Dear Stefan

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

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

Best regards

Janko

Dear Marc,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes,

Stefan Weckbach

Stefan Weckback,

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

From my remarks to John Ellis on his essay:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best regards,

Jim Stanfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very Best.

Peter

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

7 days later

Stefan,

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

Very best. Peter

COPY;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very Best.

Peter

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