Edwin,

Quite a mindfull. Much of it above my paygrade though.

If I may make a few observations about the section on consciousness;

"Awareness is located in the field, but concentrated where the action is.'

The example I tend to think of is of a magnifying glass, focusing light to a point. When we draw it out, the light is diffuse and fills the whole circle, while when we draw it in and concentrate the light to a point, there is shadow in the surrounding area. I find concentration to be like this; Isolating from the broader network of beingness. It is when we blend, unfocused, with what is around us, that we are one with it. Meditation is the conventional model, but steady activity works just fine.

I think though, that I would compare awareness to light, rather than gravity, while gravity is the coming together that is knowledge. Like light, awareness is constantly pushing at its surroundings. looking for whatever crack it can find, constantly moving on. While knowledge is the thought structures, insights and observations that form and either grow, if we keep adding more attention/energy to them, or are forgotten, if our awareness moves onto something else. Only those thoughts which hold together and grow are what we would think of as logic, while the rest are only connected as a stream of consciousness. Awareness is what is present, the hands of the clock, constantly taking on new forms, or building up the old ones and knowledge is events, marks on the face of the clock, that come into being and recede, like waves, either crashing or fading. So with galaxies and gravity, the structure falls into the vortex, while the light radiates out. Awareness moving on, as thoughts fade away.

There is a political relationship in here as well, since conservatism is the structure, seemingly hard and fast, yet constantly crumbling and consolidating, while liberalism tends to be more the soft connecting tissue, radiating out and growing, yet never quite grasping and when it does, becoming conservative and solid. Like youth and age. Light and structure.

    Hi John,

    Thanks for reading and commenting. I'm always interested in your ideas, as you tend to take a more catholic approach, and don't sweat the details. But, of course, the devil is in the details!

    I'm very happy that FQXi has finally created an essay contest where the topic of 'consciousness' must be treated, since knowledge, information, interpretation, meaning, and similar terms make no sense in a dead, unaware, universe.

    John, you say: "I think though, that I would compare awareness to light, rather than gravity...". But I am not "comparing". I am stating (proposing) that self-awareness *is* the nature of gravity, not *is like* gravity. This is a very important distinction. The field exists, and has a 'nature'.

    I just finished posting on another thread you are also contributing to, (forum/topic/1778) and I will repeat the relevant content here:

    I consider consciousness to be a field capable of awareness and volition. The awareness is of mass flow, including the mass of the field energy itself, ie, self-awareness. The "information" that 'in'-forms the brain is energy that contributes to (at one level) the establishment, through learning or adaptive response, of connectivity between neurons that results in complex 3-D flows of ions in axons and vesicles across synapses. Actually 4-D flows, since they are dynamic. Thus the visual (or other) senses stimulate the neural network and activate a pattern of mass flows through it. This is typically a very specific pattern whose interconnectivity has already been learned.

    As Basudeba pointed out in a comment above, the perception (or awareness) is essentially "(this) is like (that)". It is in this way that we gain our understanding of reality. He also mentioned that: "in the perception "this (object) is like that (the concept)", one can describe "that" only if one has perceived it earlier."

    That is, it was not meaningful the first time!

    That is, one can correlate only after there is something to relate to.

    That is why, for example, if one meets someone at a party with an unusual name, it's very hard to understand the name the first time one hears it. Similarly, one must listen to complex music more than once to hear the complexity.

    This model answers (for me at least) Lev's question of "How do I recognize a previously unseen cat as a 'cat'?"

    It also has seemingly unrelated implications, such as why one can, in a dream state, get caught in a "loop".

    This model, nor any other, does not 'explain' awareness, per se, but, as a self-aware being, I know it exists. If it is of the proposed field nature, aware of complex dynamic mass flows determined by learned connections (in 4D) I believe the above captures the essence of our mental nature, and fits with my definition of intelligence as "consciousness plus logic", where the logic is physical interconnectivity in the network(s). We know that multiple networks are interconnected, so this model also yields hierarchical structures of 'ideas'. Thus 'thinking' is simply appropriate self-generated stimulation of these dynamic flows, while 'observing' is external stimulation of these dynamic flows, and dreaming is semi-random stimulation of these flows.

    The key to all of the above is the field's awareness of local mass flow. This is the significance of the C-field circulation equation relating local circulation to local mass current density. This comment is the tip of the iceberg. Much more ice can be found in my essays and books.

    As simply a matter of interest, this comment (and all my comments) was dictated to Dragon software. If software is capable of pattern recognition of this order, the model I describe above is capable of pattern recognition of the order that we exhibit.

    Best,

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

    Edwin,

    The distinction is between awareness and self-awareness. Yes, I do agree self-awareness is (a form of) gravitational feedback. Yet as I point out in the analogy of the magnifying glass, when we become too self-aware, it becomes that gravitational collapse into narcissism, personal obsessions and political fanaticism, that causes isolation. Much as gravity points to a center, without having a point at the center, the sense of self becomes a vortex. And motivates the sort of people who end up either behind bars, or running large corporations. Or both. (Large centralized organizations are gravitational vortices, with requisite cult-like tendencies.) Not to say we are all not the center of our own view of the universe, but best to keep it in perspective. We need to maintain the connective tissue that is like the light simply radiating out and not ever coming back, but will locate our position for a long time to come, to whomever else is aware.

    Not that I have anything against gravity, but like everything else, best in moderation.

    John,

    I think we're failing to communicate. You're talking analogy. I'm talking 'nature of'. My position is not 'It's like..." but "It is...". Philip Gibbs says his ideas are radical. My ideas are radical: the idea that gravity is aware is radical. After 7 years of exploring this idea I am more than ever convinced of the reality of it. But then everyone who writes an essay on FQXi is convinced of the validity of their ideas, so what else is new?

    I don't expect to change any minds. I'm aware of only one person changing their mind on FQXi in the last 5 years! But it's an excellent forum to present ideas, and record with a time/date stamp, so that's what I do here.

    I would ask that you consider the difference between 'it's like..." and "it is...", although the modern relativist view is to deny the possibility of the latter; too absolutist. I get the feeling from your comments that you are missing my point. I am not analogizing, or coming up with a cool 'viewpoint'. I'm trying to explain the nature of awareness, which is key to the topic of this contest. It takes a while for radical ideas to sink in. That's the meaning of Basudeba's point above. There has to be the first 'that' before there can be the realization that 'this is like that'. So I keep banging on building the structure that allows things to fit into place.

    In short, awareness is a field property, while perception is awareness of the relation between structures that information has built into one's brain. The question is how awareness couples to physical reality. The general fuzzy idea that prevails today is that arrangements of matter lead to awareness. Instead, the field is inherently aware, and always has been. But the biological evolution reached the point where energy, sensed by bio-physical mechanisms, is stored as information (because it creates formations within) and these then lead to perception. It was a long process, but without the built-in awareness, I don't believe it would have ever happened. No possible arrangement of matter is capable of creating awareness from a non-aware piece of matter. But, given a field that couples to structural flows that 'model' the thing of interest, one can perceive the thing of interest and similar things.

    Thanks for giving me the opportunity to expound.

    Have Fun,

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

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    • Post #21

    Edwin

    "In short, awareness is a field property, while perception is awareness of the relation between structures that information has built into one's brain. The question is how awareness couples to physical reality. The general fuzzy idea that prevails today is that arrangements of matter lead to awareness. Instead, the field is inherently aware, and always has been. But the biological evolution reached the point where energy, sensed by bio-physical mechanisms, is stored as information (because it creates formations within) and these then lead to perception. It was a long process, but without the built-in awareness, I don't believe it would have ever happened. No possible arrangement of matter is capable of creating awareness from a non-aware piece of matter"

    This is incorrect, the main reasons being:

    1 Awareness is the receipt of physically independently existent input (which happens to be representational of something else, but is existent in its own right). Whereas perception is the resultant output of the subsequent processing of that. How that processing occurs is irrelevant to the physical circumstance in that it does not create it, or in any way affect it. It affects the perception of it.

    2 Physical existence demonstrates no form of awareness, only sentient organisms possess the capability to be aware, this being an evolutionary development which takes advantage of certain existent phenomena. In other words, a brick also receives that physical input, but unlike the eye, it has no means of processing it.

    3 We are trapped in an existentially closed system. Which is a function of what we can be aware of (ie what we can potentially know), that being determined by a physical process. There could be an alternative, but we cannot know it. And this is science, which is limited to the potentially knowable, indeed, whether we can fully know that is another matter. Asserting how this existence came into being is outwith our possible knowledge.

    Paul

      Hi Paul,

      I do not assert how this existence came into being, only how it is, in my opinion. As I state in my abstract, "what is real" is a matter of belief. You have very fixed beliefs, which do not coincide with mine. You also have your own definitions, which do not necessarily coincide with mine either. I am fully aware of your beliefs, which have at least been consistent. This has been the case for quite a while and we both know this, so there is absolutely no point in my arguing with you over this. Thanks for your opinion and good luck in the contest.

      Best,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Hi Eugene,

      If I will be entering next year's contest I have things to learn and copy from your presentation.

      A lot of comments have been made so I wont bore you repeating issues like 'awareness', etc

      Now here goes...

      1. Gravity is a subject where even Angels like Newton fear to tread (recall 'hypothesis non fingo') but you have boldly tackled aspects of it. Kudos!

      RE: "Yet gravity, which is real and which DOES INTERACT WITH ITSELF must, in some meaning of the word, be aware of itself". This SERIOUSLY ATTACKS one of the important principles of physics, the action-reaction principle, by which I mean no particle or field can interact with itself. You may want to mention self-gravitation of things like a star, etc. This interaction is between the particles constituting the star and not a particle or field interacting with itself. Awareness can therefore hold, IF and only if this principle must be jettisoned and particles and fields can interact with themselves.

      2. "the threshold--essentially two-state--which provides the only real meaning of 'bit', ... Thus a bit has meaning only when a real change in form of the structure (in-formational change) occurs".

      RE: I agree. What is the most fundamental basis of 'structure' available to Nature? And if this structure is discrete, can it undergo change? If so, what kind of two-state change?

      3. On the 'Not-two' aspect of reality,

      RE: this is a very, very fundamental issue. I have replied you on my blog. You may wish to see

      http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.1b.txt

      and See Aristotle Metaphysics Book 1, part 3...

      "... Parmenides seems in places to speak with more insight. For, claiming that, besides the existent, nothing non-existent exists, he thinks that of necessity one thing exists, viz. the existent and nothing else". In a two-state change, cant we attribute 1 to existent and 0 to not existent?, taking cognisance that monads which are fundamental units of space (re: Pythagoreans) can according to Leibniz emerge from nothing and be annihilated to from nothing.. (see his first 8 paragraphs. Others deal mainly with God, soul, etc. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/leibmona.pdf).

      Finally, gravitational action is action-at-a-distance. How is this effected? Some say via exchange of force particles, some say by curving space. I didnt quite get the mechanism you would be proposing or will it be out of place to ask considering the scope of the essay contest?

      Please accept my high regards

      Cheers,

      Akinbo

      Hi Eugene, It is my pleasure to explain...

      If we assumed that no measures give us a guarantee that the ideas a theory is based on bear the slightest relation to reality (experiments and observations) then what would be the sense of our work? Obviously I do not expect 100% relation and forever but an approximation possible to get at the moment. In the abstract I have meant a common language issue.

      Yes, I do not understand the illusion not as fully distorting reality but rather as the issue of human being's perception (incl. our brain construction that has evolved for DNA successful replication and not for discovering the reality). The explicit example is gravity being not a force but a manifestation (representation if you like) of spacetime geometry. Exactly in my view it is an *idea* of reality, not direct reality. As you see we do share similar understanding of reality and we only use different language (that is what I have noticed in the abstract).

      I will try to clarify my experiment idea. If we assume (like in my thought experiment) that the photon comes back to us along a geodesic coming around the "particle" observed and not it is reflected (as assumed in QED) than it cannot change the spin.

      The reality as "created" out of Platonic math world is I guess what Wheeler meant in his "It from Bit". And here we come back to the illusion / perception / definitions issue. It is not easy to shortly explain how to find the relation between the spacetime and Bit but Torsten Asselmeyer-Maluga in his great essay "directly identifies the spacetime as carrier of the Bit". His essay is very technical so maybe it would give you better view at my concept from a different angle. It does not mean that I fully support Torsten ideas but our concepts in general are very close.

      Thank you for commenting.It is nice to observe a unification of ideas and I hope in the outcome we will get a unification of forces.

      Best regards

      Edwin,

      I do have the sense of what you are saying, just not quite going all the way there. Rather than seeing gravity as aware, I'm more of the view that awareness uses these physical properties of contraction and expansion, riding the waves, as it were. To take your view completely, from my perspective, I would have to say light is aware and gravity is the forming it choses to manifest. Like light manifests as mass. As awareness manifests as knowledge. Not to say I'm right, but that's just sort of where I'm at, at the moment.

      I forgot to mention that I liked these:

      "Smolin says "it took 55 circles to get epicycles to work", while Susskind recently summarized physics as depending on from 25 to 150 parameters, whose values are set 'by hand'. How can physicists believe theories that require 25 to 150 parameters to fit data?"

      and

      "ET Jaynes reminds us that:

      '...a false premise built into a model which is never questioned cannot be removed by any amount of new data.' "

      If gravity(and light) are fundamentally aware, wouldn't life, or other manifestations of this awareness be more pervasive?

      Jacek,

      Thanks for the explanations. We do agree that we do not expect a 100% (and forever) relation of theory to reality, so "certainty" is impossible. But as I explained above, we can hope for and work toward an anomaly-free theory which would give us greater faith in the "probability" of correct understanding.

      I understood your use of "illusion" to mean "idea" and we do agree on this point.

      I now understand the idea behind your experiment. Thanks!

      I do believe I understand space-time as "the carrier of the Bit", but I view it as the carrier of (packets of) energy and, as I noted in my essay, it is not a 'bit' of information until it triggers some threshold that essentially 'records' the information in some structure. The structure may be as simple as a hydrogen atom or as complex as DNA or neural network. There are no "bits" traveling through space-time, there is only energy registering at the end of the travel. As far as I can see the net results are the same, but the lack of independent existence of the 'bit' means it could never "give rise to" physical reality, as Wheeler suggested. It has meaning only in the context of a pre-existing physical reality. On the other hand, the information *does* give rise to our mental images or ideas of physical reality, which your diagram seems to allude to.

      You and I are largely in agreement on these issues except for the Platonic math and the reality of the 'bit' before it registers. As I note above, we agree that "space-time is not the background, but the material of matter and energy itself..." and are close to agreement on "the self-organized space-time in the form of [waves] being physical world and perceptual experience (mental world) at the same time".

      In agreement on these issues we are close to a unification of ideas. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

      Best regards,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      John,

      Perhaps part of the problem is that you're trying to fit many things together while I'm trying to derive many things from one. I suspect that there are many more ways to fit things together than there are to derive them from an initial unity. I'll try to address gravity and electromagnetism in a separate comment below. In this comment I'll address your question about pervasive life:

      John, like you, I live on a ranch. It's near the Pacific Ocean and has a major creek, a decent natural pond, and two forests, a eucalyptus and a redwood forest. I see life everywhere I look, in any direction. It's hard to see how it could be more pervasive.

      If you mean on the moon or on other planets it's harder to say. If one believes that, with a weak primordial consciousness field, it took billions of years for local, mobile, lifeforms to reach our stage of intelligent awareness, then it's pretty clear why this hasn't happened on the moon. Who knows what's on other planets? I'm not an Earth-centrist, but there is no mandate, as far as I can see, that every inch of the universe be covered with life. Once life does come into existence (as sustainable living forms) it operates pretty much as you describe in your many observant and insightful comments.

      Thanks again,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Hi Lev,

      That's a reasonable question, but it doesn't have a simple answer. For one thing, it's the fundamental 'entity' of my theory, and fundamentals are often undefined by specific words. The theory tends to define them. But more significantly, it is subjective, which increases the difficulty. I am self-aware and aware, as are you, so I assume you know what it is. It is simpler to say what it's not. It's not thinking, reasoning, remembering, projecting, or any other logic-based or information-based activity. These all involve the interaction of the field awareness with the local mass flow(s) in a neural network, which, as I indicated in a comment above, can involve countless neural interconnections in a 4D (i.e., 'dynamic') structure that is created by incoming energy which becomes 'information' when it is registered.

      Consider the definition of 'mass' and 'gravity' and 'gravitational field' in general relativity:

      In my essay I noted Yau points out just how poorly mass is defined in general relativity (very poorly!). To this I would add the following from Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's 'Gravitation' (page 399):

      "...nowhere has a precise definition of the term "gravitational field" been given -- nor will one be given. Many different mathematical entities are associated with gravitation: the metric, the Riemannian curvature tensor, the Ricci curvature tensor, the curvature scalar, the covariant derivative, the connection coefficients, etc. Each of these plays an important role in gravitation theory [and] the terms "gravitational field" and "gravity" refer in a vague, collective sort of way to all of these entities."

      That's pretty much how the definition of "awareness" has to stand.

      I think you picked my favorite Jaynes saying as well. And the number of parameters involved in our current theories does give one something to think about does it not?

      Thanks for reading and commenting Lev,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Hi Akinbo,

      Thanks for reading and for your gracious comments. I've observed that you always ask good questions!

      1.) As I noted in an earlier essay, Eugenio Calabi in 1953 essentially asked if our Master equation was valid:

      "Could there be gravity ... even if space is a vacuum totally devoid of matter?"

      He reasoned: "...being non-linear, gravity can interact with itself and in the process create mass", and he conjectured, "curvature makes gravity without matter possible". The Calabi-Yau manifold confirms our Master equation-based only on gravity -but his conjecture was based on special geometry in which "time is frozen".

      As I mentioned in technical notes, the uncharged electromagnetic field has energy, hence mass, but only interacts with charge, hence does not react with itself. The gravitomagnetic field energy has mass and interacts with mass, hence does interact with itself (in local motion). This has two consequences. The self-interaction vortex leads to soliton-like particles and the particles can be confined in a 'self-generated' field, hence achieving what is currently assigned to "color" in QCD. Thus the one field can interact with itself in a Yang-Mills gauge theory of mass. I would replace the "gluons" [which are considered to interact with themselves] by the C-field. In this case QCD has 10 extra parameters used to "fit" data.

      2.) I'm pleased that you agree the threshold provides the real meaning of 'bit'.

      The quantum analysis (which falls out of my master equation) leads to discreteness only for 'bound' systems. A free electron (say) has no well-defined properties (other than charge, which, in my theory results from binding the particle together.) When it is bound to a proton then it has discrete orbit-determined wavelength and energy. Thus a hydrogen atom can undergo structural change to record a 'bit' of information. Many higher levels of structure can be 'in'-formed.

      3.) I will answer 3 in a later comment.

      Finally you ask about gravitational action and action-at-a-distance. The first FQXi contest I participated in was "What's ultimately possible in physics?" I conclude my essay with:

      "What is ultimately impossible is to explain gravity and consciousness; the essence of G and C (self-attraction, self-awareness, and ability to act) will forever remain mysterious. This defines the ultimate possibility of physics."

      In other words, gravity, as the souce of action, matter, and awareness will always be a mystery. But it's behavior is describable, and it's self-evolution may be 'understood'. It's essence will never be understood. Newton was surely right to tread carefully there.

      Thanks again. It's a pleasure to discuss these things with you.

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      PS. As I have provided links to two earlier essays, I may as well provide the link to my last essay, The Nature of the Wave Function. In it I present a formulation that, in Geometric Algebra terms is a 'trivector', defined to have volume and orientation but not a fixed 'shape'. It occurs to me that this in some ways describes your 'monad' as an amorphous extended entity.

      Edwin,

      I guess I would have to say that my starting point is my own existence. I know that when I look into the abyss, I can't see the bottom of it. I had this experience once, of sensing that anything which would qualify as God, would be so utterly objective and removed from any sense of experience that it would be about as meaningless to life, as life seems to be to it. I remember that it shook me up enough that I felt disoriented, but being tenacious, I kept coming back to the idea. After about three days I thought I'd finally come to grips with it. Then I got a call that my father had died. Suffice to say, I kind of left the idea alone after that and just accepted my subjectivity as who I am.

      John,

      We all start with our own existence. I still believe the essential difference in our approach is that you're trying to fit many things together while I'm trying to derive many things from one. You range from galaxies to atoms to social and economic entities and bounce all over the place. I can't tell what your starting point is, or if you have one. That is not possible in the approach I'm taking. Yet you argue as if your ideas about awareness and electromagnetism and gravity are based on scientific analysis. I think you just like playing with ideas. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's not addressing the problem I'm trying to solve. Not that you need to address it. The topic of the contest is based on the reality of information or 'bits' as compared to physical reality. Information brings in the topic of awareness, interpretation, and meaning, which has typically been avoided in physics. I'm taking advantage of the topic to present my ideas.

      It's hard to interpret the above except that you had a profound experience followed by an emotional shock. Not really sure what "just accepted my subjectivity as who I am" means. Again, we all accept ourselves. It's hard to address specific questions or comments when the topic wanders all over the place. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. There are people (I hope) who are interested in the problem of deriving our current universe from a single field as opposed to the hundreds of fields that Susskind bases his 'Multiverse' or 'Landscape' on. That is best done from specific hypotheses and equations and analyses and predictions. Otherwise it's just philosophizing and BS'ing.

      Have Fun,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      In a comment above John said, "I would say light is aware and gravity is the form it chooses to manifest."

      I did not ask John how he came to this conclusion, but his comment made me realize that it might be relevant to describe how I came to my conclusion. I did not just wake up one day and say "I think gravity is aware." Instead, after writing a long book about life (unpublished) I realized that I had effectively represented (without saying so) consciousness as a field. I then asked myself, if consciousness is a field, how does it interact physically? I knew force equations for fields, but what could the force equation for the consciousness field be? In about two hours I decided that the only thing that made sense to me was a Lorentz-like equation that depended on mass and velocity. This was for many reasons that are laid out in 'Gene Man's World' and are too lengthy for a comment.

      Although I took general relativity as a graduate student, we did not cover Einstein's weak field equations, and if I ever knew them I had forgotten them. And as an atomic and molecular physicist at NASA, I did not work in general relativity. So it was only later that I realized I had "rediscovered" the weak field equations of gravity, first proposed by Maxwell, investigated by Heaviside, and then derived from Einstein's field equations.

      The point here is that I did not come to the key consciousness equation through gravity, but instead came to the gravity equation by analysis of consciousness! I consider this significant. It is quite different from one day deciding "I think gravity is aware!" My master equation, based on one initial field, I derived later and it leads to the circulation equation and the force equation as well as a generalized quantum equation and Schrodinger's equation. Over the last seven years I have found a number of reasons to consider this a good theory and have not found good reasons to reject it. Obviously it's a hard sell.

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

        Edwin,

        I previously expressed my views that empty space is the "single field." It doesn't need explanation, since it doesn't physically consist of anything, not even a singularity. Yet this lack of physicality does give it two properties, infinite and absolute, since it isn't bounded, bent, moved, etc.

        Since this brings up the whole Big Bang argument, I was trying to avoid it.

        Yes, that overwhelming "objectivity" would be space. (I've spent a fair amount of time staring up at night.)