The Hole at the Center of Creation by George Gantz

Jonathan Dickau

To be clear..

1. Oneness. 2. Openness. 3. As-ifness. 4. Multiplicity...

Oneness is, in this construction, akin to the void as you speak of it. It is the state beyond or before distinctions, as with the concept of Wu-Ji; neither hot nor cold, light nor dark, great nor small. In other words; it is what mathematicians call a non-commutative space.

If you add, having neither inside nor outside, this makes it a non-associative space as well. And since we are talking about the void, a place beyond or before entities and contents, it satisfies this condition as well. This is where I tell you that the octonion algebra is non-associative.

Consider that in an evolving torus or donut shape, the center hole defines how it moves or changes. So on some level; what the hole in creation signifies is that there is always a state of becoming, where something yet to be defined is evolving to be a certain way.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Neil Bates

George,

Thanks for commenting at my essay. I read your essay at your invitation, and found it a beautiful meditation which fits well into my Unitarian Universalist spiritual journey. Indeed, the world is full of paradox and perhaps we really can't ever resolve all of them. I don't think any kind of math can explain or replicate true indeterminism, of the sort represented by the varying life-times of apparently structureless, identical muons (which is "absurd" as Feynman noted.) So as I also offered, we have to fall on our chosen intuitions without knowing for certain if they are correct, or if indeed there is a clear "truth" for them to be about. Your final statement is moving and persuasive:

"The Whole that Encompasses Creation is that which we believe in yet cannot know - it is what gives each of us purpose."

Yes, it is the way out of the Hole. Although focused on a specific physical problem (the viability of physics in spaces with other number of dimensions), I too offered the broad insight that we can't know what or why is the "more" than the math we analyse with, but didn't recommend a path. And, although many find purpose in specific work in the world, without a grand framework then that too would not be possible or intelligible or meaningful. Good work.

George Gantz

Thanks Jonathan - Yes there are many threads that a much longer exposition could delve into - and collaboration would be a great way to do it.

Thanks for the comment! George

George Gantz

Neil - I am delighted that you liked my essay. It"s perhaps a difficult message for this audience but I feel it is important and your comment gives me the feeling it is worthwhile.

Regards - George

Vladimir Tamari

Dear George Gantz

Thank you for your comments on my essay I will respond on my page.

Your exceptionally well-written essay is refreshing because it grapples with questions that the sciences have practically banished from educated discourse these days. Yes science and religion do not mesh and I believe should not attempt to try to, but this leaves important questions that remain unanswered, and you have put them into a beautiful gilded Whole Hole Box for further respectful inspection and contemplation. Your WHB is a good place to turn to when multiverses, questions of what happened before the Big Bang and so forth crop up.

Some haphazard remarks generated by my reading:

- Like most educated Westerners these days the development of mathematical and scientific thought is neatly channelled into the Greeks-to-Renaissance story. This ignores the important achievements of Hindu, Arab and Muslim scientists, mathematicians and philosophers who have grappled and solved some of the conundrums before they landed in Europe.

-Another thing is that Buddhist thought ancient and modern has centered on much of the Whole-Hole idea you highlight. Zen of course is wholly focused on the idea of emptying the mind to find truth. The philosophy of Kitaro Nishida centers on the concept of Nothing. I hastily withdraw from further discussion on all of this as my mind is happily materialistic as far as physics in concerned. (While looking for a place to stay in Kyoto my wife an I met Kirtaro's widow, but the rooms offered where impossible: she kept about 60 cats roaming the grounds and the stench of fish and cat litter was overwhelming! That was Something).

- For an essay centering on the Whole-Hole in the Universe you only mention the Big Bang in passing but there is nothing about the vacuum but that is alright because the thrust of your essay is more philosophical than materialistic.

- You touch on Quantum and Relativistic mysteries and paradoxes. In my outline theory Beautiful Universe I try to show how the assumption of a Universe of simple mechanical self-assembled dielectric nodes may answer many of these questions in realistic terms.

What remains of course is to be found in the WHB.

Ommmmmmmm

Best wishes from Vladimir

George Gantz

Thank you Vladimir. Yes I am admittedly limited in my knowledge of near and far eastern contributions and had to smash 3000 years into 9 pages so I left out much. A more thorough treatment would acknowledge the universality of the human quest for understanding in all quarters. Among the more interesting questions that could be asked is whether it is western dualism and binary (true / false) logic that dooms reductionism. Eastern nondualistic logic may have much to offer. Also, hindu and buddhist philosophy seems far more comfortable with the Void - a concept most western thought shuns.

Much obliged! George

Vladimir Tamari

Dear George you say "much obliged"

I can truly say "for nothing" !

Best,

Vladimir

Akinbo Ojo

Hi George,

A wonderful contribution and quite fundamental. I tend to like such essays.

Regarding Zeno supporting a conclusion that movement was an illusion, I fully agree that this would be so without some fundamentally significant change in how we view space and time. I however suggest that while calculus is useful to quantify motion, it does not fully address the fundamental basis for it. For example, calculus admits that space is infinitely divisible and Zeno's Dichotomy Argument was formulated to show that with infinite divisibility, motion would not even start in the first place. To avoid the problem, the "infinitesimal" was created, a quantity that can be zero and not zero at the same time, i.e. neither dx = 0 nor dx тЙа 0. When you therefore say, "The invention of calculus fundamentally reaffirmed the notion of space and time as infinitely divisible continua", I have an alternative view. The idea I propose in my essay is that we exorcise the spell cast on our physics by Parmenides, who was Zeno's teacher.

I argue and try to demonstrate in my essay that what you call, "the process of the separation of One {1} from the Void {0}..." is not just a once and for all event but a continuing event underlying all activity and motion in our universe up till this very moment. Even today, you have yourself caused the process of One from Void several times and vice-versa, the reverse which you did not much discuss, Void from One. Even, if you do not agree with my hypothesis, I believe you will find it interesting.

Best regards and all the best in the competition,

Akinbo

George Gantz

Akinbo - Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay. I'm not sure I agree that infinitesimals were created to answer Zeno's paradox. While the conceptual problems are related, the mathematics are 2,000 years apart. Given the required length of our essays, I had to skip a lot of the historical details.

Your notion that the distinction of {1} from {0} is a continuing unfolding of creation is an interesting one. In my view, this would occur every time a conscious entity has a conscious experience as that involves a distinction. However, I'm not sure I understand how this distinction per se can be the cause of activity and motion, unless you are referring to this distinction as being caused by consciousness (the Voice) which simultaneously gives existence to both form and substance. In my view the mathematical world of form and the physical world of cosmos are different.

Sincerely - George

Marc Séguin

Dear George,

Thank you for your comments on my essay - I left some comments about them on my forum.

Your essay is one of the most interesting I have read so far, and I hope it does well in this contest. I really like your dichotomy "Hole at the Center of Creation" / "Whole that Encompasses Creation". Your concept of "Hole at the Center of Creation" reminds me of this quote from Borges, in his essay "Avatars of the Tortoise":

"We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and external crevices of unreason which tell us it is false."

I agree with your statement "Assuming that the world is logically consistent, there are truths about the world that cannot be proven from within the world"... but only if "the world" means the finite part of reality that we observe. I believe that the "Whole of Creation" (the Maxiverse) is infinite, and that in this infinity, issues such as Gödel incompleteness no longer hold: therefore, I believe the Maxiverse is logically consistent and contains no truth that cannot be proven.

I find it interesting that you reference Rudy Rucker's book "Infinity and the Mind", when you say that "in Cantor's paradise of multiple infinities, it is impossible to conceive of the largest infinity". As I explained to Alma Ionescu on my forum, I read Rucker's book back in graduate school and it had a major influence on my own views about reality. The fact, explained by Rucker, that it is impossible for a finite mind to conceive of V (Absolute Infinity, the largest possible infinity) was, for me, not a bug, but a feature: to me, it seemed natural to equate the totality of existence, U, with this Absolute Infinity: U = V. And since V does not contain any information (as Rucker explains on page 136 of his book), this means that the Maxiverse considered as a whole does not contain any information, which makes it plausible that it just "is" --- that it exists by itself, without needing anything outside of itself to bring it about.

I fully agree with some aspects of your creation story, in particular, the fact that the first stage is the separation of One {1} from the Void {0}. My favorite fiction author, Greg Egan, once said :

"I suspect that a single 0 and a single 1 are all you need to create all universes. You just re-use them."

But I have a question about stage 2, the process of coming-into-being. If I understand your story correctly, you believe stage 2 requires something, "The Voice", that stands "outside" the totality of what physically exists and intentionally wills it into existence. But what could this Voice be? If it can have intention, it must be fairly complex, possibly intelligent... but to avoid the need for a Higher Voice to will it into existence, it must be "self-existent"... How can the non-zero information encoded into the Voice be "self-existent"? Where does the information come from? I am well aware that these questions are as old as philosophy itself, and that they are not easy to answer, but I am curious to know more about your opinion about them.

Marc

George Gantz

Marc - Thanks for your very detailed review and comments!

Actually, the "Voice" is required for both stage 1 and for stage 2 which, as discussed with T.Bolognesi above has dual features - the physical Cosmos and Intentionality. The Voice and the Void are self-existent, "uncreated" - not dissimilar from AI (Absolute Infinity). They are also self-reflective.

I'm not sure I follow the "informational" part of your thesis. In my view, the Voice and the AI, like the set of all sets, is going to contain all information, including all information about itself. Of course, that is quite a trick to contemplate with our very finite minds --- so it falls into the category of mythology.

Regards - George

Jonathan Dickau

In response to your comment above..

Thanks again George. I think it would make the world a better place, so I look forward to the opportunity to work with you, collaborating to further explicate some of the threads discussed.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Rick Searle

Dear George,

I greatly enjoyed your essay. I am curious whether or not you think something like the philosopher John Leslie's "Goodness" or Robert Nozick's "fecundity" would fill the hole?

http://utopiaordystopia.com/2014/05/04/why-does-the-world-exist-and-other-dangerous-questions-for-insomniacs/

Please take the time to check out and vote on my essay for this contest.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2391

All the best!

Rick Searle

George Gantz

Rick - Thanks for the references, I will have to look them up. I've also left a comment on your essay (which I thought was marvelous, but the way).

Regards - George Gantz

Jonathan Khanlian

Hi George,

I was wondering if you thought that Zeno's paradox could be cleared up if the universe were proven to be finite (and discrete) in both time and space? I actually don't think this finite view of the universe is too far off what is accepted by modern physics due to ideas such as the Planck Scale and Quantization. From this perspective, (continuous) movement may still be considered to be an illusion, much like the images in a movie never "move", they only discretely change positions (states) in each subsequent frame of the movie. This relates to my Digital Physics movie essay if you'd like to take a look at that.

Thanks,

Jon

George Gantz

Jon - Thanks for the comment! Zeno's paradox was resolved by Aristotle, whose solution works whether space is discrete or continuous. A fully discrete and finite universe solves many issues (within the physical universe the difficulties with infinities disappear) and is a hypothesis I am comfortable with. However, it does not answer a number of questions. For example, if time is finite, there is a beginning point, and an ending point. - What is before and after, and what caused things to start? And, even if the universe is finite, math is not, nor are the implications of recursion or self-reflection and consciousness.

I conclude the Hole at the Center remains even in a finite universe!

Regards - George

Steven Sax

George, very creative essay and a nice sentiment about the whole. I liked the history of scientific philosophy and overall found your ideas interesting - I gave you a high rating, and thank you again for your kind comments. Your questions that you posted on my thread inspired me and you can see my answers there.

Thanks again, Steve

George Gantz

Thanks, Steven! Great exchanges on your essay which I will continue to follow.

-George

Jonathan Dickau

Some thoughts George..

The film that first brought public attention to Arnold Schwarzenegger was called 'Stay Hungry' and the movie's theme pertains to the topic of your essay, as per my comments above. The title refers not only to the reduction of body fat, so you can better show off your muscles, as it also spoke to the ideal of remaining competitive, always striving to improve yourself, and so on. This is somewhat the Apollonian ideal or archetype, as well.

But perhaps the same applies in the evolution of consciousness, where one must cultivate a hunger and thirst for knowledge - and stay hungry, maintaining an appetite for learning and knowing - in order to learn and grow in understanding. This would again make a hole at the center of creation an essential feature of reality, serving to bring transcendental qualities like those seen in creatures with self-awareness into being - which would otherwise lay dormant.

More later,

Jonathasn

Jonathan Dickau

oops...

finger slipped.

JJD

George Gantz

Jonathan -

Exactly, thank you! Without "intentionality" (desire --- willing --- thirst for knowledge) there would be no consciousness. Without growth, there is no life. Without direction/purpose, there is no universe. Without self-reflection (and therefore consciousness), there are no distinctions --- and no existence.

The Hole is indeed an essential feature of reality - as is the infinite Voice which is its reflection.

Cheers - George

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