🍄 The Physics of Information

There are no such things as coincidences!

Feb 09, 2024

Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: listen to Freewill
🎧 Alice podcasts
📘 Alice books: Tuning into Frequency: The invisible force that heals us and the planet

"You can think of the world as a world of energy, particles, atoms, molecules, fields and so on, which is the world that we learn about in school. But you could also think of the world as a universe of information with human consciousness becoming aware of the information from microsecond to microsecond.” - Jacques Vallée, Internet pioneer

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. In the age of artificial intelligence and augmented reality, it is not heretical to say that everything can be expressed in information. Jacques Vallée — self-described "heretic among heretics" — in a interview with ALICE in 2006, introduced the theory of information and how it is related to time and coincidences in our lives.

Jacques Vallée is an Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer.

After receiving an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University in France, Dr. Vallée came to the U.S. as an astronomer at the University of Texas, where he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA. Vallée went on to work at SRI International and the Institute for the Future, where he directed the "Forum" project to build the world's first network-based collaboration system as a Principal Investigator for DARPA. Venture capitalist since 1987, Jacques Vallée has served as an early-stage investor and director of over 60 high-technology companies. Apart from his work with information science and finance, Vallée has had a long-term private interest in astronomy, in writing (as an author of several books, including science-fiction novels) and in unidentified aerial phenomena.

Fun Fact: Vallée served as the real-life model for Lacombe, the researcher portrayed by François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He also attempted to interest Spielberg in an alternative explanation for the phenomenon. In an interview, Vallée said, “I argued with him that the subject was even more interesting if it wasn't extraterrestrials. If it was real, physical, but not ET. So he said, ‘You're probably right, but that's not what the public is expecting — this is Hollywood and I want to give people something that's close to what they expect.’”

The following is an excerpt from an Alice 2006 interview with Jacques Vallée.

What is the physics of information?

“I studied physics in school a long time ago. As you know, I worked as an astronomer for a while. That was my background in science–astrophysics. But I quickly became very interested in computer science and most of my career was dealing with information science and computers. In physics, you learn that energy and information are two sides of the same coin. That information can be transformed into energy and vice-versa. If you observe a physical system, you are taking information out of the system by observing it but you cannot do that without taking energy out of the system. So there is a balance, there is an equilibrium between energy and information. Yet the only physics we have is the physics of energy. What we teach in universities, in Stanford and Berkeley, is the physics of electromagnetism, fields, energy. And there should be another physics, which would be the physics of information.

You can think of the world as a world of energy, particles, atoms, molecules, fields and so on, which is the world that we learn about in school. But you could also think of the world as a universe of information with human consciousness becoming aware of the information from microsecond to microsecond. And, in fact, in history there have been systems of the world built around that concept. Mostly the Arab philosophers of the Medieval times had a concept of the world as a world of information. There’s a whole philosophy called “occasionalism” that says that this camera is not really the same camera that you brought into the room. That it’s another occasion of the idea of a camera. And that there is a higher plane, God, or a world of idea, or some other plane from which this camera is recreated every second. Now the nice thing about that idea, and again this was an Arab philosophy of the 10^th, 11^th century that had major influence at the time, and what’s nice about that model is that if the camera disappears, it’s not a miracle, it’s just simply that the program stopped for a while or changed. So it’s a model in which miracles and coincidences and all kinds of things that are unexplainable in the physics of energy become normal things in the physics of information.

For example, telepathy, you know “paranormal” phenomena, would become a normal occurrence if the world is really a world of information rather than a world of energy. And in the last twenty or thirty years there has been a lot of interest in coincidences, certainly in parapsychology and it’s impact on physics, mainly because quantum physics is coming to some of the same ideas from a different perspective. So from my background, mainly as an information scientist, I find that very interesting.

There’s another way of thinking about it. The reason I dropped out of physics after my PhD, never really continued in physics, is that I could not believe what I was told or what I was taught about dimensions. We are taught that there are three dimensions: x, y, & z, and then there is time. Then we’re told just think of time as just another dimension. In mathematics, you just put an “i” for “imaginary” in front of the “t” symbol and then you treat it, for example in relativity and other parts of physics, you treat it as if it was just another dimension. Well, I could never believe that. That doesn’t make any sense. Of course, I would have been thrown out of the university if I had said that it doesn’t make any sense. But, frankly, the only reason I had passed those tests was that I was very good in math, but I could never believe the physics.

In computer science, when you have a large amount of information to store, you begin with the metaphor of a library. Shelves with books. This is 3-dimensional. You have an x, y and, if you give me one more book, I can push some of these books aside and insert it. That works when you have a few thousand books. If you have millions of books, it begins to break down. If you have billions of books and you get millions of new books every second, you can’t do it like that. So what we do with computers is that we randomly fill the memory with whatever comes in with a scheme that’s a statistical scheme to find it again when we need it. In other words, dimensions don’t really work when you have a lot of information that changes all the time.

And think of Google with terabytes of information every day, with more terabytes coming in every day on top of what’s already there. All of which has to be searchable with a response time of seconds. You cannot do that with x, y, z, and t. That just doesn’t work. So you have to go beyond the idea of dimensions, and you need to go to the idea of an information universe, which is essentially a statistical universe in which you are creating coincidences. To me, that’s a very attractive way of thinking about the universe that makes more physical sense to me than I was taught in school.”

The concept of coincidences...

“A number of people have been fascinated with coincidences, starting with Arthur Koestler, of course, Carl Jung. Coincidences give a major insight into the way consciousness works, the way we become aware of things, about sometimes the illusion of coincidence that has to do with the process of thinking at the time, and also the possibility that there are, in fact, physical coincidences that have to do with the structure of the universe.

If you believe that the world is a world of information, if you were to present the universe as a universe of information, then you should expect coincidences.
You should expect that since we are information machines…I mean that’s what our brain is, it’s primarily an information machine…then consciousness gives us the illusion of a physical world because we are transversing the database. The universe is a big database where there is no time. And time could be generated just by the process of our own consciousness. If that’s the case, then you would expect coincidences. You would expect that it would be like if you put a search into Google, you’re going to find thousands of things that match the particular key word you’ve given. And that doesn’t seem strange to you because that’s a way that information has been organized or that’s the way it organizes itself in response to your search. It was not pre-organized for that particular search but it happens to work when you come in and you give a key word. Well, maybe the universe is the same way. And if it is the same way then coincidences are nothing strange…they are just an indication that that’s the way the universe functions. If you take that approach then there are many experiments that could be done in parapsychology, for example, that have not been done to try to maximize these coincidences.”

Remote Viewing

“I had the privilege of being associated with some of the research at SRI in remote viewing. In fact, I was at SRI before the remote viewing project started in one of the computer departments, and I quickly became an unpaid advisor to the project, and later became actually involved in the project.

In the early days of remote viewing, a very gifted experimenter came in to California, Ingo Swann, and we started talking about what experiment could be designed.

And we had exactly that discussion, Ingo and I, about information. He described what he could do…which was to describe a scene that was remote in space and time from where he was. And that suggested that you could try to draw an analogy with what happens in a computer in terms of addressing. I went through, essentially giving him a crash course in programming. In programming there are different ways a computer can get data. I can give you the address of a cell where that particular data is, I can actually give you the data in a spot of the program, or I can give you indirect addressing. I can tell you, “If you go to this particular location, you will find the address of where the data is. Or you can do virtual addressing which is what we do when we need to handle a large amount of data than the memory you have. Then you spread it in another medium, and then you map that into the computer as you need large chunks of data. What we need to know is whether the brain or remote viewing works by direct interact or virtual addressing. And that inspired him to start to idea, call it the nature of remote viewing. In other words, remote viewing starting with longitude and latitude. And then just with words like “target,” for example that would give you the information link to the particular location that you want to look at. And that’s the way that particular project started.

My inclination would have been, I wasn’t directing the project, would have been to try to experiment further with that, and to find out what kind of addressing remote viewing really was. And that was never done, in part, because the sponsors of the project had very short term objectives that they wanted and, also, because most of the project was an engineering project or a physics project dealing with essentially classic communication models rather than information models. I think it would be very interesting to go back and start another project that would look at information addressing in parapsychology.

To the extent that the technology of computers is going to disappear. I mean there is a computer inside this camera. You don’t think of that camera as a computer but there is a computer in it. There is a computer in your cell phone. The technology is becoming very pervasive and will, essentially, disappear in the infrastructure of our world. It would be possible. Wires are disappearing. We’re more and more accessing information through wireless devices, at larger and larger distances, higher and higher rates. So, yes, we are getting into a form of structured information all around us all the time. Whether that’s good or bad depends on how we use it. But we are quickly moving in that direction.

Remote viewing is still a very, very primitive insight into how the information machine, the human information machine, really works. I think it will be a long time before we can have a computer model of it. I talk to researchers who tell me that, yes, consciousness is more than what’s contained in the brain. And from a computer perspective, maybe the brain in the higher levels is primarily an interface for something else. What that something else is I think remains to be discovered. Certainly, remote viewing would suggest that the brain is an interface rather than a computer.

Remote viewing is a very rich opportunity for experimentation about how information can be transmitted from one part of the world to another…from one part of our world to another. One of the surprising claims of remote viewing is that this can be done in time. If that could be validated then we would have another need to research what time really is. The question, the basic question is, “Is there really such a thing as time?” Does time, itself, have multiple dimensions? If time is a dimension, why should we only be able to go one way? When we’re told that time is a dimension like the others that’s obviously not true because time only goes in one dimension. I can move back and forth in x, y, and z. I cannot move back and forth in time. Or can we? Now if we can then that would give us insight into something that has been a mystery ever since mankind has existed, and it will immediately raise a lot of spiritual, religious questions. What is left? If time can be reversed then we exist forever. Or we can access other consciousness that may not be tied to the human body, to the human brain. That would open up all kinds of new areas. So the moment we break out of the multidimensional model that we have today, all kinds of things become possible. The problem is to have very rigorous experimentation in those areas, and that’s very difficult to do.”

How to remote view

“The claim that is usually made in remote viewing is that given, I use my own metaphor of an address which could be “longitude” or “latitude” or it could be a key word, a channel is open in some way between the person doing the remote viewing, the operator, and the site, and the simplest level that you can describe what’s going on in the middle of the Gobi Desert right now. You would first become aware that that particular location is a desert. Then you would become aware of some of the physical parameters of that area: the heat, the wind and so on. Then you might become aware of aesthetic impact of the area: the beauty of the sky. You might become aware of dangers about the area, of the emotional impact of the area. And then you might, if you’re really good, become aware of detail. The claim is also made that you could be given instruction to look at the Gobi Desert a year from now or the Gobi Desert on July 17, 1992…and that you might be able to access that particular location at that particular time. There have been experiments that have been done that way, claims by many remote viewers that, in fact, time is indifferent to them…that they can move back and forth in time.”

UFOs, extraterrestrials, dimensions beyond time and space...

“I became interested in UFOs as an astronomer when I discovered that there were a number of reports of UFOs by astronomers that had never been published and that, in fact, scientists, in general, had made observations that were not published or were not shared with other scientists. And I thought that was, frankly, a scandal. I started building my own network of friends in science and in technology and in business who had observations to share. At the beginning I felt that the best explanation for UFOs was extraterrestrial. That’s the first idea that comes to mind. We know that there has to be life throughout the universe. There’s no reason why we should be unique. There are billions of planets throughout our own galaxy and other galaxies, so why couldn’t they come here? That’s a natural idea.

However, as I’ve created more and more data and spoken to more people, that idea just doesn’t match what witnesses describe. And you have to go to a more sophisticated model of what’s going on to address the phenomena. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to witnesses, and I listen carefully to what they say because I may have my own ideas but I wasn’t there. They were there. They saw whatever they saw. And what they tell me is not that they’ve seen a spacecraft come down from the sky and land. Very often, they’ve seen an object appear on the spot, sometimes out of just a light getting larger and taking physical shape. They’ll see objects disappearing the same way. They see objects changing shape as they move through space, and fading and becoming transparent and disappearing. That doesn’t suggest spacecraft the way we think about spacecraft. This is not the space shuttle, it’s something else. Certainly, it’s physical. They describe interactions with the environment, traces, heat, light, all the things we associate with physical phenomena. And I do believe that this is a physical phenomena. However, it takes us beyond physics as we know it. And it suggests, again, the idea that there might be other dimensions. When I first came out with this dimensional idea, the idea of other dimensions or other universes was heretical. It was very marginal in science. There were models of other universes in science but they were not in the mainstream. Today, those models are in the mainstream, not because of UFOs but because of cosmology, because of quantum physics, because of many other means in mainstream physics.

I think it indicates that physicists and mathematicians today feel the need to go towards an extended view of the universe rather than just the 4-dimensional universe that I learned in school. In that respect, the UFO phenomena is a very interesting avenue to do research into physics.”

Thank you Jacques Vallée, the heresy of one age definitely becomes the innovation of the next.

What else we are wandering...

🔍 A Theory of Everything (else)... TEDxBrussels - Jacques Vallée

🔍 Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck
One of the most ambitious works of paranormal investigation of our time, here is an unprecedented compendium of pre-twentieth-century UFO accounts, written with rigor and color by two of today's leading investigators of unexplained phenomena.

🔍 Ingo Swann, Psychic Extraordinaire, Consciousness Researcher

🔍 Possibilities are Quantum: Creative possibilities require imagination, intuition, vision, creativity, comprehension, and inventiveness, properties that are associated with human consciousness and free will. New developments in quantum information theory have allowed to recently postulate with high confidence that consciousness and free will are properties of quantum systems in pure quantum states. Only a creative agent like a human being could imagine real possibilities in a near-infinite combinatorial sea of informational patterns, and then figure out some intelligent way to realize them.

🔍 The Roots of Coincidence: An Excursion into Parapsychology by Arthur Koestler

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts
👁‍🗨 Coincidences with Jacques Vallée
👁‍🗨 Remote Viewing with Jacques Vallée
👁‍🗨 Viewing Coordinates with Jacques Vallée