Dear Torsten,
A very well written technical essay, that makes some very interesting points. While I grasped the larger ideas of feedback loops, top-down effects and the results you obtained on fractal curves, I can see the devil is in the details. I wish my knowledge of topology was better to better appreciate some of the results and insights here, but I intend to change that and come back to this paper again once I have a better grasp of related concepts (PS: If you can suggest some kind of good resource for someone who is beginning to study topology, I would be very grateful. I rather not start with some of the advanced references in your submission).
Please know that I appreciate the mathematical rigor of your work, for I think it is important to not be wishy washy when dealing with issues of learning and intuition. My submission shows that our learning is intricately tied to feedback-feedforward models. I also agree on the idea of top-down causation (though I prefer that Ellis is now referring it to as top-down realization). It is heartening to see that over the course of the various submissions, there seems to be a growing consensus emerging on what some of the important ideas to probe further are.
This is great work and focuses on the important questions. I have rated it highly so that it can make it to the final deservedly, and can be judged fairly for its proper technical content. I now look forward to going back and reading your past winning essays on this forum. Thanks and good luck in the contest!!
Cheers
Natesh
PS: My email is nganesh@umass.edu. Please feel free to reach out. I would love to see where you go further on this line of work. Hopefully I will gain more understanding on this area of math, as I dive deeper. I am particularly interested in understanding strange non-chaotic attractors.