I will try to explain it again.

Causality is about answering the "why" questions. We answer with an explanation that begins with the word "because". In other words we explain a "cause".

However causality can take different forms and different philosophers have classified different types of cause in different ways. In the past Einstein used the word "causality" when talking about quantum mechanics to refer to what we now call "determinism". All this creates a lot of confusion.

Some scientists say that science is not about answering why questions. It just says how things happen, not why. Others say that causality is so fundamental to science that it is meaningless to say that causality is not fundamental.

One type of causality that people are particularly attached to is temporal causality. This is the idea that cause precedes effect. Everything that happens is caused by something that happened earlier. This refers to real-world physical events that have a place and time. Temporal causality cannot tell us about general facts of existence like why the electron is charged because this is not something that happens at a particular place and time. Answering those types of questions requires a different type of causality that we call "ontological causality" Ontological causes do not proceed ontological effects in time, they just explain why things are the way they are. For example I could day that momentum is conserved because of transaltional symmetry and Noether's theorem.

A conservative view would be that temporal causality is fundamental but ontological causality is just reductionism and is not what science is about. I take the opposite view.

Temproal causality is not fundamental. People might have been excused for thinking so in the 19th century but now we know that the fundamental laws of physics are time symmetric so they can not distinguish cause from effect. The arrow of time emerges as a macroscopic effect from thermodynamics which tells us that entropy always increases in one time direction. The direction depends on boundary conditions so it is a feature of the solution of fundamental laws, not the laws themselves. We can try to reduce the principle of temporal causality to the statement that operators commute if they are not inside each other light-cone. But even the geometry of lightcones is a dynamic feature of gravity, not a fundamental feature of physics. It depends on the spacetime metric which is the gravitational field. The causal structure of spacetime is part of the solution of the equations of gravity, not something that is built-in.

This is why we say that temporal causality is emergent. This enmergence is not something that happens in time. You cant say that at some time in the past there was no temporal causality and then something happened and it emerged. That would be a contradiction in terms as you pointed out. Emergence of temporal causality is ontological, not temporal. We have to explain why temporal causality is part of our everyday experience when it is not part of the fundamental laws. When we do that we use ontological causality, not temporal causality so there is no contradiction.

Dear Dr.Philip Gibbs ,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest.

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Dr. Philip,

Thanks for your query. Before the first mind? Of course there were Its and Bits, but to make meaning out of them the existence of mind or something similar to that is essential. I have stated in my conclusion that, 'It and Bit in themselves are empty and blind without mind'.

If you are asking regarding the existence of first mind, you will find answer to that in detail in the 'biology' section of my essay. There I have explained clearly how mind came in to existence (as a result of the evolution of Life for over billions of years). If you have further queries, please, inform me.

I have gone through your essay once and want to see it once more, before I post my comments on it.

Regards,

sreenath

Dear

Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon.

So you can produce material from your thinking. . . .

I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The main stream community people want magic from science instead of realty especially in the subject of cosmology. We all know well that cosmology is a subject where speculations rule.

Hope to get your comments even directly to my mail ID also. . . .

Best

=snp

snp.gupta@gmail.com

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/

Pdf download:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/essay-download/1607/__details/Gupta_Vak_FQXi_TABLE_REF_Fi.pdf

Part of abstract:

- -Material objects are more fundamental- - is being proposed in this paper; It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material. . . Similarly creation of matter from empty space as required in Steady State theory or in Bigbang is another such problem in the Cosmological counterpart. . . . In this paper we will see about CMB, how it is generated from stars and Galaxies around us. And here we show that NO Microwave background radiation was detected till now after excluding radiation from Stars and Galaxies. . . .

Some complements from FQXi community. . . . .

A

Anton Lorenz Vrba wrote on May. 4, 2013 @ 13:43 GMT

....... I do love your last two sentences - that is why I am coming back.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 6, 2013 @ 09:24 GMT

. . . . We should use our minds to down to earth realistic thinking. There is no point in wasting our brains in total imagination which are never realities. It is something like showing, mixing of cartoon characters with normal people in movies or people entering into Game-space in virtual reality games or Firing antimatter into a black hole!!!. It is sheer a madness of such concepts going on in many fields like science, mathematics, computer IT etc. . . .

B.

Francis V wrote on May. 11, 2013 @ 02:05 GMT

Well-presented argument about the absence of any explosion for a relic frequency to occur and the detail on collection of temperature data......

C

Robert Bennett wrote on May. 14, 2013 @ 18:26 GMT

"Material objects are more fundamental"..... in other words "IT from Bit" is true.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 14, 2013 @ 22:53 GMT

1. It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material.

2. John Wheeler did not produce material from information.

3. Information describes material properties. But a mere description of material properties does not produce material.

4. There are Gods, Wizards, and Magicians, allegedly produced material from nowhere. But will that be a scientific experiment?

D

Hoang cao Hai wrote on Jun. 16, 2013 @ 16:22 GMT

It from bit - where are bit come from?

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on Jun. 17, 2013 @ 06:10 GMT

....And your question is like asking, -- which is first? Egg or Hen?-- in other words Matter is first or Information is first? Is that so? In reality there is no way that Matter comes from information.

Matter is another form of Energy. Matter cannot be created from nothing. Any type of vacuum cannot produce matter. Matter is another form of energy. Energy is having many forms: Mechanical, Electrical, Heat, Magnetic and so on..

E

Antony Ryan wrote on Jun. 23, 2013 @ 22:08 GMT

.....Either way your abstract argument based empirical evidence is strong given that "a mere description of material properties does not produce material". While of course materials do give information.

I think you deserve a place in the final based on this alone. Concise - simple - but undeniable.

Dear Dr. Phil,

I went through your exhilarating essay with ease and enthusiasm. The first half, I feel, is far easier to understand than the second one. I am surprised to know that string theory can solve the problem of QG. I wish you success in this endeavor. Going through your essay was simply smooth sailing. Thanks for giving audience a very good essay and it deserves high ranking.

Best of luck in the contest,

sreenath

Phil,

I must confess that as a non-mathematician I don't follow how we can build a new mathematical theory characterizing space, time and matter as secondary unless you model information. Does the math of string theory put you into a cyclic scenario of braneworlds?

Jim

    Philip,

    ''A conservative view would be that temporal causality is fundamental but ontological causality is just reductionism and is not what science is about. I take the opposite view.''

    In the reductionist view the universe is just the sum of its parts. However, if particles have to create themselves, each other, so particle and particle properties must be as much the cause as the effect of their interactions, where particles only have a physical reality to each other if, to the extent and for as long as they interact, then the part(icle)s cannot exist without each other so have no autonomous, independent existence. A universe can only be the sum of its parts if particles, particle properties would only be the cause, and not also the product of their interactions, in which case the question as to the why of their properties never can be answered, explained ontologically nor (temporal) causally even in principle.

    If the most fundamental law of physics says that what comes out of nothing must add to nothing, then this 'sum of its parts' must be nil (so everything inside of it, including space and time somehow must cancel so it has no physical reality as a whole, as 'seen' from without, so to say), then it obviously doesn't make any sense to make statements about the universe, to assert that it has a particular entropy. Moreover, by saying that its entropy changes in time, we in fact say that the universe lives in a time realm not of its own making, so Big Bang Cosmology (BBC) in fact represents a reductionist, i.e., an essentially religious view on the universe. To speak about the properties of the universe can be justified only if and when the inside objects, their particles, only are the cause of interactions, not when they are both cause and effect of their interactions.

    As to ''The arrow of time emerges as a macroscopic effect from thermodynamics which tells us that entropy always increases in one time direction'', no, I still disagree with you, and not only because to do so would presuppose an initial low-entropy state of the universe, something which cannot be explained ontologically nor (temporal) causally. Such initial low-entropy state would make the universe an automaton which, once winded at (or just before?) the mythical bang, only can unwind in a preordained fashion so implies the intervention of something outside of it to wind it up, to provide it with a low entropy in the first place.

    If particles cause, create one another, then real particles can be thought of as virtual particles which have managed to set up a continuous energy exchange, which by alternately borrowing and lending each other the energy to exist, force each other to reappear again and again after every disappearance. According to the Uncertainty Principle (UP), the smaller their distance is, the higher the frequency they exchange energy at, pop up and disappear to pop up again and again, the higher their rest energy is, the smaller the areas are where they keep popping up, the less indefinite their position is. It is clear that in this scenario particles owe their existence to each other, that they exist to each other only if and for as long as they keep interacting, exchange energy: as they cannot exist as autonomous, independent objects, the universe clearly is (much) more than the sum of its parts.

    The fallacy of reductionism, the flaw at the heart of BBC is that it imagines to look at the universe from without, like we imagine God to look at His creation, so is even worse a 'theory' than creationism which at least is honest in stating that, yes, the universe has been created by some Outside Intervention.

    My objection to (temporal) causality is that it confuses cause and effect, or, to be more precise, that, if particles indeed are both cause and the effect of their interactions, we can no longer say that their mass precedes gravity between them, so instead of saying that particles contract because they have a certain constant rest mass (they somehow, mysteriously have been provided with) and gravity is attractive, we can as well say that they acquire mass only if and when they contract (agreeing with the UP), that in doing so they power time, so the ''arrow of time'' has nothing to do with entropy whatsoever. The idea of temporal causality, that cause precedes effect, only would make sense if we could determine what precedes what in an absolute sense, if we could look from outside the universe in, which Big Bang Cosmology (BBC), in the concept of cosmic time, wants to make us believe is justified even though we cannot actually step outside of it. Sorry if this has again turned into a lengthy reply.

    Regards, Anton

    Hi Phil,

    I enjoyed reading your essay, and I wish you luck. I got mine in on the last day, so I do not expect it to appear immediately, but you can expect a good rating from me once it does. I don't see an essay from Tom Ray yet either, and I know he submitted his a couple of days before mine.

    I shall likely have further comments or a question, but for now I'm just skimming.

    All the Best,

    Jonathan

      James, thanks for your question.

      I dont claim to have all the answers about building space and time from information but I have presented one idea of how it might work by mapping discrete necklace lie algebras to continuous space and time using iterated integrations.

      Some solutions of string theory fit the braneworld idea. It is a possibility but I dont think that is how the world works. It would be hard to keep conserved energy contrained to the braneworld if it is embedded in a higher dimensional space with its own dynamics.

      I have read your essay, good luck

      Thanks very much for reading and your kind comments Philip.

      Best wishes,

      Antony

      Dear Gibbs,

      Going through your entire essay we seem to agree, essentially. Though I don't have your expertise.

      The idea in my essay is that if we take any observer as the first quantisation (i.e. as the fundamental frequency or phase space or "non-locality") then his observables follow as the harmonics (i.e. second, third etc quantization or phase-points or "localities"). In my view this means simply that certainty or determinism (Heisenberg's "position" notion) emerge from uncertainty (the "momentum" notion). Essentially this picture is Pythagorean, like you get an octave frame a keynote. Any de facto observer is then the de facto key (perhaps what you called the redundancy) from which one may get observables as the Pythagorean harmonics. And this is not mere speculation, I show values that define man as the key[note] for quantum gravity.

      Now when we see any observer as by definition the superposition (non-locality; fundamental frequency) does not it amount to your holographic principle namely: "The amount of information in any volume of space must be limited by the area of a surface that encompasses it,"? In my opinion this area of/or surface signifies the observer as the natural unit and limit of physical information.

      If you don't mind I will love to have your no-holds-barred comment on my [/essay], Mr Gibbs, but only after you have actually read through. Probably my essay simplifies yours, sort of like a String Theory idiot's version. Meanwhile, thanks for creating virxra.org and kind of adopting the academically orphaned.

      Chidi Idika

      Phil,

      Very nice article. My argument for why the black-hole information paradox is not true would rest largely on the idea that the orthogonal states of the density matrix are at best approximate in nature. So while the density matrix can be defined as a collection of pure states of a statistical ensemble, the pure states are at best approximations of the system itself. The underlying uncertainty ensures that there is a retention of information even when that system is thought to "collapse" into a definite state. It is only at the limit of measurements of single particle systems that we can be definite about the purity of states.

      In other words, the nature of the yes/no questions are always hampered with a distribution. We can say they are mostly true or false based on observation, but only with including a confidence interval about those mean states.

      On Constrained Perception

        Thanks, I look forward to reading your essay for more details soon.

        This is the only essay I have read so far that required me to look up word definitions in the English (Oxford of-course) dictionary. Leave it to a Scot to keep an American informed about the proper use of English. Well written. Introduce me to the notion of bi-geometry. A strong attempt to further relate Lie-geometry to (super)string theory.

          Dear Philip,

          very frankly, I cannot see where is the digital nature of your "Necklace Lie Algebras and Iterated Integration". It is as analog as is string theory. This is "Bit from it"!

          Best regards

          Mauro

            Philip,

            Perhaps you havent noticed my post of 29 June. Though I'm aware that you are having many discussions with other contestants, I do hope that you'll find some time to formulate a reply to it as it is quite germane to your position.

            Regards, Anton

            Mauro, the digital vs analogue question was the topic of the essay two years ago so it is not my emphasis in this essay. There as here I take the view that quantised information made of qubits has analogue as well as digital features. It has never been my position that the foundations of physics are based on pure digital information in the form of bits.

            The analogue side comes from the uncertainty which is realised through quantisation or multiple-quantisation. I think I could not have made the importance of this clearer given the title of the essay. If I had to give my own short slogan it would be more like "it from qubit" or even "it from ...quququbit"

            The "It from Bit" question is not so much about digital vs analogue as about emergence. This has also been a common theme in all my previous essays where I have discussed emergence of locality, causality, space and time. My contention is that the foundations of physics take an purely algebraic form where space and time are emergent. I have argued in this essay that the holographic principle implies a large redundancy of information when physics is viewed as a theory in space and time which suggests that a "complete" symmetry plays a role in the emergence. My fundamental formulation is therefore in terms of pure algebras defined by multiple quantisation but independent of space and time. These are infinite dimensional Lie-algebras defined over the complex numbers so there is an analogue nature to physics already at this level. I do not expect the analogue nature of physics to be purely emergent.

            As for the reference to string theory you should be aware of the modern view that string theory is just part of the larger framework that includes quantum field theories. It is of interest because of its ability to bring gravity into the picture. I do not adhere to the view that it will provide a conveniently unique formulation of particle physics. I think that is a view which is fading in popularity. We now have to accept that such a theory is a long way off and concentrate instead on the underlying principles to understand the relationships coming from dualities and how these lead to emergence. Hoefully when new experimental BSM data is forthcoming we will be in a position with the theory to understand it.

            I have been looking at necklace lie algebras in this way for nearly twenty years and have seen many new ideas appear in the mainstream that follow the same principles. Permutations of the qubits extend to larger infinite dimensional symmetries which should resolve to diffeomorphism invariance as space and time emerge. You can compare this to what happens in quantum graphity for example. More recently we have seen new work on scattering theory in planar 4D SYM where permutations of states are of fundamental importance. The super conformal symmetry in space-time is joined by a new dual superconfirmal symmetry in momentum space and the completion of these symmetries defines an infinite dimensional Yangian symmetry which is similar to a necklace lie algebra. It is natural to turn this round and assume that the Yangian symmetry is the fundamental idea and that space and time are emergent along with locality, causality and unitarity. In the last few years this has become a very active field of research which is philosphically and mathematically very similar to what I have been looking at for many years.

            Iterated integration also arises in scattering theory as a process that recursively generates the polylogarythmic amplitudes. I have recently learnt that the free Lie algebra is a simple form of necklace algebra that can be mapped to a continuous space using iterated integrations. This is what I have described in my essay. It is just a small part of the whole picture which is too big and as yet incomplete to describe in more detail. The hope is that similar mappings could be used on my earlier necklace lie algabras in the same way.

            I hope this gives you a better picture of how my ideas fit in to the bigger picture. I am sorry that you seem to have gotten a completely upside down impression of what I was trying to say. Others have graciously complemented me on the clarity of my exposition so perhaps you just need to read it again more carefully.

            Dear Philip

            thank you for your thorough response. I believe in the value of simplicity of the starting principles of a theory. It seems to me that the Lie algebras are not good starting principles: they relate to continuous symmetries of something else. But I surely miss the conceptual points within the math. Also, we have too different background and motivations.

            My best

            Mauro