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 Rick,

      I am glad to meet you again at this contest, and that you liked my essay. I plan to read your essay as soon as possible, it seems very appealing judging by the title and abstract.

      Best wishes,

      Cristi

      Dear Natesh,

      Thank you for the comments, and for the interesting questions.

      I didn't come across John Searle talking about the fallacy of ambiguity. I just started watching the video you sent me and I watched so far 30', and I like the idea of having an epistemically objective science of something that is ontologically subjective. It definitely is something to think about, thank yopu for sending me the link. Regarding the question about panpsychism, I think that if there is a way to see what is the level where subjective experience emerges, we may be able to decide it. I am not sure if this would be possible. I will read your essay, I feel there may be some connections.

      Best regards,

      Cristi

      Hi Steve,

      I'm glad to see you too again. Thanks for the comments and the recommended lectures. Hilbert and Noether rock! Have fun at this contest!

      Best regards,

      Cristi

      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

        Dear Vladimir,

        I am glad you liked the essay. I am looking forward to read your essay, which I think is interesting judging by the title and the provocative abstract.

        Best wishes,

        Cristi

        Dear Natesh,

        I finished watching John Searles' video. I like it, and there are many points in which I agree with him. I hoped that I can cast my arguments for a subjective science in terms of Searles' epistemically objective science of ontologically subjective things like consciousness, but I think it doesn't improve them. His idea of epistemic/ontological subjective/objective fit well with his view that what is something special about subjective experience is reducible to the biology (idea which I don't think is enough to explain subjective experience).

        Best regards,

        Cristi

        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 James,

          I appreciate your comments.

          > Any sort of universe is a "something." Vacuum fluctuations, the string landscape, etc., are all something.

          This is exactly what I said.

          > Nothing = no universe. No universe = no mathematics.

          I take it that you refer to mathematics as a tool discovered/invented by humans. To see what I understand by mathematical structure, you can read my previous essay, and then read again my argument about something rather than nothing, and see if your syllogism still holds. In that essay I explained in more detail the logic behind the omnipresence of mathematical structures. This also answers the part related to mathematics from your other two comments. Of course, even then, you don't have to agree with me.

          > where I try to validate our subjective experience without reducing it to matter or mathematics, or vice versa

          To me, matter is nothing like classical physics matter, mathematical structures are nothing like a set of axioms and proof that fit in a human brain, and I don't think I try to reduce subjective experience to these or vice-versa. I compare different possible positions, including that there is only one stuff which is all three at the same time. I am satisfied without knowing the answers to unanswerable questions and without reducing things that we don't understand to other things that we also don't understand :)

          Best regards,

          Cristi

          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!

            Dear Christi

            I found your essay very thought provoking. I like your open-mindedness, posing more questions than you provide answers to: "I am satisfied without knowing the answers to unanswerable questions and without reducing things that we don't understand to other things that we also don't understand." I also appreciate your point that mathematics as a tool may leave us short of a unified explanation of reality: "The lowest level of the pyramid of physics seems to be imperfectly rooted in the ground of mathematics" - and your use of the Hawking quote along similar lines.

            The view, a la Tegmark, that mathematics can describe all would seem to lead us astray from the fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing. I say this because I think that the question is better posed as "why do we have THIS universe rather than nothing", and this universe has a set of laws which seem to be finely tuned to complexity. As the Hawking quote points out, why the universe would be inclined to create complexity is likely a question beyond maths. In my essay "From nothingness to value ethics" I try to explain why this tendency should be a fundamental consequence of existence from nothing - to create not only a when and a where, but also a WHAT. I would be interested in your opinion of this.

            Best regards

            Gavin

              Christinel,

              The tablet of the law is the theory of everything, something you suggest is fundamentally simple, but your tablet of metalaw sounds like metalegal principles applying to all intelligent creatures of the universe, relating to Kant's Categorical Imperative based on natural law theory. Critics say it depends on subjective or relative concepts of good and bad. Does that relate to your tablet of metalaw?

              My essay surveys the zoom-dependent nature of the universe and entropy as an independent law of nature, citing the Jeremy England flavor. I find the issue we are exploring somewhat difficult to scrutinize.

              Enjoyed exploring your ideas and views.

              Regards,

                Dear Lawrence,

                Thank you for your comment.

                You said "I know that you have worked to dethrone spacetime singularities."

                Yes, I worked a lot in spacetime singularities in (classical) general relativity, but not to dethrone them. I actually love them and wanted to understand them. They exist (if no quantum or other kind of effect doesn't remove them), but I provided a description of them which is free of infinities, while still making geometrical and physical sense. They are still singular, and I think this may be useful, because they have dimensional reduction effects which may be useful in quantum gravity.

                Bet regards,

                Cristi

                Hi Robin,

                Thank you for the comments and the very interesting questions.

                As you know, there is a position that tries to reconcile free-will with determinism, called compatibilism, which perhaps is just what you refer to by "it would not be more fruitful to define it in terms of the specific nature of the determinism that is involved". The position that I mentioned in the essay is different. Schrodinger's equation is a fundamental law governing the wavefunction, and its success in describing the behavior of particles and atoms is overwhelming. But to reconcile it with the definite outcomes of measurements, it is supposed than the wavefunction should collapse. This leads to some problems: it breaks a fundamental law like Schrodinger's equation, it violates the conservation laws, and escapes a causal description. My proposal is to resolve the tension between clasical macro and quantum micro (also at the origin of the measurement problem) by selecting from the Hilbert space only the solutions that work like this. But this leads to moving the collapse on the initial conditions of the universe, in an apparent retrocausality. The solutions are then still deterministic according to the Schrodinger equation, without collapse, but the probabilities are moved to the initial conditions. So we have both determinism and randomness. I argued that this provides a compatibility between determinism and free-will, although I leave it here, since I am not sure what free-will really is. Of course, even the input from QM is too small to be able to account for what we feel free-will is, so in all cases one should add to the description what you said, "Autonomy, openness, etc.".

                About your question about a lower level description of mathematics. I think any sort of description of any sort of thing, if it is consistent and rigorous, it becomes mathematical. I agree that we can conceive worlds in which the propositions change from being true to being false and vice-versa, but this happens by change, as in the example you provided, and maybe this is time. So if I understand it well, I think this is still a dynamical system. But who knows, I may be surprised someday by learning about something more fundamental than mathematics. If you advance with the idea, please let me know!

                Best regards,

                Cristi

                Dear Gavin,

                Thank you for reading my essay and providing interesting comments and questions.

                I agree with you that "why do we have THIS universe rather than nothing" is indeed a better question. But maybe if we break it into smaller questions, we increase or chances to advance. The smaller questions may be (1) "why do we have THIS universe rather than something else" and (2) "why do we have something rather than nothing". Then, what I did was to break (2) into (2') "what can't not exist?" and (2'') "what else do we need for what can't not exist to make up a world?". I think that the answer to (2') is "mathematical structures". MUH states that the answer to (2'') is "this is enough", but not everyone is satisfied. Also, Tegmark can be understood as proposing to reformulate (1) as (1') "why is this particular mathematical structure our universe rather than any other structure", and to addressing it by anthropic reasoning. I think the latter part is subject to some critical remarks based on computational equivalence which I described in And the math will set you free.

                You made me curious about your essay "From nothingness to value ethics", and I am looking forward to read it.

                Best regards,

                Cristi

                Dear Cristinel Stoica,

                I highly appreciate and completely support thoughts and the approach, stated in your essay. It's magnificent and very topical material. I hope that you will find concrete attempts of transition to the following level of physical laws in my work.

                Best Regards,

                Vladimir A. Rodin

                  Hi James,

                  Thank you for the comments. Yes, the table of the law contains the fundamental laws. In the essay I try to not use the words "theory of everything" about this, since it would be about the fundamental laws only. It is not evident at all that the higher level of organizations can be reduced to the fundamental laws, and I gave several reasons about this. Of course the table of the law underlies them, but there are limits of computability, logical completeness (by finite length proof) etc. In addition, the higher level may do stuff that is not visible in the low level ones, and may even constrain them (as I argue it happens in quantum mechanics). The table of the metalaw include no-go theorems, emergent laws that are independent on the fundamental ones, like entropy for instance, etc. I did not discuss ethics, but I think it should be connected to the metalaw too. I agree, these are all difficult, some problems may be impossible to even define.

                  Best regards,

                  Cristi

                  Dear Vladimir Rodin,

                  Thank you for the comments, and I am interested to see your attempts of transition to the following level of physical laws.

                  Best regards,

                  Cristi