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

      Dear Rajiv,

      thank you so much for reading and commenting on what i wrote.

      I will take the time to also read your approach and hopefully i can make some useful comments on it. Your approach sounds interesting and i am eager to study it more closely.

      Best wishes,

      Stefan Weckbach

      Stefan,

      Probably more metaphorical, relating to the "butterfly effect," but interesting:

      http://www.sci-news.com/physics/article01083-hofstadter-butterfly.html, producing a fractal butterfly with a quantum effect.

      and recognition ther is no sharp distinction between the quantum and the macro worlds:

      http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091007/full/news.2009.980.html

      Jim

      Dear Stefan Weckbach,

      Thank you for your delightfully thought provoking essay. Let me see if I have understood it correctly. I think you are saying that if we consider the ultimate provenance of artificial intelligence, which we see as "intent laden" simulations, they always originate from agents such as ourselves that have created computers and written software with the intention of having useful intentions. So in your case, you take the next step back and ask where did those agents get their intentions from?

      I wanted to say thank you for the perspective and I have already rated your essay.

      Regards,

      Robert

        Dear Robert Groess,

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

        I don't know whether artifical intelligence with aims and intentions is possible in principle. I would intuitively say no, but who knows.

        My point is to emphasize that aims and intentions, defined in the usual sense of like/dislike and defined therefore as goals, can only be intrinsic in the course of events of the universe (apart from the fact that it obviously is realized already in us humans and in animals), if there is a purposeful consciousness behind it. A strictly mathematical universe cannot have any aims and intentions, because mathematics is a kind of deterministic logic, an abstract thing. Therefore, if goals and intentions are somewhat build into the universe other than in form of human beings (and their goals and intentions), i conclude (for various reasons) that only a more potent purposfull consciousness can be the author of such an 'encoding' of purpose and intentions into a mere mechanical universe.

        One surely can argue that the whole universe was created by an artifical intelligence, but what does this help for finding the level of ultimate reality? Who or what created this artificial intelligence? There has to be a point where our usual explanatory ingredients (like space and time) aren't anymore appropriate. The case for the more potent conscious author, which i identify with God, is, that he/she can be identified as eternal being without the regress to again and again ask for the ultimate causes in a mechanistic manner (with assumptions that presuppose a mechnistical explanation in terms of physical causes and effects), refering to some physical causes and effects. This may be viable to a certain point, but does not answer the question why there should exist anything rather than absolutely nothing (not even some logic!) and why there should exist consciousness and aims and intentions at all (does it not suffice that something comes out of absolutely nothing without also producing consciousness and logic to ponder about these questions?, one may ask.).

        It therefore seems to me that, due to the presented arguments in my essay, it is necessary to assume the existence of a creator (an eternal first source, but not impersonal, but with personal attributes and aims and intentions).

        I am happy that you like my essay and enjoyed it! Thanks again for your kind words!

        Best wishes,

        Stefan Weckbach

        5 days later

        Stefan -

        A nice essay, thanks. There are few of us in this contest that find serious inadequacies in the formalizations of math and physics. You and I also both see a compelling "intentionality" at work in the world - something that abstractions and formalizations work so hard to eliminate. One of my favorites is the fact that the laws of physics are time-invariant, which results in the conclusion that "time is an illusion." I would rather trust my phenomenal experience which tells me that time is an invariant of our experience.

        Best of luck - George Gantz (The How and The Why of Emergence an Intention)

          • [deleted]

          • Post #90

          Dear Stefan,

          I am extremely impressed by your sense of humanism which relies on the welfare of humanity and its existence. I did not learn this from your essay, rather from your interaction with other members. In my observation, the people who traverse such a path are isolated, fall out of mainstream, remain largely unheard, except with close friends whose appreciation keeps them going. It sorely becomes difficult for such people even to survive well. But I do see, you have managed to sustain relevance and connection at large to be at least heard meaningfully. 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. I would not go into detail of how and why. But here is my wishful thinking in our context -- I would love the same value for humanism that you display among the majority, but without the need for basing our values on the supremacy of any 'more potent agent'. I usually, do not take this line with others, since I understand that for most, such supremacy is the only way to find meaning, and happiness in a transient life. But I am certain, it is not so for you; I have seen strength and robustness of your arguments. Reference to your statements are in double quotes.

          When you titled your essay 'in search of meaning of meaning', I felt that you understood the fact that every sense and feeling of ours, every thought and expression of ours, carry certain meaning (let me call it semantic value). Then problem gets reduced to what natural process give rise to such semantic values. Most surprisingly, if we only consider the natural association of information with states of matter that is based entirely on limits of natural causation, then it becomes possible to construct a model of how interactions process information and how high level structured and abstract semantic values arise. Physical states interact not the information represented by the states. Does not that make the states objectively observable, while keeping the represented information subjective? But since the process of emergence of abstraction is objective, one can always create tools that can produce certain semantic value by selecting certain specific sequence of interactions, and exhibit the consequence of it even if one is not able to measure it directly. The trouble is that scientists find it easy to deal with quantities of information rather than specific meaning / sense / specification of meaning, that too, only in discrete form, with measures in terms of bits / qubits. But I have not been able to muster enough viewership, or gather momentum.

          "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". I could not agree more. In light of this, it would display an arrogance beyond limits to propose 'Theory of everything'.

          "But goals, intentions and meaning are terms which describe a subjective world; they cannot easily be made totally independent from any subject and are surely not per se formalizable. Therefore, the terms goal, intention and meaning simply make no sense if every subject is eliminated from these terms. It would be like talking about thoughts and at the same time claiming that there is no need for a thinker of them."

          My response to this dichotomy is that subjective experiences are formalizable even if not measurable. Secondly, thoughts (semantic value) of thinkers arise from the same very process that create thoughts. Therefore, thoughts requiring thinkers is merely a linguistic catch.

          "Eliminating the subjective dimension from which goals, intentions and meaning take form cannot be the answer to the hard problem ..."

          Yes, as I said, if we consider the natural association of information with the states of matter, then there is no way one can eliminate subjective part, the information, which is the source of emergence of all abstract semantics (meaning).

          "If there are goals and intentions in the universe that are independent of living creatures, then only another, more potent conscious agent can be the author of these goals."

          In order to convert this statement to make it compatible with mine: The term 'living creature' may be replaced with 'physical system'; the difference between a 'physical system' and 'living creature' is merely a definition of living things; 'more potent conscious agent' may be replaced with 'the mechanism of emergence of abstract semantics from natural processes'.

          "These kinds of atheism try to deny free will and with it subjective goals and intentions." No, as long as the atheism agrees with non-deterministic world view, it agrees with subjective goals and intentions. I agree with your trust in non-determinism. A formalizability of universe should include this limited non-determinism. Yes, the universe is not entirely predictable, if that is what you mean by 'not formalizable'. It seems you equate formalizability with deterministic predictability, where as in my view formalizability refers to accountability of limits of non-determinism. But let me go ahead with your definition.

          "By equating objectivity with mathematical formalizability, it is no wonder that science at one point tends to eliminate the very actor of science, namely the scientist including his goals and intentions." Yes, very right.

          "Causation in this picture wouldn't be anymore a one-to-one relation, but a one-to-many relation, whereby the 'many'-parts are all isomorphic to each other." Yes, this is what I mean by indeterminism. By then, I also mean, many-to-one mapping, such that not only the future is non-unique (undetermined), but past is also non-unique from the perspective of the present state.

          "For Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems to be true, it is necessary that one assumes this system to be consistent, but incomplete. An inconsistent system could prove everything, even the statements of which Gödel could prove that they are not provable within the mentioned system." This view is entirely in consonance with mine, I have also articulated this nearly the same way at some other place. It simply means that Godel's theorems do not apply to information processing in physical systems.

          Barring the 'near-death experiences', I feel, your essay is very strong as an alternative description of the theme, fulfilling the very purpose of this contest. I suppose, you brought the near-death experiences only because you demanded, "from time to time this kind of evolving universe can display some truths about itself on some screens called consciousness" from those that defend absolute determinism. I do not know why, often times I feel connected with objects that I encounter. I feel as if I have a stake in this essay, and if I give credence to my feelings, then I wished, near-death experiences were not reasoned here.

          Stefan, at the end, the question comes back as, "which version of the 'potent agent' that you believe in?". I mean, those that exist in the scriptures can easily be reasoned against; but to make discussions glamorous, and their presence needed in certain fora, some scientists create their own version, and then go about shooting the ghost they create. But you brought in genuinely to establish your version. I do not know completely your version. But, within the limits of our discussion in the context of this essay, I have reasons to trust that we do not need one. If someone takes a position, that his/her version entails all the laws (known/unknown) of natural causation, then, of course, one cannot disagree with that. Also, I must confess, we are no in a position to discuss the origin and the very existence of things that we feel all around us. There is no way any arguments could settle the issue one way or the other.

          Rajiv

          Dear George,

          thanks for the time it took to read my essay. Time as we perceive it is surely not the last word on a more fundamental level. Where time emerges from hinges on the different assumptions one can make. If you have phenomenal experiences with forms of time that do not fit into a causal scheme, then you may have taken a look at this more fundamental reality.

          Since i am interested in near-death experiences, i regularly stumble across narratives which claim that there is a realm without 'time', at least without time as we know it. In the physical universe, all is relative to time. In the other realms, all is relative to eternity. This seems to be the message.

          Best wishes,

          Stefan Weckbach

          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