NMP and intelligence

Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, have developed a theory that they say describes many intelligent or cognitive behaviors, such as upright walking and tool use (see this and this ). The basic idea of the theory is that intelligent system collects information about large number of histories and preserves it. Thermodynamically this means large entropy so that the evolution of intelligence would be rather paradoxically evolution of highly entropic systems. According to standard view about Shannon entropy transformation of entropy to information (or the reduction of entropy to zero) requires a process selecting one of instances of thermal ensemble with a large number of degenerate states and one can wonder what is this selection process. This sounds almost like a paradox unless one accepts the existence of this process. I have considered the core of this almost paradox in TGD framework already earlier.

According to the popular article (see this) the model does not require explicit specification of intelligent behavior and the intelligent behavior relies on "causal entropic forces" (here one can counter argue that the selection process is necessary if one wants information gain). The theory requires that the system is able to collect information and predict future histories very quickly.

The prediction of future histories is one of the basic characters of life in TGD Universe made possible by zero energy ontology (ZEO) predicting that the thermodynamical arrow of geometric time is opposite for the quantum jumps reducing the zero energy state at upper and lower boundaries of causal diamond (CD) respectively. This prediction means quite a dramatic deviation from standard thermodynamics but is consistent with the notion of syntropy introduced by Italian theoretical physicist Fantappie already for more than half a century ago as well as with the reversed time arrow of dissipation appearing often in living matter.

The hierarchy of Planck constants makes possible negentropic entanglement and genuine information represented as negentropic entanglement in which superposed state pairs have interpretation as incidences a_i↔ b_i of a rule A↔ B: apart from possible phase the entanglement coefficients have same value 1/n^1/2, where n=h_eff/h define the value of effective Planck constant and dimension for the effective covering of imbedding space. This picture generalizes also to the case of multipartite entanglement but predicts similar entanglement for all divisions of the system to two parts. There are however still some questions which are not completely settled and leave some room for imagination.

1. Negentropic entanglement is possible in the discrete degrees of freedom assignable to the n-fold covering of imbedding space allowing to describe situation formally. For h_eff/h=n one can introduce SU(n) as dynamical symmetry group and require that n-particle states are singlets under SU(n). This gives rise to n-particle states constructed by contracting n-dimensional permutation symbol contracted with many particle states assignable to the m factors. Spin-statistics connection might produce problems - at least it is non-trivial - since one possible interpretation is that the states carry fractional quantum numbers- in particular fractional fermion number and charges.

   These states generalize the notion of N-atom proposed earlier as emergence of symbols and "sex" at molecular level (see this. "Molecular sex" means that all states can be seen as composites of two states with opposite fractional SU(n) quantum numbers (this decomposition need not be unique!). This brings in mind the monogamy theorem for ordinary entanglement stating that maximal entanglement means this kind of decomposition to two parts.

2. Is negentropic entanglement possible only in the new covering degrees of freedom or is it possible in more familiar angular momentum, electroweak, and color degrees of freedom?
   1. One can imagine that also states that are singlets with respect to rotation group SO(3) and its covering SU(2) (2-particle singlet states constructed from two spin 1 states and spin singlet constructed from two fermions) could carry negentropic entanglement. The latter states are especially interesting biologically.
   2. In TGD framework all space-time surfaces can be seen at least 2-fold coverings of M⁴ locally since boundary conditions do not seem to allow 3-surfaces with spatial boundaries so that finiteness of the space-time sheet requires covering structure in M⁴. This forces to ask whether this double covering could provide a geometric correlate for fermionic spin 1/2 suggested by quantum classical correspondence taken to extreme. Fermions are indeed fundamental particles in TGD framework and it would be nice if also 2-sheeted coverings would define fundamental building bricks of space-time.
   3. Color group SU(3) for which color triplets defines singlets can be also considered. I have been even wondering whether quark color could actually correspond to 3-fold or 6-fold (color isospin corresponds to SU(2)) covering so that quarks would be dark leptons, which correspond n=3 coverings of CP₂ and to fractionization of hypercharge and electromagnetic charge. The motivation came from the inclusions of hyper-finite factors of type II₁ labelled by integer n≥ 3. If this were the case then only second H-chirality would be realized and leptonic spinors would be enough. What this would mean from the point of view of separate B and L conservation remains an open and interesting question. This kind of picture would allow to consider extremely simple genesis of matter from right-handed neutrinos only (see .

      There are two objections against this naive picture. The fractionization associated with h_eff should be same for all quantum numbers so that different fractionizations for color isospin and color hyper charge does not seem to be possible. One can of course ask whether the different quantum numbers could be fractionized independently and what this could mean geometrically. Second, really lethal looking objection is that fractional quark charges involve also shift of em charge so that neutrino does not remain neutral it becomes counterpart of u quark.

Negentropic entanglement corresponds therefore always to n× n density matrix proportional to unit matrix: this means maximal entanglement and maximal number theoretic entanglement negentropy for two entangled systems with number n of entangled states. n corresponds to Planck constant h_eff= n×h so that a connection with hierarchy of Planck constants is also obtained. Power of p-adic prime defines the largest prime power divisor of n. Individually negentropically entangled systems would be very entropic since there would be n energy-degenerate states with the same Boltzmann weight. Negentropic entanglement changes the situation: thermodynamics of course does not apply anymore. Hence TGD produces same prediction as thermodynamical model but avoids the almost paradox.

For details and background see the section "Updates since 2012" of chapter "Negentropy Maximization Principle".