Hi Tommaso

Here is my long answer I wrote to you in my essay site, and I decided to paste it here so you get a notice.

I am glad to remind you some ideas of Teilhard De Chardin which I don't know him well @ deeply. It seems, that he was both Dualist - body vs spirit and held to the principle of Causation, and the Cartesian belief in the total existence of perfect God.

I am a...

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Hi Tommaso

Here is my long answer I wrote to you in my essay site, and I decided to paste it here so you get a notice.

I am glad to remind you some ideas of Teilhard De Chardin which I don't know him well @ deeply. It seems, that he was both Dualist - body vs spirit and held to the principle of Causation, and the Cartesian belief in the total existence of perfect God.

I am a philosopher that relate more to phenomenology of consciousness; Building a philosophical "floor" on the works of Husserl, Bergson, Ponti etc. My philosophical work is a positive cosmology, (not deconstructionist) a general work in all aspects from ontology through phenomenology to ethics. So I also address to the whole cosmos but in this restricted essay I limit myself to 25000 characters.(it seems I was not clear on that)

My view is ontogenic and with it when I zoom into the nano level into the Movement-phenomenon itself (regardless whether it is a particle or a wave) I found that the subjectivity, the uniqueness of each movement whether its a grain of sand or a person or galaxie is in the quality of the movement in each of them. The movement (non movement is also an option of the system that consume energy) has attributes like "character", "memory", "structure", "material" etc, and the sum total qualities of the attributes are unique to each movement-phenomenon.

In this essay I tried to show that reality is continuously being ratified to us internally and externally. Without this ratification we would not possess the assurance that we are unique though we change continuously.

I showed how the ever changing preset continuous, hold us as self organization and explain the inner self what Ponti or Heidegger and others did not.

What makes the ever changing present? or in other words of Bergson : what makes the Ever duration, Homogeneous Duration works that Bergson did not solve? He sensed and wrote that Causality does not give enough explanation and could not find the answer.

Causality is a special case in the occurrence of Phenomenon and in reality phenomena are occurring based on the natural language of Movements. The language of the attributes of Movements.

As to your last question, since It is all potential information of the possible actions in the relations of each "existent" in the relation, there is a choice of actions (conscious or unconscious) for each of them. This choice I define as "natural choice" bound by the environment. Since each Movement-Phenomenon is finite, the relationships always change the potential choices of action. Once a potential action is chosen the relation change again, and in this way you get a perpetuum mobile of the duration of the ever changing present.

I think that the Mathematics of physics needs a modeling breakthrough. Its Time to philosophy to challenge science and open our horizon. Maybe string theory will be able to calculate the existents of attributes to a movement smaller than 1 in power of -34 to ratify its existent. We today, ratify the existence of quarks at a nano level of 1 in the power of -24. So, there is a way we have to go.

I hope I explained some of your questions and our essay are exposed to large (relative) potential readers through this relationship with FQXi.

Thanks again

Yuda

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Dear Peter,

your essay is one of the very few left in my folder, and I will certainly read and rate it before the deadline of April 7.

I am not sure I understand precisely your first remark, ending with: 'The universe consists of (hierarchical interacting) mechanisms, and a 'goal' is just a convenient lower order description.' (Looks like a quote, but I did not find this in your...

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Dear Peter,

your essay is one of the very few left in my folder, and I will certainly read and rate it before the deadline of April 7.

I am not sure I understand precisely your first remark, ending with: 'The universe consists of (hierarchical interacting) mechanisms, and a 'goal' is just a convenient lower order description.' (Looks like a quote, but I did not find this in your text, nor in mine.) What do you mean by ‘lower order’?

I first tried to understand the difference between ‘mechanism’ and ‘goal’ by viewing both of them as computations. A first attempt to discriminate between them purely in terms of computational complexity (they would compute the same function but with different efficiency) miserably failed.

But I could retain the software-engineering-inspired view that the (mechanism, goal) pair corresponds directly to an (implementation, specification) pair, with implementations expressed in a *programming language* and specifications expressed in *logics* - both potentially affected by undecidability limitations. More importantly: the mechanism exists, it is ontological stuff; the goal does not, it is epistemological baggage, created for convenience, as expressed in the opening quote by Wolfram - a high-level description. (The illusory nature of goals is then quite clear in darwinian evolution.)

Do you imply that a compact logical characterisation of a mechanism is a ‘lower order description’ of it?

In your subsequent remarks you hint at top-down causation. My familiarity with top-down causation in the context of simple computational systems (thus, outside the realm of traditional biology) is still poor, although I am convinced that this powerful trick could greatly boost the emergence of complexity in simulated digital universes, as already suggested by Ellis, much beyond what can be obtained by plain Wolfram-type experiments.

Indeed, I wonder whether the system of six interacting Elementary Cellular Automata that I have presented, with their ability to locally reduce entropy, could not be seen as a possible rudimentary example of top-down causation, with the whole influencing the local parameters of the parts (as evidenced by comparison with the non-cooperative scenario).

In conclusion, I may agree with you that the night was foggy, but the conversation with the man in the tailcoat gave me an opportunity to ponder on a number of issues reasonably related (I believe) to the Contest Theme, although I myself would not be able to choose and distill a unique take-away message, or answer (but, given the difficulty of the theme, who could?).

Thanks, and keep in touch in your page!

Tommaso

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