The Tablet of the Metalaw by Cristinel Stoica

Dear Cristinel Stoica,

the content and the writing style of your essay are very appealing to me. You present the problems in a very understandable language, show pros and cons and come to a conclusion. You take into account many of the relevant fields of investigation and many aspects of reality. And you have a well balanced judgement about different / possible answers to the questions posed in your essay. I think you try to tackle these problems as objectively as possible, what especially means to not forget the subjectivity of the agents who undertakes these considerations. I will mark your essay therefore with a very high score.

Allow me to make some annotations to your essay. The question "why is there something rather than nothing?" can be answered in an alternative way. You answered it by a necessity-argument: Maths is necessarily as it is - eternally. I would add a possibility-argument: there cannot be 'nothing' in the radical sense, because this nothing obviously has the potential to produce something. So 'nothing' is a misnomer, it has at least one feature and therefore it can't really exist as something that has no properties.

If we find the complete set of physical laws, these laws would not tell us how they came about or have been selected. They would just build up a consistent overall explanatory scheme where these laws can be thought of as being necessary *from the perspective within the system*, because these laws would heavily relate to each other. Even if mathematics would be the bottom layer of ultimate reality, i doubt that mathematics would be able to explain why this set of mathematical laws should be reserved to correlate with some physical stuff, or stated more precisely, be that physical stuff. Tegmark does explain it the way that all mathematical structures which have some delicate properties *are* indeed physical stuff. This exludes i think a part of mathematics which hasn't these properties, otherwise all inconsistent or contradictory axiomatic systems do also exist as physical stuff. Or think of all infinite series: Does there exist a kind of Hilbert-hotel physically somewhere (as a universe or some other physical instantiation)? I think the MUH demands a certain kind of filtering and for this filtering i know no mathematical law that should govern it (please see my remark on the implications of Gödels theorems in my own essay). So the question for the MUH to be necessarily true seems to remain somewhat subjective to me, because there doesn't exist a metalaw (other than by human definitions) which could decide what mathematical structures are physical by necessity. Why not include all inconsistent mathematical descriptions and let there be an inconsistent (chaotic) universe (or infinitely many of them)? And if so, how can we know that, at the end of the day, we don't live in exactly such a universe (with some delicately hard to detect inconsistencies)? Or even worse: maybe the measurement problem is an indication that we indeed live in such a universe? Maybe the multitude of different interpretations of QM is a hint that we live in a system which is inconsistent at some point and therefore can prove everything, especially all the different kinds of QM interpretations to be somewhat all equally sound and all seem to be equally rational? Surely, if one takes the MUH serious and takes the quest for ultimate reality serious, one should demand consistency as a main property. But does reality necessarily follow this demand? I would strongly answer with yes, but there are enough people out there who would say no, reality is absurd and irrational. Similar to assume ultimate reality to be strictly deterministic and therefore at odds with human experience, these people would argue that existence per se is irrational - and therefore could well be considered as inconsistent (inconsistency therefore would be just another word for them to say that existence is irrational).

So, the MUH demands a kind of filtering of mathematical structures and i see no metalaw which could dictate this filtering. A natural metalaw should be 'consistency', but *how natural* is this in the light of the existence and the possibility of the existence of 'inconsistencies'? Is this demand of consistency only a fluke due to the accident that our universe *seems* to be overall consistent? I would again answer no, but how to prove it? I think the only way out here is to assume that mathematics - and logic - itself are not necessarily eternal facts, but brilliant *ideas* of a higher state of consciousness i would call God. We only think that these ideas are eternal (and in a certain sense they indeed must be - because God itself is eternal and operates beyond space and time), but they could turn out to be only some tiny aspects of such an eternal God. Surely, whether maths and logics are 'temporal' ideas or eternal aspects of such a God depends on how eternity is structured and whether there is a kind of other-dimensional time within it or not. Who knows.

Dear Christinel,

Your paper is interesting. It reminds me of an idea I had years ago of their being this levels or a hierarchy of being. I also thought is had some basis with the Godel-Turing thesis. I am not quite so concerned with these questions any more. It is not clear to me how something like Tegmarks mathematical universe hypothesis can ever be tested.

I do delve into issues of Godel's theorem in my essay. I used this essay contest as a way of displaying something I had worked on. This does involve spacetime singularities, but as you see the singularity is physically a monodromy more than anything. I remember you were quite concerned about showing that spacetime singularities do not exist as such.

Anyway, good job here. Your paper is better than most. I will score this to raise it out of the doldrums.

Cheers LC

Dear Christi;

Good to meet again here and thank you for a very understandable and informing piece of work, I have read it with great pleasure.

You say : "The universe knows how to build atoms", if atoms a constructions of an architect, this why you mention perhaps that "Because of our limitations (compared to the architect), it is possible that some phenomena are not comprehensible to us".

Of course he title architect is aiming at a power outside of ourselves, in my perception I argue that this is not a "power" or "personality" but a timeless and spaceless Hilbert space that I call Total Simultaneity.

I very agree with you that "The tablet of the metalaw includes emergence, metatheorems, the relative interdependence and independence of various levels of reality"

So I hope that you will find some time to read and comment on my "subjective experience" The Purpose of Life. I should be glad if gave it also the rating you think it deserves.(yours deserves for me an 8)

best regards and good luck

Wilhelmus

Dear Cristinel,

I always look forward to your entries and greatly enjoyed your latest.

I especially liked the section comparing physics to negative theology:

"We can only find out what the laws are not, through the no-go theorems - similar to apophatic theology.."

Please be so kind to check out my own much more literary essay entitled "From Athena to AI" when you get the chance.

Best of luck,

Rick Searle

Dear Cristinel,

Thanks for a very nice essay. It was enjoyable to read and understand. I was hoping to clarify a few things.

"Science is by definition objective - all definitions and inferences are objective, and the experiments have to be reproducible by anyone who follows the specifications. All easy problems of consciousness fall within the objective nature of science. But the very notion of subjective experience seems to escape any objective definition."

I was curious if you have come across John Searle talking about the fallacy of ambiguity and what you think about it. He contends that it is possible to have an epistemically objective science of something that is ontologically subjective, like conscious experience. Here is a youtube link to a talk he gave at google discussing these ideas in greater detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg&t=1393s

"Maybe subjective experience emerges from the organization of matter, or as a property of information, like integration. Then, since matter is always structured and always processes information, we arrive at a kind of panpsychism reducible to the structure and information of matter."

Do you think it is possible to avoid this type of panpsychism, if there is good reason that constrains the type of matter organization and external conditions, under which the matter might have a subjective experience.

Looking forward to your thoughts and comments on this.

Cheers

Natesh

Hi Christi ,

Happy also to see you again on FQXI.

I liked also your papper like the papper of Don Limuti.The free will and this determinism.How can we rank the importance of informations.How to consider this determinism and antideterminism and the encodings.It is about the reductionism also and the roads towards our singumlarities after all.Hilbert indeed was very relevant and Nother also.The works of Mr Van Leunen are interesting also.The AI could appear with determinism.

Good luck in this contest

Best from Belgium

Dear Cristi,

Very profound essay and ideas that show the real direction of the output from the crisis of understanding in the fundamental science.

This is strong: «The Tablet of the Metalaw»!

I invite you to read and evaluate my ideas.

Kind regards,

Vladimir

Hello Cristi

Your essay reveals an open and inquisitive mind, which is most enjoyable to read.

To the question about "nothing" I don't think you go far enough. Any sort of universe is a "something." Vacuum fluctuations, the string landscape, etc., are all something. Nothing = no universe. No universe = no mathematics.

I believe you were on track when considering how profound subjectivity is than with "we are just substructures of ... a mathematical structure."

You may be interested in my essay "Quantum spontaneity and the development of consciousness" where I try to validate our subjective experience without reducing it to matter or mathematics, or vice versa.

I am pleased that you liked it. I know that you have worked to dethrone spacetime singularities. Of course in my essay they are really physically relevant of monodromies, which have topological consequences. This is in some ways a part of a program I have for understanding how we might renormalize quantum gravity.

LC

Hi Cristi,

I very much enjoyed your essay, and I have a couple of questions.

The first is that you mention free will as being possibly "compatible with the determinism of the Schrödinger equation". This is an issue that I wish I had touched on more than the short paragraph it got in my essay, so I can't resist expanding a little bit here. Simply: I wonder if looking at free will in terms of determinism isn't by necessity an impasse, but if (as you seem to be leading towards as well) it would not be more fruitful to define it in terms of the specific nature of the determinism that is involved.

If we accept that individuality can be characterised by information-theoretic relations (that make it possible to establish a clear but porous boundary between an organism and its environment), then an array of measurements for different aspects of this individualised organism's relationship with its environment becomes available. This provides a framework within which to define how and to what degree an organism's behaviour is controlled by its environment. Autonomy, openness, etc. could then lead to a satisfying description of free will.

I wonder how you would see this view as relating to yours on this topic?

The other is the classic question you bring up of "What breathes fire into the equations?" I wonder -- and this is way more speculative even than the previous part -- if mathematics doesn't admit a lower level of description that is entirely processual/functional, and that the static, timeless relations we have extracted above that are not "simply" special cases that happen to lend themselves to such static-oriented analysis. Notably I have been wondering how many paradoxes vanish if mathematical statements are taken to be transformative operations in which the output cannot conflict with the input since the world has changed by that very operation (eg. the barber shaves those who did not shave themselves in the current time step -- in the next step they will have shaved themselves and therefore will not do so again, etc.). In other words, the fire has always been there, we just took it out.

Admittedly this notion is barely in its infancy and might require just a little bit more work ;-)

Thanks a lot for sharing your essay!