John,

best wishes for the new year also to you and the whole FQXi community!

I will let my thoughts freely run and maybe some reader may profit from what I will write. It will be a longer line of thoughts about several issues that are of interest for me and hopefully also of interest for one or the other reader. In every case, have fun with it!

Surely there is a survival...

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John,

best wishes for the new year also to you and the whole FQXi community!

I will let my thoughts freely run and maybe some reader may profit from what I will write. It will be a longer line of thoughts about several issues that are of interest for me and hopefully also of interest for one or the other reader. In every case, have fun with it!

Surely there is a survival instinct present to certain degrees within human beings right from the birth. I just cannot see how the factual existence of dead things (stones) and living things should lead to an objectifying value judgement such that pure physics should favour living things over dead things in a way that is then expressed in the survival instinct of living things.

Obviously such a favouring is entirely first-person subjective and has nothing to do with pure physics, although that instinct is present to certain degrees in all human beings and therefore could, superficially, be termed a “regularity”. Now, my argument was that this “regularity” fails from time to time and therefore cannot be considered a law of nature: since there are and have been many many people throughout history that wished to be dissolved in nothingness due to their own will, for the sake of gaining peace and freedom from some unbearable emotions.

For those people, failure is success (and success is failure). Again, “failure” and “success” are entirely first-person value-judgements, since by definition of naturalism, nature has no such concepts as “success” or “failure”. By neglecting all thought-to-be-deterministic influences that led to survival or suicide, we are left with the factor of chance as the one being “responsible” for survival or suicide. I don't see how “the meaning of meaning” can be objectified by something that generates that meaning by pure chance other than to state that the whole concept of “meaning” - when objectively considered - has no meaning, it is a void, contradictory term that should have nothing to do with pure physics. In other words, if following “pure physics”, the whole concept of “the meaning of meaning” is really *nothing* – and that may exactly be the reason why those suicidal people mentioned above wish to be immersed within that “nothing”.

As a matter of tautology, “the meaning of meaning” then just means what it means and has no objective meaning independent of the one a first-person perspective attaches to it. But that does not explain how such first-person perspectives came about in the first place. Moreover, if “meaning” cannot be objectified – because it does not exist objectively -, then all the noble attempts to determine nature's secrets and get some objective insight into the most inner workings of nature are doomed right from the start to be just perfectly camouflaging illusions of the fact that there is absolutely nothing in the universe that could truly be objectified to have some “meaning” independent and external to the one that seeks such a meaning. As another matter of fact, every trial to pin down “meaning” then means to going round in circles.

So, the real “meaning” of “meaning” is nothing other than going round in circles and that would be true for every scientific endeavour that tries to pin down some “fundamental” fundamentals of ultimate reality. Nonetheless many scientists act as if they could have arbitrarily much access as they want to examine such fundamentals in order to “pin down” the “real fundamentals”. Within the picture of naturalism and nihilism in mind one then must say that this kind of scientific delusion is as “natural” as one's delusion about the own death: it somewhat must be suppressed becoming aware of the own limitations for the sake of one's survival (survival in one form or the other, in the case of the scientific endeavour for a complete and consistent theory of everything it seems to me that the narrative of the existence of such a theory should survive).

What seems to be clear to me after all these lines of reasoning is that there is a huge amount of belief involved for at all being able to coming to a “realistic conclusion” in foundational physics. Therefore in my previous posts I wrote a lot about “initial conditions” and determinism. Honestly I think that assuming some kind of Big Bang where an ludicrous amount of quasi-particles get spread over a ludicrous amount of space, interacting just in the “right” manner (by the way, what is the “right” manner?) to deterministically resemble some conscious agents and at all times govern every little thought and emotion of them so that I and others do not put the Christmas turkey accidentally in the oven say, at 1. August, but instead regularly at Christmas, is, for me nothing less than believing in some higher intelligence, means God, which set up these initial conditions in the first place. Now, I do not believe in such initial conditions, but I do believe in that higher intelligence, so I do believe that there is something much more intelligent than I am. People that believe in such initial conditions usually do not believe in such a higher intelligence (than they themselves have...). Personally I consider such an omniscient point of view as an expression that one cannot accept certain human limitations – although I do understand those people's craving for more knowledge.

So, as a matter of fact the overwhelming majority of people put their turkey in the oven at Christmas, for the majority of people their logical conclusions aren't undermined by some cosmic, deterministically converging particle accidents in the brain that regularly fool them to have false emotions of satisfaction when having made a “successful” logical deduction whereas in ultimate reality there wasn't and isn't any reliable logic available that could be congruent with such emotions. For making that point more explicit, since I think it may be hard to understand, just envision that you are a brain in a kind of Petri dish that is permanently stimulated such that you permanently have the emotions to have made successful logical deductions about the external reality. Imagine that such a “Petri dish” would not reside in our space-time, but in a realm where the term “brain” just means that you have a mental live just like you have it now. There may exist rules external to your mental live but every attempts to reliably determine such rules could be undermined by exactly the rules you wish to determine.

Nobody can exclude such a scenario to be factually the case when it comes to definitely determine what fundamental reality should be or not be. Furthermore, proponents of determinism and some special initial conditions which are responsible for our existence (yours and mine) should have some convincing explanations for why reality is *not* of the impenetrable kind I just envisioned above with the “brain” in the Petri dish example. For assuming such an explanation to be existent, these proponents must assume right from the start that the initial conditions are such that they completely entail the explanation of why these initial conditions are what they are. Usually one aims to do that by invoking mathematics to be the most fundamental level of reality. Taking that literally, for example the Big Bang then is a highly complex mathematical pattern. It deterministically evolved and produced some minds that now think about that pattern. By the above made definition of the explainability of that pattern, that pattern should entail an objective description of itself and why it is what it is. Since this is a kind of self-reference, we now assume that this pattern is a kind of fractal and say that one does not need to know everything about this fractal in detail to deduce its fundamental nature (namely that it is a fractal).

Now, could this be considered an explanation of all the wonderful correlations we ponder about as human beings (the turkey that regularly goes into the oven at Christmas and all the other correlations)? Yes and no. Since a fractal is self-similar, one could interpret this as the origin of many correlations we observe. But the price to pay for this is that we have to invoke a mathematical infinity and moreover another “going round in circles” since these are the main characteristics of a fractal's nature. The same is true for other attempts to model ultimate reality, for example assuming a universe that did not come into existence via a Big Bang, but existed forever and presumably is infinite in scale. Or a universe that repeatedly comes into existence and thereafter ends up in a big crunch and resembles itself again (although maybe with some slightly different initial conditions). All these attempts make it impossible to determine the likelihood for us to inhabit or not inhabit a universe where the above mentioned congruence between emotions and logical deductions is given on a regular basis. Unless one can explain why logic and emotions about logical deductions always have to be in the one and only logical one-to-one congruence in every such toy world, I see no reason to prefer such a mathematical world view over a more spiritual world-view. The point here is that on the one hand we obviously must take serious logic, since otherwise we cannot conclude anything. Mathematics is the ideal tool for doing so. But on the other hand I see no logical necessity or even possibility to successfully link every part of the whole spectrum of human emotions in a necessary manner to every corresponding part of a mathematically infinite fractal structure. Putting it this way: why is emotion X linked to the part Y of that fractal and not to the part Z? This is equivalent with asking why 1 + 1 is 2 and not 0 and the answer could be that it cannot be other – although we really cannot determine why it cannot be other and even the whole hyper-infinite landscape of mathematics does not know why it cannot be other!

The main point here seems to me that such an understanding of reality is really equivalent to the assumption that a higher intelligence is responsible for our reality. The difference would be “merely” that this higher intelligence could know why 1 + 1 is 2 and not 0 and knows something about the mystery of non-existence (the mystery of 0) whereas mathematics has no clue about this mystery.

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Dear Jonathan,

thanks again for your reply.

Octonions certainly show some nice regularities that surely are fascinating for every individual who studied them extensively. This in my opinion is independent of whether the various extensions and modifications of the complex number system have anything to do with how the universe works or came into being.

Having read the paper you...

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Dear Jonathan,

thanks again for your reply.

Octonions certainly show some nice regularities that surely are fascinating for every individual who studied them extensively. This in my opinion is independent of whether the various extensions and modifications of the complex number system have anything to do with how the universe works or came into being.

Having read the paper you referenced at Jan. 5, 2021 @ 14:40 GMT, personally I consider the playing therein with words, “polarities” and “meanings” as nothing other than another variant of mantic incantation, on a similar level as reading the cards, or maybe even as some kind of spiritual channeling. This does not mean that I deny the beauty or the exceptional properties of octionion mathematics, since this is a totally different matter. People throughout history that have been involved in such mantic practices, in my opinion, never have learned something essential about reality, other than that these practices do not reliably work and deliver what they once promised to deliver. Best recent example was the “2012” hype. I observed that hype since 2006 and spoke with many of its proponents and read many “channelings” and some books from individuals that really believed that they are something *very, very* special – and godlike... and as was to be expected, after that hype, these godlike people weren't any more that godlike as they themselves thought at first sight.... but the glaring opposite, helpless and confused...

That led me to the conclusion that all the attempts to grasp the “fundamentals” of reality are heavily misleading when they tacitly equate nature with God, whereas I think that God is the creator of nature and human beings – and hence also the creator of mathematics. So from my perspective I do not understand why one needs to invoke some magical mathematics at all to determine the real fundamental “fundamental” of reality. Look, if we define nature as mathematical relationships, as an uncountable, mind-boggling, Cantorian never-ending landscape of mathematics that extends in infinite directions, the small, the large, or whatever dimension, and never are able to prove even the tiniest part of that landscape to really be responsible for what we want it to be responsible, what have we then achieved with all of that mind-boggling exercises other than simply equating nature to work according to some unknowable and never reachable magic? It is true that believers in God must exactly assume this to be the case. And the only substantial difference I see to the believer's account on nature and yours is that the regularities that God installed within nature can – coarse-grainingly – represented in a very dense and compact language that differs from other human languages.

All the attempts that try to extrapolate mathematics in the manner you try to do it are therefore in my opinion merely a kind of mantic strategy, a homeophatic practice with which one tries to expel – or rather “heal” - the many humanly unknowables by many other humanly unknowables according to the magic spell of some “similia similibus curentur “. What this seemingly harmless aphorism of Hahnemann entails is nothing other than the ability of the human mind to recognise similarities and bring them into a causal relationship or not – at one's own will and according to what meaning one attaches between the objects of such a similarity. My example with the fractal in one of my comments above should illustrate that point: there are wonderful similarities and regularities to be found in fractals – but have you ever discovered such a fractal other than on your computer screen or as a printout? Have you ever discovered a *real* fractal in 3d-nature, not merely a piece of broccoli that has some *similarities* with a fractal but one “broccoli” that *is* a fractal (means, it repeats certain patterns infinitely often down the micro-scale and even up the macro-scale)?

Honestly, I consider such modelling of reality as a fractal as simply confusing the map with the territory, thereby believing that even at the outermost regions of some broccoli, its corresponding elementary particles sitting there should all necessarily (because of the maths of fractals) look like broccoli – all the infinite way down! My rather extended critics is not against you Jonathan, you are surely a nice person, you are surely a seeker and you know a lot about everything and about every area of science and you maybe do not at all consider nature as some kind of fractal. My critics is simply based on my opinion that many such attempts as yours eventually may confuse the map with the territory and get dissolved into magical thinking in the same manner the followers of the 2012 hype got dissolved within their own chaotic net of ambivalent and ever-changing meanings that have been channeled to them by some non-physical entities.

I do not want to be self-opinionated here and therefore for the sake of justice I like to state that my world view is also just based on some deep beliefs, together with a bunch of personal experience, insights into the results of some eminent scholars and investigations into different topics.

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This UN have big responsabilities, I beleive that many are skilling educated persons seeing the generality , they make their jobs, but they are not scientists and philosophes, the problem is maybe there, they try to make with what they have like parameters and frankly it is not easy indeed seeing the complexity of this global earthian society. Others probably , a small number are not made for...

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This UN have big responsabilities, I beleive that many are skilling educated persons seeing the generality , they make their jobs, but they are not scientists and philosophes, the problem is maybe there, they try to make with what they have like parameters and frankly it is not easy indeed seeing the complexity of this global earthian society. Others probably , a small number are not made for this. The conflicts of interest, the business, the governments, the different cultures, the religious extremism, the poorest places, the psychologyand this and that, wowww not easy indeed to solve and find the best adapted solutions. What I try to explain is that the scientists aware of this universal altruism and that this energy is disponible have the solutions and are there to help these leaders at this UN. They are politicians mainly and economists or businessmen , the solutions exist with sciences and consciousness, we are arrived at a time where we are obliged to adapt us in inserting better global parameters. It lacks foundamental , me I don t see a better global ecology and better qualities of life, many are tired , even in belgium, if you knew where I live the psychological state of people, wowww they loose hope and the depression increases, the salaries must be increased and the jobs disponible also, for this the UN must make a revolution industrial , and the solar system is the key. The ecology also on earth must ne solved, have you seen the states of oceans and soils and air ??? me I want well but don t tell me that this UN obliges the governments to act , and that these governments oblige the enterprises and towns to act correctly , no it is not true. The water, the same it is not well balanced. In fact the problems are so important that a new revolutionary global solution must be made simply , all must be harmonised. We have an incredible military forces but it is a business and nothing is made really in cooperation to stop all these crazy systems destroying the earth. The free will yes but it is the consciousness and the global universal cooperation the most important. We can solve , it is sure and for this , we must listen the persons having solutions and being entire universal altruists. The keys are not in the good hands globally and the leaders make their lifes and don t really listen these scientists general. You know Jonathan I repeat but we go all in the wall soon, you imagine when we shall be 20 billions frankly ??? if the UN don t make the revolution that I told, the future generations shall live a pure global disorders and chaos and the psychology will be very odd , already that the majority looses hope, so imagine in this near future. They exist these solutions, the money is a kind of energetical tool, and we must change its distribution to catalyse, we must give water, food, hope, energy, jobs to all and all wins, and for this we must liberate correctly the funds and catalyse the 197 governements and industrialise this solar system and heal our mother earth and its ecosystems. It will be already a little bit better for the globality.That will decrease the odd comportments and the sufferings.

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Jonathan,

I think we are in agreement here. But the 'whys' of public resistance to sensible safeguards are symptomatic of that peculiar 'packrat' hoarding instinct in humans. We aren't solely predators, but a strange mix of predator, forager and scavenger. Like squirrels when pretending to bury a nut because they will steal one they see another stash. They're fun to watch.

Most...

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Jonathan,

I think we are in agreement here. But the 'whys' of public resistance to sensible safeguards are symptomatic of that peculiar 'packrat' hoarding instinct in humans. We aren't solely predators, but a strange mix of predator, forager and scavenger. Like squirrels when pretending to bury a nut because they will steal one they see another stash. They're fun to watch.

Most people whom have ever bought a loan will usually say they 'were given a loan'. They know that at the start of payments that only a trifle goes to reducing the principle but they figure that they are committed to 30 years of 12 payments anyway and the monthly payment they think they can manage and so what. They don't have a clue about the 'miracle of compound interest' being anything but. Its the grand-daddy of all exponential functions and there isn't anything miraculous about anything that is precisely predictable. But it is that front end of loans that makes the big bucks and that's what Wall St is all about. So why should I invest 100 million of my assets in something unpredictable and risk heavy as producing something people might no longer want once its in production, when I get generous tax breaks and lax regulation buying the front end of a loan bundle. Under this laissez-faire mercantile environment, even large corporations play the financials instead of plowing their cash rich balances back into the business and employees. They can make even more money at artificially depressed interest rates borrowing money for capital expansion. Its a boom to final bust scenario that has recurred since the Medici's and people still want easy credit so they can download an app so they can 'charge stuff for free'.

Try taking easy credit away from people and they'll nail you to a cross. The average science factory worker was encouraged by parents because they knew it would be a better paying job. That was their indoctrination. They won't be budged to challenge the status quo. They'll go with the flow. Much of the hi-tech solutions that we now have, are disastorous to personal privacy and the preservation of democracy itself. And unfortunately, the Chinese don't care about either. In all categories, we are up against the wall. jrc

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Thanks for sharing, yes indeed we have many global challenges facing this planet Earth. I believe strongly that it is possible if this collaboration is a reality in beginning in these high spheres of power, the UN and the governments, they have an enormous responsability and the people also of course, they shall follow if they are reasured in seeing that the high spheres of power take these said...

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Thanks for sharing, yes indeed we have many global challenges facing this planet Earth. I believe strongly that it is possible if this collaboration is a reality in beginning in these high spheres of power, the UN and the governments, they have an enormous responsability and the people also of course, they shall follow if they are reasured in seeing that the high spheres of power take these said responsabilities.

Many loose hope and many follow a system like if it was normal and logic, they try to find their place in living and surviving. This normality is like logic and it is this that we must also fight, change the minds. We need really a revolutionary industrialisation , this AI arrives and is going to replace the manual jobs, we cannot stop this but we can create laws and favorise these manual jobs and for this the solar system is there. We could really create wheels well studied in orbit mimating our g gravitation and we create ecosystems, we can also improve this earth in insisting on this depollution, recycling and harmonisation of our ecosystems, it seems for me a priority.

Frankly I don t understand how is it possible that the UN don t make this , they are smart ans conscious in logic, educated and they want the well of this planet and all lifes, why so it is not made, we can with this world bank and this UN create this revolution, it is even a necessary step of evolution for our earth. And all can win, I don t want to create problems for the lobbies of gas, fuels, energies, arms and weapons, they make what they want, they shall still win more, so there is no problem, it is this win win at all levels the most important, we must give water, food, energy, jobs, hope to majority, they need to be reasured the humans , they loose hope and it is not easy in several countries, it lacks several catalysers.

Imagine our potential , it is not an utopy what I explain, it is a real global solution, we need just funds for the governments and jobs and concrete revolutionary industrial projects, this solar system is the key for me.

I have remarked that a few number are aware of this , and many follow unfortunally and accept, and also the humans can be odd psychologically speaking, the fact to create this revolution will decrease the odd psychology because like I said they need to be reasured and stabilised. The money and conflicts of interest are not a problem, we can harmonise them also. The high spheres of power must understand that it is time to take its responsabilities with sciences and consciousness and with a concrete cooperation between the systems. We cannot accept the chaotical exponentials, they can arrive quickly is nothing is made revolutionary speaking.

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Lorraine,

Okay. That is a clear enough statement, with a qualification that whereas humans may understand numeric situations, viruses definitely would not. But, there again, some responsibility resides with the reader to include that sort of distinction in any kind of discourse.

The whole point being, that math is a human invention, and it was originated with the express idea that...

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Lorraine,

Okay. That is a clear enough statement, with a qualification that whereas humans may understand numeric situations, viruses definitely would not. But, there again, some responsibility resides with the reader to include that sort of distinction in any kind of discourse.

The whole point being, that math is a human invention, and it was originated with the express idea that it be useful to humans making some sense of their worldly perceptions. ie: Pythagoras and the building of dwellings that would not fall down on the people who built them. Fast forward and we have a small tool box of approximations of observations of relationships which, again, we humans devised as categories. They are all up for debate, and are at best approximate in calling them natural or physical laws. Not that nature gives any notice to us doing so and calling them "laws". Laws are a uniquely human construct. I really don't understand why there is such argument about our poor attempts to make nature comprehensible to our own human way of dealing with things. What comprises an 'algorithm' in computer sciences is really nothing new, it is a reasoning process that in other fields is treated as 'procedure'. And much of physical law statements in math are understood to be the end result of procedural processes.

I don't see much advancement in demanding that everybody reinvent the wheel to suit The Great Computer. Quite frankly, the current political climate is very revealing of how far from reality the expectations of pundits and promoters of the electronic revolution really were. If everyone whom posts here, had to go to a printshop and pay for the labor intensive production of hard copy and distribution of their meandering thinking on myriad topics, there would be a lot more thought put into what was written. Let's not conflate the internet with Guttenberg, talk is cheap but publicizing it isn't, and its the metadata generated from this site's activity that is trotted out by the Foundation to prospective donors. It certainly isn't being monitored and mediated, it just keeps churning out metadata because... talk is cheap and FQXi doesn't have to pay anybody for it. {-) jrc

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