Wandering Towards a Goal: The Causal Provenance of Intent by Robert Groess

Hi dear Robert

Your work seems to me deeply analytical where you try to represented mutual interconnections of the peculiarities of whole with the primordial bricks. I think this is the right and maybe only is a single way to solve actual questions in such character. For me also it is attractive that you have guiding by energetically aspects of study and judgement, that allows to use math opportunities. However I am some skeptical that the offered question can be solved at all and right now, even principality (not speaking about of practically.) I feel you also have finished in somewhat sadly note on this. Why it is so, you and me can understand this as there are not clarified yet much of fundamental questions, as the quantum-classical duality, the essence of elementary particles at all, as will as mystery of gravity, break of symmetry etc. Then I think that it is just not so serious try to explain how operated and taking the decision the human brain when we cannot yet to answer what kind of force pressed on us in the our chair. I think our efforts must be directed on these in first. I hope my work can be in your interest (there main things are in refs). Meantime I continue to read your attractive essay. Hope you will answer in my page and we will completed our impressions!

Best wishes

Robert,

Thanks for your rare perception & comments on my essay. I've replied there. I've also just seen Charlie Bennett's IBM Q video, thank you. Very good if quite sold that it was all Einstein that was wrong. I've now read your essay too and found it a great refresher on the key role of entropy. I've always been somewhat skeptical of the importance of the 2nd law but I now have a broadened basis for it.

I can't write much now (96yr old mother being rushed hospital) but two things that did stop me was; "{i]Biological systems arise from elements that are described completely, if intractably, by the laws of physics that we already know" Do you really think we already know all the laws which may be applicable to biology?

And did you suggest 'intentions' ..require the ability to perform computations'. (or even require US to have that ability. Is computation not a conscious act? so does a baby really 'compute' for his first intentional acts?

Best

Peter

Thanks dear Robert that you find time to read my article as well as for favorable words. I also have completed my readings and I can add to my early post not so much but only your article really contained many interesting directions and aspects, which deserve more carefully studies than we doing hurried in such circumstance. In my view your work deserves to good rate that I'm going to do.

Be well, my dear!

Dear Robert,

With great interest I read your essay, which of course is worthy of the highest rating.

I'm glad that you have your own position

«In Maxwell's apparatus we wish to sort the fast-moving molecules from the slow-moving ... thereby providing a thermal gradient that has the ability to do work. This situation is laced with intent.»

«As with the statistical nature of thermodynamics, quantum equations themselves present no indication of aims and intentions.»

Your assumptions are very close to me

«This is a classical case of free expansion and provides us with the following insight into the dynamics of the physical world.»

You might also like reading my essay , where it is claimed that quantum phenomena occur in the macro world, where "there is no measurement problem" due to the dynamism of the elements of the medium in the form of de Broglie waves of electrons, where parametric resonance occurs and solitons are formed, wich mechanism of work is similar to the principle of the heat pump.

I wish you success in the contest.

Kind regards,

Vladimir

Dear Robert,

Your Essay is a remarkable contribution to this Essay Contest. In fact, Maxwell's Demon, Landauer Principle (which is a further proof of the power of the Second Law) and the quantum-classical boundary are intriguing issues that always fascinated me. In fact, I am currently working in the quantum-classical boundary of black hole physics, where the role of thermodynamics is fundamental. In any case, I enjoyed a lot in reading your work, which deserves the highest score that I am going to give you.

Congrats and good luck in the Contest.

Cheers, Ch.

P.S. I replied to your comments in my Essay page.

Hi Robert -

Thanks for your very thoughtful and well-informed meditation on our theme. I agree with your approach, and you generally support your argument well with concrete instances.

There's one point (in section 5) where I think you jump too far, though. In a computational setting, I'm sure it's true that "replication, given the right constraints, is inevitable." But such an artificial environment lets us set up whatever constraints we like, and I don't think it's clear at all "that life on the early Earth was an inevitable result of complex carbon chemistry being subject to... solar, volcanic and electrostatic energy sources." I know this has been argued by some quite knowledgeable folks, but they tend to take a broad thermodynamic view, and underestimate the great many specific difficulties in the way of the emergence and survival of replicating systems.

As you know from looking at my essay, I lean the opposite way, emphasizing the improbability of the major transitions in our history. Very unlikely accidents are by definition rare, but they can also be very important, as we all know from the course of our own lives. But I don't think this contradicts the gist of your argument.

Incidentally, I think your treatment of senescence is largely correct in relation to complex organisms, but probably not in relation to bacteria. At the cellular level, sex and horizontal gene transfer, along with various repair mechanisms, seem to deal effectively with destructive mutations over millions of generations.

Thanks again - Conrad

Robert,

"Macroscopic objects emerge from the quantum classical boundary. They do not exhibit any quantum behavior such as entanglement and decoherence." There are studies that make the boundaries of that world less distinct. Quantum Biology studies in "Life on the Edge" show a strange quantum coherence in the photosynthesis, making the process much more efficient. Does that show "intentions are a connection from abstractions with no existence in physical reality" The author also mentions quantum features in European Robins. We keep seeing how much we have to learn in this quantum-classical joining. I present Jeremy England's views on entropy: According to Dr. Jeremy England , a clump of atoms, when driven by some form of external energy, such as the Sun, and surrounded by a heat bath (ocean or atmosphere, for example), will always restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy into the surrounding environment.Our origination is seen less as a random,even accidental event.

I guess that is why I see this as such an inscrutable topic.

Hope you have a chance to comment on mine.

Jim Hoover

Dear Robert,

Thank you very much for your interest in my modest work.

Answered your question

«I am intrigued if there is a specific link you make connecting our physical world with the notion of intentionality?»

in my thread of the forum.

I wish you success in the contest.

Kind regards,

Vladimir

Dear Robert,

thank you for a well-written and well-thought out essay. I wonder weather you know off the work of Terrence Deacon---some of your remarks regarding the 'thermodynamic trail' of intentionality seem to point in a very similar direction. The basic idea appears to be that intentional action may locally contravene the tendency towards entropy maximization (at an at least equivalent cost to be paid elsewhere)---i.e. one can spot a goal-directed system by looking at its entropy balance (to simplify a bit).

Deacon calls behavior in accord with expectations---e.g. entropy maximization---'orthograde', and consequently, the actions of a system that locally subverts such a tendency, like Maxwell's demon, 'contragrade'. He identifies three levels of such behavior, each emerging from the lower one---basic thermodynamics (homeodynamics), morphodynamics (self-organization), and teleodynamics, which is where intentional behavior comes in. This allows him to reconcile the emergent, goal-directed behavior with the lower-level maximization of entropy, which is locally subverted. I think you might find some common ground with his ideas!

Anyway, I wish you luck in the contest.

Cheers,

Jochen

Dear Robert Groess

I invite you and every physicist to read my work "TIME ORIGIN,DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MEANING FOR PHYSICISTS, Héctor Daniel Gianni ,I'm not a physicist.

How people interested in "Time" could feel about related things to the subject.

1) Intellectuals interested in Time issues usually have a nice and creative wander for the unknown.

2) They usually enjoy this wander of their searches around it.

3) For millenniums this wander has been shared by a lot of creative people around the world.

4) What if suddenly, something considered quasi impossible to be found or discovered such as "Time" definition and experimental meaning confronts them?

5) Their reaction would be like, something unbelievable,... a kind of disappointment, probably interpreted as a loss of wander.....

6) ....worst than that, if we say that what was found or discovered wasn't a viable theory, but a proved fact.

7) Then it would become offensive to be part of the millenary problem solution, instead of being a reason for happiness and satisfaction.

8) The reader approach to the news would be paradoxically adverse.

9) Instead, I think it should be a nice welcome to discovery, to be received with opened arms and considered to be read with full attention.

11)Time "existence" is exclusive as a "measuring system", its physical existence can't be proved by science, as the "time system" is. Experimentally "time" is "movement", we can prove that, showing that with clocks we measure "constant and uniform" movement and not "the so called Time".

12)The original "time manuscript" has 23 pages, my manuscript in this contest has only 9 pages.

I share this brief with people interested in "time" and with physicists who have been in sore need of this issue for the last 50 or 60 years.

Héctor

Dear Robert Groess

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

Robert -

I enjoyed reading your essay, and I think you have captured the essential feature of intention as fundamental to the way the world works. I also agree with the caution you exhibit in making the leap from intention to volition.

Finally, I was amused by your closing sentences, "Their ultimate progenitors however remain elusive. Until such time as intentions find a way to know themselves." The beginning (the source of intentions) and the end (self-reflective intentional agents - us) are intimately connected, yet that connection is eminently mysterious.

I explore identical themes in my essay (The How and The Why of Emergence and Intention) - I would appreciate you reaction if you have the chance to read it.

Regards - George Gantz