quaintly expressed it — congealing along with the universe that they govern in the aftermath of its shadowy birth.” But this is a chronological sequence that seems at decided odds with Wheeler’s “continuum-based physics, no” (315).

A.N. Whitehead from Process and Reality (1929): "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

Both Wheeler and McLuhan were justly famous for their coinages such as McLuhan's 'global village'. Wheeler is often said to have coined the term 'black hole', although it appears he more popularized than coined it.

A medium for McLuhan is often mis-taken to be something like a book or television. For discussion see https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2019/03/media-definition/

The passage from Niels Bohr is from ‘Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?’ (Phys. Rev. 48, 1935).

A rarely understood point in McLuhan’s work is that, while the nature of media may be better expressed by electronic devices than by mechanical devices, this does not mean that that nature can ever be thought to exclude mechanical devices. In their own way these latter express fundamental aspects of media just as, for example, inert gases express essential aspects of the structure of elements including valence. Moreover, blindness and singularity are a common pairing. Where either appears on the scene, the other must be suspected to be there as well.

“Closer to primordial” is an unhappy expression. It situates Wheeler’s thought in a spatial and chronological context (which he will not have) and begs the question whether the “primordial” is known or not. If not, how be “closer” to it? Or, if indeed known, in a world of “scientific revolution” via paradigm shift, “closer” may eventuate in fundamental distance.

“I, like other searchers attempt formulation after formulation of the central issues.” (310)

“An information-theoretic entity”, that is, a “bit”.

Also: “Translate the quantum versions of string theory and of Einstein's geometrodynamics from the language of continuum to the language of bits.” (321)

“Intercommunication” was a favorite term of one of McLuhan's mentors at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright. It subsequently became common in McLuhan's work as well.

Wheeler often reverts to “alternative” formulations such as this. But “endlessness” and “loop” may not be alternatives in a “complementary” universe. These formulations may result from Wheeler not following his own advice to “translate (...) from the language of continuum to the language of bits” (321).

At the dawn of writing, around 3000 BC the Egyptians already had a myth cycle known today as the contendings of Horus and Seth. These were divine forces of above (the hawk god Horus) and below (the desert animal Seth) who were family relations, yet deadly enemies. Through a council of the nine supreme gods they became reconciled across their fundamental difference. It would thus seem that “the principle of complementarity” -- relation across unbridgeable difference -- has been a theme of some wonder for at least 5000 years. Indeed, it is easily imaginable to have been envisaged in the relations of man and woman, and of different age generations, perhaps even of different hominid species, for hundreds of thousands of years prior to that.

Hawking, 'The Beginning of Time', lecture, 1996.

Some definitive ontological delineation is exactly what Plato’s gods and the giants war forever against.

The long history of gnosticism is an exposition of all the different ways such illusion or error may be described and accounted for.

The meaning of words depends upon the ‘bit structure’ (compare, atomic structure) in terms of which they are deployed. This applies to ‘entity’, ‘existence’ and ‘reality’, but just as much to ‘theory’ and ‘information-theoretic’. In the event, the investigative requirement in this area is to keep ‘trying on’ meaning complexes, like so many jigsaw puzzles, each implicating a different world and a different subject, until one is found that ‘holds’. “I, like other searchers attempt formulation after formulation of the central issues” (310); “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe” (311). Nor is this a question only of ‘elementary’ bit structures since experience may well be more like a protein or a weather front than a noble metal. Hence McLuhan’s frequent recourse to the images of ‘mosaics’ and ‘galaxies’.

The term “entity” is misleading in another way as a singular.

It is unclear if by “physical question” here Wheeler means a question that is itself ultimately physical — “device intermediated” (309) — or a question that is about the physical although itself “immaterial” (311).

The passage from Bohr is again taken from ‘Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?’ (Phys. Rev. 48, 1935).

Wheeler uses the word ‘phenomenon’ 6 times in his paper, ‘phenomena’ twice more.

See A whole new genus of sciences.

It may be that Wheeler should have distinguished “no law” from 'no single law'. That “the boundary of a boundary is zero” follows from the plurality of fundamental laws, not at all from “no law”. Among other problems, the latter would submit the genesis of law to the sort of “continuum-based physics” rejected by Wheeler. The same need to distinguish 'no' from 'no single One' may be seen throughout Wheeler's paper: for example, “no space, no time” (315) may rather be ‘no one space, no one time’.

Twilight of the Idols, 'History of an Error: How the true world' became a fable': “Die wahre Welt haben wir abgeschafft: welche Welt blieb übrig? die scheinbare vielleicht?… Aber nein! mit der wahren Welt haben wir auch die scheinbare abgeschafft!!”

Compare: “everything from nothing, all law from no law.” (315)

“The line between the unconscious and the conscious begins to fade in our day as computers evolve and develop — as mathematics has — level upon level upon level of logical structure.” (320)

Wheeler: “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe”. (311)

“Its as bits, yes; and physics as information, yes; but whose information?” (313)

Nothing is less remarkable than the inclusion of other sciences in physics research. Of course there is no violation of, say, chemistry when physicists design their experiments or conduct elaborate observations. The central question posed by McLuhan is whether a “new science” based on “laws of media” must equally be incorporated in it.

Also: “by his choice of question, he [the observer] decides about what feature of the object he shall have the right to make a clear statement.” (323)

Dialectic has many meanings. Dialectic as pathway is not to be confused with dialectic as a synonym for ‘logic’ or as opposed to ‘rhetoric’.

In fact, Wheeler himself seems to have imagined this possibility: “Have we had the mechanism of creation before our eyes all this time without recognizing the truth?” (John A. Wheeler, ‘Bohr, Einstein, and the Strange Lesson of the Quantum’, in Mind in Nature: Nobel Conference XVII, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, edited by R. Q. Elvee, 1982, 25). Again: "What’s the explanation for it? It must be absolutely beautiful absolutely simple. And how stupid we are not to see it!" (Cited in Jeremy Bernstein, ‘Physicist John Wheeler: Retarded Learner’, Princeton Alumni Weekly, October 9, 1985, 42.)

The Quantum of Experience

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