Dear Charles,

A rich presentation and well researched. From my biased perspective I see you identifying the answer to the question posed in this essay contest but skirting around it with ?trepidation, ?fear or just being circumspect and careful. Note that I write from my biased position.

But do you contemplate the possibility that Res Extensa can represent one of the two binary states, while Res Mensa represents the other?

Rene Descartes, calls both substances,"res extensa" being an "extended thing" while "res cogitans" exists only in thought. Further, both are PRIMITIVE and ORIGINAL. Then, you mention... "the assertion of atomicity--of UNDIVIDABLE WHOLENESS".

And again, you say, "With somewhat more clarity than Wheeler, von Weizsäcker has reached the perspective that information (A BINARY DIGIT) is the COMMON BASIS UNDERLYING both matter (RES EXTENSA/ CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE) and mind (RES COGITANS/ MENTAL SUBSTANCE).

These statements bring me satisfaction and joy. When you read the first 8 paragraphs ONLY of Leibniz(most of the rest are spiritual) and my essay, you will realize why your essay has thrilled me. It supports my suspicion and claim!

Very good. Lets do a bit of dialectic and reductio ad absurdum arguments when you must have gone through my essay. You profoundly understand what It from Bit actually should mean.

Regards and best of luck!

Akinbo

*All capitals mine.

    Dear Akinbo,

    I have just taken the opportunity to read your essay and have enjoyed it very much! It is beautifully and lucidly written, and it provides a valuable excursion through the various conceptualizations of the monad. Perhaps you are aware that Wheeler compared his 'elementary quantum phenomenon' to Leibniz's monad in his essay, "The Computer and the Universe", Int.J. Theo. Phys., V. 21, N. 6/7, 1982

    The overwhelming issue for any discrete space-time theory such as the one that you have advanced is to find the road to quantum mechanics. If someone can find a way to do that, they will have done a great thing!

    With regard to my submission, I felt that I could not possibly say every thing that I would have wanted to say in just nine pages, so I have presented an argument that leads to the door of an ongoing exploration of the possibility of formulating a psycho-physically neutral language. Interested readers can pursue this through my last cited reference.

    I will be traveling for the next few days and off-line, but I will be happy to continue the discussion that you initiated when I return on July 5.

    Cheers,

    Charles

    Dear Reader,

    I will be away traveling for the next few days and unable to respond to your posts. Thank you in advance for your interest in my submission. I will be happy to respond to your remarks when I return on July 5.

    Sincerely,

    Charles Card

    4 days later

    Charles,

    If given the time and the wits to evaluate over 120 more entries, I have a month to try. My seemingly whimsical title, "It's good to be the king," is serious about our subject.

    Jim

    Dear Charles

    I am also admirer of Wolfgang Pauli.

    I submit several years ago article devoted some his quote.

    "What Wolfgang Pauli did mean?"

    http://vixra.org/abs/0907.0022

    Did you familiar with this?

    Regards

    Yuri

      7 days later

      Dear Charles,

      I am impressed by the breadth of the historical context that you laid out surrounding the contest theme. Several others had mentioned and compared von Weizsaecker's contributions to the debate, but yours is the most extensive I have read. Given that evidently many different physicists worked on it and its development spanned several decades, I wonder why it was never developed beyond essentially being the blueprint for a theory. There may be lessons for us to draw from knowing the reasons.

      I also found the comparison of the missing 'additional ingredient' in Spekkens' toy theory with quinian bootstrap surprising, though I must admit that I am skeptical that they are the same. The former seems like a leap in a territory that is much more abstract than that which characterizes the context of the leap in the latter.

      I was originally attracted to reading your essay because the title sounded to like a contradition, and I wanted to find out how you would "pull off" considering information as a substance. Your pointing out the most basic etymological meaning of substance, however, has clarified things for me.

      My own view is that a fundamental message of the Born rule is that our current concept of "substance" (in the usual sense) is not sufficiently differentiated and if we could realize this, we would come to regard it vs. bit a false dichotomy.

      In any event, I found your essay and its elucidation of the historical context of this debate very interesting.

      All the best,

      Armin

        Hi Charles,

        I love the delightful weaving of geometry, algebra, psychology and history you have created with your essay! Congratulations for an excellent presentation.

        You conclude:

        "When Descartes partitioned human understanding of reality into separate domains, he did so with good reason and with good effect...However, his simplifying assumption must now be seen to be a first-order approximation whose limitations have been reached, and a new understanding entailing greater complexity must follow in its place."

        In my own research, I have found that geometric algebra and quaternion representations are useful, and the 3-sphere central, to a workable cosmological picture. Now you have me wondering if they might serve as well for mental representation as for physical representation.

        While I did not have the space in my Software Cosmos essay to dwell on the possibilities for mental representation, I think that my model affords (with its unobserved "implicate" space) a venue for such. In any case, I conclude with "It from Bit and Bit from Us", meaning that the source of things is information but the source of that information is Mind.

        Information about the physical world is arranged hierarchically into objects of increasing size. Are minds arranged the same way? Does an individual mind partake of a species-mind (responsible for instinctual knowledge) and does a species-mind partake of a greater mind (capable of, say cellular functioning)? If so, then the underlying invisible fractal mechanisms used to structure the physical realm that I describe might also be serving the mental realm. At least, that would be my guess.

        Hugh

          Hi Charles,

          What a wonderful paper!

          What a surprising correspondence between Wheeler's idea of It from Bit and von Weizsacker's idea of Ur!

          And what a new connection you have discovered between these and Pauli's concept of ``psycho-physical neutral" !

          This is a very very well written paper. I must give it a high score.

          Sincerely,

          Gary Glenn Miller

            Hello Charles,

            Very, very nicely written essay which taught me a lot of historical development in this field, so it was extremely relevant and interesting!

            I like the way you set the stage for the humanity's ongoing quest and it felt like a challenge to motivate the reader into physics - which is great.

            Reminded me a little of Brief History of Time with an It from Bit slant.

            Well done and all the best for the contest!

            Take a look at my essay if you get chance. Information in the context of Black Holes, geometry, entropy & Fibonacci!

            Kind regards,

            Antony

              Hi Yuri,

              You can find a discussion of Pauli's statement in which you are interested in Suzanne Gieser's "The Innermost Kernel", page 330. I hope this helps.

              Thanks for your interest in my essay.

              Charles

              Hi Armin,

              Thank you for your thoughtful response to my essay! I understand your skepticism with regard to the possibility that Spekken's 'additional conceptual ingredient' and Carey's 'conceptual leap' are the same, or perhaps are pointing to some factor or aspect held in common. In my essay I've reframed and refocused the discussion of it, bit, and information and have arrived at this conjecture rather than at a 'solution' which I do not believe is at hand. It would be wonderful if this competition proves me wrong! In any event, there is more that can be obtained as background to my conjecture by exploring the associated reference, the last one listed in the paper. After reading your paper, I've come to understand why you wanted to explore my usage of the term 'substance' and why it may have caused some initial confusion, as it would for most people who commonly associate 'substance' with 'physical stuff'. 'Substance' as I have used it harks back to Aristotle's work.

              I must say, I really enjoyed your paper, as well! Your discussion of 'patterns of distinction' and of 'actualizable objects' are particularly insightful for me. One question that I think it would be nice for you to engage is, "Why does the background of a binary distinction require a complex state space such as the Block sphere associated with the qubit?"

              Thanks again, Charles

              Hi Hugh,

              First of all, let me say how much I enjoyed your essay. I found that it was a well thought-out, creative response to the competition topic. You have a very interesting compilation of relevant references to your stated intention of constructing software for a digital universe. As well, I really value your appeal to geometric algebra in a number of instances for the theoretical underpinning of your approach. I do believe that there are some general/generalizable aspects of GA that may prove relevant to discussions of mental structures and representations, but I think that it would be premature to try to make too much of these possibilities at this point. If you care to pursue where my thoughts have largely been concentrated, you might wish to check out the last reference cited in my paper.

              Thanks again for your interest,

              Charles

              Hi Gary,

              Thanks again for all of your support and encouragement for my work. I trust you will have seen some of the influences of our many years of conversations in what I have written. I look forward to the continuing conversation!

              I truly enjoyed your paper, too. You tabled many wonderful topics, and I hope that you will take the opportunity to expand upon them outside of the confines of this essay competition. I know that you have much to say that will require a monograph (or two)to encompass it.

              Cheers,

              Charles

              Hi Antony,

              Thanks for your interest in my paper. I'm glad that it was useful to you. I have a warm spot in my heart for logarithmic spirals and golden numbers, and I look forward to reading your paper.

              Thanks again, Charles

              We know that, historically, conceptual discontinuities do provoke strong, sometimes even violent reactions from individuals whose views of reality are threatened simply by the contemplation of the possibilities of the discontinuities. Consider as examples in mathematics, the discovery of the incommensurability of the side and diagonal of a square by the Pythagoreans (irrational numbers), the possibility and potency of negative square roots (imaginary numbers),and in physics, the departures from Newtonian common sense and outright paradoxes brought forth by special and general relativity and quantum physics. In each case, a beautiful vision of the world is destroyed, but we have reason to hope, again as we have learned from historical examples, that if we persist, an even more beautiful view of the world will eventually arise in its place.

              Hi Mr. Gupta,

              Thank you for your interest in my essay. In fact, my essay is based on a large body of well-established experimental results. Consult the literature, for example, to see the variety of delayed-choice experiments carried out since 1980. On the other hand, consult Carey's work (one of many available sources) for a multitude of references to rigorously structured experiments carried out in the cognitive sciences. Enjoy!

              Cheers, Charles

              Dear Charles,

              I have read with allowances for your analytical essay written lively language. World contests FQXi - it contests new fundamental ideas, new deep meanings and new concepts. In your essay deep analysis in the basic strategy of Descartes's method of doubt, given new ideas and conclusions.

              You cite fiducial thoughts of great researchers to «grasp» the nature of the information:

              "Information may not be just what we learn about the world. It may be what makes the world. "( John Wheeler) . And Weizsacker, who regards information as "a quantitative measure of form," and «Experiment and theory, as we know them today, no longer provide any reason to postulate matter and mind (res extensa and res cogitans) as

              independent "realities," ie, as substances in the classical meaning of the

              word. Form is not an additional third, but their common basis.»

              You give great ideas to overcome the broken world of Descartes through the method Descartes: «When Descartes partitioned human understanding of reality into separate domains, he did so with good reason and with good effect. The conceptual simplification achieved by his cut became the means by which the inquiry that we call modern science was able to progress, and revolution upon revolution followed, repeatedly transforming the lives and understanding of humanity. However, his simplifying assumption must now be seen to be a first-order approximation whose limitations have been reached, and a new understanding entailing greater complexity must follow in its place.» Totally agree with you. I'll put a rating of "happy nine" ... Please read my essay. I think we are the same in the spirit of our research.

              Best regards,

              Vladimir

                Hi Charles,

                Thank you for reference Suzanne book.

                Yuri

                Dear Charles,

                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

                  Dear Charles,

                  One of the most relevant essays from philosophy I have seen in this FQXi contest. Spekkens is great. Do you consider Grothendieck's 'dessins d'enfants' as

                  a conceptual leap?

                  http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1789

                  All the best,

                  Michel