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

Hi Heinrich,

thank you for having read my essay and for commenting it. Thanks also for your very reasonable questions.

The problem of how meaning came into the world can surely be labeled a big puzzle. Although subjective observers have the - subjective - impression that many things mean very much to them, the very quest of what meaning should really mean would need to reconcile consciousness / Qualia with the external world - in the one and only possible meaningfull way.

Maybe the latter can be achieved in the future in a more stringent manner than merely assuming that form and content are - seen from a bird's view - identical. This would be the Tegmark's MUH view and maybe also the one AI purports. The problem with this is that we have to wait until some AI shows to us that *objective* meaning can indeed emerge from a pure formal system in the one and only possible meaningfull manner.

I think by pondering about how this could be and - by using the terms "objective meaning" without yet having grasped what meaning itself definitely could be at its core - one wanders around in the confusing realms of possible meanings of the very term meaning. One may even be tempted to consider this term as purely self-referencing - exactly in the sense I introduced the Rule F in my essay, where rule F is a purely formal description where content and form coincide (since Rule F is exlusively only about formal aspects of other rules - without defining their contents).

I think the grounding problem hasn't been solved yet, even not by my own approach. The grounding problem - so I think - is a variant of Gödel incompleteness. My own has at its basis two strategies. Firstly, it tries to take all the hitherto known formal aspects of the world and re-arrange them in an as much as possible coherent manner so that a new (hopefully more general) meaning of the relation between form and content can be inferred.

Secondly, by doing the first step, one has to consider that the very subjects we are talking about here, namely formal systems, may not be sufficient to solve the grounding problem. Surely, one always can say that there is no meaning at all in the overall scheme of affairs independent of human observers. Or alternatively, that formal systems (like a landscape of mathematics) must necessarily somewhat incorporate something that at least generates the illusion of meaning - and with that also the illusion of this landscape's own 'real' meaning (in the sense of being most fundamental). This is a crucial point, since it implies that one cannot objectively determine some real meaning for the existence of such a mathematical landscape but only subjective musings. Surely, the one and only objective meaning of such a landscape could be 'found' (defined) by defining this landscape as the ultimate source of reality. But this is just an alternative strategy to say that all that exists must necessarily be exclusivel only formal systems. As I outlined in my essay, I doubt this assumption.

I think that all boils down to Gödel and the impossibility to unequivocally prove some fundamental statements about the world. In my approach, I have compressed these ambiguities by saying they are merely a characteristic of a temporal world with antivalent logics in it. The realm of fundamental truth I spoke of is the necessary alternative for a worldview that is fundamentally based on self-referential ambiguities, leading either to a kind of nihilism ('nothing' has indeed produced logics and all the rest) or to the mathematical landscape (where meaning is fundamentally illusionary - except for the case that if one believes this, this would be the only objective definition of meaning and therefore wouldn't be anymore illusionary). Since I doubt that such mere formally self-confirming logical figures can say anything about the real nature of nature, I surely do not claim that my proposal must be an exception of that. But I think it is a viable possibility. The realm of fundamental truth I spoke of would then be a realm of conscious creativity, where things can be constructed into existence according to the very fundamental rules this realm allows one to construct such extensions. The latter must be then understood as deeply connected with Qualia and consciousness - what is constructed would be of phenomenological content (in this realm content is a valid concept), it cannot alter or annihilate the very basis of this realm nor its fundamental truths. Stated differently: what is considered in our world as a fundamental distinction - namely the subjective and the objective - coincide in the realm of truth and the content of these phenomenological appearances can be totally shared amongst other conscious beings in this realm - beings that are tuned in to the emotional content of such phenomena (in this sense 'time' in those realms are a matter of emotional alignments).

Having said all this, I would like to add that in the phenomenological realm of fundamental truth, there is also a kind of time, but I assume that it is more a kind of 'many-fingered' time. I further assume that this kind of time can only vanish if one could enter the inner core of what consistutes this realm at all, namely what I called in my essay the 'most objective subject'. I do not know whether or not by entering it (if possible at all), the individual consicousness must totally vanish, and I think these are more theological questions not answerable by pure logic.

According to logics itself, I think that in the mentioned realms logic may be organized different than in our realm here. I do not say that there isn't any logic at all in these realms - and to be honest - I not even no for sure what a realm without any logics would look like. So, surely in the realms I suggest there is structure and rules, but these structures and rules are axiomatically based on emotional truths rather than on mere formal truths. So what my approach implies is that logics could merely be a reduced version of such rules and structures, what would mean that the reduction of form and content into a concept of 'the meaning of meaninglessness' (in the sense of a provable nihilism, purported by many scientists) is - according to my approach - a meaningfull example of how the phenomenological realm of fundamental truths can create consistent intersubjective worlds. I think that is part of the big picture I have to offer: By choosing some suitable axioms on the basis of some free will one can effectively reduce one's own freedom by claiming that there is no such thing as free will (or consciousness, or meaning etc.). Do we at all have the choice to choose our starting axioms? I think we have, but cannot prove it.

Dear Vladimir,

I am happy that you enjoyed my essay much. Cusa's lines out thought are very interesting and I will delf into your essay as soon as I can. Since the weekend I have a flue and it got more severe today. Therefore I am not able to concentrate for much long by reading an essay. I bookmarked your essay for studying it when I am again more healthy and can give longer comments without being exhausted. I think at the beginning of next week I will be able to again wrap my head around other essays. Thanks again for visiting my site,

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Peter,

thanks for reading and commenting my essay.

My 'cirlce' is merely a metaphor, it isn't intended to catch any ontology of the referred realm other than its completeness regarding its self-contained truth.

My esssay is not interested in entanglement and non-locality questions, indeed it is agnostic about that. So I will not comment on yours.

I am interested in the more fundamental questions this time.

Best wishes,

Stefan Weckbach

Dear SNP,

I currently have the flue and have to go to bed again soon. Checking out your essay will take more time and concentration, what I will have at least next week. So be patient.

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Francesco,

Thankyou for reading and commenting on my essay, much appreachiated.

I introduced rule F as the compressed, extreme case of an assumed to be found 'TOE' and examine with this rule F what such a TOE could mean for our quest about "what is fundamental". Surely, the term "except" in the b)-part of rule F can be misleading, but it mustn't. One can understand the b)-part as "but not for rule F." without changing the term "except". Since rule F is the whole lot only about rules and exceptions, but makes no reference to the contents of such exceptions, the term "except" in the b)-part is just a negation of the a)-part for *exclusively only* a very special rule, namely rule F itself. As I annotated in the essay, formally this is a double negation, referring to a default state that has no exceptions.

According to your question:

I consider it a false statement that I am non-existent at the moment - so I consider it a *truth* that "I am non-existent at the moment" is indeed a false statement.

Another example would be that I consider it a false statement that my computer monitor is a living elephant (like the ones in the zoo). So I consider it a truth that "my computer monitor is a living elephant" is indeed a false statement.

But vice versa, I would enter into some problems. If I consider that my computer monitor is indeed a living elephant (and therefore the truth of the starting premise is doubted), I think I had to go to a doctor. Similarily, if I consider myself to be non-existent at the moment, I had to go to a doctor. Even when I am dead, I cannot consider myself as being non-existent, because non-existent things cannot consider anything.

Francesco, if you have further questions, just ask and I will respond. Best wishes, Stefan.

Hi Jose, thanks for reading and commenting. I did not state that Rule F isn't arbitrary; it is as arbitrary as E = m(c x c). Why not E = m (c x c):2? Elsewhere on this site I wrote that Rule F is just a gedankenexperiment and I think I made it clear in my essay that even for the case that such a strange Rule F would reflect something fundamental in nature, this Rule F would remain mysterious and arbitrary. The point is therefore, even if you find a "theory of everything" (in the sense of a set of mathematical relationships that unite GR with QM and explain [away] all the rest - dark matter, dark energy, cosmological constant etc.) you also end up with arbitrariness - in relation to that set of rules instead of other possible ones. Nothing within the relationship of these mathematical rules tells you that the world must be such that it only obeys those rules, instead of possibly some others. You only end up with consistency and the *induction* that these rules govern all things in the microscopic as well as in the macroscopic realms. But you can never prove your induction to indeed meet reality, since such a TOE remains in the realm of coarse-grained experimental verification. Does the water-vortex in your shower really obey infinitesimally the laws of motion together with the laws of gravity - nobody can ever prove this, since every new instant of that votex is different from any other such instant.

By rules in physics I mean for example F = ma. Or E = m (c x c). My Rule F is only a gedankenexperiment, an idealized TOE that compresses all rules into one to show that such a TOE may be self-consistent, but merely 'explains' terms like energy, force, space, time in terms of those other terms. What remains unexplained is what these terms refer to in the first place. Since you argue with matter, I ask why matter and energy are equivalent. So the question of what is matter is rephrased by the question what is energy. You may say energy is a kind of vibration. Well, maybe, but what does vibrate? You may say fields do vibrate, well maybe, but what are the fields made of? Every TOE comes to a point where we are forced to ask whether or not we are further talking about physical things at all.

If it were true that the law of addition is sufficient to explain everything in physics, then consciousness must be an unphysical phenomenon. I also cannot see how space can be a physical phenomenon, since adding up infinitesimally small pieces of space to come to a kind of planck-area seems to make no sense to me - unless one presupposes space to be some magical kind of Cantor-dust. Not to speak about the question whether or not one has to take the mathematics behind any TOE seriously such that one assumes that nature incorporates and executes the physical constants to an infinity of decimal places. In my opinion there is something wrong with assuming that physical relationships and mathematical relationships are in a one-to-one correspondence. Infinities cannot be part of the very fabric of reality, since otherwise every rule of addition wouldn't come to an end even for the tiniest changes in nature.

But you are surely right that mathematical rules are indeed short-cuts, since they indeed compress a wide range of phenomena into a small piece of algorithm. The problem is really the initial conditions. Are the latter of infinite precission or merely of a finite precision? And if merely of finite precision, at which mathematical resolution do the physical constants stop to have any impact on the course of events? Since we know from chaos theory, even the tiniest differences can make a huge difference after some time-evolution. I think that mathematics isn't able to describe such dynamics in nature, not because deterministic chaos wouldn't be possible, but because such tiny dynamics simply doesn't exist. The gap that remains must be bridged by some other means than classical causality and classical determinism. Please do not misunderstand me, I do not generally deny causality, that be far away from me. But I doubt that 'reason' and 'causality' must be one and the same thing under every circumstance. My essay was intended to expose all these questions I outlined here, surely in a rather compressed form due to character restrictions and with the focus on the mutual exclusiveness of some 'ex nihilo creation' versus reasonable (logical) thinking.

Thank you again for your comment Jose!

Best wishes,

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Jose,

thanks again for your reply.

Yes, I would agree that space and time are needed for processes involving matter. I also do not consider infinity as something which is physically realized.

In my considerations about fundamentals, I can only take into account what we know today works reliably, which seems to be GR and QM. By physical relationships I mean not only the properties matter has - according to our hitherto establishes theories - but also how matter behaves when it meets other matter. Or alternatively, how matter behaves when it does not meet other matter.

Yes, the terminus 'deterministic chaos' is a little bit misleading and I agree that 'chaos' is synonym with lawlessness. But that is not what I intended with deterministic chaos. I intended to say that deterministic chaos (in the sense of chaos theory) is hard to differentiate from a probabilistic interpretation of QM.

I think I do not agree that if mathematical relationships and physical relationships have no one-to-one correspondence, then consciousness must be a physical phenomenon. I cannot see any necessity for this conclusion. Also I cannot see how mathematics or the physics of matter or both could in any way elucidate that 'matter' (or mathematics) should be capable of becoming aware of an external world (say, of other matter particles, brains etc.) and should additionally be able to fully understand all this - on the basis of three-dimensional matter structures. Surely, animals are aware too, but do not understand all this. But if I take your claims serious that human beings can understand all this - by means of some law of addition with some 'emergence' mixed in - what would THIS then MEAN for our worldview? Would it be deeply natural that nature MUST come to a point where it becomes aware of itself ('itself' as defined in our theories) and additionally aware of the fact that it must become aware of itself at some point in time? I deeply suspect that what we as 'nature' are factually aware of in reference to 'nature', is not the complete, ultimate nature, but merely our pictures we make ourselves from nature.

I do not claim that consciousness is a-natural or something like this. I merely state that what is natural is at the foremost a matter of personal taste. For some it is natural that mathematics is indeed the thing we only think it describes it (the MUH for example). I purport the view that we should not exclude other possibilities and options. As you may know - and as I have outlined in the last essay contest - the phenomenon of near-death experiences can give us a totally other perspective on matter and consciousness. Albeit it is not clear at all how a consciousness that is considered independent of any brain can interact or perceive a physical world, it nonetheless is the case - at least for me. And believe me, I have studied hundreds of such experiences, I studied what they may say about the mind-body problem and also studied what they teleologically may say about the existence of a physical world. The crucial point is, that there are many cases where information was brought back from such experiences that couldn't be achieved by the physical senses at all. One cannot explain this by statistical randomness and probability, since there are no reports out there that could underpin such an interpretation (in terms of information brought back that could be falsified - what should be the case for a statistical interpretation). What I consider is that consciousness is natural, but our framework what is allowed to be natural at all is too narrow still.

If you have any further questions, just ask and I reply.

Best wishes,

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Jose,

thank you so much for your reply and for elucidating your points of view.

I think there is a creator behind all this, but I also think that he is in a certain sense not omnipotent. Firstly, he seem to have granted his creatures some free will (what contains the possibility to decide against choosing some good instead of some bad things) and does only intervene when its creatures are willing. Secondly I do not assume that this creator has the abilities to annihilate himself - or at least his eternal network of values is such that he will never do this.

Besides those points, I think this creator is really some eternal being with some personal characteristics, although not in the sense of a human person (as is often reported in near-death experiences). I am surprised that a you do not exclude such a creator as a possibility.

The crucial point to explain why there is so much suffering and falseness in the world may come from the fact that we are separated from this creator by some own free-will decision in the past. Surely, this past then must be before we have been born into this world.

As I outlined in my essay, in the realm of this creator, one part of antivalence has vanished - or more precise, does not exist yet. This part of some binary opposites is regularily the bad part, darkness, chaos, falseness, delusion, hate etc. By separating from the eternal principles of this creator, these negative opposites are *created* in the first place - since they reflect what happens when one does negate the realm of fundamental truth. The more a creature does negate this realm, the more negativity will be created.

I am perfectly aware of the implications of what I write here. Either the separation I spoke of was due to a free-will decision of some creatures of God to experience how it is if God does not exist (to experience what could lie outside the realms of God, so to speak) - or this separation is the result of a real opposition to God's realm, means the fall of mankind by a severe delusion. A delusion that says that God cannot be the most potent principle existent and that his creatures (part of them) begun to search for some power within themselves that should transcend the power of the creator.

In light of all this, the 'meaning' of our existence is to find the way back to this creator - or to reside further in opposition and spiral down into more and more negativity. This may be a depressing picture for you, but I simply must confess that it is at least consistent with all I see in the world, in the past as well as in the present. We both are relatively blessed, since I assume we aren't attacked too hard by the negative aspects of life. But this should not delude me to think that life is a kind of funny game and I deserved to be on the sunny side of life. I think nothing could be further away from the truth, but most people think so - and at the same time increase negativity in the world. Just look at the powers of money and corruption. Most of those people think they are of esteemed value for the world, maybe they also think they deserve their power, influence and money on the basis of some karma or something like this. But they simply delude themselves and / or God deludes them just as it is written in the bible cause of their wicked hearts.

If I had to resume what leads people to commit bad things and at the same time think that they do harmless, or even good things, is that people want to be like God and cannot accept their human conditions, a delusion that in psychology is called 'narcissm'. Just as Narciss they constantly see only themselves - reflected from every surface. Narcissm is the illness of humankind and just like in the story of Dorian Gray, its ugly face becomes more and more apparent in the world, especially by people who invent philosophies that try to divide mankind in more or less 'developed' spiritual or otherlike superior / inferior beings. And there is no antidote against this, since this is the condition of mankind after the split from God's realms. The only antidote is to realized that mankind cannot deliver itself. But this will not happen for mankind as a whole, but can only be achieved by the single individuum.

Well, now you have a pretty precise picture of what I assume to be really fundamental as a thinking and conscious being. Another annotation: by studying tons of cases of near-death experiences, one can realize that God reveals himself only if the subject allows this by its free will. And even this is no guarantee that a kind of revelation must occur. Revelations, if searched for seriously and with an open heart, may also come in subtle forms, so that the individual can assimilate them step by step. There is no real borderline between the realm of God and the physical realm, but it is a one-way connection, since people cannot reach over to this realm of God, but God can vice versa. After this world has ended, there may be not even exist anymore this one-way connection, since then for some people the True-part of antivalence vanishes and only the accumulated negativity of all histories remains true, but the accumulated positivity vanishes totally. This is also a result of near-death experiences that encountered the dark side of some life after death. If one sticks to negativity, then negativity becomes a totality. What do I mean by negativity? First of all, denying the realm of God, which created conscious beings in the first place. Secondly, denying that one cannot be like God, but is just a creature of a creator. Thirdly, trying to take the place of God by deluding other people by tricks and lies so that they serve oneself whenever it pleases.

So, now enough, this is not a theological seminar. But nonetheless, many will consider it as philosophy, so its appropriate to bring it up here and freely write it down, since the whole contest's question is one of philosophy rather than of science. And additionally, we as human beings or even as scientists cannot deny that we sometimes have religious thoughts and questions.

Hope you can extract something meaningfull out of my considerations!

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Jose,

thanks for you reply and your lines of reasoning.

My theological comments were thought as supplementary for what i wrote about the emergence of mathematics and antivalent logics. Near-death experiences are a controversial topic, i know. Not everybody deduces the same from the fact that such things occur. And at the end, it must remain a matter of personal disposition, since these phenomena do not occur regularily or can be reproduced in a laboratory.

Jose, best wishes and thank you again for an engaging discussion!

Stefan Weckbach