Essay Abstract

In a refined version of Wigner's interpretation of quantum physics, the Universe is explained as a part of the mathematical world (a specific history inside Everett's many-worlds) that is distinguished by the event of being consciously perceived. Physics focuses on the mathematical side of this combination, that is a Platonic mathematical realm slightly less than infinite. Consciousness provides the substance of time and randomness (beyond their mathematical forms as 4th dimension and probability laws).

Author Bio

Sylvain Poirier (Le Havre, France) is fond of mathematics, theoretical physics and philosophy since teenage. Not finding sense in current official science curricula and teaching systems, he left institutions after a math PhD (UJF, Grenoble) and one year teaching as assistant professor of mathematics, to focus on the development of his Web sites, first in French, then in English : settheory.net offering a new design of the undergraduate foundations of mathematics and physics.

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Sylvain,

I enjoyed reading your paper because it touches on some of the same concepts I have been thinking about. I am particularly interested in your thoughts on algorithms and whether they can or can not explain human behavior. From your paper it suggests you do not believe this is possible, but are we necessarily tied to the motive of the human that leads to the action of a human or the simply the action? The actions are at least observable and measurable, and from that point of view, if we take the sequence of actions in a humans life time, while certainly some patterns exist, is it sufficiently complex to declare it random and interpretable as an algorithm?

Curious as to your thoughts,

Best

Harlan

Hello. I tried to be clear that I speak about the actions, and that they cannot be correctly simulated if the needed stuff (feelings) is not really there behind.

As I also tried to explain, it makes no sense to declare something random in the absolute, but only relatively to a specific framework or "explanation" in which we analyze a file, and only by comparing it to a range of other candidate "explanations" (such as the range of all possible algorithms that can be written and operated with given computing resources). The usual kind of framework is that of some specific algorithm (a computationally defined probability law or equivalently a compression algorithm). The file is random for an algorithm if the compressed version of the file with this algorithm is still big (as such an amount of entropy was expected with this law), and cannot be better compressed with other algorithms we can find (unless we cheat by using a more complex algorithm, which must be corrected by adding the size of the program to that of the data, a detail that also depends on the programming language, but this correction becomes insignificant as the file of observation expands), so that this optimally compressed file is "purely" (directly) random.

In my view, human behavior cannot be well "explained" (compressed) by any algorithm. As long as we only try algorithms, we only get inefficient compressions (big size of compressed files). There needs not be any favorite algorithm either : more and more complex algorithms might be found to be relatively more and more efficient, but the point is that they all remain inefficient compared to the true non-mathematical understanding of "psychological laws". We only observe "pure randomness" in the sense that it conforms to the probability law of quantum physics (without any better explanation even by psychological laws), when we analyze not human behavior but "purely physical" phenomena, where psychological preferences happen to be absent.

Dear Sylvain Poirier,

You and I have significant differences in our global understanding of reality, but I admire any serious, informed effort to formulate a theory of everything. And, of course, as we share conscious existence in a complex world, we overlap in many particulars.

I'm glad you feel free to include consciousness as a (the!) major point of your scheme. I do also, but often suppress mention of it in specific areas, as it can prove too distracting. While you ask how a 'thought' can exist without the fundamental addition of an immaterial soul inside the brain, I view consciousness as the fundamental essence of the primodial physical field, so local organisms represent high density/complexity but not "addition of a new thing" to a local structure, more a matter of degree.

Whereas I see the physical field behavior as governed by laws, the aspects of awareness and volition (free will) are not described mathematically, in agreement with your statement that a purely mathematical world with deterministic laws... would fail to include free will.

I also like your statement that "what a "probability law" rigorously does is to exclude zero-probability cases from the range of probabilities, all other cases remain possible by definition." Very nice.

And I agree with you about Penrose's and others' ideas of "quantum consciousness". I don't agree about waves and particles as dualistic opposites. I see particles as inducing waves, therefore: particle and wave, not particle or wave.

I admire that you even consider the problem of evil. I don't believe anyone has done so (explicitly) in any previous contest. Finally, you deal with a point I touched on in my 2014 essay, which is "not to understand our economic and political systems as they are, but to redesign them." Bravo! I will look at your ideas ("How to change the world..."). I especially agree that the ability to handle money (or its equivalent?) online is key. As any serious attempt to displace corrupt governments and powerful educational establishments would be opposed with both feet, my belief is that a workable system would first have to evolve as a 'game' until it became powerful enough to work as a real system. Even then it would have to run in parallel with the in-place systems for an indeterminate time. It is a terribly tough problem, but for the first time in history, the technological means are present, or almost so. By the way, Bob Shour's essay is probably relevant to this problem.

In short, I very much enjoyed your (first?) FQXi essay. I hope you do well and decide to enter more contests. I invite you to read and comment on my current essay and I think some of my previous essays may be of interest to you.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

    "I view consciousness as the fundamental essence of the primodial physical field, so local organisms represent high density/complexity but not "addition of a new thing" to a local structure, more a matter of degree."

    This is the definition of Panpsychism, it seems. I looked at this concept but I cannot agree with it, as it cannot account for the presence of totally unconscious materials, which does exist as it is what physics precisely describes. As you agree that volition is not mathematically described, you have to admit the presence of the fundamentally different "purely physical systems" on which the mathematics of quantum physics is an amazing success. What do you mean by "consciousness as the fundamental essence of the primodial physical field" ? I do not see any kind of field of consciousness spread in space and underlying the physical fields. Instead, I would see physical space and its contents like objects of divine imagination or conceptualization.

    You wrote "I don't agree about waves and particles as dualistic opposites." There is nothing here to agree or disagree about, and there is no sense in trying to specify things such as your phrase "I see particles as inducing waves". Such a debate occurred about the nature of light before the discovery of quantum physics. Now it is over, understood as an empty debate that does not belong to physics. You can check for example that is has no place in wikipedia's list of unsolved problems in physics. Remember Plato's cave allegory. Concepts of "waves" and "particles" are mere shadows, or projections, of the deeper reality of quantum fields on the wall of scientific popularization. The ghost of that former debate is only resurrected somehow by the followers of Bohmian mechanics, which I see as a bad idea.

    I don't see any sense trying to make a game version of the new network first, as I consider that any implementation is necessarily directly a real implementation (hum... I'd say unfortunately, as it can be a problem to test the money system avoiding risks of failures due to initial bugs in the code).

    I don't see any sense to fear opposition from any existing powers, as I consider them to be mere shadows of power with no ability to stop the new system once done. You may fear them as you look at them and how powerful they seem; I have my conviction as I look at the concept of the project and how its qualities will make it unstoppable once done. The only risk I fear is the risk of never finding any programmer accepting to make that software, not because of any fear, but only as they may be too lazy to care understanding the concept before they see any visible success.

    I looked at your previous essays but did not find them interesting, since, sorry but I see you plainly ignorant about modern physics. And I see no chance for meaningful contributions to serious debates on the foundations of physics from such people.

    "There is nothing more righteous than a 17-year-old."

    You may chronologically be a few years past 17, but not socially. And yet you want to redesign social networks. You say in your essay, "I describe the sketch of such a new social network, but could not find anyone else to care understanding it..." I suspect you will find that someone who has not yet learned the art of polite conversation will have a hard time convincing others that they can or should redesign society. But you're young, and have lots of time to figure out how much you don't know.

    Good luck in life, with your attitude you'll need it.

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

    Quite funny, and, I'd say, usual.

    My language is neither that of polite nor impolite conversation, but the language of reason and honesty.

    I do as I can to not be impolite, but when people define "politeness" to mean pretending that their view is wise when it clearly isn't, then even though I wish I could do otherwise I cannot escape this dilemma : either being honest, or being mistaken as "impolite".

    No matter if you like to believe it or not, the fact I hardly learned in my life is that essentially all the troubles I went through resulted from trying to trust people, assuming they were wise and trying to work with them or following their advice, while they were in fact dumb or mad. I am just too naive and confident towards people in order to manage. Many things would have gone better for me if I just understood from the start how mad they were, however the problem for me is that such an assumption is extremely unnatural, so that despite all experience I continue falling in more troubles by trying to give people undeserved trust over and over again.

    I am aware of the huge troubles resulting from the domination of this world by hypocrites who have so big ego problems (the ego problem of assuming that the biggest evil in the world consists of any hypothesis that someone might think better than themselves, which they misinterpret as the sin of inflated ego of others, since it puts a shadow on their own), which I have to cope with if I want to try bringing some contributions on this planet. However the crude fact is here: the effective progress of science requires to use the language and care for truth and reason, not that of hypocrisy.

    If you reply that sciences do not need impoliteness either, well of course, scientists usually do not seem impolite as long as their discussions remain between scientists all able of reason, where nobody has the crazy idea of misinterpreting truth as an insult. But this happens precisely because discussions take place in a community of selected rational people where hypocritical idiots (cranks) were left out. The only way to find useful partners for genuine work, does not consist in attracting crowds of hypocrites who unfortunately aren't able to contribute any good work anyway, no matter if I wish it or not, but it would consist in finding a nonzero number of people who are actually serious thinkers, and who therefore are not in need of any sweet lies and hypocritical language to understand and find the motivation to do the work. Such people may be unfortunately hard to find indeed but even if I wished to, there would be no way to make things work otherwise.

    More comments on this topic here, there and there.

    And if you think that by being "more polite" it would be possible to better succeed attracting useful partners to do works that can change the world, well, what are you waiting for ? Just go and do it, I'll be very pleased to see the world changing for the better without having to bother working on it myself. You are even free to choose between stealing my plans if they may be good, or developing your own otherwise.

    In reply to Eckard Blumschein's "objection to the neglect of the distinction between past and future" as he asked in another thread.

    I agree there is indeed such a distinction to make between the past which is fixed and the future which is not determined yet, as I did in my essay.

    The problem was to specify the source of this distinction that gives the concept of time its special substance, and what role it plays. As I explained, I see 2 kinds of time which are independent but similar to each other. One is in the foundations of mathematics, and the other is in consciousness which is the source of existence of the physical universe. Only the latter is related to the time of physics but it only parallels it, not being directly involved in its fundamental laws.

    In your writings, you presented this as a topic of divergence between (for example) Einstein who ignores this subtlety of time, and Shannon who takes it into account. In my viewpoint there is no real opposition here, only the fact that not the same concept of time is relevant to different aspects of reality. Both Shannon and Einstein are right in their respective fields of study.

    Einstein focuses on fundamental physics. In fundamental physics, time only appears as a geometric dimension among others indeed, with no need of any distinction between past, present and future. Why would it be a problem ? The amazing success of theoretical physics shows that there is no problem with its block model of time. But this "only" concerns theoretical physics, which does not account for all aspects of reality.

    The time of thermodynamics and information theory, considered by Shannon, belongs to another aspect of reality, outside the strict scope of theoretical physics. It is a time of finite mathematics, which is rebuilt at a higher structural level of the universe (away from its foundation) from a combination of finite mathematical data (physical states) and conscious time. See the diagram on page 7 of my essay to see what I mean.

      "different aspects of reality"? Doesn't reason compel us to trust in the uniqueness of the reality of just one universe? I cannot blame somebody who is at the beginning of his life in science if he at least pretends trusting in G. Cantor, Einstein, and possibly God. Incidentally, I already distrusted Stalin. To me being a reality is a reasonably conjectured property that we may attribute to the entity of something particular, even to a feeling, a thought, a chance, and a risk. While an existing plan of a building must not be confused with the building itself, both may belong to reality but not to different aspects of it.

      We are already agreeing on that past and future are reasonable notions. I repeatedly added that the present is not a state in between, and I hope you will agree on this too although the idol spoke of "past, present and future".

      I don't belittle the distinction between past and future as just a subtlety. I agree on "2 kinds of time which are independent but similar to each other". I disagree if you are attributing one of them to "the foundations of mathematics" and the other one to "consciousness which is the source of existence of the physical universe". I don't see any justification for the latter speculation. What about the foundation of mathematics, I dealt with many facets of the belonging history of paradoxes and got aware of brutally ignored deficits. Even if most mathematicians hesitate admitting these deficits; the putative foundations of mathematics are only partially self-consistent. Comprehensive self-consistence is obviously still missing in mathematics and consequently in speculative physics, too.

      You are using the notion "fundamental physics" instead of theoretical or mathematical physics. Some prudent experts compared mathematics with a solid building that apparently levitates. They meant set theory did not contribute to the work of those including Cauchy, Galilei, Gauss, Kant, Leibniz, and Newton who were listed by Cantor himself as enemies of his actual infinite and nonetheless distinguishable from each other numbers. We may add the contributions by Archimedes, Euclid, Euler, and virtually all other important ones who definitely did also not use set theory.

      Aren't measurement and compelling reasoning the true foundation of physics? My distinction is quite clear; only past time can be measured.

      You seem to belong to those who still consider scholastics as foundational. Otto de Guericke's attitude led to steam engine and electricity.

      Eckard

      7 days later

      I'm not sure what you mean by "abstract". Some people use this word to qualify what they don't understand and are not familiar with, and thus want to dismiss as unreal because it seems to them unreal, far from their universe.

      A universe of pure feelings would clearly be different from the universe we are in. Therefore, we aren't familiar with it, so that, simply for this reason, this sort of universe does not seem concrete to us. But I don't see here any point to qualify it as "abstract" as if it made objective sense.

      You can describe what you see as real using your usual human language. An animal hearing your story will not understand it, and will thus dismiss it as "abstract" and "unrealistic" because it is "incomprehensible" to him.

      Out of deference to American English Dictionaries, I try my best to use the correct definition of the word "abstract" included in one of them whenever I can. Abstract is an adjective and it means "existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence."

      You do not know what the word means. I am a real person and I used the word correctly. Only abstract people could abstractly use the word "abstract" to abstractly qualify what they did not understand or were abstractly unfamiliar with and thus wanted to dismiss as unreal because it seemed to them unreal, far from their universe. If I did not know what the word "abstract" meant, or if I was unfamiliar with it, why would I qualify it?

      Because you do not know what the word "abstract" means, you cannot possibly know anything about reality.

      All the best anyway,

      Joe Fisher

      You are still not getting away from my objection. You are making imaginary sense of a word that you fictionally define by playing with synonyms which have the exact same problem of lack of definiteness as what your pretend to define. Indeed what do you mean by "physical" or "concrete" ? I challenge you to make any objective sense of these words, that would not ultimately come down to "being familiar to you personally", or "looking like what you usually find in your universe". (In my text I only call "physical" the precise things we happen to call this name in our universe, but this concept can become irrelevant, together with the word "abstract" in another very different universe). If what you find in this universe seems concrete to you, then what inhabitants of another universe find in their universe, will seem "concrete" to them as well, no matter that it does not seem concrete to you. And they would equally dismiss as "abstract" the things that you call "concrete" because it is not familiar to them.

      I described a similar psychological flaw in another text.

      • [deleted]

      • Post #13

      I am not fictionally defining the word abstract. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it the way I used it. The Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary defines it that same way as does every edition of Websters Dictionary. Please stop deluding yourself.

      Patiently yours,

      Joe Fisher

      The job of the Oxford English Dictionary is to provide a vocabulary describing the way things usually look like and that is good enough for common people to discuss everyday life, not the way things ultimately are according to the top modern scientific understanding, which is actually very different. It is not its job to make its vocabulary in perfect agreement with the discoveries of modern physics on the nature of reality, nor to specify how things in completely different universes can be qualified. Your way to qualify things indicates that you remain stuck to the physical realism of classical physics, which the paradoxes of quantum physics refuted. You need to initiate yourself to these paradoxes.

      Dear Sir,

      We thoroughly enjoyed your excellent essay. Here are certain elaborations of your concepts.

      The halting problem (what can/cannot be computed) arises due to a wrong question: "How long are you willing to wait"? We are familiar with irrational numbers, which are mostly non-computable. Yet, we know that they hover around a limited range. We choose as precise a value we want and proceed with it. Thus, the right question should have been: "How precise we want to be"?

      The other problem is equating language to a set of strings over an alphabet. In our essay in this forum, we have defined language as the "transposition of information to another system's CPU or mind by signals or sounds using energy (self communication is perception). The transposition may relate to a fixed object/information. It can be used in different domains and different contexts or require modifications in prescribed manner depending upon the context". In our 2013 essay, we had said: "In perception, these tasks are done by the brain. Data are the response of our sense organs to individual external stimuli. Text is the excitation of the neural network in specific regions of the brain. Spreadsheets are the memories of earlier perception. Pictures are the inertia of motion generated in memory (thought) after a fresh impulse, linking related past experiences. Voice is the disturbance created due to the disharmony between the present thought (impulse) and the stored image (this or that, yes or no). Video is the net thought that emerges out of such interaction. Software is the memory. Hardware includes the neural network. Bytes and bits are the changing interactions of the sense organs (including sound that produces words - strings) with their respective fields generated by the objects evolving in time." The problem arises when we treat the language as a set of strings. The elements of a set have fixed value. But the words in a sentence can have various meanings depending upon the context.

      The unpredictability of behaviors arises from our method of measurement, where we can measure only limited aspects over limited time, even though everything perpetually evolves in time due to interconnectedness and interdependence of everything with every other thing. Because of these limitations, a physical universe has to be described by a probabilistic law. You are correct also regarding past and future. Please note that future is strictly ordered in a sequence based on present. But past can be related to present in various random ways. This signifies the arrow of time. Your reference to the bigger set is interesting. We have also used the same concept along with Russell's paradox in our essay in this forum.

      You have correctly described that mathematics is only the quantitative description of Nature, whereas physics describes its qualitative aspects. You are also absolutely correct that "Consciousness can explore mathematics, but mathematics cannot describe consciousness".

      However, there are many problems with relativity and there is no standard interpretation of quantum physics. Many of its interpretations are contrary to observation elsewhere. Thus, there is a need for introspection and review of the present theories based on the presently available information. Unfortunately, most papers are building on "established theories" even though the latest observations prove it to be not true.

      The points you raise at page 7 are interesting and important. We can explain it all. But this is not the forum for that. Just to give one hint: pain may be in the legs or hands, but it is experience in our brains just like a tiger may be confronted in the jungle, but fear in our mind induces reactions in our body. Thus, the cognizer is different from the physical cause. The content of cognition as "I know ..." remains invariant in all cognitions. That it is universal is proved from the fact that language conveys the same information to the other. By this we are not talking about religion or God, though we are hinting at a universal meeting point which you may call Scientific God.

      Regards,

      basudeba

        I am a common real person. Would you care to provide me with the contact information of one of the top modern real scientist who would have a different understanding of the word "abstract" than the one I, and the Oxford English Dictionary offered?

        Cheers,

        Joe Fisher

        6 days later

        Dear Sylvain,

        I have not read your essay but I saw your comment elsewhere and I suspect it would have a geometric flavor. It is therefore a must read for me in the next one or two days. Then intellectual missiles may follow :)

        Regards,

        Akinbo

          You wrote : The halting problem (what can/cannot be computed) arises due to a wrong question: "How long are you willing to wait"?

          This is not a wrong question. At first sight it may look not very serious, like the liar paradox or the Berry paradox, but further examination of the foundations of mathematics shows that it is crucial and cannot be eliminated. Namely, once added up Goedel's completeness and incompleness theorems, we discover that the provability of some formulas happens to be undecidable, as the question of their provability, that is the "existence of a finite proof", begs the question "what is finiteness ?" which cannot be defined in the absolute as there are mathematical "universes" where a given formula (that we can write !) is "provable" but the length of its shortest "proof" is a nonstandard number, that the system mistakes as finite according to its definitions but which is actually infinite. In this universe, the proof "exists" but "the time we need to wait" to find it is infinite. If we wait long and do not find it, it may be because the time we need to wait has non-standard length, i.e. is infinite, so that we are right to stop searching and conclude we have no proof (as we are sure to do it before non-standard times) instead of taking the abstract "existence of a much longer proof" as meaningful, whose truth value in a non-standard universe does not conform to the real truth about provability.

          Then, your remark about irrational numbers and precision is a particular of computation that does not answer the halting problem in its generality, in case we were interested with the halting problem in its generality.

          The precise properties of quantum physics refuted since long ago the naive classical expectations that unpredicability only came from the limited precision of measurements. Such explanations cannot account for the precise form of quantum randomness which turned out to be irreducible in such terms.

          "mathematics is only the quantitative description of Nature, whereas physics describes its qualitative aspects" This is not what I meant. I mentioned the hypothetical concept of a universe with only qualities and no quantities, but this is not the one where we live.

          "there are many problems with relativity" : it depends. There are many people who imagine much more problem with relativity than there really are because they failed to understand it.

          "there is no standard interpretation of quantum physics. " If you paid attention to my text you would have seen that I offer a precise interepretation of quantum physics, which seems to me by far the most coherent, and in agreement with observations.

          I have ideas in geometry indeed and how to use it to understand theoretical physics, but this was not the topic of my essay, as I had more important and on-topic things to put there instead. You can find in my site some of my ideas on geometry and its axiomatization, and how to understand Special Relativity and quantum physics in geometric terms. There are also algebraic aspects of geometry, such as more deeply using duality in linear algebra, seen as a particular case of a much more general concept of duality in algebra involving the concept of polymorphism, and giving a clean introduction to the formalism of tensors. Long ago I also wrote other things on geometry in French (on affine, projective and conformal geometries, and geometries with a constant curvature). Unfortunately, I am still far from completing and cleaning up all things I wish to write on the topic, as I had many other things to write on, such as in the foundations of maths and in philosophy.

          Dear Sylvain,

          I was thinking the focus of your essay would be geometry based on your comments elsewhere. A thought provoking piece destined to do well in the competition.

          Just one question based on the essay's focus: Is very, very, very high probability the same as certainty? If not, i.e. if 99.9999% is not 100% then should this not be of some relevance in mathematics and physics?

          Is it very, very, very probable that 2 3 = 5 or is it a certainty?

          When adding 2 and 3 apples together, can any of the apples perish as you go about doing your summation to see what you get?

          When adding 2 quantum particles to 3 of same, is it more or less likely the results you will get will be same as for apples? Give this a thought.

          All the best in the competition.

          Regards,

          Akinbo