Essay Abstract

There is no reason to think that mankind has already explored all the mysteries of nature. One such mystery is the dichotomy between mind and matter. It is argued that science should take terms like goals, intentions and meaning more seriously, because it could turn out that these concepts play a more crucial role within the grand scheme of things than science has thought of until now.

Author Bio

The author's main scientific interests are mathematical undecidability, algorithmic information theory, questions concerning consciousness, human free will and logics. Additionally he is interested in various interpretational questions about quantum mechanics.

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It is a real pleasure to read your research article from time to time Mr.Weckbach; the essay is among my preferred favorites. The search for the meaning of meaning or a physics of consciousness belongs to the intersection of science and religion, that is for me personally humanity's level about the knowledge of an eternal and creative upper force, i.e. the existence of space and time has a 'higher' purpose, in terms of 'altruistic' science as the opposite to intellectual egotism. In any case, true meaning waits to be discovered.Best: s.ternyik

    Thank you Stephen for reading and commenting and for the positive feedback. If someone can benefit from what i wrote, then i am really happy and have achieved one of my goals in writing an essay at all. Another goal is to make people sensitive to some possible prejudices they might have about what science can achieve and what it can't. Science has 'evolved' nearly to the degree that it is considered by many people today as a kind of religion (that does not allow other religions to exist besides of it). Science and religion have both their limits, but i am convinced that if there is a higher purpose (and i believe there is), this purpose encompasses that human beings are able to find broad hints of it in many areas.

    Best wishes

    Stefan Weckbach

    6 days later

    Stefan Weckbach,

    I read your essay; it appears that you are a believer. It is good; it will help you in harsh times. I will call you a lucky man.

    Quoting you,"If there is goal-oriented ... should have its roots in a more knowing and more potent conscious agent". Then logic requires that you explain how the "more knowing and more potent conscious agent" got the knowledge and consciousness; it may require a still more potent conscious agent, and so on. Then why should you limit it to just two levels? So I think it would be better to stop with just one level by stating that 'there may be a goal oriented behavior in the universe'.

    Healing is done by the body itself; medication just helps the body to cure by itself. If the body loses its healing power, no amount of medicine will work. Belief has the power of both healing and aggravating, even if the belief is totally false. As long as the belief does not aggravate your condition, but provides you with some healing effect, it is good, even if it a false belief. So it is practically good to believe in a 'more potent conscious agent' who protects us.

    Near death experience is a hallucination created when you feel that something abnormal is happening to your body. Interpretation of near death experience is just like interpretation of dreams; it has nothing to do with "a more potent conscious agent" if any.

    Jose P Koshy

      Dear Jose, thank you for reading my essay an commenting on it. I respect your considerations, although i do not automatically share them.

      Let me explain why i do not automatically share them.

      I don't think that logics necessarily does require an explanation of the existence of 'the more potent conscious agent'. The reason is twofold. Firstly, if time and space are not fundamental, logics requires the assumption that there should be a realm beyond space and time. In your essay, you take space and time as fundamental. If true, then logics would require one to ask what created the 'more potent conscious agent' in time. But since your framework is causally closed hermetically, this question does not make sense, along with the assumption that a 'God' could be possible or would be needed as an explanation of all the questions that can be posed by conscious beings.

      Secondly, whether or not space and time are fundamental, one has to presuppose certain assumptions to be given. In your essay, this is an enternally pulsating universe. In my opinion, logics does require an explanation of how an uncaused eternal universe shoule come into being, since the framework within your assumed universe deals explicitly only with physical causes and effects in time. Even if one assumes space and time as not fundamental, logic would require to explain how the abstract mechanisms came into being that facilitated space and time.

      In the case of assuming 'God' to be existent and space and time are not fundamental (as i do), one is logically forced to assume that 'God' is an eternal fact (there would be no need to install a 'much more potent conscious agent' to explain what brought 'God' into existence, because God is considered by me as beyond physical time) same as you assume that a pulsating universe is an eternal fact, or some quantum physicists assume that the rules of quantum mechanics are an abstract eternal fact.

      In ALL scenarios i mentioned, one thing surely remaines unexplained, namely how it can be that there exists logics at all to come to some meaningful - and sometimes even true - conclusions about the world. By meaningful, i also mean that logics is able to facilitate consistent relationships at all, independent of wether they meet reality at all or not. Additionally, in ALL scenarios i mentioned, the possible assumptions or conclusions cannot be proven or falsified rigourosly. All our tools, including logics, are not sufficient to enable the provability of such assumptions.

      In a strictly deterministic, physically closed universe, healing is a matter of certain physical properties interacting with each other according to some (mathematical) governing laws. Beliefs would have no causal powers. But i see no logical reason to believe the possibility that physicalism is all there is.

      Stefan Weckbach,

      Quoting you, "one is logically forced to assume that 'God' is an eternal fact". Yes, I agree with you, it is an assumption that can neither be proven nor falsified.

      As I pointed out in the thread you started in my essay, freewill is possible only in a deterministic world; similarly, belief can have causal powers only in a determinitisc world. In a random world, things happen arbitrarily. (It is to be noted that this explanation depends on how we define determinism and randomness).

      Jose P koshy

      12 days later

      Stefan Weckbach,

      We first met with my 2009 essay on consciousness, and we seemed simpatico then. I find your current essay power packed and fail understand why it has seen so little action. Perhaps because you began by noting that "it seems to be impossible to talk about goals, intentions and meaning without some kind of reference to human experience", whereas many authors have the goal of showing consciousness to emerge mechanistically. [My own essay considers experience the predominant aspect.]

      You clearly state a conclusion I too have arrived at: "a strictly deterministic [no 'will'] evolution ... leaves no room for the subject to change the course of events in any way." Therefore 'awareness' has no value, since it cannot act, hence no Darwinian worth, and would not be selected for. For me that disposes of the will question, in favor of will.

      And you make the most convincing argument I've come across against 'mindless math' producing anything. It is so powerful that I quote you in my essay [thank you]. You point out that from Godel we conclude that "relatively simple mathematical systems, although they are consistent, must remain incomplete" but the mathematical system cannot itself formalize this conclusion! This is a killer argument against "the complete formalizability of all that exists." It seems inescapable that "there is more to existence than mathematical structures ever can deliver."

      With these two examples of inescapable logic you have in essence answered key questions that this essay contest is searching for. Congratulations. I think you need more visibility.

      Best regards,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

        Stefan,

        You write between pages 2 and 3:

        The picture described here implies that the physical universe as a whole is an open system and that conscious beings are too.

        My essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2737 is about the requirement for an open universe for there to exist consciousness. I largely argue for an open universe according to quantum entanglements. Your essay then proceeds to talk about Godel's theorem, where I in turn discuss Malament-Hogarth spacetimes that serve as a hyper-turing machine. My essay looks at this issue from a somewhat different angle.

        It has been a sideline question for me for a long time as to what role Godel's theorem plays in physics. I tend to think it has a role in the measurement problem. If we think of a measurement as a quantum system being coupled to a larger quantum system that as a whole is performing at least partially a self-measurement this is a self-referential loop. Maybe the inability to understand quantum measurement from the foundations of quantum mechanics is because of axiomatic incompleteness of quantum logico- algebraic system. This is also connected with black holes as well, where the apparent loss of entanglement according to a local observer is similar to a measurement.

        I think the universe is in some sense set up as an open system to permit the probability for conscious entities. I don't go into great depth on the nature of consciousness, though as with you I think it is emergent from self-referential incompleteness. I do however, think consciousness is more approximately self-referential, which is what cuts it off from infinite regressions.

        I will give your essay a score of 9. I reduce it 1 point because the mention of near death experiences and such testimonies does not seem right. However, over all your essay was great!

        Cheers LC

          Dear Stefan:

          Enjoyed reading your excellent essay. You have pointed out two key insights that could lead to the development of an integrated scientific model as presented in my paper - "FROM LAWS TO AIMS & INTENTIONS - A UNIVERSAL MODEL INTEGRATING MATTER, MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND PURPOSE."

          The first insight is that the universe is alive and conscious as you say- "If there is goal-oriented behavior in the universe independent from all the pettiness of living creatures, this behavior should have its roots in a more knowing and more potent conscious agent than we are and least of all in a dead universe.

          The second key insight by you is - " Although quantum mechanics has

          formalized the microscopic world so that scientists can in many cases predict the long-term behaviour of some macroscopical subsystems, at shorter scales and with less particles involved, individual particle behaviour

          cannot anymore be predicted for sure in all cases. This lack of prediction alone does not necessarily imply that individual particle behaviour in these cases is totally random and not governed by any 'instruction'. But until now, huge efforts to decipher the possible principles of such instructions have all more or less failed. The results of these efforts cannot be objectified enough to trigger general accordance about them."

          My paper builds up a physical model on these two insights via integrating the physics of spontaneous (free-willed) decay of particles as a natural degree of freedom or free will in nature that not only predicts the classical or empirical universe but also provides a choice to the observer to follow its intentions or goals to select or choose a relative reality that is allowed within the envelope of an infinite set of physical realities satisfying the laws of mass-energy conservation.

          I would request you to please read my paper as it not only resonates with your insights but also forwards a model to resolve the Hard problems of consciousness, free will, intentions within the existing laws of conservation. Moreover, the model resolves the QM puzzle via explaining the inner workings of QM based on the universal consciousness.

          I would greatly appreciate your comments about my paper at your convenience.

          Best Regards

          Avtar Singh

            Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman,

            thank you for reading and commenting and for the positive feedback.

            This year's essay topic is quite difficult to tackle and i am glad that you appreciate my attempts. Some researchers on the origins of consciousness (and free will) have changed their attempts to tackle the problem by starting from the phenomenological properties of consciousness (e.g. Tononi or Donald Hoffman) instead of starting by reducing it via material correlations.

            The underlying lines of reasoning for them are, i think, that we know today that reality is (or at least in a scientific framework should be) a consistent whole. Consciousness therefore isn't anymore handled as just an 'epiphenomenon', a kind of accident, by these researchers, but as a significant part of reality; the latter seems natural to me due to the fact that without consciousness, no science would be possible and the term 'consistent' would have no objective meaning; without consciousness, consistence or inconsistence would be both meaningless terms, because such 'terms' simply wouldn't exist. So the fact that they do exist together with consciousness should be not pushed aside to easily.

            I think Gödel's results are somewhat underrated when it comes to questions that try to tackle problems at the borders of our logic and our understanding. The mind-body problem is just such a problem. It remains unresolved for what i think is due to the difficulty to unify an assumed physically closed worldview (consisting of only deterministic necessities) with an open worldview (mainly the ability of consciousness to 'imagine' counterfactual things or to imagine things that can't be proven to be counterfactual in nature or not).

            I think if we take logics seriously and not as another cosmic 'accident' in the grand scheme of existence, then we are forced to assume our universe to be the result of a meaningful event in the past - if one believes there was a big bang at all. Besides the latter, even an eternal physical universe should not rule out realms beyond space and time, realms where logics itself has its origins. For me, logics - like Gödel's results - indicates that there must be such a realm. Even if one assumes that all that exists did come into existence via an 'accident', or out of literally 'nothing', this 'nothing' nonetheless must have at least one well defined property, namely the possibility to produce 'something'. If this logical reasoning holds true (and i think it does), then 'nothing' as the origin of everything is a misnomer - it is bound to a kind of logic in the first place to produce something at all, namely the logic that it is possible at all. Otherwise we are wandering in a kind of magical world.

            I will take a look at your essay!

            Dear Lawrence B. Crowell,

            thank you for reading and commenting and for your scoring.

            I read your essay a few days ago but have to re-read it to fully capture it.

            I think Gödel's results, as simple as they appear on first sight, are a profound result about the structure of reality. I think you are on the right track by handling reality as an open 'system'. And yes, entanglement seems to play a crucial role in this by measuring subsystems and thereby turing their possibilities into consistencies, thereby procuding new entanglement. So one could say this is a kind of evolving process, a process seemingly not determined to the last detail. Otherwise Darwinian evolution, or to say it better, selection processes wouldn't make any sense in nature.

            You mentioned another important area, namely the measurement problem, or stated differently, the axiomatic basis of quantum mechanics. Here i think, and i have the impression that you do also, that Gödel's results are somewhat related to it. The crucial point here for me is, that to find natural axioms to complete some formal systems is not at all a simple task because one always has to differenciate between a necessity and a possibility. How can a mathematician unevocally know that a certain axiom is necessary instead of simply only possible? This problem is tied to the 'problem' that we live in a seemingly contingent world where things happen which cannot be explained by mere mechanical terms. For example the fact that Kennedy was shot - was this inevitable due to some laws of physics / nature or not? Surely it was possible to happen (otherwise it did not happen), but was it also *necessary* in the sense that it could not have been avoided by any action in the universe?

            The problem of contingence plays a similar role when one tries to completely axiomatize a formal system. I suspect that some claims about the validity of Gödel's results (by questioning some of his used axioms in his proofs) stems from the dichotomy between a necessity and a possibility.

            I too think that consciousness is only approximately self-referential. In my opinion it surely has some elements of self-referentiality, but i wouldn't reduce it just to the property of self-referentiality. There must be some other properties of consciousness that make a difference between a mere description, a representation of reality in a conscious mind, and the qualia of it. Representation and mere data processing doesn't do the job, i think. Consciousness seems to have the ability to simply be aware of some reality without judging or interpreting it. It then is in a state to be aware of the existence of something, simply as it appears to this consciousness. How qualia does fit in there, i do not really know for sure. I suspect that the real meaning of our qualia (e.g. the subjective feeling of seing red) do reside beyond spacetime in a realm where the answers to the question about the objective meaning of existence also resides.

            I didn't fully grasp what you meant by a 'hyper-turing machine'. What is the difference of this machine to a UTM?

            I will re-read your essay and try to comment on your essay page.

            • [deleted]

            • Post #12

            It may have come to your notice that mention of Gödel's theorem in physics circles brings up pretty negative reactions and comments. I can in part see why that is the case. Gödel's theorem has some rather negative implications for the ability to do physics. It also has not had the impact on mathematics that Godel himself thought it might.

            The idea that quantum measurement problems were self-referential occurred to me in graduate school. In fact I took a few courses on symbolic logic, set theory and studied Gödel's theorem in order to think about this. Alas I was not able to do much, in part because of time. It seemed to me back then that a measurement consisted of quantum states of system + measurement apparatus that made a sort of self-referential encoding of its states. The collapse of the wave function then seemed to be a manifestation of the axiomatic limits of the quantum logico-algebraic system thought of as a numerical system. The raising and lowering operations on state vectors are a sort of complex vector space version of Peano number theory on addition and subtraction.

            The hyperTuring machine is capable of being a full UTM. Classical physical information processing systems do not permit the existence of a UTM. Quantum computers are not UTMs either, and in fact only extend the domain P computations to bounded quantum polynomial set, and not NP. It is a bit like going from the field of reals to complex. An eternal black hole (BH) could in principle be a UTM. The BH could receive an infinite set of bits or qubits necessary to solve any problem.

            A funny case of this is the problem of what is the on/off state of a switch if I set it to on at time t = 0, then off at time t = ВЅ and then on at t = Вѕ and so forth so that at t = 1 the switch has been flipped an infinite number of times. Will the switch be on or off? It sounds a bit like a bizarre question to be concerned about, but remember there is the related issue of the Riemann zeta function

            О¶(s) = sum_{n=1}^в€ћ 1/n^s,

            where О¶(-1) = -1/12. The curious thing is that О¶(-1) = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ..., which does not look at all like -1/12! Similarly for О¶(0) = -1/2 which is a sum of ones. There is a form of p-adic number theory at work here. As a result we might not be so hesitant to think this Zeno type of problem is nonsense. However, the one thing that happens is that if each flip of the switch requires a unit of energy, then at some point the flipping of the switch becomes so fast and requires so much energy that it becomes a black hole. That is of course if it can be prevented from exploding. Hence the answers to these odd questions does seem to involve black holes and maybe quantum gravity.

            As for truncating the self-reference, I left that pretty ambiguous. I would say that one possible more precise way to think of it is that we are looking at first order logic. Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves effective first-order theories with a large finite set of the theory of the natural numbers can never be both consistent and complete. I think this sort of thing relies upon Berry's paradox or related issue of bounding the subset of the natural numbers with a number that is "unnameable." Black holes are not eternal, but decay by Hawking radiation. This cuts off the self-referential process, say something similar to renormalization cut off.

            I wrote my essay in part to illustrate my work on entanglement of black holes with quantum hair. I decided to do this because I wove in the idea of MH spacetimes and hyper-Turing computations.

            Cheers LC

            Dear Avtar Singh,

            thank you for reading and commenting and for your positive feedback.

            I read your essay and left a comment on your page

            Best regards,

            Stefan Weckbach

            Dear George Ellis,

            thank you for having read my essay and for your positive feedback!

            Dear Stefan Weckbach,

            Thank you for excellent essay....

            In your reply to Lawrence B. Crowell wrote on Feb. 10, You also accepted you think it is an open universe.

            In an open universe all the radiation emitted from Stars, Galaxies goes out of universe at the velocity of light. In your opinion where that radiation goes, will that not be a part of the universe ...?

            Best

            Snp.Gupta

              Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

              thank you for reading and commenting and for your question.

              Due to current physical theories, radiation that was produced in 3D space, remains in 3D space. Thhis should be the case whether space is infinite or finite. In the latter case, there are hindsights that the universe began as a 'big bang', space and time did emerge from some other process. Space expands in the far field of the universe with v > c, so that no light does ever reach a point where space does end.

              By 'open' i mean not the case that space does end 'somewhere' far out at the borders of our universe, but i mean that it is interwoven within another dimension, different from space and time. Again, hindsights are there for this in form of spontaneous particle creation / annihilation and the energy / time uncertainty relation. So, with 'open' it is meant another dimension, indicated by quantum mechanical processes measureable in our universe; the latter seems to be open in the sense that what we think as our universe isn't causally closed, but open. Surely, the latter also indicates that it is an open question what rules reside in this other dimension. Personally, i think these rules should have something to do with life, consciousness and intentionality.

              • [deleted]

              • Post #18

              Hi Stefan,

              I enjoyed reading your essay - I think you are getting at something important. I intend to read it a few more times.

              Dear Stefan Weckbach

              Thank you very much for reading my paper as well as your kind comments.

              I would appreciate it very much if you could please rate my paper.

              Best Regards

              Avtar

              Dear Stefan

              Thanks for your article that debates around the possibilities of meaning base information. From my observation the space is full of relations between 2 or more existents and the relation itself hold the potential action for each existent in he relation. Meaning based information exists when there is a possibility for at least one action to the relating Existants. If there is no potential for at least one action (conscious or unconscious) there is no relations between the existents. Causality works as a special case in the finitude life of the phenomenon. Causality does not evolve the phenomena in general. Therefore, reality is contingent and possible, and not predetermined. The forces of nature that we know works within the framework of the Phenomena but they are special cases where the relationship hold only one (even statistically) possible outcome. The selection of potential action from a range of potentials by a self organization depends on the actual State of the self organization and the attributes it has for its movements. I claim that a movement are not only the 3-4 measurable attributes we used in physics but rather 20 attributes that allow the self organization to be unique in its existence whether it is a grain of sand or a human being.

              Thanks again since I use the term of Operating meaning in my book: "generators theory", and I claim that the space is a composite of these natural language of operating meanings.

              Here, at FQXi contest, I wrote an article about the attributes of the movement without getting into the space of Operating Meaning. The essay name is: "we are together, therefore I am".

              thanks

              yehuda atai