Thanks Rajiv. Indeed, the world gets more and more difficult for honest people. Either you adapt to the 'game', or you are in trouble. The same with this contest here, where group dynamics and other charades seem to replace honest discussions. But i also see the exceptions here.

"In my view, we are living in the darkest phase of humanity, I say so, because, this is the only period humanity understands its place in nature, it has technology even to interfere with natural processes at reasonably larger scale, it knows what is good and what is not good for its own existence, yet it willfully decides to accelerate its own possible extinction."

If the people in the middle ages had the technology we have today, i think we'd gone extinct already. Luckily they weren't clever enough to figure all out. Today, we think we figured it all out, but i assume this is a huge fallacy. A fallacy which leads to a false sense of security and victory over whatever will come. The age of enlightenment as well as christianity helped the human civilization to become less superstitious in the sense of projecting all the bad onto other beings. But there are subtle tendencies for both, enlightenment and belief in God, to erode and being replaced by a new kind of superstition, one that heavily relies on esoteric mumbo jumbo and the belief that every human being is somewhat god-like in its core.

I know my limits, life has told me so. But a majority of human beings has been deluded by technology and consumption. Nonetheless you are right that the hard questions cannot be settled in an objective, so scientific manner. It all hinges on beliefs, whatever they are. But i also think that one can make some guesses on the basis of logical thinking, in relationship with other areas of experience and investigation, just as i outlined in my essay.

The question of which 'more potent conscious agent' we should trust is a well known question. I think it can only be answered personally, if such beliefs do shipwreck. But to recognize such cases for oneself, one has to be honest to oneself and not delude oneself. This is a hard problem, since love of the truth seems not to be something which is favored by either evolution or human psyche. I belief in a salvation figure, since i realized that i cannot redeem myself. Life can give you situations where every solution leads to another problem. Since i transcended all solution-dependend problems by means of what my psyche needs the most, i am free to jettison most of what i believed so far by means of realizing that it is only a belief in the first place and does not necessarily reflect reality. Despite this more psychological ansatz, my philosophical ansatz is simply to know that i cannot control all parameters in my life and all influences that may come (or already had come in the past).

The problem with near-death experiences is, that they deliver also some messages one could interpret as esoteric knowledge in the tradition of corpus hermeticum. I am aware that at some more fundamental level, these teachings may meet reality to a certain degree, but we cannot decide to what degree and how it all is connected to the teachings of the evangelists. I only see a tendency that these hermetic teachings strengthen the human disposedness to self-exaltation with all its mad consequences. Look around and see how people change due to such messages. Non of their predictions (2012 etc.) came true. This would be no problem if one anyway does not belief in spiritual realms. But for those who do, movements like light-workers and similar have a strong influence on the elite, since the elite likes to self-exalt itself.

I know the stories around Swedenborg, although not all and in detail, but summa summarum i would say there is more between the heavens and earth as scientist may dream of. And if so, this should be a good reason to ask the right questions. Thank you very much for your feedback and your kind words!

Best wishes,

Stefan Weckbach

Stefan Weckback,

I greatly enjoyed your well-written article. You make so many solid points for arguments in favor of free will. I will happily fold them into my own advocacy of its existence. Right from the beginning of your essay you see the problem of the objectification of science. Reductionistic science concentrates solely on the object of study without regard for the necessity of a sentient observer and the curiosity that motivates it; little lone avoiding the teleological pitfalls built into our descriptive language (and the way we think). Math affords a neutral ground for this description but in doing so avoids any pretense of agenda other than following its own internal logic; and even here in this sentence I was unable to avoid that trap. I start from phenomenology: cogito ergo sum. That we are mud that got to sit up and look around is wondrous to me. To modernize Kant's lingo a bit, the nominal can only be known through the phenomenal. To paraphrase Stanfield's (named after my father Arthur Stanfield) three rules of perception: 1) It is a reconstruction. 2) Remember it is a reconstruction. 3) Don't forget it's a reconstruction. The need for these three rules flows from the extreme transparency of the process which would naïvely lead us to believe that we are seeing objective reality directly. It is always filtered through the teleological biases of the individuated, subjective sentient observer. As I say in my essay: we have skin in the game.

From my remarks to John Ellis on his essay:

Purpose is something we see within ourselves and see in others. As embodied minds, we take its existence for granted as part of the requirement for the evolution of life. And like consciousness, it seems to resist a reductionistic explanation. Existence, sentience, consciousness and the nature and mechanism behind the collapse of the wavefunction remain elusive mysterious.

A sentient being is an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment in interaction with an external environment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject. It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized observation of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise? Somehow, it must be connected to existential threat. But how does the organism come to sense that existential threat? My simplistic answer is that an organism's nerve endings, no matter how primitive, provide the initial feedback. All sentient beings have skin in the game. But there still remains the problem of how that feedback might be converted into sentience and the sensation of jeopardy. {Insert hand waving here} Once the sense of jeopardy has been detected, the obvious back reaction would be a teleological bias to fulfill the dual agendas: stay in the energy flux and avoid destruction. This would go for the tubeworms living near a steam vent or, as more neural circuitry is thrown at the problem in service of this agenda, an investment banker competing for her share of the billions in bonuses available to maintain herself far from equilibrium.

To answer the question you posed on my essay thread, I make the distinction between the existence of the Abstract Realm of Mathematics (ARM) as a discovery and the Platonic realm of mathematics, also as a discovery, but existing in the form of ideas which then would seem to require a consciousness as the medium of existence. On this score I am an agnostic. I jokingly say about myself that I used to be an Orthodox Platonist but now I am a reformed Pythagorean. I love to guess at metaphysical questions but I have a great aversion to taking as the starting axiom, that which is to be explained. The perennial philosophy of taking consciousness as the ground of all being is very comfortable. Perhaps I will be able to arrive at a conclusion eventually, but in the meantime I have the feeling that when I do, all further explanations cease. As the fundamentalists said to his son, do you want to study your biology homework or just say God did it and go out and play.

Whenever I came upon your phrase, 'simply not fully formalizable,' I had to stop and think what you meant by it. Then I realized that I didn't have a clue. My intuitive guess was that you meant that all of nature cannot be described in terms of an equation (with an underlying set of mathematical relationships) that is deterministic. If that is what you were getting at then I agree. There is an underlying mathematical structure their but it opens into a phase space that renders it indeterminate. Math is open-ended. Then later in your essay I came upon your mention of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and figured we were thinking along the same lines.

Reductionism works well with inanimate objects such as physics and chemistry but it loses explanatory traction at biology. Trying to explain evolution without purpose or volition, just by the principles of random chance becomes problematic.

Also from the standpoint of duality, which I have found to be the most powerful tool in the philosopher's toolkit, whenever I perceive an attribute in nature I must always realize that in order to see that attribute it must be seen against the background of its conjugate attribute. The conjugate attribute pair, CAP [objective/ subjective] is one of the more basic ones. The most basic CAP is [being/ nonbeing]. Love is the opposite of hate but the conjugate attribute of them both his indifference. All three of these seem to go with sentience. The universe partitions into the observer, the object or attribute and the rest. I would say that the CAP of sentience is non-sentience but that would be ridiculous;-) I now realize that I do not have a good word for the CAP of sentience but I do believe the universe needs both ends of the continuum in order to manifest either one. In conclusion I would say, if the ARM 'am' (first-person singular) totally suffused with consciousness then what is the motivation for physical being.

Best regards,

Jim Stanfield

    Dear James,

    thank you so much for your thoughtful comment.

    I will reply more in detail later, since now its early in the morning here and i have to go to work. Your remarks on polarity are interesting and i will also comment on this later, since its a crucial ingredient for evaluating fundamental questions.

    Best wishes,

    Stefan Weckbach

    Dear Stefan

    The known style of essay, as many others of you; and similar, anti-materialistic, ideas as mine.

    You wrote more clearly, as I tried to write:

    You wrote:

    "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."

    I suspected, (at Sara Walker) that the cause of top-down causation is quantum mechanics. You remained me with this sentence that uncertainty principle also means top-down causation. (Hoel, Stoica, Ellis and many here wrote about top-down causation.)

    You try also to say that materialistic world without consciousness loses meaning. I also claim this.

    You write about near dead experiences. Do you know someone with these experiences? I looked documentary on National Geographic, where one scientist claimed that he explained all stages of near death experiences. He explained this materialistically, of course. I do not remember his name, maybe you can find him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience. But, I think that total explanation need to explain what the matter is versus consciousness, and what is more basic of them. This is not so easy.

    my essay

    Best regards, Janko Kokošar

      Dear Janko,

      thanks for your comments!

      Yes, i tried to say that a materialistic world without consciousness looses meaning. This is in my opinion so, because every fundamental explanation of the world's past, present and future states must involve some presuppositions. For the case of a materialistic world, one usually presupposes quantum mechanics (some fluctuations beyond space and time) and/or mathematics for explaining how it all came about.

      But both, quantum mechanics and mathematics follow a certain logic, they both must be consistent in order to being able to be traced back to the origins of all. So, the origin of all should be 'consistency' or in other words, logic.

      Usually, by pondering about such explanation schemes, one forgets that in order to meet reality for those schemes, they presuppose also *logic*. Since logic is a dualistic net of realationships (either yes or no or undefined/unknown, but never yes *and* no for the same instance), one has to conclude that either the world's fundaments are inconsistent (so being able to produce yes *and* no for the same object in question), what would be the case for a world having arisen out of shere nothing in a 'random' manner - or one has to conclude that at the fundamental level there is something other (unknown/undefined) that is consistent with logic and can be induced by logic in an a posteriori manner. Quantum fluctuations as well as mathematics aren't the suitable candidates for the fundamental reality, cause the former follow a mathematically describable statistics (as is the case for an infinite ensemble of random events), so must presuppose mathematics, and the latter can also not be the fundamental level, because it would instantiate infinite complexity for a physical world to circumvent Gödel's results (alternatively said, it must build up an infinite tower of axiomatic turtles to circumvent Gödel's results). Since no concept of infinity can counteract the ever expanding incompleteness of formal systems (or alternatively, if one thinks one can prove Gödel's results to be *wrong* - the ever expanding inconsistency of formal systems!!!), i am not convinced that mathematics is at the root of it all (and also due to some other reasons i described in my comments here and on other essay pages).

      Deniers of the ontological content of near-death experiences cannot other than deny a crucial aspect of the latter, namely what i wrote in my essay: the many cases where experiencers saw (during an out-of-body experience) things in their physical surroundings they never could have seen if these informations would have come through their physical eyes. Moreover, many of them report that they had a kind of 360 degree view onto the whole scene. There are cases where, for example a man in the surgery room saw during his experience what went on in the neighbor room and he saw that someone put an amputated leg into a bag. This case was later confirmed by the hospital crew. There are overwhelmingly many such cases, but one has to watch not only a commercial documentary on a commercial channel, but search for personal reports on the internet and youtube. This needs a huge amount of time, but this is how personal research works.

      If the mind/consciousness is independent in principle from the physical body, surely there have to be some intersections between both modi of existence. A natural candidate, considered by many researchers, is quantum mechanics. My argument here is that in general, both modi are expressions of a deeper principle which can - due to lack of proper language and ontological access - be termed 'vibrational'. The latter in the sense of energy as an emanation of some intelligent activity. Since energy and matter are to a certain degree transformable into each other, my conclusions seems reasonable to me. The mistake is to take 'intelligent activity' as bounded by space and time - and within the range or our own human intelligence. But this is not what i mean by it. Since we do not really know the ontological properties of energy, space, matter, time and even do not know the ontological properties of intelligence (means logic and intentions), we are indeed not in a position to belief we have unraveled all there is. My argument converges to what i termed 'undefined/unknown'. Certain properties of the unknown are known, others not. And with 'unknown' i refer here to what i called God. There are some properties of God which must be assumed by necessity (for example that he cannot destroy himself, annihilate himself - since he incorporates an eternal principle, although equipped with some unimaginable intelligence and intentions that are not our intentions). From multi-theism to monotheism, mankind has developed its own intelligence and sense for nature, spiritually as well as scientifically. We do not easily accept today a TOE which is composed of two or more parts that are not intimately linked to each other in a logical manner. Same with theism. It does evolve due to our ability to evolve emotionally and intellectualy. But i think we never will evolve to grasp all properties / intentions of God, at least not in the physical / dual realms we exist so far.

      Concerning the mind-body relation, it all hinges on how much power 'causality' one gives. Is it a one-way street, is it bounded to the physical realm, are mathematical relationships (the = sign) 'necessary' and in what sense (since there is no explanation yet why the numerical value of Pi should begin with 3,1415... instead of 4,1415). Who or what 'caused' these relationships? Was maths created due to a certain plan or is it just as it is, period? Who or what is the origin of, for example, a circle? Must the latter be considered as fundamental such that it *has* to exist (in unison with its diameter)? I tend to think of mathematics as created out of logics (Kronecker's dictum only the natural numbers are fundamental to a cerain degree), but logics to be created out of God's intelligence. A circle is intimately linked with logics, because independent of the starting assumptions of some deductions, if the way of concluding something is consistent, the circle is closed (the end of the circle, the conclusion so to say, 'confirmes' the beginning of the circle, namely the starting assumptions!). Surely, i consider my lines of reasoning as also consistent, and the 'circle's logic' does also apply to my considerations. But if the world would be inconsistent in its very core, i would ask how there then can arise consistent systems other than due to some 'randomness' (which again closes the circle because 'randomness' leads us back to a formalized, mathematical description of something, arising randomly from nothing). Moreover, if inconsistence would be at the very core of fundamental reality, all our conclusions are subject to serious doubts about their consistency! So consistency, randomness and logics are in conflict with each other as long as one does not assume a realm beyond these categories.

      Best wishes and thanks again for your comment Janko!

      Stefan Weckbach

      Dear Stefan,

      Your very well-written essay tackles head-on the big ontological questions that are relevant to this year's FQXi question. You take as your starting point the idea that there is a "level" of reality "higher" than space and time, which contains a "more knowing and more potent conscious agent", which is for all practical purposes "God". Of course, if you start with God, it is very reasonable to expect a universe that is lawful, and where human conscious agents, as a "lower-level reflection" of the mind of God, can have goals, exhibit agency and perhaps even free will. If we go further and suppose that God transcends any conception that we have of structure or formalization, we can certainly justify your conclusion that "nature is not fully formalizable" and that there are "immaterial" influences that can act with intentionality within our universe, without receiving any back-reaction.

      It is certainly a possibility. It gives answers to some of our questions, but it creates so many more new questions... Why is this God-level the way it is? Where does it come from? You say it is beyond space and time, so it has no beginning in time... but that does not mean that its existence does not need to be explained! In your comments on my essay, you wrote that "one could describe the main realm there as God, equating him with zero information". But if this is the case, God has no particular attributes (or has all of them at the same time, and they somehow cancel out)... but then I would say that "He" is no more than what I call ISAAC, the "infinite set of all abstract computations" (or "relations", if you think that "computation" is too narrowly associated with our human-level mathematics).

      What makes metaphysical debates so difficult is the different meaning we attach to words like "abstract", "mathematical", "material", "immaterial", etc. For instance, you say that "there is more to existence than mathematical structures can ever deliver". But in my view, anything that can be thought of is some kind of structure, and mathematics is the general study of structure, so there can be no such thing as a structure that is not mathematical! But, as Jonathan Dickau pointed out in his essay, for most people, "mathematics" means something very restricted and limited, so my view does not make sense to them!

      You would probably say that a universe that is, at the deepest level, built on abstract (mathematical) structures is a dead universe. I would say it is the most alive of all universes, because all-of-math is an infinite, limitless ensemble where even the most complex "god-like" minds can exist and play!

      The ontologies that we propose may sound very different, but our starting intuitions on what should constitute a satifying metaphysics may be closer than they appear to be! I commend you for not being afraid to ask the big questions, and I wish you and your essay good luck in this contest!

      Marc

        Dear James,

        now i have a little more time to write back.

        The problem of describing human beings (living entities) as mud lies in the well known fact that we even do not know what 'mud' is! Of what fundamental constituents is it composed? For what reasons (if any)? Can it be decomposed into single entities? I speak here of 'mud' in the sense of fundamental particles / entities.

        Although we have skin in the game, if logics is a fundamental principle at the roots of reality, we can follow it and hopefully arrive at some beginning of the whole story. Either through deduction of the laws of nature or by the deduction of logical necessities or both. If it is not logically necessary for logics to be as it is, namely to be consistent, then what remains of our awareness of physical laws, mathematics and all the rest?

        Feedback is surely important. As i wrote to Janko below, it manifests even in logic. The cirlce is a potent symbol for this kind of feedback, since the starting and end point of it coincide. So for the case of logic, the initial assumptions are 'confirmed' by the final conclusion just by obeying the exact rules of logic - independent of the initial assumptions to be true or not. But by reducing awareness and consciousness to logic, we end up in a mechanistical explanation scheme that poses other questions. For example, why should there be consciousness and some kind of free will at all, if the whole machinery can run without being conscious at all?

        "Perhaps I will be able to arrive at a conclusion eventually, but in the meantime I have the feeling that when I do, all further explanations cease."

        Right so. As long as there are different alternatives, one should follow each of them - this is my opinion.

        "Also from the standpoint of duality, which I have found to be the most powerful tool in the philosopher's toolkit, whenever I perceive an attribute in nature I must always realize that in order to see that attribute it must be seen against the background of its conjugate attribute. The conjugate attribute pair, CAP [objective/ subjective] is one of the more basic ones. The most basic CAP is [being/ nonbeing]."

        Sure, since all abstract polarities are figures at least in the mind, and you can construct the complement of any figure. The interesting question is if such polarities are necessary and whether or not there could be existence without them. The more phenomenal polarities also can be viewed as abstract, since in the Kantian sense we cannot know the 'thing in itself'. Since polarities are intimately connected also to logic, i would say that logic is very down at the bottom of fundamental reality. It is something which is hard to explain, especially how it should have come into existence if it wouldn't have existed eternally. But as i wrote to Janko below, if one assumes mathematics and logics as being eternal, what can we make out of Gödel's results (which are also the results of logics itself) that every axiomatic system has its incompleteness (its limits)? A complete description of nature then had to be infinite, since to circumvent Gödel's results, nature had to take infinitely many axiomatic steps.

        There are two different modi of logic. The one is coupled with active negation, so if 'a', but not b, b but not c (or b and c), 'a' but not c, but 'not-c'. In other terms, if 'a' is one side of polarity, then b the other side. Both exclude each other. Surely, there are intermediate steps. But assuming 'a' to be true, b cannot be true at the same 'time' (and 'space'). The other modus is passive negation, claiming that if we know 'a', we cannot automatically conclude all about 'not-a'. This modus is different then the first one because firstly, we cannot know for sure what 'a' is as a 'thing in itself' and secondly, we cannot know if there is a continuum from 'a' to b. Both assumptions, 'a' as well as b, may be wrong in the first place and therefore, also a continuum does not exist between these both desriptions. I would formulate it as follows:

        'Either-or' as well as 'neither-or' are viable options to choose from. The question is, does there exist realms that do not necessitate the thinking in such polarities and in what cases is it better to think in either modus? I think if we take the quest for ultimate reality serious, there has to be a realm that transcends logics as we know it, but nonetheless would make perfect sense to an observer. I conclude this from the assumption that logics itself must have come into existence by some more intelligent intervention than human logics can grasp (because it cannot explain its own, assumed to be necessary existence). By assuming the contrary, that logics is the most fundamental level of reality, we end up with the case that the results of logics in many cases have nothing to do with reality, but only with consistence. So, a thing like logics, viewed as the most fundamental level of reality has as its main mechanism something that cannot describe ontological reality in the most cases, is an interesting contradiction. The only way out is to assume that logics is not the last word about fundamental reality. In fact, the contradiction arises because we aren't able to fully recognize 'the thing in itself'. We only ever have our assumptions about it, but not reaching the thing. Since this is a phenomenological insight into our reality, it should also be an ontological insight into that reality. If true, logics demands a realm beyond it. If false, logics as we know it is the only ruler in the whole game and in conflict with inconsistency and Gödel's findings. Because then, either logics is inconsistent (instead of incomplete) or it is consistent to the price that nature (mathematics) must build up an infinite tower of axiomatic turtles to counteract the polarity one can term 'unprovability' (or indefiniteness, uncertainty).

        Since i do not believe in infinite complexity, i do not adopt to the whole MUH idea, since for a mad mind, even inconsistent mathematical structures may seem to be consistent. And moreover, why should we be the ones that are not the mad minds instead of the mad minds being correct? This illustrates that mathematical consistency is not automatically equal to ontological reality. It mirrors that logic is a highly abstract 'thing' and its ultimate roots are unknown. It cannot explain itself other than assuming that it is only a subset of a more intelligent level of reality. One can expand this further and ponder about wether love and hate are 're-united' in the realms beyond our physical existence (at least near-death experiences do imply that these two emotional states do mutually exclude each other). But these are religious considerations that would drift away too far from our subject, namely whether mind / consicousness has some priority over physical stuff or not. And if so, should this also be the case for logic and last but not least, should it be the case *only* for the logics we know so far or are there possibilities that our human logics is only a subset of a more intelligent level of reality - then surely in the sense of some higher aims and intentions. To speak in the sense of Kurt Gödel: because logic has its limits (is incomplete), there has to be another realm of meaningfull existence beyond ordinary logics - otherwise we end up in an absurd universe, arisen out of some incoherent abstract concept like fluctuations, mathematical structures, or even 'nothing' (try to imagine the latter without time and space and everything, even without the notion of 'nothing'!!!).

        Much thanks again for your interesting comment!

        Best wishes,

        Stefan Weckbach

        Dear Stefan

        I do not claim that this scientist is correct. I only claimed that relation consciousness versus matter should be solved before one claim that he materialistically explained near death experiences. But scientists are not so objective as they think they are. At this, I do not know what is true. If you give me your email, maybe I can find you some people with these experiences.

        If you have time, you are invited to read my essay.

        Best regards

        Janko

        Dear Marc,

        thanks again for your remarks and your interest in what i wrote.

        You ask interesting questions and i will try to answer them from my perspective. I will start from logics as we know it.

        Logics has a self-explanatory dynamics, since independent of its assumptions, if the rules of logics are obeyed, they lead to a certain result. It seems then that the starting assumption must be correct, since the derivation is also correct. The dynamics is like a circle, its starting- and endpoint can be choosen arbitrarily. So not all consistent formal explanation schemes do necessarily meet reality. The insight into this 'mechanism' is a little wonder in itself, since logics in its usual meaning is concerned with things like 'a' and / or 'not-a', or 'a and b' or 'a or b' and so on.

        Ordinary logics does rest on some polarities, usually truth and falsehood. We can play with logics ingredients like with lego bricks. Some fit symmetrically together, others not. All of this is based on the interplay of polarities, leading from one pole to the other. We can't really imagine a realm of existence where one polarity is simply canceled out in the equation.

        So, to shortly summarize, logics is like a system of equations and inequalities, it's the ability to differentiate. Somehow logics manages to make some statements about itself (in unison with human experience). Its main ingredient is consistency, leading to descriptions which a circle-like in the first place. Only experiments can decide whether the starting assumptions may be correct or not. Edward Moore (1952, i think) showed that there is a multitude of consistent explanation schemes for the inner workings of a black box. Regarding the reality we live in as a black box (in parts deciphered), we have a problem of identifying Kant's 'thing in itself'. But wait a minute. One 'thing in itself' does say something meaningful about iself, namely logics. It states that we cannot find synthetical a prioris easily, and it is not at all clear whether logics *itself* should be handled as such a synthetical a priori. Because only analytical a prioris can be found to necessarily meet reality. Since logics is an analytical tool, it says about itself that there are limits of our analytical perception of reality. The question now is whether logics itself is limited synthetically also. But if true, how can logics deduce this result, if it has both of these limits, the analytical and the synthetical? The answer is we must take logics as a synthetical a priori, since otherwise no analytical path makes fundamentally sense, and especially taking logics *not* as a synthetical a priori but demanding from it to give some answers about the fundamental levels of reality.

        With that we arrive at the questions about God. In the same sense as logics is necessary to conclude something about itself and evaluate it, the question about God and its roots outside space and time are similar. I agree with you that metaphysical debates have the problem of talking about things that are understood differently by different participants. We now proceed further and ask whether logics (defined as a God-like eternal mechanistic structure at the foundations of every reality) is a necessary ingredient of *any* reality, caused by whatever you will (or - paradoxically, as some people belief, caused by shere *nothing*). If no, every existence would be just a lucky fluke out of shere 'madness'. So we have to presuppose logics as something very fundamental, to at all being able to think meaningfully about fundamentals. In my opinion the same is the case for the term God. If we start by *nothing*, we will get that same *nothing* in the end. So the starting assumption is crucial. You start with mathematics, in good agreement with what i said so far about logics. If we take mathematics as the fundamental, we have a solid bases to answer the questions i posed so far.

        But i nonetheless would doubt that mathematics has the status of ultimate reality. I doubt it, because i see its consistency, but at the same time see the inner world of a conscious being. Here i am not anymore confronted with thoughts, but also with emotions. I do not believe that the whole range of personal emotions, all the shadows and the peaks, are 'how information feels when it is processed' (an expression termed by Max Tegmark). I think the conclusion of Tegmark is an extreme extrapolation, since we aren't able to mathematically resolve some 'simple' dynamical interactions (3-body-problem, 4-body-problem... ; 4-color problem, 5-color problem...;), not to speak of the limitations of computational time and memory to tackle other mathematical questions. If our reality *is* the mathematical structure we only think it *describes*, this mathematical structure seems to have less power than we ascribe to it. Surely, our world could be descibed as a tiny subset of all mathematical structures and this could be the reason why in our world, we can explore a multitude of mathematical structures but at the same time cannot *solve* also a multitude of mathematical structures due to the lack of computational power and memory and time. Nonetheless, the question remains how the human mind is connected to a platonic realm of mathematics, since consciousness itself *is thought of as only a consequence of OUR specific little substructure of this mathematical landscape! Here the mind-body problem strikes back in terms of a platonic realm and its infiltration of a subset of itself!!

        For these reasons i prefer to set my starting- and endpoint in the term of God, since it encompasses 'naturally' the problem of consciousness, a problem that seems to me to remain unsolved in the materialistic worldview. Other problems remain, i agree. But to escape the interplay, the game of polarities, one has to skip one part of it at some point in one's line of reasoning (since otherwise even in a life after life we would ponder about these things - and higher things in the same circular way we do it now, fighting against an infinite tower of turtles, to make reality consistent, if not complete; so if life has some meaning - in a religious sense, it is only a little episode of something far greater). Logics tells me this and it astounds me that it is able to do this. But it can and this is a hint for me that the mainstream scientific worldview inclusively the mainstream view of mathematics is the wrong path. Because it is only based on polarities, on the usual kind of logics. So we must ask what kinds of logics should there be 'out' that is *not* the usual kind? Here i refer to the mentioned near-death experiences which report a realm beyond space and time, with faster and more precise thinking, with immediate insights without analysing - the latter presumable because it happens in a realm where the game of polarities is fully transcended. The interesting thing here is that there are two realms which exhibit such a behaviour. The heavenly realm and the hellish realms. Both realms are experienced as the ultimate truths - with no connections to the other polarities - in an eternal sense. I do not advocate for a middle-age world-view, i only take the reports serious and try to extract some fundamental meaning out of them. My conclusion so far is, that there was a 'time' where all souls were in the realm of God (the "polarity" of 'love, harmony and understanding'). But somehow, we decided to leave this realm, to be far apart from God. Since then it is naturally that the attributes of God do vanish, we end up with what is left in the absence of God. If i look around in the world, i see plenty of indicators how such a realm, empty of God, looks like. History shows that we do not evolve from some dumb middle-ages people to some highly moral civilizated human beings, we only put some white powder on our separation from God to heal what's missing.

        Apart from these more religious and philosophical considerations, i would say that to a certain degree, we agree, and to a certain degree, i also would say that some complex, "god-like" minds are possible to exist. But i view it from a religious point of view, so conclude that without a rational basis to not only explain consciousness, but also our emotions apart from evolutionary needs, i conclude that what you term "god-like" is just the old story of the tree of awareness. For me, this is a consistent narrative, since it fits very well with what near-death experiencers tell me. I do not belief in "god-like" intelligence (AI), in the omnipower of mathematics and surely not in the omnipresence of determinism (since maths is a deterministic system; with axioms, surely, but nonetheless deterministic; the axioms can be sorted into the category of metaphysical considerations you mentioned).

        The open question for me is whether God's more unknown properties include the whole landscape of maths, or whether God has created the latter due to some necessary or possible plan. You see, we agree in principle, but we don't agree on how to interpret the findings.

        I also wish you a good result in the current essay contest!

        Best wishes,

        Stefan Weckbach

        Stefan Weckback,

        I greatly enjoyed your well-written article. You make so many solid points for arguments in favor of free will. I will happily fold them into my own advocacy of its existence. Right from the beginning of your essay you see the problem of the objectification of science. Reductionistic science concentrates solely on the object of study without regard for the necessity of a sentient observer and the curiosity that motivates it; little lone avoiding the teleological pitfalls built into our descriptive language (and the way we think). Math affords a neutral ground for this description but in doing so avoids any pretense of agenda other than following its own internal logic; and even here in this sentence I was unable to avoid that trap. I start from phenomenology: cogito ergo sum. That we are mud that got to sit up and look around is wondrous to me. To modernize Kant's lingo a bit, the nominal can only be known through the phenomenal. To paraphrase Stanfield's (named after my father Arthur Stanfield) three rules of perception: 1) It is a reconstruction. 2) Remember it is a reconstruction. 3) Don't forget it's a reconstruction. The need for these three rules flows from the extreme transparency of the process which would naïvely lead us to believe that we are seeing objective reality directly. It is always filtered through the teleological biases of the individuated, subjective sentient observer. As I say in my essay: we have skin in the game.

        From my remarks to John Ellis on his essay:

        Purpose is something we see within ourselves and see in others. As embodied minds, we take its existence for granted as part of the requirement for the evolution of life. And like consciousness, it seems to resist a reductionistic explanation. Existence, sentience, consciousness and the nature and mechanism behind the collapse of the wavefunction remain elusive mysterious.

        A sentient being is an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment in interaction with an external environment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject. It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized observation of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise? Somehow, it must be connected to existential threat. But how does the organism come to sense that existential threat? My simplistic answer is that an organism's nerve endings, no matter how primitive, provide the initial feedback. All sentient beings have skin in the game. But there still remains the problem of how that feedback might be converted into consciousness and the sensation of jeopardy. {Insert hand waving here} Once the sense of jeopardy has been detected, the obvious back reaction would be a teleological bias to fulfill the dual agendas: stay in the energy flux and avoid destruction. This would go for the tubeworms living near a steam vent or, as more neural circuitry is thrown at the problem in service of this agenda, an investment banker competing for her share of the billions in bonuses available to maintain herself far from equilibrium.

        To answer the question you posed on my essay thread, I make the distinction between the existence of the Abstract Realm of Mathematics (ARM) as a discovery and the Platonic realm of mathematics, also as a discovery, but existing in the form of ideas which then would seem to require a consciousness as the medium of existence. On this score I am an agnostic. I jokingly say about myself that I used to be an Orthodox Platonist but now I am a reformed Pythagorean. I love to guess at metaphysical questions but I have a great aversion to taking as the starting axiom, that which is to be explained. The perennial philosophy of taking consciousness as the ground of all being is very comfortable. Perhaps I will be able to arrive at a conclusion eventually, but in the meantime I have the feeling that when I do, all further explanation cease. As the fundamentalists said to his son, do you want to study your biology homework or just say God did it and go out and play.

        Whenever I came upon your phrase, 'simply not fully formalizable,' I had to stop and think what you meant by it. Then I realized that I didn't have a clue. My intuitive guess was that you meant that all of nature cannot be described in terms of an equation (with an underlying set of mathematical relationships) that is deterministic. If that is what you were getting at then I agree. There is an underlying mathematical structure there but it opens into a phase space that renders it indeterminate. Math is open-ended. Then later in your essay I came upon your mention of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and figured we were thinking along the same lines.

        Reductionism works well with inanimate objects such as physics and chemistry but it loses explanatory traction at biology. Trying to explain evolution without purpose or volition, just by the principles of random chance becomes problematic.

        Also from the standpoint of duality, which I have found to be the most powerful tool in the philosopher's toolkit, whenever I perceive an attribute in nature I must always realize that in order to see that attribute it must be seen against the background of its conjugate attribute. The conjugate attribute pair, CAP [objective/ subjective] is one of the more basic ones. The most basic CAP is [being/ nonbeing]. Love is the opposite of hate but the conjugate attribute of them both his indifference. All three of these seem to go with sentience. The universe partitions into the observer, the object or attribute and the rest. I would say that the CAP of sentience is non-sentience but that would be ridiculous;-) I now realize that I do not have a good word for the CAP of sentience but I do believe the universe needs both ends of the continuum in order to manifest either one. In conclusion I would say, if the ARM 'am' (first-person singular) totally suffused with consciousness then what is the motivation for physical being.

        Best regards,

        Jim Stanfield

        Stefan, (posted on mine, repeated here for your convenience);;

        Sorry about the delay, busy reading & responding, then a weekend away.

        I think we too often rely on assumptions and hearsay in physics. Those and poor descriptions leads to much misunderstanding. Lets just deal with actual results rather than what people may of may not think or 'know'.

        The only 2 slit experiments I know not showing interference patterns on a backboard are when actual states are changes or blocked. I've done the one removing it with twin orthogonal polarisers myself, similar to to the 3 filter case in my video and as my model predicts. The single slit after the pair in Fig2 just makes it a single slit diffraction case. Zeilinger was of course entirely correct in the (once removed) correlation of paths 1 and 2. If you can find any actual experimental results showing no 2 slit interference do please post them.

        Also compare Zeilingers findings 15 years later that photons have 'no memory' of previous state with the analysis his 1999 paper, assuming the contrary at the path 1 lens! (s290 right hand para; "..provides information about it's direction, i.e., momentum before entering the lens.") Sure understanding improves, so lets keep up with it!

        The Key point here is more fundamental Stefan. In my schema there are TWO 'states' as opposed the the assumed one, and orthogonal, and thus no case of 'which path'. It's the false initial assumptions that cause all the confusion that follows. All have recognised there looks like something wrong or incomplete in QM, Einstein, Bell, Feynman, and Anton Zeilinger!; (s292 bottom)"Such a picture would imply a theory underlying quantum physics which provides a more detailed account of individual mechanisms". All I've done is identified it, allowing a coherent interpretation without needing the illogical nonsense!

        If it were the other war round, if we HAD the sensible derivation and I was proposing an illogical one relying on wierdness and backward causality then I'd expect all to resist! I suggest the only problem here Stefan is quite normal cognative dissonance, as the first part of my essay identifies.

        But do present any ACTUAL apparently contrary findings. I have searched for some time but perhaps not exhaustively.

        Very Best.

        Peter

        PS; See also my blog ref to Pauli's important spectral lines solution, from which we got the periodic table. His strict condition was that the valance electron HAD to somehow have TWO-VALUEDNESS! He never did did find an explanation of what that meant so we've always assumed it's 'classically indescribable'. No longer perhaps as that's exactly what the 2nd state is.

        7 days later

        Stefan,

        I did finally respond to your last post on my string. I re-post it below in case you do wish to continue the conversation. Did you read Dr Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri's essay? see also his comment on mine, (6th April) perhaps seeing what you may have missed.

        Very best. Peter

        COPY;

        Sorry about the delay, busy reading & responding, then a weekend away.

        I think we too often rely on assumptions and hearsay in physics. Those and poor descriptions leads to much misunderstanding. Lets just deal with actual results rather than what people may of may not think or 'know'.

        The only 2 slit experiments I know not showing interference patterns on a backboard are when actual states are changes or blocked. I've done the one removing it with twin orthogonal polarisers myself, similar to to the 3 filter case in my video and as my model predicts. The single slit after the pair in Fig2 just makes it a single slit diffraction case. Zeilinger was of course entirely correct in the (once removed) correlation of paths 1 and 2. If you can find any actual experimental results showing no 2 slit interference do please post them.

        Also compare Zeilingers findings 15 years later that photons have 'no memory' of previous state with the analysis his 1999 paper, assuming the contrary at the path 1 lens! (s290 right hand para; "..provides information about it's direction, i.e., momentum before entering the lens.") Sure understanding improves, so lets keep up with it!

        The Key point here is more fundamental Stefan. In my schema there are TWO 'states' as opposed the the assumed one, and orthogonal, and thus no case of 'which path'. It's the false initial assumptions that cause all the confusion that follows. All have recognised there looks like something wrong or incomplete in QM, Einstein, Bell, Feynman, and Anton Zeilinger!; (s292 bottom)"Such a picture would imply a theory underlying quantum physics which provides a more detailed account of individual mechanisms". All I've done is identified it, allowing a coherent interpretation without needing the illogical nonsense!

        If it were the other war round, if we HAD the sensible derivation and I was proposing an illogical one relying on wierdness and backward causality then I'd expect all to resist! I suggest the only problem here Stefan is quite normal cognative dissonance, as the first part of my essay identifies.

        But do present any ACTUAL apparently contrary findings. I have searched for some time but perhaps not exhaustively.

        Very Best.

        Peter

        PS; See also my blog ref to Pauli's important spectral lines solution, from which we got the periodic table. His strict condition was that the valance electron HAD to somehow have TWO-VALUEDNESS! He never did did find an explanation of what that meant so we've always assumed it's 'classically indescribable'. No longer perhaps as that's exactly what the 2nd state is.