"No rule without an exception, except this rule." by Stefan Weckbach

Scott, i read your essay. Even in the papers you cited on your essay page, you mention your 'ruby slipper conundrum' only for the purpose that for understanding it one has to buy and read your 300 page book available on amazon.

In your essay, this presupposed important concept is not exemplified, not referred to a single time. You have to understand that for your strong claims, you can't simply refer to a 300 page book (one has to buy for 40-90 Dollars) in an essay contest like this. You missed the chance to give the reader an access to the 'ruby slipper conundrum' (if it at all exists) by outlining it in your essay. Everyone of us has the problem of limited space and characters for accurately writing down one's own ideas. Compressing these ideas into a 9 page, 25000 character body is difficult, but a challenge.

Your essay is in large parts a copy of your papers published on academia.ru. Why you didn't use the 9 pages to explain the 'ruby slipper conundrum' a bit closer is a hint for me that this conundrum doesn't play the important role you claim. Anyways, you can't expect that the reader buys your book (350 pages for 89 Dollar hardcover), when you can't convince him with what is the sole purpose of this essay contest - namely with a well composed essay on the essay's theme.

What is a conundrum for me, is that you are in my opinion one of many people who think they found THE TOE, people who want the appropriate merits and credit for what they think to be THE TOE, but different from most of this people, you deny the access to the claimed understanding of your TOE by trying to SELL it, instead of publishing it for free. Therefore I recommend you to give away your book's content for free, so that everybody can prove for himself whether or not your claims are justified.

"Yes - I AM making a huge claim - and of course people will question it... like when you say you serious doubt that my theory explains everything."

Remember that the one who makes huge claims has to justify them. I will not buy your book to refute your claims, simply make it available for free and we can further discuss it.

Andrew, what is the main point you refer to? Let's have real discussions here at the Essay contest, with arguments from yourself instead of citing chapters from wikipedia. I cannot conclude from your citings what your main point is and if there is any point at all you want to make.

Branko, thanks for your comment, your question and that you cherish what you read.

As to your question, you cited a case where a prediction of a theory has been confirmed. Let's say this is the precession of Mercury's perihelion, what comes about in GR to be approximately the value of observation. Since GR was not designed to a posteriori fit these observational data (as far as I can know!:), I would say that GR predicted it.

I cannot exclude that there are different theories possible which also can predict this phenomenon, theories that rest on different postulates than GR does.

For the case of Newton's theory of gravity, I cannot see how it can hold to explain the precission of Mercury's perihelion. But that I cannot see it does not mean that you necessarily must be wrong. Tell me more about your view on Newton's theory of gravity if you like.

Interesting. If you are right, then a former ‚less fundamental' (space in GR) could turn out to be 'more fundamental' than we thought - if your approach takes space and time as an independent background like Newton did. Does it do so?

Andrew, you claim very much with your comment... You claim e.g. that

1. I have not read Gödel's work

2. I do not understand it

3. My essay is a loose paraphrase of what Gödel was bringing up

All three points you made are false.

Even for the case that Gödel's work would turn out to be - for whatever hitherto unknown reasons - false, my essay does not in any way depend on the correctness of Gödel's work. The latter just reassures my conclusions, it is not in opposition to my conclusions. I think you misunderstood what I intended to say with the realm of fundamental truth. This is not merely a realm of logical / mathematical tautologies, but an existential realm that incorporates consciousness as a fundamental ingredient. Not all tautologies are fundamental truths, but according to my essay, all fundamental truths are perceived (and are) as self-evident tautologies in the realm of fundamental truth. Self-evidently, this realm must be located beyond space and time, since space and time could turn out to be just temporary appearances. They are, in my opinion, for the reasons I layed out in my essay, not fundamental truths, since in my opinion, a fundamental truth should be timeless.

I have not found any hints in Gödel's official mathematical work that states that truth must be in union with consciousness, what my essay says is independent from what Gödel brought up with his work. Therefore the points you made are twice devoid of any meaning for the conclusions in my essay. Gödel's work is important, but for me, Gödel is not the one and only authority when it comes to the question "what is fundamental".

Good luck also for you!

Hi Georgina, thanks for reading and of course for commenting! Your effort of commenting is appreachiated by me.

I indeed took the terms frog's view and bird's view from Max' paper. They encode a huge problem not yet solved, the dichotomy between the subject (consciousness) and the object (matter), between relative, subjective truths (in reference to what is fundamental) and the necessity for the existence of such fundamental truths, means the fact that there is an external world independent of relative, subjective truths (objective truths) and whether or not these objective truths come out of literally nothing in the sense I defined it in the essay.

Many accounts on these problems assume the realm of what is most fundamental to be infinite. I am not quite sure if Max does also, but I take both possibilities into account. If mathematics is infinite, then one cannot speak meaningfully of an 'outside' for the black box I described as gedankenexperiment, hence there cannot be a bird's view, since then, the mathematical landscape is infinitely infinite, so to speak. Otherwise, if what is most fundamental would be finitely describable (albeit in a coarse-grained manner), one could refer to an 'outside' meaningfully in the sense whether or not there are further objective reasons for this most fundamental thing (in the case of Max's paper it would again be mathematics) to be fundamental at all.

If maths is finite, I think this would be a surprise for everybody. But I conclude just this in my essay: mathematics is a finitely, physical construct, as physical as one assumes matter, enery, wave functions and laws of physics to be physical. I consider 'infinity' from a logical point of view as merely an alternative term to express that something is fundamentally undefined - and undefinable (at least in our limited world).

You raise the question of many worlds. Many worlds fall naturally out of a global wave function, the latter seen as fundamental. The question is whether or not such a global wave function does exist ontologically. I cannot exclude this, but I doubt it, due to the arguments I gave in my essay against the exclusiveness of the complete formalizability of all that exists.

I like your painting analogy. This is what we normally do by inferencing due to antivalent thinking. The point I wanted to make in my essay is that you never can picture such a painting objectively with only antivalent thinking at hand. The best example for this impossibility seems to me the very essay contest here, where different assumptions are hold about what is true and what is false.

My own approach stems from the considerations of what properties a realm must have that does not suffer from the dichotomy of true and false propositions. My conclusion is that falseness as an option should evaporate into 'thin air' for at all being able to meaningfully speak about a 'most fundamental' as the basis for objective reality. Just consider what an angel in a spiritual realm ('heaven') would experience: she wouldn't experience the possibility that her realm could be just a fake, a kind of computer animation (since then it wouldn't be heaven anymore but just like earth...). She wouldn't experience this possibility, but not due to an error in her perception, but due to the fact (the truth) that this realm refers not anymore to 'time', but to eternity. Eternity in this sense means eternal truth without falseness in it. So the reason why you can't objectively paint this realm is that there is only 'white' in it, but no black.

You state that "I think the truth can be arrived at by finding all of the falsehoods and putting them out of the way. Which is how the scientific method at its best works." Albeit there is some truth in this statement, personally I wouldn't fully agree, since obviously there are situations where you aren't able to unequivocally identify some falsehood in the sense of a decisive proof for a counterexample, or a decisive proof for a certain assumption to be true at all. The problem is not that we can't observe in many cases *how* nature behaves, the problem is to unequivocally prove for at least some cases *why* it does so.

Thanks again for your thoughtful comment and good luck in the constest!

Kind regards, Stefan

Hi Georgina, i found your article and am going to read it now with much eager and will reply here and at the other site. It takes much time for the second bunch of essays to go online. I hope your essay contribution will be published soon, so i can also read your 'official' contribution to the essays current theme.

Hi Georgina, thanks for leading me to your 2 page article, which i just read. I have to think about it at bit longer, but just want to mention my spontaneous thoughts about some issues you raised.

Your attempt to model human intelligence and scientific progress as a result of a hive mind of a swarm of intelligent beings is interesting. I think it has pro's and con's. the pro's are surely that the progress in sciences was due to a huge swarm of beings, working on the question how nature works, falsifying some options and finding out that other options obviously do work and have some truth in them. But I would not glorify such a 'swarm intelligence' - and do not automatically assume that you indeed do. For me, the con's about the 'swarm intelligence' are directly before our very eyes. Different to, say birds, or flies, humans have the ability to some (assumed) unlimited imagination. That's an advantage, but I also see a certain danger, in that certain 'memes', 'ideas', 'trends' become dominant, trends that are not healthy for mankind. I could mention for example the glorification of money, but moreover, the glorification of science, the glorification of certain hypothesis of science, and in general, the glorification of the *assumption* that science can solve all problems human kind will probably face in the future. I see a trend that many unproven things are taken at face value and that more and more scientists cannot anymore discriminate between logical and physical / ontological necessities. Surely, the latter is impossible in general, but that's exactly the reason why one should handle hypothesis' as hypothesis', and not as some discovered truths.

It's the human ability to imaginate a full blown version of a wishfull future that is also a danger to mankind. Since most of us easily accept rose gardens and science-fiction like versions of ultimate reality, most of us tend to forget (or not even investigate) how such versions came about in the first place. A prime example for me is Max's mathematical universe - but to apologize to him I have to say that his new book (life 2.0) is a good piece of responsible science when it comes to probable future challenges. But let's briefly check what the mathematical universe is at its core. For me, it is a hypothesis that is able to camouflage itself as an established fact. It does so by using Curry's paradox. The latter are propositional statements of the form 'if this sentence is true, then Santa Claus does exist'. Obviously this sentence is true - hence Santa Claus *has* to exist. Examining the logical structure of Curry's paradox a bit closer (what I will not do here) reveals that it is just a kind of tautology of the form "if Santa Claus exists, then Santa Claus exists". Max's mathematical universe hypothesis uses (I think not deliberately) an instant of Turing's halting problem to appear as a proven fact. It states that all existent things are completely captureable by mathematics, even consciousness. This may all be true, but *until* we have captured consciousness in this manner, it remains an instant of the halting problem. Nonetheless, Curry's paradox enables that many recipients of Max's hypothesis to switch from "if this sentence is true, than all things that exist are exlusively and completely describable by mathematics" to the 'truth' of the second part of such a conditional proposition. Worse, you can also switch from "if this sentence is true, then all things that exist *are* exclusively only mathematics." to the 'truth' that "all things that exist *are* exlusively only mathematics". As I have mentioned, I see a tendency in theoretical physics to overlook such kinds of mechanics by not carefully discriminating between logical possibilities and ontological necessities. But I think I move on heretical grounds, since most professionals as well as non-professionals are convinced that mathematics is a kind of 'God-like' entity in a platonic heaven.

Your comments on entanglement and variables are also interesting. In this field, a similar self-confirming pattern as I described in my essay about the 'paradigma' of 'strict determinism' can be observed for a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Once the premise is established that this theory is not about universal determinism, but rather about contingent single events in nature which are in most cases not predictable ('explainable'), but nonetheless statistically well defined, one must come to the following conclusion about the statistical method of the theory itself: if a huge trial of measurement outcomes is analyzed for possible deviations from the well defined standards of the theory, the theory should be capable of discriminating between random errors whose probability distributions are known and systematic errors, which can be excluded. The latter however, is not guaranteed by any probabilistic theory, because the theory concludes from observable events to counterfactual events and after that the other way round. This means, it presupposes to have taken into account all possible parameters and therefore assumes to know all governing laws of the counterfactual events. Moreover, even estimating the size of the expected random errors of huge trials of measurement outcomes on the basis of such a theory depends on what one assumes to be part of the theory. Putting it differently, the estimation of expected errors was put into the theory in the first place (necessarily without being falsifiable by 'further' measurements) on the basis of necessarily only measurable facts, and therefore the estimation of expected errors in the measured data base also becomes part of the output of the measurements when it comes to analyze the gathered data. This is again an extrapolation from known or assumed-to-be-known things to things that cannot be known for sure due to Moore's theorem.