Effectiveness of mathematics! An answer, not a question by Marcel-Marie LeBel by Marcel-Marie LeBel

Hi Marcel,

I am not sure I understood everything in your brief essay, but I do agree that physics has a date with philosophy.

Please check out my Digital Physics movie essay if you get the chance.

Actually, Ed Fredkin, the guy who coined the term "Digital Physics" now prefers "Digital Philosophy"... maybe one day "physics" will be a misnomer for the name of the science that describes reality.

Thanks,

Jon

Dear Marcel-Marie LeBel,

In your essay "Effectiveness of mathematics! An answer, not a question", you wrote, "Every 100 years or so, the science of the day has an appointment with philosophy. Simple matter of stepping back and figuring out where we stand. Now, Science has to stop poking the black box and must start figuring out what's in it. Use ontology and logic; add it to your mandate. That would be a paradigm shift! To me, that is what the effectiveness of mathematics is telling us to do." Wolfram in "A New Kind of Science" Chapter 9 suggested a new non-measurable concept of time -- each Planck time interval is an approximation created by Wolfram's updating parameter within Wolfram's automaton operating on Fredkin-Wolfram information below the Planck scale. Wolfram also suggested that there are 4 or 5 simple rules that define his automaton. Google "witten milgrom" and "milgrom new paradigm". I say that the string theorists have underestimated Milgrom, McGaugh, Kroupa, and Pawlowski. Because the anti-MOND camp has vastly more funding than the pro-MOND camp, there has been very slow acceptance of MOND.

Dear Marcel,

I agree with you: "Every 100 years or so, the science of the day has an appointment with philosophy. Simple matter of stepping back and figuring out where we stand. Now, Science has to stop poking the black box and must start figuring out what's in it. Use ontology and logic; add it to your mandate. That would be a paradigm shift!"

It is necessary to dig deep into the ontology and dialectic logos and eidos, ontology and dialectics of Nature.

John Wheeler left physicists good covenant: "Philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers". But how many people follow this covenant? What is needed is a synthesis of all knowledge accumulated by mankind. This problem is well formulated Edmund Husserl in "Origin of Geometry»: "Only to the extent, to which in case of idealization, the general content of spatio-temporal sphere is apodictically taken into account, which is invariant in all imaginable variations, ideal formation may arise, that will be clear in any future for all generations and in such form will be transferable by the tradition and reproducible in identical intersubjective sense ."

I believe that the scientific picture of the world should be the same rich senses of the "LifeWorld» (E.Husserl), as a picture of the world lyricists , poets and philosophers:

"We do not see the world in detail,

Everything is insignificant and fractional ...

Sadness takes me from all this."( Alexander Vvedensky,1930)

It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise,

as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye;

but that is sufficient guidance for all our life.

We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period,

but we would preserve the true course.

(Henry David Thoreau, 1854)

Kind regards,

Vladimir

Hi Marcel-Marie,

I sat down last night preparing myself for a long and controversial read but was surprised by the brevity of your entry this year. I have read your explanation and good on you for putting something together that will at least introduce new readers to your ideas.

All the best, Georgina

Dear Marcel-Marie LeBel,

I think that makes little difference whether an essay is short or long, but what matters only its topic.

Is it "logic", that connects physics & mathematics in most fundamental level?

Best wishes

Dipak

Dear Marcel,

I invite you to see and appreciate my analysis of the philosophical foundations of mathematics and physics, the method of ontological constructing a new basis of knowledge and new unifying paradigm - the maternal generating structure, "La Structure mère" as the ontological framework, carcass and foundation of knowledge, the core of which - the ontological (structural, cosmic) memory.

Kind regards,

Vladimir

Dear Marcel,

I wish you had had more time to review your basic ideas. Your 2009 essay [the first five pages] provides the best argument I have ever read for the substantial unity of the world. Here is a link to your essay.

I also agree that 100 years is a meaningful period for re-conception. Quantum theory has (surprisingly) not changed much in the last century, despite the flood of new data that must be described in terms of old concepts. I believe this largely accounts for the confusion we face in 2015, where we don't even know whether a 'quantum state' is ontological or epistemological.

In my essay I focus on the 1925 concept of spin that Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck provided us and the 50-year-old concepts of non-locality that John Bell based on an oversimplified model of spin in a constant magnetic field. I invite you to read my essay and welcome your comments.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Yes, you are logically, right.

Great work!

-Sincerely,

Miss. Sujatha Jagannathan

Hi Marcel,

Happy you could contribute something. Although, we may differ in the specifics, I find this statement profound and true:

"For a universe to be operational on logic, all of its constituent must be, although different in appearance, of the same nature because we can't add apples and oranges. Better, it can only work using one cause. This is because no rule of simple logic could decide which of two causes would have priority. All in all, there would be only one type of stuff, only one cause for its spontaneous evolution"

On 'stuff'. What is a stuff? I believe by stuff, you mean substance. What is a substance? Borrowing partly from Leibniz in his Monadology, the fundamental stuff must be of the simplest possible nature, even though more complex substances can exist they will be made of the simplest substance. Now, stuff has properties. What properties can substances have? Substances can have color, mass, charge, taste, smell, size (i.e. extension in length, breadth and width), etc. Of all these properties, which one is sine qua non? Which one is that on which others depend but which does not depend on others? I believe you may agree on extension.

Another way to look at the most fundamental property, is to take a stuff and remove its properties one after the other to exhaustion. For example, take an apple, remove its color, you have a colorless tasty apple. Remove all other removables to exhaustion. What you are left with is an extended object, massless, colorless and tasteless.

On 'only one cause for its spontaneous evolution'. Evolution connotes change. As above, there must be a simplest possible change. The simplest possible change that a featureless simplest possible substance can undergo is a loss of its simplest possible characteristic, i.e. extension. That is, that which used to have size ceases to have size, and that which had no size comes to have size. In short, what exists ceases to exist, and what was not existent comes to exist. I discuss this more in my essay, where I also suggest a hypothesis that: the non-zero dimensional point does not have an eternal existence, but can appear and disappear spontaneously, or when induced to do so..

Best regards,

Akinbo

Dear Marcel, Your thesis is a tautology.

Dear Marcel,

I agree with you that the answer of why mathematics is to so effective is to be found in the foundations of mathematics, and in particular in logic, but I would go even further than you to claim that classical logic is not sufficient to model all aspects of reality and that when we talk of "logic" the term needs to refer to formal systems which are extensions of classical logic.

In my essay I outline how the ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality requires (at least) two extensions of classical logic, namely modal logic and free logic. Interestingly, both of these extensions of logic were developed not by mathematicians or physicists, but by philosphers, for purposes completely unrelated to what I am using them for. I don't quite get to the question of what the universe is made of or what causes it to evolve, but I think it does take me deeper than current approaches.

I agree with your last paragraph. About 4 years ago, I wrote an essay, "Ontology and the wave function collapse"

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/83153

which can be interpreted as a declaration of a new research program of which my current essay is the latest contribution, doing exactly what you suggest should be done: to use ontology and logic to elucidate some of the fundamental processes described by physics.

It appears we have a common vision.

Best wishes,

Armin

FYI:My Essay 2408 error corrections @

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Dear Marcel-Marie,

I think Newton was wrong about abstract gravity; Einstein was wrong about abstract space/time, and Hawking was wrong about the explosive capability of NOTHING.

All I ask is that you give my essay WHY THE REAL UNIVERSE IS NOT MATHEMATICAL a fair reading and that you allow me to answer any objections you may leave in my comment box about it.

Joe Fisher

Marcel,

"Science has to stop poking the black box and must start figuring out what's in it"

Can we not observe the classical world like scientists have done with nature, the European robin, for example, and figure out how they navigate N and S with the seasons. Biologists and Physicists saw an integral connection with quantum mechanics in the new field of quantum biology. My essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2345. on connections of mind, math, and physics also looks into mapping DNA and simulating the BB, that is if the BB was real.

Incidentally, hasn't the soliton wave model for light been used in the slit experiment?

Jim