Dear Anton,

regarding your post in Matthew thread above,

This is similar to what I did: special relativity emerging from a more fundamental theory--the quantum automaton. Dirac is emergent, and Maxwell as well!

Best regards

Mauro

Dear Tom

Thank you very much for your beautiful compliments, and thanks for the citation of the metaphysical realism of Popper espoused from Tarski's correspondence theory of truth. I will come soon to it, since it is a major point for serious science. I also appreciate your last sentence about QT: indeed, I think that it has been rehabilitated to a new mature kind of realism.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Edwin Eugene,

even though I know that you are a realist opponent of my point of view, I very much appreciate your post, since it allows me to peek more inside the realist's mind, and enrich my arguments. From the fact that I need to tell a tale, made of real objects and persons, in order to help the reader have an intuition of what is "emergent space", you conclude that the world must be really made of objects and matter, since we cannot imagine a world made of pure software without having an intuition made of hardware. You are exactly the incarnation of a "matter-realist" (no offense). You say that, ultimately, my tale represents a process of abstraction, from real things toward mathematical notions. You should just consider that space itself in your view is pure abstraction. And the same is motion. But what is substance then? Quantum theory (QT) thought us a really stunning lesson about reality, and to what extent the lesson is amazing can be realized exactly from your post. A physical theory, QT, is now capable of destroying our most obvious intuition: that of "substance". The matter-realistic substitutes of QT, as the Bohm's theory, are indeed very poor from the materialistic point of view: particles are point-like, their trajectories are indiscernible by definition, and they change instantaneously and non-locally when we locally change the boundary. What is the Bohm's potential made of? Is it what you mean by hardware? Are such abstract point-like particles an hardware? Besides, Bohm's theory is doomed to never be able of achieving quantum field theory. We know that a better interpretation of "substance" is a force field, and that what we feel as substance is indeed empty space (the various kind of "radius" for particles are just heuristic notions). What is then pure energy? What is a field? Is it hardware?

What matter for a theory to be good is to minimize the assumptions to explain everything we see, and in the automata theory, we just assume quantum bits in interaction, and very basic principles, as homogeneity, isotropy, locality, unitariety. My point is that we shouldn't be obsessed by our matter-realism, and we should keep our minds open to simplification of theories, and to a corresponding change of our intuition of how the world is made. We should never forget that our intuition--what somebody calls our "ontology"--is only a powerful tool, and, as such, is temporary. Think in this way: you are wearing powerful glasses that hugely improve your vision, to e.g. a Tera-pixel per microsecond. But your brain is not capable of processing such a large amount of information: it synthesized it, and this is what you actually see. What is your ontology now? What you actually see? Or the full Tera-pixel image?

My ontology is a space-time being a huge 3d digital screen made of quantum pixels. You may not like this new ontology, but my seven-year-old daughter loves it. We must be more open minded, not be crystalized on our old way of looking at things, but look at reality from a new angle, and coherently pursue the new point of view. This always provides new powerful insights.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Roger,

Thank you for your post. Your compliments and your feedback are very much appreciated. Here my answer, point by point.

1A. About holism, everybody including me will agrees that the whole is not necessarily the sum of the parts. What is not so obvious is that we can still think the whole as composed of parts when properties of the whole are incompatible with any property of each part! What then does it mean to be an object? Does the notion of object make sense without a consistent notion of property?

1B. Allow me to correct your "more fundamental state" into "more fundamental entity", and there are infinitely many entities having all properties still incompatible with some properties of the whole (holism), but that, at least in principle, we can observe locally thanks to local-discriminability of QT.

2. It seems to me that we are on a similar wavelength. I just want to emphasize that I'm using the world "state" the way we use in QT. The state is one (for the whole universe), the systems are many. The specific state is not controlled by the theory: the theory provides only its evolution.

3A. Objects are usually located in space. This doesn't mean that the space location define the object: it is a property of the object. Besides, a moving object is always the same object, it is not a different object at each different time. In this sense a teleported object is the same object moved to another place. The fact that matter is the same everywhere is the indistinguishability of identical particles in QFT.

3B. We agree here that space is made by "relations between things". For me such things are quantum systems, not objects.

Nice to talk with you, Roger

Thank you again

My best regards

Mauro

Dear George,

Thank you very much for the "master as a lector and writer".

I hope my students are not completely spoiled by me.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Antony

Thank you for your very nice compliments. I really appreciate them.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Torsen,

Thank you for your very kind appreciation.

Regarding my opinion about geometry, I strongly advise you to take a look of the new geometry coming out from the Geometric-group theory of Gromov. You would love it. Though, it may look as new-age music compared to the classical one of differential manifolds. There are still differential manifolds there. Look at the book of Misha Kapovich https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~kapovich/EPR/kapovich_drutu.pdf

You would love it!

Dear Hoang,

Which was first: the egg or the chicken?

I will look at your essay

Best,

Dear Lawrence,

Thank you for your very nice compliments.

I'm not in differential geometry, but I always wondered which are the connections with the quantum automaton, since here we have indeed a nontrivial manifold emerging at the Planck scale. And I always wondered about a simple starting connections with string-theory, there must be some. But I need a string-theorist for this, and one with an open mind. As regards the experimental data putting bounds on the Planck scale are far from being definitive, since, in my opinion, they are very theory-dependent. This is one of the topics that I'm mostly interested in.

Thank you for your interesting post.

My best regards

Mauro

Looks interesting.

I will take a look at it.

This thread is giving me quite an input. It will take time to digest them

I addition top answer posts, I still have to read other essays!

Thank you for your suggestions.

Dear Patrick

thank you for your wonderful compliments.

It seems that we are on the same wavelength.

I will definitely read your essay.

Best luck to you!

Mauro

Dear Wilhelmus,

thank you for your very nice compliment.

I will definitely read your essay, also to see the different way you use for the "deamterialisation" and Plato's cave!

Before starting reading other people essays, I need to finish answering to my thread.

Thank you very much again

And best luck to you!

Mauro

Dear Giacomo,

I don't need to be convinced by you that the "it from qubit" concept is very powerful. But you manipulate it with a great expertise. I guess you will also be attracted by my essay that deals about "it from qubit" in the contextual perspective.

Best wishes,

Michel

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    • Post #55

    Giacomo,

    I have been interested in quantum codes and the related matter of sphere packing. This connects up with E8 and Leech lattice Λ24 for quantum codes. The Leech lattice embeds into a 26-dimensional Lorentzian manifold. This space has a number of interesting features, the first being it is the space of the bosonic string and the second it is automorphism group/space for the Fischer-Griess group or Monster group. The iterations of these with MINIMOG is a sort of cellular automata.

    My take on string theory is that I suspect it is too deep and profound to think that nature has absolutely nothing to do with superstrings. On the other hand, I don't believe in being dogmatic about string theory as the "TOE." There is the minority report considered to be contrary to string theory with loop quantum gravity. The odd thing about this is that it is too closely tied to pure general relativity to be completely wrong. The prospect for an inter-relationship between string/M-theory and LQG is something I have pondered at times.

    Cheers LC

    My pleasure Giacomo. If you get chance I'd be delighted if you could look at my essay, although a little different from your approach.

    Regards,

    Antony

    Process philosophers, based upon Alfred North Whitehead, have argued for an event ontology for decades. It seems both an object ontology and an event ontology must make way for the new state ontology so useful here. As an aside-As the old English cliche goes, "You are a gentleman and a scholar."

      Giacomo,

      Nicely written and argued proposition with some agreeable concepts, but I still found myself worrying about where the wardrobe doors were to step back into reality at the end. There were a number of assumptions I disagreed with, particularly the Bell's theorem implications that snipped the tethers and launched us on our fascinating trip. But you may see from my essay I have good reason for not using the same assumptions from the EPR case. I agree Bell MAY imply what you infer if correct, but, as Bell suspected I found "no boundary" between relativity and QM, finding von Neuman's logical solution correct, and consistency with Godels n-valued logic.

      I don't dispute the validity of your case, as all should be argued, and may have been happy I was unconvinced.

      But to identify those parts I very much DO agree with;.. I agree we should trust observation, but not our naive belief based 'interpretations' of the data!

      That matter is not made of 'matter', and Heraclitus of course, but at a far deeper level where NO two observable 'entities' are identical (I have a challenge out for even two snowflakes or grains of sand).

      That "motivations for adopting the new ontology must always be its additional explanatory power in accounting for the behaviour of the observed shadows on the cave walls, and, more important, the logical solidity and consistency of the theoretical principles embodied by the ontology."

      I'm not sure why you consider QM to 'rigid' to change, as 'interpretation' can always change, and there are anyway so many of them! I find that small changes to understanding of both QM and Relativity derive one directly from the other, in a 'bottom up' but holistic way ('holism' in it's original sense).

      So I propose and build an ontological construction od an uncertain but relative reality, which I'd be fascinated by your view of. I thank you very much for a well argued case for the opposite view, which is always essential to understand. Scoring of course should be for the work itself and evidence argued more than any matching of beliefs.

      Very best wishes for the contest.

      Peter

        Thank you for your long and detailed response. Your position is a lot clearer to me now.

        Regarding the lack of logical necessity of frame independence, I concede the point, but I think it is a rather weak argument. Almost nothing we think about physics is a logical necessity. After all, we can choose to think of quantum theory as a perfectly ordinary realist theory in which there are nonlocal influences if we want to. There is no logical necessity to rejecting that picture. Instead, the question is more about whether we think this violates the "spirit" of the theory, i.e. the intended meaning of the principles behind the theory. On this ground, I would argue that the relativity of simultaneity is good grounds for denying the significance of particular frames, and to go against that is a violation of the spirit of relativity. Of course, since the spirit of a theory is a rather vague concept, there is room for different people to view things differently. Ultimately, the position that leads to the best new theory is the correct one, and the future will be the judge of that, but in the meantime we need these intuitions to guide us. It seems to me that the core of our disagreement is simply that you trust the picture of the world that quantum theory gives us more than the one that relativity gives us, whereas for me it is the other way round. Neither position is a logical necessity, but my view is at least motivated by the fact that we have so may problems interpreting quantum theory but relatively few interpreting relativity. Sure, you have the argument that relativity is "not quantum", but what of it? Neither is quantum theory general relativistic.

        Dear Lawrence

        what you say about the possible connections with S/MT and cellular automata is very interesting. I should really find some string theorist explaining to me in detail. I have the book of the Becker's and Schwarz to look at, but I doubt I will find a contact point. I'd like to save some time in my theory using the experience of string theory, but I'm not sure that it will be useful, and I cannot risk to invest too much time. That's why I need somebody explaining to me things fast.

        Regarding LQG, last week I met Carlo Rovelli, and, from our discussions, I got the idea that LQC maybe closer to my way of thinking. I have indeed loops, and the emergence of space-time is from a purely relational framework. The automaton is a radically new point of view, and have little contact with S/MT and LQG.

        Cheers

        Mauro