And the math will set you free by Cristinel Stoica

Dear Cristi Stoica

Your essay is clearly written and you included all the essential notions, which are important at explanation, for instance, consciousness. I also look on physics from reductionical view. But, I disagree that neural correlates are enough to explain consciousness. Not only me, Tononi and Koch also claim for panpsychism. Thus neural correlates only explain consciousness in brain, but not panpsychism, primary consciousness everywhere. Thus Duck is not a Duck if everything looks like the same. I think from reductional view that various qualia in brain should be explain from one qualia. Thus despite of all, I agree that everything is isomorphic to mathematical structure of physics, because primary consciousness is only extremely reduced element, which in principle does not disturb this isomorphism. Thus, if the duck is completely the same, it is maybe not duck, but the difference is not important.

In the prolonged version of my essay [reference 1], I describe Turing experiment, which tries to distinguish conscious ''duck'' from unconscious one. The principle is:''Let us suppose that Turing experiment gives distinct answers of a duck versus computer. (Otherwise free will does not exist.) If we respect non-quantum physics, then explanation of free will needs new physics. But a quantum computer always gives distinct answers than a duck, thus free will does not need new physics.''

It is important for me, that consciousnes does not exist without free will.

I agree with you, that theory of everything thus not need two independent set of laws. But Petkov has an interesting idea that gravitational force does not exist. I gave one answer to him, but what is your answer to him?

One good example of precise words of Maluga are: ''Without abstraction, our species with a limited brain is unable to reflect the world.''

Thus math is a process of abstraction. Thus, my conclusion is that the essence of math in physics is to be abstract and simple as much as possible. Because foundations of physics should be simple, the task of math is to describe quantum gravity on a t-shirt.

Because of this reason, and because of intuition I am reductionist also.

Best Regards

Janko Kokosar

Dear Cristi,

About interrelations among consciousness, math and physics, we are close, we only need to see details. But you do not mentioned a word ''Panpsychism'' and not many about ''quantum consciousness''. Thus maybe you can give some words about this. I looked two your links about free will, but here are clear differences.

If you wish you can read my essay. The main speculation in my quantum consciosness is that quantum randomness is free will, thus that the human mind MAYBE sometimes changes randomness of quantum phenomena.

Best regards

Janko Kokosar

Very boring essay. Such a filling of the maximum allowed length for so little... maybe I'm just already too familiar with the fact that mathematics is the study of structures to have any interest reading it again, but...

Despite your try to develop a visual metaphor to illustrate the question of discovered vs. invented, you did not even come up with any decent answer to this question. Your illustration by points of a line is more confusing than explaining, since if you take a physical line made of aligned atoms, a physical point in this line as defined by a particular atom can only encode a few words, not even an ordinary sentence. To encode whole texts you need a mathematical line, far from anything concrete or visual (would you qualify this as visual ? I don't). There are not even enough atoms in the visible Universe to be in bijection with all possible meaningful texts of 1 page length. But a decent answer is possible as I explained in my essay : by making the difference between mathematical existence (where all possibilities exist but can be lost in a huge pool of alternatives as soon as they are a bit complex) and the conscious act (or contingent event) of pointing out a particular possibility here and now (which is what the notion of "brilliant text" is actually about).

"Some may hope that there are things in the universe which can't be described by mathematics. But can you name those things? To name them, you would have to provide a list of their properties, of propositions which hold for them. If the universe is describable by a list of propositions, then there is a mathematical structure describable by the same propositions. But then, couldn't we find something to say which is true about our universe, but not about the mathematical structure? The answer is no."

Example : the sensation of the red color. I can name it (as I just did). I can list its properties : this is the empty list, since it does not have any mathematical structure. Or maybe I can say that I do not like this color : would you classify it a property of this sensation ? We can also say that it is the color of blood. However, if the sensation of the red color is a property of the sight of blood, I doubt the relevance of this link as a description of the sensation of red itself. So, some things can be said about the sensation of the red color, which does not mean that it admits any mathematical description as a mathematical structure.

"If we can't [describe it completely by a list of true propositions], it's only because of practical limitations."

Disagree: if I can't describe the sensation of the red color completely by a list of true propositions, it is not because of any practical limitations, but on the contrary because the list of mathematical structures it is made of is trivial: an empty list.

"We know what a feeling is: some chemistry of the brain"

Disagree. The sensation of the red color surely has neural correlates which can be described mathematically, however these mathematical structures will never account for what this sensation actually is. And it is found in NDEs that many feelings occur far away from any chemistry of the brain. As for the idea that a feeling is some chemistry of the brain, it is still pure speculation from a scientific viewpoint. Feelings must have correlates in the brain of course, but these concepts of chemical correlates in the brain did not achieve any actual scientific understanding of what feelings are and how they work, and I think they never will (if psychiatrists think they do, they are just hallucinating).

"any kind of world, as long as it is free of contradictions, is isomorphic to a mathematical structure"

Unfortunately, this claim looks much less like an expression of amazement at how deep mathematical concepts are involved in physics, than like an expression of lack of imagination to consider any other possibility. In my essay I explained how I consider the world as not a mere mathematical structure since it includes the non-mathematical component of consciousness, even if mathematics takes a large part in it.

"...maybe the universe obeys two or even more sets of laws. This doesn't make much sense, since if the universe obeys two or even more independent sets of laws, there must be two or more disconnected mathematical structures modeling them. But we can't live simultaneously in two disconnected worlds."

Looks like you never heard of any intermediate possibility for 2 sets between being equal or disjoint. I see no contradiction in having a world made of a combination of the fundamentally different ingredients of maths and consciousness, as I described in my essay.

You don't even seem to understand what is Godel's incompleteness theorem actually saying. You wrote: "To obtain an inconsistency, we should make the physical laws assert their own undecidability". What the incompleteness theorem says, is that "To obtain an inconsistency, we should make a mathematical theory able to express arithmetic, stating (among its theorems) its own consistency". I admit that your claim is rigorously correct, since, actually, and still according to this incompleteness theorem, the claims of consistency and incompleteness (in a theory able to express arithmetic) are logically equivalent. But... the reason for the correctness of your formulation is so indirect that it makes things even more twisted to figure out than they basically are. Especially given your previous sentence: "If a man states the undecidability of some problem in physics, would this introduce an inconsistency in the universe? No, since the statement can simply be wrong". If consistent theories able to express arithmetic are unable to prove the claim of their own undecidability, it is not because this claim can be wrong, but on the contrary because it is right: these theories are undecidable, which is why they are unable to prove some true facts, such as the fact of their own undecidability.

And I see no justification for your implicit assumption that the laws of physics should be able to express arithmetic, as I disagree with this claim (see my essay).

"the only prediction made by the mathematical universe hypothesis is that our universe has to be Turing complete"

I answered about the issue of predictions of the MUH in reply to Marc Séguin's essay.

In your previous essay "Flowing with a Frozen River" you described a possibility for free-will in a way that seems to be the same as I support, except that you seem to attribute free will to a retroactive effect on the initial conditions. Maybe because you use your own variant of quantum mechanics, "Smooth quantum mechanics", while I accept quantum mechanics in its standard formulation, and I attribute randomness to the event of wavefunction collapse by conscious observation, which I qualify not as a physical event but a metaphysical one (so that the discontinuity is not something physical, it is not located in the physical space-time). It looks like your interpretation is just a twisted rewording of the "discontinuous collapse of the wave function" into a "retroactive discontinuous collapse of the initial conditions" from which the present state would be a posteriori re-determined by the continuous quantum evolution, and which is just mathematically equivalent to the former, but only coming as an illusory way to deny that anything here is discontinuous.

So it looks like, your special way of wording your interpretation through this mathematical reformulation is just hiding the fact that we have essentially the same interpretation, which I invite you to read in my essay.

But... no, there is still a difference, by which I would qualify your version as incoherent: the problem I see with your interpretation is that the new observations do not just complete the previous ones, but can also be incompatible with them (in the sense of non-commutation). Thus, the new initial conditions are turning past states into thermodynamically incoherent states (such as with the story of "liar states" which I commented there), retrospectively changing past clear observations into indeterminate ones, and finally, changing the big bang into a combination of initial conditions mixing the smooth big bang that normally explains things (the thermodynamic time arrow) with highly chaotic initial states with multiple singularities and so on, where the thermodynamic time arrow cannot be found anymore.

In your text "Modern physics, determinism and free will", you make a distinction between "branching time" and "choice time". But what is the role of a "branching time", that would not be the same as "choice time" ? I cannot see a role for it. Nothing in the formalism of quantum physics, speaks about "branching" as a fundamental event. Proponents of the Many-worlds interpretation saw it well, as they just dismissed the existence of any branching, to conclude that different possible measurement results keep coexisting, not really as branches from any specific branching event (as might be intuitively said for approximative descriptions), but as emergently separable components of the unitarily evolving state, which remains a unique physical state that only happens to be equal to a combination of these practical measurement results (without being directly affected by this fact). As David Wallace wrote : there is no such a thing as a well-defined "number of branches". Instead, in my view, all what plays the role of a branching time, is what you call the choice time; it needs not be retroactive, but only non-local (see details). So, since other interpretations (Bohm and Many-worlds) just deny the existence of any special measurement times at all, I think that introducing 2 different special times, one for branching, the other for choice, is a bit too much.

Dear Sir, I was not convinced. Your argument that mathematics is not a human invention was not convincing. I am more interested in the problem of why scientists believe in Einstein relativity when the mathematics involved in that theory is completely false. We are supposed to believe it because experiments validate it. So we believe in a false mathematical theory because the experiments say it is correct. Pretty funny.

Dear Cristinel, conclusion of your essay "So we can't prove the mathematical universe

hypothesis by Tegmark's method" provokes me to let you know that in our essay this hypothesis of Tegmark is refuted.

Best regards,

Alexey Burov.

Sorry for the ambiguity of some of my words that could be perceived more negatively than I meant. I did not mean that you had any intention to twist something. About this, I only meant I saw your interpretation of quantum physics as a sort of more complicated equivalent to other concepts I know. I am aware that when some ideas are discovered, they usually first appear in forms which are not the optimal way they can be expressed.

Of course I am aware that your idea of the line aimed to be interpreted mathematically only, so that physical interpretations of this idea were irrelevant. However, as long as it is about mathematical abstraction, I would consider it more relevant to stay in the vocabulary of abstractions, such as by the idea of encoding texts by numbers, and the idea that all natural numbers exist no matter how big they may be. So I just wanted to insist on the fact that a geometrical view adds strictly nothing to it, unless it gives a wrong intuition.

About NDEs, I think there are enough proofs, the only problem is that it is such a huge field that many people think there is no known proof yet just because they did not take enough time getting informed on what there is. I would just advise you to go explore the field without any preconception about what should a proof exactly look like to be conclusive, because many kinds of things can happen and form different sorts of proofs.

"Godel, what I said was in the context of Hawking's argument"

I did not check what Hawking's argument is, I just directly know what the incompleteness theorem says and how it can be proven :)

If you don't assume that the laws of physics should be able to address arithmetic then all comments on the consequences of the incompleteness theorem on the laws of physics should be dismissed as inapplicable: then physical laws cannot assert their own undecidability, simply because they are not even able to express the question of their own undecidability, no matter what Hawking might have suggested about it.

About branching time "in the context of indeterministic dynamical systems" : which indeterministic dynamical systems are you talking about, which can be found in known fundamental physics ? There is one established physical law, that is the unitary quantum evolution, which is deterministic. And there is the measurement problem, with disputed interpretations whether the collapse is due to conscious observation, or a spontaneous one, or none at all (MWI). I think, if you see a branching time somewhere, and you think that the choice operation retroactively modifies the state starting exactly from that branching time, then you make the behavior at that branching time discontinuous, since it does not conform to the unitary character of quantum evolution ; if you try to get a continuous indeterministic behavior from some non-linear differential equations with non-differentiable terms, I will dismiss such equations as having nothing to do with anything that could be scientifically verified about our universe.

I think you are over-interpreting my words. I do think your interpretation of quantum physics is more complicated than the Copenhagen interpretation. What I meant is that you tried to introduce the idea of restoring a continuity, since you criticize the Copenhagen interpretation as introducing a discontinuity. But I consider that we can reach the same "result" of looking at things in a physically continuous way, not by completely different ideas, but by re-interpreting the Copenhagen interpretation :) and more precisely considering the mind makes collapse interpretation as I described, which is not so different from Copenhagen.

I consider that your way of calling "anecdotal evidence" the whole body of existing observations which I guess you did not really care to study, is missing the point of the fact that even though "anecdotal" in some sense, some of these evidences (and even more: the accumulation of them) are nevertheless solid genuine evidence for your question of "distinguishing between remembering and imagination". Thus, I would dismiss the very categorization of evidences between "anecdotal" and some other, supposedly more solid kind of evidence, as meaningless : there is no such boundary. So, as soon as would be established that genuine out-of-body perceptions occurred during the experience (such as by the accurate report of information that could not be accessed by the body), it becomes logically necessary to reject any idea that such memory could be a fruit of the imagination by natural effects of neural activity, as an absolute impossibility, without any need of close examination of the brain activity.

" it doesn't make sense. It is like saying that if you don't assume the existence of tooth fairy it doesn't make sense to criticize a viewpoint which assumes the existence of tooth fairy."

It makes sense, and no it is not "like" what you say. Maybe you misinterpreted my words again, but for what I meant your comparison is just wrong, you are bringing up an example whose structure has nothing to do with the issue of the incompleteness theorem we were discussing. Let me be more precise to avoid any misunderstanding : I meant "Let us split possible cases: either the laws of physics are able to express arithmetic, or they are not. In the first case we can discuss the consequences of the incompleteness theorem on the laws of physics ; in the second case we can't, as it is not applicable". Any issue of personal belief is out of the question here.

" I addressed any possible indeterministic theory, to show that indeterminism doesn't guarantee free-will. Rejecting them because the only one you want to consider is quantum indeterminism is unjustified."

What is the point of discussing "any possible indeterministic theory" ? as if the probability for the mathematically expressible laws of physics of our universe to be as described by quantum physics, was close to zero; my view is to consider that this probability is close to 1. You seem to assume that some abstract general landscape of "all possible indeterministic laws" you nevertheless seem to have somewhat clear ideas of and that excludes quantum physics, should be admitted as much more likely to contain the correct picture instead. I think that my hypothesis has more scientific grounds than yours.

"branching in the space of states, the branching of the history into two possible histories", what the heck is that ? You mean the consistent histories interpretation ? Of course, except that quantum physics could never find anything to explain what may cause such branching, which has to be postulated from the outside of physics, and it makes the evolution clearly discontinuous, which you were claiming to avoid.

"You think one should discuss only what one believes". No I don't. Of course I don't !!!!! How can you imagine that nonsense ????? Again an absurd misunderstanding. What I meant is that any argument should clearly distinguish both cases. So the problem in your essay (or did I fail to read it correctly ?) is that you did not make it clear what are the assumptions under which your argument is written. And this matter of "the assumptions under which an argument is written" is a matter of text and clarified presentation. And this matter of text and clarified presentation, has nothing to do with any issue of personal belief of the author, which is obviously irrelevant. If my reply looks as if your personal belief was the matter, I am sorry I did not mean it. I thought it was your belief since you seemed to take for granted that the incompleteness theorem was applicable, which requires this assumption, but this is ultimately irrelevant. then if it is not your belief, the trouble I found is that your text did not seem to make the needed clarification of the distinction of cases.

I will reply in more details later.

Dear Christinel,

in your essay you outline clearly the 'isomorphism-paradigm' of the relation between physics and mathematics. I quote from you essay :1. 'If the universe is describable by a list of propositions, then there is a mathematical structure describable by the same propositions'.

And a bit later :2'....the unified theory must exists...because we can not live simultaneously in two disconnected worlds.'

I would like to point out that you make two strong metaphysical assumptions, based upon the ontology of classical mechanics :

1. That it is possible to come up with a complete list of properties of the entire! universe.

This assumption is clearly wrong!Why? Because you leave out the agent compiling the list.According to quantum mechanics it is simply not possible to auto-describe a state to a system.A quantum mechanical state ( even of the 'universe') is always assign by an observer outside the system. In other words, your 'complete' list always has a blind spot.

2.You make the assumption that there is only 'the-one-reality', with all of its parts in mutual 'connection'.

But it is again quantum mechanics which tells us otherwise. The parts of the reality 'to be connected' is not only a logical operation ( like the 'AND'-operator), but also a physical interaction between a system and an observer (another system).During the interaction the system will in general undergo a random change of state.

That means that your 'complete' list of properties not only has a blind spot, but it also undergoes random fluctuations.

As a conclusion, the notion of 'the-one-whole-reality' ( can be traced back to Parmenides) is exposed as a fairy tale.

We should learn to live and do physics without it.

In my essay I describe how physics is better understood as Darwinian process, instead of a static description of 'the -one-reality'.

regards

Frank