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

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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

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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

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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.

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    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

    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.

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    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.

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    Roger Penrose conception about the Second Law

    of thermodynamics and Big Bang.

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

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      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.

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      Frank, thank you it is a beuatiful idea

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      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.

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      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

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      What is difference between temporal causality and ontological causality?

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      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.

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      Yuri, It is because causality is an emergent phenomema

      How do you know it? From Ellis?

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      Dr. Gibbs,

      "It is because causality is an emergent phenomema. There is no indication that it is built into the fundamental laws of physics..."

      I gather that by "...the fundamental laws of physics..." you don't mean beginning equations such as f=ma. With regard to the implication of "There is no indication that it (cause) is built into the fundamental laws of physics...", it is a state of affairs that leaves physics permanently incomplete and permanently lacking understanding of the nature of the universe.

      Cause is not dispensible from a body of empirical knowledge that consists only of effects, not even by sophisticated mathematical theoretical manipulations and theoretical speculations. If it isn't included from the beginning it cannot emerge from theory.

      There is no basis in the body of empirical evidence for declaring anything about cause other than that effects require it. The major missing part of your program is the origin of order. You accept order for free: Orderly stuff happens because order exists? Presumably meaning that order emerges from orderly stuff.

      James

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      Definition: causality

      The relation between causes and effects.

      Definition: phenomenon

      Any state or process known through the senses rather than by intuition or reasoning.

      Phil

      You're confusing process itself with relations within process or between processes.

      "Yuri, It is because causality is an emergent phenomema How do you know it? From Ellis?"

      Ellis has written in his essay about a different type of causality, I would call it reductionism or ontological causality. My essay is about temporal causality. In his earlier essay about time he described his view about the flow of time. It is very very different from my acausal view of time.

      I have been writing about casuality for quite a few years, long before FQXi was formed so I dont think my view has been influenced by anyone here. See for example http://www.weburbia.com/pg/cause.htm or http://www.weburbia.com/press/html/g05.htm

      Perhaps I was influenced more by the Hawking-Hartle no-boundary proposal and by Huw Price's "Archemedes Point" but my views come from my own reasoning and have not much in common with others.

      James. I would not call F=ma fundamental because it is a classical Newtonian equation which has been replaced by more fundamental laws from relativity and quantum mechanics.

      However, even in classical Newtonian mechanics temporal causality is not a necessary assumption. You can state a problme by giving initial positions and velocities which you would call causes and work out later positions and velocities which you would call effects. But you can also start from final positions and velocities and work backwards as we do when working out where the planets were in prehistory. The only requirement here is consistency. Causality only appears when thermodynmaics is taken into account and then there is an asymmetry between future and past, but the laws of thermodynamics are emergent and are not written into the fundamental laws.

      "Cause is not dispensible from a body of empirical knowledge..."

      You have just stated this and not given a reason for it so it appears to be your assumption that it is true. It is the point of my essay to say that the assumption is unnecessary.

      You say that the origin of order is missing from my explanation. Order is low entropy and I have explained that I think it is the symmetry present in the big bang that explains the initial low entropy of the observable universe. I do not claim that this is a complete theory. Nobody has a complete theory yet.