Dear George

(As a courtesy to Professor Ellis, and to keep discussions focused I hope other posters will not respond to this on his page unless he does.)

You make a convincing case for being wary of simplistic down-up causation. Your arguments make sense but only in the context of present-day physics which is far from being a harmonious conceptual whole where one theory applies both to the very large and the very small - please see my present fqxi essay Fix Physics! about that. I am conviced that if such a simple theory of everything were to be found, causation would be always local and linear at the smallest scales and the effects of large systems will be the resultant of effects transmitted locally and causally down to the local level and vice-versa simultaneously in a balanced way:

Think of a ripple tank where one 'simple local' point sends out waves to a 'complex system' consisting of points on a surrounding perimeter. Anywhere in the space between the 'local or down point' and those of a larger 'higher complex perimeter' system the resulting interference pattern will be caused by both systems simultaneously. Here is my tentative approach to such a ToE Beautiful Universe Theory .

With best wishes from Vladimir

    Well said Edwin.

    Paul, has a gift for systematic analysis of statements by physicists. This may be put to very good use for example in writing a monograph on how historically various physicists changed their own positions on subjects such as SR , the ether, time, etc. That would be really interesting.

    Cheers to both of you

    Vladimir

    Edwin

    "You have repeated your beliefs on FQXi probably more often than any one else"

    First, why this concept of "repeated"? In your post you picked up, and mentioned, a response to me. To which I responed, particular since it is a fundamental point in this topic, but had no response.

    Second, why the concept of "beliefs"? If what I write is belief, particularly childish ones, then as I said before, and as would have been a better response here, why don't you point out, factually, where I am, obviously, wrong?

    Paul

    Vladimir

    You, and indeed many others (ie it is not a personal point) keep making statements about SR. I post, with evidence, that SR might not be what people think it is.

    In particular, when relevant, I ask if people can please read my posts on my blog, ie 11/7 1933 & 13/7 11.24, which since I now have a blog, I took the opportunity to post. These are 8 pages of analysis of the subject. So, although it is not quite the subject of the monograph you suggest, it is a monograph that is more relevant. I could be wrong of course, but as yet, I am not even aware of anyone having read them. And incidentally, this is not my essay, so it is not as if I am making a point in order to market my essay.

    Paul

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    • Post #70

    Anton

    "What is or happens within a perfectly closed system has no physical reality to someone outside of it"

    Exactly. And we are part of physical reality, we cannot extricate ourselves from it. We can only know that which is 'outside', ie independent of, sensory detection. Which means we have a validated closed system. That determines the 'boundary' between scientific knowledge and belief. Bearing in mind that we have to hypothecate to overcome known practical problems in the physics of the sensory detection process, but must reference this back to validated direct experience, ie avoid belief when doing this.

    "As in a self-creating universe..." But this is not the reality of which we are a part. When we sense something, we are receiving a physically existent phenomenon, ie it exists independently of our sensing of it.

    Paul

    Paul this is the last time I will reply to any of your extremely repetitive comments.

    You say "physical reality obviously occurs in a specific physically existent state. It does not exist in some "unclear" manner. ... The Copenhagen interpretation, and any other theory that assumes there is no 'bottom', or that sensing affects the 'bottom', is invalid."

    You seem not to understand either wave particle duality or entanglement. The way experiments are done does indeed affect the properties of the bottom-most particles we can access. Please spend a bit of time reading Feynman or any other good text on basic quantum physics. I do believe that Heisenberg, Bohr, and Feynman understood the physics considerably better than either I or you do.

    You continue "The question then becomes, having swept away metaphysical presumptions and invalid theories, what constitutes the 'bottom'? My definition .. is: " the physically existent state which occurs as at any given point in time, is a function of the particular state of the properties of the elementary particles involved, and their spatial position, as at that point in time".

    I repeat what I have already said to you: in quantum field theory, particles are not the fundamental entities: they are just excitations of fields. They don't have either definite positions or momenta, according to the uncertainty principle. Your Newtonian model of basic reality is 90 years out of date.

    As for time, I have already agreed with your statement "What physically happens is that a different physically existent state subsequently occurs from that which would have otherwise occurred." True. The future does not exist now but it will exist later on. Yes.

    I can't see the point of all the further argumentation about this. Whatever else it is about time that bugs you is unclear to me, and repeating it yet again won't help. Please don't repeat it again on this particular forum.

    Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman

    you ask "where is the top?" A very good question, and the answer depends on context:in the case of structure of the human brain, no top is currently identifiable: things near the top seem to be non-localised. In the case of cosmology, one ends up with philosophy because the largest physical scales are unobservable (there are observational horizons in the real universe) so you can say anything you want about it and no on will ever be able to make observations that contradict what you say. So the claims I make are local claims (for any pairs of related levels) and independent of any global claims about any topmost level.

    This applies also to the bottom - there may or may not be a bottom-most level; if there is one we don't know what it is (it may be string/M theory, but then again it may not). Indeed all the levels we deal with in ordinary physics are effective levels, not fundamental;and this does not matter. This is just as well , else we could not do physics.

    George Ellis

    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

    Vladimir you state

    "I am conviced that if such a simple theory of everything were to be found, causation would be always local and linear at the smallest scales and the effects of large systems will be the resultant of effects transmitted locally and causally down to the local level and vice-versa simultaneously in a balanced way'

    I agree with you completely. My more technical article on the way quantum theory works is based in precisely that premise. You will find it

    here .

    George

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    • Post #75

    Dr. Ellis,

    "In addition to contemplating relativistic and philosophical aspects of cosmology, he is now engaged in trying to understand how complex systems such as you and me can arise out of the underlying physics."

    Could this be made to work without a thorough simulation, down to the particle interaction level, of the underlying physics -- in this case, of condensed matter physics?

    One assumes the higher-level effects ("epiphenomena" seems to be a word to avoid) emerge as interactive constraints upon the substrate physics. (Let's not get into the contentious issue of substrate independence, which isn't a required topic at this point.) Whether or not their emergence is inevitable (and why shouldn't it be?) we know they wouldn't exist, at any rate to begin with, in the absence of the underlying physics. And the more complex the higher-level emergent phenomena, the more you need to know about the operational physics in order to map the emergence ... or is that a fallacious assumption?

    Anyway, what about the fermion minus-sign problem? And thanks for your provocative and knowledgeable essay.

      Thanks George

      I just downloaded your paper and it will take me some time to read. My first impression is that it differs from my Beautiful Universe paper in scope and intention (and the presence of non-linearity it appears) as you will see if you read it. Another difference is that mine is the work of someone who has waded in deeper waters than he was trained for!

      Cheers

      Vladimir

      You don't need simulation to establish effective laws at any particular level. For example you can establish the effective gas laws without using any simulations, through two routes: (a) experimentally, (b) by use of kinetic theory. The latter does not need to involve simulations, nor does it need quantum field theory, much less M-theory or string theory.

      "One assumes the higher-level effects ... emerge as interactive constraints upon the substrate physics." I'd phrase it this way: the high level structure emerges somehow (it may be spontaneous, or may be manufactured, or may emerge through developmental processes) and then sets constraints on the underlying physics.

      Yes, this emergence would not take place in the absence of the underlying physics. "The more complex the higher-level emergent phenomena, the more you need to know about the operational physics in order to map the emergence" - well not really. Digital computers are really good examples: they are the most complex things we have built. You don't need to know anything about the underlying physics to design the computer itself, you just need to know that it established the possibilities of existence of transistors and hence various kinds of gates. On that basis you can work out the logic of integrated circuits and make CPUs, memory banks, etc. Hence computer scientists are not taught quantum theory as part of their computer science courses. Someone else needs to know how the transistor works but you don't need to do so: you can take the transistors as the bottom level, for your purposes. And it's crucial that we are able to do so, for as I've already said we don't know what the bottom level is: we'd be unable to do most of present day physics if it was requisite that we understand the quantum gravity foundation layer first. The key question is, Which is the operational level? It's the one that is convenient for you to choose as the lowest level in your particular analysis.

      The fermion minus-sign problem is to do with quantum Monte Carlo simulations; a technique for trying to understand specific types of emergent systems. I cannot meaningfully comment on that technique and problem, except to say that I don't think it helps understand systems such as the brain or a computer.

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      • Post #78

      Thanks for the extended response. We'll simply have to disagree that manufactured artifacts are useful analogues of complex nonequilibrium systems -- complex natural processes -- to the extent I read you as believing them to be.

      "Hence computer scientists are not taught quantum theory as part of their computer science courses."

      Actually, that's not true in the case of quantum computation itself. And perhaps overly optimistic though it may seem, qcomp programming is taught on the theoretical level. You can't understand quantum algorithms without some fundamental knowledge of QM. Anyway, my own paradigm these days is the role of proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) in photosynthesis. Now, to be sure, a plant doesn't need to understand anything at all about quantum tunneling in order to do its photosynthesizing thing, but if you're designing an artificial leaf (vide the Nocera team's ambitious project) you definitely do. Anyway you and I, a couple of complex systems, generate information no computer can, no matter how sophisticated its programming.

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        • Post #79

        Note. Anticipating a possible objection here. An artificial leaf, albeit a manufactured artifact, doesn't stand in relation to a real leaf as a digital computer does to a brain. An artificial leaf reproduces a known process selected from a real leaf's repertoire of physics, whereas a computer can't be demonstrated to reproduce any process selected from the physics or systemic functionality of the brain.

        An artificial leaf copies to some degree a real leaf. The computer is sui generis, a physically realized TM, as anyone familiar with Turing's papers from the 1930s realizes. Is the brain a TM? A lot of people seem to think so, but haven't proven it.

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          • Post #80

          Dear George,

          I agree with your point. It is also necessary to beware of linking unrelated events and so inventing a causation story when it didn't happen in that way. It can happen in science,( including social science), that correlation is mistaken for causation.It probably occurs more often than is realised. Particularly important and well known is the placebo effect, where getting better may be nothing to do with the treatment given.

          I read an interesting item a long time ago about a study into the effect of high fat diets on rabbits. Rather than getting more unwell the badly fed rabbits remained healthy. Eventually it was found that the animal handler looking after the badly fed rabbits was giving them extra attention and fondling. Presumably reducing the animals stress level and making them better able to handle the bad diet ill treatment.

          The book "Freakonomics" Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner has many amusing stories of how correlation might be mistaken for causation. Fascinating.

          "We'll simply have to disagree that manufactured artifacts are useful analogues of complex nonequilibrium systems -- complex natural processes -- to the extent I read you as believing them to be." Well I don't want to overdo the analogy, but for me a key similarity is they both are hierarchically structured modular systems with information hiding. This kind of structuring is very nicely described by Grady Booch in his book on object oriented programming. The mechanisms used in these two kinds of systems are quite different, but some of the logic is similar. And of course you can get the digital system to simulate many aspects of the physical system to high accuracy, basically because digital computers are universal computers (Turing).

          Yes of course I agree about quantum computing. I should have added the caveat "classical computing" in all above.

          Proton-coupled electron transfer seems fascinating. I'd be really interested to know how it relates to quantum state vector reduction. And I agree with you about the limitations of computers (though many don't).

          "a computer can't be demonstrated to reproduce any process selected from the physics or systemic functionality of the brain." The physics functionality, I agree; the systemic functionality, perhaps not. The brain is an embodied brain certainly; but it also carries out pattern recognition and prediction processes that can be digitally simulated to some degree (indeed that's where Artificial Neural Nets came from). Furthermore computers can indeed learn to some degree, through adaptive programs such as genetic algorithms.

          The brain is not a Turing Machine inter alia because emotion plays a key role in its functioning (see for example Damasio's writings). You can to some degree simulate those effects but I certainly don't believe you can reproduce them.

          Dear Georgina,

          yes indeed, in general separating out correlation from causation is very difficult, which is why I stated my definition of causation at the start of my essay in terms of the reliable consequences of an action. That makes clear what the initiating event is.

          The placebo effect is fascinating; of course from my viewpoint it's a case of top-down action from beliefs (abstract entities) to physical systems (human bodies). Placebos are certainly effective, which is why drug treatments are compared to placebo treatments.

          I like your story about the rabbits. The welfare of human children is similarly crucially affected by being given attention; it affects their bodily weight and even their survival.

          Dear Avtar

          I am glad we agree on top down causation.

          George Ellis

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          • Post #85

          "Proton-coupled electron transfer seems fascinating. I'd be really interested to know how it relates to quantum state vector reduction."

          This topic has never been mentioned in any paper I've seen. The question for me has been to what extent is PCET a coherent quantum phenomenon. You don't even need to believe in wave function collapse to wonder about that, as one is interested also in the whole emerging discussion of room-temperature and high-temperature quantum coherence. (See Vlatko Vedral on the ubiquity of entanglement. Seth Lloyd on entanglement as crucial to ordinary bivalent bonds. And when you visited the IQOQI you were doubtless regaled with an account of the super-hot double-slit buckyball experiment.) Nocera & Co. are adamant that PCET's a coherent quantum tunneling effect, and appear to have established this contention to the satisfaction of those sectors of the scientific community that have paid attention.

          Here's a now-defunct webpage from Daniel Nocera's MIT site, undoubtedly not technical enough for you but okay for most kibbitzers, which a friend of mine downloaded and converted to pdf a while back. It lays out the basic stuff:

          http://www.dancing-peasants.com/Proton-Coupled_Electron_Transfer.pdf

          I can cite deeper material if desired.