THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING & THE ITSY QUBITSY UNIVERSE by Vladimir F. Tamari

Vladimir,

One of the points I keep making is that perception is inherently subjective. Clarity and distinction require some form of framing from the larger context. Such as with a camera, having to set the aperture, lens, filter, speed, position, direction, etc. Math is abstraction. A generalized view blends details. I went into this a little in the essay, but it goes to the subjective nature of information. It's not as though things do not happen, but that any information about them is incomplete. Consider something as simple as two billard balls hitting each other. How can it be really understood outside of the larger context, how is it perceived from the position of the balls themselves, as opposed to someone watching them. While the reality seems quite objective and clearcut, there is no fully objective view, because even in so simple of a situation, the potential information could go to infinity, as every atom and molecule of the balls, the surface, humidity, etc. plays some part.

So it is a subject that itself could go to infinity.

If I was to suggest some basic necessity for information, it would be that there first has to be some distinction, both within what is being observed and between the observer and the observed. Then there has to be some form of connection in order for these distinctions to be relatable. The connections would have to be more dynamic and the distinctions more static, otherwise any information would be disturbed/lost before it is registered. Light makes a good form of connection, while mass makes good distinctions. Part of the "explaining water to fish" problem.

Obviously this is a broad category, from fleeting thoughts to thousand year old structures. and beyond.

Yet at the stage of the absolute, there is no distinction and so no information, unless viewed from a non-absolute state and then the relationship is not an absolute. Toward infinity, all information blends into white noise. So it is in these relativistic configurations between the extremes.

Vladimir,

I also wanted to ask you about another, more important, statement in your abstract:

"Information is an artifact of human thought imposed on Nature to describe some of its aspects."

Why don't you like an opposite view according to which the "information" in our heads is of the same *nature* as the "information" in the Universe, basically because this is what was 'given' directly (from the very beginning) to the biological evolution?

John

Yes and the factual point I keep making is that "perception" can have no affect on the physical circumstance, which is received, ie it exists independently, and therefore, within the limitations of what we can receive (or hypothesise based on that), it is possible, but difficult in practice, to have a "fully objective view".

Paul

Lev

I too commented on this sentence in my first post, but your point is not correct either. What is in your heads is a perception of reality, not reality. That is 'out there'. So one can label this perception, especially if it has been verified as knowledge, information, if one wishes, but tat serves no purpose. The point is that any such knowledge, in being designated so, must correspond with reality (as best we are able to know at that time), ie it is the equivalent of reality. We never 'directly access' reality. And no knowledge is being "imposed", it may be a deliberate conceptualisation of reality, rather than a direct definition of it.

Paul

Paul,

Yes, within your view of time as a sequence of distinct event, there is no function by which one can affect the future, or change the past, but within my view, where action generates change and thus time, our actions and perceptions are integral to their context.

As for objective, can you know every action, quantum, molecular, distant input, etc. which goes into your every moment?

Vladimer,

This is an interesting essay to read. I found the frank admission in the "Absolute Reality and Relative Observers" segment that abstract scientific information is only glorified unrealistic guesswork truly refreshing. As I have pointed out in my essay BITTERS, the Universe can only deal in absolutes. One (1) real Universe can only be eternally occurring in one real here and now while perpetually traveling at one real "speed" of light through one real infinite dimension once. One is the absolute of everything. (1) is the absolute of number. Real is the absolute of being. Universe is the absolute of energy. Eternal is the absolute of duration. Occurring is the absolute of action. Here and now are absolutes of location and time. Perpetual is the absolute of ever. Traveling is the absolute of conveyance method. Light is the absolute of speed. Infinite dimension is the absolute of distance and once is the absolute of history.

An abstract human brain may have abstractly evolved over abstract millions of abstractly counted years from abstract primitive cells made of abstract molecules that were abstractly identical to those making up the rest of the abstract universe, my real unique brain only knows unique once. If I only know unique once, you can only know unique once. Unique cannot evolve. Unique cannot be primitive or fundamental or teachable or purchasable. Unique can only ever be unique once.

Vladimir

Tainted is just another problem to overcome, along with individual capability, in trying to reverse engineer perception in order to discover what was physically received. Which then needs to reverse engineered to ascertain what happened, because what you receive is not what happened.

Paul

John

Time is the rate at which the sequence progresses, ie a reality (present) becomes another. You cannot affect the future, it is not there, and you cannot affect the past, it has been and gone.

Re objective. No, nobody ever will, but the potential is there, ie an objective exists. The point is a practical not metaphysical one.

Paul

Paul,

You can affect what is happening at this very moment and then the moment will become past. Meanwhile that effect will have consequences in other moments and other situations.

For very practical reasons, we have an inherently subjective perspective, ie, we are not god.

John

No. You cannot physically affect what is happening, because it has happened. What your action does is cause a different happening in the sequence from what would have otherwise occurred. But that is the same for any cause. Whatever prevails (happens) becomes a cause of what happens next, having been itself the outcome of a previous such circumstance. The point is it is not what could have prevailed, but what did, ie there is no future to affect, it is not pre-existent. The only "inherently subjective perspective" is the fact that there is a possibility of an alternative existence to the one we can know of. But since we cannot know of it, then that is irrelevant in science. And we must restrict ourselves to what is knowable, that being a function of an identifiable physical process and not some philosophical ramblings.

Paul

Vladimir

Indeed. If you start off with incorrect presumptions about the nature of physical existence then you are going to reverse up a blind alley!

Paul

Quite right too Vladimir.

Joe, light is just a physical entity, but with the evolution of sight we see with it. It does not have any other particular significance in physical existence. It may not be the fastest travelling entity in existence. It certainly does not travel at the same speed in all circumstances, though its starting speed is always the same because it is the result of an interaction, not a collision, ie the speed of that which it interacts with, which then results in a light representation thereof, is irrelevant. And like anything else its speed would remain constant in vacuo, but we do not live in vacuo.

Paul

Hi Vladimir,

Very interesting essay with beautiful and smart drawings - especially 'the five blind men and the elephant'. Congratulations!

It seems to me we have a lot in common and only sometimes we use different names. E.g. your 'Cloud of Unknowing' is what I call H. Sapiens' perception. Nature (IT) I call a Platonic entity because we do not have direct access to it but only through our perception (Cloud of Unknowing) etc.

Referring to a cave dweller: since she was not able to explain the nature, she has been inferring the existence of some invisible forces being in charge. The most likely that way religions have been born. At the present time, Newton's law of gravity (with GR corrections) has been well-established on spatial scales from the order of millimeters out to solar system scale. However at much larger distances all tests have been found to fail. Where Einstein's equations failed, researchers (trying to save them!) have been looking for dark forces (dark energy and matter) to explain the lack of 95.5% (almost all) of the content of universe. Could we therefore consider that belief in dark forces to be a kind of modern religion? Something that cannot be proved or falsified, but the vast majority are believers?

In my opinion looking for the foundations, we should abandon the temple of dark forces and return to the laboratory and the department of mathematics. I would bet the crucial task is to find an appropriate metric, being not only spatial but temporal scale invariant too. Why a metric? I propose the strongest equivalence principle claiming that any interaction is entirely geometrical by nature (that is, the metric alone determines the effect of the interaction). The metric should be foundational in one and the same system from the order of quanta out to the universe itself, for the entire observable time scale and ... falsifiable. Obviously assuming that such a metric exists it would change GR and QM.

You claim that Nature and information can be regarded as one and the same thing. I think it depends on definitions of Nature and information. For me both are manifestations of the spacetime geometry so in that sense I would agree. However the lattice of nodes arrayed as in the cluster does not convince me. Maybe this is a good thing that not everyone agree in everything.

And finally I have to refer to Einstein's SR. It indicates that our reference frame is not the one and not the most important one but only a one out of infinity of other reference frames. So I guess Einstein was not so wrong.

Dear Vladimir,

I very much enjoyed reading your wonderful, clarifying and funny essay! You definitely make the cloud of unnowing become more transparent. But I cannot agree about the universe being a quantum computer - not even a kind of. As little as it is a kind of hammer. This opinion is a "Baconian Idol" of mine. Perhaps, as such, it adds dust to my personal cloud of unknowing. But I take the risk.

Best regards!

Inger Stjernqvist

Vladimir,

Your gracious comments are much appreciated. The main point I wished to make about light was that it must be the absolute of speed only because light is actually the only stationary substance in the Universe. You will note that I did not list an absolute of inertia.

Dear Vladimir!

Sorry - careless me - for mixing up sort of with kind of. For my "Baconian Idol" (perhaps it has bad cholesterol) see Francis Bacon's Novum Organum Scientium (1640) about how our prejudices (Bacon calls them Idols) stand in the way for our capacity to know; adding to our cloud of unknowing.

Thank you for asking, but no, I'm not going to write any contest essay this year. I'm still busy reading and re-reading essays and conversations from last year, trying to put together a meta-essay about what I learn from it.

My very best wishes to you in this contest!

Inger