Stephan

An excellent essay, with subtle and powerful reasoning.

I especially liked:

To eliminate the subject from the consideration of meaning "would be like talking about thoughts and at the same time claiming that there is no need for a thinker of them."

"mathematics speaks to us, and the message is that there is more to existence than mathematical structures ever can deliver, not even an infinite tower of axiomatic turtles can do this."

I would have encouraged you to exclude the part about near-death experiences, as it only gives the dogmatists a convenient target to divert upon. Your logical arguments are devastating unless they're carefully avoided.

Stefan,

When I am reading your posts, I always enjoy, although not always feel myself able to follow you :) . Well, anyway now it's your turn to visit our page, my dear colleague, express there your critical ideas about our essay and maybe score our aufsatz (german words sound sometimes so funny for my slavic ears :)).

Yours, Alexey.

Hi Stephan,

I liked everything about your essay.

There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in FQXi essay questions.

Thanks,

Don Limuti (and do check out my essay!)

    Dear Alexey,

    thank you so much for your kind words. Yes, german words sound funny in the context of english language. For example 'Gedankenexperiment' or 'kindergarten'.

    I aready scored your essay high after having written the comment to you above, but i will re-read it and try to contribute something essential when i am able to.

    Best wishes,

    Stefan Weckbach

    Hi Don,

    thank you so much for reading, commenting and for the kind words!

    I will check out your essay soon!

    Best wishes,

    Stefan Weckbach

    Dear Arnold,

    thank you so much for your kind words, i am happy that you like my essay and its lines of reasoning!

    I know that mentioning near-death experiences in a forum for physics with many experts is not a thing that guarantees huge storms of enthusiasm. But i couldn't leave it out since in my opinion it shows that there are some things in reality we haven't understood yet. I take it as guaranteed that these experiences transcend our physically known world, although the religious interpretation of these experiences remains a question of personal taste.

    I know that these arguments are a target, but at the other side, there are not yet any objections to it written as a post on my essay page. I think one can debate such experiences on a rational basis with arguments, instead of dogmatically rate the essay with some 1's as recently been done twice. Doing this is in my opinion not scientific behaviour, it avoids the arguments and instead wants to create facts in favour of the own position where no facts are (at least i cannot read any on my essay page).

    Thanks again for your kind words, James.

    Best wishes,

    Stefan Weckbach

    Right after having submitted the post above, i received another 1-bomb (without explanation or comment). The dogmatists are getting nervous and i enjoy to watch how they have no arguments but only small mathematical numbers.

    Dear Stefan Weckbach!

    . I appreciate your essay. You spent a lot of effort to write it. If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better. There is not movable a geometric space, and is movable physical space. These are different concepts.

    I invite you to familiarize yourself with New Cartesian Physic

    I wish to see your criticism on the New Cartesian Physic, the founder of which I call myself.

    The concept of moving space-matter helped me: The uncertainty principle Heisenberg to make the principle of definiteness of points of space-matter; Open the law of the constancy of the flow of forces through a closed surface is the sphere of space-matter; Open the law of universal attraction of Lorentz; Give the formula for the pressure of the Universe; To give a definition of gravitational mass as the flow vector of the centrifugal acceleration across the surface of the corpuscles, etc.

    New Cartesian Physic has great potential in understanding the world. To show this potential in essay I risked give «The way of The materialist explanation of the paranormal and the supernatural" - Is the name of my essay.

    Visit my essay and you will find something in it about New Cartesian Physic. Note my statement that our brain creates an image of the outside world no inside, and in external space.

    Do not let New Cartesian Physic get away into obscurity! I am waiting your post.

    Sincerely,

    Dizhechko Boris

      Dear Stefan,

      you write science should take terms like goals, intentions and meaning more seriously -- I agree. Goals are an essential part of our best macroscopic theories and as such should be taken seriously. Our best microscopic theories, however, don't use the language of goals. That's the basic tension.

      You report on a way (decade of the brain etc.) to ostensibly resolve this tension by letting the microscopic take precedence over the macroscopic, by eliminating the subject. You reject this solution and rightly so.

      You then move on to your own solution positing external goals rooted in a greater consciousness. I'd just like to mention that there is also a way to resolve the basic tension within the initial setting, without leaving the realm of science and leaping into metaphysics (as you put it over at the discussion of Alexey and Lev Burov's essay). In my own essay I explain that goal-free microscopic theories are not automatically at variance with macroscopic theories of goal-oriented behavior. With this I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't try to explore the metaphysical explanations and consequences, I'd merely like to point out that we don't have to in order to resolve the basic tension.

      Cheers, Stefan

        Dear Stefan,

        first time that someone has the same first name as me :-)

        It is no question for me that we can describe parts of the macroscopic world in terms of goal-oriented behaviour. This is exactly the crux of the essay's contest question. We *can* do it - because there is indeed goal-oriented behaviour! The hard question for me (and probably also for you) is how dead matter can give rise to life, consciousness and aims and intentions.

        We only can describe parts of the macroscopic world in terms of aims and intentions, because obviously there are really such aims and intentions present in the world. I wrote my essay because i had the intention to participate and to share my thoughts. Even if the microscopical level would totally determine my aims and intentions, i nonetheless have consciousness and are somehow 'able' to think about the essay contest's questions. The big question is how a 'bunch of quarks' can emerge to a phenomenon that has space- and timeless features (we can imagine thinks far away from our location and far away from our present time).

        Stefan, you wrote

        "I thus conclude that goal-oriented dynamics - formulated mathematically or not - is part of essentially every successful theory of the macroscopic world. And successful macroscopic theories should be taken as seriously as their microscopic counterparts."

        I think here you miss a crucial point. Not all theories of the macroscopic world are formulated in terms of goal-oriented behaviour. For example Special Relativity, or the behaviour of galaxies. I used the term 'behaviour', because there is no other suitable word (at least in german language - or is there one?). But galaxies are a dead bunch of aggregated particles, following some dynamics according to the mathematical laws discovered so far.

        You are correct that a rock cannot / should not be described as an agent. You write then

        "At this point a mechanistic model of your macroscopic dynamics no longer works. Instead I will switch to a theory involving goals and intentions."

        Yes, in practice a mechanistic model does not work anymore. But this hasn't prevented many scientists to claim that if one had all the initial data for a specific time and enough processing power, one could calculate the future behaviour of my arm. Surely, it does make more sense to describe the behaviour of my arm in terms of goals and intentions, but this - and here is the crux again - does only make sense, because there exists goals and intentions at all in the universe, goals and intentions which aim to describe someone other's goals and intentions. The question how this can come about at all in the universe, is left unanswered (for good reasons).

        Personally, i think that it is not only impossible in practice to forecast at which point in my future my arm will reach out for a glass of water, but also impossible in principle. But this does also not solve the main question scientifically, because it is only a belief of mine.

        Although it seems possible that our world could be fully determined by the physical laws, what does this assumption add to our understanding of aims and intentions other than they are merely rigid illusions? If the world is fully determined, the predetermined thoughts in my mind in this moment i write these lines of reasoning are dictating me to write that this kind of determinism would be very strange. Strange because it must be orchestrated such that it leads to an appropriate answer to your comment on my essay site! How can this be possible without both of us having physically interacted ever? The only explanation i know of is, that there are quantum correlations sieved out over time so that the ones left over, are all consistent with each other (in a strange way, because not all human communication is per se consistent).

        If i assume nonetheless this scenario to meet reality, then i arrive at quantum correlations and information flow in quantum systems. Since we need a kind of entanglement for this scenario, some kind of unexplained behaviour of the microworld is inclusive, either as the question of what this fundamental randomess means, or as the question of how an individual measurement result is choosen from the multitude of possibilities. I have also no answer to the question why in a multiverse it should be me to observe the particle taking the left way and my alter ego in the other world observing it taking the right way and not vice versa.

        Surely, galaxies have not the kind of rigidity and the kind of flexibility as living systems. And i agree that you identified - at least for life as we know it - some properties of the latter. I do not know whether these properties are necessary for some conscious entity, but according to Darwin i would think they must. But as i wrote in my essay, the problem with Darwinism is that it does not fit into an assumed to be fully deterministic world. In the latter, the process of evolution would evolve in every single detail in the same manner as we assume it to have happened - if we would trace all trajectories back to their origin. At this origin there had to be a highly ordered initial condition to lead to Darwins results. But here i come up with an exception: If many ordered initial conditions lead to Darwins results (one way or the other), then his theory would be not much in conflict with radical determinism. But again, how precise and of what nature should these initial conditions be to lead to meaningful conversations between two bunches of quarks (me and you:-) which never interacted in the past?

        At the end of your essay you wrote

        "Summing up, we have seen that goal-oriented macroscopic dynamics is equally real as goalfree microscopic dynamics. Moreover, goal-oriented macroscopic behavior is compatible with goal-free microscopic laws, if the macroscopic entities under question are sufficiently flexible and sufficiently rigid. Under these circumstances mindless mathematical laws can give rise to aims and intention."

        Surely, macroscopic dynamics is equally real as goalfree microscopic dynamics. This is only the case because there exist goals and intentions that can be described as such (but it must not necessarily be described with these terms. As i remarked above, some people think that it can at least theoretically be described with goal-free microscopic laws). The circumstances you describe for mindless mathematical laws to give rise to aims and intentions are those that are in the middle between rigidity and flexibility. Let me note that i cannot see how these mathematical laws - although i only assume here that they indeed do exist - should be facilitated to give rise to aims and intentions. Although it sounds logical that life occupies the realm between the flexible and the rigid, i would not claim that these characteristics ground the path for life to be possible from an emergent point of view.

        Let me shortly also cite a sentence from Ines Samengo at your essay page:

        "But I know that people working on insect behavior, for example, can reproduce their actions to a remarkable precision, they truly behave as tiny robots."

        This is no wonder, since we humans can also predict the behaviour of our fellow friends in many cases. But this does not mean that we are robots. The insects have a rather small space of goals and intentions and therefore i would expect that the prediction of such behaviour is possible. The more interesting question is whether some kind of God can *to a remarkable precision* predict the actions of humans, since from the perspective of God our space of behaviour may be equally small than that of an insect.

        Thanks for your comment and for your essay. Your identification of rigidity and flexibility as a necessary ingredient for life is very interesting.

        Best wishes,

        Stefan Weckbach

        Dear Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich,

        thanks for your comment. I'll take a look at your essay and comment on it if i have to say something substantial!

        Best wishes,

        Stefan Weckbach

        Stefan,

        Response to your post on mine;

        Yes, it'd be ideal if such major advancements were perceived immediately, but it never happens, as history shows. Big new physics is 'wrong', ignored, and finally 'self apparent'. In 2010 I estimated 10 years ('2020 Vision') so it's on track.

        But there are no 'local hidden variables' in the model. Bell was correct. The 'secret' is found in the particles themselves, hidden from current theory and designated as the second unreal but 'superposed' quantum state. It isn't unreal. IT IS REAL! (And we know well the process in an eyes lens 'decoding' lambda!!).

        We get lots of discovery's in astronomy, only the odd one BIG. An astronomer in my field, Nick, had the previous big one a while ago, but that similarly proved TOO big to be accepted! To save loosing his job and livelihood he stopped pushing it. All very sad. Finally, more recently, it 'crept in' after verification by someone else, but it then caused that guy endless problems too!

        As the US Chemical Soc. president said explaining why Dan Sheckman had 40 years of pain before his recent 'quasicrystal' Nobel, "That's how science is done". That was only a minor advance! but he was right, and I'm a realist. I just hope nobody ends up like the guy who followed Nick, he ended his life under house arrest by the Pope!

        To answer your question; People really should READ essays as I try to, not skim them! I identify clearly that, and why, there can be NO 'perfect printer plot!' Chaos and stochasitic variables are not eliminated. They just can't reproduce the QM findings, as Bell showed. you'll find the explanation partly under 'mutation'. 'Curl' is uncertain to 50:50 at an 'equator' and similarly linear momentum at EACH POLE (So both orthogonal to the angle of max amplitude).

        "how can it make a difference if it has no experimental consequences?" It's a fair question but I don't think you thought much before asking it. Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo's discoveries also had no physical consequences. Celestial bodies didn't suddenly head off in different directions! They just explained what we DO find (that's what all Cosmology is too!) Yet those were the greatest advancements in understanding for eons, and have ended up affecting almost everything in physics in some way or another! (I don't include Relativity or QM as both are flawed and have been counter productive).

        So; Yes. Unlike Eddington's view, science ISN'T 'all sorted'. My papers and video's include long lists of the mojority of anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies in physics which the combined 'SR/QM' model resolves. They only have to be actually read! If you're interested in any one in particular just ask and I'll show you how it emerges.

        Unlike most I DON'T want to be a 'new Einstein' and don't want rewards. I was a legend in my own lunchtime by 30, have a nice yacht and drive an Aston. But think about it; if you were me wouldn't you feel guilty if you 'kept it all secret'? It's actually now rather a cross to bear!

        Very Best

        Peter

        Dear Peter,

        thanks for your reply.

        I really read your essay, not skimmed it. You used 47 times the term 'may' in the sense of 'it may be that'. Therefore and for the reason that i am not into cosmology, i don't want to comment on the anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies you claim to have resolved. It only appears to me that you use two different modalities to communicate your ideas, one that does claim something to be ultimately true (IT'S REAL), the other which suggests a probability for something to be true in a subclause (it may be).

        Then you go on to claim that 'the secret is found in the particles themselves'. Peter, why don't you then - after a couple of essays on your topic - eventually write down the relevant equations which describe the particles and their interactions and show mathematically that they violate Bell's inequality? You can't argue that there isn't the appropriate maths out there if you have already identified the physical mechanisms. Please show mathematically the interactions between your particles and how this necessarily leads to the violation of Bell's inequality. Put in some stochastic terms to even mathematically model the chaos you spoke of.

        I never saw an elaborated equation of the interactions from you, nonetheless seeing you so heavily claiming these interactions meet reality. This is not a cross to bear, but could be elaborated together with a good mathematician. The fact that you do not show up such equations leaves the impression that if indeed done, they wouldn't lead to your intended claims.

        You cannot compare your case with Galileo and Copernicus, unless you have done the mathematics. I very well thought about it, and additionally i must note that even if Galileo and Copernicus couldn't prove some of their ideas by observation, the later generations could - and verified them. Your theory is immune against testing it empirically and moreover, there are a multitude of different ideas about how to explain what you want to explain out there. How can you, for example show that your theory IS REAL instead of the one David Bohm developed, unless you have exemplified your theory with mathematical equations that show that your theory is more than just a suitable idea?

        Peter if you have a yacht and you drive an Aston, you should also be able to find a mathematician with whom you can develop the needed mathematical equations. Nobody is guilty of developing and publishing some ideas. But couldn't it be that your were really guilty if you would further insist that IT'S REAL without simply doing the maths? This would be your fault, nobody in the scientific community can be blamed for that, not even i myself for criticizing you! You constantly complain about modern science and its omnipotent behaviour and its trickery, but yourself do just the same - you constantly claim something to be true without putting the mathematical litmus test on the table!

        Best wishes,

        Stefan Weckbach

        Stefan, (copy)

        I did so & published the algorithm in 2014. You had the link. (Diracs twin stacked 'spinor' pair equation is then fine). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3754.1287 (open access). Most schoolboys know spherical surface momentum (Earths surface speed) varies by the cosine of latitude, and QCD shows Amplitude2 values emerge in fields ('squared' 3D 'cascade' geometric progressions couldn't be simpler!) and I identify WHERE - which is in cascade photomultipliers or avalanche photodiodes). The words 'cascade' and 'avalanche' kind of gave that away, hiding before our eyes!

        All I can do is publish it, point to it and keep working Stefan. I'm a scientist not a salesman. In the end notes of my 2014 essay I even reported an experiment deriving it subjectively with students and did a full results chart! So it's certainly NOT immune to testing! In the next I showed that 'reversible' socks, like dipoles, or simply 'lining' red socks with green, allowed the classical solution. In algorithmic terms the (mathematicians) correction of QM's 'state pair' revised algorithm was;

        p(A1 B1 |a,b, l b,a, l) = p(A2 B2 |a,b, l b,a, l) = p(A1 B2 |a,a, l b,b l) = p(A2 B1 |a,a, l b,b l) = 1. Certainly perturbation theory always applies too.

        I do ask mathematicians regularly if they'd like to look and play with it, but have the same problem Einstein found with that! (You'll even note a co-author is one J Minkowski!). I don't know what else you want. I can teach students and children, but it seems that beyond 25-30 everyone knows better so ignores it. That's really not a problem for me Stefan. I'm really anyway not entirely convinced humanity is quite ready for any great advancements in understanding.

        On "MAY", just so you know; I've said 'NOTHING is certain in science', but some are more certain than others (My 'Law of the Reducing middle' in logic is Bayesian curves) so adopt the convention "may" for anything suggested but not 'required' (or 'highly probable' like finding 'left' or 'right' near an equator).

        Lastly on ANOMALIES etc. Your assumption that these are just in astrophysics is wrong. Try me on ANY well known anomaly, the chances are I've 'turned the model on it' and a resolution is shown; CP Violation? simple dynamic geometry produces it, Lorentz Transformation? I described & derived that 5 essays ago, 3 Filter problem?, Non-integer spin states etc? - all in the video, Quantum eraser/backward causality? simple and all in a current draft paper. Just pick one.

        For me this is an academic excercise Stefan. I don't have a website (the net abounds with them!) I don't 'OWN' it, nature does! I don't want to belittle work by others, much of it has informed the DFM, and I'm certainly not an expert on everything! But at the end of the day it's veracity can be judged as a jigsaw puzzle. Either it fits together or, like most current science, heaps of confusing inconsistencies remain. Anyone who looks at it all can see this fits rather better.

        Please take any part you wish and improve it (but do beware the papal police!).

        Very best

        Peter

        Dear Stefan

        thank you for your long reply. You write: "I think here you miss a crucial point. Not all theories of the macroscopic world are formulated in terms of goal-oriented behaviour. For example Special Relativity, or the behaviour of galaxies. (...) But galaxies are a dead bunch of aggregated particles, following some dynamics according to the mathematical laws discovered so far."

        I agree that there are macroscopic objects whose overall behavior is well-described by theories that look like our microscopic theories. These are objects which I called 'rigid'. Essentially, you just look at their center of mass and describe it like a point particle, no matter whether you do that within Newtonian mechanics or Special Relativity -- well, things get slightly more complicated, when you take rotations into account, and all this is not strictly true in Special Relativity, but that doesn't spoil the general argument.

        You write. "Surely, it does make more sense to describe the behaviour of my arm in terms of goals and intentions, but this - and here is the crux again - does only make sense, because there exists goals and intentions at all in the universe, goals and intentions which aim to describe someone other's goals and intentions. The question how this can come about at all in the universe, is left unanswered (for good reasons)."

        In my essay I intend to show that macroscopic theories including entities which act according to aims/goals/intentions are not at variance with microscopic theories consisting exclusively of 'mindless mathematical laws'. No more. But also no less! I do not attempt to describe or even derive goals of the universe or anything the like.

        Your write: "Although it seems possible that our world could be fully determined by the physical laws, what does this assumption add to our understanding of aims and intentions other than they are merely rigid illusions? If the world is fully determined, the predetermined thoughts in my mind in this moment i write these lines of reasoning are dictating me to write that this kind of determinism would be very strange."

        This would be some kind of superdeterminism which I do not advocate. If your thoughts, your goals, and your resulting behavior were predetermined, then I could probably eliminate 'goals' from my macroscopic theory about you and treat you simply like a puppet or zombi. That's not what I'm claiming. I say that my best theory about you is one which treats you as an entity that develops goals and acts accordingly. And I claim that this theory is compatible with our best microscopic theories although they do not contain any goals.

        Cheers, Stefan

        Hi Stefan,

        thanks for your clarifications. I understood that you didn't support superdeterminism, but just wanted to show that your best theory about me is one which treats me as an entity that develops goals and acts accordingly. You claim that this theory is compatible with our best microscopic theories although they do not contain any goals. I agree insofar as they obviously work well in their respective regimes. The existence of particles and their interactions can be thought of as being a fact, and the existence of human goals and intentions can also be thought of as being a fact. I just wanted to stress how one fact (particles) can lead to another fact on the basis of some mindless dynamics, for the case that our best microscopic theories are indeed the ultimate descriptions of the most fundamental level of reality. Compatibilism is true in both cases, in the case that there isn't a transcendental realm of consciousness beyond space and time and consciousness emerged due to Darwins framework and in the case that this transcendental realm does really exist. Surely, in the latter case, the quest of compatibilism does pose another question, namely how the non-material can interact with the material world. For the case that this transcendental realm should exist, more and more researchers have investigated different frameworks to explain such interactions.

        I merely posted my comment above with the content i did, because i thought you are in the materialist camp and therefore it should be - from your point of view - uncircumventable that dead matter and goals and intentions must necessarily be compatible with each other. So i took your statements as plain consequence of the material worldview (without adopting the material worldview). Since within that material worldview this plain consequence is nothing new, i liked to point to the question how such a compatibilism is possible (or stated different, how mind is possible in a seemingly dead and mindless world).

        Best wishes,

        stefan Weckbach

        Stefan,

        "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."

        In addition to the mystery of the dichotomy between mind and matter, a mystery of nature you reference above is the relation of the quantum and the macro world. Quantum biology poses such mysteries. I had not seen such evidence of biomolecules directly depending on quantum phenomena like tunneling, coherence and entanglement for efficiencies like photosynthesis, where the noisy interior of a living cell might act to drive quantum dynamics and maintain quantum coherence. Such quantum phenomena have been seen in butterflies and birds.

        How are meaning, knowledge and consciousness interwoven in plants and animals as well as goal-oriented behavior?

        Your essay inspires one to ponder many things.

        Hope you get a chance to give your thoughts on mine.

        Jim Hoover

          Dear Stefan Weckbach,

          Twists and turns presented with the force of logic, took me on a roller coaster ride. Everytime I thought, you are attempting to establish certain things, I discovered the logic taking me away from it.

          When you said, "This force of 'intentionality' must be thought of as not being able to receive a physical back-reaction from the material world", I first took it in a different way -- if intentionality can be worked on by the material world as a back reaction, then material world and intentionality together becomes an encapsulating system of determinism losing the sense of intentionality altogether -- a contradiction. Furthermore, while this force of intentionality has one way influence, yet it has power to observe the changes effected and correct the course. While this does appear like a back reaction, but it need not be, as intentional force uses its free will to choose whether or not it should be influenced by the new observation.

          Given the uncertainties at microscopic level interactions, conservation laws need not be violated for any given probable outcomes. Violations of conservation laws within Planck's scales are of no problem even with pure physicalism. Now, that I understand where you concluded, I would say QM directly offers a mechanism, where a degree of interference is permissible for certain specific results without violating the causation at observable scale.

          I whole heartedly agree that the physical function cannot be entirely deterministic, and also that indeterminism must be limited, otherwise the universe would become unviable.

          Having agreed to all this, I must confess, I have a slightly different plan, which does not require a 'more potent conscious agent'. Though, I feel, it is rather simple one, since it depends merely on the limits of natural causation.

          You titled your essay 'In search of meaning of meaning', which I consider is an excellent starting point to begin a discussion. Each of the senses that you listed, goals, aims, and intentions, primarily convey certain meaning that are semantics of information, to the self. Semantics is used only in the sense of 'meaning', without any connection with any language or any need for an interpreter. It allows us to refer to all such subjective senses as well as objective expressions as semantic values. Examples of semantic values could be atomic value 5, 5 meters, 'right angle', velocity, specific aims and intentions etc. Of course, we understand each of such terms only in our subjective domain. For completeness sake, "All of physics and mathematics has an existence only in our subjective realm'. So, all we need to worry about is how these specific semantic values get objectively expressed in the physical universe.

          We like to begin with a first principle statement, "Could there be a state of a physical entity that does not correlate with any information?" Certainly, each of the observable states must correlate with its causal factors under natural causation. Each interaction then must account for some information exchange amounting to information processing. Then it becomes only a matter of arranging interactions in such a way that higher level complex structures and abstraction arise to form correlation with the states of matter. This is what I have attempted to work out in my essay. So, the abstractions of aims and intentions could be broken down to two developments, 1) how to create limitless abstraction of semantics from the observation of external as well as internal senses, and 2) the evolution shaping the processing system to select only those actions that favor certain high level abstract notions. The observing system then naturally classifies all intermediate level abstractions of the demands in line with the high level requirements as aims and intentions.

          Rajiv

            Dear James,

            thank you for reading and commenting and for your kind words.

            I know of the photosynthesis and the case of birds, but was unaware of the butterflies. Can you give me a source where the case for the butterflies is exemplified? This would be great, since i am interested in these new findings.

            I will take the time to read and comment on your essay. It may take a bit time, but i will do it and looking forwards to read it.

            Best wishes,

            Stefan Weckbach