In Search of The Meaning of Meaning by Stefan Weckbach

Dear Yehuda Atai,

thank you for reading and commenting.

You mention that causality does not evolve the phenomena in general. I think you are right about this, otherwise one would end up with a picture i described in my essay. The question though is how unphysical causes are connected to physical stuff. Movement is important insofar as it indicates activity, even on the quantum level. Activity also seems to be an attribute of consciousness, although there are also states of consciousness where the latter seems to be totally passive.

I'll take a look at your essay.

Dear Peter,

thank you for reading and commenting.

You catched up with a version of my essay which i did alter in some details (accidentally FQXi uploaded the older version the first couple of days after posting the new one for eligibility) For a dualistic view of mind and matter, one needs two ingredients. First, one needs some commonalities and second, one needs some differences. I identify 'activity' as a commonality, i circumscribe it in physical terms as energetical vibrational patterns. I could have left out the term 'energetical', because 'vibrational' indicates activity, too. I define 'energy' as the potential to transform a potentiality into a factuality. This means that the world isn't fully determined by mechanical causes and effects. I stumbled over an interesting approach to systematizise these lines of thought in physical terms by a researcher named Joachim Keppler. The reference to his work can be found in Avtar Singh's essay, if you are interested in it.

With mindless universe i mean the widespread belief that the universe came into existence (or forever existed) without a higher purpose and our minds and insights into nature's lawfullness are somewhat just an accident, a random fluctuation. I do not belief this scenario, but naturally it is hard to disprove it rigorously.

Thank you for your kind words and best wishes for your own attempt in the contest!

Dear Steve,

thank you very much for reading and commenting.

I hope you are well and i am happy that you participate in the discussions on FQXi. Yes, i too argue for a higher purpose of existence and i think spacetime isn't all there is, same with physical systems. This does not imply that God is a nonphysical 'system', although i define the term God to be surely a nonphysical entity by the very means of its definition and of the definition of consciousness. I wished you would elaborate your model into an essay, so we could discuss commonalities and differences better. I think that spheres are important, they are not only archetypical forms, but for me, they also have archetypical content. For example the number Pi, defined as the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a sphere nicely combines linear and circular features, leading to a number sequence which is statistically normal (random), but at the same time precisely calculatable. I do not think that the digit before the decimal point is 'random', the '3.' is in my opinion an expression of the intricate link of a unity and its possibility to split it in two seemingly symmetrical parts by the diameter. Nonetheless the circle remains a unity, a unity with two complementary parts of it, resulting in a threesome composition. Think of the many threesome collections in nature: 3 spatial dimensions, 3 qualities of time (past, present, future), 3 classical states of matter, 3 generations of fermions, 3 components of atoms (electrons, neutrons, positrons), 3 color charges of gluons, 3 sentential connectives of propositional logics (not, or, and), 3 categories of classical metamathematics (completeness, consistence, decidability).

Wish you some further exciting readings of the essays and may the relevant solutions and insights come to you as a surprise and a gift!

Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

thank you for your reply. I cannot comment on the many issues you raise because i am not an expert on such many fields. The question for me is how consciousness fits into the bigger picture of logically derivable results in science. Is it logical that inanimate matter should be able to produce 'res cogitans', as Descartes put it? The universe may be finite or infinite, it may be eternal or finite in time, on a logical basis something should be accountable for what the universe is and isn't. In my essay i presuppose that the accountable part cannot be within the universe, even if the universe does somehow 'cause' itself (for example by recycling itself).

That consciousness in a purely mechanistical universe should be possible is nearly a wonder, but that this consciousness should, as time goes by, be able to also understand the universe seems to me a slightly unprobable coincidence. I think the fact that we are able to understand so much about the universe and the fact that the same universe allows consciousness to exist to do that points to some teleological explanation. The universe is not a random mash of events, the latter are ordered and in realtionship with each other (despite the fact of quantum mechanical indeterminacy). The latter, the QM indeterminacy points to the outer regions of spacetime reality, its gauze gets frayed there everytime we test it. This leads me to conclude that spacetime is a secondary reality, emerged on the basis of something other than spacetime alone.

I will have a look at your essay, but cannot guarantee that i understand all the conclusions you make in it.

Dear Eckard Blumschein,

good questions. Firstly, i am not convinced that the pope is an authority choosen by God. Secondly, i think that believing in God is not the point, but acting as if he would exist. Surely, for me, i claim that such an entity does exist, but it should make a difference then how i impart my values. We all know that acting according to the golden rule could make the world a better place. This is also a message from near-death experiencers. Another message is 'learning', respectively 'education'. Overpopulation is a problem, indeed. I do not know in detail the reasons why there are so many people on the planet, it may have to do with the lack of prevention of pregnancy, but there are surely other reasons as well like having offspring which can fend for oneself if one gets old. If it is also due to some statements of popes, then I would say they are wrong with it.

Back to education. We live in a system (at least in the western world) where a person is evaluated by his/her manpower and/or his/her money. The system has accumulated gigantic amounts of wealth in very few person's accounts - by all sorts of trickery. There's a famous saying in the banking scence that goes 'you will hold them dense, i will hold them poor'. Our educational systems, our advertising, our addictions of consumption, our fear to be excluded when we don't please the mainstream and its 'Zeitgeist' makes us prisoners and are the tools by which a few individuals make most people dense and poor. Maybe these people are those who voted for Trump and the Brexit, but not necessarily. Look, we have 2017 now, the financial crisis began 2007. What has the world learned from it? Does a majority of people even know that there are 700 Billion dollar on CDO contracts out there? Don't blame God or the non-existence of God for all this, humanity has overslept to invest in true education. By the latter i don't mean education for some job, but education of the heart. In the western hemisphere, people go to work and then amuse themselves, a majority without ever thinking about philosophical or religious things, about how it is that they are here and where they probably go when they die.

There are no easy answers to these questions, but i think every human being should have thought about it once in a lifetime and should have searched for an answer without being biased by modern science. Who does regularily read books which are concerned with those questions? I would assume that most people are occupied with the trash on their handies or with cheap trash at the TV. Therefore i do not expect the majority of people to even understand what i have written in my essay or that they know of Gödel or some interpretations of quantum mechanics or about modern cosmology. But this isn't a tragedy. The Tragedy is that modern science behaves like it is almighty. That's the picture purported by science itself and by several magazines and tons of books - and most people believe it *without thinking for themselves*. They believe that science can know (or indeed does already know) all things and solve all problems. Think for yourself whether or not science can solve all problems. Personally, i think believing this would be extraordinarily naïve. Not until it is too late people will recognize that they believed in a false God, in an idol, and to be honest to you, there are so many false Gods out there, from money, science, fame, to personal potency. We live in an age of abuse, everybody misuses everybody (under the cloak of political correctness) and it is no wonder for me that individuals like Trump or others gain influence. As long as science does communicate that it has all the ultimate answers (although it doesn't have them), you will see the ever same scenario of seducers giving the dense audience what it wants to hear / to read.

Dear Eckard Blumschein, i critizise science for its omnipotent behaviour, but the latter isn't exclusively reserved for science, but an attribute of mankind in general. I know that some people do not like what they read here, but should i renounce my values just for some guys giving me some more points for my essay? I would be no better than the dense people i spoke of. Recognition of what i wrote will come or don't come, and i do not expect it to come easy, for it is not the short success, but remaining values i search for. If you want people that have voted or not voted for Trump to be more intelligent, you should always admit the truth and the truth is that we both do not know if a God does indeed exist. It is a matter of belief, personal experience and of believing that certain aspects of science and other phenomenologies support such a worldview. So for people which lack the experience i spoke of in the last sentence: do not claim what you don't know for sure and the world will be a slightly less confused place. Maybe it is too late to turn mankind into an overall intelligent community, but if true, this has nothing to do with God, it is then our fault. Therefore we as intelligent beings should begin here and now, every day. This is the minimum of what can be expected from people who are termed by FQXi as top thinkers in foundational questions.

Dear Eckard,

thanks for your reply. The peace you spoke of cannot be achieved, if there are aggressors. If they hit you once, they will hit you twice. Therefore the question about it being resonable to invite poor people coming to Europe will not be a peaceful adventure in the long run. The motivations and reasons for these people are as different as ours to vote for or against Trump i would think. Some hope for a job, some for more food, some for more money without a job, some for peace and maybe some for an adventure and for bringing terrorism to Europe. The same i think holds for voting for or against someone like the president of America - there are many motivations involved in the majority which has formed the voting result recently. Last but not least different candidates can have very different motivations to become the worlds most powerful person (besides some advisers of the president and some military commanders).

The more divided our societies become, the more different reasons accumulate into one and the same voting result i would suspect. But you are right, nationalism is a danger these days, months and years, and i think it becomes more dangerous as our societies get more divided. As more and more people live on this planet, the question of distribution and allocation of natural resources and money becomes more and more virulent. Yes, i think here guys like Daniel Dennett and his memes come to the point, virulent behaviour and thinking patterns can distribute over a whole population and poison it, if misdistribution goes further on.

The question also is, who are the aggresssors, or formulated otherwise, are there aggressors at all in the world? Who is the aggressor in Syria, for example? I think there is more than one aggressor in this conflict, all fighting against each other for some profitable outcome of this war for their interests. If Europe slips into another financial or economical crisis, there will be also more aggressions between european countries. In this sense, many aspects are connected with many other aspects and this makes the whole case of global peace so difficult, so complex. Your message is welcome by me, but it will not alter the course of events unfolding in the next, say, decade. Humanity does only learn in small steps, if ever, and only by global suffering i suspect. This seems to me to be an unbiased view of the human psychology if it is fully attached to hedonism - as is the case for many people, in my opinion. I cannot say what Trump is planing in the future or has already planed for his country / the world. Therefore it is very difficult for me to estimate what his actions will bring us. It seems like he is an impulsively acting person, supporting the financial complex and his own country rather than global peace. I also agree that human rights are insufficient, the same with the rights of some nations (like for example iraq, which was destroyed and radicalized by the Bush family and Albright). I have now written too much political opinions to win the contest, but my words are conserved by the internet for whoever wants to reflect them again in the future!

Dear Bala R Subramanian,

thanks for reading and commenting.

"Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorems can be concurrently consistent, complete and be both open and closed"

Yes, but only in the modus of non-dual thinking. Remember that near-death experiences tell us that in the more pleasant realms, one part of duality has vanished (of course the bad part). But there are also experiences which tell us that the 'same' can be true for a realm where the other part (the good part) has totally vanished. Heavenly realms may have multiple layers, yes, and consistenly, the hellish realms too (as also delivered by some near-death experiencers). The reason that in the heavenly realms there are no open questions which all lead to self-referential answers (like those we discuss here at FQXi) is that one part of duality simply vanishes and therefore all paradoxons do vanish. All is crystal clear. The same is true for the more hellish realms - you realize that you are (for whatever reasons) caught up in an existential realm that is completely distinct from God's realms. There are so many aspects of near-death experiences to interpret and discuss and surely every spiritual tradition does it different. The problem here is that such experiences do not deliver the one distinct interpretation that suffices all the different expectations of different religious / spiritual traditions. They all are a matter of belief.

Therefore i am not in a position to comment on societal mechanics or other systematizations. I only observe society, psychology and the different values of people and ask where these different patterns could lead in the end globally. As i outlined to Eckard in my comment above, i am rather sceptical of an interpretation which guarantees every soul a pleasant place in the heavenly realms after death. I follow Eckard's words that reasoning demands that menkind lives up to its responsibility and don't see life as a kind of cosmic game or something one reincarnates into again and again. But this is only my personal opinion.

Surely for all practical purposes, the quest for determinism or indeterminism is void of any help. Nobody does believe 24 hours a day that he/she has no free will. Nobody does believe 24 hours a day that solipsism is true. But when making a difficult decision, by thinking humans do not have free will, one can defend every irrational / immoral intention. The same is true in my opinon for the concept of reincarnation or the multiverse interpretation. Let the majority of mankind believe in such concepts and i would assume that morality would vanish dramatically. If i can kill somebody and there are no real consequences (besides maybe that in my next life i am killed also by a person), this would in my opinion demand a chain of killing events, what does not seem to me to be a consistent explanation of human consciousness and some overall purpose of existence. I therefore think that consequences and responsibility come into play in a different, much more serious way - as is indicated by the fact that there is no universal interpretation of near-death experiences, a kind of undeniable accredited 'true' interpretation. You have to choose. Of course i do not say that you believe in one or the other, because i cannot know and i don't want to teach someone due to my own beliefs. So please do not take my lines of reasonings personally.

Best wishes

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Alexey and Lev Burov,

thank you for reading, commenting and for your appreciation!

You pose important questions. First, i share a theistic worldview. As you may know, to come to some reliable conclusion about 'ultimate reality', means, the deepest level, one has to presuppose something as given. Science and my own experience of life tells me that there must be something out there which is meaningful in itself, is alive, is intelligent, is conscious in itself (eternally). I gave some arguments in my essay why i presuppose God instead of 'quantum foam' or some other ingredient to be the 'fountain of all existence'. Obviously, a natural explanation of all there exists cannot explain itself to exist and to bring all other things into existence. It seems to me that with God, things are a bit different, because he has some attributes that beautyfully differ frome a mechanical solution - and they are consistent with what near-death experiencers regularily report.

Now to your question: Firstly, one can doubt that all our mental and psychological contents are caused by some brain activity. A certain class of mental subjectivity could well be uncaused by any brain activity, but could force some brain activity to be instantiated - for example to move my hand. But either way, this cannot be proven. So let us stick with a more physical view of the connection of the mental with matter. Both have in common that they are obviously expressions of some activity. Therefore one could circumscribe them in terms of energy patterns, or frequencies if you will. A nice analogy for the mind-body connection would be the wave-particle duality in QM. Thinking of the wave (whatever it is) as a non-localized activity pattern (outside of normal spacetime) and the particle as the result of such a wave activity (in ordinary spacetime). Gulio Tononi assumes some 'Qualia space' where all the possible Qualia reside, QM assumes an Hilbert-space. Well, both should be located out of ordinary spacetime (if one does not identify them with 'dark matter' or something else).

So the question reduces to the question of how a wave function evolves (and collapses) and if there is some irreversibility after such a process. I think, one way or the other, consciousness is somewhat linked to the quantum realms (see the paper of Joachim Keppler for a very good theory on that which is very different to Penrose/Hamerhoff ideas). I think this is the interface for Qualia and for filtering out contents of a consciousness that may relate to higher levels of existence. Once a wave function collapsed, the particle(s) cannot alter this wave function anymore to make it undone. This is what i intended by my remarks that these actions of the wave function (especially its collapse) cannot receive anymore a physical back-reaction. This is fundamentally different than in Newtonian mechanics, where all physical states are reversible (in principle). I do not believe that QM is completely unitary, i think some states vanish, therefore some other states arise (in terms of information, the total informational content of the universe stays the same, hence is conserved).

I tend not to be a pan-psychist (anymore), because i see no necessarity yet to involve all matter into an antropomorphical worldview. But i am convinced that at the borders of matter and spacetime - namely in the realm of quantum mechanics, there is a good place to identify the interface between mind and matter. For the other facts of consciousness, for example that it can be altered by drugs or anesthetics, i would prefer a combination of Joachim Kepplers theory with that of Penrose/Hameroff. Maybe one can dim down consciousness (without ever destroying it) by limiting the frequency window for it to act on and so some material stuff like drugs and anesthetics can come into play. We are just at the beginning of investigating these fascinating possible connections and i think it will take some time to put every detail into its natural place.

I just read your own essay and i like it very much. It argues for reason and intelligence and against nonsense and self-contradiction. Good work! By the way, i think that a part of the fascination into mathematics relies on the fact that it has an appeal to be eternal - something most human beings are fascinated by. If there are values that are eternal, we also wish that our own values may be eternal (best example: the rich man who wants to take his money with him to heaven, because he has identified his self-value so much with that money/gold he 'made').