The Universe - An Effect Without Cause by Philip Gibbs

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

To my opinion dichotomy "emergency vs reductionism" can be united by bootstrapping idea:top-dawn & dawn-top.

Surprisingly, the container(space-time),theoretical content(fermions-bosons), casual content (energy-matter) obey the same law 3:1.

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/946

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?"

This touches on the arrow of time problem. Unitarity does not distinguish between cause and effect. The thermodynamic arrow of time in the decoherence picture of quantum mechanics indicates that overlap terms or off diagonal in the density matrix leak out to some reservoir of state. If there is an infinite reservoir of states then a Poincare recurrence time can't be defined.

It is hard to know how this fits into the picture of some loss of unitarity in the foundations. Since this has bearing on the accounting of states on a black hole horizon there may be some deep connection in some manner.

My essay got delayed because I spilled over onto page 10 with a couple of sentences. So it may not appear for several more days.

Philip,

Thank you and no rush. My essay tends to cover a bit of the psychology of perception, as well as develop some of the consequences of this view of time, since I've been arguing for it for some time and don't see why it doesn't register intellectually with most people. For me, it is like try to figure out the problems of epicycles, without thinking whether the sun moving across the sky, vs the earth spinning underfoot, is a big deal. The fact though is that the linear sequential effect of time is foundational to the intellect, from narrative to causation, so conceiving it as a non-linear dynamic tends to short out a few conceptual fuses, but then breaking open a few of our intuitive boxes is what physics claims to be about.

Roger Penrose conception about the Second Law

of thermodynamics and Big Bang.

http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/e06/PAPERS/THESPA01.PDF

Yuri, this is a very good extra reference for my essay. Penrose has been the one who has most clearly highlighted the paradox of low entropy at the big bang. The first two pages give a readable summary of the problem and the last two describe his solution (Conformal Cyclic Cosmologies) which is much more controversial. His solution fits into the collection of attempts to explain cosmology in causal terms which is what I am criticising.

My solution as described in my essay is that there is a very large and rich symmetry in nature that is restored at singularities such as the big bang. It is a complete symmetry, meaning that there is one dimension of symmetry for each field degree of freedom making everything in the bulk redundant. This explains the hologrpahic principle and Penroses low entropy paradox. It is an incomplete theory but it is a natural conclusion from holgraphy which is driven by the need for consistency rather than wild speculation.

Frank, thank you it is a beuatiful idea

Emergence of cause is what my essay is about. I am concentrating on temporal causality rather than ontological causality a.k.a reductionism and emergence does not have to be a temporal process.

Phil,why you criticize any attempts to explain cosmology in causal terms?

Please answer me by one or two sentences.

Very large and rich symmetry in nature that restore at singularities.

I introduced and call metasymmetry. See my essay in the last competition.

S.Weinberg:

One could imagine "... that specifying the symmetry group of nature may be all we

need to say about the physical world, beyond the principles of Quantum Mechanics."

Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics, The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures

What is difference between temporal causality and ontological causality?

Yuri, It is because causality is an emergent phenomema. There is no indication that it is built into the fundamental laws of physics and therefore no reason to think that cosmological models that go beyond the observable universe are required to be causal. There is especially no reason to think that we need a cause to explain why the universe started at the big bang. The physical extraploation based on consistency tells us only that time and space break down at the big bang. Instead we should just be looking for theories that are consistent. It is a good enough constraint that we dont need to look further.

Of course there is no reason why people should not speculate about cosmological models of all kinds but if they are not required for logical consistency or observation than I am skeptical that they have much likelihood of being correct.