The Nature of Mind: mindless math = projections on reality by Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Jon,

Glad you enjoyed my essay. I found several interesting things in your short essay. I particularly liked:

"If you're able to see the forest for the trees, or if you have access to the high-level programming language, you can interpret the system from the [top-down] view."

And,

"I think humans are more like information systems than physical systems. After all our cells turn over so we aren't made of the same stuff we were just a short time ago."

That interests me from two perspectives. First, the consciousness field is compatible with cellular turnover. Second, I don't believe information exists other than as a change in physical structure, and your statement seems completely compatible with my view of information.

And I think your focus on 'gliders' in 'The Game of Life' is an excellent toy model to debate the meaning of 'emergence'.

As for the change of consciousness you spoke of, emotional changes, hormonal changes, even starvation, can change the brain chemistry enough to experience the world differently. Why not?

Today's been a very very busy day, and the list of essays seems to never quit growing. I did watch the trailer and will watch later!

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Willie K,

Thanks for reading my essay and telling me how it triggered introspection on your own.

Your essay, as you note, did begin with the Platonic credo:

"...when these physical entities are studied down to their most fundamental constituents, all that's left will be mathematics..."

You then propose that the total biomass on earth is a measure of "successful deployment of 'aims and intentions' by some living systems." I think that's an excellent perspective. It immediately places the problem into a statistical realm and removes it from individual idiosyncrasies. Your comparison of human biomass footprint over social insects is also insightful, and your suggestion that recent equality of intrinsic human biomass to extrinsic social insect biomass may be indicative of a new form of extrinsic intelligence, that of human society.

You clarify your focus: "use mathematical laws to describe the human social system." As you have focused on biomass as a surrogate for statistics, and considered negative and positive liberty (freedom) as the criterion of interest, I would like to suggest an earlier FQXi that focuses on the same aspects of society:

The Thermodynamics of Freedom

I did not understand much of your discussion on page 3 at first reading. I do not believe that it strengthens what has started out as a very strong essay. You might consider deleting this and moving directly into the page four discussion where you begin filling in the blanks. (Or maybe I should go back and read page 3 few more times)

Your discussion of the various rights is superb, and I see very little (if any) need to justify these using page 3 arguments.

You, however, appear to make more use of your page 3 model on page 5 with the 'regulation' right. Since you've included your email address, I may send you information that you might find of interest.

I'll say this. You deal with the big picture. Galaxies are interesting, but in cosmology they are aspects of the 'dustball' model. The truly larger universe of interest is between your ears.

Your figure 5 on the inherent balance of rights of the people and feedback for the people is masterful. I assume this is your own creation, and I congratulate you.

In the end, you briefly discuss AIs. Having some expertise in these areas I do not see the singularity as a likely event, but I think AI might reasonably fit into your extrinsic intelligence model.

In summary, I believe yours is one of the most important essays in the contest. We should all thank Templeton for founding this organization, and those people who have run it so well for almost a decade.

Thanks for entering your essay. I encourage you to continue developing your theme.

My very best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Posted to Dean Rickles page:

I believe you're close to expressing Wheeler's conception when you state:

"The laws of physics... are heavily laden with material from humans devising such representation and laws.... The structure of the universe, on such views, is intimately connected with our own existence."

I would prefer to state that "the perceived structure of the universe... is intimately connected with our own existence." The structures we project on the universe [as discussed in my essay] do not actually change physical reality, but only our perception of physical reality.

Nor is it at all clear that mathematical laws, as artifacts of the mind are thereby "infused" with mind. They are and remain "mindless".

Schrödinger's remark about "mind and world" address mind and physical reality, not mathematical laws or poems. Poems or mathematical laws "generated" by mind are and remain "mindless". Nor do I see Ernst Cassirer's attempt to merge objective and subjective through wordy abstraction as relevant. I believe the problem arises when you state

"That laws are only ever 'objective'."

It is physical reality, the ground of being, that is objective, in the sense that when you jump off a tall building, you will go 'splat'. The attempt to formalize the rules, and hence derive Newton's F=ma or Einstein's curved space-time are only more or less 'objective', depending upon their congruence with reality. This is where Schrödinger's "gaps, lacunae, paradoxes..." arise - the mismatch of our imposed laws and objective reality. I discuss the projection of mathematical structure on physical reality in my essay, which I invite you to read.

I do agree that "physical reality is deemed tantamount to independent from some arbitrary observer." Physical reality is the territory; theories, descriptions, and models are the map. Your suggestion of "averaging over" the maps is perhaps one way to define 'consensus' reality.

Such confusion shows up in Eddington's "much of the 'stuff of the world' is 'spiritual' [now 'mental']. Although this is poorly worded, it is congruent with my thesis of a consciousness field that interacts with material reality [in the form of momentum density]. Nevertheless, to say that "the laws that we often suppose to be entirely mindless... are in fact products of the mind" does not in any way "infuse" laws with mind. They are, insofar as they can be said to exist, "mindless". They do not possess mind!

I think it nonsense for Eddington to claim that an intelligence "should be able to obtain all the knowledge of physics we have obtained by experiment." You are correct. It is absurd!

You then say "modern physics is beholden to more abstract ideals" and "it is possible that this use of mathematics imposes 'blinkers' on the view of the world." This is compatible with my "mindless laws as projections on reality" and I note that Rovelli concurs with this as I believe do Gambini and Pullin. This is not to agree with Wheeler's "bootstrap" and certainly not with Q'bism.

Despite that I disagree with many statements in your essay, nevertheless I do agree with the opening of your final paragraph - "that the world is in some sense mind stuff..., or at least infused with some kind of mind stuff...". The fact that this is such a nebulous statement is probably what causes you to back off a little in your last sentence.

My belief is that either consciousness arises when Lego blocks come together in such a way as to make dead matter magically self-aware, or else the universe is inherently conscious. As I believe it is the latter, then it is not enough to wave ones hands and say "mind stuff", or draw a cute picture as did Wheeler. If mind has any effect on matter then the laws of interest should be those describing the field and its interaction with matter. [Universal mind could be nothing but a field.] The description of the interaction between the field and matter is what makes it physics, whereas the fact is that the "operation" of the mind [essentially it's self-interaction and self-awareness] is beyond physics. That's the world we live in.

Thank you for an essay that focuses on how many have tried to say this, and how hard it is to say correctly.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Rajiv K Singh,

You begin by saying "information must have reality of its own, otherwise it cannot be created."

Many today speak of information as if it were a type of particle. I do not believe this. Energy flows between systems, and if the energy causes a structural change (ink on paper, electronic gate switching, photon exciting retina, etc.) then information is "created" or "written" or "recorded" or "registered". But it is meaningless unless there is a codebook or interpretation; "One if by land, two if by sea" has a historical context, without which it is meaningless words. So you are correct that information always conveys a relation, at least with contextual elements, i.e., semantics or 'meaning'. In physics this meaning is provided by models or theories through which experiments are interpreted.

In your argon experiment you say "each of these electrons individually carries information". Yes, in the context of our theory. In actuality all the electron carries is energy/momentum. So I'm unsure when you say 'nature is expected to pick such a language to build layers of description...". Nature does what nature does, interacting with itself perpetually. We through our models provide the language. That this is possible, verges on miraculous, but we should simply give thanks and employ it.

If I understand your use of 'conjunction' and 'disjunction', you're defining logical operations for processing conditions. As all possible logic is derivable from AND and NOT gates, I assume you can map these into such if needed to. You note that "the simplicity of information processing makes it much more likely to occur in self-organized systems." I agree. You then find it reasonable that this leads to self-sustaining organization. I also agree, at least I agree that it increases the odds of such happening.

Then you say "it is apparent that more an organism learned about processes and its environment, more it could develop action pathways to meet its own needs." I still agree. In essence, the codebook or interpretational repertoire is growing, allowing the system to handle an increasing number of contingencies. But then you take the big step! You say this creates a specification-free-want, which I interpret to mean an aim, intention, or goal. I do not believe this follows. You are suddenly assigning conscious qualities to what is simply a very sophisticated physical system driven by the flow of energy/momentum. This is essentially the basis of the Darwinian Credo that increasing complexity leads to awareness. That is an assumption, and one that I do not make, or find credible.

Thus, since you apparently do make this assumption, you claim that no consciousness field is needed for awareness. As I've said several times above, "you pays your money and you takes your choice".

Thanks for an interesting essay, and for your response to my essay.

My best regards

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Avtar Singh,

Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay. I have now read your essay and agree that we see consciousness as inherent in the physical universe rather than an artifact, almost an afterthought, that emerged in unplanned fashion. If this were the case, it could just as easily have been that consciousness never arises at all.

I agree with you that "a common set of physical laws govern the functioning and behavior of matter, mind, consciousness, intentions, aims, and purpose at all scales in the universe." and that "laws are not mindless but the very mind of the universe and goal-oriented behavior is not an accident..."

Your focus is heavily on the cosmological problems of dark matter and dark energy. I have not quantitatively pursued my theory in this direction, so I cannot compare our results. My focus has been on the physical interaction of the field with neural networks of the brain, and of the field with itself.

As Harry Ricker points out elsewhere, physics suffers from "underdetermination", in which case two or more theories fully comply with all the verification evidence. This is exacerbated when the theories do not fully overlap in their applications. The significant thing is that we draw the same conclusion that consciousness is inherent in the universe, not an 'after-the-fact' artifact, nor anything that arose from 'mindless math'.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Heinrich,

Thank you for reading and for asking excellent questions. Having read your essay, I see it will be difficult to frame the answers to your questions in a comment. Some answers are already presented in above comments but I do not think you have time to read all these.

First, primordial - either awareness exists from the beginning, or it 'emerges' as some process by which dumb matter becomes self-aware. If it emerges, it is an artifact, not a fundamental aspect of the universe, and any view of the universe 'understanding itself' by evolving an artifact necessary for this 'purpose' is to me not credible. And the idea that it boils down to a 'large molecule' such as the microtubule, even less so. You note that expanded consciousness exhibits "interesting (anti-) parallels to [...] triggering the quantum-to-classical transition", and mention consciousness experienced as 'dissolving'. This (more or less) is the basis of my belief in the classical continuum as reality, and the Quantum Credo as error-full interpretations of inexact projections onto reality [see my page 3]. Further you say if unitary quantum mechanics provides a truthful description of nature, then the emergence of time and classical reality depend on a local perspective on to the universe. I believe that time and space, as Einstein noted, do not exist "absent of field". Elsewhere you say that the quantum-to-classical transition is perspectival!

You treat consciousness as 'emergent' and as linked to a classical algorithm operating in the brain. This differs from my definition. The combination of 'awareness' and logical structure I call intelligence - it's here that algorithms apply. Awareness is more fundamental. You seem to subscribe to the Quantum Credo which believes classical reality emerges from quantum substrate: the 100 to 500 quantum fields that Prof. Susskind, head of physics at Stanford, proposes. You also say 'time and a definite classical (as opposed to quantum) world are necessary prerequisites for purpose and intention."

You ask: "where in the chain is the quantum-to-classical transition happening?" As I note, Zurek's long trek has gotten us no closer to the answer. As ET Jaynes remarked,

"...a false premise built into a model which is never questioned cannot be removed by any amount of new data."

In short, being very familiar with all modern theories, which have failed completely to give an integrated picture of the world, you examine the various pieces of the picture. Amazing that you can do that in 9 pages. I have it easier in that, while acknowledging the utility of the bookkeeping systems such as QFT, I observe that these are mathematical structures projected onto physical reality. That unitary quantum mechanics supports half a dozen or so interpretations is strongly indicative of this point. After almost a century quantum physicists still do not know whether the wave function is ontological or epistemological. I explain it as both but not in a brief comment. I reject Copenhagen, and have a deBroglie-Bohm-like model with particle and wave (always) properties that account for interference, while the Partition function supports the Born probability distribution. The fact that both concepts apply does not mean that they are the same thing. For a taste of the possibilities you might wish to look at my The Nature of Quantum Gravity.

In contradistinction to Schrödinger's wave mechanics, QFT treats particles as excited states of the underlying field, with a particle-per-field. This is accomplished always through the mattress spring model (see Zee) and is a simplistic way to make particles appear and disappear. As one poster put it "electrons are made from the electron field. What's the electron field made of?"

Despite Susskind's 100 to 500 quantum fields only classical fields, gravity and electromagnetism, appear as real, measurable in the lab. Quantum fields are a clever bookkeeping scheme, but artificial in nature, which is why QFT cannot calculate particle masses but must put them in 'by hand'. QFT is supported by the unrealistic Dirac equation (speed = 1.73c), inexact isospin symmetries, vacuum energy off by 120 orders of magnitude (biggest error in physics ever!), 4% discrepancy between the anomalous magnetic moment of electronic hydrogen and muonic hydrogen, 'halo' neutrons, 'massless' neutrinos, and so on. Everyone knows the Standard Model is neither correct nor complete, but lacking a better model, everyone is forced to play the game. To make it work one must introduce virtual particles, ghost particles, whatever it takes, with 20 adjustable parameters of the standard model required to fit the data. Fermi said, "with 5 parameters I can fit an elephant". So I consider particles to be real, but I don't consider the quantum fields to be real, only a bookkeeping scheme.

Mentioned in comments above, but not developed in my essay, the consciousness field couples to momentum density. For example, ions flowing in axons or vesicles flowing across synaptic gaps couple to this field more strongly. Even 'walkers' on microtubules. Living cells are chock-full of moving parts. So if rocks or meatballs couple, it's very weak. And neither has the logic structure to support intelligence (algorithmic). I believe it is necessary to separate 'awareness' from 'thinking'. One is primordial, the other is local, based on the emergence of logical structure. The problem is awareness. I don't see any problem with logical activity. The problem is to couple the two. I do this through momentum density.

I believe that, rather than supersede QM and GR with a new theory, the better approach is to remove the 'built-in' errors from QM and GR, and hope that the corrected theories reflect reality more closely and unitarily. I think that classical world is capable of explaining experience and experiments, and I think many of today's interpretations of mathematical projections are clever nonsense. As one who is outside the establishment, I need not deal with "microtubules" or "integrated information", as neither of these has a chance of explaining awareness, and, given awareness coupled to logic structure, intelligence is not really that hard to grasp.

Thank you for reading my essay and replying, and thank you for writing your own excellent essay.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Vladimir Rodin,

Thank you for reading and commenting. I agree with you on the centrality of motion in all metaphysical endeavors. In my essay, it is momentum density that the field couples to. I also agree with you that motion entails structures or topology of space (proto-medium), energy, time, and mass. Given this arena, you add preons and derive constant speed. As the preons are developed elsewhere, I did not follow all of your development. It is often hard to encapsulate all necessary information in 9 pages.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Shaikh Raisuddin,

I define mind as that which possesses consciousness. In my theory it would be the field. As I postulate that it is a physical field, it is substantial and has mass-energy equivalence, hence 'matter'. The 'matter' of the field has awareness of other matter in motion. The field interacts locally with momentum density, including its own, so in this case one might say 'matter is it's own mind'. A problem in current physics is that 'matter' has no universally agreed upon definition or meaning. I do not envision local instances of 'matter' containing 'mind' but absent the field. The key point from my perspective is the universal quality of the field, that interacts locally with material systems that support motion, such as neural nets with ions and vesicles flowing. A goal is a target state that is capable of being defined in some way.

Thanks for your questions. I read your essay and commented on your page.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Jack Hamilton James,

Thanks for your kind wishes. I believe the ranks get 'roiled' towards the close of the contest, but I'm happy that many seem to find value in my essay. Like many here, I'm not in it for the money, but to share ideas.

I very much enjoyed your latest informal essay, and, with your permission, I might copy it and add comments of my own at the end. If I do so I'll share them with you.

Warmest regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Gavin,

Thank you for your very gracious comment. I've now read your excellent essay and agree with much of it. You say:

"Within living things, there is no threshold of complexity at which consciousness can be said to begin."

That is key! If there were, consciousness would clearly 'emerge'. Also, you note 'learning' and 'decision' are all the way down to the cell, while "within the human brain there are perhaps 100 trillion synapses."

So one must explain how, with no threshold of complexity, consciousness is everywhere abundant on earth, each becoming conscious without crossing the threshold. And explain how one hundred trillion synapses are 'integrated', capable of pretty well understanding other similar brains, (or even cat and dog brains!). Quantum entanglement is generally 'monogamous', occurring between two particles [if it occurs at all!] Are all the quantum 'wave packets' conglomerated to produce self-awareness and feelings of happiness, sadness, pride, shame? A field solves all of these problems [and feels right too.] You ask "what endows it with properties of mind? What endows gravity with the property "Come here now!"? You say the consciousness field is ontologically separate from matter. Not so. It is a classical field, with energy, hence E=mc**2 equivalent mass or matter. I think that ideas of "determinism inherent in matter" are confused, but this is beyond the scope of a comment. A classical field is better understood ontologically than an "underlying complexity dimension".

You discuss "value ethics". I would note the fact that over millennia, across all religions, "Do unto others..." is what one would expect from a consciousness field, common to all, not from isolated, individual, 'emerged' minds trying to figure things out in a dog-eat-dog Darwinian world. In other words, a physical consciousness field that interacts with local biological flows [momentum density: ions in axons, vesicles across synaptic gaps] sensing and 'nudging', solves problems that are otherwise incomprehensible. The details of the physical field are scattered through the above comments on this page, but for a taste of the physics involved look at The Nature of Quantum Gravity.

The idealist view that the universe is at base-level "just information" is simply confused, while Spinoza's 'substance' (that which stands beneath, under-standing) is very compatible with a consciousness field that spans the universe, as occasionally sensed directly by vast numbers of people. The primary drawback to the field today lies in misconceptions associated with the Quantum Credo, but this too shall pass.

Thank you for participating in this contest and good luck!

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your comment. I'm very glad you enjoyed my essay.

While I agree that neither space alone, nor time along, exists, I also agree with Einstein that space does not exist absent of field. Vishwakarma has recently adopted this is as basic postulate:

"Space-time cannot exist in the absence of fields."

I think you might enjoy his 2016 work arXiv:1605.09236, "Einstein and Beyond: a Critical Perspective on General Relativity". Since I agree with him, and since the primordial space-time-filling field is gravity, then one might postulate gravitational field as the consciousness field, with the gravito-magnetic portion of the field being the local part that interacts with ultra-dense particles, in the manner described in The Nature of Quantum Gravity. However between adherents to the Quantum Credo and adherents to 'curved space-time' it's simpler merely to postulate the existence of the consciousness field. The particulars can be nailed down later.

I had not known of your stroke. Very glad you're healing. Yes, very remarkable, this body! The ability of the body to heal itself is probably another argument for the consciousness field.

I will look at your essay again and comment.

Thanks again, Tom. My best wishes for you.

Edwin Eugene Klingman