Dear Sir.

The master presenter has done it again! Presented a highly readable multidisciplinary essay with the right conclusions.

Mathematics explains only “how much” one quantity accumulates or reduces in an interaction involving similar or partly similar quantities and not “what”, “why”, “when”, “where”, or “with whom” about the objects involved in such...

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Dear Sir.

The master presenter has done it again! Presented a highly readable multidisciplinary essay with the right conclusions.

Mathematics explains only “how much” one quantity accumulates or reduces in an interaction involving similar or partly similar quantities and not “what”, “why”, “when”, “where”, or “with whom” about the objects involved in such interactions. These are the subject matters of physics.

Mathematics is also related to the measurement of time evolution of the state of something. These time evolutions depict rate of change. When such change is related to motion; like velocity, acceleration, etc, it implies total displacement from the position occupied by the body and moving to the adjacent position. This process is repeated due to inertia till it is modified by the introduction of other forces. Thus, these are discrete steps that can be related to three dimensional structures only. Mathematics measures only the numbers of these steps, the distances involved including amplitude, wave length, etc and the quanta of energy applied etc. Mathematics is related also to the measurement of area or curves on a graph – the so-called mathematical structures, which are two dimensional structures. Thus, the basic assumptions of all topologies, including symplectic topology, linear and vector algebra and the tensor calculus, all representations of vector spaces, whether they are abstract or physical, real or complex, composed of whatever combination of scalars, vectors, quaternions, or tensors, and the current definition of the point, line, and derivative are necessarily at least one dimension less from physical space.

The graph may represent space, but it is not space itself. The drawings of a circle, a square, a vector or any other physical representation, are similar abstractions. The circle represents only a two dimensional cross section of a three dimensional sphere. The square represents a surface of a cube. Without the cube or similar structure (including the paper), it has no physical existence. An ellipse may represent an orbit, but it is not the dynamical orbit itself. The vector is a fixed representation of velocity; it is not the dynamical velocity itself, and so on. The so-called simplification or scaling up or down of the drawing does not make it abstract. The basic abstraction is due to the fact that the mathematics that is applied to solve physical problems actually applies to the two dimensional diagram, and not to the three dimensional space. Yet, there is an unreasonable over-dependence on mathematics by physicists – often wrongly.

For example, the equality sign in the mass energy equation only shows that both mass and energy are inseparable conjugates (if one becomes zero, the other becomes zero) and their proportion in the totality vary in a fixed proportion like the two sides of the scale – if more is added to one side, it goes down (becomes dense) and vice versa. Yet, this has been interpreted as both mass and energy are exchangeable. No, only the product becomes different, that makes for all the variations in the universe. And this also supports that “Planck satellite data shows with high precision that we live in a remarkably simple universe” made complicated by modern scientists.

Geometry is related to tangible structures that are directly perceptible. The so-called space-geometry is actually geometry of objects in space. Without objects, there can be no geometry of space. Gravity is a force that is indirectly perceptible through its effects only. How can geometry be used to explain gravity? If the space between the apple and the Earth curved, why only the apple became close to Earth; why does that space behaves as if it has not changed or did not affect other bodies? We can pass through that space without bending,

It is correct that “Linearizing an equation does not make a non-linear field linear”. Yet, the reverse process has been done and followed in an arbitrary manner violating the principles of mathematics. . The wave function is determined by solving Schrödinger’s differential equation: d2ψ/dx2 + 8π2m/h2 [E-V(x)]ψ = 0.

By using a suitable energy operator term, the equation is written as Hψ = Eψ. The way the equation has been written, it appears to be an equation in one dimension, but in reality it is a second order equation signifying a two dimensional field, as the original equation and the energy operator contain a term x2. The method of the generalization of the said Schrödinger equation to the three spatial dimensions (adding two more equal terms by replacing x with y and z) does not stand mathematical scrutiny. A three dimensional equation is a third order equation impling volume. Addition of three areas does not generate volume [x+y+z ≠ (x.y.z)] and [x2+y2+z2 ≠ (x.y.z)]. Thus, there is no wonder that it has failed to explain spectra other than hydrogen. The so-called success in the case of helium and lithium spectra gives results widely divergent from observation.

Yet, the conclusions are all correct! “A bit has meaning only when a real change in form of the structure occurs. All else is simply energy exchange”. And all these are guided by gravity. “Bits and information imply consciousness; knowledge and meaning of information require awareness!”

Regards,

basudeba

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Dear Eugene,

thank you very much for your very inspiring essay.

I was surprised to find even esoteric aspects in your profound approach, f.e. the Not-Two aspect of reality, which is indeed terribly difficult for our brains to deal with.

I am convinced that our Universe bases fundamentally upon such a Not-Two conception (which I am calling the "Principle of Radical...

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Dear Eugene,

thank you very much for your very inspiring essay.

I was surprised to find even esoteric aspects in your profound approach, f.e. the Not-Two aspect of reality, which is indeed terribly difficult for our brains to deal with.

I am convinced that our Universe bases fundamentally upon such a Not-Two conception (which I am calling the "Principle of Radical Non-Duality"). The Wave-Particle Duality of Light is - as conceived by me - nothing else than a physical reflection of this fundamental principle.

It implies that wave and particle are two distinguishable aspects of one and the same reality comparable with the two sides of one and the same coin.

Einstein was quite unhappy about this dualism (i.e. this Not-Two aspect of light). He could not accept quantum mechanics because in quantum mechanics this duality was actually consolidated as a fundamental principle whereas Einstein dreamed of Oneness instead of Not-Two-Ness.

If we accept this duality of wave and particle as being a fundamental aspect of light, it would be natural, to assume that the speed of light c is of dual nature as well. That means the fundamental constant of c should be given twice - in a wave-like version and in particle-like version. In special relativity only one of these two faces of c has been taken into account, expressed by its second postulate.

In this way the Not-Two aspect of reality - if taken as a fundamental feature of reality - implies revolutionary physical consequences like the existence of a hidden face of c. If this concequence were true, special relativity would be fundamentally incomplete.

When P. Dirac combined Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity, just this incompleteness of special relativity became integral part of QED. To me this incompleteness of special relativity is the misleading core of QED, in particular with respect of the relativistic version of Lorentz symmetry.

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Dear Edwin

I enjoyed your guided tour into realms of ideas that are brilliant, inspiring and always thought-provoking. I could not follow everything, and did not agree with everything that I did understand. You have the right combination of technical grasp and mental stamina, and have scribbled a treasure map with the few equations you distilled from the infinite tangle of those available....

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Dear Edwin

I enjoyed your guided tour into realms of ideas that are brilliant, inspiring and always thought-provoking. I could not follow everything, and did not agree with everything that I did understand. You have the right combination of technical grasp and mental stamina, and have scribbled a treasure map with the few equations you distilled from the infinite tangle of those available. With this map you propose to find the way out of the jungle that physics has become full of untamed beasts (many mythical). And it has a friendly elephant too! Excellent!

Your kernel equation of the self-interacting field is very much how I see the self-assembly and self-convolution of a Beautiful Universe (BU) made up of a lattice of nodes interacting with adjacent ones as I have described elsewhere.

In the Einstein Maxwell equation what does the vector v represent? A variable speed of light? If so it is exactly as Eddington proposed that the vacuum has a coefficient of refraction n= c/v according to the local density, as incorporated into my (BU).

Thank you for quoting many of Smolin's bon-mots - I was not aware of this one - "the theory of epicycles was good to one part in 1000"..."Neither mathematical beauty nor agreement with experiment can guarantee that the ideas a theory is based on bear the slightest relation to reality." Bravo - so true.

Now where I tend to disagree with you is about gravity being a basic attribute. You say "Energy has mass, and mass gravitates". Hmm this is too sweeping a statement - perhaps you are sweeping some mechanism for how energy gets converted to mass and its gravitational field under the cosmic carpet. Yes (m) and (e) are mutually convertible but they are are not the same thing. Mass may be a knot of energy that prevents the energy propagating, whirring in place instead. So the gravitational field has energy but it is only created when mass is created. This process becomes very clear in (BU) when two nodes twist and their (+ -) poles 'click' in place and the adjacent nodes twist accordingly and the effect propagates through the vacuum by twisting other nodes. If indeed gravity is due to such twisting, it is not at all a fundamental property. But perhaps we are thinking the same thing and the terminology is different.

You said "Gravity is a field, not abstract geometry". Bravo- and so much for General Relativity. I have stressed this point in (BU) theory where the local potential density slows down light, not flexes space-time.

In your mass-flow induced C-field diagrams should not the arrow follow the right hand rule and spin in the other direction?

You said "I hypothesize that awareness came into existence but once". Interesting and tantalizing, although again I do not see how this can be so. Are you talking about some sort of Teilhard de Chardin-like Noo-Sphere or a mystical universe that envelops the physical one? I sympathize with your drift to the neo-mystical because all this science has hardened our minds (at least it did mine) whereas mystical/religious experiences, while being "real", have no physical theory to explain them and give them weight in this too-confident age.

You touch on other interesting things in your gem of a paper, but I had better stop here. Best of luck with your ongoing research and work.

Vladimir

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Dear Sir,

You have proposed a different field, never seen, as the consciousness field and the field is aware of both position and motion aspects of reality - Space and Time! Did you realize that by this you have not only made a universally true statement that can explain the creation event?

If you bring down position and motion to fundamental levels (Space and Time are later...

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Dear Sir,

You have proposed a different field, never seen, as the consciousness field and the field is aware of both position and motion aspects of reality - Space and Time! Did you realize that by this you have not only made a universally true statement that can explain the creation event?

If you bring down position and motion to fundamental levels (Space and Time are later derivatives), then position becomes the background structure on which motion acts multiplied by inertia. This, in turn, generates friction due to the reverse process of inertia of restoration (elasticity) of the background structure that acts like the bow-shock effect for the boat in a river. Where the inertia of restoration dominates, motion becomes zero cutting off a big chunk and returning back to repeat this process again. The successive motions are less energetic. Thus, viewed at the current rate of motion, everything will look far off the center. This is the true explanation of the current state of the universe and not the so-called Inflation.

In the universal scale, position can exist on its own independently, but motion is energy that requires an object to move to make it perceivable. Thus, the universal position can form the background structure. Since there is no true void, nothing moves in a straight line, because the object next to it obstructs it and it must “scrape through” by displacing that object laterally. This is because, all micro and planets, stars and galaxies, etc, are nearly spherical – their diameter is related to their circumference by a ration √10 instead of π. Thus, the universe is spinning on its axis making the galactic clusters look temporarily receding from each other, though no such effect is seen in lesser scales – the Solar system is not expanding. This explains the so-called dark energy, which is an oxymoron – if it is dark (non-interacting), it cannot be energy, which is perceptible only through its interactions.

You are correct that “It makes sense only if consciousness is inherently a field which concentrates locally to become aware of local structure and 'in'-formation - the formation of a model or encoded structure within more comprehensive structure”. The in-formation part implies that there is a sequence. We have repeatedly shown how space and time arise out of the concept of sequence. But there is another important angle here. The observer (relatively static) and the observable (transitory) are related through the mechanism of observation. The content of all observations is “I perceive this...(different observables)”. Thus, from the angle of observation, all A=A. But when it comes to the observable, A is not A. The other A represents the material world, where everything is discrete. The relation, which makes the observation possible, is the fundamental force gravity.

Have you ever wondered the difference between force and energy? Free on-line dictionary defines force as “The capacity to do work or cause physical change; energy, strength, or active power” in the general category, but changes to “A vector quantity that tends to produce an acceleration of a body in the direction of its application” in the physics category. The same dictionary defines energy as “The capacity for work or vigorous activity; vigor; power” and “The capacity of a physical system to do work” in general and physics category respectively. The word “capacity to cause” physical change means, energy in its stored or potential state is force. In its kinetic state (vigorous activity), it is interaction and after it ceases to act, it is action. Though the three are only evolutionary states of the same thing, they are physically different.

Gravity has two functions: structure formation that makes particles interact and its complement displacement that makes particles separates. Gravity as a “force” stabilizes orbits between interacting bodies, when both bodies circle around a point called barycenter. If you take the distance from this point to the centers of each body, draw a square of that length and distribute the mass of the two bodies in the reverse field, you will find some interesting results. We leave it to you for working it out so that you can draw your own conclusions. For this reason, gravity is closer to magnetism. Bodies with strong magnetic fields exhibit high gravitational potential also.

On the other hand, gravity as “energy” in its structure formation function; makes particles interact in four different combinations of proximity-distance variables (proximity-proximity, proximity-distance, distance-proximity and distance-distance) between the two bodies involved in interaction. These four are expressed as strong, weak nuclear, electromagnetic interaction and radioactive disintegration respectively.

The states of matter are described their dimension, which differentiate the “internal structural space” – bare mass from the “external relational space” – the radiative mass. It is perceived through electromagnetic radiation (ocular perception), where an electric field and a magnetic field, move perpendicular to each other and also to the direction of their motion. Thus, we have three mutually perpendicular dimensions. For this reason, we classify the states of matter as solid, fluid or gaseous, depending upon whether the dimension is fixed, unfixed or unbound. Since gravity displaces all three types from each other, it appears in 3 x 2 + 1 = 7 types. Thus, all the present models of gravity, which treats it as one type, fail outside the Solar System.

These are elaborations of our essay, which harmonize with your essay.

Regards,

basudeba

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Dear Edwin,

Nice to read and comment your next essay.

You are right saying: “Not all theories make predictions, yet some physicists seem to believe in these because of the ‘beauty’ of the math. But what about theories that do make predictions testable by experiment? What does ‘testable by experiment’ mean? Generally it means a theory can fit the data.”

You claim...

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Dear Edwin,

Nice to read and comment your next essay.

You are right saying: “Not all theories make predictions, yet some physicists seem to believe in these because of the ‘beauty’ of the math. But what about theories that do make predictions testable by experiment? What does ‘testable by experiment’ mean? Generally it means a theory can fit the data.”

You claim also that: “Gravity is real. This is experientially obvious, yet gravity is considered mere geometry by many…” I have proposed a simple experiment to prove or falsify your statement about gravity:

http://vixra.org/abs/1304.0027

If the photon spin in my experiment will not change as predicted by my concept (at this point contrary to QM) and calibrated measurement will show that, the concept will fit the data. This spin experiment is simple and has only two possible outcomes. If physicists claim that physics is nothing more than geometry it does not mean that it is not real. I do not think that geometry itself is the reality but I try to use it as a model of reality helping me to imagine and understand the laws of physics and create predictions about the reality evolution. The geometrical point of view together with an evolutionary approach lets me reason that the universe is a dissipative coupled system that exhibits self-organized criticality. This structured criticality is a property of complex systems where small events may trigger larger events. This is a kind of chaos where the general behavior of the system can be modeled on one scale while smaller- and larger-scale behaviors remain unpredictable (this is also Smolin point of view). The simple example of that phenomenon is a pile of sand. When QM and GR are computable and deterministic, the universe evolution (naturally evolving self-organized critical system) is non-computable and non-deterministic.

After the same Smolin you claim "Neither mathematical beauty nor agreement with experiment can guarantee that the ideas a theory is based on bear the slightest relation to reality." So tell me what could possibly give us the guarantee? If anything? I know this is a hard issue with our perception involved.

Best regards

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Edwin,

Quite a mindfull. Much of it above my paygrade though.

If I may make a few observations about the section on consciousness;

"Awareness is located in the field, but concentrated where the action is.'

The example I tend to think of is of a magnifying glass, focusing light to a point. When we draw it out, the light is diffuse and fills the whole circle, while...

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Edwin,

Quite a mindfull. Much of it above my paygrade though.

If I may make a few observations about the section on consciousness;

"Awareness is located in the field, but concentrated where the action is.'

The example I tend to think of is of a magnifying glass, focusing light to a point. When we draw it out, the light is diffuse and fills the whole circle, while when we draw it in and concentrate the light to a point, there is shadow in the surrounding area. I find concentration to be like this; Isolating from the broader network of beingness. It is when we blend, unfocused, with what is around us, that we are one with it. Meditation is the conventional model, but steady activity works just fine.

I think though, that I would compare awareness to light, rather than gravity, while gravity is the coming together that is knowledge. Like light, awareness is constantly pushing at its surroundings. looking for whatever crack it can find, constantly moving on. While knowledge is the thought structures, insights and observations that form and either grow, if we keep adding more attention/energy to them, or are forgotten, if our awareness moves onto something else. Only those thoughts which hold together and grow are what we would think of as logic, while the rest are only connected as a stream of consciousness. Awareness is what is present, the hands of the clock, constantly taking on new forms, or building up the old ones and knowledge is events, marks on the face of the clock, that come into being and recede, like waves, either crashing or fading. So with galaxies and gravity, the structure falls into the vortex, while the light radiates out. Awareness moving on, as thoughts fade away.

There is a political relationship in here as well, since conservatism is the structure, seemingly hard and fast, yet constantly crumbling and consolidating, while liberalism tends to be more the soft connecting tissue, radiating out and growing, yet never quite grasping and when it does, becoming conservative and solid. Like youth and age. Light and structure.

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Edwin

“In short, awareness is a field property, while perception is awareness of the relation between structures that information has built into one's brain. The question is how awareness couples to physical reality. The general fuzzy idea that prevails today is that arrangements of matter lead to awareness. Instead, the field is inherently aware, and always has been. But the biological...

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Edwin

“In short, awareness is a field property, while perception is awareness of the relation between structures that information has built into one's brain. The question is how awareness couples to physical reality. The general fuzzy idea that prevails today is that arrangements of matter lead to awareness. Instead, the field is inherently aware, and always has been. But the biological evolution reached the point where energy, sensed by bio-physical mechanisms, is stored as information (because it creates formations within) and these then lead to perception. It was a long process, but without the built-in awareness, I don't believe it would have ever happened. No possible arrangement of matter is capable of creating awareness from a non-aware piece of matter”

This is incorrect, the main reasons being:

1 Awareness is the receipt of physically independently existent input (which happens to be representational of something else, but is existent in its own right). Whereas perception is the resultant output of the subsequent processing of that. How that processing occurs is irrelevant to the physical circumstance in that it does not create it, or in any way affect it. It affects the perception of it.

2 Physical existence demonstrates no form of awareness, only sentient organisms possess the capability to be aware, this being an evolutionary development which takes advantage of certain existent phenomena. In other words, a brick also receives that physical input, but unlike the eye, it has no means of processing it.

3 We are trapped in an existentially closed system. Which is a function of what we can be aware of (ie what we can potentially know), that being determined by a physical process. There could be an alternative, but we cannot know it. And this is science, which is limited to the potentially knowable, indeed, whether we can fully know that is another matter. Asserting how this existence came into being is outwith our possible knowledge.

Paul

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In a comment above John said, "I would say light is aware and gravity is the form it chooses to manifest."

I did not ask John how he came to this conclusion, but his comment made me realize that it might be relevant to describe how I came to my conclusion. I did not just wake up one day and say "I think gravity is aware." Instead, after writing a long book about life (unpublished) I...

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In a comment above John said, "I would say light is aware and gravity is the form it chooses to manifest."

I did not ask John how he came to this conclusion, but his comment made me realize that it might be relevant to describe how I came to my conclusion. I did not just wake up one day and say "I think gravity is aware." Instead, after writing a long book about life (unpublished) I realized that I had effectively represented (without saying so) consciousness as a field. I then asked myself, if consciousness is a field, how does it interact physically? I knew force equations for fields, but what could the force equation for the consciousness field be? In about two hours I decided that the only thing that made sense to me was a Lorentz-like equation that depended on mass and velocity. This was for many reasons that are laid out in 'Gene Man's World' and are too lengthy for a comment.

Although I took general relativity as a graduate student, we did not cover Einstein's weak field equations, and if I ever knew them I had forgotten them. And as an atomic and molecular physicist at NASA, I did not work in general relativity. So it was only later that I realized I had "rediscovered" the weak field equations of gravity, first proposed by Maxwell, investigated by Heaviside, and then derived from Einstein's field equations.

The point here is that I did not come to the key consciousness equation through gravity, but instead came to the gravity equation by analysis of consciousness! I consider this significant. It is quite different from one day deciding "I think gravity is aware!" My master equation, based on one initial field, I derived later and it leads to the circulation equation and the force equation as well as a generalized quantum equation and Schrodinger's equation. Over the last seven years I have found a number of reasons to consider this a good theory and have not found good reasons to reject it. Obviously it's a hard sell.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

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Hi Akinbo,

An excellent question: can computers be aware?

Considering that I posit awareness in the field, locally concentrated near mass flow, then to some extent the answer would have to be yes. But I'm sure you're asking can they be aware "like humans" (or dogs, etc.).

I don't think so, for the following reasons. If local awareness depends on velocity of mass flow, both...

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Hi Akinbo,

An excellent question: can computers be aware?

Considering that I posit awareness in the field, locally concentrated near mass flow, then to some extent the answer would have to be yes. But I'm sure you're asking can they be aware "like humans" (or dogs, etc.).

I don't think so, for the following reasons. If local awareness depends on velocity of mass flow, both the velocity of electrons and the mass flow are very small. (The electron's high mass density complicates this answer, but I don't think it changes the result.) Even more significant is the organization of the flow. Computer flows (as currently constituted) are sequentially clocked and have no pattern that relates to reality. By this I mean that I can design the processor that processes the scene from a microprocessor, an FPGA, a gate array, a custom integrated circuit, or even vacuum tubes (in theory!). Each of these implementations will be completely different in the sense that, while executing exactly the same algorithm, the timing and spatial distribution of pulsed movement of electrons will be very different in each circuit. And in none of the circuits will the flow have any analogous relation to the scene being processed.

Contrast this with the way brains work. For simplicity take a rat's whiskers. The whiskers are laid out on his face in approximately 5 x 5 array and the nerves from the area preserve the pattern in the brain! That is, the nerves travel to a corresponding 5 x 5 array network in the brain. Thus the brain actually models the space being sensed (i.e., the root of the whiskers). There is nothing corresponding to this organization in computers.

Additionally I believe all mass flows in brains are complex 3-D flows (that vary in time) while all computers flows are essentially 2-D. And the gated flows of vesicles across synaptic gaps and the train of pulses in the axons are essentially analog (i.e, proportional) while computer flows are completely digital, flow or no flow. So brains have 3-D flows that vary in time and provide parallel analog processing of signals that, I believe, effectively model a 3-D world being observed by the brain. Computers have 2-D pulsed flows that vary spatially in ways essentially uncorrelated with the 3-D world being sensed. These I believe are very significant aspects that relate to say drones that see and shoot down missiles.

If the computer is "aware of" anything, it will effectively be aware of noise. And the vaunted ability of computers to "rewire" or "reprogram" themselves, so exciting when one first hears about it, has not produced any remarkable results that I know of.

The Dragon software that I'm using to write this comment inputs my voice and outputs ASCII text, but has absolutely zero awareness of the meaning of the words, which yet are easily interpreted by your learned brain structures. Despite the NSA's efforts to change this situation, the best they can do is recognize suspicious patterns that are then brought to the attention of a human intelligence.

I hope the sense of the above comes through. I see these problems is inherent, and not really subject to solution by those who favor AI. Nor do I believe anything essential changes with "quantum computers", which I do not believe will ever approach silicon-based computing except, perhaps, on simple factoring problems that are of no real import.

There is another aspect that touches on your question 3.) above so I will handle it in another comment.

Thank you for your most interesting questions that go to the heart of the matter.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

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Akinbo,

In an earlier comment above you ask the tough question, about "the not-two aspect of reality". You note that Parmenides said "of necessity one thing exists, viz., the existent and nothing else."

If this is true then several questions arise: how to conceive of or represent this fact. And whether this is merely a conception or whether one can be aware of this fact in direct...

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Akinbo,

In an earlier comment above you ask the tough question, about "the not-two aspect of reality". You note that Parmenides said "of necessity one thing exists, viz., the existent and nothing else."

If this is true then several questions arise: how to conceive of or represent this fact. And whether this is merely a conception or whether one can be aware of this fact in direct fashion.

I choose, as a physicist, to identify the "one thing" as the primordial gravity field, and attempt to show how our current universe, including us, can and did evolve from this one thing. To do so I necessarily include in the nature of the field the aspect of awareness, based partly on the self-interaction of the field that is necessary for the one thing to evolve (since nothing else existed!) and partly on a conclusion that I have reached that awareness, as I experience it, cannot be created from material building blocks, but must be inherent in the Participatory Universe that Wheeler intuited.

But this then implies, as Amos noted above, that we can, being evolved parts of the one thing, be directly aware of the one thing. Yet if this is the case, why is not everyone aware of this, and further, what does it mean to be aware of it?

In my essay I discuss how the existence of a threshold allows the creation of "two-state" systems, idealized as logic gates and the interconnection of these gates can produce numbers and such numbers can be generated by energy input to the 'counter'. I then discuss how we can, algorithmically, treat these numbers to derive 'feature vectors' which are the essential ingredients of physics. This process can be internalized in our brains to represent the world as "things", or what Zen calls "the Ten Thousand things".

Now whether awareness arises from the biological fact of putting the right building blocks in the right order, or from its inherent existence as a primordial field, in either case human beings identify as 'separate individuals', generally denoted by the term 'ego'.

If all we are is 'meat machines' then that's probably as far as we can go. But if awareness is the core property of the universe, then one might expect that it's possible to have some direct indication of this. Unfortunately, the nature of ego is to divide the universe into 'me' and 'not-me', an inherent two-fold reality.

Is it possible to transcend this? Many reports claim that is.

Abraham Maslow's studies, related in "The Peak Experience" claim that many people naturally have episodes wherein they experience the 'one-ness' of the universe, also termed 'being one-with the universe'.

William James in "Varieties of Religious Experience" came to the same conclusion.

Jill Bolte Taylor's "My Stroke of Insight" describes the state as she (a neuro-anatomist) experienced it while having a stroke.

Innumerable reports of LSD and psilocybin experience indicate the same thing.

All cultures have a mystical tradition based on experiences of this sort.

In my opinion every one of us was born with this general awareness, before our brains learned to distinguish 'me' from 'it' based on sensory input.

I also believe it is essentially a 'topological' awareness, based on *connectivity*, wherein the metric overlay of 'distance' is (almost) completely suppressed.

What is absolutely certain is that it can neither be adequately described in words (or math) nor can it be reached by talking, reading, or "thinking" about it. It is apparently reached through a biological state, either naturally, as Maslow and James report, or chemically induced, or stroke induced. Those who have never experienced it (or have forgotten the experience) tend to believe it's hogwash (or possibly codswallop). However it would appear that millions have experienced it, and the general consensus is that it's 1.) real, 2.) extremely positive, and 3.) has 'religious' overtones.

According to Zen and the Tao, it cannot be reached with words, but for a taste of the experience, I find D T Suzuki's translation of "Inscribed on the Believing Mind" to be exquisite.

I hope this adequately addresses the 'not-two' question.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

PS. This may seem to border on 'mystical', but I personally find it far less mystical than the belief that "math lives in some Platonic realm". It is based on direct experience, not abstract concept.

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Edwin,

Re your iconoclastic survey of the status of modern physics.... Bravo! Your insights into the wild and wooly world of physics research are a refreshing .... well, just refreshing says it best.

The difficulties of experimental testing of extrema theories, like particle physics and cosmology, seem to tempt some of our colleagues to cheat on sci method testing in order to stoke...

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Edwin,

Re your iconoclastic survey of the status of modern physics.... Bravo! Your insights into the wild and wooly world of physics research are a refreshing .... well, just refreshing says it best.

The difficulties of experimental testing of extrema theories, like particle physics and cosmology, seem to tempt some of our colleagues to cheat on sci method testing in order to stoke the imagination. When objective analysis leads to an impasse, a resort is made to bypass testing or to shave away hairy problems with Occam's Razor, a subjective and unscientific standard.

Special thanks are in order for the revealing review of the QED skeleton in the closet. Apparently QED is really only Quantum ElectrON Dynamics, finely tuned parametrically to agree with electron testing, but QMD would require another tune-up for the muon... perhaps another alpha 'constant' and doubling of the parametric set? And then noting that QED has all the predictive power of Darwinism.... breathtaking expository precision but nonexistent predictions.

Interesting, Edwin... Why isn't this specificity trumpeted along with the 6 sigma QED compliance with reality?

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world!".....said Archimedes. Now this has been updated to, "Give me enough 'tunable parameters' and I shall completely curve-fit reality with least-squares laws!

"Planck satellite data shows with high precision that we live in a remarkably simple universe.".... but maybe too simplistic. More than the inflationary paradigm is in trouble, post Planck-2013... just the iceberg's tip, Edwin.

The CMB as officially interpreted: the remnant radiation from the surface of last BB scattering, capturing the primeval structure of temp differences then, for all time and all places. We are looking - we are told - back in time 13 billion years to the first formation of matter.

However, a series of unexpected multiple multipole alignments had appeared in the COBE and WMAP sky scans, but were assumed to be temporary artifacts that the Planck survey would erase.... Instead, Planck affirmed the anomalies even more credibly.

The combination of a complete lack of any known systematic error, and long odds against random alignment was such a threat to the BB model that the combo has earned the initial low-alignment anomaly the nickname - "Axis of Evil". The axial correlation between multipole harmonics evident in all 3 CMB sky scans matched the local sky geometry to a very high CL.... the Leo direction, equinoxes, ecliptic and galactic planes were all there. And now there are more.... a lot more. All of these anomalies contradict the standard model of the universe and have no explanation in the LCDM, the standard Big Bang model. We are told we are seeing a pattern ubiquitous in space and formed far back in time, yet what we see is what is in the sky now - the local symmetries and celestial landmarks of our solar system and galaxy. As if when peering into deep space with our telescopes, we would actually see the surrounding buildings and trees in our own backyard! And how is it that the Andromedans see our solar and galactic alignments in their local sky?

There are not one, not two, but three giant elephants in the living room.

1) What explains this evidence so contradictory to the conventional cosmology for the CMB, BB, LCDM and even the Copernican principle?

2) Why is this evidence treated as non-emergent in the world of physics?

3) Why is the vast CMB universe seemingly centered on an insignificant planet like Earth?

All the best,

Robert

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I would like to call my readers' attention to a remarkable essay by Alexei Grinbaum. To understand fully the following comments, one must read his essay, nevertheless, my comment to him is worth reproducing:

Dear Alexei,

A most interesting essay! If I understand you correctly, you are considering the case of what will remain of a physics theory "if one clears away its human inventors...

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I would like to call my readers' attention to a remarkable essay by Alexei Grinbaum. To understand fully the following comments, one must read his essay, nevertheless, my comment to him is worth reproducing:

Dear Alexei,

A most interesting essay! If I understand you correctly, you are considering the case of what will remain of a physics theory "if one clears away its human inventors and users," based on the assumption that our ideas of physical reality are primarily a function of the way our brains are wired. Thus the first thing you throw away are ontological bases for theories. You conclude that only a mathematical basis of theories remains.

This appears to be a Platonic belief that math exists in some extra physical realm. An alternate perspective, developed in my essay, considers that, in the sense of Wheeler's "Participatory Universe", we are immediately connected to the physical universe (i.e., we sense gravity directly), while mathematics is a creation of the organization of our brains. In this case, if brain-based ideas are removed, then only physical reality, but no mathematical "principle" remains. This seems to cover the extreme cases.

A Platonic mathematical universe seems reflected in your statement: "in theoretical physics the axiomatic method must be separated from the Greek attitude that axioms repeat truths about reality." And "the axiomatic method has become a powerful tool for mathematical research."

My approach is based on the fact that I know how to derive math from matter, but I cannot imagine how to derive matter from math, and Occam's razor seems to argue against the separate independent existence of math and matter. Given a set of measurement numbers, an algorithmic procedure based on entropy maximization will produce a feature vector, with no ontological assumptions, and the space of such feature vectors is the typical basis of physical theories. The numbers and their mathematical manipulation, up to and including the derivation of the feature vectors, all are generated by material circuitry. Similarly, the fact that you discuss, that physics is observer independent (in the sense you describe) "only because quantum mechanics uses abstract mathematics..." is also compatible with matter generated math.

You have an interesting discussion that concludes that we do not have the "precise physical constitution" of the observer. This too is compatible with matter-generated-math as there are countless ways to design mathematical circuits, all of which will produce the same numeric outputs. You conclude that "the defining characteristic of the observer" is that "it must have information about some physical system." In my model this information is equivalent to energy transferred from the system to the structure of the observer, and thereby 'registered', becoming information. In other words wholly dependent on the 'it' of the observer structure. The 'bit' is the result that comes into existence only when a threshold is crossed. This is in agreement with your remark that "this information fully or partially describes the state of the system."

So we are both led to the conclusion that "An observer is a system identification algorithm."

I was surprised when our different assumptions converged on this point. You note that the observer can be flesh or silicon. Like you, I treated a robot developing a theory of physics, based on measurement, for the same purpose of eliminating human preconceptions. It is fascinating that you appear to start with the reality of a mathematical world and the reality of information, while I deny both, and we reach an important common conclusion. This became much clearer with the development of your schema based on where one cuts the loop.

You say "Each way of cutting the loop fixes one part of the loop in the position of derived concepts [...] while the other part becomes a given, ..."

You have done a superb job in developing this formalism. Congratulations!

You say, "it is mandatory to cut the loop, which makes it impossible to close within one theory the gap between the observer and the observed." This might also be considered the inherent boundary between the subjective and the objective. But where does one cut the loop? The system cannot choose, only the observer can choose. Based upon awareness that metric overlays on reality are mental constructs, and based on subjective awareness of the reality of gravity, I choose to interpret physics as real and information as a derived concept. I congratulate you again on having developed the schema and I hope you enjoy my essay as much as I enjoyed yours.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

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Hi Edwin,

Things like ''ad hoc 'creation' and 'annihilation' operators'', ''virtual particles'', ''Bell nonlocality'' and ''awareness'' look quite different when we discard causality -in which case we can no longer conceive of the 'speed' of light as the velocity light moves at but have to interpret c as a property of spacetime, which is something else entirely.

If real particles...

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Hi Edwin,

Things like ''ad hoc 'creation' and 'annihilation' operators'', ''virtual particles'', ''Bell nonlocality'' and ''awareness'' look quite different when we discard causality -in which case we can no longer conceive of the 'speed' of light as the velocity light moves at but have to interpret c as a property of spacetime, which is something else entirely.

If real particles are virtual particles which by alternately borrowing and lending each other the energy to exist, force each other to reappear again and again after every disappearance (Uncertainty Principle (UP): the smaller their distance, the higher the frequency they exchange energy at, pop up and disappear to pop up again, the higher their rest energy is), then they create and un-create each other over and over again. As the energy sign of a particle alternates, it is a wave phenomenon. If the energy, the rest frequency of a particle is the superposition of all frequencies it exchanges energy at with all particles within its interaction horizon, a frequency which depends on their mass, distance and motion, then the particle in its properties carries all relevant information about its entire universe, information which is refreshed in every cycle of its oscillation, so we might perhaps say that it at all times, in real time is 'aware' of what happens within its entire universe, however primitive that awareness is.

We can distinguish between two kinds of interactions: the conspicuous kind in which the energy and motion of particles changes, and the energy exchange by means of which particles express and preserve their, each other's properties, interactions which, preserving the status quo, aren't observable so aren't thought to exist, in fact can be identified as the long sought for ''hidden variables'', which of course only works if their communication is instantaneous. As a Big Bang Universe (BBU) lives in a time realm not of its own making so it is the same cosmic time everywhere, here it does take a photon time to travel. In contrast, a Self-Creating Universe (SCU) does not live in a time realm not of its own making but contains and produces all time within, so here clocks must be observed to run slower as they are more distant even when at rest relative to the observer. As a result in a SCU it is not the same time everywhere, so here a photon bridges any spacetime distance in no time at all (see http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1328). That we cannot experimentally determine whether c must be conceived of as a (finite) velocity or as a property of spacetime, combined with the fact that an instantaneous transmission over any spacetime distance would make the riddles of quantum mechanics like entanglement, the EPR paradox and the double-slit experiment self-evident, should at least give pause for thought.

Wheeler's participatory universe obviously doesn't require human participation to make the universe exist as his existence then would causally precede the universe. Since in a SCU particles create each other so particles, their properties are as much the cause as the effect of their interactions, their energy exchange, it is a participatory universe indeed. However, while in a SCU particles would vanish when we could cut of their energy exchange, in a Big Bang Universe (BBU) particles are assumed to keep existing even when they would be isolated from interactions since here their properties are privately owned quantities, only the cause of interactions so are unchangeable, they cannot be accused of having any form of awareness. The problem of a BBU is that it violates the conservation law according to which what comes out of nothing, must add to nothing, unlike a SCU which does obey this very most fundamental law of physics. Big bang cosmology conceives of the universe as an ordinary object we can imagine to observe from the outside, which has particular properties as a whole and evolves in time, i.e., lives in a time realm not of its own making. Since a SCU obeys the law which says that everything inside of it, including space and time must add to nil, it is that unique, paradoxical 'thing' which has no physical reality as a whole, as 'seen' from without but only exists as seen from within, here it doesn't make any sense to ask how old or large it is, how much energy it contains or what its entropy is, questions which anyway require that the meter, second, gram and joule are defined even outside the universe. As in a BBU particles only are the cause of forces, here one has to assume the existence of virtual photons and gravitons to transmit forces between real particles, so must move, like pin-balls in a pinball machine, at a finite velocity. Though the emission and absorption of virtual particles by real ones is supposed to be random so the energy of real particles fluctuate randomly, they nevertheless obey the UP according to which a deviation in the energy of a particle may last shorter as the deviation is greater, begging the question how its neighbors can know when to supply the particle in a timely fashion with energy so it can obey the UP. This is obvious in a SCU since here the particle in every cycle exchanges all of its energy: in fact, the UP is just another formulation of the Planck relation E = h v, with h the Planck constant and v the frequency the particle oscillates at.

Continued in the next post.

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As to ''the origin of the universe'', as argued, unlike a BBU, the real universe we live in has no beginning as a whole, no cause, no origin as it does not exist as 'seen' from without: in a SCU every particle can consider itself to be (at) the center of its own interaction horizon, so is the alpha and omega of its own universe. A SCU obeys the perfect cosmological principle: here particles start...

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As to ''the origin of the universe'', as argued, unlike a BBU, the real universe we live in has no beginning as a whole, no cause, no origin as it does not exist as 'seen' from without: in a SCU every particle can consider itself to be (at) the center of its own interaction horizon, so is the alpha and omega of its own universe. A SCU obeys the perfect cosmological principle: here particles start to exist to each other, create one another as they start to exchange energy, start to evolve to higher energies, as they start to contract, which they will due to gravity which, as I argued in my 2013 essay, favors events which increase their mass above a decrease, powering time as they do. If according to the UP a particle with an infinitesimal energy has an infinite lifetime, then we can say that it always has existed: the smaller its energy, the less definite its energy, its properties are, the more it has a virtual character, the less its presence differs from its nonexistence.

As to ''gravity may not fit into quantum mechanics'', in my study (which is a bit of a mess, see website) I have defined the mass of a particle as being greater as its position is less indefinite, agreeing both with the uncertainty principle which is at the heart of quantum mechanics, and, as the (in)definiteness in its position must be specified relative to an observing particle, also is a relativistic definition. The greater the mass of a particle is, the stronger the forces it exerts and feels from all directions, the more exactly equal they are, the smaller the area is where they are more precisely equal, the smaller the area it can be found in, the less indefinite its position is. Conversely, the smaller its mass is, the less definite its position is, the less it matters physically whether it exists or not, where it is when. If the (rest) energy of a real (massive) particle, its rate of change varies within every cycle, from an infinitesimal value to some non-zero magnitude, then according to this mass definition, the indefiniteness in its position similarly varies within every cycle and hence its momentum.

Your lamentation that ''we don't have access to reality'' presupposes that there exists such a thing: as I argued in my 2012 essay, there is no objectively observable reality at the origin of our observation, with emphasis of ''objectively'' since in our self-creating universe, the building blocks of reality, its particles are made out of each other. The fallacy of classical mechanics, of big bang cosmology and general relativity is that they assume that there exists an absolute reality, something we could objectively observe from outside the universe if we could step outside of it, if we could look over God's shoulders at His creation, so these theories are infected, contaminated with religious suppositions we aren't even aware of.

Regards, Anton

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Edwin, very nice essay. I think we are in solid agreement on the approach to physics – one grounded in the idea that there is something real, an “It”, from which we derive information, “Bit”.

You do a good job of exploring why we believe a theory is good. The graphic of the n-parameter elephant, combined with the Jaynes quote in your conclusion “the proper question is not “How...

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Edwin, very nice essay. I think we are in solid agreement on the approach to physics – one grounded in the idea that there is something real, an “It”, from which we derive information, “Bit”.

You do a good job of exploring why we believe a theory is good. The graphic of the n-parameter elephant, combined with the Jaynes quote in your conclusion “the proper question is not “How well do data D support hypothesis?” [but] “Are there alternatives which data D would support relative to H, and how much support is possible?” puts its all together. Just because one hypothesis yields a nice elephant does not mean it is correct, and we always need to explore other hypotheses which might draw better elephants.

In my essay, I put forward an argument for an interpretation of quantum theory which associates wavefunctions with experiments, not things. By rejecting assertions that QM is a theory of things, thus is not a physical theory, we are free to pursue theories that are physical. We can now explore what sort of physical things and physical theories might then explain the predictions made by the predictions of QM – other hypotheses which might fit the data. After reading your essay, and re-reading your essay of last time, I understand that you seek a locally realistic theory underlying QM, as I do.

Your proposal is that we begin with a single field (“But rather than postulate hundreds of fields as Susskind does for his Multiverse, we can assume that only one real field existed initially.”) and I agree this is an excellent beginning. I am a little unsure whether you a proposing that we now have multiple fields, and I am a little unsure where particles fit in your scheme. Here we may diverge somewhat, as I would suggest exploring the hypothesis that the one real field is what existed initially and is still all there is, thus no particles (in the sense of Democritus or Newton) and no other fields (except perhaps as components of one field). Certainly, as you argue in your last essay on the nature of the wavefunction, we must also distinguish between the real field and our probabilistic estimates of what we might expect should we perform experiments on the real field.

You took some pains to distinguish between the field and geometry in your essay, but I think that if you adopt the idea that there is only one real field, then the distinction between the field and geometry is not problematic: the geometry and the field are equivalent. As you quote from MTW, “any physical theory originally written in a special coordinates system can be recast in geometric, coordinate free language.” We encounter many more problems if we try to describe geometry as multiple fields and particles.

I think your final discussion regarding awareness and the consciousness field is daring, in that it may venture a little beyond the conventional realm of physics, but you argue very logically and come to a sound conclusion. You make a sensible assertion that, for example, there is a sense in which we can say gravity is “aware” and proceed very carefully from there. If you assume there is only one real field the argument is even simpler: if there is only one field, then you (or anyone else) are a manifestation of that field, and combined with the apparent evidence that you are aware, you are quite logically led to a conclusion that the field is in some way aware. As I said, this is logical but also daring.

Nice job on the essay. Thanks for recommending that others read mine. I think that it fits very nicely with yours, and discussing how ideas can be fit together - arranging the jigsaw puzzle of ideas - is the most valuable part of this contest.

Regards, Mark

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Eckhard Blumschein, on his thread, asked me questions that are relevant here, so I repeat portions of my answer below. I made the decision to write an extremely high level overview of my theory in 9 pages, guaranteeing that those unfamiliar with it will find it confusing, or at least incomplete. The list of references are intended to "fill in the holes". But of course many will not have time or...

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Eckhard Blumschein, on his thread, asked me questions that are relevant here, so I repeat portions of my answer below. I made the decision to write an extremely high level overview of my theory in 9 pages, guaranteeing that those unfamiliar with it will find it confusing, or at least incomplete. The list of references are intended to "fill in the holes". But of course many will not have time or interest to explore these. I am, in effect, drawing a high level map of my theory and staking a few claims.

You ask how gravity relates to information. My theory of gravity produces particles, the particles create structures, and local energy transfers cross thresholds, restructuring or "in-form"-ing the structure, and creating and storing information. There exists a long chain of details stretching from the gravity field to the information stored in the local structure. I merely sketch the chain.

The scenes from the Chinese tapestries simply illustrate that humans have always been presented with contradictory information since antiquity. The contradictory information referred to here is "it from bit" versus "bit from it". An 'artistic' illustration, nothing more.

I do agree with most of Schlafly's essay, but I think the best essay in the contest currently is Mark Feeley's.

My master equation for self-evolution of the universe yields solutions G = 1/r, C = 1/t. And it leads to a Newton-like equation suggesting G = gravity. If my G is multiplied by c-squared, it assumes the dimensions of acceleration, as required for Newtons gravity. The C solution already has the dimension (1/t) of Maxwell's and Einstein's gravito-magnetic field (the gravitational analog of the magnetic field).

So, from the simplest and most universal equation I can imagine, I obtain solutions that are easily interpreted as the two aspects of gravity, just as E and B are two aspects of the electromagnetic field. The G field is radial and relates to local mass, whereas the C field is induced by mass density in motion, i.e., momentum density. Therefore the picture relates to moving mass such as relativistic particles, as the problems I am interested in are dominated by C so I ignore G for simplicity.

As for your astute question about the possibility that my asymmetric time can be considered 'now', that is how I interpret it, however the inverse time refers to local 'frequency' associated with the de Broglie-like wave function induced by particle momentum.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

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Dear

Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon.

So you can produce material from your thinking. . . .

I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The...

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Dear

Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon.

So you can produce material from your thinking. . . .

I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The main stream community people want magic from science instead of realty especially in the subject of cosmology. We all know well that cosmology is a subject where speculations rule.

Hope to get your comments even directly to my mail ID also. . . .

Best

=snp

snp.gupta@gmail.com

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.b
logspot.com/

Pdf download:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/essay-downloa
d/1607/__details/Gupta_Vak_FQXi_TABLE_REF_Fi.pdf

Part of abstract:

- -Material objects are more fundamental- - is being proposed in this paper; It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material. . . Similarly creation of matter from empty space as required in Steady State theory or in Bigbang is another such problem in the Cosmological counterpart. . . . In this paper we will see about CMB, how it is generated from stars and Galaxies around us. And here we show that NO Microwave background radiation was detected till now after excluding radiation from Stars and Galaxies. . . .

Some complements from FQXi community. . . . .

A

Anton Lorenz Vrba wrote on May. 4, 2013 @ 13:43 GMT

……. I do love your last two sentences - that is why I am coming back.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 6, 2013 @ 09:24 GMT

. . . . We should use our minds to down to earth realistic thinking. There is no point in wasting our brains in total imagination which are never realities. It is something like showing, mixing of cartoon characters with normal people in movies or people entering into Game-space in virtual reality games or Firing antimatter into a black hole!!!. It is sheer a madness of such concepts going on in many fields like science, mathematics, computer IT etc. . . .

B.

Francis V wrote on May. 11, 2013 @ 02:05 GMT

Well-presented argument about the absence of any explosion for a relic frequency to occur and the detail on collection of temperature data……

C

Robert Bennett wrote on May. 14, 2013 @ 18:26 GMT

"Material objects are more fundamental"..... in other words "IT from Bit" is true.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 14, 2013 @ 22:53 GMT

1. It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material.

2. John Wheeler did not produce material from information.

3. Information describes material properties. But a mere description of material properties does not produce material.

4. There are Gods, Wizards, and Magicians, allegedly produced material from nowhere. But will that be a scientific experiment?

D

Hoang cao Hai wrote on Jun. 16, 2013 @ 16:22 GMT

It from bit - where are bit come from?

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on Jun. 17, 2013 @ 06:10 GMT

….And your question is like asking, -- which is first? Egg or Hen?— in other words Matter is first or Information is first? Is that so? In reality there is no way that Matter comes from information.

Matter is another form of Energy. Matter cannot be created from nothing. Any type of vacuum cannot produce matter. Matter is another form of energy. Energy is having many forms: Mechanical, Electrical, Heat, Magnetic and so on..

E

Antony Ryan wrote on Jun. 23, 2013 @ 22:08 GMT

…..Either way your abstract argument based empirical evidence is strong given that "a mere description of material properties does not produce material". While of course materials do give information.

I think you deserve a place in the final based on this alone. Concise - simple - but undeniable.

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Hi Edwin,

Of the things I understood in your essay, I find nothing to disagree with worth disagreeing with, but that leaves many references, your math and hence most of your essay opaque to my understanding. I leave it up to you to see elements of agreement or disagreement in the following observations, none of which are meant as criticism.

When philosophers considered space and...

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Hi Edwin,

Of the things I understood in your essay, I find nothing to disagree with worth disagreeing with, but that leaves many references, your math and hence most of your essay opaque to my understanding. I leave it up to you to see elements of agreement or disagreement in the following observations, none of which are meant as criticism.

When philosophers considered space and time as continuous and independent of each other, the notion demanded everything in space be recreated from moment to moment. And while that was tenable for a time, it could not stand in a large complex universe. Most things are obviously discrete (granular) and some things continuous (smooth), but debate about what was divisible and indivisible was heading in one direction only because discrete was winning at every observation. Those who could extrapolate, extrapolated a discrete universe made from dimensionless points, and those who stopped short of extrapolating to infinity and beyond saw the universe as being comprised of very small granularities. But that led to a conflict between philosophy and dogma. For the complexity of a large continuous universe full of very small things to be recreated from moment to moment required a God infinitely more powerful than anything previously imagined, i.e. God*, that is, God to the power of infinity.

Einstein united continuous space and continuous time, i.e. space-time, and what he got for his troubles was a block-universe, and when infinitely small slices of time accommodate a universe of small things frozen relative to each other, no argument could explain how observations could be made from within this frozen universe. Observation must then be the purview of something or someone beyond space-time. The product of Small-Things* and Small-Slices* equates to a God**, otherwise slices containing incomprehensible complexity can not be created one after the other; and not just this, but this time God must be removed from space and time. And while this did not upset dogma, it is not a reasonable proposition. You can not unite space and time via math without continuous time; time is up, the gig is up as they say. The reason physics persists with things continuous is because mathematics doesn't work well in a universe of discrete entities. And the math falls over completely the moment time is not continuous, the best mathematicians can do is a symbol for an increment in time which can be infinitely small (but never zero because that exposes the error in reasoning). To move forward I choose explanations where derivatives are transparent, I choose a granular universe where everything which exists has extension in three dimensions. I say it's time philosophers took philosophy back from scientists, and in that effort I propose that "Law from no Law" be rephrased "Law from things Predictable".

When I think of space itself as comprised of discrete elements, i.e. granular (pbit), and time as a function of not just the elements of space, but the fabric of space made possible by the self organization of predictable elements, I am compelled to explain why elements and fabric exist in a symbiotic way, and for that I must explain purpose. For those who say gravity must be explained also, I say the elements of space are the elements of gravity, and the purpose of space, time and gravity are all concerned with appreciating the persistent material of the universe. In other words granularity need not be recreated from moment to moment, only appreciated, and appreciation requires observation, and observation is a complimentary measurement; that is, observation is a concurrent measurement of one thing by another and visa-versa, and that means both things must be changed by each others "structured measurement" if the instantiation of a momentary "observer" is to be actual.

I hope this helps, and await your opinion as to the relevance of my observations.

Best Regards.

Zoran.

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Dear Dr. Klingman,

Your essay was recommended to me by Ralph Waldo Walker III. I'm glad I read it - I found it fascinating, and very well written. It also has much in common with my work.

You open your argument by showing that physics builds its models from its own assumptions, so that we shouldn't be too impressed that the data obtained seems to bear these out. This does indeed...

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Dear Dr. Klingman,

Your essay was recommended to me by Ralph Waldo Walker III. I'm glad I read it - I found it fascinating, and very well written. It also has much in common with my work.

You open your argument by showing that physics builds its models from its own assumptions, so that we shouldn't be too impressed that the data obtained seems to bear these out. This does indeed remind us to be adventuresome, and to question the prevailing view.

As you point out, it has become unfashionable to consider the Cosmos in simple physical terms, even though that's how it all began – back when the mind first wandered from the pages of the Bible, and began to see space and time for what they truly are.

My take on physical reality, however, diverges from yours in the matter of there being other Universes. Our system is the result of self-interaction, as you say, but to claim that such self-interaction can only have occurred once is an assumption that is harder to justify than its opposite – that a General Field of cosmic systems is perpetually forming.

This is an important point, because these cosmic systems must have certain effects upon each other, and in my essay I show that some of these can be deduced.

The fear that prevents serious thinkers from venturing in this direction is that they might end up simply fudging vexing questions - or still worse, might find themselves in the company of mystics and other strange birds. We are frail, and we usually don't want to appear ridiculous; but if it makes sense, we should go with it.

Therefore, I describe a General Field of Cosmae along perfectly logical lines, and refer to it only in the context of its likely effects upon our Cosmos. These effects include the evolution of Organic and Sensory-Cognitive Vortices, once an Inorganic Vortex has come into being along the lines that you describe.

I was struck by your brilliant expression of gravito-magnetism in mathematical terms. A gravitational-magnetic force that underlies both Inorganic and Organic evolution is central to my paradigm also, and yields a structure of physical reality that involves the Human Observer, and even the Mind.

These Organic and Sensory-Cognitive Vortices are shown to be correlated with each other and with the Inorganic Vortex, as a result of their simultaneous and similar interaction with the Gravitational-Magnetic Field: They remain distinct from one another – that is, they do not interact directly – so that borders are formed between them that delineate certain Zones, within which our parameter systems (including mathematics) are most effective.

These borders are not fixed, but are rather in continuous flux – as a result of the perpetual evolutionary effect of the Gravitational-Magnetic Force.

This in turn means that the It and Bit must be correlated, and indeed must be continually altering their relationship (as we have experienced since diverging from other animals). In other words, information must 'shape itself', as do Inorganic and Organic phenomena.

Though it is undoubtedly true that 'without the physical reality there can be no information', we have obviously defined this physical reality by continuously interacting with it over the course of our evolution; thus what we know as information is a distinctly Human variation of it that ultimately emerges from, and is directly affected by, the Gravitational-Magnetic Field.

Though mine is a common sense and axiomatic paradigm, I believe your mathematical insights could be applied to the physical reality it describes. You'll also appreciate that this three-field structure very usefully formalizes the concept of a participatory universe.

In this spirit, I hope you'll have a look and let me know what you think.

Congratulations on this very significant work,

All the best,

John.

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Dear Edwin,

I had penned a long reply to your stuff, which disappeared into a puff of nothing, which I assert violates the law of conservation of energy. So would like an instantaneous return of my thoughts... O well. So here I begin again. But I am first writing offline so that I can control things better.

You wrote on my blog...:

Einstein said,"There is no space...

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Dear Edwin,

I had penned a long reply to your stuff, which disappeared into a puff of nothing, which I assert violates the law of conservation of energy. So would like an instantaneous return of my thoughts... O well. So here I begin again. But I am first writing offline so that I can control things better.

You wrote on my blog...:

Einstein said,"There is no space absent of field." In other words, the gravitational field fills space completely. Although you may or may not think of this field as a 'substance', it is considered to have energy (Maxwell taught us fields have energy) and hence mass (Einstein taught us energy has mass equivalence) and a number of writers of books on gravitation consider it a substance (as do I). Your question implies that you think of space as 'empty' ,but it is entirely possible that the primordial gravity field gave rise to space. Your second question, about what qualities would make it the source of all else is the topic of my essay

You are correct in that I used to imagine space to be “empty”, but when I read Berkeley, I adopted his view, which critiqued Newton’s notion of a God-created world-machine, which in turn caused our perceptions of itself.

With Berkeley’s view I now see space, not as a container in which “things” reside, but as a mental and perceptual x, y, z, t coordinate system by which we keep track of where and when we are, for ourselves in the world and to coordinate with other perceivers. B saw the world-machine as an unhelpful intruder because it could never itself be observed (except by the perceptions themselves, which begs the question of its existence), so that we could never empirically know it to be there, nor be able to compare it with our perceptions to make sure we were perceiving correctly. Knowledge of the machine would be entirely metaphysical, not empirical. So it would have to be a logical conclusion, not an empirical one. So he cut out the “middleman” and went directly to God as the cause and the coordinator of the cosmos for us inhabitants. Occam’s razor with a vengeance. God is by nature a metaphysical entity, not physical, and this requires the cosmological argument (or something similar) to justify belief in Him.

So I am very interested in your attempt to understand gravity as the source of all things. I have always understood gravity to be an attraction between objects with mass. But I could easily imagine a space entirely empty. So I am not sure what to think of Einstein’s notion above. I suspect that he was the victim, as many others, of the collapse of real causality (a personal God), and so had to find substitutes within the cosmos itself.

In any event, B’s view, if true, changes the whole discussion on the meaning of space at all, and the sense in which physical matter can be the cause of anything. We no longer have things of a Newtonian sort bumping around, we rather have perceptions which are related to each other by laws of behavior – what I called “bundles of behavior” in my essay.

In either case, there has to be an adequate “objective unifier of apperception” to tie together the disparate events, experiments, etc., that we want to think are part of the “same” world, and under the “same” laws. How gravity might be a better candidate than God for doing that I wait to see.Dear Edwin,

I had penned a long reply to your stuff, which disappeared into a puff of nothing, which I assert violates the law of conservation of energy. So would like an instantaneous return of my thoughts... O well. So here I begin again. But I am writing offline so that I can control things better.

You wrote on my blog...:

Einstein said,"There is no space absent of field." In other words, the gravitational field fills space completely. Although you may or may not think of this field as a 'substance', it is considered to have energy (Maxwell taught us fields have energy) and hence mass (Einstein taught us energy has mass equivalence) and a number of writers of books on gravitation consider it a substance (as do I). Your question implies that you think of space as 'empty' ,but it is entirely possible that the primordial gravity field gave rise to space. Your second question, about what qualities would make it the source of all else is the topic of my essay

You are correct in that I used to imagine space to be “empty”, but when I read Berkeley, I adopted his view, which critiqued Newton’s notion of a God-created world-machine, which in turn caused our perceptions of itself.

With Berkeley’s view I now see space, not as a container in which “things” reside, but as a mental and perceptual x, y, z, t coordinate system by which we keep track of where and when we are, for ourselves in the world and to coordinate with other perceivers. B saw the world-machine as an unhelpful intruder because it could never itself be observed (except by the perceptions themselves, which begs the question of its existence), so that we could never empirically know it to be there, nor be able to compare it with our perceptions to make sure we were perceiving correctly. Knowledge of the machine would be entirely metaphysical, not empirical. So it would have to be a logical conclusion, not an empirical one. So he cut out the “middleman” and went directly to God as the cause and the coordinator of the cosmos for us inhabitants. Occam’s razor with a vengeance. God is by nature a metaphysical entity, not physical, and this requires the cosmological argument (or something similar) to justify belief in Him.

So I am very interested in your attempt to understand gravity as the source of all things. I have always understood gravity to be an attraction between objects with mass. But I could easily imagine a space entirely empty. So I am not sure what to think of Einstein’s notion above. I suspect that he was the victim, as many others, of the collapse of real causality (a personal God), and so had to find substitutes within the cosmos itself.

In any event, B’s view, if true, changes the whole discussion on the meaning of space at all, and the sense in which physical matter can be the cause of anything. We no longer have things of a Newtonian sort bumping around, we rather have perceptions which are related to each other by laws of behavior – what I called “bundles of behavior” in my essay.

In either case, there has to be an adequate “objective unifier of apperception” to tie together the disparate events, experiments, etc., that we want to think are part of the “same” world, and under the “same” laws. How gravity might be a better candidate than God for doing that I wait to see.

Dear Edwin,

I had penned a long reply to your stuff, which disappeared into a puff of nothing, which I assert violates the law of conservation of energy. So would like an instantaneous return of my thoughts... O well. So here I begin again. But I am writing offline so that I can control things better.

You wrote on my blog...:

Einstein said,"There is no space absent of field." In other words, the gravitational field fills space completely. Although you may or may not think of this field as a 'substance', it is considered to have energy (Maxwell taught us fields have energy) and hence mass (Einstein taught us energy has mass equivalence) and a number of writers of books on gravitation consider it a substance (as do I). Your question implies that you think of space as 'empty' ,but it is entirely possible that the primordial gravity field gave rise to space. Your second question, about what qualities would make it the source of all else is the topic of my essay

You are correct in that I used to imagine space to be at least potentially “empty”, but when I read Berkeley, I adopted his view, which critiqued Newton’s notion of a God-created world-machine, which in turn caused our perceptions of itself.

With Berkeley’s view I now see space, not as a container in which “things” reside, but as a mental and perceptual x, y, z, t coordinate system by which we keep track of where and when we are, for ourselves in the world and to coordinate with other perceivers. B saw the world-machine as an unhelpful intruder because it could never itself be observed (except through the perceptions themselves, which begs the question of its existence), so that we could never empirically know it to be there, nor be able to compare it with our perceptions to make sure we were perceiving correctly. Knowledge of the machine would be entirely metaphysical, not empirical. It would have to be a logical conclusion, not an empirical one. So he cut out the “middleman” and went directly to God as the cause and the coordinator of the cosmos for us inhabitants. Occam’s razor with a vengeance. God is by nature a metaphysical entity, not physical, and this requires the cosmological argument (or something similar) to justify belief in Him (the subject of my doctoral thesis).

So I am very interested in your attempt to understand gravity as the source of all things. I have always understood gravity to be an attraction between objects with mass. But I could easily imagine a space entirely empty of objects. So I am not sure what to think of Einstein’s notion above. I suspect that he was the victim, as many others, of the collapse of real causality (a personal God), and so had to find substitutes within the cosmos itself.

In any event, B’s view, if true, changes the whole discussion on the meaning of space at all, and the sense in which physical matter can be the cause of anything. We no longer have things of a Newtonian sort bumping around, we rather have perceptions which are related to each other by laws of behavior – what I called “bundles of behavior” in my essay.

In either case, there has to be an adequate “objective unifier of apperception” to tie together the disparate events, experiments, etc., that we want to think are part of the “same” world, and under the “same” laws. How gravity might be a better candidate than God for doing that I wait to see.

(You were right, we need more space than nine pages to present our case....)

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Dear Edwin, what an accomplished man, what a renaissance man! What a beautiful essay and what a pleasure to read it. You started with the Suzhou Qingming Scroll that shows the celebration of ordinary lives during the worship of ancestors festival in Suzhou market. You mockingly ask the quetion of this contest: "the ambiguity of life. I hear the man on the left saying "Information is real, matter...

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Dear Edwin, what an accomplished man, what a renaissance man! What a beautiful essay and what a pleasure to read it. You started with the Suzhou Qingming Scroll that shows the celebration of ordinary lives during the worship of ancestors festival in Suzhou market. You mockingly ask the quetion of this contest: "the ambiguity of life. I hear the man on the left saying "Information is real, matter is imaginary", while the one on the right proclaims, "Matter is real, information is imagined".

Which is correct?.... This contest could have been titled: "Map from territory, or territory from map?"

Smolin says of purely math-based ideas: “sooner or later we’ll find ourselves just making stuff up.”

Modern physics, tied maximally to math, minimally to reality, contains a lot of ‘made up stuff’.'

You indicted the professional physicists of bias and they have failed to realize or acknowledge their bias or ignorance. You presented your case: "QED’s worst gives 4% accuracy and QCD’s best about 1%—both ten times worse than the theory of epicycles—yet dogma such as virtual particles, QCD color, Bell non- locality or other premises are never to be questioned."

Then brilliantly, you proposed your powerful but simple alternative. You wrote: "...we can assume that only one real field existed initially. If so, it could evolve only through

self-interaction. If we call this field φ and the change or evolution operator ∇ , then this English statement about evolution has a math equivalent10 (expressed in Geometric Algebra notation):

∇φ =φφ. . Powerful stuff! Great achievement! I like it very much.

However this conclusion below, I beg to differ with respect. You wrote: "The model is thus a structure or form in hardware (computer or brain) and the addition of measurement data ‘in-forms’, or develops improved in-ternal form-al structure. This is the meaning of in-form-ation. It derives from the physical hardware that incorporates the map or model, and is inherently and unquestionably "bit from it". Without the physical, there simply is no information. To argue otherwise one must show how a world with no physical reality can be brought into existence from information. Wheeler’s remark "how to combine bits in fantastically large numbers to obtain what we call existence" was just unsupported fantasy." In contrast, in my essay Child of Qbit in time, I postulate that bit = it that it can come from bit or bit from it. Because as you pointed out, it is one field that interacts with itself. Thus bit interacts with itself as bit or it. As Shakespeare told us, our thinkings make things right or wrong or bit or it. KQID describes our reality that all things are one Qbit(00,1,-1). This Qbit is the singularity Qbit Multiverse that projects its computations in Einstein complex coordinates(like Pythagoras triangles) with A = pc and S = mc^2 satisfies Einstein vector space in time |E) = A + iS, where S and A are real, and i is imaginary number satisfies i^2 = -1, S = mc2 and A = pc that satisfies (mc2)2+(pc)2= 1 onto the 2D screen (our Multiverse event horizon) Lm which is Minkowski's Null Geodesics that in turn project those Einstein coordinates in our real world that we really feel as alive and conscious. Yes we agree there is only one field, in KQID is our Ancestor FAPAMA Qbit.

I agree with what you said: "I hypothesize that awareness came into existence but once. A consciousness field does not arise when a number of Lego blocks are first assembled in correct order— and re-arise with every organism that is born! It’s been a Participatory Universe from the beginning." Here, we use different terms naturally, I say this is that Qbit and this Qbit manifest itself into myriads things in a field as described in KQID equation υτ(iLx,y,z, Lm) in the form of conscious and aware entity as described in this equation ψI( CTE) where I is information as the bits- wave function of consciousness(C), time(T) and energy(E). Of course then, as you deduced: "Thus the field is aware of both position and motion aspects of reality — Space and Time!" And of course that

"Bits and information imply consciousness; knowledge and meaning of information require awareness!" We have similar idea but using different terms and symbols. What a wonderful essay beyond words to describe. I rated it the best score. Please comment on my essay and rate it accordingly. Thanks for this gift, Leo KoGuan

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Hi Edwin,

I kept wondering why I have not been seeing any posts regarding interesting essays, under the "Recent Forum Posts". It just dawned on me that only posts about blogs, not essays, appear there now. Bummer!

I recently encountered this essay, from a local college, that I think you might find interesting, in the context of your essay:

Fields and Particles and...

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Hi Edwin,

I kept wondering why I have not been seeing any posts regarding interesting essays, under the "Recent Forum Posts". It just dawned on me that only posts about blogs, not essays, appear there now. Bummer!

I recently encountered this essay, from a local college, that I think you might find interesting, in the context of your essay:

Fields and Particles and Being

The essay, by Dylan Casey, begins on p. 57 of the PDF file.

The essay is published in "The St. John's Review". St. John's is a rather unique, small liberal arts college, whose entire curriculum is devoted to reading and discussing "Great Books". Consequently, the faculty members, called tutors, are well versed in the history of philosophical and scientific thought. Dylan Casey is a physicist, turned tutor. His essay concerns how notions about the nature of "particles" and "fields" evolved over the centuries and into modern Field Theory. Because of his position, at the college, he is rather more cognizant of the distinction between actual physics and metaphysical speculation, than most modern physicists.

The essay begins by noting the problem of "Action at a Distance", encountered in Particle Interactions. It then notes that Faraday "coined the term field", to avoid this problem; particles don't interact, at a distance, with other particles, they only interact with the field they are immersed in. Subsequently, Maxwell and Einstein delved into the origins of such fields and hit upon the notion that particles might disturb the field near them, and these disturbances propagate, at finite speed, towards other particles, and thereby alter the field near them, thereby altering their response to their local field.

This brings me to your intriguing "master equation". As you know, I'm not particularly fond of pulling mathematical rabbits out of physical hats. But I like the idea of starting solely with a single, self-interacting field. But why assume that the *entire* field is interacting with itself? Perhaps, given any finite speed for the propagation of disturbances, and a large physical universe, only localized interactions are possible, like schools of fish, and flocks of birds. The evolution of the interaction occurs as a result of the constantly changing subset of the field, that is actually influencing any given particle, at any given moment.

I could say more regarding my take on gravity as geometry, consciousness, the Holographic Principle and the like, but, at least for now, I'd mainly like to hear your thoughts regarding global vs. local self-interaction.

Let me give you a little more idea of where I am coming from. You are familiar with some of my concerns regarding the usage of Fourier Transforms in Field Theory. Let me be explicit about it, in the present context. Spatial Fourier Transforms integrate over all space. Temporal ones integrate over all time. But, they cannot integrate over a disturbance that has not yet arrived, unless one reintroduces instantaneous action, not just at a spatial distance, but temporal, future ones, as well. Hence they cannot be a correct model for any local interaction. This is why communications engineers introduced concepts like "instantaneous frequency" as opposed to "Fourier Frequency", to extract information from only localized fields.; localized in both space and time.

Rob McEachern

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Hi Edwin,

I very much enjoyed your essay. You wrote:

1. "Without the physical, there simply is no information. To argue otherwise one must show how a world with no physical reality can be brought into existence from information. Wheeler's remark "how to combine bits in fantastically large numbers to obtain what we call existence" was just unsupported fantasy."

I think the...

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Hi Edwin,

I very much enjoyed your essay. You wrote:

1. "Without the physical, there simply is no information. To argue otherwise one must show how a world with no physical reality can be brought into existence from information. Wheeler's remark "how to combine bits in fantastically large numbers to obtain what we call existence" was just unsupported fantasy."

I think the question is whether what we experience as "physical" is really better understood as "virtual". Is our "physical reality" an illusion? When we look out at the world, are we just seeing an immersive virtual illusion? We have the example (or analogy) of software agents in a virtual world. What they might "perceive" as "physical" we know to be "virtual", that is, just based on information. Are we in the same position, that everything we take as "real" is virtual and the ground of being is unobservable?

2. "It's been a Participatory Universe from the beginning."

I agree that is the simplest explanation.

While yours is an elegant bottom-up explanation for the cosmos, my essay Software Cosmos takes a top-down approach. While my starting point is very different, my picture does include a hyperspherical gravito-electric field (i.e. without boundary conditions) that may provide a venue for yours. You also may like the fact that I endorse Geometric Algebra and do not require Inflation in my model. Anyway, I hope you find some food for thought or a reference or two in there that will be of use to you.

Hugh

P.S. I have a copy of your Microprocessor Systems Design (vol II) still on my bookshelf, from my days of developing operating systems for new computer hardware. Chapter 7, which describes the construction of a floating point processor, is a remarkable account of how a higher order can be constructed from simpler parts. Consider that today's virtual worlds like Second Life, while implemented in software, are reliant on decent floating point calculations. We could say that conceiving and implementing the FPU design is where the physical world opens to the possibility of hosting a virtual world. You described that transition in 62 pages that are still enjoyable today as a reminder of the ineffable pleasure of seeing such possibilities open up.

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Dear Edwin,

Thank your for your many very interesting ideas. Here are a few comments.

The real world is not a purely mathematical or informational entity. As I understand your essay, this is one of your main theses. I agree with this contention. For one thing, nearly all of mathematics has no relevance to the physical world. Therefore, some additional principle or fact of...

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Dear Edwin,

Thank your for your many very interesting ideas. Here are a few comments.

The real world is not a purely mathematical or informational entity. As I understand your essay, this is one of your main theses. I agree with this contention. For one thing, nearly all of mathematics has no relevance to the physical world. Therefore, some additional principle or fact of reality must account for actual existence. Nonetheless, you would, I think, allow that some part of mathematics is at least useful for the understanding of physical existence. Indeed, you present your theory in a mathematical way. What about the mathematics which is not physically applicable? Is that just fictional or made up? Or does it have a different kind of Platonic reality of its own? This point is to the side of your topic, and therefore you did not discuss it, but it would be interesting to know your views about it.

I also have to agree with your insistence that awareness is a genuine feature of reality. Would you consider your position a kind of panpsychism? If awareness is a primordial property of the field, that would seem to imply that awareness, or at least proto-awareness, is everywhere.

I am not clear about the relationship in your theory between this universal aboriginal awareness and the self-interaction which gives rise to the physical world. Are these two separate properties of the field? Two aspects of the same property? Or something else?

Finally, your essay should remind us not to be too quick to dismiss awareness from reality altogether, based on what are thought to be the findings of physics. You propose a new system of physics, based on one field. Even those who accept some other system--such as the hundreds of fields, which you attribute to Susskind--will have to admit the force of your critique of the current state of knowledge (or current state of ignorance and belief). Given this not very satisfactory situation, do we really have adequate reason to suppose that awareness, consciousness, and thinking are something other than the way they present themselves to us?

Laurence Hitterdale

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Edwin,

OK, so the "existence" and "changes" in this "self field" constitute what? Measures? ...they better be .... and .... then your arguments draw on other's measured data to confirm or deny your drawn conclusions. You therefore remove yourself from measures of your "self" field changes and revert to quoting data external to that measured by the "self."

That sounds like a...

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Edwin,

OK, so the "existence" and "changes" in this "self field" constitute what? Measures? ...they better be .... and .... then your arguments draw on other's measured data to confirm or deny your drawn conclusions. You therefore remove yourself from measures of your "self" field changes and revert to quoting data external to that measured by the "self."

That sounds like a reductionist requirement of holistic to obtain the measured definition of ones self? If your single field explains everything from inside out, why does it require an outside -> in confirmation?

The reason may be due to our measured reality requiring this confirmation from others, and, it is highly likely that others have an alternate approach to your self field and can match your measurable results in anything you will ever predict. This implies that many relevant, coherent, calculable paths may lead to your very same conclusions .... so who is correct?

Until science finds the correct "context" to apply all we measure, natural breaks in coherent knowledge will inevitably result, because the next step in a GUT correlation requires a deeper understanding of the single context that all measured science operates under. This implies that everyone can be correct when viewing information in their own sub-context, and, when the universal context is eventually found and accepted, all sub-contexts can be projected onto it and commonalities will appear with differences. This implies that multi-universe theory may be one man's way of saying each of us has our own measured universe with all sub-contexts merging into the single context supporting "life" as the center of creation. Holonomic physics/CFT/Shape Dynamics/etc., your "self" field/ all may simply point to being capable of merging into a much deeper, unique context.

It would then appear that unification requires context definition and your self field doesn't seem to fit the entire bill when it comes down to the "self" having to be "measured" by others. We know that the measurers HAVE to interject in the results of the measure and add their own personal sub-context bias.



Best regards,

Tony

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Edwin, first I want to thank your for your open reply. Here are a couple replys to your questions.

You state: "I am subjectively aware of myself and this does not require either measurement or definition."

I can assure you that your subjective view of your "self" was developed by ALL the measurable information your personal biology obtained throughout your entire life. Remove all of...

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Edwin, first I want to thank your for your open reply. Here are a couple replys to your questions.

You state: "I am subjectively aware of myself and this does not require either measurement or definition."

I can assure you that your subjective view of your "self" was developed by ALL the measurable information your personal biology obtained throughout your entire life. Remove all of this information and I believe I can say with high confidence that this "subjective self" you believe is present will no longer be capable of being defined. ALL your past, physical information sets the boundaries of your current state of "subjectiveness." This implies that your subjective self is built on your history of collected, measurable, information. So when you say "objective" and "subjective" you simply refer to information on the outer surface (current physical measures), and, information locked inside the boundary of this surface (the entire history of information alluded to above - the information that fills the "volume" in your life). Therefore, your subjective awareness takes root in all your past physical endevours and is not a seperate part .... like saying the leaf does not partake in the life of a tree as part of a whole -or- visa versa..... "sustaining a life" being the context here.

Also, you have stated: "And although I tend to view it, as a physicist, as the gravitational field, which possesses an inherent, if only primordial, self-awareness, it is just as valid for you to consider it a 'self' field possessing gravitational properties. But only the gravitational properties are measurable. "

Well, I too am a physicist, however, I also consider our conciousness as supplying a point symmetry to do all its analysis of information - this implies we measure everything as a geometric product - agreement and uncertainty in agreement - dot and curl... including our own "self measurement." Gravity may supply the measurable gauge to the self, however, we can only measure the differences within the gauge and this comes with a dot and curl value, and, this again may go back to requiring more then just the self .... to define the self....



You also stated" As for a single field explaining everything, my hypothesis is that initially only one "thing" exists, the field. There is no 'outside' or 'inside'. As it evolves, symmetry breaks, and 'local' and 'global' acquire meaning. Any attempt to describe a holistic 'system' has to start somewhere, but this should be arbitrary, since it all must tie together."

While there may have only been "1" thing at the very beginning of time, we are now immersed in times where there are MANY physically separated "selfs." In the beginning everything may have been "self parallel" and thus only a dot product solution to everything, all self's completely aligned (an incubation, accelerating growth period - like individual spin in a ferromagnet state) .. until a curl (asymmetry) sets in (birth).... increased temperature for the ferromagnetic to demagnetize .... and measured differences (curls) exist between all the "selfs." The "self's" part like the tribes of self's in ancient times. (a GUT on "self's" would need to explain measured past civilation movements also ... and markets... etc)

On a final note you stated: "You make some assumptions about science finding the correct "context" that indicates you've put a lot of thought into this."

Well, I like to "think" I put more then thoughts into it ... I like to think I put ALL measures (past and present) we make, and can potentially make, into it. This therefore creats a self that goes from the inner cell, beyond the cell wall out the skin, through the ecosystem and into the solar system (as a NASA scientist you know how we collect information here in the solar system)... and intimately connected out to the far reaches of the universe. If the real, physically measurable descriptions of this instantaneous "self" fosters many testable paths to it's description .... imagine what can transpire when we figure out that it is really a part of the "measurable self" that we physically describe with each valid GUT description (speak of potentially new understandings of the genomes measurable information structure (and when deemed and proven measurable .... becomes manipulative for cures to every physical ailments known and unknown to man)! Now "that" would truely be a Grand theory...... A Measurable Self Physics having the subjective part removed.

Best regards,

Tony

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Dr. Klingman

Richard Feynman in his Nobel Acceptance Speech (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19
65/feynman-lecture.html)

said: “It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the...

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Dr. Klingman

Richard Feynman in his Nobel Acceptance Speech (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19
65/feynman-lecture.html)

said: “It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. And example of this is the Schrodinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don’t know why that is – it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.”

I too believe in the simplicity of nature, and I am glad that Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning famous physicist, also believe in the same thing I do, but I had come to my belief long before I knew about that particular statement.

The belief that “Nature is simple” is however being expressed differently in my essay “Analogical Engine” linked to http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1865 .

Specifically though, I said “Planck constant is the Mother of All Dualities” and I put it schematically as: wave-particle ~ quantum-classical ~ gene-protein ~ analogy- reasoning ~ linear-nonlinear ~ connected-notconnected ~ computable-notcomputable ~ mind-body ~ Bit-It ~ variation-selection ~ freedom-determinism … and so on.

Taken two at a time, it can be read as “what quantum is to classical” is similar to (~) “what wave is to particle.” You can choose any two from among the multitudes that can be found in our discourses.

I could have put Schrodinger wave ontology-Heisenberg particle ontology duality in the list had it comes to my mind!

Since “Nature is Analogical”, we are free to probe nature in so many different ways. And you have touched some corners of it.

With regards,

Than Tin

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Edwin,

In my usual distracted fashion, it has taken me several tries to read through your essay. It pulls a lot together and the wires in my brain get crossed.

The result is that I have to look at things very simplistically and other ways of thinking keep popping up.

Rather than the gravity field as the source of consciousness, why not light?

Consciousness is not...

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Edwin,

In my usual distracted fashion, it has taken me several tries to read through your essay. It pulls a lot together and the wires in my brain get crossed.

The result is that I have to look at things very simplistically and other ways of thinking keep popping up.

Rather than the gravity field as the source of consciousness, why not light?

Consciousness is not structured, but simply the element of awareness. It is only as it condenses down into denser forms of mass that structure and complexity emerge, so it would be that knowledge is the increasingly complex concentration of awareness and gravity is this process of concentration.

Then gravity is simply the vacuum effect of light coalescing into mass, rather than a property of mass. Much as mass releasing light creates pressure. Both pressure and vacuum can be modeled geometrically, without needing their own particles and waves. So light and radiation is the gravity wave; What escapes as mass keeps getting ever more concentrated.

Of course, black holes are the center of much larger gravity fields and seem more likely to be the vortices/eye of the storm, at the center, rather then some object or other worldly dimension. Then whatever actually falls in, is spun back out the poles as cosmic rays, being shot across the universe.

So if gravity is a contraction of light, this would mean free photons/light quanta, are not dimensionless points, but more diffuse fields and it is this expanding effect which creates redshift proportional to distance, as well as why gravity and expansion are inversely proportional, since they would be opposite sides of a cosmic convection cycle. If convection pretty much defines the atmospheric and geologic activity on this planet, as well as all others and their stars, why wouldn't it be the basis for galactic activity as well?

Then we wouldn't need inflation, or dark energy and dark matter either, since it is all "glued" together and those outer rings of the galaxies are being pulled along. Those outer stars are first generation anyway and lack heavy elements.

Regards,

JM

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Late-in-the-Day Thoughts about the Essays I’ve Read

I am sending to you the following thoughts because I found your essay particularly well stated, insightful, and helpful, even though in certain respects we may significantly diverge in our viewpoints. Thank you! Lumping and sorting is a dangerous adventure; let me apologize in advance if I have significantly misread or misrepresented...

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Late-in-the-Day Thoughts about the Essays I’ve Read

I am sending to you the following thoughts because I found your essay particularly well stated, insightful, and helpful, even though in certain respects we may significantly diverge in our viewpoints. Thank you! Lumping and sorting is a dangerous adventure; let me apologize in advance if I have significantly misread or misrepresented your essay in what follows.

Of the nearly two hundred essays submitted to the competition, there seems to be a preponderance of sentiment for the ‘Bit-from-It” standpoint, though many excellent essays argue against this stance or advocate for a wider perspective on the whole issue. Joseph Brenner provided an excellent analysis of the various positions that might be taken with the topic, which he subsumes under the categories of ‘It-from-Bit’, ‘Bit-from-It’, and ‘It-and-Bit’.

Brenner himself supports the ‘Bit-from-It’ position of Julian Barbour as stated in his 2011 essay that gave impetus to the present competition. Others such as James Beichler, Sundance Bilson-Thompson, Agung Budiyono, and Olaf Dreyer have presented well-stated arguments that generally align with a ‘Bit-from-It’ position.

Various renderings of the contrary position, ‘It-from-Bit’, have received well-reasoned support from Stephen Anastasi, Paul Borrill, Luigi Foschini, Akinbo Ojo, and Jochen Szangolies. An allied category that was not included in Brenner’s analysis is ‘It-from-Qubit’, and valuable explorations of this general position were undertaken by Giacomo D’Ariano, Philip Gibbs, Michel Planat and Armin Shirazi.

The category of ‘It-and-Bit’ displays a great diversity of approaches which can be seen in the works of Mikalai Birukou, Kevin Knuth, Willard Mittelman, Georgina Parry, and Cristinel Stoica,.

It seems useful to discriminate among the various approaches to ‘It-and-Bit’ a subcategory that perhaps could be identified as ‘meaning circuits’, in a sense loosely associated with the phrase by J.A. Wheeler. Essays that reveal aspects of ‘meaning circuits’ are those of Howard Barnum, Hugh Matlock, Georgina Parry, Armin Shirazi, and in especially that of Alexei Grinbaum.

Proceeding from a phenomenological stance as developed by Husserl, Grinbaum asserts that the choice to be made of either ‘It from Bit’ or ‘Bit from It’ can be supplemented by considering ‘It from Bit’ and ‘Bit from It’. To do this, he presents an ‘epistemic loop’ by which physics and information are cyclically connected, essentially the same ‘loop’ as that which Wheeler represented with his ‘meaning circuit’. Depending on where one ‘cuts’ the loop, antecedent and precedent conditions are obtained which support an ‘It from Bit’ interpretation, or a ‘Bit from It’ interpretation, or, though not mentioned by Grinbaum, even an ‘It from Qubit’ interpretation. I’ll also point out that depending on where the cut is made, it can be seen as a ‘Cartesian cut’ between res extensa and res cogitans or as a ‘Heisenberg cut’ between the quantum system and the observer. The implications of this perspective are enormous for the present It/Bit debate! To quote Grinbaum: “The key to understanding the opposition between IT and BIT is in choosing a vantage point from which OR looks as good as AND. Then this opposition becomes unnecessary: the loop view simply dissolves it.” Grinbaum then goes on to point out that this epistemologically circular structure “…is not a logical disaster, rather it is a well-documented property of all foundational studies.”

However, Grinbaum maintains that it is mandatory to cut the loop; he claims that it is “…a logical necessity: it is logically impossible to describe the loop as a whole within one theory.” I will argue that in fact it is vital to preserve the loop as a whole and to revise our expectations of what we wish to accomplish by making the cut. In fact, the ongoing It/Bit debate has been sustained for decades by our inability to recognize the consequences that result from making such a cut. As a result, we have been unable to take up the task of studying the properties inherent in the circularity of the loop. Helpful in this regard would be an examination of the role of relations between various elements and aspects of the loop. To a certain extent the importance of the role of relations has already been well stated in the essays of Kevin Knuth, Carlo Rovelli, Cristinel Stoica, and Jochen Szangolies although without application to aspects that clearly arise from ‘circularity’. Gary Miller’s discussion of the role of patterns, drawn from various historical precedents in mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, provides the clearest hints of all competition submissions on how the holistic analysis of this essential circular structure might be able to proceed.

In my paper, I outlined Susan Carey’s assertion that a ‘conceptual leap’ is often required in the construction of a new scientific theory. Perhaps moving from a ‘linearized’ perspective of the structure of a scientific theory to one that is ‘circularized’ is just one further example of this kind of conceptual change.

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