Hi Cristinel,

Thank you for your comment on my thread. The gravity in my system seems to have a flavor of Verlinde's via a paper by Joakim Munkhammar which I think it is an interesting read in itself

Is Holographic Entropy and Gravity the result of

Quantum Mechanics?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.1262.pdf

Thanks again

Dear Cristinel Stoica,

Thank you very much for your lucid and fulfilling essay. There are many perspectives you describe that have helped me enjoy a different viewpoint on sometimes established subjects, such as for example your section on thermodynamics. So to keep it brief, I have two comments to share with you - not too sure how useful they may turn out to be. Firstly your diagram representing "Multiple levels of a dynamical system." reminds me of the topology of Voronoi Tessellation. This is interestingly brought up in a book by A. P. Fairall on the large scale structure of the universe. It just strikes me as curious that what you describe and what we see on the largest scales, may share some conceptual architectures. Which brings me to my second comment, and that is I enjoyed how you tie everything in to "tablet of the metalaw", which is in its entirety accommodated by the universe as we know it.

Thank you again for a great read, and I have in the meantime also rated your essay.

Regards,

Robert

    Dear Cristinel

    You have presented your next attractive essay. I no need tell you that it is amazing - provocative as per many people already saying this in their comments. On this I can tell only that your work deserves to highest rate that I'm going to do right now.

    Let me just tell you one point only; you dare to put clearly formulated natural questions "What is the world made of?" for example. Meantime many high-advanced scientists just look on such questions as "immodest" and just inappropriate for "serious" scientists! I see this as a big tragedy in the natural science and I think now that you can be with me. I will simply ask you to open my work and go to end (to look on Refs too) because I am very hopeful you can find there some useful things.

    I wish you future success!

      Hi Christi

      Did you get a chance to look at my essay [link:fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2830]From Nothingness to Value Ethics[link/]? Near the bottom of my chat I am also talking about some current controversies in cosmology. I would be interested in your thoughts on my essay and/or these cosmological issues, if you think they are within your scope as a theoretical physicist.

      Best wishes

      Gavin

        Dr. Cristi Stoica

        Great essay and I voted accordingly.

        Your key points of interest to me are:

        1) Science of the subjective vs science of the objective

        2) If sentience is irreducible then it must (still) be associated with structure and matter.

        3) The question "why is there something rather than nothing?" can be answered by:

        Because there are structures that can't not exist." {mathematical structures}

        4) (Hawking, 1988) Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

        5) Additionally, one may feel that physics and mathematics are not enough to build consciousness. But almost all features of consciousness are conceivably reducible to information processing of one sort or another. If something resists, this is subjective experience.

        In the absence of an absolute ground to rely on, I think what we really know is that we are, and that there are mathematical truths.

        6) The tablet of the metalaw includes emergence, metatheorems, the relative interdependence and independence of various levels of reality. It takes into account both the bottom-up and the top-down constraints. It may even include a subjective science of the subjective experience.

        All that is missing is a philosophical structure tying your ideas together. I would be interested in your reaction to my proposed structure...Binary Reflective Field Theory. It is suggested in my essay, Our Emergent Universe. Again, thank you for your essay, Graham

          • [deleted]

          Christi Stoica,

          This was an enjoyable, thought-provoking article, just as the few others of yours I have read over the years have been. (Do you remember me from the collection of essays on time?)

          I was glad that I could find at least a few points to disagree with which prompted this response. Please take these remarks for whatever you might extract from them.

          |7> What is the sound of one universe rhyming? Discontinuity lurks within every koan.

          |8> Emergent goals:

          If I may offer my own phenomenal definitions: a sentient being is an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment in interaction with an external environment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject. It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized observation of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise? Somehow, it must be connected to existential threat. But how does the organism come to sense that existential threat? My simplistic answer is that an organism's nerve endings, no matter how primitive, provide the initial feedback. All sentient beings have skin in the game. But there still remains the problem of how that feedback might be converted into sentience and the sensation of jeopardy. {Insert hand waving here} Once the sense of jeopardy has been detected, the obvious back reaction would be a teleological bias to fulfill the dual agendas: stay in the energy flux and avoid destruction. This would go for the tubeworms living near a steam vent or, as more neural circuitry is thrown at the problem in service of this agenda, an investment banker competing for her share of the billions in bonuses available to maintain herself far from equilibrium.

          |10> I take the a priori existence of mathematical structures as the most comfortable and fruitful metaphysical position to jump to. But I guess that abstract existence of math is fundamentally different than its in-rebus implementation. My wild guess is that the ongoing collapse of the wavefunction turns potential existence into physical existence.

          Existence, sentience, consciousness and the nature and mechanism behind the collapse of the wavefunction remain elusive mysterious. But are they intractable? The in-rebus causal lattice calculator is now busily humming away at that halting problem. Of course we have a para-logical tendency to personify this process (a short circuit to a simplistic answer at which point all further inquiry stops) and give it goals. But this bestows an enormous amount of baggage onto a mathematical structure, no matter how complex. Certainly, any goals or agendas must be present as potential eigenstates in the math for them to be able emerge in physical form.

          Also, I think comparing the abstract with the imaginary is a category error. Imaginary is dependent upon an imaginer; the abstract is not.

          Notes on the notes:

          17. Here I find an excellent openness to new descriptions of reality.

          18. When I see the word pure, which points to an abstract attribute, I want to see the conjugate attribute against which it can be discerned. Then I see that in order for any attribute to be manifested by the universe, then both it and its conjugate must be present.

          Thank you so much for providing me with so much thought-provoking material for these cogitations.

          Jim Stanfield

            Dear Cristinel Stoica

            If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better. There is not movable a geometric space, and is movable physical space. These are different concepts.

            I inform all the participants that use the online translator, therefore, my essay is written badly. I participate in the contest to familiarize English-speaking scientists with New Cartesian Physic, the basis of which the principle of identity of space and matter. Combining space and matter into a single essence, the New Cartesian Physic is able to integrate modern physics into a single theory. Let FQXi will be the starting point of this Association.

            Don't let the New Cartesian Physic disappear! Do not ask for himself, but for Descartes.

            New Cartesian Physic has great potential in understanding the world. To show potential in this essay I risked give "The way of the materialist explanation of the paranormal and the supernatural" - Is the name of my essay.

            Visit my essay and you will find something in it about New Cartesian Physic. After you give a post in my topic, I shall do the same in your theme

            Sincerely,

            Dizhechko Boris

              Dear Cristi

              There are nicely presented problems on the way to physically explain consciousness. It seems that you are not sure, what is the answer. For instance Dawkins is almost sure, what the answers are. :)

              As a detail:

              You wrote about down-top causation, how details of quantum physics are un-important in classical physics. But if we assume that quantum consciousness exists this is something from quantum level, what remain in classical level. There are still some physical experiments, like interference, which show quantum physics on macro level.

              But in my old essay I wrote one sentence and now you and Ellis write a similar sentence:

              Kokosar: Let us assume that there is a woman Desiree who is never awake and only dreams. As a consequence, her ego would be weaker. Thus, this is one hint that differentiation and integration are important only because of memorizing of qualia.

              http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1832

              Stoica: If one would dream his entire life, and the dream would be consistent, then wouldn't that person experience imaginary as real?

              More in my essay and in other my links.

              Best regards, Janko Kokošar

                Dear Cristi,

                There is remarkable correspondence between my " Kantian answers " essay and your neo - Kantian passages when you suggest that:

                1." Only necessary existence is mathematical existence"

                2." Physical Universe don't exist with necessity "

                3." Merely mathematical structures exist with necessity " ( because mathematical structures are Kant's synthetic a priori judgments based on necessity - correspondingly they cannot be analytical judgments ! )

                4." They are a priori truths " ( it is correct, because they are synthetic a priori judgments ).

                Hence, my transcendental Kantian answer for your conjecture :

                Suppose we will find the Unified theory of the fundamental physical laws. Then what? My answer - we will find neo - Kantian transcendental physics as a realization of Kant's dream of so called " Pure Metaphysics ".

                Some additional definitions could be found in my Kantian answers.

                Thank you.

                Respectfully

                Michael

                  David,

                  > "ToEs are just theories that try to cover a wider range of dimensional scales of the Whole Universe spectrum. But each time this spectrum is enlarged, new laws and concepts will emerge (new Landscapes)."

                  I agree that most likely we will never have a definite reason to believe that a theory is final, and this can be seen in my essay soon after the first page from which you quoted.

                  > May we believe that there will be some basic and elementary objects (and laws), since which there will be nothing smaller? Only if this were so, then we could think on getting a TOE based on these elementary and basic objects and laws."

                  Not necessarily. Positive integers are made of a smallest unit, yet the completeness of their theory can't be proven. Euclidean geometry doesn't have a smallest unit, but can you find in it new laws or objects?

                  Dear Conrad,

                  Thank you for your comments.

                  > Any mathematical structure, and in particular any useful equation in physics, can represent an infinite number of particular cases, only some of which are physically instantiated in any particular part of spacetime. Even if we assume the universe is infinite and contains all possible cases somewhere, a mathematical structure can be "isomorphic" to it only in a very partial and limited sense, that abstracts from every local viewpoint. [...] Yet isn't the existence of distinct instances at particular times and places a basic feature of the physical world? What do our equations refer to, if not to the dynamic relationships between these instances?

                  The statement "the universe is isomorphic to a mathematical structure" doesn't mean that it is to all solutions of an equation. Each initial condition gives a different solution, and maybe only one of them is a universe (ours), or maybe each of them is a different universe.

                  > In my current essay I've tried to show how quantum measurement can be treated as a form of natural selection ...

                  Maybe you will like quantum darwinism.

                  > My sense is that we conflate "having a particular point of view on the world" - which is something we can reasonably ascribe to atoms, or anything else that's localized in space and time - with the kind of reflective self-awareness we humans have.

                  Indeed, I think this conflation is common but unsupported yet.

                  Best regards,

                  Cristi

                  Dear Robert,

                  Thank you for your comments. Yes, I think the coarse grain partition looks similar to a Voronoi diagram. Indeed, the interior sets of any Voronoi tessellation define a relation of equivalence, and I think that for any relation of equivalence one can define a distance and select some representatives which make it into a Voronoi diagram. Interesting connection.

                  Best regards,

                  Cristi

                  Dear George,

                  Thank you very much for the comments. You said

                  > "you dare to put clearly formulated natural questions "What is the world made of?" for example. Meantime many high-advanced scientists just look on such questions as "immodest" and just inappropriate for "serious" scientists!"

                  You are right. In fact, I also try to avoid such questions in physics papers. But I like the FQXi platform because encourages such questions, and this is the right place for me to discuss them. If I would be able to suggest a clearly scientific answer to such questions, no doubt I would discuss them in scientific papers too. Thank you for pointing me to your essay, and I wish you success!

                  Best regards,

                  Cristi

                  Hi Gavin,

                  Not yet, but thanks for pointing your essay to me.

                  Best regards,

                  Cristi

                  Dear Graham,

                  Thank you for your comments, pointing out the key points of interest to you, and a philosophical structure you propose which you think may help tying them together.

                  Best regards,

                  Cristi

                  Dear Cristi,

                  The structure of this essay is wonderful with brackets from quantum mechanics used for section numbers. The essay is clearly written with a sense of style. You artfully fold in the major bullet points of the contest and end with musings about the nature and existence of the universe.

                  I have seen a few of these essays with the idea of a multi-level system with one level being the microstates needed for the next level up. The largest jump in levels is between the quantum level and the thermodynamic level. If we think of entropy being the "arrow in time" than we need to be in the thermodynamic realm to experience the evolution of time (with time being undefined at the quantum level). We cannot see entropy in the ground state of a single atom. Bacteria exist near the border of the thermodynamic realm and more importantly they exist because they are near that border.

                  Intelligence is a simple, common, but important process that is misunderstood. Intelligence is not a better or more rapid calculation, but a different type of process with advantages and disadvantages.

                  Sincerely,

                  Jeff

                    Dear Dizhechko Boris,

                    > "If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better. There is not movable a geometric space, and is movable physical space. These are different concepts"

                    I don't think space(-time) and matter are independent, actually I think they are faces of the same thing. My guess is that a geometric structure, and geometry seems so far to be the best description of relativity and particles.

                    Best regards,

                    Cristi

                    Jim,

                    Thank you for your comments, I will not comment them, except to say that they are brilliant. You said "I was glad that I could find at least a few points to disagree with which prompted this response.", but I don't disagree with most of your comments, perhaps maybe that my definition of sentient is different from the one you used, hence the conclusions.

                    Best regards,

                    Cristi

                    Dear Janko,

                    Thanks for the comments, and for the links between our essays, the differences and the parallels, in particular about the role of consciousness in quantum, and the difference between the dream state and the awake state. Good luck in the contest!

                    Best regards,

                    Cristi

                    Dear Michael,

                    Interesting the connections with Kant's synthetic a priori judgments based on necessity. I like in principle your answer 'Suppose we will find the Unified theory of the fundamental physical laws. Then what? My answer - we will find neo - Kantian transcendental physics as a realization of Kant's dream of so called " Pure Metaphysics ".'

                    Best wishes,

                    Cristi