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FQXi Essay Contest - Spring, 2017
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Fundamentality Here, Fundamentality There, Fundamentality Everywhere by Marc Séguin
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Author Marc Séguin wrote on Feb. 1, 2018 @ 21:49 GMT
Essay AbstractThe question “What is fundamental?” elicits widely divergent responses, even among physicists. The majority view is that the mantle of the most fundamental scientific theory is currently held by the Standard Model of particle physics, and will eventually be passed on to its successor, a “Super Model” that will incorporate quantized gravity and explain current mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. But many disagree with this straightforward, reductionist viewpoint. Some invoke the concept of emergence (weak or strong) to argue that science is anchored by many equally fundamental concepts and theories, at every level of description. Some turn the tables around and assign greater fundamentality to higher levels, in many cases, to consciousness itself. Some maintain that the most fundamental level must be an abstract/mathematical structure, and that the physicality of the world we perceive is an emergent phenomenon. In this essay, I will try to make sense of these diverging views while attempting to distinguish between epistemological fundamentality (the fundamentality of our scientific theories) and ontological fundamentality (the fundamentality of the world itself, irrespective of our description of it). There will also be towers of turtles and chains of monkeys.
Author BioMarc Séguin holds two master's degrees from Harvard University: one in Astronomy and another in History of Science. He teaches physics and astrophysics at Collège de Maisonneuve, in Montréal, and is the author of several college-level textbooks in physics and astrophysics.
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Wilhelmus de Wilde de Wilde wrote on Feb. 2, 2018 @ 16:46 GMT
Dear Marc,
It is a pleasure to meet again here in the contest.
I have read your very informative essay attentively and it is a treasure for historic description of our quest for the foundations of our reality both scientific and philosophical.
My real attention was drawn when I saw your figure 4. You mention Universal Consciousness and ALL=Nothing. You say that 3 is going UP...
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Dear Marc,
It is a pleasure to meet again here in the contest.
I have read your very informative essay attentively and it is a treasure for historic description of our quest for the foundations of our reality both scientific and philosophical.
My real attention was drawn when I saw your figure 4. You mention Universal Consciousness and ALL=Nothing. You say that 3 is going UP and 4 is going DOWN. You also mention the “fogs of metaphysical hand-waving” representing the abstract structure that contains self-aware sub-structures. It is between conscious identity through time. This perception is almost the same as what I suppose : Begin and end are both ALL=Nothing , nut in this non dimensional “area” resides “Total Consciousness”, the “area” itself I call “Total Simultaneity” and you can reach that at every POINT of our Reality. Our reality emerges from this “area”. I refer to “causal emergence” in order to explain the steps you are taking from particles to brains.
Indeed the questions are still WIDE OPEN also because human intelligence has such a short history, we are just beginning to understand the what we become aware of, and even that information is highly incomplete.
In
my essay: Foundational Quantum Reality Loops I try to construct a new model of the emergence of reality(that also gives an alternative for the MWI), but I think that the end conclusion is the same as yours.
I hope that you can spare some time to read, comment and eventually rate it.
Best regards and good luck
Wilhelmus de Wilde
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 02:23 GMT
Dear Wilhelmus,
I am glad you liked my essay! I've put yours on my reading list.
Marc
Conrad Dale Johnson wrote on Feb. 2, 2018 @ 17:14 GMT
Marc,
I was very glad to see your last-year’s essay on the list of prize-winners, and your new one lives up to expectations. Again you give an excellent overview of the issue by combining remarkably various viewpoints into a clear and engaging narrative. I particularly liked the paragraph on “basic chemistry,” since I imagine it’s generally assumed there’s no “strong emergence” here, just quantum physics at work – and yet even if we could describe complex molecules and chemical reactions strictly in terms of physics, why would we want to?
You’re certainly right that we need to distinguish between “epistemological” and “ontological” ways of being fundamental. As the above example illustrates, chemistry may well be ontologically nothing but physics, yet for the sake of explanation and understanding, it’s much better to give “laws of chemistry” in their own higher-level language.
But you’re also right that this distinction is not really so clear. If we look at the case of biology, it’s not just a question of what level of explanation is most helpful. Ontologically, what’s going on in living organisms is not just very complex physics; it’s very complex physics in the service of self-replication, which doesn’t happen at any lower level. I have no doubt that everything organisms do is done by molecular physics. And though it’s not at all clear how life began, I see no reason to think it can’t be explained by physics and chemistry. Yet the ability of self-reproducing organisms to evolve is something entirely new… both ontologically and epistemologically.
This makes me doubt whether there’s any point to the debate over ”strong emergence.” I think the problem is that physicists and their philosophical attendants tend think only in terms of structure, not function. Structurally, every level up to the neural networks of the brain may be “derivable” from lower levels, but radically new kinds of functionality clearly appear at higher levels of structure.
My current essay tries to show that functional emergence is relevant in physics as well. As you explain so nicely, the quest for a fundamental physics has uncovered a bizarre combination of theoretical structures that are very far from simple or self-evident. I take “fine-tuning” as pointing toward a functional explanation for all this, in terms of what’s required for a universe to be able to make any information definable and measurable.
That connects with your “metaphysical” discussion of “all=nothing”, since your “infinite ensemble of all abstractions” seems strangely like the “chaos of all possible happening” I take as a starting-point. And by the way, your one-sentence summary of your last-year’s essay took my breath away. You “explained why it is reasonable to consider that a physical world is simply an abstract structure that contains self-aware sub-structures: what makes such a world physical is the contemplation of its mathematical structure by these sub-structures.” Wow! This is conceptual imagination of a very high order… not apparently derivable from anything more pedestrian.
Of all the “overview” essays here, this is definitely the most fun, and gave me most to think about. So thanks!
Conrad
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 02:33 GMT
Dear Conrad,
Nice to talk to you again in this contest! Your very positive analysis of my essay certainly constitutes a good summary of how I see the issue of fundamentality. We do share the same hope that we can ultimately explain the Universe out of "chaos" or "nothingness", through a feedback loop of functional emergence. I read your essay when it came out, and I will be commenting on it in your thread as soon as I find the time to put my ideas together.
Marc
Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 02:36 GMT
There seems to be something strange going on with my posts: my paragraphs breaks are replaced by "n"... ?!?
Stefan Weckbach wrote on Feb. 2, 2018 @ 20:12 GMT
Dear Marc,
I enjoyed reading your essay. I also had to read your previous essay, since you refer to it and also enjoyed it. I have a couple of questions and hope that you can answer them.
In your current essay you state that the infinite ensemble of all abstractions contains zero information. But this can’t be the case, since you necessarily have to discriminate between ‘lawfull...
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Dear Marc,
I enjoyed reading your essay. I also had to read your previous essay, since you refer to it and also enjoyed it. I have a couple of questions and hope that you can answer them.
In your current essay you state that the infinite ensemble of all abstractions contains zero information. But this can’t be the case, since you necessarily have to discriminate between ‘lawfull patch’ and ‘chaotic space’. In other words: by taking all abstractions as the ‘ground of being’, you must discriminate between consistent (lawfull) and inconsistent (chaotic) relationships. Your very premise that the reality we live in is a mathematical structure and an observer is a sub-structure, you have differentiated between structures that never can become conscious and structures that can. It follows that the ‘infinite ensemble of all abstractions’ must contain some information that indicates the difference between conscious and not conscious.
Even if an infinite ensemble of all abstractions would have zero information, how can you discriminate it from God, I am tempted to ask. In your previous essay, you state that God must be more complex than the universe. This may be the case and I wonder how your ‘infinite ensemble of all abstractions’ is different from God, since your abstract landscape is atemporal (being) and contains consciousness – and is surely more complex than our universe is.
I really like your approach to tackle the contest’s question, since you bravely go to the very deep questions and to the extremes to come to a reasonable answer. But I have the suspicion that an infinite ensemble of all abstractions, something that can only be thought of by human beings as a whole (albeit an ‘infinite’ whole), if looked at more closer, cannot be thought of in any meaningfull manner – since an infinite thing is never complete as a whole. Therefore, the reason why it seemingly ‘contains’ zero information is that it is simply not formalizable.
Now, in my own essay, I purport the idea that ultimate reality isn’t completely formalizable. Instead of building a fundamental ontology by the help of a 0 and a 1 (as you and Greg Egan may wish), I trace back logics and mathematics to the identity of 0 and 1. the big difference to your approach is, that I claim a realm beyond time and space that is not mathematical or abstract, but concrete and real, but nonetheless not formalizable. One can call this realm God if one wishes, since its essential features are consciousness and eternal truth. God in this sense contains very less information, but he is surely the creator of all information (and of abstractions).
I would be happy if you could read my approach and comment on it.
Best wishes,
Stefan Weckbach
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 02:52 GMT
Dear Stefan,
Thank you for taking the time to read my essay! I will try to answer your questions. First, in my opinion, the infinite ensemble of all abstractions contains every possible abstraction, be it very regular ("lawfull patch") or irregular and chaotic. The minute you start to discriminate and include only some abstractions in the ensemble, it ceases to have a simple, almost-zero information description (simply, "the ensemble of all abstractions"), and needs to be specified (at least) by what it excludes, which defeats the purpose of having something unique and non-arbitrary serving as the "ground of being" of all Universes, chaotic or not. Of course, the big question now is "Why is the world that we observe so 'lawful'?", what I called the "Hard Problem of Lawfulness" in my previous essay...
Moreover, since the infinite ensemble of all abstractions contains, overall, no information, it is not an arbitrary "God" more complex than what we are trying to explain.
Since I believe that an infinite ensemble can serve as the "ground of being", I do not subcribe to the idea that an "infinite thing" can never be complete as a whole, and thus cannot be formalized or thought of. Of course, the problem of inifinity is a thorny one (Max Tegmark is trying, for instance, to see how his mathematical universe hypothesis can work within a finite context): I tried to address the issue of infinity in my previous essays. Despite all the problems associated with infinity, I still find it more likely that the whole of reality is infinite instead of finite. For instance, if reality is finite and discrete, it is made of a certain number of particles, that number being either odd or even. But if it is one or the other, why? It just seems too arbitrary in the context of the WHOLE of reality...
I find your idea of "realm beyond time and space that is concrete yet not formalizable" intriguing. I will certainly take a look at your essay!
Marc
Stefan Weckbach replied on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 03:23 GMT
Dear Marc, thank you very much for your reply. I just want to annotate that within such an infinite set of abstractions, there must be some information according to which abstractions can get conscious and which not. Otherwise all abstractions are somewhat conscious of themselves in the sense that “oh, I am an abstraction”. If I am indeed an abstraction, this information must be somewhere in...
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Dear Marc, thank you very much for your reply. I just want to annotate that within such an infinite set of abstractions, there must be some information according to which abstractions can get conscious and which not. Otherwise all abstractions are somewhat conscious of themselves in the sense that “oh, I am an abstraction”. If I am indeed an abstraction, this information must be somewhere in the infinite realms of abstractions. This information can only be zero when the claim that I am an abstraction is empty, means consciousness is something other as we assume it to be – or every abstraction is conscious. If consciousness would be of that kind, means an abstraction thinking that itself is an abstraction, the very term ‘abstraction’ gets void as long as there are other abstractions that aren’t able to become conscious. Either all abstractions are ‘conscious’ or none of them are ‘conscious’. If parts of them are ‘conscious’, then there must be some information about which parts, and how and why they are destined to be able to be conscious of themselves…. and realize that they are ‘abstractions’. Isn’t the whole term ‘abstraction’ itself an abstraction for something we just don’t understand, namely the fundamental underlying ontology of reality? If yes, this term does self-confirm itself to reliably catch some ontological truth, albeit it merely self-confirms it character as a container for something we do not yet understand. These are just a few toughts… in my own approach I try to exemplify these thoughts with a certain deduction scheme. I would be glad if you would be able to comment on my own approach – best wishes from germany, Stefan. P.S. Sorry for the missing blank lines – i left them out, because the fqxi formatting system has a bug (hope that AI will work more reliable some day :-)
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 04:25 GMT
Dear Stefan,
Thank you for you comment. I believe that the "information according to which abstrations get conscious or not" is not something that need to be added to the abstractions themselves: if an abstraction is complex enough and has the right (self-reflexive?) structure, it simply is conscious. If you search for "self-aware substructure" in Goolge, you will find many references to Max Tegmark's various articles, to my 2015 FQXi essay "My God It's Full of Clones" and to many other similiar ideas from many people.
I agree with you that "abstraction" is a shorthand for what we are trying to understand, the fundamental underlying ontology of reality. Words are so limited! Mathematical structure, abstraction, relationship without relata... many words for the ineffable... the pure fundamentality at the heart of everything...
Marc
Joe Fisher wrote on Feb. 2, 2018 @ 21:58 GMT
Dear Marc Séguin,
FQXi.org is clearly seeking to confirm whether Nature is fundamental.
Reliable evidence exists that proves that the surface of the earth was formed millions of years before man and his utterly complex finite informational systems ever appeared on that surface. It logically follows that Nature must have permanently devised the only single physical construct of earth allowable.
All objects, be they solid, liquid, or vaporous have always had a visible surface. This is because the real Universe must consist only of one single unified VISIBLE infinite surface occurring eternally in one single infinite dimension that am always illuminated mostly by finite non-surface light.
Only the truth can set you free.
Joe Fisher, Realist
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David Lyle Peterson wrote on Feb. 3, 2018 @ 01:18 GMT
Dear Marc,
You write well -- I liked your essay and underlined a lot of it: chemistry is not molecular physics, independent fundamentalities for many disciplines, our world is an abstract structure like mathematics, and that consciousness wins out over space/time/matter in a poll. I also took another look at your two previous essays (2497 and 2912). I now think of the abstract mathematics as a superposition of various hypercomplex algebras (like Wilczek’s GRID with different levels of complexity for different types of fields) working and duplicated at each tiny interval of space time throughout the universe. But rather than “pure” math, it might be a strong isomorphism to a sub-reality (which might still be called “physics” more than math – how’s that for “abstract”).
Best Wishes,
David
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 04:15 GMT
Dear David,
Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my essay. I will certainly take a look at the ideas that you present in yours.
Marc
Marcel-Marie LeBel wrote on Feb. 3, 2018 @ 01:32 GMT
Marc,
I like very much your essay. In my essay, I give a different treatment of the metaphysical aspect, in which the universe comes pretty much like as a “dynamic emptiness” substance, motivated (cause) by simple logic. The spontaneous nature of the universe is its most under-rated property.
Salutations et bonne chance,
Marcel,
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 04:10 GMT
Dear Marcel-Marie,
Thank you for your comment. I agree with you that, ultimately, everything must spontenously arise... and if we can understand how it can arise out of something that is unique and non-arbitrary, it would seem to me we would have reached ultimate fundamentality. I will take a look at your essay!
Marc
Thomas Howard Ray wrote on Feb. 3, 2018 @ 17:36 GMT
Hi Marc,
I was reading the first part of your concluding section on metaphysics and thought to myself, 'that sounds like Zen emptiness.' So I felt vindicated when I got to the end, and the interpretation 'dynamic emptiness' appeared, which has abundance of meaning for me, as I expressed in
my essay entry.And I particularly like your 'turtles' figure--every step seemingly becoming more fragile, further removed from the source turtle. This would miss the point, though, that the structure is not hierarchical; feedback mechanisms give every turtle access to the source.
Tres jolie, monsieur. A first class essay.
Tom
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 04:08 GMT
Dear Thomas,
Thank you for your nice comments! I am glad you liked my take on Zen's dynamic emptiness as a possible "ground of all being". I will take a look at your essay.
Marc
Thomas Howard Ray wrote on Feb. 3, 2018 @ 17:43 GMT
Sorry, secure link. https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3124. Also, I meant figure 1 for the turtles.
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Luca Valeri wrote on Feb. 3, 2018 @ 21:53 GMT
Hi Marc,
well written essay. Other figures are thinkable than your figures 3 and 4. In
my essay I try to defend a positivist view on physics, as good as this is possible, where the fundamental concepts depend on their observability. However the means of observation must be describable by these fundamental concepts. So the figure we get here is a circle.
Best regards,
Luca
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 04:06 GMT
Dear Luca,
Thank you for taking the time to read my essay! I agree that my figures 3 and 4, combined in a circle, would form a "strange loop" that could "explain" it all. I elaborated on this possibility, that I called co-emergence, in my previous FQXi essay. I will take a look at your essay.
Marc
Francesco D'Isa wrote on Feb. 4, 2018 @ 09:54 GMT
Dear Marc,
thank you very much for your essay, it's a very interesting text and a concise summary of the subject, it should be read before all the others as introduction as well. It's for sure one of the best essays I've read so far.
You write that
> Something is truly fundamental if it could not have been otherwise.
and, since everything could be otherwise (also this statement!), you argue that we should consider 'nothing' as candidate for being fundamental. I reach similar conclusions through my analysis of Nagarjuna's philosophy and absolute relativism, and I try to handle its paradoxical consequences.
I find also very interesting when you write
> the infinite ensemble of all abstractions is a unique construct that contains, overall, zero information .
But I have to read your essay "Wandering Towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Mathematical Laws Give Rise to Aims and Intention?" to fully understand what you state.
All the best!
Francesco D'Isa
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 04:03 GMT
Dear Francesco,
Thank you for your kinds comments! It is not the first time someone mentions similarities between my outlook and Najarjuna's philosophy: Jochen Szangolies commented on it in the previous FQXi contest. I will certainly take a look at your essay!
Marc
Francesco D'Isa replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 15:03 GMT
Dear Marc,
thank you very much!
Have a nice day,
Francesco
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Heinrich Luediger wrote on Feb. 5, 2018 @ 09:32 GMT
Dear Marc,
there is a central notion resp. concept in your essay that, formally speaking, seems to undermine the turtle pile as well as the ape chain. The notion ‘abstract’, I believe, doesn’t support what you intend to express. For instance, you say: “Being abstract, it can exist by itself, ...”. Also the notion ‘purely abstract structure’ doesn’t make much sense when these structures are placed between ‘all=nothing’ and the ‘fog of metaphysical handwaving’. Here is my argument:
‘Abstract’ derives from Latin abstrahere, which means to withdraw or to isolate from. So we can, for instance, abstract weight, shape, atoms, (infrared)waves, etc. from a cow just because they are already there (thanks to our forebears), i.e. abstraction is a posteriori! Then “Being abstract, it can exist by itself...” is a contradiction in terms, because ‘it’ has been withdrawn from something else by something else and it follows that the abstract cannot exist by itself. So, I think that your turtle and ape chains fail on meaning.
Heinrich
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 03:57 GMT
Dear Heinrich,
There are many ways to define "abstraction". It can also mean "the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events" or "something which exists only as an idea". It is in this sense that I use the term, and this is how I can claim that an abstraction (like the number "3") exists in itself, independently of being embodied in some physical phenomenon.
I elaborate on this in my 2015 FQXi essay, "My God It's Full of Clones".
Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my essay!
Marc
Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich wrote on Feb. 5, 2018 @ 20:05 GMT
Dear Marc Séguin, after reading your essay, I thought that you should definitely get acquainted with New Cartesian Physics. Look at my essay, FQXi Fundamental in New Cartesian Physics by Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich Where I showed how radically the physics can change if it follows the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes. Evaluate and leave your comment there. I highly value your...
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Dear Marc Séguin, after reading your essay, I thought that you should definitely get acquainted with New Cartesian Physics. Look at my essay,
FQXi Fundamental in New Cartesian Physics by Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich Where I showed how radically the physics can change if it follows the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes. Evaluate and leave your comment there. I highly value your essay; however, I'll give you a rating as the bearer of Descartes' idea. Do not allow New Cartesian Physics go away into nothingness, which wants to be the theory of everything OO.
Sincerely, Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich.
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Stefan Weckbach wrote on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 02:18 GMT
Hi Marc Séguin, hope you are well and find the time to reply. I've made some annotations in a comment above and would be happy if you would be able to reply. Best wishes, Stefan Weckbach.
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 02:59 GMT
Hi Stefan,
I just commented on your previous comment and tried to answer the questions you raised. I will certainly take a look at your essay!
Marc
Steven Andresen wrote on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 05:02 GMT
Dear Marc Séguin
Just letting you know that I am making a start on reading of your essay, and hope that you might also take a glance over mine please? I look forward to the sharing of thoughtful opinion. Congratulations on your essay rating as it stands, and best of luck for the contest conclusion.
My essay is titled
“Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin”. It stands as a novel test for whether a natural organisational principle can serve a rationale, for emergence of complex systems of physics and cosmology. I will be interested to have my effort judged on both the basis of prospect and of novelty.
Thank you & kind regards
Steven Andresen
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John Brodix Merryman wrote on Feb. 7, 2018 @ 18:56 GMT
Professor Seguin,
This is a very thought provoking essay, so I thought I might offer a few that come to mind...
Your metaphysical handwaving seems to assume there is that "purely abstract structure" in the "All=nothing." Yet wouldn't all that abstract structure equally cancel out to nothing as well? Is there some platonic math hiding in zero, or does it arise with the...
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Professor Seguin,
This is a very thought provoking essay, so I thought I might offer a few that come to mind...
Your metaphysical handwaving seems to assume there is that "purely abstract structure" in the "All=nothing." Yet wouldn't all that abstract structure equally cancel out to nothing as well? Is there some platonic math hiding in zero, or does it arise with the divisions, distinctions and interactions arising from that total equilibrium? Wouldn't it be even more fundamental if you could describe the process by which even that mathematical structure comes into being, from the zero up? For example, say there is just the fluctuating vacuum. Such that it is only energy and the forms expressed by this energy. For instance, temperature would be an elementary description, thus form of this energy. Given the energy is dynamic, it is constantly changing form. Simple as that seems, it opens a Pandora's box for physics, as it creates the effect of time. Since there is only the energy, it is always and only present, thus "conserved." Now our awareness manifests as flashes of perception and so we think of this point of the "present" flowing past to future, which physics codifies as measures of duration, but the far more logical explanation is that it is change turning future to past, as in tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. Duration is simply the state of the present, as events coalesce and dissolve. This makes time an effect of action, similar to temperature. As evidence of this underlaying dichotomy of energy and form, consider that after a few billion years of evolution, we developed a central nervous system, specializing in processing form/information and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process energy. Consider as well that the seat of this information processing, the brain, is divided into two hemispheres. The left, linear, sequential, rational side effectively equates to the sequencing of time, while the right, emotional, intuitive, circular feedback side effectively equates to thermodynamic feedback loops. E.O. Wilson described insect brains as a thermostat, but they have been shown to have the ability to count, as a navigation tool. Navigation is logically the substrate of narration and thus logic, history and civilization. Consequently the fundamentality of time to human existence, sort of like the earth as the center of cosmic perception. So if time is really an effect, where does this leave space? Is it reducible to geometry, or is geometry a mapping of space? Which is truly abstracted from the other? We could as easily correlate measures of temperature and volume, using ideal gas laws. Might it be that space is that physical zero? The all=nothing? The vacuum might fluctuate, but first you need the vacuum.
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 03:51 GMT
Dear John,
Thank you for your comment. You say that we should try to describe the process by which mathematical (abstract) structure comes into being, for instance, starting with a fluctuating vacuum and considering its energy. But "vacuum" and "energy" are physical things, so, in my view, less fundamental than pure abstraction... relationships without relata... "cosmic structuralism" (see my 2015 FQXi essay, "My God It's Full oF Clones").
All the best!
Marc
John Brodix Merryman replied on Feb. 11, 2018 @ 01:07 GMT
Marc,
Does such information exist without a medium? Is there structure in the void?
Abstraction is necessarily abstracted from our experience and while it is defined by its consistency, is it completely logical? Consider the idea of a dimensionless point as an abstraction of location; If it has zero dimension, does it really exist, any more than a dimensionless apple? It is a...
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Marc,
Does such information exist without a medium? Is there structure in the void?
Abstraction is necessarily abstracted from our experience and while it is defined by its consistency, is it completely logical? Consider the idea of a dimensionless point as an abstraction of location; If it has zero dimension, does it really exist, any more than a dimensionless apple? It is a multiple of zero and last I heard, any multiple of zero is still zero. Obviously it is more conceptually efficient to overlook this than deal with insisting on some infinitesimal dimensionality, but does that negate zero being zero, or is something being ignored?
How about the idea of space as three dimensional; Isn't it really just the xyz coordinate system and a mapping device, rather than foundational to space? Presumably volume, thus 3 dimensions, is prior lines and planes? Consider that any such coordinate system requires the 0,0,0 center point and multiple such points can exist in the same space, just as people all exist in the same space and are the center of their own coordinate systems. Lots of political conflicts revolve around different coordinate systems being applied to the same space. Are longitude, latitude and altitude foundational to the surface of this planet, or just a mapping device?
Obviously nature is incredibly complex and the patterns and laws we manage to extrapolate from it are also complex, but are they prior to nature, or an expression of its regularity?
Wouldn't it be even more foundational if we could explain how these abstractions emerge from ever more basic patterns, than assuming they exist in some platonic realm? Is there proof of that realm, or is it just belief?
Regards,
John
https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3039
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Juan Ramón González Álvarez wrote on Feb. 9, 2018 @ 20:06 GMT
Emergence and other features prove that a reductionist approach with the Standard Model as its foundation does not work.
Quantum mechanics is not a general framework, quantum mechanics is just a kind of mechanics. And quantum field theories are not build over quantum mechanics. In fact, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are two disjoint theories as Dirac correctly...
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Emergence and other features prove that a reductionist approach with the Standard Model as its foundation does not work.
Quantum mechanics is not a general framework, quantum mechanics is just a kind of mechanics. And quantum field theories are not build over quantum mechanics. In fact, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are two disjoint theories as Dirac correctly mentioned.
Elementary particles are not quantum fields. There are misguided attempts to interpret particles as excitations of associated fields, but this is physically meaningless. First, those excitations do not correspond to real particles but to unphysical bare particles. Second, fields are unobservable by definition, what we really measure in experiments are particles. Third, those fields are based in approximations like models of infinite chains of harmonic oscillators.
Wave-particle duality is a misnomer based in a misunderstanding about quantum theory. Particles always behave as particles. That wave-like phenomena refers to the collective behavior of ensembles of particles.
Electrons and anti-electrons are not localized "disturbances" or "bundles" in the electron field. Even ignoring that the Standard model deals only with unphysical bare particles, those "disturbances" cannot be localized in the model, because "x" and "t" in the Standard Model are dummy parameters not related to physical space and time coordinates.
"Because of the well-known incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we simply do not know how to satisfactorily describe
gravity as a quantum field." We know how to describe gravity as a quantum field, as a spin-2 field, in the quantum field theory of gravity. The problem is on
that people that pretends to quantize General Relativity. That people is trying to quantize geometry.
Of course, the Standard Model is not fundamental, but not only because of the large number of constituents. Considering the "Super Model" as a “Theory of Everything” would be so incorrect like the past half dozen of occasions that physicists believed they had explained everything or were close to explain everything.
There are good reasons why chemistry is not simply called "molecular physics" and they are not historical: e.g., nuclear chemistry and supramolecular chemistry deal with something more than just molecules. The claim "chemistry should be nothing more than electromagnetism and quantum mechanics applied to protons, neutrons and electrons" is so wrong like when Dirac pretended that the "whole of chemistry [is] thus completely known".
Biology is not applied chemistry, but that does not mean that we have to appeal to the anthropic 'principle' to explain the origin of life. The 'principle' is a mere tautology, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know.
Contrary to what a reductionist as Steven Weinberg claims, thermodynamics is not deduced from statistical mechanics alone. Statistical mechanics requires of a previous knowledge of thermodynamics principles and laws, and that is why some scholars prefer the term statistical thermodynamics to refer to this fusion of disciplines.
Weinberg himself tried to deduce the second law of thermodynamics (in the form of H-theorem) from "the level of the elementary particles": he claims that the second law is a consequence of unitarity; he could not be more wrong! Weinberg even pretends that his H-theorem is more fundamental than the theorems "derived in statistical mechanics textbooks", because textbooks use the "Born approximation", whereas he does not. What the reductionist does not mention is that textbooks often deal with condensed matter situations, where the scattering approach that he uses is invalid, because
interactions are persistent.
Finally, add my vote "no" to the poll of if consciousness is more fundamental than space/time/matter. Consciousness is an emergent property of matter.
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 03:44 GMT
Dear Juan,
Very interesting systematic rebuttal of pretty much all of physics as we know it! It would indeed be so simple if, as you say, "particles always behave as particles" and "wave-like phenomena refers to the collective behavior of ensembles of particles." But electrons would fall on their nuclei in a fraction of second and we wouldn't be having this conversation, right?!
That said, some of your criticism of mainstream interpretations of fundamental physics nicely point to "grey areas" in our comprehension. If everything was crystal clear, there would be no need to keep working on the foundations of physics.
Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my essay!
Sincerely,
Marc
Juan Ramón González Álvarez replied on Feb. 28, 2018 @ 20:42 GMT
Atoms are stable because electrons behave as
quantum particles, not as classical particles. The wave-particle duality is a serious misunderstanding of QM that is avoided in advanced textbooks in the topic. From Ballentine:
"Are ”particles” really ”waves”? In the early experiments, the diffraction patterns were detected holistically by means of a photographic plate, which could not detect individual particles. As a result, the notion grew that particle and wave properties were mutually incompatible, or complementary, in the sense that different measurement apparatuses would be required to observe them. That idea, however, was only an unfortunate generalization from a technological limitation. Today it is possible to detect the arrival of individual electrons, and to see the diffraction pattern emerge as a statistical pattern made up of many small spots (Tonomura et al., 1989)."
From Siverman:
"The manifestations of wave-like behavior are statistical in nature and always emerge from the collective outcome of many electron events. In the present experiment nothing wave-like is discernible in the arrival of single electrons at the observation plane. It is only after the arrival of perhaps tens of thousands of electrons that a pattern interpretable as wave-like interference emerges."
As I said in my former post particles always behave as particles. That wave-like phenomena refers to the collective behavior of ensembles of particles.
Some areas are grey and open to further research. Other areas are simply maintained in a perennial grey status by certain people interested in receiving grants and so.
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Philip Gibbs wrote on Feb. 9, 2018 @ 20:58 GMT
Marc, It is good to see you back with another strong entry. I like your idea of no information meaning the whole ensemble of all abstractions, but where can you go from there? If each abstraction
has a probability
then they can be selected on the basis of that measure. Add the constraint that our experience has to take place in a habitable universe and you are done. The information gained in selecting an abstraction with probability
is
in bits. Where then does the probability come from? Doesn't that require some arbitrary information about the universe? That would spoil the philosophical approach rather badly. The solution is to invert the problem and use the information content to determine the probability so
The information
is the length of the shortest description of the abstraction in bits and if
the whole thing turns into a simple path-integral-like sum over the ensemble. A whole universe from nothing in one easy step.
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Stefan Weckbach replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 00:58 GMT
Hi Philip, you have successfully proven that it is possible to link some unknown but assumed to be existent and exclusive abstractions like information and probability to derive the ultimate unknown abstraction, nothing = something. However, the question remains, do we really know what ‘something’ is in-itself and do we really know what ‘nothing’is in-itself? Surely not, since we even do...
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Hi Philip, you have successfully proven that it is possible to link some unknown but assumed to be existent and exclusive abstractions like information and probability to derive the ultimate unknown abstraction, nothing = something. However, the question remains, do we really know what ‘something’ is in-itself and do we really know what ‘nothing’is in-itself? Surely not, since we even do not know what the term ‘information’ should mean to discriminate between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’. According to the zero-information approach of Marc, nothing must be something, it merely cannot be fully formalized in bits or other formal systems, since it has zero bits of ‘information’, zero bits of formalizable content. This tells me that the whole menue of ‘nothing’ as well as that for something cannot be completely understood by human beings with only the menue card at hand.
Every shortest description of ‘nothing’ or ‘something’ must remain incomplete, since it neither can determine the essence of either of them, nor their relationship other than concatenating two unknowns to come to a third unknown. Otherwise one could say that the shortest computer program that is able to emulate ‘nothing’ has exactly zero bits and is complete – and that therefore an infinity of such programs run unnoticed permanently on our computers, non-existing programs that emulate, well, ‘nothing’.
I think the failure here is to assume that undefinable, unknowable things must necessarily be equal to non-existent things and that non-existent things must necessarily be equal to unknowable, undefinable things. But this would mean that the non-existence of a real elephant in my room is an unknowable thing and that there could well be a real elephant in my room, albeit in a rather undefinable manner… so, just a moment… where are you…elephant…at least there is the potential for such an elephant to be here, since I have enough space in my room… and you are invited to guess whether or not there is indeed an elephant in my room at the moment – and state some probabilities for either case. The big question is, I think, which things we should reasonably consider as non-existent and which things we should reasonably consider as existent, but undefinable.
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 03:28 GMT
Philip,
I glad you enjoyed my essay. What you propose in your comment above is very interesting. The importance of the shortest description in bits to ascertain the probability of a particular "abstraction" is reminescent of Jurgen Schmidhuber's ideas (see, for instance, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html). This is one of the most promising paths to getting "everything from nothing"!
Marc
Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 03:35 GMT
Stefan,
I understand your struggle in making sense of nothing and something being in a way equivalent and containing zero information! I like how you put it:
"...one could say that the shortest computer program that is able to emulate ‘nothing’ has exactly zero bits and is complete – and that therefore an infinity of such programs run unnoticed permanently on our computers, non-existing programs that emulate, well, ‘nothing’."
I think any truly fundamental explanation of everything, if such a thing is even possible, is bound to appear in many ways paradoxical. Yet, for me, the only thing that could possibly be truly fundamental must be unique and non-arbitrary, hence, contain zero information, yet explain everything. It is such a high-level (or you could say low-level) approach to the problem that most would considered it meaningless (or at least, useless)... But from an ultimate/metaphysical perspective, could it be just simple (and crazy) enough to be true?!
Marc
Stefan Weckbach replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 07:34 GMT
Hi Marc,
I will refer to your comment a couple of replies above and to your comment here.
O.k., agreed. We then have to re-define the terms mathematics, structure, relationship to ‘enable’ consciousness, means to be consistent with it. Since consciousness is qualitatively different from non-conscious ‘abstractions’ (non-concious abstractions cannot built for example a Boing...
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Hi Marc,
I will refer to your comment a couple of replies above and to your comment here.
O.k., agreed. We then have to re-define the terms mathematics, structure, relationship to ‘enable’ consciousness, means to be consistent with it. Since consciousness is qualitatively different from non-conscious ‘abstractions’ (non-concious abstractions cannot built for example a Boing 747 and have no Qualia – at least this is the most reasonable induction by observing non-conscious matter), we are talking not anymore about quantities and self-consistency of formal systems, but about different qualities of them. Surely, a certain amount of complexity needed for a ‘thing’ to be conscious is a quantitative statement, but it is surely also a qualitative statement, a statement that make a qualitative difference.
So, in another somewhat ambigous manner, your informational approach states that strong emergence is fundamental to consciousness, since it is another quality different from non-conscious ‘abstractions’. If an ‘abstraction’ can realize its own ‘essence’, namely being an emergent abstraction, then it really gets paradoxical, since the starting premise was that all abstractions are a complete ensemble, existing somewhat in a timeless realm with eternally fixed ‘qualities’. Human recombination of some of them does not change or add something to this eternal realm of abstractions. Hence some ‘strong emergence’ does not fit into your picture. But nonetheless, a structure that is complex enough to become aware that it is a structure, is a qualitative, an analytical insight into fundamental reality.
You wrote
“Yet, for me, the only thing that could possibly be truly fundamental must be unique and non-arbitrary, hence, contain zero information, yet explain everything. It is such a high-level (or you could say low-level) approach to the problem that most would considered it meaningless (or at least, useless)... But from an ultimate/metaphysical perspective, could it be just simple (and crazy) enough to be true?!”
O.k., once more agreed. But now you give a good reason for defining God as being truly fundamental, not in its more traditional definition, but simply as a truth which is at least totally conscious of two truths, namely of itself being THE fundamental truth and that he / she is conscious about this fact – and nontheless being able to explore a realm of itself that this God knows is non-conscious, unconscious so to speak. This God for example can re-define and re-structure some non-conscious realms of himself to become ‘physical’ – without in the first place having to know what these non-conscious parts of himself are in detail. He only knows the results a posteriori by realizing that they are consistent with the observations that they have a consistent dual meaning in reference to his own truth, namely a realm where time is present and things, although being temporal truths, do change according to their temporal relationships. Altough it may seem that such a God has merely discovered such a ‘physical’, self-consistent realm within himself, its free will to examine its ‘non-conscious’ realms may have lead to construct such a realm in the first place instead of discovering it. And additionally such a God may be well aware that he / she has constructed its own yet non-conscious extensions. This is also a kind of bootstrapping facts from nothing. This God may simply imagine something and decide that this imagination should have a permanent reality, he may not even hold this reality permanently in his conscious awareness, but it could well be delegated into some sub-realms of himself (the latter he may or may not have also created in the first place).
The same seems true to me for your approach, since it re-defines things to be consistent with consciousness, without having to figure out in the first place whether or not ‘consciousness’ can at all be put into a sufficiently consistent and complete ‘mathematical’ pattern that unequivocally also contains some signs of Qualia. To be honest, I do not believe that such a mathematical pattern can achieve more than pinpoint to some neuro-physical correlates, not even to all of them, since brains, albeit being similar, have some delicate differences when it comes to certain areas of activities. Similar approaches delegate the problem of consciousness into a sub-realm of mathematics.
Once more I would like to say that the imagination involved in this – and foremost the Qualia of at all being able to imagine something like a God – seems to me to be the main reason for being able to at all create a consistent enough induction scheme that seems to realistically invoke what is truly fundamental. And in some sense you are right with your approach, since it subsumes all of reality under a common principle, the better known things as well as the yet unknown things. Every attempt to state what is truly fundamental must as well subsume some unknowns, since we are not all-knowing beings. But we can simulate that we already know everything, at least in reference to the truly fundamental basis of existence. This is not much different from a God which simulates some things for the sake of them staying permanently in his / her realm of experience or existence.
In summary, I think that your approach, albeit I am not comfortable with it (but others may also be not comfortable with the notion of God), is not totally senseless and I agree that maybe reality is more crazy than we suspect it to be. A reality where crazyness and rationality may well coincide into a perfect whole and we realize that both terms - crazyness as well as rationality - are just limited terms to describe one and the same matter of facts. I am not against crazy ideas, indeed i like them!
Marc, thanks for having replied, so I can make more sense of your motivations to take the approach you did.
Best wishes,
Stefan Weckbach
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Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich wrote on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 10:51 GMT
Dear Marc Séguin, after reading your essay, I thought that you should definitely get acquainted with New Cartesian Physics. Look at my essay,
FQXi Fundamental in New Cartesian Physics by Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich Where I showed how radically the physics can change if it follows the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes. Do not allow New Cartesian Physics go away into nothingness, which wants to be the theory of everything OO.
Sincerely, Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich.
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 19, 2018 @ 03:56 GMT
Dear Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich,
Thank you for taking the time to read my essay!
Marc
Avtar Singh wrote on Feb. 12, 2018 @ 18:27 GMT
Hi Marc:
Congratulations on intriguing and well-written essay.
Building upon your statement - "......try to make sense of these diverging views while attempting to distinguish between epistemological fundamentality (the fundamentality of our scientific theories) and ontological fundamentality (the fundamentality of the world itself, irrespective of our description of it).", my paper...
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Hi Marc:
Congratulations on intriguing and well-written essay.
Building upon your statement - "......try to make sense of these diverging views while attempting to distinguish between epistemological fundamentality (the fundamentality of our scientific theories) and ontological fundamentality (the fundamentality of the world itself, irrespective of our description of it).", my paper - “
What is Fundamental – Is C the Speed of Light”. describes the fundamental physics of antigravity missing from the widely-accepted mainstream physics and cosmology theories resolving their current inconsistencies and paradoxes. The missing physics depicts a spontaneous relativistic mass creation/dilation photon model that explains the yet unknown dark energy, inner workings of quantum mechanics, and bridges the gaps among relativity and Maxwell’s theories. The model also provides field equations governing the spontaneous wave-particle complimentarity or mass-energy equivalence. The key significance or contribution of the proposed work is to enhance fundamental understanding of C, commonly known as the speed of light, and Cosmological Constant, commonly known as the dark energy.
The paper not only provides comparisons against existing empirical observations but also forwards testable predictions for future falsification of the proposed model.
I would like to invite you to read my paper and appreciate any feedback comments.
Best Regards
Avtar Singh
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 19, 2018 @ 03:54 GMT
Hi Avtar,
I am glad you found my essay intriguing. I also find yours intriguing!
Marc
Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta wrote on Feb. 13, 2018 @ 23:44 GMT
Prof Marc Séguin wrote on Feb. 1, 2018 @ 21:49 GMT
Essay Abstract
Very nice OP ...."The question “What is fundamental?” elicits widely divergent responses, even among physicists. The majority view is that the mantle of the most fundamental scientific theory is currently held by the Standard Model of particle physics, and will eventually be passed on to its successor, a “Super...
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Prof Marc Séguin wrote on Feb. 1, 2018 @ 21:49 GMT
Essay Abstract
Very nice OP ...."The question “What is fundamental?” elicits widely divergent responses, even among physicists. The majority view is that the mantle of the most fundamental scientific theory is currently held by the Standard Model of particle physics, and will eventually be passed on to its successor, a “Super Model” that will incorporate quantized gravity and explain current mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. But many disagree with this straightforward, reductionist viewpoint....."
I hope you will not mind that I am not following main stream physics...
By the way…Here in my essay energy to mass conversion is proposed...……..….. yours is very nice essay best wishes …. I highly appreciate hope your essay ….You may please spend some of the valuable time on Dynamic Universe Model also and give your some of the valuable & esteemed guidance
Some of the Main foundational points of Dynamic Universe Model :-No Isotropy
-No Homogeneity
-No Space-time continuum
-Non-uniform density of matter, universe is lumpy
-No singularities
-No collisions between bodies
-No blackholes
-No warm holes
-No Bigbang
-No repulsion between distant Galaxies
-Non-empty Universe
-No imaginary or negative time axis
-No imaginary X, Y, Z axes
-No differential and Integral Equations mathematically
-No General Relativity and Model does not reduce to GR on any condition
-No Creation of matter like Bigbang or steady-state models
-No many mini Bigbangs
-No Missing Mass / Dark matter
-No Dark energy
-No Bigbang generated CMB detected
-No Multi-verses
Here:
-Accelerating Expanding universe with 33% Blue shifted Galaxies
-Newton’s Gravitation law works everywhere in the same way
-All bodies dynamically moving
-All bodies move in dynamic Equilibrium
-Closed universe model no light or bodies will go away from universe
-Single Universe no baby universes
-Time is linear as observed on earth, moving forward only
-Independent x,y,z coordinate axes and Time axis no interdependencies between axes..
-UGF (Universal Gravitational Force) calculated on every point-mass
-Tensors (Linear) used for giving UNIQUE solutions for each time step
-Uses everyday physics as achievable by engineering
-21000 linear equations are used in an Excel sheet
-Computerized calculations uses 16 decimal digit accuracy
-Data mining and data warehousing techniques are used for data extraction from large amounts of data.
- Many predictions of Dynamic Universe Model came true….Have a look at
http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/p/blog-page_15.h
tml
I request you to please have a look at my essay also, and give some of your esteemed criticism for your information……..
Dynamic Universe Model says that the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation passing grazingly near any gravitating mass changes its in frequency and finally will convert into neutrinos (mass). We all know that there is no experiment or quest in this direction. Energy conversion happens from mass to energy with the famous E=mC2, the other side of this conversion was not thought off. This is a new fundamental prediction by Dynamic Universe Model, a foundational quest in the area of Astrophysics and Cosmology.
In accordance with Dynamic Universe Model frequency shift happens on both the sides of spectrum when any electromagnetic radiation passes grazingly near gravitating mass. With this new verification, we will open a new frontier that will unlock a way for formation of the basis for continual Nucleosynthesis (continuous formation of elements) in our Universe. Amount of frequency shift will depend on relative velocity difference. All the papers of author can be downloaded from “http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/ ”
I request you to please post your reply in my essay also, so that I can get an intimation that you repliedBest
=snp
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Don Limuti wrote on Feb. 15, 2018 @ 03:04 GMT
Hi Marc,
It is treat to be in another contest with you.
Could I summarize your diagrams as follows:
If you climb down the stairs (turtles) you favor small scale cause. If you climb up the stairs (monkeys) you favor large scale emergence.
Or is this a little to simplistic?
I have a tendency to climb down the stairs. I think you may find my essay interesting.
I think your essay could be a "crystal clear" introductory course to the sciences.
Thanks,
Don Limuti
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 17, 2018 @ 17:40 GMT
Dear Don,
I am glad you appreciated my essay. I agree that going down the stairs to look for fundamentality at the smallest scale is easier, because physics has had a long streak of successes with reductionism! But we may yet be surprised and find ultimate fundamentality at the top of the stairs, or even in the middle!
Best wishes,
Marc
Jochen Szangolies wrote on Feb. 15, 2018 @ 17:39 GMT
Dear Marc,
thanks for the intriguing essay! However, I always have to smile a little when I hear somebody claiming that 61 is too 'large' a number of constituents for the Standard Model to be fundamental---given that it could just as easily have been thousands, or millions, or billions, it seems actually rather an astonishingly small number!
But still, there are of course plenty of reasons that the Standard Model should not be expected to be fundamental.
You mention the generation structure as similar to the order of the periodic table, hinting at something more fundamental, and I think there's something to that---to me, it's always been a terribly frustrating element of the SM: it's kinda like, being out of ideas like a washed-up Hollywood producer, nature decided to capitalize on its greatest hit with two unnecessary sequels that introduce litte novelty except for packing a heftier punch. That alone is reason enough for me to want the SM replaced by something neater!
Going further, I think we share some common ground in thinking about epistemological fundamentality, and in particular, in terms of 'everything' being essentially of zero information content, and our models of the world ultimately containing information because they only pick out some part of it, being themselves only incomplete descriptions. Although I come at it from a very different angle, it's intriguing that we should find some common ground there. There's even a little Zen in my essay, too!
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 17, 2018 @ 18:23 GMT
Dear Jochen,
Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my essay. I agree that 61 is not that big a number, but it is so ugly… If only it had been 42 fundamental constituents! ;)
I love your comment that the three generations of the Standard Model are like a washed-up Hollywood producer making unnecessary sequels… From now on, when I talk to my students about the tau particle, I will liken it to “The Matrix Revolutions”!
You always have the best analogies... Last contest, you likened my co-emergence hypothesis to a rainbow, which owes its existence both to the objective set-up (sun and rain) and to the presence of the observer… And since my co-emergence hypothesis works within a “Maxiverse” where everything that could happen does happen, I think that the scenario I proposed in last contest’s essay could be called the “Rainbows and Unicorns Cosmology”. I wonder how my essay would have been received with THAT title!
I read you essay when it came out and found it very interesting (I even refer to it in my essay’s bibliography). We do share many similar interests, Zen philosophy being one of them. I have been caught up in several last-minute “emergencies” at work lately, and I am hopelessly behind in commenting and rating essays --- although I have read a lot of them. In the next few days, I will try to make up for lost time. I will comment on your essay soon… although most of the comments and the questions that I have will be very similar to what you already discussed with Philip Gibbs on your essay’s respective threads. By the way, I found your discussion with Philip fascinating… some of the things that you discussed being sometimes even more interesting and pertinent to this year’s topic than what you wrote in your essays… Wouldn’t you agree that in an ideal world, each FQXi contest would be followed by a “rematch contest” where we could submit revised essays (or new ones) that take into consideration what we learned by reading and discussing each other’s essays?
All the best!
Marc
Jochen Szangolies replied on Feb. 18, 2018 @ 10:33 GMT
Dear Marc,
the Matrix trilogy is, in fact, exactly what I had in mind when I made that comparison. And yes, I suppose I have a somewhat analogical style of thinking---which I often have to reign in, as one tends to see spurious connections; on occasion, I have been so taken in by a (superficially) fitting analogy that I didn't notice where it breaks down. I always feel the danger of...
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Dear Marc,
the Matrix trilogy is, in fact, exactly what I had in mind when I made that comparison. And yes, I suppose I have a somewhat analogical style of thinking---which I often have to reign in, as one tends to see spurious connections; on occasion, I have been so taken in by a (superficially) fitting analogy that I didn't notice where it breaks down. I always feel the danger of succumbing to crankdom in that area: I get so taken in by my own associations that I forget to stop and check them against hard data, or, failing that, the hardest arguments I can find against my own views.
This is why discussion, such as that generated by these contests, is so important to me: here, I get the chance to have other people look at my stuff, and hopefully tell me if I've left all solid ground behind and analogized myself into some fantasy cloud-cuckoo-land.
That said, I am admittedly somewhat fond of the rainbow analogy, I have to admit: it goes to show (well, suggest) that whether the world is just as it is in an objective way, or whether the observer creates what they observe, is not necessarily a cut-and-dried dichotomy, but rather, that the two may complement each other to give rise to observed phenomenology.
This is the sort of thing that I also see at work in your thinking: it's not just the tower of turtles or the chain of monkeys, both have their part to play. A point that one might also make in this regard is how we know of the (current) 'bottom layer' of the tower of turtles only via mediation of the 'top layer'---i.e. ultimately, the entire tower is, of course, presented to us only via our experience within the world, and hence, as much a part of the mind as it can claim to be objective reality.
So again, idealism's insistence that 'all is thought' and materialist reduction to fundamental particles may not be the opposite poles of the spectrum of metaphysical options, but may both be valid views of the world, with different emphasis.
And yes, I do agree---a lot of valuable thought has emerged in the essay discussions, and I would be very interested in seeing how this might have impacted individual views. Perhaps make the next essay question, "what's the most important insight to emerge from FQXi contests"?
Cheers,
Jochen
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Peter Jackson wrote on Feb. 16, 2018 @ 18:07 GMT
Marc,
An exceptionally classy job, as usual, and thorough review of the whole concept. I particularly liked reading your take on the standard model. I'ts been described in many ways to me including from what seemed like a small frame of snooker balls to a top Fermilab guy talking about a 'quark/gluon soup'! It always seemed a cloudy soup to me, missing stock and seasoning, so I enjoyed your clarity and agreed your view.
I agree big affects big and loops back to small but I confess most sympathy for Weinbergs view (indeed I find massive new value in the smallest condensed scale of fermion 'pairs' after 'popping up' and "permeating all space"). I certainly agree your plan to form a loop with the turtles & monkeys, all is connected and relative though perhaps leave the monkeys out of the soup!
I DO want to discuss the GREAT issue between SR/GR and QM. Bell said a classic QM would be found, but it would 'amaze'. Well you may need to be prepared to be amazed. Full ontology and experimental proof in mine, matching code and CHSH>2 Cos^2 plot in Declan Traill's. So yes, I agree "the situation can improve" but only if those in Academia dare to look! which few have. I judge you to give a fearlessly honest view.
Very well done for yours, penciled in for another top score.
Best wishes in the judging.
Peter
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 17, 2018 @ 18:52 GMT
Dear Peter,
I am glad you appreciated my essay and my analysis of the Standard Model. (Looking back, I think I spent too much time talking about it, so it did not leave be enough room at the end to discuss what could be truly fundamental.)
I am not surprised that you would "leave the monkeys out of the soup": turtles all (or some) of the way down are easier to make sense of, since physics has had a long streak of successes with reductionism. But, as I commented above to Don Limuti, we may yet be surprised and find ultimate fundamentality at the top of the "tower", or even in the middle...
I see that, once again in this contest, you address what you consider to be the major problem with the preferred view of most physicists today, the interpretation of experiments where quantum correlations are present... Obviously, the recent "almost loophole-free" confirmations did not convince you... If you are right, there is an amazing worldwide delusion/cover-up of the true facts about Bell’s inequality tests! I am not an expert on the subject, but I find it a little bit difficult to believe...
Best wishes,
Marc
Peter Jackson replied on Feb. 19, 2018 @ 11:40 GMT
Marc.
Thanks. On the classical QM matter; "
I find it a little bit difficult to believe.., of course. But to paraphrase Douglas Adams;
"Ahh..yes, that's just perfectly normal 'cognitive dissonance' ..we all have that".!
You saw my identification of the FOUR inverse Cos momenta state distributions on all spinning spheres last year, which may be unfamiliar but is unquestionable as proved by the table top experiment shown this year. Borns rule (Cos^2) simply comes from the
second cos theta momentum transfer, at the photomultiplier.
Now what you CAN use, I'm sure, is logic. Try this;
Alice & Bob are sent half each of a spinning sphere (any but conserved = polar axis). Each USES a spinning sphere (polariser electron) to find either 'same' or 'opposite' momentum direction (for polar spin AND linear momenta). Each can then revers the dial to change A,B outcome from 'same' to 'opposite'.
Now tell me why we'd need 'action at a distance'?!!
Peter
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Georgina Woodward wrote on Feb. 18, 2018 @ 06:23 GMT
Hi Marc, clearly written and nicely illustrated essay.
About combining 3. and 4. take care not to muddle map and territory when doing that.
Dynamic emptiness is a nice idea but to be dynamic it can not be utter emptiness, nothing alone can not move, it seems to me. I think I can equate it to the idea of the base medium from which all kinds of existent things and phenomena are differentiated. I don't think everything physical can come from nothing at all. Though I have read Max Tegmark's argument.
Good question at the end. I think we can still have awe without mystery. Such as for the scale, and the complexity and diversity of the universe. There is another saying, "ignorance is bliss," but does that make it desirable?
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 19, 2018 @ 04:00 GMT
Hi Georgina,
When you consider a limited terrain, it is clear that you can have a map that is not the same as the terrain. But when the terrain is all-that-exists, could it be that the terrain and the map become one and the same? Just a thought!
Marc
Georgina Woodward replied on Feb. 19, 2018 @ 09:32 GMT
Marc, yes and no. I think a more complex structure is needed. For analogy; The story in a book is something different from the ink on the pages. When the printed characters are interpreted by a mind the story can be of another world, not the world the book, (ink on pages), is in. The 'things and events of the mind are not the same things and events as external reality independent of the mind, There is a categorical difference.That is to say the map has to be within the terrain, as that is all that exists, but that does not make the map the terrain itself. That's how I see it.
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Cristinel Stoica wrote on Feb. 18, 2018 @ 18:36 GMT
Dear Marc,
I was very pleased to read your essay! It was very well explained, honest, taking into account multiple views about what is fundamental, and at the same time entertaining. I like the idea to use the Zen symbol ensō to symbolize "dynamic emptiness", whether it is at the top or at the bottom. And the proposal that maybe the top and the bottom was the same ensō. I had much fun seeing the "fog of metaphysical handwaving" as the missing link with the bottom fundamental abstract structure, and at the same time the missing link to consciousness. This was even funnier considering how true it is :) Excellent essay, I wish you success!
Best wishes,
Cristi Stoica, Indra's net
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Steve Dufourny wrote on Feb. 18, 2018 @ 20:55 GMT
Hello Mr Seguin,
I liked a lot your essay.It is one of my favorites.
I have an explaination for this dark matter and this dark energy and I have correlated with the quantum gravitation in my theory of spherisation with quant and cosm sphères Inside an universal spheres.It is the meaning of my equation E=m'b)c²+m(nb)l² with m(nb) this dark matter this matter non baryonic.I have encircled the model standard mith these particles and correlated fields , with forces weaker than electrmagntic forces of photons.I have also inserted a serie of quantum Bhs farer than nuclear forces, this standard model is encrcled by this gravitation.If this DM exists so it is produced by something and also encoded in nuclei.For the dark en,ergy I cnsider it like an anti gravitational spherical push and I consider that aether is gravitational also.They turn so they are these soherical volumes ....
Your essay was a pleasure to read , I learn in the same time,
Best Regards
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 19, 2018 @ 04:03 GMT
Hi Steve,
I am glad that my essay is one of your favorites!
Besides solving the problem of dark matter and dark energy, what did your essay have to say about this year's FQXi contest question?
All the best!
Marc
Steve Dufourny replied on Feb. 19, 2018 @ 11:50 GMT
I liked indeed your essay.
Each year I don't make this essay's contest, my English is not good and also I have my mind occupied by problems in Belgium.But what is foundamental, I beleive that many things are foundamentals, the sphères of course lol, the geometrical algebras , the waves, the maths, the physics, the philosophy, the hamiltonian, the lagrangian, the QFT, LOL.....so many things, in fact there are many foundamentals and it is difficult to choose one road, but the spherisation with quant and cosm sphères Inside this universal sphere and their motions for me are the most foundamental things :) they turn so they are ....
Best Regards
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Jonathan Kerr wrote on Feb. 20, 2018 @ 11:09 GMT
Dear Marc Séguin,
I enjoyed your essay, and I think it helps that you point out how disparate and disjointed physics is at present. And the general overview of the questions about fundamental makes one think about how it all might be linked up.
I found some similarities with my essay. Some of these are superficial, and some run deeper. But perhaps they all show we share a bit of a similar mindset. They can be listed, we both:
Distinguish between ontological and epistemic uses of the word fundamental
Talk about explanation as a key aspect of what links the layers of description
Look at the boundary between chemistry and particle physics
Compare the periodic table with the standard model
Quote Einstein in relation to what might be at the deepest level
Mention putting a theory of everything on a t-shirt
I'd like your opinion on a point of mine about emergent time, which I've never seen made anywhere else. No-one had refuted it so far, but several people have said it's a good point. It's near the top of page 2 of my essay, and boils down to the need to explain a coincidence - if a real or apparent 'flow of time' emerged somehow, then why was it so appropriate that it allowed physical laws (such as laws of motion), which were already pre-implied in the sequence of the time slices in the block, to function? And what were the laws doing, sitting there in the block in this 'just add water' sort of way, as if waiting for something to emerge?
I'd appreciate it if you'd rate
my essay, it has only had four ratings so far, and in some situations that isn't enough for the average to be taken seriously.
Thank you, best regards,
Jonathan Kerr
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Jonathan Kerr wrote on Feb. 20, 2018 @ 11:36 GMT
PS we also both mention that we don't yet know how the chemistry to biology transition is made.
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Jonathan Kerr wrote on Feb. 21, 2018 @ 10:22 GMT
PPS. I was very surprised to find an idea that I used as an analogy in the '80s and '90s about QM on your page, in a conversation you had with Georgina. At the time I was looking for an analogy for what Paul Davies used to call the 'software/hardware entanglement', and what Jaynes called an omelette: “A peculiar mixture describing in part realities of Nature, in part incomplete human information about Nature - all scrambled up by Heisenberg and Bohr into an omelette that nobody has seen how to unscramble”[i/].
I thought about a map which is at the same scale at the territory it describes, and is drawn onto it. And then one day you don't bother to draw it on, you just use the territory as the map. This idea didn't help much at the time, but it helped to understand that something, somehow, was doubling as its own description. Anyway, it seems that you and I have similar ideas! Best wishes, Jonathan
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Steven Andresen wrote on Feb. 22, 2018 @ 06:42 GMT
Dear Marc
If you are looking for another essay to read and rate in the final days of the contest, will you consider mine please? I read all essays from those who comment on my page, and if I cant rate an essay highly, then I don’t rate them at all. Infact I haven’t issued a rating lower that ten. So you have nothing to lose by having me read your essay, and everything to...
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Dear Marc
If you are looking for another essay to read and rate in the final days of the contest, will you consider mine please? I read all essays from those who comment on my page, and if I cant rate an essay highly, then I don’t rate them at all. Infact I haven’t issued a rating lower that ten. So you have nothing to lose by having me read your essay, and everything to gain.
Beyond my essay’s introduction, I place a microscope on the subjects of universal complexity and natural forces. I do so within context that clock operation is driven by Quantum Mechanical forces (atomic and photonic), while clocks also serve measure of General Relativity’s effects (spacetime, time dilation). In this respect clocks can be said to possess a split personality, giving them the distinction that they are simultaneously a study in QM, while GR is a study of clocks. The situation stands whereby we have two fundamental theories of the world, but just one world. And we have a singular device which serves study of both those fundamental theories. Two fundamental theories, but one device? Please join me and my essay in questioning this circumstance?
My essay goes on to identify natural forces in their universal roles, how they motivate the building of and maintaining complex universal structures and processes. When we look at how star fusion processes sit within a “narrow range of sensitivity” that stars are neither led to explode nor collapse under gravity. We think how lucky we are that the universe is just so. We can also count our lucky stars that the fusion process that marks the birth of a star, also leads to an eruption of photons from its surface. And again, how lucky we are! for if they didn’t then gas accumulation wouldn’t be halted and the star would again be led to collapse.
Could a natural organisation principle have been responsible for fine tuning universal systems? Faced with how lucky we appear to have been, shouldn’t we consider this possibility?
For our luck surely didnt run out there, for these photons stream down on earth, liquifying oceans which drive geochemical processes that we “life” are reliant upon. The Earth is made up of elements that possess the chemical potentials that life is entirely dependent upon. Those chemical potentials are not expressed in the absence of water solvency. So again, how amazingly fortunate we are that these chemical potentials exist in the first instance, and additionally within an environment of abundant water solvency such as Earth, able to express these potentials.
My essay is attempt of something audacious. It questions the fundamental nature of the interaction between space and matter Guv = Tuv, and hypothesizes the equality between space curvature and atomic forces is due to common process. Space gives up a potential in exchange for atomic forces in a conversion process, which drives atomic activity. And furthermore, that Baryons only exist because this energy potential of space exists and is available for exploitation. Baryon characteristics and behaviours, complexity of structure and process might then be explained in terms of being evolved and optimised for this purpose and existence. Removing need for so many layers of extraordinary luck to eventuate our own existence. It attempts an interpretation of the above mentioned stellar processes within these terms, but also extends much further. It shines a light on molecular structure that binds matter together, as potentially being an evolved agency that enhances rigidity and therefor persistence of universal system. We then turn a questioning mind towards Earths unlikely geochemical processes, (for which we living things owe so much) and look at its central theme and propensity for molecular rock forming processes. The existence of chemical potentials and their diverse range of molecular bond formation activities? The abundance of water solvent on Earth, for which many geochemical rock forming processes could not be expressed without? The question of a watery Earth? is then implicated as being part of an evolved system that arose for purpose and reason, alongside the same reason and purpose that molecular bonds and chemistry processes arose.
By identifying atomic forces as having their origin in space, we have identified how they perpetually act, and deliver work products. Forces drive clocks and clock activity is shown by GR to dilate. My essay details the principle of force dilation and applies it to a universal mystery. My essay raises the possibility, that nature in possession of a natural energy potential, will spontaneously generate a circumstance of Darwinian emergence. It did so on Earth, and perhaps it did so within a wider scope. We learnt how biology generates intricate structure and complexity, and now we learn how it might explain for intricate structure and complexity within universal physical systems.
To steal a phrase from my essay “A world product of evolved optimization”.
Best of luck for the conclusion of the contest
Kind regards
Steven Andresen
Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin
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Terry Bollinger wrote on Feb. 23, 2018 @ 04:49 GMT
Marc,
Yours was easily the most enjoyable essay I’ve read in this contest!
It is lucid, learned, well-stated, well-ordered, and covers the topic in an interesting and engaging way. It as also spot-on for the question that FQXi asked, and your sly and often self-deprecating sense of humor had me chuckling multiple times.
In short, your essay was entertaining, illuminating,...
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Marc,
Yours was easily the most enjoyable essay I’ve read in this contest!
It is lucid, learned, well-stated, well-ordered, and covers the topic in an interesting and engaging way. It as also spot-on for the question that FQXi asked, and your sly and often self-deprecating sense of humor had me chuckling multiple times.
In short, your essay was entertaining, illuminating, and fun.
Perhaps more importantly, however, was its impact: You actually
persuaded a rather hard-nosed scientific type like me to take your arguments and points to heart, though I’ll also admit that the “hard-nosed” part is a bit of a fraud. These issues have always fascinated me, even when I was very young. Alas, in exploring such issues later in life, what I discovered was that as a general rule, the greater the size and of the words and the frequency with which they were used, the less was the actual knowledge that someone was attempting to convey to me. For that reason it was a mercy that you held off using “epistemology” and “ontology” until page 7. It was your determined use of well-chosen ordinary words and analogies in the pages before that persuaded me to read and enjoy the essay as a whole.
I’ll mention just two points: qualia, and your definition of what is fundamental.
Qualia are a topic I pondered for decades before encountering the word for it. You state on page 7 that “qualia…are truly…independently fundamental.” As someone who worked for years in topics involving both human and machine cognition, allow me to state a position that I did not come to trivially: Computers, even computers that exactly mimic human behaviors and emotions, have no qualia. That is because they
need for qualia, and in fact have no any room in their fully deterministic designs by which qualia might somehow “slip in” and affect the behavior of such devices.
To help explain that, here is an assertion about qualia that you likely have never heard before, and that many might consider to be heretical: Qualia do not just define our very existence, they are incredibly useful. Qualia, including emotions, somehow help our limited suite of human neurons to connect and sort through information faster. When you look at an apple tree with green-red color blindness, you see only leaves. When you look at the same tree with full color vision, you see bright red edible fruit and exactly where it is located. It is the qualia that within the mind convert ordinary data from the eye into a single coherent map, an interplay of red and green that helps your body get to the food faster and more safely.
We do not know what qualia are. The simple truth is, we simply do not
want to know what qualia are. Humans want reliability, so human designers make their machines as deterministic as possible to help shield against such ill-defined forms of information processing. In fear, we purge the scourge of qualia before we even get a glimpse of what they look like. In their place we use blinding digital speed, a safe way to emulate but not access the incredible speed, smoothness, efficiency, and diversity (emotions, colors, space, sounds, tastes, senses) of qualia.
Is it offensive to say that the same quantities that define our very existence, that create meaning and enable empathy, and that categorically distinguish us from literally mindless, full deterministic computers, are also useful?
Perhaps it would be if qualia are nothing more than local chemical reactions with no more profundity than the foam that arises when you pour vinegar on baking soda. But what if qualia are so remarkably powerful at processing information precisely because they are
not just simple local phenomena, but something more akin to shared access to some pool or network of resources of an unknown type? For those who already suspect that qualia are a quantum mechanical effect, this would not even be much of leap. These days you can buy off-the-shelf communication encryption devices that spookily entangle particles of light that are many kilometers apart, so it is no stretch at all to say that the quantum world is broader and stranger than our local-only classical perspective.
I like to think that qualia are either simpler or more complicated than the quantum world. When we finally get around to figuring out whether your mental image of green and my mental image of green are the same, or that what I call green is what you call red, I suspect we will whack our foreheads with the backs of our hands and say “why didn’t we see that before?”
If qualia are
not just local effects — if they somehow represent limited peeks into a much larger world in which the colors of human rainbows are nothing more than a starting point (which some birds and butterflies already know) — then your own point about what is fundamental becomes more immediate and personal:
“Something is truly fundamental if it could not have been otherwise.”And so you have persuaded me to a broader perspective. Without qualia we are nothing but more machinery, striving to remain alive and acting out the part, but with no more awareness of that life than has the glowing image of a great actor on a television screen. It is only our access to qualia that puts
meaning into the bodies that are our images of life projected into this chaotic universe. That makes qualia far more than just helpers in our striving to survive. It makes the something that could not have been otherwise, for otherwise no one reading these words would even care.
Cheers,
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)Essayist’s Rating Pledge by Terry BollingerP.S. — You forgot to add in the chiral particle counts in Table 1. Chirality doubles the number of most of the fermions, except for the odd and fascinating case of neutrinos. If you are interested in seeing more and more precise info on this issue, please try out the online
Elementary Particle Explorer by Garrett Lisi, Troy Gardner, and Greg Little.
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Conrad Dale Johnson replied on Feb. 23, 2018 @ 15:46 GMT
The notion that qualia are useful reminded me of something I read the other day in
Ancillary Justice, a scifi novel by Ann Leckie, recommended to me by my literary son. In this story it’s taken for granted that advanced AI systems have feelings – since “Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It’s just easier to handle those with emotions.”
Conrad
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Laurence Hitterdale wrote on Feb. 24, 2018 @ 03:57 GMT
Dear Marc,
It is good to see again an essay of yours in this contest.
One interesting point in your essay is the distinction between ontological and epistemological fundamentality. I accept the distinction as you have drawn it. However, I would tend to identify fundamentality as it presents itself in scientific theories with an estimate of ontological fundamentality. Thus, when...
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Dear Marc,
It is good to see again an essay of yours in this contest.
One interesting point in your essay is the distinction between ontological and epistemological fundamentality. I accept the distinction as you have drawn it. However, I would tend to identify fundamentality as it presents itself in scientific theories with an estimate of ontological fundamentality. Thus, when fundamentality is ascribed in a theory, it is not epistemological fundamentality that is meant. So, it is necessary to distinguish genuine ontological fundamentality (i.e., “the fundamentality of reality itself,” as you describe it on page 7) from our best theoretical estimate of what that fundamentality is. Neither one is epistemological fundamentality. From this perspective my interpretation of the story about the panelists from the 2016 conference (page 6) might differ from your interpretation. I think they might have been voting about ontological fundamentality. As you point out with the reference to Descartes’ cogito, it is hard to deny that consciousness is epistemologically fundamental. So a vote on that does not seem necessary. But then, I did not attend the conference, so this is only my interpretation.
I think that the idea of non-arbitrariness (page 8) is important. I agree that the best current theories ascribe a considerable amount of arbitrariness to the facts of the world. I am inclined to consider non-arbitrariness a separate feature from fundamentality. In this view, fundamentality is a matter of the arrows of explanation, as discussed particularly on pages 1 and 2 and then again on page 6. At present the arrows cannot all be traced back to a core of fundamental truths. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the world is organized in that coherent way. By contrast, it does not seem likely that the primary truths are non-arbitrary. So, non-arbitrariness is different from the distinctive order built on the relation of explanations in terms of more fundamental truths.
I agree, that, if all possibilities are real, then there is no arbitrariness, as you also discuss on page 8. I would guess that for the infinite ensemble there is only one fundamental truth, namely, that everything is true (somehow, somewhere). If that is so, then the concept of fundamentality does not apply in infinite-reality theories to the same extent that it applies in more standard theories.
Laurence Hitterdale
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 25, 2018 @ 04:23 GMT
Oops, instead of replying here, I replied bellow! :)
Author Marc Séguin wrote on Feb. 25, 2018 @ 04:22 GMT
Dear Laurence,
It is indeed good to talk to you again in this contest. Thank you for the interesting remarks you made about my essay. I pretty much agree with everything you said! In particular, the possible ambiguity between ontological fundamentality and epistemological fundamentality makes it very difficult to interpret the results of my "poll" on the relative fundamentality of consciousness vs space/time/physics.
I also agree that "local fundamentality", that is, the fundamentality of our observable corner of reality, need not possess the attribute of non-arbitrariness. That is why, in my essay, I wait until the section on "metaphysics" to bring in non-arbitrariness. Now, once you start thinking metaphysically and try to come up with a non-arbitrary ultimate explanation, you may as well go for a very classy T-shirt, with only a black circle that signifies All=nothing! Within that worldview, the concept of fundamentality loses some (or all?) of its importance, as well as everything else. And perhaps, the “depressing/distressing” possibility that consciousness is not more fundamental than anything else, that you describe so eloquently in your own essay, may also lose most of its “sting”…
I will see you on the other side… I mean, on your essay’s thread! ;)
Marc
Stefan Weckbach replied on Feb. 26, 2018 @ 01:41 GMT
Dear Marc,
just yesterday I remembered something that could conceptually fit into your All=nothing equation. Instead of assuming that All happens at the same "time", I suspect that All is existent at the same "time" in potentia.
By differentiating between actual and potential, one could gain a distinction between existence and change (and hence time).
Just wanted to mention it, since although it is an old classical distinction, I think it could nonetheless be of conceptual value philosophically.
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corciovei silviu wrote on Feb. 25, 2018 @ 22:11 GMT
Mr. Séguin,
I fully enjoyed the way you put things together it and I think further words are useless.
Rated accordingly.
If you would have the pleasure for a short axiomatic approach of the subject, I will appreciate your opinion.
Silviu
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Author Marc Séguin replied on Feb. 25, 2018 @ 22:27 GMT
Thank you Silviu!
Time is short, but I will go take a look at your essay...
All the best,
Marc
corciovei silviu replied on Feb. 26, 2018 @ 09:47 GMT
Beg your pardon, Mr. Seguin
I noticed some "guardian angels", that are trying to protect me, grading my essay with one's (I'm sure that they wanted some ten's for mr, but that zero, for sure scared them). Due to this remark I decide to play the role of the "heretic" and play this game by myself.
Your understandings of my 3 pages are enough for me (and for my good mental peace) and I do appreciate that a lot. But in order to play effectively this game (and to get as much as I can out of it), I need to compensate the work of my protecting friends. So I hope I'm not being to intrusive by asking if you graded me or not (not a single problem if you don't want to, but at least I have the certainty that you didn't forget)
Apologies for my words, but I do hope that you have the sense of humor, as a game needs to be played in order to say that I'm playing
Respectfully,
Silviu
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Peter Jackson wrote on Feb. 26, 2018 @ 22:00 GMT
Marc,
I see I hadn't rated yours. Hold on tight for a mo.
Very best
Peter
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