Thank you Patrick. I have just read the intriguing (and very short) essay you submitted, which dives straight in the most fundamental aspects of metaphysics, and I wish you good luck in the contest and in your ongoing research.
Marc
Wandering Towards Physics: Participatory Realism and the Co-Emergence of Lawfulness by Marc Séguin
Dear George,
In the previous contest, we had a very interesting discussion about our respective views of the world. It is good to interact with you again in this contest. Thank you for your enthusiastic comments about my essay!
Mind, physics and math are indeed three co-dependent poles in Penrose's triangle, but this is certainly not the only way to look at them. Personally, I would not so easily dismiss the three central columns of my table! After all, most of the essays in this contest take physics as the basis of the Universe, but a lot of them take mind, and only a few take the God option like you do. Ideas similar to my concept of co-emergence are also pretty rare, at least explicitly --- but many of the hypotheses I have come upon have some sort of strange loop/self-referentiality built in... or maybe I am just interpreting them that way.
ISHMAEL is a nice acronym. You choose to take intention and love as axioms, while I think these are too "high-level" concepts to serve as the basis of all-that-exists. So I will keep on trying to eat my something and have my nothigness too --- a real, tangible, self-meaningful pearl of a universe, nested in the purest of all oysters: the Oyster of Nothingness. Maybe it's the end of the voting period that is getting to my head, but I am certainly waxing lyrical tonight!
One last thing: one could think that if the universe, at the deepest level, emerges out of mathematical/computational structures/relations/abstractions, it is a sad, worthless illusion --- a dead universe, in the words Stefan Weckbach uses at the end of his essay. To the contrary, I would say it is the most alive of universes, because all-of-math is an infinite, limitless ensemble where even the most complex "god-like" minds can exist and play!
I will soon comment your essay's on its thread.
Marc
Dear Rajiv,
Thank you for this amazingly detailed analysis of my essay! I will address some of the issues you raise below, with >> indicating the excerpts from your post that I am responding to.
>> An infinite number of any reality, or object, even infinite computations, (...) places the argument in serious jeopardy.
I am well aware of the issues with infinity --- the infamous "measure problem" that plagues cosmology! I explicitly addressed these issues in my essay for the previous FQXi contest, "My God It's Full of Clones". But a finite reality would be even more problematic, in my opinion, because it would have a particular size, and that size would be a brute, arbitrary fact --- so metaphysicaly ugly, in my opinion!
>> Moreover, the moment we allow indeterminism of any kind at any level, mathematics loses its absolute position to be the most fundamental cause of everything.
In my view, indeterminism and mathematics are not incompatible: an indeterminist framework is still a structure, and there is no such thing as a non-mathematical structure, since mathematics is the general study of structures.
>> A universe based entirely on absolute determinism of mathematics cannot come into existence, since a deterministic universe allows back tracing, and at no point of time an universe could emerge from null reality. On the other hand, if it always existed, then the definition of eternity demands that there could be nothing that has not happened in the past. Such an universe could only be cyclic or non-deterministic.
I am beginning to suspect that we have divergent views about the fundamental nature of time, and that's one of the reasons my argument sometimes seems so strange to you. In my view, the basic level of reality is not really eternal, it is more like timeless/atemporal. Cyclic universes do exist within the Maxiverse, as do non-cyclic ones. Within the infinite set of all abstract computations/structures/relations, you can have finite physical sub-domains, each with its own concept of time. It does not really make sense to ask how these different sub-domains are related in time or space.
>> Information has not existence if not associated with physical states, such as bits, or neural states, or for that matter any state.
In our world, information does require a physical basis, because at our level our world is physical. But at the most fundamental level of reality, I think it makes sense to talk about the information of abstract structures/relations. I think that a more serious issue about "disembodied information" is the fact that the information content of some structure really makes sense only relative to some point of view or observer... hence the need for some sort of co-emergence.
>> No processing can occur without interactions that result in change of states. A computation without such an association can only be imagined as a reference to the logical steps in mathematics. But then, [in ISAAC] there is no time element to control the steps, the steps can be thought of as having executed all at once.
Once again, I think this boils down to our different ideas about the fundamental nature of time. In my view, our physical time emerges when consciousness observes the steps of the computations. The computation exists atemporally, in a complete "static" form. The flow of time is part of our conscious experience of the computation, not something outside of it.
>> We will have no forceful need for maxiverse, as an Universe is logically complete within its limits of indeterminism.
Deterministic or not, if only one particular universe exists, it seems to me unbelievably arbitrary. The Maxiverse is an elegant solution and should be, in my opinion, the default ontological hypothesis. Now, if you want to argue against the Maxiverse, fine: just find an explanation as to why some perfectly possible universes are "forbidden", and why only a few or only one is left in existence. By the way, I hold similar views concerning the interpretation of quantum mechanics: I think that the many-worlds view should be the default interpretation. If you want to argue for the "Disappearing World Hypothesis", where only one outcome has "real reality", the burden of the proof is on you! :-)
>> In Indian mythology, at one point, (...) In this contest, people do not seem to appreciate humor, therefore, I am making it upfront clear that relating the story from Bhagvad Gita was in plain humor, no other motive.
I appreciate humour... and Buddhism, so I appreciate the comparison you are making between co-emergentism and Ved Vyas' argument!
>> I have discussed in my essay the specific logical construction of the emergence from the elemental properties (semantics), where the emerged property is not a part of any of the elements.
I am looking forward to the ideas about emergence that you present in your essay, and will comment soon on its thread.
Marc
Dear Marc,
glad you could make some use of my vague gesticulation in Nagarjuna's direction! I think it's truly not so far away from the general conception that seems to gain traction at the moment: everything is empty of 'ultimate' nature---deep down, the world contains exactly zero information. Definite structures only arise in mutual dependence---it's only if you 'cleave' the set (class, whatever) of 'everything' in two that any information emerges (along the crack, so to speak). So maybe you have to partition the infinite ensemble into observer and observed to have a 'world' as we conceive of it emerge, complete with goals, warts and all.
In a sense, it's a bit like a rainbow: the physical conditions---light hitting rain in the right way---don't fix the rainbow completely; rather, it's only once you introduce observers into the mix that any of the 'possible' rainbows becomes actual; and then, every observer sees their own rainbow.
Cheers,
Jochen
Marc, well done again. This is another excellent contribution. If you take first prize I would find that completely satisfying.
The hardest problem in this area is how to explain a difficult point of view in a way that others will understand. You are excellent at doing that. For example, it is very hard to justify to some people that the ensemble of mathematical possibilities is not some realm whose existence still needs justification. I like your solution of thinking in terms of information. If someone asks me "tell em something about your experience of existence" and I rely "It belongs in the collection of all mathematical possibilities" then I have given them precisely zero information. It is a perfect tautology.
Your concept of co-emergence is another good idea. It is possible to describe emergence from logical possibilities as if it is a reductionist argument, starting from mathematics and ending with consciousness as a causal chain of explanations. However, there is a sense that consciousness itself is an alternative starting point which leads to possibilities. There is a "strange loop", or co-emergence. I talked about a bootstrap which is an analogy with two sides to it. On the one hand it describes a process by which a computer starts up by using a short piece of code to load in a longer bit of code, but it also conveys the idea of a system that pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.
At the end you express a hope that some way to calculate from these ideas will come about soon. I hope so too. It would be ideal if some analysis of the relationships between abstractions in terms of category theory could bring us to something like a physical master theory. If these ideas are right then such an analysis should be possible.
9 days later
Dear Marc, I finally managed to come back to you. I also left (quite a lengthy!) response in my entry.
> I would be satisfied if we could just show that our type of universe can be shown to be "reasonably likely"
But that is precisely what puzzles me. Why do I live in such an ordered universe if all possible universes exist? I tend to think that there are many more weird universes than lawful ones, although I must admit that such a belief is grounded in a specific way of weighing the probability distribution defined in the set of all possible universes. Of course, not all weird universes are compatible with the co-emergence hypothesis. But the hypothesis still appears to be too lax to explain the ordered environment I perceive. Even if we restrict ourselves to the subset of universes that produce at a certain instant a subject like me right now, how come I continue to view a coherent universe the following instant? And the following one? And the next too? It is hard for me to believe that out of the many versions of me living in parallel universes that are all equal to each other up to a certain point, from that point on, I constantly happen to be the lucky one that continues to perceive sensible facts all the time. I do understand that many of my parallel versions simply cease to exist, if their universes are too chaotic. But should there not be more of the semi-chaotic universes, ordered enough for consciousness to continue, and yet weird enough to surprise their conscious observers?
I am fully aware of the fact that this argument relies on a prior hypothesis that it should be possible to have observers observing weird universes. That hypothesis may be wrong. But in any case, if your aim is to show that our universe is "reasonably likely" (an aim I am willing to embrace, by the way), then I guess we should work on determining more stringently which are the requirements that consciousness imposes on the regularities governing the universe, right? I have the feeling that inner-time is one such requirement (see below), but I may we wrong here. Ideas are welcome!
> Since ISAAC simply is, in a timeless/atemporal way, the coherent worlds within it can have a structure that can be described as an evolutionary story within time, but of course they also simply exist "right from the start" as self-defined lawful observers/physical world systems.
I myself cannot disentangle the notion of consciousness with the feeling that time flows. That is, if time were to freeze, I have the impression that my self-awareness would disappear. I tend to believe that only differences (changes) are perceivable. If I understand you correctly, however, in you view observers-from-within may or may not have a feeling of time flowing. Time from within is an option for you, but not a necessity. If you are right, then either I am mistaken to believe that my self-awareness disappears in the absence of (inner) time, or else, what holds for me may not hold for other pairs of universe + observer. That is, there may be other observers which have a type of self-awareness that differs from mine in some fundamental way, because theirs does not require the notion of change.
Resolving whether time-from-within is or is not a requirement for co-emergence to take place would be an example of the requirements I believe we should work on. Can you think of other similar requirements? I guess it's not easy to be too specific, not at least without a clear idea of how consciousness emerges. Or even more broadly, how consciousness can emerge (in our universe, or in others!).
Ok, I'll send this right now. And will try to nail down the thoughts that Conrad's ideas about QM have triggered in me - slowly.
Best wishes to you both!
inés.
21 days later
ok, and now I reply to Conrad's comment (which I'll replicate in his forum, so that he notices it).
> But random events are only "selection" if there's something useful to select. The "collapse" of the wave function can only support a macroscopic world because it's selecting from a set of possibilities that are somehow highly structured - evolved? - to help other measurements happen, in the macroscopic environment.
Let me try to rephrase this idea, adding more redundancy, so you can assess whether I get you correctly - or not. I am trying to parallel this sentence made in the realm of physics to some other statement in biological evolution. In biology, a mutation progresses only if it gives rise to an organism that is at least as fit as its parent. Out of the many branches of the wavefunction, the ones that progress are the ones that give rise to a world that can still progress. Or, if we want to link it with Marc's idea, to a world that still contains the observer that was observing the universe an instant before.
If this is what you meant... it makes full sense to me. We should, however, make an effort to try to derive why the permanence of observers requires the laws of quantum mechanics to be the way they are. Because as you well say: quantum mechanics is not just blurriness, it's blurriness with a very specific structure. If we manage to derive some property of the physical world out of the hypothesis of co-emergence, the hypothesis becomes plausible in an Occam's razor context. That is, the world with the co-emergence hypothesis is simpler to understand than without it. Until we manage that feat, it is just an interesting idea, right?
> And I think simplest explanation for the Born rule - why probabilities are squared, in computing the outcome of a measurement - is that at bottom, every "collapse" is a mutual selection between a thing and its context, so the same outcome has to be randomly chosen from each side of the interaction.
Wow, this is truly interesting. I do understand the part that the outcome of the random choice has to be compatible for both sides of the system. That's what entanglement is about, right? Once an interaction develops, subsystems become coupled. Now, how do you derive Born's rule from here? I always thought it was a starting point, not something to be derived. Can you point me to some textbook to follow this idea?
So nice to keep thinking of the ideas triggered by the two of you. And I still have a lot to read in my agenda. By the way, forgot to mention. I have now read "Theory of nothing", excellent book! The style is a bit messy, which I guess is natural if it emerged from a discussion list. But still, there's a lot of good original stuff in there, providing raw material to start thinking from a new perspective. I guess this combination (messy, and yet still providing good input) is valid for "The user illusion", which seemed to interest you both. Moreover, "Theory of nothing" helped me to put a context to Marc's co-emergence.
Best!
inés.