Dear Stefan

I think your approach is a sensible approach that takes the problematic issues seriously and tries to make sense of how quantum mechanics works, and in particular how, according to delayed choice experiments, it "reaches back" into the past in an apparently acausal way.

"QM could "mimic" causality via intermediate steps of instantaneous information transfers between the "deterministic evolution" of the "wave-function" (surely with the help of a yet unknown "principle" *what choice* is to make is best and due to what criteria - surely a criteria that has something to do with achieving the macrocosmical causal consistence)." This mechanism you sketch out is, I believe, more or less in accordance with what I have written about in my post above: Oct. 2, 2012 @ 07:24 GMT: yes it is about choice between competing possibilities. Please see that post.

I'll try to get time to comment on your thread.

George Ellis

Dear Professor Ellis,

First, I'd like to note that the idea that both bottom up and top down causation (in the sense you defined it, which seems adequate to me) are necessary to tell the whole story about causal interactions seems so obvious to me that I am rather surprised that anyone would seriously debate it.

What I would be interested to know is whether you have considered that dimensionality may itself play an as yet recognized role in top down causation. More specifically I mean this: What if the dimensions that characterize our reality are emergent, with some coarse (and as yet to be precisely defined) correlation with scale? Then it would seem to me that possibly the largest scale phenomena for which we have difficulty finding an adequate explanation may also be unrecognized top-down effects, in effect manifestations of events that must be properly explained within a higher dimensional analog.

I realize that this sounds rather vague, and that is partly because I don't yet know enough about cosmology, but I have focused in my work in the opposite direction. It turns out that when one attempts to represent an object in a higher-dimensional space, then it exhibits two phenomena which one finds in (and to some extent define) quantum mechanics: superposition and collapse.

The "superposition" in this case is due to the fact that any property of the lower-dimensional object which requires for its expression the same number of dimensions as the space in which it is represented must take into account all of the possible values for the dimension that the object lacks. The "collapse" in this case is due to the fact that if one "attributes" to the object extent along the dimensions it lacks, then it is no longer necessary to take into account all of the values, the superposition reduces to the representation of the property which has just the value due to the attribute extent.

(I apologize for this awkward wording, it comes about because I am trying to express this in the greatest generality. My submission to this contest contains a simple and I believe very accessible illustration of this idea.)

In any event, if this is what lies behind quantum mechanics (i.e. that we are "observing" prior to a "measurement" objects that exist in a lower-dimensional analog of spacetime) is it not possible that at the other extreme of scale a similar process might lead to phenomena we cannot adequately describe using our theories which hold strictly for spacetime events? If so, then dark energy and possibly dark matter may be the top-down phenomena par excellence.

I enjoyed your carefully crafted essay and am glad that you chose to participate.

Sincerely.

Armin

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    • Post #426

    Dear George Ellis,

    thank you so much.

    I think your approach to take adaptive selection seriously is as promising as it is important. Selection mechanisms do cover all parts of science, biology and - meaningfully! - also human cognition (assumptions taken for granted, the working of our senses etc.), statistics and so on.

    Your elaboration on that helped me to remind me how important the principle of selection is and how easy at the other side it is to understand/contemplate it - but also to forget it!

    You stated in your talk mentioned by me above that in our dreaming states we incorporate what is important for us to know/to incorporate. What's important is not conscious, but unconscious. This is very interesting in my opinion, because everyday logics seems to say, what is important has to be all the time present in our consciousness.

    Well, in my opinion, what really has to be all the time present in our consciousness, should be the fact that human minds permanentely do select assumptions in favour of others and built their world around them. This happens in society as well as in science.

    The principle of adaptive selection, as you explained it, in my opinion, is surely more than an assumption. It does reflect the coherence of the external and internal world of human beings. The fact that adaptive selection does play a key role in so many branches of science is meaningfull at its own right - in my opinion.

    Again, concratulations to your current essay as well as to your arXiv-papers which i enjoyed very much!

    Best wishes,

    Stefan

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    • Post #427

    I see on your thread that other people believe you caused a major decline in their rankings by giving them a low score.

    Did you do the same to me?

    George Ellis

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    • Post #428

    Dear Armin

    Thanks for the nice comments.

    You say "possibly the largest scale phenomena for which we have difficulty finding an adequate explanation may also be unrecognized top-down effects, in effect manifestations of events that must be properly explained within a higher dimensional analog." I probably agree with that if you have a fibre bundle over spacetime in mind; otherwise nit so sure about it. The problem is that dimensions are discrete: it's a big notch going down a dimension.

    You state the following: " The "collapse" in this case is due to the fact that if one "attributes" to the object extent along the dimensions it lacks, then it is no longer necessary to take into account all of the values, the superposition reduces to the representation of the property which has just the value due to the attribute extent. " Sounds just like the idea of adaptive selection (see the post above at Oct. 3, 2012 @ 04:44 GMT). Seems concordant with this.

    Best wishes

    George Ellis

    This is probably my last post unless something comes up that deserves a reply.

    The negative side has been the hate postings from people who resent that I am a main stream scientist, and postings by one individual that had no serious scientific content, they were just trashing exercises. I just delete these. There have also been the numerous postings that have had nothing to with this essay; their only message has been either look at my own essay, or special relativity is wrong, or both. My post of Sep. 28, 2012 @ 07:41 GMT is as much as I am prepared to do about responding to the special relativity deniers.

    Interesting but disturbing was the hostile attack by a physicist who did indeed raise some potentially significant points. This has been useful to me in terms of alerting me to issues I have to deal with. I answered him in full, summarising my various responses in my posting of Sep. 23, 2012 @ 08:05 GMT; he has never replied. This is I suppose not surprising, because I have shown his main contention to be wrong. The disturbing part was the completely closed mind these postings displayed. This author was a classic example of the "shut up and calculate" school: don't think about the bigger picture, and attack with hostility those who do. This demonstrates a serious failing of present day physics education: this narrow minded kind of approach will never produce great science.

    Then on the positive side I have had really nice discussions with many respondents, particularly T H Ray, Georgina Parry, J C N Smith, nmann, Robert H McEachern, Ian Durham, and Frederico Pfrimer.

    I have been amazed at how high my essay has risen in the ratings, as it is not in the mainline of what is usually discussed on the FQXI website: quantum theory, quantum gravity, the nature of time, the start of the universe, etc. And this raises the final issue, which is indeed a big question:

    * Are questions to do with complexity to be regarded as foundational questions?

    My essay has assumed they are. If it ranks high, it is because many others here at FQXI agree with me. Thank you for your support!

    George

    Hi George:

    Your description of science's true goal is very limited and underestimated. It is not merely to understand the mechanisms whereby physical things work (the natural sciences) and how livings beings exist and function (the life sciences), but also to understand how the universe (beyond matter) works and how the human mind and consciousness work. Once these are understood, the wholesome science will be able to naturally provide meaning and purpose to the universe and life in it.

    Because of the underestimation of science's true capability, the mainstream has imprisoned itself into the vicious circle of material-only theoretical and testing pursuits leading to inconsistencies, singularities, and irresolvable paradoxes (QM & GR) that leave 96% of the universe unexplained with a virtual dead-end. The ultimate test of any theory is its universal, and not just worldly, prediction. Experiences with QM and GR show that even countless worldly experiments or observations are no guarantee of their universal validation.

    Further, an operational framework of the Top-down approach would remain undefinable until the "Top" is describable in true scientific terms. The "Top" here means the ultimate universal reality or Cosmic Consciousness or Free Will thru which everything emerges or into which everything merges. We cannot a priory underestimate science's capability in describing the holistic Top-down (Holistic) approach that would naturally reveal purpose and meaning to the universe and life in it.

    However, if this is not understood as the true goal of science, we would promote demeaning of science by default.

    Best Regards

    Avtar Singh

    Dear Mr. George Ellis,

    I found your essay very late, so I please you that you give opinions about my essay, although it is end of the contest.

    You wrote that cosmological time arrow is top-down effect. This is also my idea, written in my article, section 6.

    I agree also that the mach principle exists, thus that Newton's bucket can be explained.

    I suggest also conscious decisions. They are also top-down causation.

    Similar ideas of top-down causation were written also by Mrs. Walker on this forum.

    Best regards, Janko Kokosar

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    • Post #432

    Thanks Tom for this very positive comment, much appreciated.

    george

    Dear Janko Kokosar

    Thank you for that. We agree on the top down nature of the cosmological effect in determining a consistent local arrow of time, and the top down nature of conscious decisions. So I am happy our essays are in concordance.

    Mach's principle is not so clear to me. There are rotating solutions of the Einstein Equations where Newton's bucket result is not true, so again like the globally consistent arrow of time, a selection of solutions is required for this weak version to be true. That is top-down action to the local scene from distant matter: but it does not matter much for local physics that on Earth distant stars are at rest in your local non-rotating rest frame.

    Of course it does matter very much that inertia *exists*, and nobody has a viable strong version of Mach's principle that derives this from cosmological conditions - which was Mach's original hope.

    Yes the paper by Mrs Walker is very nice.

    George Ellis

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    • Post #434

    Hello Mr Singh, It is a message of wisdom.

    I beleive that the crisis can be solved in centralizing the competences. But if and only if the universal determinism is the torch of researchs and studies. The sciences, rational and foundamental have the solutions, so why?

    is it a probelm of hormons and unconsciousness due to this papper governing our lifes. The equilibriums can be reached if we act globally in a pure spherization of all spheres. The social high spheres also can be optimized with wisdom.

    I see the universal consciousness , complex and simple.If we take this infinite light above our walls, without motion. and if we consider that this infite consciousness so has created a physical sphere with spheres of light in motion becoming mass due to their intrinsic codes. So this universal sphere is like a project.Our physical consciousness evolves , like babies of this phsyical 3D sphere and its intrinsic quantum spheres and cosmological spheres.

    I agree indeed, it lacks in the high spheres this universal consciousness.Perhaps it is due to our young age at this universal scale.13.7 to 15 billions years, it is young still.I beleive that the hour is serious and that it is time to act in a pure universal way globally speaking. The earth is near an add of several possible chaotical exponentials. I ask me how it is possible knowing our potential of resolution of major probelms. I don't understand the human nature. It is bizare. We have the solutions and we do not put them into practice. How is it possible ?

    You know Mr Singh, I beleive simply that the most important is to be universal and determinsitic and foundamental respecting our universal physical laws. We have so many tools around us. The solutions, global exist.

    The consciousness indeed is an important parameter.It is even an essential when we play with this entire universal enrgy, this entropy present in all things at its maximaum paradoxal. Just a part is sufficient. This entropy is even infinite when we unify both of system, the physical sphere and its spheres and the pure light infinite above our walls. The aether is this entropy. The free will more this consciousness give harmonious parameters of spherization instead of chaotical parameters.

    Thankig you Mr Singh

    Regards

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    • Post #435

    Mr. Ellis how can you use the pieces or detached observations to explain the totality regarding causation?... to understand the whole, one must consider the whole? right or wrong?

    Well that's a good question. Yes of course that must be true in the end, if you only have access to parts you don't have enough data to determine the whole. But this is mitigated by all the connections between the whole and the parts, which is why Sciama emphasized the idea of "The Unity of the Universe" (he wrote a book under that title).

    Hermann Bondi made the point as follows: if you contemplate the existence of a bus ticket carefully enough, you'll be able to deduce that we must be in an expanding universe, and maybe even estimate the present age of the universe and the Hubble expansion rate.

    The point is that the bus ticket firstly is made of carbon and other elements that somehow came into existence, and second they only exist because humans exist, so all the Anthropic coincidences emphasized by Carter, Barrow and Tipler, Rees, and others must be true. Nucleosynthesis and structure formation must have taken place; planets must have formed; evolution of life must have taken place; so all the conditions necessary for this to happen must have been true. Indeed one of the few places where Einstein made a serious error was in considering the possibility of his static universe: he forgot to think of the thermodynamics of stars, and how it could be that we could still see stars existing in a universe that had an infinite history, hence an infinite past time for all stars to burn out.

    The whole is an interconnected web, so you can deduce quite a lot about the whole by contemplating the existence and nature of the parts. This is also true for example in the case of human beings: if you were just given say a blood cell and asked to deduce where it came from, you should be able to deduce quiet a lot about the nature and existence of animals from the fact of its existence.

    The causal link that makes this kind of thought possible is top-down causation from the whole to the parts.

    George Ellis

      Addendum:

      One quite interesting similar story is astronomical influences on the biosphere.

      Life on Earth is conditioned by four astronomical features:

      1. Existence of the Earth, and the gravitational pull towards the surface of the Earth. This gravity is essential inter alia to the existence of the atmosphere, which otherwise would disperse to empty space.

      2. Existence of the Sun, proving our heat source that powers the whole biosphere.

      Its effect on the Earth is mediated by (a) the daily rotation of the Earth, leading to the day-night cycle that all animals are designed to relate to; (b) the annual seasonal cycle due to the rotation of the Earth round the sun, that is crucial to agriculture.

      3. Existence of the dark night sky, that provides the heat sink that enables the biosphere to work as a thermodynamic engine receiving high grade thermal energy form the Sun and disposing of low grade thermal energy to the sky. As I mentioned before, this is the present day version of Olber's paradox.

      4. Existence of the Moon, that provides tides which have been crucial in the evolution of life on Earth. Many biologists believe existence of the Moon was essential to our evolutionary history (enabling the transition from the sea to land).

      So these are all examples of top-down influences from astronomical bodies to daily life.

      George Ellis

      Final addendum:

      I recommend for further reading, two great integrational books that relate to what I have been saying:

      1. "We Need to Talk About Kelvin", by Marcus Chown. Its subtitle is "What everyday things tell us about the universe". Just what my last two posts are about.

      2. "The arrow of time" by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield. Looks at the issue of time in an integrated way across all sciences.

      Good reading!

      Gerorge

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      • Post #439

      It seems like a central issue in the Top Down view would be the Necessity of particular Building Blocks with specific properties - not just the possibility, so the Top Down can match the Bottom Up - without any 'coupling constants' to fiddle with. Perhaps the universe just seems to be 'finely tuned' because of the way equations are defined. And QM ignores the expansion of the universe anyway, and that curious seeming fact that Photons lose energy in expansion, but fermions do not lose their rest energy, and Hydrogen remains invariant. Which makes me wonder why there is so much emphasis on Quantum Gravity rather than the simpler problem of uniform expansion. Einstein describes it rather than explaining how it is possible. It probably can not be explained geometrically, but needs details of what the vacuum actually is - without the 'useful simplifications' like a background space. Perhaps one possibility is that relationships of elementary oscillator objects given by a direct product already include spacetime relations, as if the direct product has a 'lifetime' and then disappears, and thus bulk spacetime is being continually recreated.

      Hi George,

      I read the Coveney and Highfield book when it first came out, and I just pulled it from the shelf for another read, on your recommendation. I note the year of publication is 1990, which reminded me of another favorite from that year, Kafatos and Nadeau, *The Conscious Universe* (the revision in 2000 was even better). I think interdisciplinary research that has hovered strongly in the background for a couple of decades is ready to flower.

      Best,

      Tom

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      • Post #441

      thanks.. Thomas,seem to me the universe is potential form that changeable, and not be understood well by us Prof Ellis?

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      • Post #442

      Warm greeetings Dr. Ellis why are gravity and inertia equivalent?

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      • Post #443

      Tom,

      thanks for that reference - I'll look for it.

      Anonymous,

      not sure what the point is. The universe is a particular realization of what is potentially possible. It is changeable in that it is evolving, but it then takes on a definite form. We understand that form quite well, but we are basically guessing when we try to understand *why* it takes the form it does. It depends what you mean by "understood".

      Elizabeth,

      Einstein's great discovery in this regard is that the effects of acceleration and of a uniform gravitational field are identical: local experiments can't distinguish them. To show this he considered a closed laboratory at rest in the Earth's Gravitational field of 1g, and the same laboratory in a rocketship far from any gravitational field but now accelerating at 1g due to the rocket motors. In both cases if you drop an apple you'll measure it to accelerate towards the floor at the rate of 1g per second per second. Thus acceleration and gravity equivalent in terms of their physical effects. What this means is that gravity is a different force from all other forces. The underlying reason is that the inertial and gravitational mass of a body are the same, no matter what the body is made of (Galileo's great discovery); if this was not true you could distinguish gravity from inertia by dropping objects made of different matter.

      For more in depth discussion, you can look at my book Flat and Curved Spacetimes, written with Ruth Williams.

      George Ellis