Moira and Eileithyia for Genesis by Alexey and Lev Burov

Dear Alexey and Lev,

Congratulations for another strong essay! The subject of this year's contest truly called for an examination of the connection between thought and matter. In your view, thought is "cosmic, even super-cosmic", and you defend the need for a non-deceiving (Descartes), non-malicious (Einstein) God to make sense of our Universe and of the truthfulness of our thought processes. I too struggle with the search for a first principle that would ensure, among other things, the "lawfulness" of the Universe. I am willing to accept that, in the space of all possibilities, there are local domains that are shaped by god-like super-intelligences, but I cannot see how this explanation can be scaled to encompass all of reality. So I am still searching for a way to have All-that-Exists be a self-existing ensemble that is overall devoid of characteristics and information, and to have local minds and ordered worlds "co-emerge" within it. We do not share the same hypotheses about fundamental metaphysical axioms, but we do share the same yearning that made Schrodinger say that knowledge truly has value when it contributes to the synthesis toward answering the demand, "Who are we?".

By the way, in my current essay, I refer to your "Pythagorean Universe" essay from the last contest, specifically about the difficulty in accounting for the stability of the universal constants of physics by simply invoking the Anthropic Principle. It's always a pleasure to read your essays, and I am already looking forward to the next contest. In the meantime, I wish you good luck in this one!

Marc

Dear Lev,

I apologize for misquoting you. I read the several comments several times, and still managed to get it wrong. I do not know how to edit posted messages, but I apologize again for the inaccurate quote.

We are therefore in even more agreement than I thought.

Thank you for correcting my mistake, and thanks again for a most fascinating set of comments on your page. You seem to inspire more insight on your page than most of us can manage.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Alexey,

I managed to remove the post in which I misquoted you. As we seem to disagree on the Wigner issue, there is no need to revise and repost. However I've noted that there are some other issues which we do agree on that I may post later.

Thanks for your gracious understanding, and your many meaningful posts, here and on other's threads.

My very best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Alexey,

It was refreshing and interesting to read your essay.

I hold the view that thought and cognition are ontological and we are continuously ratifying our reality. (see my essay:"we are together, therefore I am")

It is all embedded in the qualities of the Movements attributes, which make us unique and singular.

Thanks again

Yehuda Atai

Dear Alexey

Once again, I repeat that I never said that I was even trying to explain how life began; what I am explaining is how molecules of the kind of DNA were produced. Between this and life is an enormous distance and I am surprised that you made such confusion.

Differently of your argumentation, the production of molecules of the kind of DNA has, at least, a reasonable property in the scenario I defined - this is not a guess, I calculated it.

Concerning life, even if one believes that it was created by God, one has to think that God did not created life from nothing. Or from clay. It is more reasonable to think that the material universe provided the material components of Life. For a believer in God, the role of God is to give life to matter, not to manufacture all life components.

So, you see, in nothing I said, God is put in question in any way - quite on the contrary. To put God in question is to pretend that the universe was made in seven days and life from clay. Would you disagree with me in this point?

I can say to you that during my life I had a set of experiences that I cannot explain by any known physical property, or by coincidences, etc; and one of them concerns precisely something that is written in the Bible - something of the utmost importance for the near future of mankind. Therefore, I know very well that the universe is much more than the description Physics can do. And this is not a "belief", its a knowledge from experience; and as I am an experienced empiricist, I am not in mistake when I state this. For me, "God" is a way to address everything that does not belongs to the material plane but I have no idea of what it might be because I have not enough data.

For us to know anything about any subject, we first have to be ready to accept all possibilities; if we are not, we will just be believers in something that pleases us. Jesus went to the desert to find the answer He was looking for. Only then He knew.

Although there are arrogant physicists that consider that Physics is able to explain everything, that periodically produce statements of the kind "to know all about the universe we are just missing this small aspect", they are just stupid and ignorant persons that not even have an idea of how far you are of understanding the universe. However, that is not the case of most scientists. Physics may conflict with "religious" explanations for physical phenomena but not with the essence of Religion, i.e., with the perception that the universe is not just matter. A bad physicist thinks that what he/her does not knows, does not exist; but that is not the methodology of science; a serious scientist analyses the data available and in relation to anything else he/her has only to assume ignorance. In this way there is no possible conflict between Science and Religion because they address different fields.

One thing that I assumed still a teenager is that to achieve some knowledge one has to drop the word "belief". Be it in Physics, Religion, whatever field. And drop it also in the negative form - we shall not "believe" or "not belief" in anything. I strictly follow Descartes method. That is a hard way, and with many problems, but is the only way for those that really want to know.

I hope that now, after this loooong message, you may understand me better.

All the best

Alfredo

Dear Alexey and Lev Burov,

On another thread [Robert Groess'] you made notice of a quote from P. Anderson:

"In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less society."

The statement is not unlike Steven Weinberg's remark, that

"The more comprehensible the universe becomes, the more it also seems pointless."

David Berlinski, a mathematician, remarks

"He had a point. The arena of the elementary particles... is rather a depressing place, and if it resembles anything at all it rather resembles a florescent lit bowling alley seen from the interstate, tiny stick figures in striped bowling shirts jerking up and down in the monstrously hot and humid night. What is its point?"

I suspect the 'stick figures' are Feynman diagrams. [By the way, if you have not read Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion, I think you would enjoy it very much.]

Anyway, you then asked, "If it is so, what do you think is the value of the particle physics for the humanity?", and you discussed the high cost of particle physics research, questioning the payoff.

The Higgs candidate has been found, as was to be expected by anyone who has read Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks, and supersymmetry, once felt to be a requirement for the Standard Model, is nowhere to be seen. No other particles are predicted [only resonances]. As you know from my essay, I view physics, particularly quantum physics, as mathematical projections onto physical reality. Due to its appropriateness in many physical situations the statistical nature of quantum mechanics delivers the goods. In particle systems QFT is essentially a bookkeeping system, based on a simplistic 'creation' and 'annihilation' formalism. I believe it is primarily a way to fit theory to data.

In contrast, I've found over several years that the predominant model from which QM is often heuristically derived is Stern-Gerlach, and physicists, after approximately a century, still do not understand the physics of one silver atom in an inhomogeneous magnetic field. In fact, I am, with others, building an experiment that will significantly affect QM if our research results are positive. We're self-funded, and, if successful, will have more impact on "real world" physics than the next few years operation of the LHC is likely to. So I agree with your implied sentiment.

My very best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Alexey,

In reviewing the essays I have read, I noticed you are a scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. I have been following the LHC news and noticed among other things they are looking for evidence of dark matter. I had mentioned in my comments on your essay the speculation I provided in my essay about dark matter, feeling it is a byproduct of the interactions of normal matter, its forces, and the SMBH in the center of galaxies. It is probably my amateur speculation that dark matter will only be found in the field. With your background, I would be interested in your thoughts.

Jim Hoover

Alexey,

Your essay effectively describes the ideal beauty that should be and can be the unifying source of discovery that brings stellar order of knowledge and survival that celebrates rather than shrinks humanity. Those who puff up their importance and act to shrink humanity are liars. I think we are among many experiments in humanity in the universe. Two weeks ago, I gave you high marks for how effective your words of inspiration are.

Thanks for checking out my essay:

I appreciate you mentioned "life's higher meaning". Don't you think that the biggest discoveries and inventions of humanity happened in following this meaning, not the goals of survival and comfort? If so, would it be correct to try to explain the core of human beings by means of entropy and survival? In our essay we are trying to show that this approach leads to the Epimenides paradox. One more question relates to the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics": how it can be accounted in the framework of your paper?

Life has a higher meaning but there are those who would destroy all life around them for their own glory. Perhaps you have more faith in this higher ideal being the imperative.

Jim

Уважаемые Alexei and Lev,

Taking Ancient Platonism seriously is usually considered as some sort of pre - pre - Kantian simplification in today's philosophy. Both Poincare and Einstein Relativity theories are based on Kant's heuristics, but not on Platonism. Mathematical intuitionists, Schrodinger and Dirac expressed similar attitude on Kant transcendental aesthetics as well. Club of Alternative Natural Philosophy Association ( neo - Kantian researchers ( Eddington, Dirac, Bondi,Bronstein )of fundamental constants as Kant's synthetic a priori judgments ) also attempted to find suitable aesthetic generalizations in the terms of neo - Kantianism but not Platonism. Weyl's " Pythagoreanism" was not also "pure Platonism " because Weyl was well- known neo Kantian.etc. In other words, philosophically, in order to use simplified ancient method of philosophizing in our 21st century is needed to prove that your method is suitable indeed.

In modern metaphysics "Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" is connected with fundamental question of Kant- how are synthetic a priori judgments possible ?

Dmitry Gawronsky brilliant Russian neo - Kantian mathematician and philosopher(1883-1949) Marburg school of neo - Kantian philosophy suggested that the philosopher must not rely on idle metaphysical speculations but has to know how synthetic a priori is actually applied in scientific practice (1912).

Some details of such sort of academic thinking could be found in my essay entitled " Kantian answers ".

С самыми наилучшими пожеланиями в не слишком постоватом мире философии

Michael

Dear Alexey and Lev Burov,

Ah! You make such valiant and passionate appeal to our senses of beauty that it becomes hard for us to even think of constructing any arguments that defies the centrality of beauty. Having apologized for this violation of beauty in the hands of rationality, let me commit that anyway.

Beauty has many forms, as you too captured in your essay, but you remained confined to the beauty of mathematics. As someone said, "Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder [i.e in the senses of the perceiver]", I see so many other forms of beauty that are equally magnificent and grand as mathematical beauty, that mathematics alone does not appeal to me as the sole source of the genesis. Of course, none other is eternal as mathematics. I will not find heart to ask -- what gives beauty the causal power?

Since you assert, "Eternal beauty calls to new manifestations; by evincing the contemplation of itself", I see a problem with eternity. If it is truly eternal, then what is still left to make 'calls to new manifestations' that has not already been called before? Genesis of universe in the hand's of mathematics has this problem too.

There is another dilemma that I run into: I see the emergence of senses via certain mechanisms that are not entirely deterministic. That is, the universe must have certain degree (within limits) of indeterminism. Mathematics cannot deal with imperfections, where its elegant forms break down. Therefore, contemplating that imperfections have the causal power to create appreciation for perfection and the beauty in mathematics is again an Epimenidic error. Atoms do not dance to the perfect tunes of mathematics.

You ask, "If the two branches of being were totally alien to each other, how could they interact? If they have a common ground, how can that ground be understood?". What if they do not interact, but are inseparable in such a manner that interaction of physical states constructs the semantics for another, as I have tried to work out. This way, the path to subjectivity is laid down with the processes of objectivity.

Please correct me if I exhibit certain misunderstanding of your essay, since I found it too abstract without much help to feel the ground below. Moreover, it also has certain elements tied to certain culture and history.

Rajiv