Classical Quantum Conciousness by Peter Jackson

Dear Peter

Very interesting essay and a challenging one. It seems that there a cross-point between us. Your claim that :"Ironically limited primeval evolution of neural mechanisms can explain why it's own workings remain a mystery." and that non-causal factors are playing in the occurrence of the phenomena. The late Prof. David Bohm and others saw that causality is not having sufficient explanation to the occurrence of the phenomenon and Quantum and Relativity theories are special cases in the evolvement of phenomena.

My claim is that it is all in the attributes of movements, and maybe String theory will prove it. The motivational selection of the self-organization is subject to its Optimal STATE, intrinsically and locally. And the "existent" chooses the most optimal potential action (or non action).

Yes, this is a real challenge to prove it, but realty is being ratified again and again in the relationships of 2 waves or particles relating to each other.

All the best. interesting view and approach.

yehuda atai

Peter,

Your paper involves a hypothesis concerning a classical underpinning to quantum mechanics. You have written a number of papers on FQXi on this topic. I will say these papers do quite well on both the popular and community votes. However, this and related ideas contradict a number of theorems on quantum mechanics, such as the Bell inequality violation, the Kochen-Specker theorem, no-signaling and Tsirelson's bound. I will not go into these, though I published a paper last year on the categorical equivalency between the Tsirelson bound and aspects of spacetime geometry. What these theorems tell us is that if there is a classical underpinning to quantum mechanics they must be nonlocal and have no observable consequence, and if they do have observable consequences and are local then QM is wrong. So for the experimental implications of these theorems have been consistently positive.

While your papers do well on the voting, as do others that express similar ideas, they never win any of the prizes. The FQXi judges are the ultimate gatekeepers, and even if a paper has top spot on the voting, if it contradicts known physics it will not win. Of course to be somewhat jaded about it all the FQXi judges end up picking largely essays by FQXi members, with maybe one or two winners that are not.

I will say right off that I am pretty much in line with the basic understanding of quantum mechanics without hidden variables and the rest. There are of course issues with us trying to understand QM in a macroscopic or intuitive way, because QM has these odd consequences that seem too bizarre to believe. However, maybe the problem is not so much QM, but the human brain. If you own dogs you know they simply can't figure out how to unwind their leash if they get caught up. Their brains can't process deep geometric relationship. When it comes to QM we are a bit similar in our mental deficiencies with regards to intuiting it.

Of course this does not mean I would judge your paper badly. It is pretty well written, even if it simply does appear to be incorrect. I will have to wait to think before I score. I will probably give it around a 7.

Cheers LC

Hi dear Peter

It is nice to see you again in this contest.

I have very good impression on your works, in a whole! That is why now I start to study your attractive essay with pleasure. I hope we can tell each to other some ours favorable opinions, if there will be not some hard contradictions in ours approaches, of course.

My best wishes!

It is the case here that I am a bit in the minority on this here on the FQXi contest. I will say there was a parallel development from the late 19th century that was popular through the 1920s and still has some popularity today. When Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs laid down the foundations of statistical mechanics it solidified the no-go theorem for perpetual motion machines. There arose a sort of cottage industry to show this physics was wrong and to demonstrate a perpetual motion machine. This waned in the 1930s and 40s, largely because humanity was up to its eyebrows with other problems, which unfortunately seem to be returning. Since the 1970s there has been also a sort of cottage industry that is strikingly similar with respect to quantum mechanics.

The two trends have some analogous features as well. Thermodynamics has the generating e^{-硫E} = e^{-E/kT} in the partition function, while quantum mechanics has e^{-iEt/徴} in a path integral or as the evolutionary development of a state. The quantum mechanical path integral under a Wick rotation is a partition function in statistical mechanics. The equation or replacement 1/kT = it/徴 with the reciprocal of temperature as Euclidean time. This is a route towards quantum critical points and phase transitions induced by quantum fluctuations.

The idea of the perpetual motion machine had a bit of motivation with Maxwell's demon, who could open and close a valve between two regions to separate fast and slow moving molecules, However, as Szillard demonstrated this can't be done for free. The demon is a sort of computer who if restricted to resources of the system will not be able to perform this activity. The demon must appeal to outside resources. In doing so entropy over all still increases. Much the same happens in a quantum measurement. A measurement is a quantum decoherent event where superposition or entanglement phase is coupled to an outside system or open world. By this means the density matrix of a quantum system is reduced to diagonal form. However, the actual outcome is not predicted.

Now enter hidden variables, beables or classical-like descriptions. This would seems to be a way in which the actual outcome is obtained. However, this would imply that a quantum observable has some prior existence or objective outcome independent of the Born rule of quantum mechanics. This is that the spectrum of an observable has a one to one correspondence with probability amplitudes or probabilities. This is really where the fly in the ointment occurs with these ideas. It is a quantum version of the Maxwell demon that can obtain prior information about a system independent of the information = entropy constraints of the system.

This has connections to other areas of physics, such as black hole quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. Of course in science we do not have proof of things, but only go on the basis of evidence that supports known foundations and models. I have no assurance the future will not have anti-gravity warp drive space travel with sub-quantal instantaneous communications and so forth. On the other hand I have some pretty serious suspicions these will not happen. Since you mentioned Sarfatti, I do not take his ideas about UFOs as real alien spaceships at all seriously along with his claim these demonstrate his various claims.

Cheers LC

Dear Peter,

If a Schrodinger sphere actually exists in nature, and not just as a mathematical construction, what is it composed of and how does it actually function to produce that helical path? How can it be observed? In your theory what limits the speed of light to C? Generally pair production creates a matter particle and its antimatter particle. These particles would normally either have enough kinetic energy to travel away from their creation point with the antiparticle usually interacting with another matter particle in a very short time resulting in their destruction by conversion into photon energy or if their kinetic energy is low enough they would attract each other and convert to photon energy. How would this develop the complex molecular structure of RNA? Moreover, pair production needs a source of high level motion amplitude such as a gamma ray that has a high enough frequency so that it contains enough motion to make the two particles. What is the source in your concept? It must also come in contact with an angular motion component such as the field structure of an atom near its nucleus. Where would it get that in your example? In nature most pair production in an area where life could exist would just be production of electrons and positrons. Where would the protons and neutrons needed to form atoms come from? RNA molecules are not composed directly of basic matter particles, but are composed of complex molecular components that are linked together by chemical bonds to form the complete RNA molecule. How would you get from the basic matter particles to that much more complex hierarchical structure?

Generally in a recycling universe the big crunch destroys everything created in the previous cycle. How does your theory work in that respect and if things in some way survive from one cycle to the next what is the observational evidence of that? I have not seen any evidence that the universe is infinite. If you have such observational evidence that it is; what is it? The 2.58 x 10^220 is actually a very large number when you consider that it is estimated that there are only about 10^80 elementary matter particles in the universe. This would mean that if each RNA molecule only contained one matter particle, you would still only be able to produce as very small percentage of all of them if you used all of the matter in the universe to do it. Of course, in reality an RNA molecule contains a very large number of matter particles, so you would actually get a lot fewer of them. The 2.58 x 10^220 number that I gave came from a simplified example of a hypothetical simple living creature that contained 200 protein machines that each contained amino acid chains of a length of 100 amino acids. In real living creatures the protein chains can vary from about 66 to 1400 amino acids in their chains. And any living creature contains proteins of more than one size. This would likely be the same for the most basic living creature's structure, since each protein machine has a specific job to perform, which would mean that its needed structure would likely vary in size from another protein that did a different job. If you consider that the mechanism to randomly produce RNA molecules would, therefore, need to produce not only the coding of all of the possible protein variations of proteins with a length of 100 positions in their amino acid chains, but would also have to produce the coding of all of the different variations of all possible proteins of all of the possible sizes of chains, you could see that the total number would be beyond comprehension. In addition to that Each RNA molecule would have to contain the exact coding for all of the 200 protein machines that would be needed to make the first living creature. If it contained less than that, it would require more than one RNA molecule that all together contained the exact right codes and then there would be the added complexity of how they would work together. If they contained more than the 200 codes they would not likely work, but random production would likely produce some of both. This would also greatly increase the total number of RNA molecules that would need to be produced to get the valid one. In real life cells, the codes are stored in DNA molecules. When a protein machine needs to be constructed, a messenger RNA molecule connects to the proper place on the DNA molecule where the code for that protein is stored, with the help of several other molecules, and reads and stores that code in its structure. It then connects to a ribosome, which is a very complex molecular machine composed of variously modified RNA molecules and protein molecules, etc. The ribosome connects to the first codon, which is the three letter code that tells it what amino acid to add next to the new protein chain. A transfer RNA molecule picks up an amino acid and if it sees that it is the one needed by the ribosome it connects to the ribosome and transfers its amino acid to the ribosome, which places it in the new protein chain. The ribosome then reads codon for the next required amino acid from the messenger RNA molecule and the cycle continues until it reads a stop code from the messenger RNA when the new protein machine is complete. I left out many details, but that is the general way it works. If you could get an RNA molecule that actually contained all of the codes for all of the necessary protein machines needed to make a living creature and if you could get that very complex RNA molecule to automatically replicate itself, you would still need to either randomly make a ribosome to build the proteins and some kind of molecule to transfer the code from the RNA molecule to the ribosome and other RNA molecules to acquire amino acids and deliver them to the ribosome to allow it to assemble the protein machines necessary to build the first living creature or the RNA molecule would have to be super complex and do it all by itself, which would make it even much more unlikely that it could be produced randomly by nature. Even if there were a large number of universes, the anthropic principle would say the our world is at least a right model that produces a viable functional world compared to the much greater number that would not be so. I think that you may have intended to say the evolution principal instead, since that is the one that deals with the mutation concept in that way. If you don't include God as the necessary more intelligent being than man, why do you believe that any other being(s) that are more intelligent than man must either exist or at least have existed? From the naturalist point of view, if the universe and the life in it was created by just random chance occurrences, then it could be effectively argued that intelligence is not needed in the universe at all because the randomly constructed universe and the life in it are far greater in scope of size, speed, and complexity than anything that intelligent man can do. All life and the intelligence that goes with it could just be some wasteful entropy structure that will ultimately be eliminated as the random universe advances to operate more efficiently. Our existence could in that way be looked at as holding back the natural progression of advancement of the random universe. Isn't that a pleasant thought? I don't expect to see that line of reasoning given by anybody though because from what I have seen the main reason that the naturalist point of view is so popular is that man would like to think of himself as god or at least that he will attain that status at some time in the future through evolution, so it tends to be a very egotistically motivated argument. I believe that is why even now when it is obvious that the universe and the life in it requires an intelligent source (God) to generate it and make it work properly, so many still try to twist reality to make it look like it doesn't. It is always possible to imagine the possibility of anything that one desires to believe in strong enough even without observational evidence.

I thought you were talking about a 3 dimensional rotation, but was not sure that I was interpreting your paper properly. That is a great improvement over the concept of a point particle that still seems to be the most accepted concept that I have seen. When I talk about the substance of a matter particle, etc. I am talking about an actual thing that has existence of itself. What I have observed is that matter particles and energy photons can be converted into each other, so neither of them is truly conserved. They can both also be converted into basic motions and vice versa and in all interactions when you add up all of the motions contained in the input entities and also their kinetic motions the total motion content of the input particles is always conserved. This makes motion the one basic material from which all other entities are composed. When we talk about shapes such as a sphere or a toroid they can be changed during interactions between things and are not necessarily conserved either. Motion possesses a built in structural operation of change, but shapes don't. You can put a shape in motion, but it is the motion that causes the changes that you see, not the shape itself. When you say matter is condensed by rotations of a sub-matter scale medium, the things that could actually exist are the medium and the motion with a rotational structure. What do you see as the structure of the medium? When you say 3D vortices from shear perturbations, the shear perturbations are the input motions and the vortices are the pattern or structure of the resulting or output motions. You are saying that the matter particles that are produced are composed of motions with structural patterns of vortices. You probably do not realize that you are saying these things because you are used to looking at the shapes, etc. instead of the motions that work or move in such a way as to produce those shapes. When you talk about a sphere, you are actually talking about the 3d rotation of motions in a spherical pattern that is why when I ask you what the sphere is composed of you can't identify any substance. The true substance is the motions themselves. Your concept of a field is a little more difficult to interpret, however. It starts with a spatial zone (area of space), that contains quanta. How would you define the structure of a quanta? These quanta have orientations in space, which may be changeable. Are they? Bound states seem to also apply to the quanta, such that they can be connected or joined together in some way. How does this joining work? Etc. implies that there are other presently unmentioned properties or variables, etc. Are there and if so what are they? Which interact giving transformations, the bound states interact in some way that causes changes in them. How do these interactions work and how are the changes made? You give one example of such interaction and the change generated by it. (Relative motion of whole fields can produce the Lorentz transformation). The Lorentz transformation is a space time concept. A time dimension does not exist, however. We live in a motion continuum. Time is just a relationship between motions and the spatial distances that they travel through. Motions are not all the same. One motion may contain a greater amount or amplitude of motion than another motion. If two motions are on points on the same line and they both leave those points simultaneously traveling in the same direction that is perpendicular to the line and travel toward another line that is parallel to the first line, so that if they both travel to that line they will both travel the same distance and if one motion reaches that second line when the other motion just reaches the halfway point between the lines, then the motion that reaches the line has a motion amplitude that is twice that of the second motion. Any convenient motion amplitude can be selected to be the motion amplitude standard and all other motions can then be compared to that motion amplitude level. Motion can then be measured by its amount or size just like distance in space can be measured by its size or amount. A condition of all the motions in the universe that existed, but no longer exists because motions have now moved to their present locations, is called the past. The conditions of all the motions in the universe that currently exist, is called the present. A condition of all the motions in the universe that does not yet exist, but will exist when motions have moved from where they are to those positions, is called the future. It is not possible to go back into the past because the motion conditions that existed then no longer exist because the motions have moved from those positions to their current positions. You cannot go into the future because the motion conditions that will exist then have not yet left their current positions and traveled to those future positions. We can only live in the present motion conditions because that is all that exists. If there were a time dimension, a whole complete new copy of the universe would have to be made each time any motion in the universe moved to a different position in order to allow someone to travel back or forward to that point in time with those exact motion conditions. This would certainly not work according to Occam's razor or that the universe will always choose the simplest and most direct or efficient way to do things. This unimaginable amount of needless structural waste would be ridiculous. I can understand the desire of people to believe that they could go back into the past or into the future, but I might desire to have a kangaroo with wings that can fly me to exotic places on distant planets, but that desire doesn't make it exist. The time dimension is the same type of thing. The multiverse concept is also in the same category. The universe is large enough as it is. Why clog up all of the actual valid concepts with all of the unnecessary and unreasonable baggage of these types of things that can never be tested or observed or experienced by us in any way even if they were to actually exist, which they don't. The security on my computer prevents me from looking at videos on it. I will try to look at it when I get a chance to use a different computer.

Sincerely,

Paul

Dear Peter

I cannot to say "I read your essay" because whatever we can do right now, it only can be surface checking the material. I understand that you are in the same situation (that comes from contest conditions). What we can do with this - if not to delay this on the good time? Nevertheless, I think it is not disturbs us to understand each to other as two not so young people (I am 67) who have the same illness (or, maybe it is a happiness!) I know you not only from this work that allows me to say that you are a truly thinking man who try to understand the reality by using own brain and - the own skin!

Of course you are on the right way, but only let me say one practical advice - we must beforehand to count ours time and real opportunities when we put any task; we must see those as realizable, otherwise the sad disappointment waiting to us in the end. A second very important thing is what that we must to start from the one right end to build a somewhat complete - indisputable science. The live forced to us to start our science from what are close to us (i.e. from somewhere of uncertain middle position). Nevertheless, we need go to some strong defined point to be starting everything from there. This however we can do only mentally (as Copernicus has gone to sit on the sun)! Excuse me if I gone on some other side ...

My thanks and best wishes to you!

hi peter,

i read your essay and found it to be coherent, logical, and well-written. regarding one of the two conclusions:

"Mathematical laws can only give rise to aims and intentions insofar as they may help motivate intelligent beings to resolve to understand more."

how did you arrive at this conclusion? could it be said that you are asserting, by inference, that there is no possibility of aims or intentions *unless* there is a motivated being involved that may be deemed "intelligent"? if so, what constitutes an "intelligent being"?

thanks peter.

Dear Peter,

in your conversation with Lawrence Crowell some posts above you state

"Of course although conclusive and irrefutable (you can reproduce it yourself at home, experimentally and mathematically) it stands zero chance of admittance as a new paradigm in the next decade, if at all! Indeed my essay identifies why. Our brains prefer pre-set patterns and reject new alien concepts as they require the much harder 'rational computation' processes. It also takes a real understanding of QM..."

May i ask why you do not - neither in your comments to Lawrence Crowell nor in your essay - simply describe how one does reproduce your findings (at home) experimentally?

Thanks

Stefan Weckbach

I can say that in many ways I hope you wrong. I published a paper last year on the categorical equivalency between Tsirelson bound on quantum mechanics and spacetime structure. My goal is to illustrate how divergences in quantum gravity can be absorbed into unobservable nonlocal hidden variables. It is a sort of renormalization procedure.

Your recent drop here is not due to me. I am tabulating plausible future scores on a copy of the FQXi essay page, and have graded rather few so far.

Cheers LC

I can say that in many ways I hope you wrong. I published a paper last year on the categorical equivalency between Tsirelson bound on quantum mechanics and spacetime structure. My goal is to illustrate how divergences in quantum gravity can be absorbed into unobservable nonlocal hidden variables. It is a sort of renormalization procedure.

Your recent drop here is not due to me. I am tabulating plausible future scores on a copy of the FQXi essay page, and have graded rather few so far.

Cheers LC

Dear Peter,

Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay. I have read and enjoyed your essay and just rated it highly. It was very informative. Unfortunately, my education in QM is not sufficient enough to break through the barriers I specified via way of Dennis Polis in my paper, but I am glad you are trying and may have succeeded. Describing life in this way well be an important part of the answer to consciousness, and indeed the question to which this contest is founded.

All the best with your future efforts in this and other intellectual regards.

Jack

Philosopher.io

Dear Peter,

In your previous comment to me you say "On RNA, I identify a 'mutation' (evolution) not creation mechanism, equivalent to people having to decide if they're spinning clockwise or anti clockwise with Earth when standing exactly on the equator. Both answers may result in that case."

This is a very good example of something that I have found concerning most people in this world and that is that they are extremists. When confronted with an observation, most will look for the most immediately conveniently found answer and accept that as the true answer and tend to reject all other answers. In the above example you say both answers may result and you are right in that observation because it would be likely that any who were standing looking to the north when the sun came up would give one answer and those who were looking south would give the other answer. A true scientist on the other hand, would look for all of the observational information and then give a complete answer based on all of it. First after seeing the sun come up and go down several times he would come to the conclusion that either the sun was going around the earth or the earth was rotating on its axis. To determine which, he would look at the background stars and see that they also seemed to be moving in coordination with the sun's movements. This would mean that either the sun and all of the stars, etc. were revolving around the earth or the earth was rotating on its axis. The logical conclusion would be that since the sun and all of the stars would almost certainly contain much more mass than the earth, the earth must be rotating on its axis. If he then stood facing north when the sun came up he would see the sun come up on his right side. If the sun was considered to be relatively stationary in comparison to the earth during one rotation time, he would come to the conclusion that the earth was rotating clockwise when looked at from his current position or if he were to back up off of the earth and move down until he was above the South Pole. If he then went back to the equator and turned around so he was facing south, when the sun came up it would come up on his left side. From this he would see that the earth was traveling to his left. From this he would come to the conclusion that it was rotating counterclockwise when looked at from his current position or if he were to back up off of the earth and move down until he was above the North Pole. If he then stood facing east, he would see that as he continued to travel around the curve of the earth, he would be traveling down compared to his current position which he would consider to be the top for reference purposes relative to his standing position on the earth with the earth under him. If he then turned to face west he would see that the earth in front of him was coming up over the curve of the earth toward him forcing him to move backwards compared to his initial position. From all of this information put together he could truthfully say that the earth was rotating clockwise and counterclockwise and was traveling up and down and also to the right and to the left depending on the given input parameter conditions. Not to say that there are not any other possible parameter variations or ways of looking at them.

Of course, we do not always have time to analyze all observable details, but when confronted with another possibility than what is currently believed, most people will just deny it and never even check it out to see if it has merits. That reaction is one of the things you have to be prepared for in this world when you try to give a new concept or even a different way of looking at an old one. So when that happens to you, just smile within yourself and think, "That's earthlings for you." Wait a minute that somehow doesn't seem quite acceptable. How about, "That's humons for you." Still could use some tweaking. Maybe, "That's man for you." I may have to consider that a little more yet. Just be glad when you find any of the few who are able and willing to think, regardless of where they are from or who or what they are. For any who can hear it, think of what God has to go through, he has to try to reach and convince all of us of his love for all of us, most of who are not just denying what he is telling us, but are actively trying to prove that he doesn't even exist.

Sincerely,

Paul

Hi Peter,

I have missed your intellectual contribution on the main forum but I don't blame you as many of the recent discussions have not been of the standard when you actively participated.

I am also happy you put in an essay despite not being fairly treated in the past. I also only decided to put in a contribution almost at the last minute.

You may wish to view and comment later although I see from one of your responses above that you may not be a fan of a single universe.

I see your continuing effort in this essay to demystify quantum mechanics. This is an area that still contains too much magic for my liking so illuminating contributions like yours are very much welcome.

All the best in your endeavors,

Akinbo

I am not sure what you see as a problem. The goal is to see if this can be mathematically realized. As for disproving that this is the domain of experiment. You generally do not disprove a theory with a theory.

The idea is that the metric structure is categorically equivalent to the Tsirelson bound, then for Einstein spaces where R_{ij} = Ag_{ij}, for A a constant the quantized curvature or expectation is similarly bounded and divergence removed. This requires going beyond the Weyl tensor spacetime physics (which is where I have worked) to the full Riemann = Weyl Ricc domain. This is rather tough as it is similar to gauge theories with sources that are notoriously difficult to work.

LC