Between Uncertainty and Entity by Chidi Idika

Chidi,

Your game is up. I hereby denounce you as an alien being. I think the laws of this contest, like those of science (though unspecific on this matter) can be interpreted to exclude aliens. It wasn't your name that gave the deception away but your easy coherent, intuitive and almost complete understanding of nature, way ahead of what we locals call "science".

Almost no human trained in physics could see; ..."The real problem is that science has gone full cycle to become like religion-consulting some "oracle"." But the final give-away was, in the face of your clear comprehension of how the universe works, your attempt to perpetuate the belief in spookiness and voodoo, i.e.;

"And the even more disturbing thing is there is NO known logical alternative to the position currently held by quantum theory."

OK, perhaps it's for good reason. Perhaps we're still too much of a danger to ourselves to be allowed to know. I dare say you're right. But just for the record, and just between you and I, I have found, so know, that there IS a logical alternative. You see we're really not ALL quite that dim. Perhaps you should go back and tell them. Can you give me any good reason why I shouldn't expose you in the meantime?

You can verify the QM solution for yourself by reading my essay. You'll recognise it immediately. Right before our eyes was an interesting place to hide it. Of course few others will be able to 'see' or remember it even now it's exposed, as it's against their beliefs, but I'm happy to listen to your advice. Is it too early to sew the seeds, and to unify physics. Would that become too powerful and dangerous a tool for man in our present half evolved state? In 2010 I estimated we may have the vision by 2020 (see 2011 essay) but is that too early?

Thanks in anticipation of your advice.

Peter

OK I'll reveal my identity as long as you promise I won't be abducted or have the standard neutering of the critical bits of my neural network.

(Actually the lack of shoes was a bit of a giveaway too).

Best wishes

Peter

Hi Chidi,

Although I thought your essay was a little wordy, I thought you made so many good points:

"The point is that entities are "gaps" in the scheme of things"

"nothing can serve as the unit for describing all the gamut of observables known to man quite as accurately as man himself"

"at the most rigorous level man is its very own uncertainty/principle"

"This selfishness seems to mark humanity out from much of the observable world; man wants not just to steer itself but the entirety of nature."

"what is a virtual entity doing in an a science that prides itself on being falsifiable?"

"So what happens if by some strange twist ideal man is actually the natural unit of action? My guess is that we are humbled, we will tend to want to conserve nature; for then it gets too clear and demonstrable that the first casualty in any of nature's imbalance is us."

"Must we always want to manipulate or "steer" nature or shall we at some point learn to willingly give in to nature against our own personal (local) interest? Shall we always search for a cure to some yet incurable disease or shall we rather not cure but seek to change our life style? These are sad questions; they are not about humanity's interest per se, they are about nature as some indivisible whole i.e. some "charge conservation law". In this scheme nature determines whose ox gets gored. Or does it? Man wants to pretend that nature does not lord over him but nature does one way or the other, sooner than later."

"Humanity does need to really technically appreciate the "self" as a valid state of nature."

"I see a situation where the laws of nations, states and communities are organic (forecast and then endured as are weather conditions and hurricanes today. No more rain making!) Men making laws for men should be looked upon much later in our civilization with disdain. Nations will forecast (seek) their laws not make them."

Well done, and very relevant.

Lorraine

Chidi,

I'm very glad you got to my essay and thanks for your comments. I'll answer there. Make sure the new shoes are big enough, I have a pair which are almost size 11 which I'll give to you. I gave up barefoot physics due to the hot sand and the need to move on. It seems many found cooler sand a foot down so are chilling their brains with it.

If you get a mo I offered definitions of detector, observer and measurement in last years essay (scored 2nd but no choccies) which I think is consistent with that of your own species. Do advise.

Very Best wishes.

Peter

(hold tight for a moment)

Hi Chidi,

Excellent! I look forward to reading your essay too. I agree with you about the strain of reading so many essays which naturally comes from sending out ~150 automated messages, but I think I will be up to the task after my semester ends. I assure you also that all the rest of our communication will be right out of my fingertips.

When you do get around to reading my essay, I suggest also reading some of the especially good conversations on my page. I highly recommend my exchanges with Michael Allan, Tommy Anderberg, and Robert de Neufville.

Lastly, I can tell from your bio that you are a fascinating person that I would like to get to know. I hope you do very well here, and that you create the life you have been dreaming of (not just on television).

Warmly,

Aaron

Hi Chidi,

I find it difficult enough communicating in one language - it can't be easy communicating in 2 or 3!

Re "wordy": I just meant that as I was reading your essay I thought that the same ideas expressed in fewer words might have clarified your ideas for me, the reader. But that's just me, and perhaps this is your natural writing style.

Best Wishes,

Lorraine

Chidi,

This is an intriguing essay. You seem to be trying to slice through the Gordian Knot of modern sensibilities, but still end up tangled in them, as the light you sense shining through doesn't quite explain itself. So you trail tendrils of logic.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that energy, life, consciousness is dynamic. Yet the concepts, words, models we have to describe it have to be static. So we assign meaning to that which is determinate, set, settled, organized, etc. Then everything in motion must be meaningless, indeterminate, unsettled, uncertain, organized only to the extent its motion can be quantified by direction and speed, rate, amplitude, etc. Even a moving car has no exact location.

Yet once we establish a fact, it quickly recedes into the past, as new facts keep sprouting up like weeds as all must ride those waves of action. We wish for humanity to be riding some monster wave of its own making and still steering it, but the more we push it and make it bigger, the less control we have, as it is driven from below and those on top only ride it.

Regards,

John Merryman

Chidi,

You do weave a lot of ideas into what seems to be a general theme, so I wouldn't pose a question, so much as make an interpretation. In my own entry, I distinguish between energy and information and go on to propose awareness as a form of energy, always expanding, moving, seeking. While knowledge is the form and information it encounters and gives it shape. Much as energy of youth pushes out, while knowledge of age presses in.

So what you might describe as certainty, or a classical view, I would see as the structure of information and knowledge which presses in on and forms our awareness. Yet without that essential perception pushing it, it would just collapse, like mass collapsing into a gravitational vortex, but in reality is always radiating energy out to hold it constant.

Right now the reality described by quantum theorists is like a cult, where you have to speak in the secret language to join, but eventually we will realize it is describing that reality we experience everyday, but which science thought it could distill down to some classic model, yet keeps chasing its tail trying to make it whole and now just obsesses over various contradictions between theory and assumption.

As I said, even a moving car doesn't have an exact location, because if it did, it wouldn't be moving and the same applies to the subatomic particles making it up. If they were not moving, the car wouldn't exist, so they all must have a blurred position and that is normal. The fallacy was assuming there has to be some exact quality to everything that we can measure and fit into that classical, deterministic view.

One of the points I keep making is that time is not so much a vector from past to future, as it is the process by which future becomes past. For example, the earth doesn't really travel some fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns. It is only because we exist as points of perception and so experience it as a sequence of events, that we think this 'point of the present' moves. Obviously it is the events being created and dissolved.

This makes time much more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude. With temperature, we think of the average of lots of velocities/amplitudes, but with time we think of the specific measures of frequency, since we experience events as singular. Yet there is no universal rate of change, simply the overall effect of lots of little changes. That is why different clocks, like on the ground and a GPS satellite, can run at different speeds, yet stay in the same system.

The faster clock doesn't move into the future quicker. Since it ages/burns quicker, it falls into the past faster.

Events are not determined before they happen, because all the input only occurs when they do happen. Probability precedes actuality.

I could go on, but the point I'm trying to make is that physics has created an elaborate structure on some questionable foundations and you seem to be making a lot of sense in trying to relate what they say to how the world really works and that requires clarity of vision.

We all are tangled by this information. Even the words we use are a form of entanglement, but we try to see into them and sense their deeper meanings.

Regards,

John

PS - Thanks again for reviewing my essay, Chidi. I'll be rating yours (along with the others on my review list) some time between now and May 30. All the best, and bye for now, - Mike

Hi Chidi,

I am trying to catch up with all the essays to read. Yours had spirit, and I like that. However, I will admit that it lost me. In my opinion, every sentence should be completely grasped by the reader, before another one is given. If I encounter more than two or three sentences where that doesn't happen--I get lost. Now, other readers above didn't mention that effect, so maybe it's not a problem, but I think you'll agree that it's a writer's job is to include and captivate as many people as possible.

My rating should have brought you up a bit, as you deserve. However, to get a better flavor for what you were expressing, I ended up having to rely upon the work that Lorraine Ford did to extract quotations she felt were valuable. Remember her first comment? She said the article was a little "wordy." I feel that many of the sentences could have been presented more simply, and with greater effect.

In my rating comments, I offer what I think will help a given author. I hope that my comments will be perceived as helpful, the way they were intended, and I hope I haven't at all offended you in the process. I commend you and thank you for offering your thoughts for the betterment of humanity. All the best!

Warmly,

Aaron

Hi Chidi,

I read your essay (and now that we have an extra week the pressure is off a bit). Your essay has interesting point and I will touch on some of them below as questions or comments. However, on e general comment (which I see was already picked up by some other commentators above is that your tried to put too much into the essay so that it is hard to follow the logic thread at points.

But there were interesting observations in the essay which I would like to point out to ask questions on.

The first thing is actually a question as to what you mean on page 2 by "no two [quantum] measurements can yield quite the same results." If you measure the energy states of a hydrogen atom that is swimming in some thermal background, which can with some probability excite the hydrogen with some probability to various excited states, then as you measure the hydro gen atom at some points you will (with some probability) measure the hydrogen to be in the same energy state. Thus there are cases where the measurement of a quantum system will show that the system is in the same eigenstate. Now maybe you mean that no two fermions can be in the same quantum state? This is true but then it is not clear that this is what you mean. In any case the statement is a bit unclear and maybe wrong.

I like the story about the chimps -- it reminds we of a similar story of a mathematician and his wife who were to leave on a trip but they wanted to check that they had the correct number of suitcase -- three suitcases. The mathematician would come back saying there were two suitcases and the wife came back with thee. When they both went back to count the suitcases together the mathematician starts "zero, one, two -- see I told you there were two."

You talk about the fine-tuning of cosmology/origin stories of physicist/creationist. I was not clear of the point here, but one ting to note is that physicist general look for ways to avoid fine-tuning (for example inflation is supposed to avoid of the the fine-tuning issues of cosmology -- although it ends up introducing some other issues similar to fine-tuning). For a creationist fine tuning if fine, great even since in the fine tuning they can see "the hand of God".

At several points in the essay you use h_0 which you say is the "threshold potential of the action potential in man precisely 55 millivolts." Where does this come from?

Lastly your mention "Humanity is going to get technology (like lie detectors!)". In fact there was some article a few years back about an FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) "lie detector". This device as I understood would give you a real time MRI image and by looking at blood flow in the brain you could tell if a person was lying or not. This was supposed to work 100% as long as the person knew they were lying. If they were delusional or didn't remember the act they were lying about. But if the lie were purposeful then this FMRI method was supposed to be fool proof.

There are some good issues raised in your essay. My main suggestion would have been to focus it more narrowly (this is hard since the question is broad and the page/word limit is strict). Best of luck with the contest.

Best,

Doug