Tejinder,

Sorry about that. You give a very dense and logical description of the relationship between "things" and laws. I think there are a few issues which might frame this relationship from a different perspective.

Because our thoughta are flashes of perception, we think of time as a narrative dimension, with events strung along it, separated by intervals of duration, thus...

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Tejinder,

Sorry about that. You give a very dense and logical description of the relationship between "things" and laws. I think there are a few issues which might frame this relationship from a different perspective.

Because our thoughta are flashes of perception, we think of time as a narrative dimension, with events strung along it, separated by intervals of duration, thus assume duration is this underlaying dimension.

The reality though is that instead of the present "moving" from past to future, it is change turning future to past, as in tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. So duration is simply the state of the present, as events coalesce and dissolve.

Reality might be considered a dichotomy of energy and form. Energy manifests form and form defines energy.

Since energy is dynamic and conserved, it is always and only present, but changing form. So energy goes past to future, while form goes future to past. Pushing against and feeding back on each other.

As biological organisms, we evolved a central nervous system to process form/information and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process energy.

Think in terms of a factory; The product goes start to finish, being in the future, to being in the past, while the production line points the other way, consuming material and expelling product, onto the future, shedding the past. Life is similar. Individuals go birth to death, being in the future to being in the past, while the species goes the other direction, shedding old generations and moving onto new ones.

So to my point about thought and consciousness, as consciousness goes past to future thoughts, while thoughts, these forms our consciousness take, go future to past.

Which gets around to things and laws as top down framing devices, of this bottom up dynamic that produces them. In the void, there is no structure and so no laws needed to define it, but as soon as there is that original fluctuation of energy, then properties like waves, frequencies, amplitudes, limits, interaction, etc all start to rise and create definitions to the energy.

Since our minds are designed to extract information, we are constantly following the trail created through this dynamical process, thinking there must be some final end, goal, nirvana, etc. but when we think we found an end or goal, it just turns out to be a cresting wave and we get caught up in the undertow.

This is because our minds are reductionist, but nature is thermodynamic.

Think in terms of a galaxy; Energy is radiating out, as mass falls in and it is one big cosmic convection cycle.

Society is the same way. We have essential social and biological energies pushing out and upward, as the civiil and cultural forms push back down, giving it structure and form. Like youth pushing out, until it crests, then age pushing down, giving signal to the noise. Then it cracks open and repeats.

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Christophe and Tejinder, please excuse my interjection here. I find that ' Consciousness ' is being brought in to our discussions on a scientific topic on ABSOLUTENESS! The reason is 'what is behind our thoughts/ thinking processes. It is considered a domain of psychologists/ neurologists, oculogists who are all linked with the field of medicine. They are basics with biology and many of them are...

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Christophe and Tejinder, please excuse my interjection here. I find that ' Consciousness ' is being brought in to our discussions on a scientific topic on ABSOLUTENESS! The reason is 'what is behind our thoughts/ thinking processes. It is considered a domain of psychologists/ neurologists, oculogists who are all linked with the field of medicine. They are basics with biology and many of them are not upto the mark or even 'afraid ' of the rigours of physical sciences/ Maths, etc.Thus there is problem with understanding and apprehension of grasping the subject matter fully. On the other hand, we mostly understand that awareness is tied to consciousness. That is considered linked to our body. But we forget the universalness of Consciousness. It exists without matter, mass, space and time too! To me it is present even before our Universe was born or for that matter any of the other verses we talk about in cosmology.Kindly do go through my brief essay on 2/3 pages, where i indicate my views without providing any references. But my background is extensive in this area. To just quote my personal experiences. In India when we retire, we are are considered out of active professional life. This frustrated me in 1993 and there after as i was confined to home and close friends. I happen to seek my friends from industry as i was an experimental scientist to the core if i may say so! We did lot of development work before we used the equipment set up for researchstudies. At that time we felt satisfied with our publications! But when i toured the industrial establishments i made my friend sit in Managerial office. I then toured and talked about each part of final product from the basic material stage. It may surprise many of you hare that it was the way i got ideas for filing my half a dozen patents as these were mere corrolaries to the development studies i got involved during the active research period! But development work remained hidden from public and even my colleague friends outside our group!

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Dear Tejinder,

thank you also for your reply.

To make sense out of the supposed dichotomy of timeless mathematics and a world of time, one could well say that the very concept of time is timeless, in the sense that there is no static state of things. So, in this sense, there will always be some dynamics irresolvably linked with existence.

I guess when you speak of mathematics...

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Dear Tejinder,

thank you also for your reply.

To make sense out of the supposed dichotomy of timeless mathematics and a world of time, one could well say that the very concept of time is timeless, in the sense that there is no static state of things. So, in this sense, there will always be some dynamics irresolvably linked with existence.

I guess when you speak of mathematics being timeless, you mean that the truths that are expressed by mathematics should be timeless, but the concrete arrangement of some mathematical relationships must not. I am not sure whether or not this is also true for you for a timeless consciousness.

But I am led to conclude that it must be in some way true, since if mathematics and the neural pathways in the brain turn out to be identical, then what we have is a dynamical conscious pattern (mind) that is only and only possible due to the fact that mathematics has a time-dependent part.

I think what you have done is to assume that a certain subset of mathematical truths are able to generate a dynamical process that is timeless exactly in the sense that it was, is and will forever take its dynamical course. A result of this dynamical course is a human self-aware mind. Although these lines of reasoning are somewhat coherent, I have a problem with them.

Since mathematics is defined as timeless truths and consciousness being possible at all within the framework of pure mathematics as also a timeless truth, nothing in the form or in the substance of a human brain or even in the whole evolution of brains seems to indicate that its mathematical grounding must result in exactly the architecture of brains as we know them.

Surely, it would be thinkable that in the infinite realms of mathematics, there exist other mathematical patterns that also have the dynamics to generate consciousness, on the basis of some other architecture of some clumb of matter than the brains as we know them. But either way, I would consider such identities of a certain clumb of matter with some mathematical pattern that is capable of self-awareness as either arbitrary or anthropic. Arbitrary for the case that one presupposes an infinite – and therefore somewhat infinitely powerful – realm of mathematics, or anthropic for the case one claims that consciousness is only and only possible within such clumbs of matter as we know them – namely human or animal brains.

In a very real and unequivocal sense, the terms ‘law’, ‘thing’, ‘thing-law’, ‘law-time’ and ‘thing-time’ are encodings that intertwine certain aspects and by decoding disentangle them again. In another real sense this is indeed an algorithmic process on the basis of an algorithm. Since the mind is aware of this fact, it may conclude that itself must entirely be the result of algorithms. But as I outlined in my own essay, such a conclusion does only close a circle, means it is consistent. If I look into the world, and especially into psychiatry, I see that the mind does not exclusively operate on the basis of consistency, but also can operate on the basis of inconsistent, irrational ‘algorithms’, even madness.

The big question is why mathematics should prefer consistency over inconsistency to facilitate minds at all and should be destined to do this in the form of brains. Making an analogy with the famous Boltzmann brain, such brains may well give one the impression of a lawless, chaotic, irrational external reality. So the big question for me is whether or not it is sufficient for a rational mind to notice that itself operates according to some stable rules to come to the conclusion that it is entirely based on algorithmic processes that are at the end pure mathematics (although in dynamical clothes). I suspect that this is only a kind of self-confirmation where a certain circle of reasoning is closed and additional reasons are excluded a posteriori.

Anyways, I highly appreachiate if you like to further engage in this discussion, since these are very important, yes, fundamental questions I think. Moreover, I would like to know how your approach differs from Max Tegmark's approach, the latter i consider as an hypothesis that intertwines many fundamental questions and therefore, albeit being highly controversial, deserves more discussion - and of course also critics.

Hope for your reply.

Stefan Weckbach

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Dear Professor Bollinger,

Thank you for reading my essay, and for your criticism. I will try to reconstruct in brief my line of reasoning, and perhaps then you could point out specific criticisms.

1. There is a physical universe around us, and we use experimental data about it to discover laws of nature. We use our mental faculties (mind) to do so. This same mind has thoughts and...

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Dear Professor Bollinger,

Thank you for reading my essay, and for your criticism. I will try to reconstruct in brief my line of reasoning, and perhaps then you could point out specific criticisms.

1. There is a physical universe around us, and we use experimental data about it to discover laws of nature. We use our mental faculties (mind) to do so. This same mind has thoughts and feelings, and this same mind also does something as precise as mathematics.

2. How does the mind do all this? How does it convert experimental data into laws? How do thoughts and feelings arise? How does the mind do mathematics? Is mathematics invented or discovered? If it is discovered, where was it before we discovered it? I think these are fair questions to ask, in a contest such as this one. As an answer, I do not offer a rigorous mathematical theorem or a new law or theory which you could test experimentally. Science is not yet advanced enough for that, with regard to these questions. But I would not call my answer my opinion; with the dictionary meaning of opinion being `a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.' It is not fair to say that my essay is not based on fact and knowledge! If anything, it is based only on fact and knowledge. You can call my answers my philosophical perspective perspective; I am fine with that. But to say that it is not science nor physics is also not fair, as I will try to justify below. A good part of what I say is based on my earlier peer reviewed publications, and the rest are new ideas in science and philosophy, which provide a basis for further work.

3. We all are self-aware beings. I am proposing that self-awareness and mind are distinct and separate entities. I discussed more in support of this in my Ref. [1]. Now, how does one prove something like this? Above all, I appeal to personal direct experience, and that makes it an experiment! A large school of thought agrees with this distinction.

4. Separating self-awareness from the mind provides a helpful framework to understand how mind converts things into laws. Self-awareness assigns a dual interpretation to an active neural pathway: it is a thing as well as a law. You could call this a hypothesis, but please do not call it an opinion! :-)

The thing-law interpretation is assigned to thoughts, physics laws, mathematical theorems. Honestly, I find it very convincing, and it clarifies a whole lot of confusion for me.

5. The neural pathways for thoughts are no different in structure from the neural pathways for mathematics, as far as we know, through experiments in neuroscience. Then, if thoughts reside *in* the pathways, then it seems reasonable maths also resides in the pathways.

6. But does the mind create mathematics, the way it creates thoughts and poems? This as you know is a controversial question. I myself wrote in favour of this view, in a previous FQXi essay. But I am no longer comfortable with that view. Different human brains are so different in their connectivity, that it seems incredible that all brains create the same universal mathematics. So I am *suggesting* that brains discover mathematics. But to believe that mathematics is Platonic is what I would call an opinion. Nobody has ever seen the home of mathematics. Thus, it seems very plausible that just as neural pathways have a dual thing-law interpretation, the physical world also has a dual thing-law interpretation. Is this not more reasonable than Platonism, and more reasonable than `minds create universal mathematics'?

7. In the world around us, why do we not `see' maths in the things? Because things live in space and time, but maths does not live in space and time.

8. The distinction between matter and space-time is true only as an approximation, in physics. As I have rigorously argued in my Refs. [6]-[9] and [11]-[12], one cannot make such a distinction in a deeper theory which addresses the problems of quantum mechanics. This deeper theory makes experimentally falsifiable predictions which are the subject of several ongoing experiments worldwide.

9. If matter cannot be distinguished from space-time, then we have one entity, matter-space-time, and another entity, the mathematical description of matter-space-time. If maths is Platonic, where is its home? Matter-space-time is all that we have, where to ask maths to live, unless we wish to invoke something unscientific. And how do we describe matter-space-time rigorously: not through some fundamental building blocks of matter living in space-time, but through the mathematical equations alone. In that sense I am suggesting that we should no longer make a distinction between mathematics and physical reality, once matter ceases to be distinct from space-time.

10. I readily admit that a great deal more needs to be done before the above ideas become a scientifically accepted theory. But the ideas are rooted in science and philosophy.

Please let me know what is it that you find objectionable in the above.

I am grateful for your kind appreciation of my writing skills! :-)

My best regards,

Tejinder

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Tejinder,

Thank you, I am deeply appreciative of your help on this point! I’ve already looked up the video, and noted with particular fascination this quote:

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Eckhart Tolle on awareness:

1:58-2:10 - "You are the awareness behind it without which none of this would be here. You'd just be atoms and molecules in space. You are the awareness that...

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Tejinder,

Thank you, I am deeply appreciative of your help on this point! I’ve already looked up the video, and noted with particular fascination this quote:

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Eckhart Tolle on awareness:

1:58-2:10 - "You are the awareness behind it without which none of this would be here. You'd just be atoms and molecules in space. You are the awareness that enables this entire world to be.”

I hate to give a teaser (you know I really don’t :), but based on the above quote I think you and others may find interesting a new mini-essay I’ll be adding soon.

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I suspect that at times though my unrelenting insistence on proper use of the scientific method that I come over as, well… a maximally reductionist materialist, or some such atoms-only description?

I find that idea delightfully amusing, since it is very far from how I actually look at the world. I just like to take good care of my tools. You don’t leave your saw out in a light rain to rust, and you don’t leave your scientific methodology out in a drizzle of unverifiable data that degrades the verifiability of its outcomes. But that does not mean that I hate rain, nor that I disdain knowledge and perspectives that come from perspectives utterly inaccessible to the narrow scope of the scientific method.

Science originated as and continues to be a philosophy, by which I mean a collection of precepts that some person or group of people have postulated (not proven) to “important” for understanding the world in which we finds ourselves. Some of the precepts of science are astonishingly arbitrary in the overall scheme of things, and I say that as a computer science type for whom the creation of new and arbitrary worlds is one of our primary motivational drivers. Programmers build new worlds, and do so in no small part because they love to explore worlds that are not as limiting as our own physical world.

(From that world-building perspective, why should experiments be replicable? Why should matter on the other side of your universe look or act anything like matter here? Why not magic? Why not time travel? Why not allow violations of causality, when for example you can just create new branches each time such an event occurs… or perhaps do something far stranger? The universe of universes that could be is mind-boggling in size, and no one knows that better than a good programmer who loves novelty and has with no inhibitions about “sacred” rules of physics.)

In the case of the philosophy of science, one of the most important precepts came straight out of Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism. That is the idea that when Yahweh/God/Allah created the material world, he chose to make it orderly, that is, highly predictable and based on relatively simple rules. This particular faith assumption was powerfully advocated by Sir Isaac Newton, a man who wrote more on Christian philosophy than he did on physics. He believed deeply in a Creator God, and from his own experience and readings about how to build new things, he presumed as a principle of faith that God would have made the universe in a similar fashion, using a small tool kit and materials with reliable, replicable properties.

(As a fascinating counterpoint, that rule of reliable replication did not hold true forever for Damascus swords. A multi-fold forging process combined with a subtle heat-induced formation of two alloys allowed the makers of these swords to give unparalleled resistance to breaking, and an ability to hold a sharp edge much longer. With acid etching the folded layers created a beautiful fractal-like fold-over surface pattern, the damask. We know now what no one knew then: These swords and their subtle alloy formations were possible only because their forgers used steel from mines in southern India that happened to have a bit of vanadium in the ore. When those mines were exhausted, the ability to make new Damascus swords also ended. Their forgers moved on, no doubt in great sorrow over their loss, and the very phrase “Damascus steel” took on a note of mystery and magic, a phrase for something that had become a lost art. Is it any wonder then that the fictional versions of these swords came to dominate the magical worlds of Tolkien and nearly every other fantasy author who followed his lead?)

That science is a collection of faith-based philosophical precepts not that different from those other philosophies and philosophical religions is often completely forgotten. The reason why it is forgotten is that the phenomenal success that it achieved when applied to the physical world. Science enable levels of material-world construction and creation utterly unmatched by any other philosophy or religion. However, it did so at the high cost of extreme narrowness of scope, since science as a philosophy is only designed for and only works well at manipulating the material world. It simply avoids the “big picture” issues that almost every other philosophy found important. The danger of course is that due to this very effectiveness, those who practice only science can completely forget that a bigger picture even exists.

When considering the role of science versus philosophy and religions that examine the world closely, I have a nerdy comparison that I nevertheless find quite apt.

Particle quantum physicists had a tendency to look down a bit on condensed matter quantum physicists, feeling that only their own particle-smashing strategy provides meaningful access to the deep and pristine (but also inherently reductionist) knowledge that can come only by probing individual particles at smaller and smaller scales. Yet historically, it is condensed matter quantum physics rather than particle physics that has produced the most bizarre and unpredicted quantum phenomena, including the Mössbauer effect, superconductors, and superfluids. It is also without much question condensed matter quantum physics that has had the most impact on our daily lives by enabling technologies such as semiconductor electronics.

So my comparison is simply this: Science is like particle physics, while philosophy and philosophical religions are like condensed matter physics. Only the latter bother to get their hands dirty with the complex situations that we call everyday life, and by doing so they uncover and address extraordinarily impactful issues that will forever beyond the scope of science.

Cheers,

Terry

Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)

Essayist’s Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger

"Quantum mechanics is simpler than most people realize. It is no more and no less than the physics of things for which history has not yet been written."

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