George,

In your reply you don't point out what is logically wrong with my reasoning:

''If we understand something only if we can explain it as the effect of some cause, and understand this cause only if we can explain it as the effect of a preceding cause, then this chain of cause-and-effect either goes on ad infinitum, or it ends at some primordial cause which, as it cannot be reduced to a preceding cause, cannot be understood by definition.''

You circumvent its irrefutable logic by asking me to explain how I go about my life, which has less to do with causality than with reason. Anyhow, I am not very interested in causality at macroscopic scale. If the antics of the moth can cause a hurricane but it depends on an infinity of other events whether the party is canceled or not, that is, if the moth only in retrospect can be accused of causing the hurricane, then it cannot be its cause at all. As far as I'm concerned, causality means that A causes B to happen with 100% certainty: to me ' approximately' causally is a contradiction in terms.

The point of my essay is that if we live in a universe which creates itself out of nothing, without any outside interference, that is, without any cause, then in such universe fundamental particles have to create themselves, each other. In that case particles and particle properties must be as much the product as the source, the effect as cause of their interactions, of forces between them.

If in a self-creating universe particles create, cause each other, then they explain each other in a circular way. Here we can take any element of an explanation, any link of the chain of reasoning without proof, use it to explain the next link and so on, to follow the circle back to the assumption we started with, which this time is explained by the foregoing reasoning, that is, if our reasoning is sound and our assumptions are valid. If we have more confidence in a theory as it is more consistent and it is more consistent as it relates more phenomena, makes more facts explain each other and needs less additional axioms, less more or less arbitrary assumptions to link one step to the next, then any good theory has a tautological character, fitting a self-creating, self-explaining universe. The circle of reasoning ought to work equally well in the reverse direction.

In other words, I don't say that events aren't related, only that we ultimately cannot say, at least at quantum level, what is cause of what, what precedes what in an absolute sense as to be able to establish what precedes what requires that we can look at the universe from outside of it, which is impossible.

Causality ultimately leads nowhere: if, for example, we invent the Higgs particle to cause other particles to have mass, then we need another particle to give the Higgs its properties, a particle which in turn owes its properties to another particle, and so on and on.

As I argue in my essay, we'll never be able to unify forces, get rid of the infinities and contradictions of present physics as long as we cling to causality.

Anton

    George,

    I see that your reply to my first post on your thread has disappeared. For the readers who want to understand my above reply to it, I again post your own reply to my comment.

    Author George F. R. Ellis replied on Jul. 23, 2012 @ 15:22 GMT

    Anton

    "Causality therefore ultimately cannot explain anything." If so please explain to me how you go about your daily life. If you are unable to cause any changes about you in your daily existence, then you don't exist as a person (and you certainly won't be able to get a job).

    I explained carefully at the start of my paper that there are always numerous causes in action, and we get a useful concept of "the cause" by taking all except a few for granted. This produces a valid local theory of causation. You don't have to solve problems of ultimate causation to understand local physical effects (e.g. heating water causes it to boil). Your complaint seems to be that if you can't explain the entire universe you can't explain such local phenomena. The whole practice of science disagrees with you.

    George

    Dear Ben and Edwin,

    thanks for these comments which are quite complex in their implications, and I can't do full justice to them at present. My view on the nature of time is set out in my paper here . I think that is compatible with top-down causation, which takes place at each instant in a local domain around each world line at all times.

    A key point I make in my essay is that top down effects don't occur via some mysterious non-physical downward force, they occur by higher level physical relations *setting constraints* on lower level interactions, which not only can change the nature of lower level entities (as in the case of the chameleon particles that might be the nature of dark matter), they can even lead to the very existence of such entities (e.g. phonons or Cooper pairs). This does not require multiple dimensions of time. So it is indeed a two-way causal flow which enables abstract entities to be causally effective (as in the case of digital computers) but does not violate normal physics. It is a largely unrecognised aspect of normal physics. The key issue you are both raising might be that in coarse graining physics one also needs a coarse graining of time to get the effective higher level laws. This certainly needs thinking about and I am not aware of much work on this.

    Two further key point I make are that (i) constraints are conserved by the dynamics of time evolution, indeed on some views effectively generate time evolution, so this is all compatible with how time works, and (ii) new information can arise by processes of adaptive selection; the outcome is not uniquely determined by the initial data because of noise and quantum uncertainty at lower levels. This is a top-down process because selection criteria are higher level entities. This is a core feature of how the brain can work in a rational way that transcends the lower level physics, without violating it.

    Edwin, you say "in such an approach there is no "quantum wave function of the universe", only local waves." I fully agree, that is what I say in my quantum paper here You carry on

    ``My previous essays treated the universe as based on one physical substance (and *nothing else*) and assumes this substance (the primordial field) can evolve only through self-interaction. This leads to a scale-independent solution (hence, per Nottale, motion-invariant, ie, time-invariant) with no meaningful physical interpretation of time until the original perfect symmetry breaks" Well as long as the symmetry breaks, time does indeed emerge. I believe its difficult for time to emerge from a timeless substrate, inter alia because of difficulties in then getting the same arrow of time everywhere.

    That's all I have time for now,

    George

    Dear Anton

    "As far as I'm concerned, causality means that A causes B to happen with 100% certainty" Well that's not this universe. Please read Feynman on quantum physics.

    "I am not very interested in causality at macroscopic scale". But that is what I am trying to explain.

    "The point of my essay is that if we live in a universe which creates itself out of nothing, without any outside interference, that is, without any cause, then in such universe fundamental particles have to create themselves, each other." But the word "create" has no meaning of there are no causes.

    George

    George,

    You wrote in reply to Edwin & Ben: "The key issue you are both raising might be that in coarse graining physics one also needs a coarse graining of time to get the effective higher level laws. This certainly needs thinking about and I am not aware of much work on this."

    I know Edwin eschews multiple dimensions; however, mathematical expressions of higher level laws, even in higher dimensions, do not forbid nonlocal causality in a finite space. That is, a closed logical judgment (mathematics) is 1 to 1 correspondent with a local physical result in the experimenter's measure space.

    This dichotomy -- between the local measure space of infinite range and the nonlocal domain of finite range -- led me to realize that Joy Christian's proposal using dichotomous variables eliminates the local-global distinction. That makes it fully relativistic ("all physics is local") and angle preserving in its application of topological orientability.

    Point is, that the general relativity interpretation of a universe finite in time and unbounded in space suffers no loss of generality as a universe finite in space and unbounded in time. This latter interpretation, though, fully embraces Minkowski space-time dynamics without ever having to refer to time as a physical phenomenon. Top-down causation is therefore continuous and locally real; continuous measurement functions are constrained by space-time topology (generalized geometry). I think this is consistent with your evolving block universe of spacetime evolution with no preferred surfaces.

    Best,

    Tom

    Yuri

    "We live in a universe that was born from a previous universe"

    - so how did that previous universe come about?

    Actually this has nothing to do with the topic of this thread. Your quote "we live in a universe which creates itself out of nothing," was not my statement, it was made by Anton. If you disagree please take it up with Anton on his thread.

    Dear George,

    Just a quick note to thank you for recommending Arthur Eddington's marvelous book 'The Nature of the Physical World.' I'm reading it now and enjoying it immensely. Having also just recently read Poincare's 'The Value of Science,' dating from 1913, it's fascinating to observe the evolution of thinking on many topics still of keen interest and still very much in a state of flux even today. It seems very much in keeping with the theme of this essay competition to observe the flow and, dare I say, "crystallization" (or lack thereof) of thinking on these topics over the past century.

    Fwiw, I'm personally convinced that we're currently living through and participating in what Thomas S. Kuhn would describe as a "crisis state" in physics. Would you agree? And if so, do you think that this is generally recognized and/or accepted in the wider physics community? I don't read or hear others talking in these terms, but I believe the evidence for it is abundantly clear; it's virtually a classic case, in my view. Exciting (and occasionally frustrating) times to witness.

    Regardless, thank you again for the book recommendation.

    jcns

      Hi jcns

      glad you are enjoying it. He was a great pioneer in astrophysics and cosmology, with a wonderful power of explanation. His book on the internal constitution of stars is still great reading, even though it was written before nuclear physics was understood. Physicists of his epoch did not deride philosophy, they realised its role as an underpinning to physical thought and took it seriously.

      Yes I do think there is a crisis in physics - but not all of it! One can get a very wrong impression of physics if you only read some of the over-hyped theoretical physics stuff, much of which seems in danger of losing touch with reality (for some people, models are more real than reality). But a vast amount of physics is absolutely solid, relating theory to marvellous experiments in materials science/solid state physics, nanophysics, quantum optics, biophysics, and so on - Nature Physics is full of the stuff, much of it very exciting. It is on the theoretical side,and in particular in relation to cosmology, where more and more extravagant hypotheses are being proposed with very little concern for usual constraints and/or for testability. "Phantom matter" and dark energy theories with p/rho < -1 are examples of the first; multiverses and theories of creation of the universe out of nothing are examples of the second. But physics has a great capacity for self-correction, and I think the more extravagant ideas will fade away and turn out to be ephemeral, as these ideas are tested and evaluated by the physics community in the long term, who hopefully will start to take philosophical issues seriously again. And I think the idea of top-down causation will gain traction and not fade away, even though it has so little support in the physics community at present. Ernst Mach and Dennis Sciama were early proponents of the idea, even if they did not call it such; present theories of the origin of the arrow of time are also of this kind; and it is starting to gain traction is some areas of astronomy, under the name "environmental effects". The exciting part is that it may help understand foundational quantum physics issues. Watch this space - but with a bit of patience!

      By the way, you quote Kuhn - have you read any Imre Lakatos? He has a more developed view of how changes of scientific research programs take place.

      George

      So it's previous universes all the way down. Are you claiming any of this is testable? Is this supposed to be science, or do you claim science does not need observations? How many universes back do you claim to prove exist, by some kind of observation - and what is the nature of the observation?

      Actually Penrose got there first: see his book Cycles of Time.

      I don't plan to read your correspondence with Weinberg, despite your demand that I do so.

      George,

      How do you explain the bottoms-up fixation? Do you think it is a cultural thing or universal? What about same-level mode as efficient and circular, the way some of your colleagues characterize it.

      I can see that the fixation you describe could explain thinking regarding many issues in physics including the nature of gravity, which I deal with.

      Jim

        Hi George,

        I regret to say that I have not yet had the pleasure of reading Lakatos; thank you for pointing me toward his work. I see that several of his works are available for purchase on the internet. Could you recommend a good, not-too-technical entry point for making his acquaintance?

        I've long admired Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,' and see evidence of his "crisis state" in some aspects of physics. Lee Smolin touched on some of this in 'The Trouble With Physics.' Speaking of which, I've heard from a reliable source that Smolin plans to publish at least one new book on the nature of time later this year. I hope so.

        Thank you for helping broaden my horizons.

        jcns

        Hi jcns

        His major relevant book is

        http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=RRniFBI8Gi4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=lakatos&ots=2lCCc8OOFr&sig=hwg5evND474xplSiBKykva-b-CQ#v=onepage&q=lakatos&f=false">The methodology of scientific research programmes](https://

        http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=RRniFBI8Gi4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=lakatos&ots=2lCCc8OOFr&sig=hwg5evND474xplSiBKykva-b-CQ#v=onepage&q=lakatos&f=false) but the wikipedia article

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos"> here ](https://

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos)

        is a good start.

        The key point is that he recognises a scientific theory as having a hard core, the central hypotheses of the theory, surrounded by a belt of auxiliary hypotheses that mediate between the core and actual data. These have to do with the experimental apparatus, sources of noise, subsidiary variables, etc. When the data don't agree with the theory, you alter the auxiliary hypotheses, not the hard core. For example in cosmology, you change your theory of galaxy evolution rather than your cosmological model. Apart from emotional issues and psychological investment in theories, it is this auxiliary structure that makes it so hard to persuade people their theory is wrong: you can always tweek some auxiliary parameter to fit the data (add another epicycle for example). The theory eventually becomes so baroque that it is no longer a satisfactory explanation. But different people differ as to when that occurs:that's when mature judgement comes in.

        Yes Smolin has a book on time in the works (broadly supporting my view).

        best, George

        Hi James

        I think there are two things at work. Firstly physicists recognise that all matter is controlled at the bottom level by the forces between particles; hence physics underlies all (e.g.Dirac stated this in relation to how physics underlies chemistry). There seems to be no room for any other kind of causation. I respond to that claim in the later part of my essay: essentially the context determines how the fundamental interactions work out; they offer opportunities and constraints but do not by themselves determine the outcome.

        Secondly, this bottom-up view is then taken as an underlying principle of faith by hard core reductionists, who simply ignore the contextual effects that in fact occur: for example claiming that biology is controlled bottom up by genes alone, thereby ignoring all the discoveries of epigenetics, which prove this false. But such reductionism is always a cheat, because it is always only partial. Example: Francis Crick famously wrote "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules". But nerve cells and molecules are made of electrons plus protons and neutrons, which are themselves made of quarks .. so why not "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of quarks and electrons"? And these themselves are possibly vibrations of superstrings. Why does he stop where he does? - because that's the causal level he understands best! -- he's not a particle physicist. If he assumes that the level of cells and molecules is real, it's an arbitrary assumption unless *all* levels are real - which is my position. It's the only one that makes sense.

        So in the end it's an ideological faith of hardcore reductionists: it's philosophically and/or emotionally driven. That's a further point: scientists like to claim what they do is purely rational. Any impartial study of academia will show this is not the case: emotions and associated rivalries drive a large part of what happens, even as regards physicists. The outcome in terms of mature scientific theories is of course free of these emotions, it is indeed impartial and strictly testable. But they do not arise out of an emotion free environment.

        George

        "If he (Crick) assumes that the level of cells and molecules is real, it's an arbitrary assumption unless *all* levels are real - which is my position. It's the only one that makes sense."

        George, that is a beautifully compact statement of complex system self organization. If consciousness were not non-zero, what could we possibly mean by the term "life?"

        Tom

        Hi George,

        Thank you for the recommendation. Sounds like an interesting approach. I've already ordered a copy (how did we survive before the internet?), and will position it near the top of my "to read" pile.

        Thank you also for the "sneak preview" of Smolin's upcoming book. If it broadly supports your view, I suspect it may also broadly support my view. I like Deutsch's comment: "The way we converge with each other is to converge upon the truth." (The Beginning of Infinity, p. 257.)

        Cheers,

        jcns