About the Nature of Time by Matti Juhani Pitkänen

Dear Matti Pitkannen,

i am completely ignorant about the abc of your mathematical approach in modeling ' consciousness' using Quantum Physics coupled with geometrical string like approach. Your self has confined the term entirely within your own Ph.D. thesis and your subsequent research. The term is so wide as to encompass the entire creation of the Universe(s) and still remain unaffected in its all potent, eternal way. May i urge you to look up other essay contributions and try to rationalize your own approach after comprehending the different approaches made therein.

Dear Dr. Pitkänen,

i'm slowly working my way through all the entries here. i see you've gotten merely one comment on your posting so far, and that appears to be blaming you for the person's own ignorance. hm.

yours is a challenging piece of work. i had to do a bit of research just to get the slightest handle on where it's even coming from, but there is an order and organization there that suggested some solid stuff that might be worth looking into. i just couldn't tell if it was an incredibly brilliant private satirical piece about your music collection getting ruined or sincere. Wheeler and Penrose? hm. perhaps both.

materializing consciousness, i can see where some might take issue with that just on general principles, but i suppose if physics wishes to study something, there needs to be something physical in some way at least ascribed to what it is that's being studied. my hats off to you if for nothing else than at least making an attempt at a physics of consciousness. there is a certain imperative for this work being undertaken in physics. consciousness is most certainly both effected by and effective in what we call physical reality. that's a question for physics. hm. still puzzling whether or no there's actually anything but consciousness...

re:

"Why this shifting should always occur to the direction of geometric past of the imbedding space?"

good question. coming down from the whiteboard a moment and working from a human perspective, suspecting it's largely a matter of perception. the question rightly posed is 90% of the way to a solution. what shapes the perception? i have some strong suspicions here. a hint. you might not like this. one word. gravity.

thanks for the brain exercise,

matthew kolasinski

Dear Matthew,

TGD is a generalization of string model which was born about 6 yeas before the super string revolution 1984 and its development has forced a lot of new mathematics and also forced to develop quantum theory of consciousness as a generalization of quantum measurement theory. Therefore I am not surprised that this vision does not open with the first reading!

The problem which remained unsatisfactorily understood as I wrote the essay was the answer to the question what mechanism causes the shifting of the quantum superpositions of space-time surfaces to the direction of the geometric past of 8-D imbedding space, and how this relates to the localization of the contents of sensory experience to the future boundary of the causal diamond (double light-cone). One possibility is that the arrow results as a mathematical necessity. The alternative possibility, which I did not consider, is that consciousness is involved in an essential manner: the arrow of time is a consequence of intentional action as p-adic considerations encouraged to consider. A possible answer to the question how this comes out came some time after the posting of the essay.

Recall that I identify causal diamonds (CDs) are correlates for selves, conscious entities. Conscious entities are also curious entities and they want to learn what space-time sheets look like outside the CD (that is in the geometric future above the upper boundary and in the geometric past of lower boundary of CD). To learn this they generate intentionally quantum jumps shifting the quantum superposition of space-time sheets to either geometric future or past. A spontaneous selection of the arrow of time takes place. It would not be surprising if a kind of phase transition would imply domino like effect leading to a global arrow of time. Local deviations from global arrow are however possible: molecular self assembly processes in living matter could represent one example of this.

Also the distribution of sub-CDs serving as correlates for mental images tends to be concentrated near the upper (or lower) boundary of CD since news arrive from there. Hence the contents of sensory and also other kinds of experiences tend to be located to a narrow interval of geometric time.

A version of article representing this view about the arrow of time can be found at my homepage .

With Best Regards,

Matti Pitkänen

Dear Dr. Pitkänen,

thank you for your very patient reply to my post.

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I am not surprised that this vision does not open with the first reading!

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it's been an interesting experience reading the posts here. some wonderful stuff, but i'm experiencing it as a bit like being in an international bazaar in a foreign country with a couple of dozen different languages to contend with while i have only a few phrases from a couple of them and am having difficulty finding my way back to where i left my car. then there's the dialects...

re:

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The problem which remained unsatisfactorily understood as I wrote the essay was the answer to the question what mechanism causes the shifting of the quantum superpositions of space-time surfaces to the direction of the geometric past of 8-D imbedding space, and how this relates to the localization of the contents of sensory experience to the future boundary of the causal diamond (double light-cone). One possibility is that the arrow results as a mathematical necessity. The alternative possibility, which I did not consider, is that consciousness is involved in an essential manner: the arrow of time is a consequence of intentional action as p-adic considerations encouraged to consider. A possible answer to the question how this comes out came some time after the posting of the essay.

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thank you. well. there may be an additional consideration. the basic premise of the directionality of time may be much more significantly an artifact of perceptual conditioning than anyone yet suspects. there are other cultures which have differing perceptions of time, don't necessarily see it as something quite so linear as the western cultural tradition.

how deceptive perception can be... there's a famous experiment where people were given eye glasses fitted with lenses which inverted the image their eyes received. within a very short time of wearing the glasses, the images were processed differently, images were perceived right-side up. upon removing the glasses at the end of the experiment, normal vision presented an upside-down world to conscious awareness during another brief period of adjustment.

the perception of time's arrow could largely be a pragmatic perceptual artifact. it could be simply that the perception is useful. by the time impressions reach conscious awareness, they're several times removed from the source of the stimulus of those perceptions, run through a lot of filters and been processed into a 'meaningful' coherent presentation to awareness.

i'd mentioned gravity in my first post to you. looking at a radically different interpretation possibility. i've heard the primary characteristic of gravity is that it imparts acceleration. the convention is to consider this acceleration as an attraction of mass to mass. but if you consider gravity in the context of inertia and acceleration, weight becomes an inertial resistance against a gravitational acceleration vector, highly counterintuitively, outward from earth [picture standing in an elevator in space. it accelerates downward, in the direction of your feet. inertia would press you against the ceiling. if the elevator accelerates upward, it feels much like standing on earth]. the only way this image of outward acceleration resulting in being drawn inward makes any sense to me is if this is occurring in what we would call 'backward time'. ouch. gravity repels; mass becomes, less an inherent quality, more a function of gravitational acceleration of matter backward in time. temporal direction becomes highly relative (sort of like the stock market lately). perhaps someone here will be so kind as to straighten out my thinking on this. such a case would suggest a significant impact on our perception of a temporal directional arrow, and any 'big bang' couldn't actually be said to have happened yet, somewhere off in a future we would never reach, racing away from backward in time.

how we think of things is actually likely extraordinarily colored by perceptual conventions.

re:

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Recall that I identify causal diamonds (CDs) are correlates for selves, conscious entities. Conscious entities are also curious entities and they want to learn what space-time sheets look like outside the CD (that is in the geometric future above the upper boundary and in the geometric past of lower boundary of CD). To learn this they generate intentionally quantum jumps shifting the quantum superposition of space-time sheets to either geometric future or past.

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you might find another paper here, by Thomas Ray, 'Time Counts', of interest (http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/274). if i'm understanding both his work and yours correctly, it would seem to fit right in here.

re:

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Also the distribution of sub-CDs serving as correlates for mental images tends to be concentrated near the upper (or lower) boundary of CD since news arrive from there. Hence the contents of sensory and also other kinds of experiences tend to be located to a narrow interval of geometric time.

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i suspect the localization to a narrow interval may be a function of velocity. from an experiential level, at one time i was involved in a very regular formal meditation practice in which a bell was rung to signal changes in activities. on occasion, i would hear the bell begin to ring a little prior to it being struck. it would have a soft ascending tone, zzzzzzzzzzzt! leading up to the 'ting!' i don't believe that it was a matter of the bell actually beginning to ring before it was struck. nor do i have the impression this peculiar phenomenon was an hallucination. hallucinations are not known for being terribly consistent. the impression i have is that the quietude of the situation expanded the perceptual 'now' to include a slightly larger moment, including the 'future' ringing of the bell. if one could construct an audio recording device which injected absolutely no movement into the system, it may be possible to replicate or even expand the effect.

judging from general human activity, many of us appear desperate to inject as much activity into the system as possible, to reduce that 'narrow interval of geometric time' to as close to a pinpoint as we can.

i'm not at all sure about exactly where news arrives from, or when. there's a question there. i've been looking at the data from psi research. how do you account for precognition?

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Conscious entities are also curious entities and they want to learn

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yep. even if i have no idea why that should be. :-)

thanks again for your response.

matt kolasinski

Dear Matt and Dr.Pitkanen,

This essay provides a new approach as there are other new approaches in this essay competition. May i just offer the point that each scientific approach depends on the precepts and subsequent concepts that one introduces to explain any phenomenon being examined. The bias starts from here and thus the consequences follow as per the assumptions made. Maths and geometrical pictures are just the tools one uses to comprehend the unknown. Thus, science ends up with relative truths which may stand the test of times but are liable to chsnge as soon as alternate concepts arrive or additional observations/measurements become available. Nothing wrong in this methodology inspite of its self-limitation. However, the concept of 'consciousness' is unique as it is not a physical parameter! i don't understand how Dr. Patkinen is modeling it in his approach.There are processes of thought however which can be utilised. The science of Yoga & meditation developed originally in India over 4000 yrs. back by Patanjali through a process of inward looking methodology, hints at the role of silence/thoughtlessness in order to reach the higher levels of human consciousness! There lies the hope of discerning the nature of 'consciousness'. perhaps then one can better attempt to model this non-physical entity and use it to broaden our scientific horizon and expand our paradigms in furthering science of outside with that of inside. i have attempted to hint such developments in my essay on the Mysteries of the Universe and two other manuscripts attached later in the posts.

The approach of Matt as a learned 'layman'is equally important as that of DR. Pitkanin or the one i am suggesting! Let us continue our interactions.

Dear Matt,

thank you for your response and apologies for my slow responses.

The idea about subjective experienced arrow of time as an artefact is difficult to formulate in the framework of physics. Same applies to the idea that time is illusion which one ends up when one quantizes general relativity using the formalism applicable to Newtonian mechanics based on the notion of absolute time but not to general relativity. We experience time and its arrow and we must explain why!

The restriction of the contents of sensory experience to a narrow time interval is with respect to the proper time of light-cone. In the case of conscious experiencer this time refers by definition to the rest system of experiencer.

You told that you heard bell ringing before it did so. When I still had alarm clock I waked up now and then after having dreamed that it was ringing: real ringing started almost immediately after wake-up. In zero energy ontology the interpretation in terms of signals traveling to geometric past would be one possible explanation. It would also provide a mechanism of precognition and be behind memory recall as communication with geometric past, intentional action (this would explain Libet's findings), and remote metabolism as generation of usable metabolic energy by sending negative energy quanta to the energy storage.

By the way I attach the variant "About the Nature of Time" emphasizing the view about arrow of time as a result of intentional action.

Thanks for an interesting response,

MattiAttachment #1: time.pdf

Dear Anonymous,

thank you for an interesting response.

I agree that consciousness is something which cannot be reduced to physics as we understand it now. In fact, this is the starting point of TGD inspired theory of consciousness! In my own view about consciousness this view realized in terms of new ontology: consciousness is not a property of physical state. The contents of conscious experience is in quantum jump between physical states recreating the Universe, between two worlds, one might say. Therefore one cannot put consciousness under the microscope and study it.

This means fundamental limitation meaning that theory of consciousness can only say something about structure of conscious experience and identify only its physical correlates, say particular kinds of quantum jumps as correlates of qualia.

There are also other limitations, perhaps the most important being finite measurement resolution which translates to a finite resolution of conscious experience. Usually this limitation is not taken seriously, say in standard quantum measurement theory it is not even mentioned. My own approach to consciousness, which can be seen also as a generalization of quantum measurement theory, takes finite measurement resolution as a fundamental guideline.

Already von Neumann developed beautiful mathematics providing the tools to give to the notion of finite measurement resolution a status of fundamental dynamical principle dictating the laws of quantum physics to a high degree. Category theory, which is now making its way to mathematical physics, makes also explicit the limitations of the mathematician, since it treats mathematical objects as black boxes below the mathematical counterpart of measurement resolution.

I see meditation practices as a direct manner to get rid of the short time scale contributions to the contents of consciousness usually masking the mental images giving information about Universe in longer spatial and time scales. The view about dark matter as a hierarchy of macroscopic quantum phases with arbitrarily large values of Planck constant (something new from the view point of standard physics predicts a hierarchy of consciousness with levels labeled by the increasing value of Planck constant serving as a kind of (spiritual) intelligence quotient. Also biological evolution could be seen as an emergence of new levels in this hierarchy meaning longer time scales of memory and of planned action. Meditation practices would realize this kind of evolution at the level of individual.

Thank you for your response,

Matti Pitkanen

Dear Matti Pitkanen,

your response to the anonymous above also provided some response to my posting too. i am happy to see that you realise that consciousness is something that has the power to unleash better and better understanding about the mysteries of the Universe. Total knowledge was bound to be born with the Universe and it lied deposited in cosmic consciousness. What we require is to expand our individual consciousness to have a wider overlap with the former. That is where i indicate the role of meditation cum Yoga techniques. It helps quieten the mind, permit moments of thoughtlessnes or silence within. Such moments are worth possessing in order to derive the maximum out of cosmic consciousness.

Your country provides the ideal scenario for peace and quiet through its natural beauty and climate, as i have myself experienced in a four month stay professionally visiting the University of Helsinki!

Dear Dr.Pitkänen,

a quick note about 'anonymous', there's a tab at the top of the posts where what one has typed in for 'Your name' in the form appears. though the post isn't signed, his name does appear there: Narendra nath. he has an entry here also.

there are a lot of interesting entries here. about time's arrow, one paper by McGucken points out that the fourth dimension in relativity is not time. it actually reads: x4=ict. that's different. we don't seem to actually have a word for what "ict" is. it imparts movement. expansion. it appears that time in this emerges naturally from this expansion. apparently so does light. it's lovely. myself, i have to try to picture this stuff happen, visualize the actual process. it occurs relative to the three primary dimensional vectors of space. it's a bit of an ethereal image for me, still thinking about it, but it seems this could also accommodate a directional tendency.

about dreaming of your alarm clock going off and waking to find the alarm go off, there was a very interesting experiment conducted by Dr. Edwin May, of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory (http://www.lfr.org/). test subjects were fitted with galvanic skin response monitors and a pair of headphones. a random generator provided an occasional stimulus in the form of a moderately loud tone in the headphones. a software program on a computer recorded both the changes in skin conductivity and the tone generated on a graph. typically, you could see the expected normal response spike appear about two seconds after the spike on the graph for the tone first appeared. on occasion, however, the response would appear about two seconds BEFORE the stimulus. this seems to indicate that the body was already responding at least four seconds before the stimulus. this was a modern day revisit of an experiment from the '40s which had employed electric shock for a stimulus (an advantage in that the body never becomes accustomed to electric shock, enabling longer/repetitive testing...) about 60% of the population are apparently hardwired for precognition of some sort. interesting test design - subjects are entirely passive participants - just relax and sit there.

thanks for the PDF, i've saved it. still trying to get the rest of the papers here read.

thank you very much for taking the time to read mine.

:-)

matt.

Dear Narendra,

nice to hear that we have common vision about consciousness. Westeners have really a lot to learn about Easteners.

I really believe that cognition is something not localizable to a finite volume of universe. So called p-adic number fields, one for each prime, which are completions of rationals to get continuum, are analogous to reals and for several reasons ideal for description of correlates of cognition. Taking this seriously forces to generalize the notion of number by fusing reals and various p-adic number fields and their algebraic extensions along rationals and common algebraic numbers to form a larger structure.

What is very special about p-adic numbers is that the notion of magnitude is completely different from that for reals: p-adically infinitesimal is literally infinite in real sense. This means that p-adic space-time sheets serving as correlates for thoughts and intentions have literally infinite size in real sense and can be said to ha have size of entire infinite cosmos. Therefore cognition would be literally cosmic phenomenon, not localizable to brain.

Only cognitive representations in the real number based world would allow localization to say brain and would always consist of discrete points corresponding to intersections of real and p-adic space-time sheets. This unavoidable discreteness corresponds in numerical mathematics to unavoidable discretization and use of rational numbers.

Nice to hear that you have visited Helsinki and liked Finland. For years ago I was teaching in Helsinki University but nowadays I am free researcher: it is dangerous for physicist to talk about consciousness! I hope I could some time visit India!

Best Wishes,

Matti

Dear Matti,

Our responses are hopefully seen by other authors and general public too. We are equal before the eyes of ' consciousness'. That is why basically, human nature is 'loving'. That is every one of us seeks love from others. Basically, love comes spotaneously provided one is free from bias and ego. One however needs to develop the qualities of compassion and self-sacrifice to get amplification of such feelings.

i like the terms p-adic no. and your explanatatory expansion of the term 'Cognition'. Certainly it is much much more than mere 'observer'.

India is a cheap country to visit and you can plan a trip between November and Febraury when the weather here will be like your summer in North India. South India is mostly tropical and wet throughout.

yes, we have some good spiritual leaders ( not to be confused with religious ones). In fact, old Indian scriptures of our land don't talk of religious matters. It takes of righteous life as meant to be lived by one and all. Even authorship of such scriptures

remained unknown o/c anonymity desired and also because the knowledge was transferred by way of words. In fact, a later holy book known as GITA/ Bhagwatgita clearly states that the religion of a given person is what he/she practices in action and not what he professes to believe in or expresses as the faith!

Through strange citing of a Blog put up by FQXI web prior to this site, preliminary draft of your essay under preparation was put up , requesting comments. i just happen to post my comments there, against your prelim draft essay. Kindly see the same and respond, as these comments are different from what i posted some days back on the formal website of FQXI carrying the finally approved essays. You may respond here or on that earlier site, as convenient>

Matti,

in case you don't locate the older FQXI site, may i repeat what essentially i posted yesterday on that Blog.

i have talked about four states of consciousness, waking, dream, deep sleep and meditation stages. The last category does not exist in biology. It is a kind of wakeful state with physical rest but total awareness. his stage is capable of providing interactions between individual consciousness with

the cosmic one, the storehouse of total knowledge/intellect. Yoga is a kind of meditation that does involve light easy body part movements and the same was founded thousands of years backn in India by Saint Patanjali. The two quotes from the same form a part of own essay in the competition, under holistic remarks!

Consciousness without vibrations is all pervading, permanent and infinitely powerful non-physical entity. The entire visible universe and its contents are manifested by IT through the modulation with frequencies, symbolizing constant motion/change. That is what we all sense with our faculties/instruments. Pure/cosmic consciousness thus remains beyond our reach via the known biological/instrumental sensing devices. In meditation/yoga, the possibilty of interaction exists via silencing the mind and developing the capability of emptiness/silencing of the automatic generation of the train of thoughts.

Now , something about the Topological Geometrodynamics Theory ( TGD) . May i know something about the founding precepts and the concepts you have evolved to simulate consciousness in this development! Can you model different stages of 'consciousness' through some providing dynamics to a geometrical model? How you get the Time relationships and irreversibility introduced into your model?

i have also mentioned about the belief of Prof. Eccles , a Nobel Leaurate Neurologist, who postulates a non-physical covering to exist around the Supplementary Motor Area (SMA) of the human brain. The latter is recording all the interactions the neurons in SMA have due to externally generated activity. He further believes that such a covering does not die with the physical death of the body. This is quite a thought provoking area to work on the interface of Science with Consciousness!

Matti,

I am attracted by your use of number theory in your essay. I loved number theory as a youngster and always conrtinued to work on some pet projects. I recently had the odd experience of seeing one of my humble number theory papers cited in a string theory paper!

You have a lot of maths packed into your essay and I think I would have to delve into the huge amount of supporting material that you referenced to understand it. But could you give an overview of the way p-adic numbers enter into the theory? Are you saying that time and space should be charted with p-adic co-ordinates for example? If so that idea would have made a fascinating topic for an essay on the nature of time in its own right. (I too may be guilty of having tried to include too many ideas in my essay)

Matti: I remember having communications with you some years ago. It looks as if you are still working on M^4xCP^2, and p-adic numbers. p-adic numbers are useful for K-theory topology and winding numbers on Fermi-like surfaces. I am not sure if that makes much contact with your work.

I submitted my entry late. For some reason I thought the deadlines was Dec 31, and last week decided to get an "early start" on this. Much to my consternation the deadline is Dec 1. So I slammed out my essay which outlines one aspect of my work the last 2-3 years. I am pretty much into quantum error correction codes, sporadic and heterotic groups, AdS/CFT dualities and so forth. My paper illustrates some tessellation results which leads to noncommutative geometry and nonassociative transformations between those group actions, and some AdS results. My paper is above in the horde that came in late.

Cheers,

Lawrence B. Crowell