Yes, the information we see in the world is ultimately just due to our relation to the world---this is what I mean when I say that it only enters due to modeling. The experience you speak of, to me, is a kind of model of the world---after all, we do not experience outside reality in some direct sense, which is obvious due to the fact that our experience is so often misleading.

We see a tiger (or a face) that isn't there because we generate hypotheses about the world---models of the world---and try to refute them using our sensory impressions, and once a hypotheses has withstood enough testing, it is accepted, at least on a provisional basis. The evolutionary reason for this is, of course, that it's better for one's survival chances to run away from a tiger that isn't there than not to run if there is, in fact, a tiger.

But I think I haven't really answered your earlier question---I am saying that there is no answer to the question of how the world 'really is', but not because I believe that to be some ineluctable mystery our minds cannot hope to grasp, but merely because the question is ill-posed. And in a sense, you agree: if the world requires no information to specify, then there's no shortest description of the world. The only thing you could say when asked to define the world, its fundamental character, whatever, is literally nothing.

Hi Georgina, thanks for your kind comments, I'm glad there was something for you in my essay.

Regarding the mirror test, I actually mostly tend to agree with you: it's certainly not necessary to be able to pass that test in order to have a sense of self, but I'm merely taking it the other way around---that having some idea of what 'you' are is necessary to pass the mirror test. Because by passing that test, a child, or ape, or bird essentially says 'that's me'; so there needs to be an idea of 'me' beforehand. I agree, though, that this isn't really clear from the way I put it in the essay.

So I think it's very well possible to have an internal experience of an 'I' without being able to pass the mirror test. Another example of such a situation might be with animals whose primary sense modality isn't vision. For instance, for a dog, vision just might not play enough of a role to take it into consideration enough to do all the data processing necessary to correlate the image in the mirror with itself; but a smell-o-vision version might be no problem (not that I know how that might look, exactly), while I could easily imagine humans failing such a test without our self-hood thereby being called into question.

Hi Stefan, yes, I think you've got the gist of my idea there. Qualia are mysterious, because they're not amenable to model-based reasoning; and they're not amenable to that because otherwise, we would end up in an infinite regress.

Regarding infinity, well, I'm skeptical of the physical implementability of anything actually infinite---after all, I consider something being only possible by traversing an infinite regress to be something that's actually impossible. Otherwise, I could just hold that well, you need an infinite number of computations to subserve modeling, so what?

But I think that doesn't mean that the notion of infinity doesn't have any value in thinking about the world. For one, there might be open-ended processes, which, while not infinite at any instant, nevertheless also can't be called finite. Furthermore, there are possibly things in the natural world that must seem infinitary to a computational reason. True randomness, for instance, cannot be produced by any finite computer program. But an infinite program could, in principle, produce a random real number (by the trivial method of storing infinitely many digits, for instance). So if the universe is an open-ended process, and quantum mechanics is truly random, then there is no finitary concept that suffices to capture it.

Regarding your reply on your essay page (which is almost another essay in itself), I probably won't get around to replying to that before the weekend, so I'm gonna have to ask for a little patience here...

Hi Jochen, thanks for clarifying. You are right, infinity can also be defined or understood as something being not finite (I am tempted to write indefinite instead...). Yes, this makes sense, since the result of many processes, in the manner we discuss them here, cannot be figured out in advance, for example by simulating these processes. Best example: I cannot exactly simulate and therefore predict what I will know, do or think tomorrow.

For my own approach to be consistent, i need a certain variant of infinity, since i purport the view that some eternal truths must exist (surely then in a realm beyond traditional time and space).

My reply to you on my essay page has been facilitated in a hurry, containing some grammar and syntax errrors. But I think at those passages, one can nonethless decipher what I intended to say. Yes, I think it is the longest comment I ever wrote in the internet...:-) For me, the whole essay theme is fascinating and I consider the contest's question as important in itself, notwithstanding of possible negative answers to the question. Anyways, take your time to read it, and I would be happy if you could again comment it.

Thanks for your reply. Really good point about the different priority given to different kinds of sensory input by different species. I think it might be confusing for a dog to smell'itself' somewhere else, that it hasn't been and left its smell. I don't think I would recognize my own smell in isolation but imagine I would be able to eliminate not my smell of other people. And you are right we would not have the same kind of relation to the smell information as a dog. We would not identify that external stimulus with internal sense of self -causing the dog scientists to question our self awareness : )

I agree that because there can be no external source of information, the foundations must start from the idea that everything is possible, but I won't yet give in to the idea that we cannot grasp how it goes from there. I accept that nature as we observe it is in part the result of unpredictable accidents that selected a particular vacuum suitable for introspective life to evolve, but there is order and structure and symmetry in nature too. There has to be some theory that provides the framework from which universes emerge. This is why I think there has to be a principle of universality from which a mathematical structure forms. The most likely case is that this is spontaneous and unique so that no further information is required to specify it.

In truth I believe in this only because we exist in a structured world, but if it is correct there should be some way to understand it in its own right. I think the kind of logic you use in your essay is the right way to think about it. I.e. it is about experience, information, modelling and the iterative nature if introspection, but there should be a different conclusion from the one you came to. At a guess based on what we know about quantum field theories, gravity and speculative combinations of the two, I think that the iterative arguments lead to a version of iterated quantisation that converges to an algebraic structure. This can then be mapped to the landscape of possible geometric universes via the magic of algebraic geometry. That is a difficult area of mathematics that challenges the ability of the best mathematicians. There may be much more that is unknown and even harder to grasp, but I think there are signs that the human mind can reach there. If it can't find it we may have to wait for some superior artificial intelligence to explain it to us.

Dear Jochen, I am impressed by your very methodical way of presentation and building of arguments / conclusions.

I cannot do but agree -->

The question "What is fundamental?" is already misguided: our instinct for searching for the fundamental is simply due to our model-based reasoning.

Best Wishes

    There might be another interpretation of your conclusion, which is that you are agreeing with me when I say that we cannot see beyond the point of universality.

    I have written up my memories of thoughts as a two month old baby. See here in (2008) https://ben6993.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/early-memories-as-a-baby/#comment-83

    I wrote that "there must have been a change of phase at two months" so I agree with you about early phase changes.

    I wrote my childhood essay as no one believes my memories are credible. One friend has childhood amnesia and cannot remember much under ten years old. Remembering under two years old is often deemed not credible.

    I also wrote that "a fractal analogy is interesting. In fractals, a similar pattern is found on different scales. ... I was remembering different occasions of being awake (small scale - one day to the next - awake/asleep/awake/asleep etc.), but it seemed like different occurrences of life (large scale - one life to the next). Before the change of phase, prior awakenings seemed like prior lives as there was so little of 'me' to remember in them. And as soon as I was old enough to know that I was a continuing 'me', ie in the new phase, it was too late... as I had been deceived by the change of phase into remembering it as a prior "life" rather than just a re-awakening."

    And maybe this sort of phase transition underlies [mistakenly ;) ] belief in reincarnation.

    Despite all that striving to find my identity at two months, I would no doubt have failed the mirror test until much older than that.

    The change of phase has nothing to do with my own contest essay, but my contest essay does look at fundamentality wrt quasi-fractal ideas so maybe my baby experiences pre-conditioned me to think quasi-fractals are generally relevant.

    Best wishes

    Austin

      Dear Brajesh,

      thank you for your kind comments. I'm very happy you found something that speaks to you in my essay!

      Hi Austin,

      thanks for your comments. Regarding the mirror test, as I said to Georgina above, I don't consider passing it necessary to establish the existence of a sense of self---it's the other way around, passing the mirror test necessitates having some idea that there is an object in the world that is picked out by the indexical 'I'.

      But it's certainly plausible (indeed, likely) that such an 'I' might exist without an ability to pass the mirror test. For instance, I can easily imagine a person that has never encountered the idea of a mirror, or reflection in general, having problems recognizing themselves as their reflection. That doesn't mean they have no concept of themselves.

      I agree, though, that my phrasing in the essay was ambiguous at best.

      In regard to fractals, I discussed them in passing in an earlier version of my essay, which however had to get cut due to length constraints---basically, the idea was that one can think about fractal structures that contain the full information about themselves within a proper part, so that the part may 'know' the whole. But it ultimately became too lengthy a distraction.

      As for early-life memories, I can't really speak to that---I don't have any, and I know virtually nothing about the neurophysiology etc. involved. Georgina above, however, reports being self-aware at birth---maybe you two could exchange early-life experiences!

      Well, as I said, it's not so much that we can't grasp what goes on below, so to speak, but rather, that the question just isn't applicable. The models we construct of the world have the characteristic that there exists some fundamental layer, some base facts whence the rest flows, but I think it may be a mistake to conclude that hence, the world itself must have that structure. So while we can answer this question with respect to a given model, the question just is ill-posed if asked of anything but a model.

      In a sense, one gets a hint of this in dualities: both gravitational and quantum theories have some 'fundamental' core, but they disagree, in general; nevertheless, in certain cases, both may turn out to describe the same physics. So which of the two theories' fundamental layers is the right one for the physics they describe? In my opinion, since neither is privileged compared to the other, the answer can only be that none is. Each model has a fundament, but the world doesn't. What we see as fundamental is just an echo of the way we build our models.

      I think that the appearance of accident and randomness is actually another clue in that direction. One can generally represent a noncomputable function with a computation plus an infinite random string. Consequently, a being building computational models of a noncomputational world would end up describing it in terms of computable, deterministic evolution interspersed with random events---which is of course just what we see in quantum mechanics, and perhaps in the selection of initial conditions and such.

      In the end, you may well be right that our approaches could be seen, in some way, dual to one another. It's kind of like asking, 'what exists?', and you answer, 'everything', while I answer 'nothing'. But these aren't ultimately distinct. Likewise, refusing to answer the question of fundamentals and answering it with a certain universality class of models where we can't further find out which is the right one may not be too far away from each other.

      Hi Jochen

      Thank you for your reply.

      You remark connecting fractals with having the full picture in a small part was interesting as was your trimming down on fractals in your essay to meet the essay length restriction. I had to trim but kept quasi-fractals as central. I cut down on quantum spin though and that was a useful enforcement as I think there is a big mystery in tieing spin into the geometry of spacetime and I did not want to get bogged down in that mystery.

      I noticed you commented on Indra's Net by Stoica. I may comment there when I am clearer, but to be honest I had not made the connection between quasi-fractals and bohmist ideas before now (so thank you as it has made me think differently!). Bohmism and the Indra's Net (may) imply a continuing spatial connection over time whereas I had been thinking only of an initial symmetry across space which breaks down via symmetry breaking because the initial symmetry is not maintained over time and space. On the other hand my model has 'universes' embedded in particles so maybe it is not surprising that particles have connections across the whole. That sounds unusual but it is simply calling the manifolds (at the heart of particles) 'universes' rather than folded dimensions.

      Thanks again.

      Austin

      Dear Dr. Szangolies,

      I read your interesting essay on modeling the universe. But I think you left out an important requirement. Fundamental models must be simple and unified, as recognized by Occam's razor. Unfortunately, too many would-be fundamental models are anything but simple and unified.

      In my own essay, "Fundamental Waves and the Reunification of Physics", I argue that unity and simplicity are most fundamental, although the unity of physics was broken in the early decades of the 20th century. I review the historical basis for this rupture, and go on to present the outlines of a neoclassical synthesis that should restore this unity.

      Briefly, quantization of spin in real quantum waves such as the electron (there are no point particles) provides the scale of discreteness in what is otherwise a universe of classical continuous fields. There is no need for Hilbert space, indeterminacy, or entanglement. The same waves provide a real embodiment of time, space, and relativity; there is no need for an abstract spacetime.

      Furthermore, the advent of quantum computing takes this beyond obscure philosophy into the technological realm. Without entanglement, quantum computing will not work. There are billions of dollars being invested in this, and I expect an answer within 5 years. But when I have tried to discuss this with active participants in the field, they react as if I am killing the goose that is laying the golden eggs. No one wants to hear such a negative story, including funding agents. My prediction is that the failure of quantum computing will lead to a reassessment of the entire foundations of quantum mechanics.

      Best Wishes,

      Alan Kadin

        Dear Jochen,

        I enjoyed reading your essay. I like some ideas like the infinite regress in the relation between an object and its model, I thing you made a good point. Also the way you reported them to the four verses by Lao Zi, and the interpretations. As one major point of your argument, I understand that you connect the impossibility to give an accurate description of reality to another major problem, the hard problem. That's an interesting approach to this, and the indeed "bold hypothesis that these connections are given by our phenomenal experience, the qualia: our mental models are connected to objects in the world via our phenomenal experience of them" is quite intriguing!

        I may come back with some questions, but until then, good luck!

        Best wishes,

        Cristi

          Dear Dr Jochen Szangolies,

          You neglected to mention that all real objects have complete visible surfaces.

          You wrote: "The world itself, however, cannot be reduced to such a set of fundamental facts. The salient fact here is the necessary incompleteness of every model of the world."

          My research has concluded that Nature must have devised the only permanent real structure of the Universe obtainable for the real Universe existed for millions of years before man and his finite complex informational systems ever appeared on earth. The real physical Universe consists only of one single unified VISIBLE infinite surface occurring eternally in one single infinite dimension that am always illuminated mostly by finite non-surface light.

          Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

          Dear Jochen Szangolies,

          I enjoyed your essay on modeling and generally agree with your statements therein. I too have long thought that an appropriate metaphor is

          "The nameless is beginning of heaven and earth,

          the named is the mother of 10,000 things."

          and I fully agree with your final sentence:

          "... Some of the most difficult philosophical problems might call not so much for their solution, as for their dissolution."

          "When the one mind is not disturbed,

          The ten thousand things offer no offense."

          One nagging philosophical problem arose from Einstein's contention concerning "the relativity of simultaneity". My essay examines the historical evolution of his view. I hope you will find interesting enough to comment on.

          Congratulations on a pleasing and well-written essay.

          Best regards,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

            Dear Jochen,

            You have constructed, in my opinion, a remarkably accurate analysis of the question at hand. Your essay is certainly one of the standouts in this contest, as far as I am concerned. You will find me to be in agreement with all of the proposals you have put forth, bar none.

            Would you happen to have read the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein? I see heavy shades of his own thought in your essay, and Wittgenstein is always welcome company in such meditations.

            I have just one query, however: You speak of the minimum amount of information required to uniquely specify a system. Do you have any suggestion for a criterion using which one may pick out this set of information?

            My own thoughts (which you will find in my now uploaded essay) are, it seems to me, quite similar to yours (in form than in substance)- I felt like I was rating my own essay when I rated yours!

            Regards,

            Aditya

              Dear Alan,

              thank you for reading my essay and commenting. Occam's razor is certainly an important methodological guideline in scientific model building, but one should not overextend its reach---otherwise, one risks it loosing its edge. Ultimately, the what the razor really does is guarantee predictivity: without it, we would be free to choose whatever ad-hoc hypotheses make the 'prediction' we want to have, and science becomes arbitrary.

              In other, less empirical domains, however, Occam's razor becomes mostly a question of aesthetics.

              Regardless, I'll have a look at your essay---however, a point in advance is that it's by no means certain that entanglement is really necessary for quantum computing: DQC1, for instance, is a proposal for quantum computing that does not rely on entanglement to achieve a speedup over what's classically possible.

              Dear Cristi,

              thanks for your comment! You're right that the infinite regress is a core element of my essay; ultimately, I fell that much gets explained once one stipulates (or buys my regress argument) that the world isn't computable. And in the end, we never had any good reason to believe it is, anyway.

              This leads to the idea that modeling itself is something not amenable to modeling---ultimately, because computation must be grounded in something non-computational, or face infinite regress. I thought it intriguing how these ideas reflect certain tenets of Daoism and Buddhism---in particular in the way they lead to the stipulation that ultimately, the world does not have a 'fundamental nature'---it is 'empty', as the Buddhists would say.

              But again, there's a lot of interpretive license here. The Buddhists didn't really think in terms of algorithmic information content anymore than Democritus thought about quantum mechanics when talking about atoms and the void.

              I'd be glad to answer (or try to, or at least, be hopefully entertainingly stumped by) any questions you have!