Dear Edwin,

Thanks for the careful reading and the well thought comments.

> When we declare the nature, we make a metaphysical choice; we choose an ontology.

Exactly.

About Klaas' comment you mention, to incorporate intuitionistic math (idea that I think is shared by Flavio too), this is in the line with what I tried to say, more that it may seem at a first...

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Dear Edwin,

Thanks for the careful reading and the well thought comments.

> When we declare the nature, we make a metaphysical choice; we choose an ontology.

Exactly.

About Klaas' comment you mention, to incorporate intuitionistic math (idea that I think is shared by Flavio too), this is in the line with what I tried to say, more that it may seem at a first sight. Intuitionism in math is not about intuition in the same sense as the one I used in my essay, but about avoiding assumptions with infinitely long shot, a thing with which I resonate.

About the usual meaning of intuition, I am very much in favor of it, but I see it like a step of a stair, you don't take the step with you when you climb the stair. You form new intuition along the way. I have the feeling that you think the same about this.

> physicists project math structure on the world, then come to believe that the world actually has that structure

I think the same as you. Projecting math structures is a particular type of projecting assumptions. This bothers me too, and I think I base my research in general on trying to also undo some of the mathematical assumptions made by physicists in an ad-hoc manner, under the pressure of history. I am just as human as the others are, so most likely I project my own assumptions on everything, even if I try to avoid this.

In fact, the intention to not be committed in the analysis made in this essay to a particular math structure led me to use dynamical systems as a general framework able to include all known theories in physics as particular cases. When talking about foundations, I don't want to miss some possibilities by relying on a particular human construct. Dynamical systems are human constructions too, but at least they are general enough to include the other theories as particular cases, which allows me to say general things without committing to particular models.

> I relate this to the universal consciousness field, which I identify with the gravitomagnetic field [your Case 2 substrate] in the present [see my essay].

An interesting thing is that I've heard recently three unrelated known people working at the hard problem of consciousness and supporters of panpsychism, mentioning gravity (maybe they didn't know about the gravitomagnetic field) as a possible example of physical field that could be associated to consciousness. I look forward to read more about this in your essay. Based on your previous essays I expect another good reading.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Jochen,

Indeed, I think we can only talk about the relational structure of sentience. I tried to be more explicit in the longer article, where I discuss that we can only research "the crack". The purpose was to see what can be done by limiting, or rather by being limited to talk only about relations, not about ontology. Kastrup is the closest to how I see it from what I've read, but I...

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Dear Jochen,

Indeed, I think we can only talk about the relational structure of sentience. I tried to be more explicit in the longer article, where I discuss that we can only research "the crack". The purpose was to see what can be done by limiting, or rather by being limited to talk only about relations, not about ontology. Kastrup is the closest to how I see it from what I've read, but I think it's "metaphorical", and still at the level of relations, because "metaphor" is all that we can do about it. But I'd rather say it in another way. Suppose you're a materialist. Based on materialism, you would attribute a certain materialist ontology to a rock, a piece of ice, water, or steam. You would see it as derived from the fundamental ontology of the elementary particles. Then, if you try to replace "matter" in the materialist ontology with "sentience", you'd have of course a problem, the combination problem you mention. A better way than materialism is physicalism, and to think of particles as excitations of the quantum field, so to think of objects like some stable excitations/fluctuations of the vacuum. Then, you don't combine, it's just the field, not a combination of particles. Then, the ontology doesn't rely on a bottom-up approach starting from particles. Now replace the physicalist ontology with sentience. This would reduce the combination problem, at least apparently, since you have just a field, out of which separate fields are apparent. But the real problem is the problem of climbing: how does fundamental sentience climb the structure, from the fundamental level, to the coarse grained level that we call brain, to our minds? This view of excitations/fluctuations with the coarse graining is a metaphor that is similar to Kastrup's I think, but closer to what I mean, yet not quite what I mean, which I think it's unspeakable. The closest to what I think the explanation is, is contained in my previous essay, Indra's net, particularly in note 8, which is about the equivalence class of germs defining the holomorphic field. I didn't include this in the essay or even in the longer essay, since I wanted to allow for more options, even though I prefer S=P, and since I wanted to see how far we can go just from the most inevitable principles, i.e. by avoiding speculations.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

Thank you for the comment. Because we moved the discussion here, let me also bring the paragraph where I mention science as a negative way.

What I mean by negative way or neti neti in the context of my longer essay is mainly science as a negative way. Science allows hypotheses then rejects them. Most powerful results come as no-go...

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Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

Thank you for the comment. Because we moved the discussion here, let me also bring the paragraph where I mention science as a negative way.

What I mean by negative way or neti neti in the context of my longer essay is mainly science as a negative way. Science allows hypotheses then rejects them. Most powerful results come as no-go theorems, which is also the theme of this contest. The body of science grows, which gives the impression that it's a "positive growth", an accumulation of knowledge. But positivism is no longer the way of science. In some sense the body of knowledge is growing, but the attachment to the accumulated knowledge is not in the spirit of science itself, which works by negation. All of the models and theories are to be seen as provisional hypotheses, always in search for contrary evidence. It's the way of skepticism, in the proper meaning of the word, which is the same as in negative mysticism, but applied to science.

What I mean by science as a negative way is in the sense of via negativa, applied to the study of reality rather than theology. I didn't call science a negative way because it rejects people's novel proposals of theories in favor of the "mainstream" ones. I called it so because it keeps testing itself, or at least it is supposed to do so. And because it is never definitive, even though many think it's definitive, and many did so through the entire history of science. So, to make it clear, I didn't complain that it is negative in the sense you mention, although this may be true as well. If I would make a complaint against the scientific community, is that it is not negative enough, but in the sense I meant for the word "negative", not in the sense of rejecting new ideas.

Most of those interested to contribute to science, both gifted amateurs and professionals, have difficulties to get enough attention. Few are those blessed with the attention. Not getting attention is not a proof that the theory is wrong, getting high positive attention and esteem is not a proof that it is right, although it's a proof that at least it's interesting enough to enough scientists. A sure way to be ignored is to not master properly the field, in the most technical details. But mastering it and even solving some good problem is not a guarantee of success. And nice words said by even some authorities don't guarantee success either. They have to cite the work, to join it and develop it in their own papers. Very few are lucky like this. Most published papers are read only by reviewers, and even so, sometimes only superficially. A lot of brain power is used to produce new research, very little of it receive the light of other conscious beings. Who knows what gems are hidden and lost forever in someone's drawer, or even published in a journal but never understood by others.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Paul,

Thank you very much for providing your interesting views about these important problems. The first 2/3 of your comment, it appears to me, you argue that we can know the nature of things, because things are made of other things. I call this "structure" and I consider it to be relations, not relata. And by nature of things I mean relata, ontology. You seem to mean structure. So you...

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Dear Paul,

Thank you very much for providing your interesting views about these important problems. The first 2/3 of your comment, it appears to me, you argue that we can know the nature of things, because things are made of other things. I call this "structure" and I consider it to be relations, not relata. And by nature of things I mean relata, ontology. You seem to mean structure. So you are right, if you mean structure, then maybe we can know it, at least we managed to know a great deal of it so far. But this has nothing to do with what I mean by "nature of things". By the way, when you say "matter particles, energy photons, and field particles are all explained at the next structural level to be composed of only one basic substance", you mean that there is always a next structural level? Then if this never ends, how can we know the nature of things? If it does end, how can the nature of things be known by knowing the next level, when there is no next level?

Then you talk about "soul" and "spirit", which you don't define, but quote from the Bible. If you'd try to define them rigorously, you would find that you can only talk about their relations and structures, as in what I mean by S. There is a part you can't talk about rigorously, their nature, which is the ontology of S. I tried to be as general as possible, and leave room for various explanations of consciousness, including dualism, which may be what you have in mind. In this case S and P are different. I tried to discuss various possible explanations, dualism included, in my longer essay The negative way to sentience. I tried to leave open all possibilities and see how they can make empirical predictions.

As for your arguments for presentism, you missed the point again. What I said is that you can't prove it by science, which is only about relations, because there is no relational stuff that highlights the present. This doesn't mean that presentism is wrong. You seem to think though that you can prove by an Occam's razor argument that only present exists. For an Occam's razor argument in the opposite direction, check Theorem 6 in my longer essay The negative way to sentience. You'll see that trying to include it rigorously in a theory to make it presentist complicates it. Also note that people use Occam's razor to "prove" things, when they mean in fact that it would be simpler for their views that things are in a certain way and not another. For example, other people use Occam's razor to deny God, which I think you wouldn't like. Occam's razor is one of the most abused things, since complexity is often relative to one's world view (for example Chaitin-Kolmogorov complexity, but also the lengths of proofs depend on the axiomatic system and there are many other examples). Returning to the problem of time, I see you rely much on Christianity in some aspects, why not when it's about time? You can check the writings of St. Anselm of Canterbury and St. Augustine for this. Also, if you want to know what I mean by negative way, I borrowed this from theology, it's an idea that appears including in Christian writings. I didn't mean my essay to have theological implications, but I think that the method of science itself is a via negativa in a sense similar to that used in these writings. I think this is a nice idea which has implications that we know much little than we think, whether we're talking about God (which is the original place where the idea appeared), but also when we talk about the nature of things, when we judge other people, or in the scientific method.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Cristinel,

After I sent my previous comment to you, I noticed that I didn’t get the second letter i entered in your name. Sorry about that.

It appears that we are using different definitions or different parts of the definition for the word nature. When I talk about the nature of something in the immediate primary sense, I am talking about what it is. If it is a thing like...

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Dear Cristinel,

After I sent my previous comment to you, I noticed that I didn’t get the second letter i entered in your name. Sorry about that.

It appears that we are using different definitions or different parts of the definition for the word nature. When I talk about the nature of something in the immediate primary sense, I am talking about what it is. If it is a thing like a matter particle, for example, I mean what substance(s) it is made of and how is that substance(s) organized, structured, or built up in it to make it to be the way that it is. If it is not static, but contains one or more active functional internal processes going on within it, what are they and how do they work. If it interacts internally with other thing(s) in such a way that it and the other thing(s) act as a unit together in some way, what is that and how does it work. Also, how and in what way(s) does it interact with other external things. There are other parts to the meaning of the word nature that can apply under certain circumstances like the thing’s origin or source of its existence, but I don’t usually go into that unless I think that the person that I am talking to will likely have the ability to understand and also the desire to understand because it took me over twenty two years of scientific study to come to the conclusion that the creation could not have come about naturally by itself, but had to have been created by a being that exists outside of it, existed before it, and is extremely intelligent to have allowed him to have been able to create it. He would also need to be powerful enough to create it, of course, and possess the resources needed to make it, etc. I came to this conclusion after analyzing such concepts as evolution, the various creation from nothing arguments, the arguments for how the first living creature came into existence, and the possibility that evolution could have created all of the various living creatures that exist now and those that have existed in the past, but have gone extinct, in fourteen billion years, etc. I found that the math just does not add up to allow for natural random creation to occur. Once I came to the conclusion that God had to exist, I looked at various religious documents and found that only the Jewish Old Testament and the Christian New Testament contained the information about the creation that I had found during all of those years of research. I had searched through man’s scientific works and did not find that anyone else had found and come to understand such things. For the most part, man still has not understood these things although I have freely given out some of them over the last ten years. Of course, it may be that there are those who work in the secret (black) scientific community who have received the things that I have given out and understood them, because man in that community has come to understand how to make plasma field engines and cloaking devices for high speed air and space vehicles, etc. that indicate that such concepts may be at least somewhat understood by them. Of course, it is possible to make structured field engines without the plasma effect, but as far as I know they have not yet gotten that far. My point is that I did not find this information in any of man’s works, or in any of the other religious texts, but it is clearly in the sources mentioned above which were written more than two thousand years ago. As I have continued to search these scriptures, I have found that they also contain much information about many other things. I mentioned a few of them in my previous comment. One of the problems of current science structure is that the concept that the creation was made by a being rather than by some natural cause is automatically considered to be unscientific. This is usually based on the lack of our ability to directly observe God. At the same time man has had no problem believing in the existence of molecules, atoms, and matter particles, etc. long before they became even indirectly observable from the way that things interacted with each other. If we look at the creation from the standpoint of the ways things are made and how they interact with each other it becomes apparent that what we call intelligence had to have been involved in its creation. First it is constructed in a multilevel hierarchical form starting with simple structures and combining them together into sub-assemblies, which are then combined into still more complex assemblies, etc. until the total device performs all of the desired functions. This is exactly the way that man who is considered to be intelligent builds complex structures. Secondly, the design is such that each hierarchical level creates a complete environment of actions and capabilities to operate at that level internally within each object and externally in interactions with other entities. As an example, at the top large scale object level of structure even if you don’t know anything about the smaller hierarchical levels of its molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic matter particles, you can use stone to build buildings and other large scale structures because of its compression strength and other properties that it has at the large scale. This was designed to allow man to use large scale objects before he was able to understand anything about the smaller hierarchical levels of structure. This has allowed man to develop at a controlled rate of progress by providing the keys to the next level at the desired time. The discovery of the next level gives man new abilities of use of the materials to allow for controlled advancement. Man uses similar hierarchical structuring in the complex things that he makes. As an example, a computer programmer who understands the C programming language can write useful programs without any understanding that when a C language instruction is executed it likely causes the execution of a large number of machine language instructions in the next lower hierarchical level of structure or that the machine language instructions execute hexadecimal coded words at the next level and those words actually are executed in the binary form by the computer circuitry in the next level or that the binary likely takes the form of an electronic or magnetic circuit that can be in one of two states at the hardware level, etc. The higher C language level will likely produce a larger program than would be necessary and do things less efficiently than if it was written in machine language, so there is an advantage of also knowing how to program at that lower hierarchical level, but it is not necessary to produce a program that will accomplish the task. It is the same with the creation’s hierarchical levels. New doors of knowledge of the next lower levels can be given out at the desired time for man to understand them, thus opening up more new abilities for man when appropriate, but from the beginning man was able to live and function adequately just using information provided at the top level of structure. To get the complete understanding of the nature of something you have to understand its complete structure at all hierarchical levels, but when you are operating within only one or a portion of those levels, it is adequate to define the objects being to be the substance(s) and structure(s) and the structure’s internal operations, and external interactions included within the level(s) being used at the time. From this and other things it should be apparent that creation was designed to start man out with a very limited understanding of the world around him, but to increase his understanding over time as necessary or as desired by the creator.

If all things are made of just one thing and that thing is simple linear motion, then you have reached the end of that chain of structure because all you have in existence is simple linear motions and the dimensional system that they move in. From there the only other thing to understand is the structure of the dimensional system that allows the linear motions to move in it in such a way as to construct field particles, energy photons, and matter particles. Once that is accomplished a complete understanding of what we call the universe can be understood. The only thing lacking is that you still could not indirectly observe matter particles, energy photons and field particles. There is a next level of structure, however. Once it is understood that a matter particle is formed by transferring some of an energy photon’s motion into its fifth dimensional motion and that this motion then returns down into the lower three dimensions in a sequential manner, such that it causes the photon to take a curved path that encloses back upon itself to form a repetitive cyclical three dimensional enclosed path and that path and the photon traveling in it is what we call a matter particle and that If you then add linear motion to it to accelerate that matter particle toward the speed of light, some of the added motion is transferred into its fourth and fifth dimensional motions, you can then see that the motion added to its fifth dimensional motion causes an increase in the curvature of the matter particle’s enclosed path. This causes it to become smaller. The closer you get to the speed of light the larger is the portion of the added motion that is transferred into the particle’s fifth dimensional motion and the rate of reduction in its size greatly increases. The next step is to understand how interactions between matter particles work. There is what is called an interaction cross-section. Interactions generally do not occur between field particles because their structural points of their motions are very small making it very unlikely that they will intersect each other and come together to interact. Energy photons on the other hand not only possess a field particle in each of them that travels at the speed of light, they each also possess a fourth dimensional motion that travels at ninety degrees from its direction of travel. This gives a much larger cross-sectional area in which an interaction can occur and thus increases the likelihood that two photons can interact with each other. If one photon possesses a very high fourth dimensional motion amplitude (it generates a very high frequency) and another one has a very low motion amplitude in its fourth dimensional motion (it generates a very low frequency) and they move toward each other, the likelihood that the low frequency photon will be in a place in its cross-section where it will interact with the other photon is greatly reduced. Matter particles work in a similar way except instead of a cross-sectional area there is more of a cross-sectional volume. You can look at a matter particle’s path as a small three-dimensional sphere. When the paths of two matter particles begin to intersect an interaction can take place, but the photons within them must be located on their paths, such that they will intersect at a time that their fourth dimensional motions are also in the proper positions within each of them to allow the interaction to take place during the time that their paths still intersect each other. Again, if one particle is very small because it possesses a large fifth dimensional motion amplitude because it is traveling close to the speed of light and the other particle is much slower in that respect, which means that it is much larger, the likelihood of an interaction is greatly reduced. If you visualize the small particle intersecting with the motion path of the much larger particle you will see that the small particle will pass completely through the motion path on one side and then travel through most of the larger particle in the internal volume of the larger particle where it can’t interact with the larger particle’s photon because it is located on the enclosed path of the larger particle and not internally within it. It will then travel through the other side of the larger particle’s enclosed path. This greatly decreases the chance of an interaction between the two particles. The net effect is that our energy photons and matter particles can only interact with each other when they are both within a specific frequency range with respect to each other. This means that we live in a universe that only includes energy photons and matter particles that possess frequencies within this range. There are other universes that exist in lower and higher frequency ranges and it is possible to travel to that nice little world in a very small galaxy near, near away in your desk drawer. Of course, if you accelerate close to the speed of light, you can observe the matter particles of our frequency range to understand their composition and operation, etc. If you learn how to slow down your fifth dimensional motion, you could also be as large as one of our galaxies or travel to a very large world in an extremely large galaxy where our galaxy might be in someone else’s desk drawer. As to whether there is a bottomless pit of frequency ranges or just a few, etc. is another story. At that point you could completely understand how our frequency range functions and its internal substances and structuring at all hierarchical levels. If all of the other frequency ranges are constructed the same way you could extrapolate that knowledge to all of them and completely understand them all. There is more to the story, of course, but that is enough of that for now.

My point is that all observational evidence supports the concept that we are continually living in the present. We don’t jump back into the past and become a child again once we are grown up. Neither do we go into the future and observe things from that perspective and then jump back to the current present. We can experience the past only in the form of recordings that were made either in our minds or by other devices when that past was the current present. We can only experience a possible future in the form of extrapolations from observed patterns that we observed from past records and from present observations. We cannot actually observe the real future because it has not yet occurred. There is no observable evidence for a continual existence of the past or the future. The relational stuff that highlights the present is the observations of normal continuations of motions in their paths and the expected results from interactions that show a continuation of motion transfers in the normal expected patterns as have been observed to happen over and over in their linear motion flow patterns, etc. Clocks are only useful to us because of this continual orderly motion flow. If the clock were to suddenly start to run backwards because we started to go backward in time to the past or if it suddenly jumped forward 6 hours because we moved into the future, the clock would be useless to us to help us record the continual passage of time. They don’t do that, but just continue to move forward at the rate that the motions contained in them provides. I have found that the scriptures themselves, at least in the King James version that is not copyrighted, are very consistent and accurate. The works of men, however, are not. Even those who are said to be followers of Christ, often mix men’s science or other works into their works and since man’s works are usually at least partially in error they can’t be counted on to be completely valid. An example would be when leaders of the Roman church adopted the then current scientific concepts that considered the earth to be the center of the universe and that the sun and planets, etc., went around the earth. When it was later noticed that the planets sometimes went back and forth they just added the concept of epicycles to try to explain them away, so that they would not be seen to have made an error. Ironically, today I see just the opposite in that atheists now in the same way often make up many obviously false theories to try to continue to support concepts like natural creation of the universe or of living creatures, etc. even though current scientific observational evidence no longer supports such concepts as practical. To get a complete understanding of anything it is necessary to both understand what is in that thing (the positive way) as well as what is not in it (the negative way). Both approaches used simultaneously work best. Yes it is not just limited to science.

I am not sure what you mean about the relata and ontology that is not about the structure or relations of things. Please give me what you would consider to be the relata and ontology of matter particles that does not include the structure or relations of them. If you can, give it to me in non-mathematical terms.

Sincerely,

Paul

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Dear Vladimir,

Thank you for the careful reading and for the comment with the feedbacks. You quote that I said "In fact, the reason why science was so successful is precisely its ability to ignore the nature of things, and focus on their relations.", and you say "I believe that it was the cognitive attitudes that were laid down at the beginning of the scientific revolution of the New Time...

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Dear Vladimir,

Thank you for the careful reading and for the comment with the feedbacks. You quote that I said "In fact, the reason why science was so successful is precisely its ability to ignore the nature of things, and focus on their relations.", and you say "I believe that it was the cognitive attitudes that were laid down at the beginning of the scientific revolution of the New Time (“Physics, fear of Mathaphysics” and “Hypotheses non fingo”) impeded the development of science. Unfortunately, the mainstream in science has always dominated. " I don't see this as contradicting what I said, I said it was successful, you said it could have been more succesful :) You said "Unfortunately, the mainstream in science has always dominated." Well, this is by definition. That people are changing their minds very slowly, this is not characteristic to the mainstream, rather to most of us, mainstream or not. I believe there is an evolutionary reason why people change theid mind with difficulty, which doesn't mean it's a good thing, but only that stubborn people survived and passed their genes, even if they were wrong in some cases, the point was that their ideas worked well enough to survive. About stubbornness, for example, I can't say that I change my mind easily, and not because I am always right :)

You said "But Galileo Galilei specified which language Nature speaks: “The book [of Nature] is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. ”"

Maybe he specified these because this is what he knew at that time. Now we know more, but of course tomorrow we will know even more. However, there is a definitivity in the universal algebra and model theory: they are universal, and we have some metatheoretical results that are universal because of this. For example, the model existence theorem. So even if we will understand them better in the future, metatheoretical results are here to stay. But this doesn't mean that triangles are not essential somehow. They are, as well as simplicial complexes, their generalizations. Infinitesimally, this is how we can understand differential forms. Also, the metric in General Relativity can be understood as an infintesimal Pythagorean theorem in an infinitesimal Minkowski spacetime. Triangles can be used to understand the Born rule too. They're practically everywhere, indeed. We just learned to consider them understood to the level that we no longer draw or even mention them, because we just take for granted that others know this.

Thanks again for your comments. You promissed "differences in our views". They surely must be differences, but with what you wrote here I pretty much agree :) (unless your words have some subtle meanings which I am missing) I'm looking forward to read your essay!

Best regards,

Cristi

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Dear Edwin,

I don't think it's a matter of interpretation or opinion here, but I don't mind you having a different opinion. Michelson-Gale experiment gives result as predicted by some aether theory. But the same result is predicted by special relativity, which I think you know but just can't believe. Other Sagnac type experiments are as well consistent with special relativity. Now, you seem...

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Dear Edwin,

I don't think it's a matter of interpretation or opinion here, but I don't mind you having a different opinion. Michelson-Gale experiment gives result as predicted by some aether theory. But the same result is predicted by special relativity, which I think you know but just can't believe. Other Sagnac type experiments are as well consistent with special relativity. Now, you seem to find essential that some experiments confirm a prediction of an aether theory, but you seem to find less important that all experiments we know are consistent with special relativity, or with general relativity if gravity is important, without doing any tricks. I don't think there's an aether theory able to explain the same many phenomena with as little assumptions, and in general aether theorists tend to be blocked in time over 100 years ago, ignoring how many tests of the predictions of relativity+quantum mechanics were done, basically the entire body of physics since then confirmed it. So basically you'll have to invent all sorts of tricks, different for different situations. Rube Goldberg aether machines to explain each experiment from those that special relativity explain with a single set of principles. In my opinion, you and other people doing this are doing something useful trying to find such theories, and I'd be the first to say that it requires great ingeniosity. And I won't be so surprised if some new effects can come out of this, although I'd be surprised if these would refute relativity. My only expressed objection to the statements about special relativity in your essay was that it is not what you made it to seem - a cartoon caricature that has nothing in common to how me and others see relativity, but thanks for the tireless and inventive efforts to make us look as some idiots who conspire to oppress real scientists like aether theorists :). Minkowski explained how these things come neatly into place if we admit spacetime and the 4-dimensional ontology that follows from this. I'm glad you took my advise to read Vesselin's essay, what did he reply to your comments? For me, relativity falls in place pretty well and has all figured out neatly, at least as long as quantum gravity effects can be ignored. Me, like others, are aware that relativity may not survive, especially since it may be the case that it needs to be quantum. But quantum field theory itself is also an argument for relativity, so maybe they are not as incompatible as they appear to us. We'll see. You seem to find support in some things Rovelli said, so I think that, if you are in tune with him, since he's editor in chief at Foundation of Physics, you may have some good chances to publish there. I also checked your updated essay, for the case 2 substrate example you mention. I think it's much more ellaborate than what I mentioned in my other comment about those 3 people I heard recently mentioning a relation with gravity, who didn't show anything as detailed, to my knowledge. Good luck!

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Edwin,

Actually, I found your "cartoon relativity" thing humorous. I think you're a guy with great sense of humor, I'd probably love to have a beer with you someday. When reading, sometimes I tend to imagine the author as giving a talk, which was also prompted to me in your essay by the Susskind video, so I imagined you could be a stand up comedian (I love those guys). So, while I know...

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Dear Edwin,

Actually, I found your "cartoon relativity" thing humorous. I think you're a guy with great sense of humor, I'd probably love to have a beer with you someday. When reading, sometimes I tend to imagine the author as giving a talk, which was also prompted to me in your essay by the Susskind video, so I imagined you could be a stand up comedian (I love those guys). So, while I know very well what I understand by relativity and Minkowski spacetime and change of reference frame and how velocities are composed, while doing a certain thing I do when listening to other's opinion (which is to try to see the world like them), I couldn't help feeling the amusement you may have felt while writing this, and also imagine the laughs of your audience, those who think like you do about these. This doesn't mean I agree, because while I try to imagine myself in the shoes of other people, I don't forget myself. But by no means I found what you said offensive. I'm not in the business of PC police, this is a thing that sucks out the fun out of anything. I just saw your depiction as not reflecting what me and other people understand by relativity. To me, this is important in the sense that me, like anybody else, I'd like others to see how marvelous some things are, or at least how they appear to me. And relativity is marvelous, in my opinion. A fair representation would help people see this. Not as ultimate truth, but as appreciation for what it is. I see it as pervading the entire body of physics. Even if we think about quantum. The types of particles, classified by spin, as well as their free evolution equations, follow directly from Poincaré invariance, as shown by Wigner and Bargmann. Trying to explain this as a 3+1 symmetry doesn't work, because of the way C, P, and T symmetries work together, which makes sense only under the 4-dimensional Poincaré invariance. To me this is just an instance of how marvelous relativity is. This doesn't mean that I don't try to appreciate other ways to see the world, this is why I said that I appreciate the ingeniosity with which people try to come up with alternative experiments and explanations, this looks to me like a McGyver approach to science, which is spectacular and surprising. So, while I'd love others to see how marvelous relativity appears to me, I'd never push a hypothetical button that would make everyone accept it without judgment. As I said repeatedly, I think it's necessary to have people testing various alternatives, challenging relativity and anything else. And even if a God would exist, bearer of the ultimate truth, I think that even that God should be challenged, as much as possible. And since people who believe something tend to strawman the opposite beliefs, I can't trust the supporters of a theory, being it relativity, to seriously try to challenge it. So who's left to do this job wholehearted, if not those who don't believe it? Now, this is a difficult thing to do, and I don't refer here because the theory is infallible, but because indeed we tend to think this to be a closed subject long time ago. Most researchers want to move forward and build something on this foundation, and in fact there are already several floors of the building, and most of us want to work at building the topmost floor. I take it as a personal quest to try to go constantly down to the foundations and review it, in fact some of the things I did and I'm currently working at are just the result of the reconsiderations of some widely accepted points of view, which became mainstream due to historical accidents. So I fully appreciate what you're doing, and I'd thank you on behalf of science, even if I am not entitled to speak on its behalf. If it would be by me, there would be at least a journal dedicated to alternative explanations of relativity or of anything else, and maybe a department in each large University, which would at least help professor and teacher test their understanding in debates. Even if most would turn out to be wrong, I prefer people to realize this by working it out, rather than taking it for granted. As Jung said (and I'm fully aware I am quoting him out of context, but it applies very much here), "Beware of unearned wisdom", which in this context to me it means simply don't take knowledge for granted, but only after you challenged it and arrived at the same conclusion, no matter how difficult it is. Otherwise you'll just overburden scientific research and increase the confusion. I feel no shame in admitting that, as a kid, I tried to challenge relativity in various ways, including by conceiving some atomic structure of space, and I tried this untill it fell in place for me and my "ground state" is just what I understand now by relativity. I did the same with quantum. On the other hand, in the process, I developed my own tools to question the foundations, which are neither infallible not at least the best. And, aware of my limited time and the many things I have to do or I want to do in this life, I had to choose between being an "educator" and an "explorer". And my own structure is not that of an "educator", this is why I don't care to get into debates, I am more attracted to do my own things, to fight my own battles. But make no mistake here: I fully appreciate what you and others try to do, as I explained above.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Gemma,

Thank you for reading and making interesting comments.

1) While dictionary is circular, this doesn't mean it doesn't say anything, just that it says only about the relations. Self-references are unavoidable in some cases, and they show something about the system, but not about anything else. I agree with you that Hofstadter makes excellent points in "Gödel, Escher,...

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Dear Gemma,

Thank you for reading and making interesting comments.

1) While dictionary is circular, this doesn't mean it doesn't say anything, just that it says only about the relations. Self-references are unavoidable in some cases, and they show something about the system, but not about anything else. I agree with you that Hofstadter makes excellent points in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and in "I'm a strange loop" takes this kind of self-reference as an explanation of consciousness. I understand this still in the relational, i.e. "easy problems", and to me real semantics has to do with the "hard problem". In my longer essay The negative way to sentience I spend more time with such questions, but the main point is that what I mean by semantics is not something that we infer about a dictonary, because this kind of inference comes from identification meaning based on the very way we give meaning to the world. So we project it, it is not determined by the dictionary.

2) Model theory deals with just this kind of things, and it works. The point being that a structure that exists doesn't have inconsistent facts. If you add on top of the sentences expressing facts other sentences, that introduce additional constraints, like in the case of Russell's paradox, then you'll get paradoxes. But such sentences are expressions of facts of the world. So I am not worried about this. If the world is inconsistent, then the principle of explosion guarantees that everything and their opposites is true and false at the same time, and we will have nothing to talk about, not even relations, because there would be no information.

3) I think this is precisely the case. I doubt there is an universal of an apple, we just experience various instances of apples, train our neural networks, so that it starts to "recoginze" apples. But not because there is some universal of an apple preencoded in the network, or to which we have acces in a Platonic world. It is interesting that in many cases of autism, this mechanism doesn't seem to work so easily, they have problems with "generalization", and when they overcome it, it is because of much more training than it takes to neurotypicals.

Now to the comments.

1) I share your view, to me is something marvelous. I don't think that everybody does, since I've seem some strange reactions to this idea :)

2) My point is quite as old as statistical mechanics, I understand that Flavio takes it one step further.

Thanks, for your excellent comments and questions! I'm looking forward to read your essay!

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Heinz,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting.

> you don't show why this situation [that we are somehow caught in our private worlds] does not degenerate to solipsism.

Well, we are somehow caught in our private worlds, but I didn't intend to address solipsism. I didn't consider it necessary, because I don't propose that only the subjective exists. I...

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Dear Heinz,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting.

> you don't show why this situation [that we are somehow caught in our private worlds] does not degenerate to solipsism.

Well, we are somehow caught in our private worlds, but I didn't intend to address solipsism. I didn't consider it necessary, because I don't propose that only the subjective exists. I don't reject for example the fact that we can know something about the "objective" world, I just explain that what we can know about it are just relations, not the relata. In particular scientific knowledge is of this kind. And since this is independently verifiable, as I explained in the essay and more in my longer essay, clearly I didn't propose that only subjectivity exists. But if you think that I missed something and there is a danger of solipsism in my essay, you are welcome to explain.

On the other hand, on a funnier note, I think it doesn't hurt to reexamine the possibility of solipsism once in a while, rather than taking by default the position that it is absurd. We spend a lot of our time asleep and dreaming. It's a good point to ask ourselves once in a while if the people with whom we interact are independent sentient beings, or just figments of our minds. This may be useful in a nightmare for example, because it can allow us to wake up or to take control of the dream. Or even just to have a lucid dream, for fun, self-exploration, or preparation for a future event by "simulating" it in the dream. Taking the default position that solipsism can't be true makes us more prone to take seriously whatever bad characters we meet in our dreams, and suffer in that illusion instead of enjoying it by taking control. Other things that help this consist in looking for inconsistencies. The habit of observing inconsistencies helps us get lucid in our dreams.

Another point from the comparison with the dreams is the following. Suppose we have an argument against solipsism. If we apply it to a dream, it should not work, because, well, the other people in the dream are not real. But for an argument to work in some instance and not work in another one, there should be a difference between the two situation. If the dream is self-consistent like the reality is, what difference would be? So, my claim is that the only difference you can notice by passive observation is one of consistency (you can also actively make experiments in the dream, e.g. trying to do things that are impossible in reality, which in general break the self-consistency of the dream). This means that no refutation of solipsism can do better than checking the consistency. Or, in my essay, I didn't reject the consistency of the world, I even took it as a principle. Being trapped in our minds doesn't lead by itself to solipsism any more than being trapped in the house.

> Further, isn't sentience a high level (reflective) idea over the immediate experiences of an observer? Can a reflection be foundational?

Well, what I understand by "sentience" in my essay is "what makes experience possible", or "the irreducible part of consciousness". I tried to explain it more in my longer essay, where I "defined" it like

Nondefinition 1. In the following, I will call sentience the ingredient that makes experience possible. Whatever this ingredient may be, I’ll not try to define it.

So I don't understand by sentience "a high level (reflective) idea over the immediate experiences of an observer". If you categorize it as "reflection", of course it can't be foundational. But I don't do this. It's a category mistake to identify what I mean by "sentience" with what others, who use it as a "reflective idea", mean. I had to use a word, some use "consciousness", but this indeed is in large part reflective. Rather than inventing a new word, I repurposed "sentience", and explained what I mean by it.

Thanks again.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Luca,

Thank you for the comments and particularly for challenging and putting at test the statements in my essay. You wrote:

> However while I completely agree with your Principle 1, I do only agree with principles 2 and 3 with some qualifications, that might not correspond the picture your wording suggests.

I don't think principles 2 and 3 apply only "with some...

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Dear Luca,

Thank you for the comments and particularly for challenging and putting at test the statements in my essay. You wrote:

> However while I completely agree with your Principle 1, I do only agree with principles 2 and 3 with some qualifications, that might not correspond the picture your wording suggests.

I don't think principles 2 and 3 apply only "with some qualifications". Here is why. Suppose you have a model where the laws change in time, as I understand to be the one you propose. Also suppose that at each time the state of the world is represented by a different mathematical structure. But this is still a dynamical system like the ones in my essay. Simply, you still have a state, even if it corresponds to a different mathematical structure, and you still have a rule that shows how one state connects to the next one, even if this rule changes in time. And you don't contradict Principle 2 The collection of all true propositions about our physical world admits a mathematical model. Here's why. The collection of all propositions true about the world also include time specific propositions. All propositions about facts of the world valid at a time t have to be consistent, and admit a mathematical model, because this is a result from logic, it's not a postulate I want to impose (so you can't break it). There is also a larger mathematical model, corresponding to all true propositions, for all times, collected together. They can be for example of the form "At the time t things were such and such". To this collection of propositions corresponds a larger mathematical structure, valid for the entire history, and which includes as substructures those valid for each particular time. So Principle 3 The physical world is isomorphic to a dynamical system P is not contradicted.

From your comment I understand that the symmetries at some time give the objectively knowable relations, hence a mathematical structure realizing those relations. And that symmetries can change. You say that this is due to the environment, so I take it that your system is not isolated, it's open. A question may be, what if you take the whole system? Will it's laws still change? But anyhow, let's focus on the possibility that you take it as open, or that even if you take the total system, its symmetries change for some reason. But when you say that the symmetries determine the objectively knowable relations, I understand from this that there is a procedure X which, given the symmetries, gives the relations, like a function relations=X(symmetries). So at least X is not changing, just its argument. Now, when you say symmetries, in general they correspond to transformations of some space (not necessarily the "physical space", it can be a space of other parameters). For example, the system may have rotational symmetry SO(3) at some time, and this be broken in a future time, so that the symmetry reduces to rotations around an axis. But this is just like in usual physics. You can have a large group of symmetries, and a particular state may not be invariant to the full group, but only to a subgroup. So, from changing symmetries I don't think it follows a change in the laws. But, as I explained, even if the law changes in the most crazy ways, there will still be a dynamical system P and Principles 1-3 will still hold. You wrote "I hope this made you curious about my essay". Yes, I am looking forward to read your essay.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Rajiv,

Thank you for returning. From my experience, people often think they can reduce consciousness to information, computation, processes, relations etc, but they usually talk about the easy problems. I realized that it is usually unhelpful to engage in such discussions, because they are about different things, and this leads to misunderstandings. I tried to give a...

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Dear Rajiv,

Thank you for returning. From my experience, people often think they can reduce consciousness to information, computation, processes, relations etc, but they usually talk about the easy problems. I realized that it is usually unhelpful to engage in such discussions, because they are about different things, and this leads to misunderstandings. I tried to give a grasp of what the hard problem is with the example with the tapestry. It seemed it didn't work for you, so I thought that our discussion will be just an exchange where each of us talk about different things. This doesn't mean that I must have a mathematical way to refute you, it may simply mean that I expect this discussion to be very difficult, and pointless, since we would talk about different things. But since you think is so important, as it follows from your reply, I looked in my draft and recovered the reply I wrote for you before deciding not to post it. I completed it a bit, and I am posting it below.

>You make a profound observation, "science deals with relations only, not with the nature of things", and yet you let that slip out of hand.

Well, thank you, but you could point out where I let it slip out of hand. Or perhaps it just went in a direction you disagree with?

>Consciousness is indeed explainable only in terms of 'relations of things', not by the underlying nature of things. Relations are observable reality.

I see. You seem to think that consciousness is reducible to relations. Do you think it is somewhere in the tapestry of the Rule 110 Cellular Automaton? Probably not, and probably you think that it's because this one is discrete and not random.

> You did not emphasize here that state descriptions are also relative

If they're descriptions, sure, they're relative.

>The trouble with math is that we begin to expect strong determinism expressible by math, where as we must allow limited indeterminism in our mathematical description to be able to construct the descriptions in relative terms alone.

I doubt that math forces determinism. There is indeterminism in math too. Probabilities and statistics are branches of math too. Sure, it forces things, in the sense that it makes it wrong to say that the result of 2+2 is anything but 4.

>Differences from Turing Machines:[...]

What I said is that the reason why some people think it is reducible to computation is because you can have Turing machines that do all these to any degree of approximation.

> Relations with limited indeterminism can explain consciousness, but one has not presented yet what is consciousness. Without such a knowledge, consciousness naturally remains inexplicable mystery. Once you are interested in taking the discussion forward, I will define consciousness and request you to critique.

I am pretty sure from what you say that you refer to easy problems of consciousness. Those you can try to define. It is not this.

>P is an observable state of a system and S is the information of its causal correlation.

I don't recognize my S and P in your S and P, here or in your essay.

>Once you are interested in taking the discussion forward, I will define consciousness and request you to critique.

I could ask you to explain what is the hard problem. That would be particularly useful since you seem to think that you know what is meaning. But it is not this, this is just a label.

>What a pity, you declined to take the discussion forward. It appears, you have such strong logical rationality against my arguments that it is not worthy of further discussion at all. Your rationality must be mathematical for it to give such certainty of mind.

You should not jump to conclusions. There may be different reasons. My reason was simply that we talk about different things, which can lead to misunderstandings. No reason to be offended by this, I hoped. If my essay was not clear enough to explain what is the hard problem and why it is not the same as the easy problems, then hopefully this longer version may help.

I appreciate your interesting and thought provoking comments, and wish you well in the contest.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Mihai,

>If science doesn’t strive to reach the heart of reality or to comprehend things in themselves and it’s simply a bunch of relations then what does?...Is it art, religion, philosophy?

First, I didn't say "science doesn’t strive to reach the heart of reality", scientists definitely want this. What I said is it can only capture relations, not "the heart of...

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Dear Mihai,

>If science doesn’t strive to reach the heart of reality or to comprehend things in themselves and it’s simply a bunch of relations then what does?...Is it art, religion, philosophy?

First, I didn't say "science doesn’t strive to reach the heart of reality", scientists definitely want this. What I said is it can only capture relations, not "the heart of reality", unless this hart is relations only. And I explained that experiment is based on finding relations (to measure is to compare, to look at the structure is to find relations etc.), and theory is based on finding relations between the experimental data. But if I am wrong, maybe you can give an example of "nature of things" found by science (or even art, religion, philosophy, because if they can, then science perhaps can absorb it). When I ask people for such an example of "nature of things" or "heart of reality", found by science or other means, sometimes they tend to become emotional, as if I offended some god of science ☺. When people get emotional, they tend to misinterpret and make quick judgments. But it's understandable ☺.

You then said I left out "concepts". I think concepts are labeled representations, and I discussed both labels and representations in my longer essay. When you give as examples "the fundamental concept of manifold as defined by Riemann or the concept of force introduced by Newton or group by Lagrange, Galois or Lie etc", somehow you ignore that these are mathematical structures and can be defined precisely in terms of sets and relations as I said. What difference makes the fact that we represent them in our minds somehow, and we label them, and call them "concepts"? They are what they are.

>Logically speaking relations are between things, facts, acts, concepts, sets, classes etc.assumes the a prior existence of these objects as something more fundamental than the relations among them as such.

This doesn't mean that we can know those fundamental things from studying the relations between them.

>From a holistic (even Daoist)point of view however I can see your point if we are to agree that everything that exists is somehow inter-connected and therefore those connections, those structural relations become essential in undertaking the structure of reality and yes in that sense perhaps one can take this ultra reductionist view.

This is an interesting remark, although I don't understand it. As for the ultra reductionist view, if you think that my essay was about this, then you missed the point, it was in the completely opposite direction ☺. It was rather a reductio an absurdum proof against reductionism.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Mihai,

Your examples of the role of concepts are true, and they are important for our understanding and the progress of science. But what I was refering to is what science is about, what can be proven objectively, not what is helpful pedagogically even for the progress of science. They are different things, and you brought the notion of concepts to oppose what I said, but it was not the...

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Mihai,

Your examples of the role of concepts are true, and they are important for our understanding and the progress of science. But what I was refering to is what science is about, what can be proven objectively, not what is helpful pedagogically even for the progress of science. They are different things, and you brought the notion of concepts to oppose what I said, but it was not the same thing. Also, I repeat, those concepts are our representations of for example semi-Riemannian geometry, but this geometry like any other mathematical structure are expressable in terms of sets and relations. So you see, I agree with your statements, but it is you who opposed them to my statements out of context. I was simply defining the context. In the context of my essay, the point was to show that there is indeed a hard problem, and it can't simply be reduced to science as usually understood as being about objectively or independently verifiable facts. These things are relations only. The personal touch each of us give to them when we interpret them or represent them internally, the labels we give when we use words as shorthands to communicate with others whom we expect to know what we are talking about, these are outside, meta, even though they are useful. Even so, they can be encoded as information to any desired level, but at the end there is the problem of converting this information into meaning, and I think here is again where we hit the hard problem of consciousness.

> I don’t dispute the fact that the way we understand nature of gravity now may not be the ultimate reality in itself due to quantum gravity problems

I don't dispute it either, I even expect that the most important parts of General Relativity will survive in the final theory, even though the majority of physicists searching for it seem to me to be drifting away of it. I worked a lot to fix issues that people consider as arguments to throw General Relativity away. I don't know how this relates to my essay, but since I see that you are interested in this, I gave you a link.

> who is to say that one day will not come along ...

Not me.

I am pretty sure that you unpacked my essay differently than I intended :) It's my fault, I had to reduce it 4+ times, and it changed in the process. Maybe the longer version is clearer, though I am not sure even of this.

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Tejinder,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting and for the visit!

>Your beautifully written and understandable essay made a lasting impression on me.

Thank you, this means a lot to me.

>I still need to dwell a little more on the last section, and the proposition P=S. [I readily agree there is a hard problem of consciousness].

I...

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Dear Tejinder,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting and for the visit!

>Your beautifully written and understandable essay made a lasting impression on me.

Thank you, this means a lot to me.

>I still need to dwell a little more on the last section, and the proposition P=S. [I readily agree there is a hard problem of consciousness].

I just want to remind something, because it can go unnoticed in my short essay, as I realized from some comments. By S I mean the mathematical description of the relational part of sentience. By sentience I mean the ontology of S.

>Some of my own earlier thoughts on this subject came to my mind while I was reading your essay. I make a distinction [and I think you do too] between mind (thoughts, emotions, ...] and the underlying substrate of self-awareness/consciousness. Perhaps consciousness is a full body experience, confined not just to the brain-mind system?

I agree. There is a second "brain", which from historical-biological perspective happened before what we now call "brain". It is the enteric nervous system, and Damasio explains well in what sense this is a brain. At any rate, I think that even when we see ourselves as very rational and logical, we are in fact just rationalizing our emotions and hunches. Relations between the gut and the development and functioning of the brain are something that we are just starting to understand. Imbalances in the gut bacteria can lead to many health issues, but also affects the brain, and is one of the major factors that are connected with autism (I have personal reasons to be very interested in this relation, one of my kids being severely autistic). Anyway, while answering you, I recalled the huge differences in nutrition between India and the US, and this prompted me to check if there is also a difference in the incidence of autism. Indeed, in India is 0.23%, while in the US is 1.47%! (although the article doesn't mention the gut). Here is a link about the relation between gut and autism.

>Also, I had imagined consciousness to be a timeless state...self-awareness without any thoughts-every moment identical with the next; devoid of mind, there is no flow of time, and hence no experience of time, or perhaps a reversible time experience, very different from how mind perceives time. Are we in disagreement on this aspect: can consciousness be treated as a dynamical system?

I think it's timeless, no disagreement between us here. I think physics is timeless. Dynamical systems are timeless, time is just a parameter on the curve representing the succession of states. I gave a proof that there's no way to introduce presentism in a dynamical system in my longer essay. So both P and S are timeless. I think sentience is timeless too, although I can't prove much about sentience (sentience is the ontology of S, but not S itself). The impression that present is more "real" and time flows comes from the limited perspective of the states, they have memories of the past, not of the future. But they are confined to a particular time, just like they are at one place and not everywhere, so their perspective is presentist and not eternalist, for the same reason why we have a location in space, and we are not everywhere. So time is a matter of perspective, which, since it correlates with the time in the dynamical system, we think it's supported by physics. But there is nothing even in the dynamical systems that would make present more actual than other moments of times, except that the state has limited knowledge of the entire history.

My views on time in physics are more complicated to be explained in a comment, but I attach a paper about this, in the form that was accepted for publication recently.

>Earlier, I also had this idea that at the most fundamental level, there is no distinction between the physical world and the mathematics which describes it. The two become one and the same. And that consciousness is the state when physical aspect of self equals mathematical description of self. I don't know how to prove this, but were it to be true, it would be different from how we treat emergent physical systems [reductionism]. Is your proposal P=S in any way related to this idea, or something entirely different?

I view everything as a timeless mathematical structure whose ontology is sentience. It becomes manifest in systems like humans, able to exhibit purpose and meaning, but I think it is unreachable by objective means, including studying humans under the microscope (although S itself may be). Metaphorically, I can put it like this: the foundation of consciousness and experience, which I named "sentience" to be able to speak about it, but took caution to call this naming "nondefinition", is all that is. It is also a mathematical structure because it is consistent. A more detailed view I have is that it is undifferentiated, timeless, dimensionless (I explained how this can be in my last essay, Indra's Net - Holomorphic Fundamentalness, particularly note 8). I see it like a germ of a holomorphic field (I explain why I think fields are holomorphic in that essay), or rather an equivalence class of such fields. It has no dimension, no time. But it contains in it the field, including spacetime, as the power series expansion of the data in the germ. So there is only one undifferentiated thing, which has "inside" it, intrinsically, many differentiated perspectives of the world. But it can be any other mathematical structure, if I am wrong and physics is not like this. It can be something like your matrix dynamics theory, or maybe this and the holomorphic one are just isomorphic somehow. Anyway, I think that that the ontology of that mathematical structure is sentience. I can't remember since I had this view, but the holomorphic germ idea came to me 25-30 years ago. And somehow, at that time, I started to read some Eastern philosophies like Taoism and Advaita Vedānta, and I had the feeling that they were saying the same. I factored out the stories that people developed out of these experiences, which resulted in various mythologies that too often don't seem factual enough to me, I think these are just attempts to conceptualize that experience. Pretty much like Descartes, who doubted deeply (his dubito), but instead of sticking to neti neti, he filled the experience with concepts based on his own preconceptions, which led him to derivate Catholocism out of this. I think this happened to many people, trying to think of the unthinkable, to speak of the unspeakable, and this filled the world with myths that contradict one another and facts.

>You have written a thought-provoking and very enjoyable essay, and I hope it will do very well in the contest.

Thank you, I appreciate this very much! I loved your essay as well, and I wish you the best in the contest and research! And if you will give a Zoom talk about your work, please count me in!

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Vesselin ,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting my essay! I enjoyed very much yours as well, and I am happy that you are visiting my page.

> why "science is only about the relations between things, not about the nature of things themselves."

The intention of scientists is of course to know the nature of things, not merely their relations. But their...

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Dear Vesselin ,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting my essay! I enjoyed very much yours as well, and I am happy that you are visiting my page.

> why "science is only about the relations between things, not about the nature of things themselves."

The intention of scientists is of course to know the nature of things, not merely their relations. But their means are operational. I think a good example is the difference of approaches between Einstein and Minkowski. Einstein tried to understand and explain Special Relativity by operational procedures, rods, signals, etc. He used physical objects like rods and clocks, but as means to derive relations between lengths, durations, etc. Historically, this operationalism worked well, and led to the rejection of the "realist" position existing at that time, that aether explained electromagnetism. So Einstein came up as operationalist and aether theory was abandoned*. Minkowski's position is different. He proved indeed that reality is four-dimensional. So he put back reality in its place, and was not merely operationalist. But we can interpret this in two ways. One is that the four-dimensional objects Minkowski talks about are "matter", and the other one is that they are geometric entities. My position is that we know at least that they behave like geometric things. We don't know what is "matter", but we know what is geometry. But both "matter" and "geometry" are metaphysical concepts. People can agree on the Lorentz transformations, but some can interpret it as geometry, and others as matter having geometric properties. So science, to allow the exchange of ideas and independent verification, avoids making metaphysical assumptions, and relies on what can be shared. And operational procedures can be shared. As well, when we have theoretical explanations, we formulate them mathematically, but we don't go into the interpretation of the underlying nature of the things in our equations. The only time we do it is when we can describe things in terms of other things whose description we already have. This is why I say it's about relations, and can't go beyond them.

Take Minkowski's spacetime. It is a geometric space. This means it's a mathematical structure. A general definition of mathematical structure is given in Universal Algebra, in terms of sets and relations. Like a parenthesis, I don't quite like the term "universal algebra", because I see those rather geometrically, but this is a matter of personal taste. Anyway, my point is that Minkowski spacetime is a real element of the Theory of Special Relativity, and I take it in a geometric sense. As a geometry, it is a mathematical structure in the sense of Universal Algebra. So all there is about it is captured in the sets and relations. But the nature of the elements of the sets in themselves play no role in Universal Algebra, than to allow the definition of relations. In fact, Universal Algebra can be reduced to relations alone, by replacing the elements by 0-ary relations.

So we have the description of the world obtained from observations and making theories, as relations, and we have the underlying mathematical structure, which is also as relations. And ideally, when we will have the right theory, the two will be isomorphic. Whatever new we learn by operational means about the objects will simply add more relations. This doesn't mean that there is no underlying reality, no ontology. There is ontology. My claim is just that we can't put the finger on it by operational means, the best we can do is to find relations.

> With regard to "nothing of the nature of the things is accessible to measurement or observation," how would you explain the common view that physics does studies physical objects, not just their relations? E.g., we measure the locations of planets and the sun (even we see them directly or through telescopes!) I agree that we may never have absolute (full) knowledge about them, but physics does measure such objects (not only their relations) and in this way proves their existence. The word “planet” means to other people essentially the same thing (whether it is exactly the same or not, I think does not challenge the fact that we see and measure (all in perfect agreement) an object that we call a planet.

There is an object called planet, of course. It is not like the object is different to each observer, it may look different, but it is the same. We share the same reality. We even agree that it is made of atoms. And we agree that atoms are made of particles. And here is a place where we no longer know what is the nature of things. Particles, fields, wavefunctions, pure probabilities? This is another discussion. Einstein wanted here to keep having a realist description. But Bell's theorem, by using the very EPR experiment, shows that Einstein had to choose between a fixed reality at each time, and locality. But sorry, I divagate. When I say that we can't really know objectively the nature of things, I mean it in a much broader sense. I would say the same in a classical world. The object is there, Einstein criterion of reality is satisfied, but I would still complain that we can't know its nature. I think what I mean is that, to know the nature of something, there is no other way for that object to be, so that what we can measure and observe about it is the same. For example, consider a classical, Newtonian world, where all the elementary objects are balls, cogwheels, pins, etc, all made of steel. And suppose, for the sake of explaining what I mean, that all these elementary objects, identical in density, can't be broken or X-ray-ed. Suppose that there are "people" made of these things, and they try to understand that world. If these steel elementary objects are all there is in this world, can anyone know that they are made of steel? There is no notion of steel there, unless the people they call steel a particular organization of those objects. But they don't know what they intrinsically are. It could be anything, from cheese compressed well enough to have the same density and assuming it is unbreakable, to any other material. We can just call it "adamantium" or whatever. In such a world, we could never know the material. This is what I mean by "their nature". So the objects exist, they can be measured by comparing them to one another, their inertia can be measured, and what we would get are relations only. Nothing about their nature. Of course, we could analyze a planet in that world, and see that it is made of ultimate parts like these, but that would be the end.

> "And, of course, my favourite example that physics does deal with the nature of things - Minkowski's explanation of length contraction demonstrates that length contraction would be impossible if the worldtube of a contracting rod were not a real four-dimensional OBJECT (length contraction showed that the name "3D rod" was incorrect and we have no choice to call it "a 3D rod", because the rod turned out to be a 4D object). I believe this is most evident from the more visualized version of Minkowski's explanation - the thought (which can be made a real) experiments - an image is given on my essay's page in my response to Harrison Crecraft and H.H.J. Luediger."

You are right, of course. It is not the reality of objects that I doubted in my essay, but the "material" so to speak. Somehow, the material is immaterial to science, only the relations. I am using the word "ontology" or "nature of things" in this sense. I was doing this in my essay to make the case that there is something irreducible about consciousness. When people think they can understand consciousness, and it's just computation or processes, they usually make a lot of assumptions on top of what they really know. My thesis is that, once we remove those assumptions that color them, and let computation or what we call processes to be bare, it becomes clearer why this reductionism doesn't work. My personal view is that all there is is geometry+sentience. Geometry is the form, and the substance is sentience. Not sure if this choice of words is very suggestive. It can be compared with Russell's monism, although I am not sure that they are the same.

Cheers,

Cristi

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* Side note: Einstein's approach is very similar to how Bohr tried to explain the quantum world operationally, by relying on classical physical objects like the measurement apparatus. This may seem paradoxical, because Einstein changed completely the approach and opposed Bohr's operationalism, trying to understand reality instead. I think this is due to Minkowski, who showed that spacetime is real. Einstein, I think, was influenced by this, and this reconceptualization helped him to discover General Relativity, where the reality is curved spacetime, and also made him expect similar level of realism from Quantum Mechanics. While Bohr remained, paradoxically, faithful to the operationalist position similar to Einstein's original position. I know this reading of history is very personal, but I try to explain what I mean.

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Hi James,

> This is a stunning essay, beautifully written.

Thank you!

> I do have an issue with your regard for mathematics, relatively measured though it is. You write “theories in physics” to be mature need “to be logically consistent and mathematically well formulated.” I believe there is another requirement, often missing in quantum physics in...

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Hi James,

> This is a stunning essay, beautifully written.

Thank you!

> I do have an issue with your regard for mathematics, relatively measured though it is. You write “theories in physics” to be mature need “to be logically consistent and mathematically well formulated.” I believe there is another requirement, often missing in quantum physics in particular, that they need to be natural.

Well, you can take my condition as necessary, but not necessarily sufficient then.

> Just to take one example, “the collapse of the wave function” is an absurdity

I think the same, although we may have different reasons for this. Some of mine are for example here and here.

> owing to the inattention to the natural consideration that a “wave function” is actually a purely mathematical “curve function”, which merely describes a cognitive transition from not knowing to knowing. An absorption in mathematics has become increasingly detrimental physics

I am aware of the fashion of blaming mathematics for the failures in physics, or at least successes that are awaited for long time and didn't appear. I would say that we should rather blame the misunderstanding of the math.

> Black Hole physics is a prime example

Black Hole physics is a prime example where the reason is precisely the misunderstanding of the math, and not math itself. I wrote a very critical article against the current trends, Revisiting the Black Hole Entropy and the Information Paradox. The point was exactly that black hole physics became a freestyle abuse of math, but taking math seriously does a better job and show that a lot of myths that lead to thousands of papers are just myths.

> I’m not sure you mean to be endorsing “since the collection of all true statements about everything in the world should be logically consistent, it follows that there is a mathematical structure which describes anything that can be said”, and “all true propositions about our physical world admits a mathematical model.”

I refer to results in model theory.

> But to say “I am sentient” is of course not one of those things that can be said.

I am sentient. Once I've got to say it, it became just a physical process. But what's the source of this thought? Can this make testable predictions? I think it does.

> And later you write “consciousness is irreducible to relations, physical processes, or computation.” Assuming you’re not inconsistent, it seems you need to distance yourself from those statements in the beginning.

Assuming that I am inconsistent, maybe you can show it to me, because I don't want to be inconsistent.

> Some of my favorites:...

Thank you, these are among my favorites too :)

> “Dualism, materialist reductionism, property dualism, panpsychism, idealism, neutral monism etc., [address] the possible relations between [a dynamical system in which all the true propositions about the world are satisfied] and [a dynamical system, which admits a mathematical model too but includes sentience as well as relations].” (Do these admit a mathematical model?)

Well, yes. In The negative way to sentience I show how various interpretations of QM connect to different of these positions. Of course, I am talking about P and S from my essay, sentience is not S, sentience is the ontology of S.

> I’d invite you to have a look at my paper “Quantum Spontaneity and the Development of Consciousness” in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 26, Numbers 1-2, but the copyright seems to have been sold to ingenta connect, and it’s no longer free.

Thank you for the invitation!

> My thesis is that the universe is fundamentally spontaneous (not random or causal), and consciousness is just the organized, convergent (rather than emergent) manifestation of universal spontaneity.

Sounds very interesting!

Cheers,

Cristi

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Hi Alyssa,

Thanks for the visit and for reading, and I'm happy that you enjoyed my essay!

You ask great questions:

> Why do you think nature, particularly biological processes, has some need to coarse grain states? Why at all do you think it occurs, and could it be some unexpected result of thermodynamics for example?

It is possible, I think, to imagine...

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Hi Alyssa,

Thanks for the visit and for reading, and I'm happy that you enjoyed my essay!

You ask great questions:

> Why do you think nature, particularly biological processes, has some need to coarse grain states? Why at all do you think it occurs, and could it be some unexpected result of thermodynamics for example?

It is possible, I think, to imagine numerous possible physical worlds, with their laws, which don't present coarse graining. By this I mean that if we try to coarse grain the state space or the phase space, the dynamical law of the system will ignore the coarse graining and cross it as if there is nothing there. But some dynamical systems admit coarse graining that is consistent with the dynamics, that is preserved well enough to make coarse grained level systems emerge. Ours is like this. The dynamical law doesn't preserve perfectly the coarse graining, and this is why the emergent systems are impermanent. But there are important gains. First, the states at the coarse grained level can be made in different ways at the detailed level. Second, but most important, coarse grained level systems can self-organize without having to do it to the finest detail, and they can store information, and, essentially, forget information, dissipate. There would be no evolution without forgetting. So I think coarse graining is needed for biology, and thermodynamics helps systems evolve while forgetting information. The second law may seem like an enemy to life, and it is indeed, but it also makes possible new, more evolved life. Growth and evolution require thermodynamics, and the price to be paid is deterioration and death. But it's worth paying it.

> I think a state gets coarse-grained according to the physical abilities of an observer. Observers with vision have the ability to coarse-grain groups of atoms according to color in a painting, while observers that do not have vision would coarse-grain a painting in an entirely different way, based on other senses like touch. The whole process of reproducibility seems to rely so much on the ability of an observer.

I absolutely agree, and it is fascinating that at the same time there seem to be a coarse graining, the one that accounts for thermodynamics in terms of statistical mechanics, which seems to be independent of the observer, seems objective. But it is objective to the observers that live in the same coarse grained level, because they are coarse-grained subsystems in that level. There may very well be other levels where information flows consistently and self-organizes, but we don't perceive it, because they are different level of coarse graining. Just like a computer is not able to gain information about the detailed physics of its own processor, it is confined to work at the level of its logic gates and memory chips.

> Consciousness seems like it could be a special case of an observer coarse-graining itself. Observers are not entirely separate from their environment most of the time, and are embedded as a part of the environment in most cases in biology. I'd be curious to hear about your thoughts here!

This is an intriguing possibility. Indeed, we coarse grain ourselves, we approximate ourselves rougher than the coarse grained level that can be explored from the macro level is. This may explain why we are able to claim that we are the same person as years ago, when our bodies and brains may have changed dramatically at the level of coarse graining that corresponds to thermodynamics, for example our cells, particularly neurons. So a question comes naturally out of this: are we capable to undo the coarse graining we impose on ourselves when we define ourselves, i.e. to perceive our own sentient experience at a more detailed level? Can we increase the resolution of self-perception? That would make us aware of how our thoughts come to be. See how they are automatic, and that in many cases when we think we're rational, we are just rationalizing some emotions, biases, or biological needs. Increasing the resolution through awareness could reveal how our thoughts materialize out of more primitive elements that we ignore, ideas, images, feelings etc. And keep going beyond these. And if we can see the moment when a thought arises in our mind, maybe we can change its course. Be able to overcome depression, anger, numerous biases we have, simply by not letting the snowball become an avalanche. And we could also be able to transform some intuitions into logical arguments, and see where they fail and where they are right. But of course this would require that, within our own consciousness, something higher-resolution exists than our mundane thoughts. That sentience indeed comes from a lower level, from the ignored details of the coarse graining of our regular thoughts. This may be computationally difficult to extract by looking at our brain with fMRI or other tools, for the same reasons you excellently exposed in your essay. But it may be possible by subjective self-exploration, assuming we're not creating yet another coarse graining that we take as finer graining :) This is in fact a huge trap for those who try to explore their own consciousness by means like introspection or meditation. On the one hand, a finer level of awareness would help with all these, on the other hand, as soon as we leave that state and try to put it in regular thoughts and words, we are back at the coarser grained level. This is the reason why, despite having flashes or longer experiences of the finer grained level, we usually end out by distorting them by processing them at the coarse grained level as just regular thoughts. Maybe this interplay between finer and coarser levels are captured by Lao Tzu in the words He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Thank you very much for the brilliant questions, and good luck with your excellent essay!

Cheers!

Cristi

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Dear John,

Thank you for the comments and for reading my essay!

> "The point about Wolfram's Rule 110 cellular automaton was strikingly mind-boggling. I can't even object on the grounds that there is some infinity-related trick being used, because the set of all sequences of conscious thoughts (given finitely many brain states and finite human lifetimes) is...

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Dear John,

Thank you for the comments and for reading my essay!

> "The point about Wolfram's Rule 110 cellular automaton was strikingly mind-boggling. I can't even object on the grounds that there is some infinity-related trick being used, because the set of all sequences of conscious thoughts (given finitely many brain states and finite human lifetimes) is finite..."

I agree with you.

> "I agree that science is all about relations. The idea of a particle's mass, for example, is only meaningful insofar as it helps us predict how a particle will behave when interacting with other particles. But on the other hand, this makes me worried when it comes to consciousness. I feel like the hard problem of consciousness is deliberately posed to exclude all scientific investigation (experimental, modeling, etc)---like you said, if you can measure it, it's not part of the 'hard' problem anymore."

Part of the reason I constructed this argument was to explain the fact that there is a hard problem, and it's not just some way to move some cherished belief in a gap where science momentarily didn't arrive yet. Nothing has changed in the definitions of sentience as a result of the advance of science. I mean, people always identified it with something unreachable by objective means. But, what I also try to bring with this essay, is that some variants of the hypothesis that sentience is fundamental make empirically falsifiable predictions. More details in my longer essay.

> "Maybe I did not read carefully enough, but I am not sure I understand the consequences of your argument. How can the collection of all true propositions about the world, and the collection of facts about sentient experience, be equal? Does that mean the world may be one big collective dream?"

In my longer essay I analyze more possible relations between P and S. Here I mention one of them, which is the simplest that solves Problem 2, of unifying the ontologies of P and S. One way to interpret it would be the one of a big collective dream that you mention, but I think this metaphor wouldn't do justice to the proposal that P=S. First, as we explore deeper the physical world P, we realize that at finer grained levels things are not how they seem at the coarse grained level, and in fact are very different from what we used to think. I expect nothing less from exploring S. So in this case, "dream" is just some manifestation at the coarse graining of S. And even so, "just a dream" assumes that we have any clue what dreams are, but we don't really know. We hallucinate even when we are awake, but we do it in a consistent way in tune with the others, and our brains create representations that we describe to others and since we all use them, we think reality is like this. But this is what we think it is, see endnote 5 of my essay. A distinguishing characteristic of dreams is that they are unstable and inconsistent, while the world P seems rather consistent and persistent. P=S would not break this persistence and consistency, it would just provide it with an ontology, one able to endow it with experience, rather than a cold dead ontology.

Thanks again for your excellent observations, and good luck with your essay!

Cheers,

Cristi

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Dear Mihai Panoschi Panoschi,

Thank you for your response!

Since you disagree with Professor Cristinel Stocia, you should direct your disagreements to them.

Grammar errors and such are something I can look over. I am also failing to see how the statement goes against Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and its computational analogue, Turing Machine.

To quote you, "It’s...

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Dear Mihai Panoschi Panoschi,

Thank you for your response!

Since you disagree with Professor Cristinel Stocia, you should direct your disagreements to them.

Grammar errors and such are something I can look over. I am also failing to see how the statement goes against Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and its computational analogue, Turing Machine.

To quote you, "It’s logically inconsistent since Gödel’s results express exactly the opposite, namely, the even in mathematics there can never be a complete and self-sufficient system of knowledge grounded on a finite set of axioms, therefore mathematics is inexhaustible in itself."

Actually, Godel merely says if a formal system can express or encode arithmetic then it cannot prove its self consistency with a finite set of axioms. So if a finite set of axioms strong enough to encode or interpret arithmetic is incomplete in the sense we will have statements which we cannot decide it is true of false with the statements we have. Which is what Professor Cristinel Stocia's clearly states; if there exists a mathematical structure isomorphic to our physical reality, we cannot prove its self consistency. The implicit assumption is that such a structure much include formal systems strong enough to encode or interpret facts about arithmetic. They state, " Our knowledge will always be limited by Godel incompleteness (Godel, 1931) and Turing’s noncomputability result (Turing, 1937)". It is very clear to those familiar with Godel and Turing's results. The limitations are we cannot verify the consistency of the mathematical structure.

As for the hypothesis being unfalsifiable, that itself is not true. Read Principle 2, "The collection of all true propositions about our physical world admits a mathematical model"

Thus, if have a mathematical model ( which we can derive from the said mathematical structure), that produces all the true propositions as verified through observation, measurement, and experiments we have a way of connecting the mathematical structure to the physical world. Whether or not they are the mathematical structure itself is a useful abstraction or actually exists is a separate question.

Professor Stocia cites Tegmark, and I think if you refer his work you would fine a more detailed explanation of a mathematical structure, how it is corresponds to our physical world ( by doing a set of mathematical operations deriving physical symmetries) and such.

Again, I am no expert here, but the extend Professor Stocia detailed her work, and from what I know I see and understand I cannot detect any "anamoly", and grammar errors while unfortunate is something I have no interest in penalizing someone for.

Kind Regards,

Raiyan Reza

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Dear Kevin,

Thank you for visiting and reading my essay, and for the excellent question.

> "In that work (Influence Theory), we make it clear that the only properties that one can know about are those properties that affect how an object influences others. Despite the validity or invalidity of Influence Theory as a foundational theory, I still believe that this idea is correct....

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Dear Kevin,

Thank you for visiting and reading my essay, and for the excellent question.

> "In that work (Influence Theory), we make it clear that the only properties that one can know about are those properties that affect how an object influences others. Despite the validity or invalidity of Influence Theory as a foundational theory, I still believe that this idea is correct. So what does this say about Consciousness in terms of it being a result of relations or substance?"

As my argument aims to prove, if consciousness is 100% reducible to relations, then one must also admit that a rule 110 cellular automaton with suitably chosen first row can have consciousness. This despite being a flat timeless tapestry. There are certainly people who think this, and even I take this view as true about anything that ignores sentient experience. And there are people who don't accept this, because they know that they are in a way beyond the mere relations, roles in society, processes, computation etc. Relations are about the "easy problems". And, while I agree that the behavior of consciousness, and all of its relations, including the causal relation that makes Descartes say "I am", are, of course, 100% reducible to relations, like the structures P and S mentioned in my essay, my whole claim is that this is not what makes experience possible. This is what makes conscious-like behavior possible. By sentience I understand what makes experience possible, its nature, its ontology. So consciousness is 100% relations by any objective and independently verifiable means, yet it's 100% sentience by its ontology, which is not accessible by the objective and independently verifiable means. Incidentally, while this position is usually associated to an epiphenomenalist position, I think that it can make testable predictions, so it's falsifiable. And in my longer essay The negative way to sentience I explain what variants of the relations between P and S correlate to what interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, and that some of them make testable predictions. If you are interested in this issue, I'd very much appreciate some comments to that longer essay, especially since you take the position that you take. No rush with this. And who knows, maybe you'll find the more elaborate arguments more compelling ;-) Or maybe you'll change my mind (just kidding about the latter, I doubt everything I think, except for the fact that I am sentient).

Thanks again for the insightful comments!

Cheers,

Cristi

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