The Universe - An Effect Without Cause by Philip Gibbs

Yuri,

Thank you for your response.

James

Our universe exhibits a very strong causal nature as you describe but the point is that this is emergent rather than fundamental. We observe that past causes have future effects but this is not built into the laws of nature. It is a statistical phenomenon governed by the second law of thermodynamics which is an emergent law valid for macroscopic processes. It works only because of the influence of the past big bang singularity which was constrained to have a low entropy due to fundamental symmetries in the laws of physics. The entropy of the universe then increases with the flow of time away from the big bang.

If we lived in a universe with an equally big singularity in the future then it would be a very different place. We observe influences from the future as well as the past and it is unlikely that life could evolve in such a universe. As it happens the cosmological constant means that the universe expands rather than collapsing in the future so the universe works in a way that is suitable for life.

Our brains are computers that have evolved to suit our environment and the nature of physical law is built into the software of our mind. We have string intuitive notions of time, space, causality, locality etc. This makes us think that these things are fundamental and cannot be different. To understand the universe properly we must strip away these programed concepts and build our picture of the universe from scratch using only logical consistency and observation to understand how it works. Of all the programed concepts causality is the one that is hardest to put aside, yet with clear thinking we can easily see that it is not part of fundamental physical law and is emergent.

David Hume and others who influenced him or were influenced by him were deep thinkers who could understand the necessity to seperate our programmed thinking from what we really experience. Hume recognised that we really just observe correlations and that causality is emergent, even if it is a very strong illusion that influences everything we do. It is remarkable that he could understand this long before the laws of thermodynamics and the nature of space and time were better understood. It is rather sad that although the laws of nature support his thinking, most people still do not recognise that causality is a concept programed into the mind and only exists as an emergent law of nature.

Einstein was influenced by Hume when he gave up the absolute nature of space and time. He realised that Hume was right that these things are programed into our thinking. We can overcome this programming by using only logic and careful observation to establish that space and time are not absolute. Physicists who have come to understand relativity in an intuitive way have succeeded in reprogramming their minds to some extent.

However, Einstein did not get what Hume said about causality and most physicists still fail to understand it. This is fine for most scientific endeavours but if we want to understand the foundations of natural law we must overcome this way of thinking and not be misled into imagining cyclic universes or evolving cosmoses. These do not come from observation or from logical thinking. They are just a product of thinking influenced by software that runs our brain which evolved to fit the emergent nature of the universe.

Thanks for the tip. I will try to find a copy for holiday reading.

In my last essay I described the universe as a quantum computer processing strings of qubits. The qubits and the stringy relations between them are fundemental in my opinion, but everything else is emergent. Space and time emerge and with it the quantum computer like structure with quantum code error correction that keeps the universe stable and coherent.

Our brains are also like computers (classical computers this time) but nobody sat down and wrote the prgrams and typed in the intial data before pressing the return key. Our brains evolved to run the way they do in response to our environment and this is possible because of the second law of dynamics which is an emergent law. The program structures which run the universe emerged much more quickly in the initial instant after the big bang, but it was not set in motion by some cause. The low entropy nature of the big bang is just due to the symmetries of nature that are manifest in the singularity and spontaneously broken as time progresses. This is all emergent from one overall block view of the universe with no causal input.

Unitarity and locality are good ones to regard as emergent. I agree.

Unitarity just says that probabilities add up to one so if you have one state which evolves to another this has to be an exact result. You cant lose some of the probability. However, the fact that one state can evolve into another is itself emergent along with the meergence of time so unitarity emerges in conjunction with that.

Unitarity is reversible so it does not tell us that cause precedes effect, just that the total information is preserved whichever direction you go in. I this sense temporal causality is distinct from unitarity and emerges seperately, but the two things are related.

Phil

Who coined term "emergent"?I can't grasp clear senыe this word.

According to Wikipedia it was coined by George Henry Lewes in the 19th century but it has become more widely known recently from complexity theory. Thermodynamics is a perfect example of emergence because it is not written into the fundamental laws but appears at a macroscopic level from the complex interactions of simpler components.

When we talk of emergence of space and time we just mean that these things are not written into the fundamental laws of physics but must emerge at a higher level.

Suggest you read wikipedia for a better understanding than I can give in a few words.

I knew it, but for me it is not enough.I know more about emergency vs reductionism dilemma.I don't understand why space -time can be emergent phenomenon.

Anderson: "The central theme of emergence over reductionism: that large objects such as ourselves are the product of principles of organization and of collective behaviour that cannot in any meaningful sense be reduced to the behaviour of our elementary constituents." The origin of this idea is Anderson himself, in a widely quoted article from 1971 - "More is different."

See: http://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf

Even the great guru John Wheeler relied on the phrase.

Dear Doctor Gibbs,

With all due respect, it is your right to think that human brains are like computers, it is my right to know that my brain is nothing like a computer. As I tried to explain in my essay Sequence Consequence, I can only really see what I am looking at here and now. I can only really hear the noise that is in earshot here and now. I can only really smell the fragrances near my nostrils here and now. I can only really taste whatever I put in my mouth here and now. I can only really feel whatever is touching the sensitive surfaces of my body here and now. No clock will ever be built that could accurately record what time it really is now and realistically distinguish that real time from when then ends. No computer will ever be built that could really calculate the boundary line of here and satisfactorily indicate where there ceases. Reality can only take place here and now. Mathematics is only a pretentious religion that uses meaningless symbolic numbers.

Joe Fisher

Dr. Gibbs,

"It is rather sad that although the laws of nature support his thinking, most people still do not recognise that causality is a concept programed into the mind and only exists as an emergent law of nature."

I don't think it is sad. I think it is good to depend upon and learn from empirical evidence and avoid philosophical drifting. Not time nor space nor cause nor intelligence are natural parts of physics equations. The equations of physics are not about the nature of the universe, they are about patterns in changes of velocity of objects.

James

James

I put my post yesterday to your essay about fundamental constants.

There is my point of view.

Philip,

Thank you for the reply. I don't know if you read it, but the point I made further up the thread is an observation about how our intuitive sense of time did escape notice and is built into current physical theory. We perceive time as a sequence of events and physics, in its mathematical precision, re-enforces this perception by treating it as a measure of duration. It is not that the present moves from past to future, but the changing configuration of what is, turns future into past. For example, the earth doesn't travel/exist along some vector from yesterday to tomorrow, tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Duration only exists within the present, not external to it.

So when we measure from one event to the next in the sequence, the prior event is only a small fraction of the potential lightcone of causal input into the second event.

If you consider the implications of treating time as an effect of action, ie. rate of change, then the physics is fundamentally dynamic, not essentially static points of measure.

It is when we try to impose that external timeline, either conventionally, as in QM, or as part of a spacetime geometry, rather than letting it emerge out of action, that problems occur.

The cat is not both dead and alive, because it is the collapse of probability which yields actuality and clock rates differ because there are different rates of change in different environments, not because they travel different time vectors.

Dear Philip:

EMERGENCE vs. CAUSALITY

Phil/Yuri: I would appreciate your feedback on the following conceptual representation:

Emergence implies appearance over time and space. What emerges was not existent before it emerges to be noticed or seen. Hence, emergence implies a kind of evolution of greater complexity over time. Since time and evolution are implied, emergence can be easily confused with causality. What emerges from some earlier state seems to be causal and effected by an external cause.

I would like to suggest EQUIVALENCE (aka complementarity) rather than EMEGENCE to represent a non-causal or free-willed phenomenon or event. Because EQUIVALENCE exists independent of time as an eternal law, it is non-causal. For example, an entity exists in EQUIVALENT states of wave and particle; a wave does not EMERGE from a particle or vice-versa. As I have described in my paper - " From Absurd to Elegant Universe", various relativistic states of the mass-energy-space-time continuum of the universe exist as EQUIVALENT states and not EMERGENT states evolving in time and space. Only those states (V much smaller than C) wherein the relativistic effects are negligible are experienced as Newtonian or CAUSAL states. In the limit, when V approaches C, pure non-causal state of fully dilated mass, space, and time exists as the pure kinetic energy (also known as dark energy). Hence, so-called dark energy is not an EMERGENCE from matter state but an EQUIVALENT state free from time and causality.

Regards

Avtar

Hello ,

the computing is a human invention, the Universe , no !

of course the informations can be correlated with good superimposings but we have several limits and incompleteness.But this incompleteness needs a pure rational road, a pure dterminism in the calculations.You cannot invent false laws.Just for a kind of mathematical plays implying confusions. The maths are there to help us to better understand our physical laws.They are not there to imply the confusions and still less for investors. After we shall ask all :but why this plaenet does not turn correctly. If already the high spheres are corrupted by an ocean of confusions. Oh My God, but what is this circus ?

That said,The artifial intelligence seems possible, and still more with biological superimposings and some algorythms. The informations are fasinating indeed.

Regards

John thanks for your comment. I agree aboiut our intuitive sense of time. I will read your essay later. I have a lot to get through

James, what Hume said is very much consistent with the statement that we should learn from empirical evidence. In fact he was saying that we should not be misled by our philosophical beliefs and intuitions that are not grounded in direct observation.

I agree that some of what philosophers say is irrelevant but Hume had a good sense of reality. This is why Einstein had so much respect for him. To say that we should avoid philosophical drifting is itself a philosophical statment of sorts. You cannot do foundational physics without following some kind of philosophical ideas about how to proceed

philip. The nature of fundamental reality/experience is FUNDAMENTALLY incomplete without the following:

Uniting inertia and gravity is the key to generally unifying and balancing attraction and repulsion -- dreams and waking -- and the body and eye does this. This fundamentally stabilizes distance in/of space. Space manifesting as electromagnetic/inertial/gravitational energy, with the observer included. And gravity cannot be shielded. NOW, dreams do all of this. Dreams are typical/ordinary experience; and, obviously, dreams are physics.

Phil

How you going for answer to next question:

"Emergence of Cause or Cause of Emergence?"

Dear Phil and Edwin:

I would appreciate your review and feedback on the following thoughts on how to integrate Free Will or Consciousness into physics.

The clues to this come from some well-known phenomena that are non-causal or free-willed such as spontaneous decay/birth of particles, wave-particle duality, and free-willed physical laws that prevail in the universe without any external cause. I have tried to derive a deterministic model (GNM) of the spontaneous decay in my posted paper -" From Absurd to Elegant Universe" and integrate into a simplified form of general relativity to allow the free willed mass-energy-space-time conversion. Just allowing such provision in the integrated model (GNMUE) resolves many of the current paradoxes/singularities of physics, successfully predicts the observed universe and galactic expansion, as well as provides understandings of the inner workings of quantum mechanics.

Causation vs. Free Will - What is Fundamental?

The following arguments support the conclusion that Free Will or Spontaneity or Consciousness is the fundamental or root cause process of all physical phenomena.

An outcome of an event is determined by the input parameters and the governing law (or equation). The governing laws are the fundamental universal laws of conservation of mass, energy, momentum, space, and time which are existent at Free Will without any external cause. The input is also chosen at the free will of the observer or operator. In some cases, the input is determined by the outcome of a preceding event such as in the Domino Effect. But even in those cases, the originating or primary root input is always determined at the free will of the originator or source. Hence, the universe is not a Clockwork Universe wherein its fate is predetermined. The evolution of the material or manifested universe is subject to the free-willed laws and inputs.

The widely used assumption of bottom-up causation that particles or strings of matter are the most fundamental elements of universal reality is incorrect. The particles are known to be born spontaneously out of or decay spontaneously into the so-called vacuum or nothingness. Hence, the fundamental reality, both top-down and bottom-up, is vacuum (or the Zero point state of the mass-energy-space-time continuum as described in my paper. This state is synonymous with the implicit eternal and omnipresent laws of the universe.

The fundamental physical process that leads to spontaneous (no causation) birth or decay of particles is the free will or spontaneity in the universe. A universal theory that does not entail this free-will dimension allowing spontaneous conversion of mass-energy-space-time continuum will remain incomplete and unable to describe the universal reality. This is vindicated in my paper.

I would greatly appreciate your comment on my paper- " From Absurd to Elegant Universe".

Regards

Avtar Singh