Hello Eugene,
I enjoyed reading your essay, an impressive product.
I wonder if you have considered the possibility that there is not a "Mind Field" but rather an "Ideas Field". I my essay "Reality ReEnvisaged" I set out the argument that minds are living patterns of information that inhabit the interface between the physical world and the "Ideas Field".
Please have a look at it, I think we can have a rich dialogue.
Best regards, ...george...
Dear George Kirakosyan,
I'm very happy that you enjoyed my essay (as I did yours) and agree that there is no need to repeat here the many points we agree upon which are expanded upon in our essays. You make the point we do not even know the nature of the force that presses us in a chair, nor the nature of the nucleons, yet we would explain the brain! In this regard I would also point out that life is almost defined (from slime mold to human) by its ability to sense and work against gravity.
It is good so many FQXi essayists seem to be finding the same truth, albeit seen from different perspectives.
My best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Dear George Simpson,
You say that, in your model, "minds feed on, create, manipulate, and act on ideas and concepts. Ideas and concepts are passive, minds act on the Ideas field and act on the physical world." You also seem to believe matter is built on information. I do not believe "information" exists in any material sense, but information is registered when energy/momentum causes a structural change in a material system, and even then can only be interpreted or given meaning via a given context or through code-books. Unless and until interpreted, it's only energy flowing through space and rearranging material structure.
You envisage reality as a three-part system, consisting of the physical world, the world of ideas and concepts, and minds connecting the two. It's unclear how the brain fits into this. Whereas you define mind as an information pattern, I believe the information pattern is found in the neural network. I see the mind as possessor of consciousness, which I propose exists in a universal field that physically interacts with matter in motion. You seem to be saying something similar when you say the individual mind takes its shape from "idea gestures" which seem to originate in the brain. You posit the mind gives physical form to concepts, whereas I propose the form is derived from physical flows in the brain, sensed by the consciousness field.
So while somewhat related, I don't see the ideas field congruent with consciousness field. Usually, when we go so far on a given path, it's hard to leave the path. Unless I've missed it you do not specify 'how' the ideas field interacts with matter.
Best regards, and congratulations on tackling the 'hard' problems.
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Hi Edwin,
"You also seem to believe matter is built on information." Quantum mechanics, as I understand it, establishes information as a foundational component of reality. It is information that determines the outcome in the twin-slit experiment. However, this is not central to my argument.
"Unless and until interpreted, (information is) only energy flowing through space and rearranging material structure" Agree. Therefore minds are needed.
"It's unclear how the brain fits into this. Whereas you define mind as an information pattern, I believe the information pattern is found in the neural network." I am a bit nonplussed here - I thought it would be obvious to readers that the information pattern exists in the brain, constructed on the infrastructure offered by neurons. I could have been more explicit about this.
"I see the mind as possessor of consciousness, which I propose exists in a universal field that physically interacts with matter in motion." I'm sorry here I think you are going off the deep end, hypothesising something enormously hard to verify and understand. Why would we think that matter in motion would always interact with mind? And motion is relative to some frame - there is always a frame in which the motion is zero.
We can verify that there are information patterns in brains, and we can verify that actions in the physical world take place as a result of the changing configurations of these patterns - i.e., what they believe.
"the individual mind takes its shape from "idea gestures" which seem to originate in the brain" Idea gestures are simply the analogue of physical gestures, which we already know rely on a causal link between activation patterns in the brain and motion of the body.
"you do not specify 'how' the Ideas field interacts with matter" You are right, I did not specify this explicitly, and should have. My "idea gestures" in the mind, which are patterns of activation, can remain internal to the mind, not affecting the areas associated with motor control, or they can interact with these, resulting in motion of the body.
congratulations on tackling the 'hard' problems. THANK YOU!!!
Dear Edwin,
Very deep, clear analysis, important ideas and conclusions to search for ways to overcome the crisis of understanding in fundamental science .
Yours faithfully,
Vladimir
Dear Vladimir,
You begin,"But how can we see the world in integrality, the world as whole?" and note that the ontological meta-paradigm, Universum as a whole, has been pushed into "philosophical backyards" of science. I agree that "the physics of particles informs us, strictly speaking, on fundamental structures of the nature, but not on fundamental particles." Yes, the 'particles' are much more abstract than 50 years ago. This is extremely well stated and agrees with my observation that physicists have projected mathematical structures onto reality. Of course the great scientists were religious. They were not one-dimensional, merely focused on 'points' as convenient simplifying concepts, that facilitated applications of set theory, etc. This is probably as far away as one can get from the "The Self-Aware Universe".
I always enjoy your essays, focused on the reality of consciousness versus the artifice of interpreting symbolic structures as reality.
My best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Dear Edwin,
I enjoyed reading your essay, courageously and mindfully challenging the mainstream dogmas. To your worldview, I have some questions. First, assuming it is correct, what or who may be responsible for the laws of nature, which are such highly specific things? Since your 'mind field' is just a part of nature, it cannot be responsible for the whole, can it? If it still can, what would be the difference between that mind field and transcendental Creator? I am giving you a high score. Your comments to my essay are very welcome.
All the best,
Alexey Burov.
Hi Alexey Burov,
The problem with Cartesian dualism, as you note, is the lack of interaction between material and mental. For a number of reasons I concluded that consciousness is best represented as a field, but it was only when I asked myself how the field interacts with my material body that I could start investigating possibilities. For example should the field interact with mass, with charge, or with some undiscovered attribute? Is the field undiscovered, or is it simply that this attribute of a known field was never imagined or tested. Local or universal?
You discuss a young man who "takes it on faith that all that is called discovery is, in the end, just chemistry of his brain..." In other words, it is devalued upfront, a mere 'hiccup' in the atoms. After reading this I looked up my JBS Haldane quote to give you, then read to the end of the paragraph where you present the quote! However, I don't believe you quoted CS Lewis, so here goes:
"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning."
[Having finished your paper, I see that you reference CS Lewis, but I don't believe you quoted him.] Anyway, you certainly put your finger on a big part of the problem. Meaninglessness is meaningless. As always, yer pays yer money and yer takes yer cherce, but who would choose meaninglessness? You label it "cognitive suicide", and you are right. Even people who claim to believe in such sterility, do not live as if they believe it.
You claim that "every error should leave the thinker a possibility of correction." As you know, I discuss errors that have propagated through GR and QM for 100 years. The problem (for a young man) is that correcting such errors offends all those heavily invested in the errors [unknowingly, until you spill the beans] and this is not career enhancing. (Probably why the most productive people I know in this matter are retired.)
You mentioned that Thomas Nagel pins his hopes on panpsychicism. Chalmers is agnostic but states "panpsychicism is not as unreasonable as is often supposed, and there is no knockdown argument against it."
You ask, "if my 'mind field' is just a part of nature, it cannot be responsible for the whole, can it?" That depends on how far the field can be pushed, and I have pushed quite far [far beyond what an essay or short comments can relate.] However to be accepted, certain current interpretations [due to repeated errors] must be cleared up, so that is where my current efforts lie.
Thanks for your excellent essay; very impressive.
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Quote
The diagram shows the
transformation of measurement data into best feature vectors, and the dynamical processes that produce
eigenvalues, generally taken as representative of the object system. Feature extraction based on distances
obtained from numbers is constructed from physical structures that can function as gates, implementing
logic operations, which can be combined to count to produce integers and to add to produce distance
maps and then compare distance maps to get difference maps (gradients) from measurements. The nature
of the process of making math maps is thus rooted in the physical universe.
end of quote
A question your last sentence raises. Do you think that the processing generalized mathematical mappings mirrors reality? Seriously ?
You are implying that the math mappings themselves are closedly linked to reality. Is this with respect to eignvalues and eignvectors ?
Or do you mean maps in a more general sense ?
Edwin,
Thanks again. With you, I have a special option to discuss very delicate questions. One of those: I cannot agree with Chalmers that "panpsychicism is not as unreasonable as is often supposed, and there is no knockdown argument against it." The key question is one we stressed in our criticism of Thomas Nagel: "However, were mentality but a part of nature, by what means could this part be responsible for the laws of the whole? In what way could it install and maintain them through the Big Bang and up to now? Nagel does not see that such a powerful and unshakable authority over nature implies the transcendence of this power." Apparently, Chalmers does not see that either.
Cheers,
AB.
Ha! Someone does read the endnotes!
Thanks Andrew.
The problem I addressed was how a robot, making raw data measurements, could build a theory of physics. It would begin with no preconceptions or categories ['baggage' in Tegmark's terminology] it would have eyes, force sensors, effectors (to kick a rock, say, and track it) but would not recognize any particular aspect of reality.
I showed that, given realistic distributions of numbers (raw data such as reflectance or illumination, but derivatives also, such as velocity or acceleration) the measurement numbers, (in the plane at left) can be clustered via 'inter-set' and 'intra-set' distances [described in my reference 5] which reduce the N numbers to n clusters. Then a minimum-error Karhunen-Loeve or a maximum-entropy mapping can reduce the n features to m 'best' features, where m is less than n. This yields a feature vector or 'eigenvector', which is "generally taken to be representative of the system."
I made no assumptions other than that the measurement numbers were not uniformly distributed (which would defeat the 'clustering' operations.)
The robot, his sensors and effectors and computers that process the numbers, were real, the measured phenomena were assumed real, so every aspect of the system was rooted in the physical universe. I taught the robot how to treat the measurement numbers, but I did not teach it categories, features, etc. These are derived automatically by the process I describe. Of course if one limits oneself to, say, atomic spectra, then the 'eigenvectors' will be more easily mapped to our current concepts, but the process works with any measurements, including those randomly (but repeatedly) performed.
Yes, the mappings represent reality. They don't represent it as well as thousands of conscious physicists, working over generations and building on previous work, can represent reality, but, for a stupid robot, they yield a primordial "theory" of physics.
Thanks for reading the endnotes and asking excellent questions.
My best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Alexey/Lev,
Chalmers is not a physicist, I don't recall what Nagel is. As a physicist I began with a Self-interaction Principle, from which the operative laws [Newton, Klein-Gordon, etc.] are derived. It is the 'Master law' that generates the laws you are concerned about. But we have terminology issues. In my terminology "mentality" is consciousness plus the logic circuits [typically the brain]. This is not what is responsible for the laws of the whole. The self-interaction of the field does not "install and maintain them", it just self-interacts, at all scales.
Best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Klingman throughout the essay seems to hold a regularist point of view about the nature of physical law that we share. For instance:
"Math maps projected on the physical territory form the substance of physics.
I have awareness of only one physical universe, but I have many maps of the universe, and I use experience of the physical universe to qualify the maps."
Dear Rudolfo Gambini,
Thank you for reading and commenting on my essay.
You discuss an event ontology and the possibility that events in the brain can be accessed physically in a third person sense, but also mentally in a first-person sense as perceptions. Is this 'mental' access occasioned by the neural network itself, or by physical field, or what? As you know, I postulate a physical field that possesses the attribute of awareness: awareness of itself (hence Yang-Mills type non-linearity) and awareness of momentum/energy density. This postulate actually takes one quite far in a physical world that includes consciousness and intelligence in myriad entities.
As you note, I am 'regularist' in the sense that I believe we project structure onto regularities of nature. The 'necessitarian' interprets the structural projections in terms of 'laws' governing system evolution, despite that QM is only a statistical bookkeeping system that depends from the evident universality of the partition function.
One would think that the underdetermination that is obvious from the existence of five or more 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics, would give pause to Quantum Credo-ists, but this is met head-on with "shut up and calculate". As a means of solving specific problems, this may be good advice. As a means of determining ontological reality, not so good.
You note that in a universe that is life-friendly and phenomenic in character one can always find purpose in its inhabitants, and this may imply "a universe capable of observing itself". With a consciousness field it is almost a foregone conclusion that local observations of self will evolve. If, instead, only a possibility exists that life and neural networks will evolve, given sufficient time, the possibility would also seem to exist that such would never happen, leading to absurdity and nihilism.
Best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Edwin,
If you have not already done so, I recommend that you read the essay by Ronald Racicot.
Best Regards and Good Luck,
Gary Simpson
Ed
Underlying this work is the implicit realist credo of separate observer holding a (more or less) accurate reflection of the actual external reality. No doubt this has worked well to effect technology and we may like to extend this scope to the big ontological questions posed by the essay theme. However, consensus we have not and the divide between fact and opinion bears witness to something more. In this important work you allude to the properties of the mind essential to extending the correlation of experience and maps to the ontological scope. Thank you.
Vik
P.S. I note no mention here of Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance theory.
Vik,
The best essays cannot be fully appreciated in one reading. In response to your enthusiastic appreciation of my essay, I have re-read your own, and realized again that yours is a masterpiece. Thank you for reading my essay, but thanks most for writing your own. I felt that our essays support each other on my first reading; I'm glad you feel the same. You have picked worthwhile goals for your retirement.
My best wishes for you,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Gary, Thanks. I shall read Racicot's essay. Edwin Eugene Klingman
Did enjoy your essay from the dissident side, Edwin... It must be that great minds think alike...or else de gustibus non disputandum... Anything that gets my mind in gear is worthwhile.
My comments on your ideas follows:
...The Darwinian Credo holds that consciousness emerges from increasing complexity. .......
My essay did not deal with consciousness...the perception of a goal seemed to be less important than separating physical/material from immaterial causes.
...The essential belief of Darwin: complexity grows until, presto-chango - dead matter becomes aware.....
...If consciousness emerges from physical reality, one should explain how
....Despite the Darwinian assumption that consciousness arises from mindless matter .....there is absolutely no factual proof of this.
....belief that we can obtain physical reality from math symbolism. It doesn't work that way.
All these violate the axiom of sufficient causality.... Nothing in the effect that is not potentially in the cause. Modern materialists are asking us to believe in their secular miracle.. deaf and dumb objects self-organize -by physical means - and achieve a state of being (alive) impossible to explain with the capability of the starting matter
Transubstantiation of math: Mindful purpose from mindless math?
Aha - a religious code word and well-placed here. Immaterial entity assumes the appearance of matter
Do numbers exist or have meaning without mind?
Mind doesn't use number in abstracting reality, but uses the existential concept of 'oneness', 'twoness'.... to classify reality by categories. This explains how the same objects can be one or more, as in 1 family but 2 persons - husband and wife.
.....Quantum mechanics is useful and correct yet some key interpretations of quantum mechanics are in error,
QM has strong support in a realist philosophy. The variational principles of Lagrange and Maupertuis give physical matter the ability to determine the actual path of an object between two points by finding the extremal path among all possible ones, using the Lagrange action integral. How does the mindless particle sniff out the real path based on a math model ? How does the math abstraction of reality produce the correct result? It's as if there were a invisible intelligence instantly considering all possible paths and immediately selecting the one that makes the action max or min!
The realist school says that this IS what happens, however improbable to materialist sensibilities ; an immaterial program(the substantial form of the object) performs the math operations(which are themselves immaterial) instantly. This occurs for the motion of all objects, in the universe, at all times. The visible result of this immaterial control....the laws of physics!
Another QM enigma is the double slit..... how does a photon wave/electron particle know the past history of testing, so that the same diffraction pattern is always produced(but in different sequences) ? ...Seems to be an immaterial memory. Hmm.
How do entangled particles communicate info immediately when measured?....Seems like it travels at infinite speed...as if the info is under immaterial control!
The facts of QM are valid; interpretation is misguided/incomplete.
If you introduced realism/scholasticism into your epistemology...you would benefit...as would others.
Feynman noted, "no one understands quantum mechanics"
No philosophy of materialism does!
Dirac's equation implies particle speed of 1.732c , greater than the speed of light. !!
An interesting new fact...Why has this been suppressed in the textbooks?
Standard Model and General Relativity parameters that must be put in 'by hand' form links in a narrative chain, linking basic principles to observed data.
Standard model has 19 tunable variables ; the lambda CDM model has 12 fixed or independent parameters.
"Give me enough parameters and a suitable function of them and I will model the world."
Encounter a new anomaly?? No problem - just add another parameter. Physics is now reduced to curve fitting.
the mind projects mathematical structure onto physical reality.
A form of Idealism
Re Godel's theorem - proves that no axiomatic system is complete; there are always unproven assumptions. BUT: the theorem is itself based on unproven assertions ...which means the incompleteness theorem itself is logically incomplete! ...and could be inconsistent.
The proof by contradiction is another stumper. Assume the opposite of what you want to prove is true
Then prove that the premise leads to a contradiction, implying the premise thought to be T is F. Again, syllogistic argumentation declares as invalid and argument based on false premises...
It all seems related to the impossibility of (human) logical certainty, possibly related to Russell's analysis of self-referencing statements...like "There's no absolute truth".
Physics has the Heisenberg uncertainty principle; does math logic have an uncertainty principle too?
Experiment-based practice is preferred to speculation-based theorizing
The crux of the scientific method...more observed today in the breach than in its execution.
....any errors in general relativity and quantum theory that have been repeated for 100 years are now viewed as truth. Hence the Quantum Credo is generally treated as religious truth, not subject to argument.
Objective comparison of modern science with religious dogmatic beliefs reveals that science is governed by subjective ideology; students of both are held to rigorous belief in unquestioned authority...(actually, less true in religion than science).
After learning hundreds of times the various quantum narratives, inconsistent and conflicting as they may be, the mind accepts the quantum narratives, errors and all.
Like Nazi propaganda? The first step is to separate quantum facts from quantum theories...
Survival-wise, it's too expensive to question every new data point when one already 'knows' the 'truth'.
Birth of ideology and intransigence??
Darwinian evolution of function leading to consciousness and purpose is compatible with this model of neural architecture as learning network...
? The insufficiency of matter to perform higher order immaterial operations will always derail any form of Darwinian evilution.
Thus pathways in the brain, learned from interfacing to the physical world, 'map' the territory, and the mind, represented here by the consciousness field, reads the dynamic local map.
I like the metaphor of map and territory...as if the mind were exploring new areas.
Realism would say that sensory images from the neural network are interpreted by the mind , using past images(maps) stored in memory, creating new images(maps) if needed.
the math is a formal byproduct, having nothing to do with giving rise to awareness, volition, or purpose.
Math is the immaterial abstraction of quantity; abstraction of qualities/attributes/characteristics requires intellect and will.
I have awareness of only one physical universe, but I have many maps of the universe, and I use experience of the physical universe to qualify the maps.
The mind contains many possible worlds. The senses report images of the real world to the mind; when the sense images match the mental constructs , then voila!....logical truth!
All the best,
Robert
Hello Edwin,
Thank you for a stimulating essay. Let me see how close I can come to understanding your main ideas. In my interpretation of what you have to say, the consciousness field is a primordial reality. A single universal consciousness field is prior to separate and distinct individual consciousnesses. The later are perhaps derivative from the universal consciousness field, or perhaps they are mistaken representations of the consciousness field. I am not quite clear about that. The physical world is, like the consciousness field, a primordial reality. It is hard to know what physical reality in itself is like. What we think of as physical theories, such as quantum theory, are not physical reality itself, but maps of parts of physical reality. Mathematical structures are not inherent in physical reality, but are projected onto physical reality by consciousness. So, asking how mindless mathematics gives rise to mental intentions and purposes is to ask the question from the wrong direction. Mathematics does not produce mind. Rather, mind produces mathematics and projects some of mathematics onto nature. I hope that this is at least somewhat close to what you are saying.
Laurence Hitterdale
