Jochen,

"covered by perhaps even superficially inconsistent pictures" Yes, right on.

also "inequalities that take only actually observed events into consideration" agree entirely, you'll see that's what I've done. (But of course it must still give CHSH>2).

I actually model the interaction events physically at a larger scale and reveal a classical natural 'complementarity' hidden within 'OAM' itself, so QM's starting assumptions need a slight change (to match Maxwell's inclusion of 'curl'). All experimental outcomes then follow classically. Yes I know that sound ridiculous after 100 years but it's none the less true. The full ontology and (slightly complex in 3D) process and protocol are given, with a short video to assist.

I'd greatly value you studying the model carefully and analysing/discussing. It seems few really understand QM and most that do are sold on nature being weird. Are you familiar with John Bells rather ignored views & comments that a classical description must exist? (around p172-5 I recall - quote on request)

Very best

Peter

Hi Jochen,

I liked your essay very much. And I love the Tao Te Ching. It helps to widen our imagination of the world.

So allow me to make one sceptical remark: Do you really belief the various incompleteness theorems are an indication (or prove?) for the existence of something beyond our modelling capacity? Sometimes I hope so. And sometimes I'm sceptical. Let me try to formulate my scepticism:

Your model in figure 1 seem to me to assume a realistic world view in the sense, that the object is independent of the model. This makes the entities (object, model) together build a new object, that can be modelled, and that is bigger, than the original object. This is analog to Thomas Breuer's "The impossibility of accurate state self-measurements". A system wants to measure an object with n properties. Let us say, that the the measurement system needs n properties itself to distinguish these n properties. So together system and object have n^2 possible properties (possible states). More than the system can measure. So a system within the total can never have the full information. Is this at the root quantum complementarity?

Not so sure. In classical systems with symmetries for instance only the relative distance is measurable. So if the object has a location x (like a property) and the measurement system has location y. Only the distance (x-y) has a physical significance. The domain of the distances is of the same range as the properties of the measurement system. So classical systems seems to work very well although it seemed we had some incompleteness here. And no wonder classical physics worked so well for many years.

Finally let me say that your argument with the Mary case is beautiful.

Regards,

Luca

    Hi Luca,

    thanks for your nice comments (in particular in regard to the Mary's room argument)! As for your skepticism, I think there's many different ways of approaching this question. One, for instance, is that I think Gödel's two incompleteness theorems establish a limitation of the human capacity to formalize mathematics, not a limitation on mathematics itself, as it's usually phrased---in other words, it's not that 'mathematics is incomplete', but rather, that the axiom systems human mathematicians can formulate---being necessarily finitely specifiable, effective, and so on, which ultimately boils down to being computable---don't suffice to capture all of mathematics.

    But to say that this implies the existence of something beyond our modeling capacity would require a belief in the preexistence of mathematical objects, i.e. some form of Platonism---which is not something I myself would be willing to commit to.

    But things get clearer once one things instead of abstract formal systems in terms of computers. The halting problem is an instance of the same phenomenon that also gives rise to incompleteness (Lawvere's fixed-point theorem, which Noson Yanofsky, who also has an entry in this contest, discusses in a very accessible way here), and the two are equivalent in some ways. Now, with the math we know how to use, we can't in general predict whether a given TM halts; nevertheless, one might justifiably hold that there's still a fact of the matter regarding whether it will or won't. But Turing machines are themselves abstract entities, and would require an infinite tape or something equivalent to build; so again, it's not immediately clear if that has any real-world significance.

    So let's now turn to physics. You mention Breuer's results, which I think are very interesting; but there's many more indications of a connection between QM and logical independence (in fact, John Wheeler managed to get himself thrown out of Gödel's office for suggesting a connection). For instance, Caslav Brukner and colleagues could show that if they encode a set of axioms into a quantum state, measurements related to propositions that are not derivable from those axioms yield a random outcome. However, this is not specific to Gödel's incompleteness, as the axiom systems were too simple for Gödel's construction to apply---Gödel's theorems then simply mean that such phenomena never 'go away', so to speak.

    A more qualitative line of reasoning is the following: you can represent any non-computable function with a computation plus a source of randomness; consequently, if we are beings using computational methods to model a non-computable world, we should expect the world to look like a computation with intermittent random events. That's of course exactly what we have in QM. An obvious counterexample here might seem to be Bohmian mechanics: but actually, it turns out that a model that reproduces quantum mechanics by introducing nonlocal influences (as BM does) cannot be computable---otherwise, one could use these influences to transmit information, contradicting the tenets of special relativity.

    There are many more results pointing in a similar direction scattered about the literature (and of course, there's my own argument that I cite in the essay); but I think it's as yet unclear what the picture is they paint. Zwick in the 1970s, and later on Peres and Zurek, proposed that QM's "inability to completely describe the measurement process appears to be not a flaw of the theory but a logical necessity which is analogous to Gödel's undecidability theorem". I think that it's again as with the incompleteness theorems in mathematics: they're not a limitation on mathematics itself, but on human mathematicians; likewise, the limitation we see is not one on physics, but on physicists: using computable models, which we must if I'm right, to model a non-computable world, will inevitable lead to something like a quantum description.

    But this is an argument that needs to be made much more carefully, and which I'm in the agonizingly slow process of working out. We'll see what comes of it!

    Dear Fellow Essayists

    This will be my final plea for fair treatment.,

    Reliable evidence exists that proves that the surface of the earth was formed millions of years before man and his utterly complex finite informational systems ever appeared on that surface. It logically follows that Nature must have permanently devised the only single physical construct of earth allowable.

    All objects, be they solid, liquid, or vaporous have always had a visible surface. This is because the real Universe must consist 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.

    Only the truth can set you free.

    Joe Fisher, Realist

    Thank you Jochen for the details. Admittedly I don't feel in position to comment on them.

    The more I wonder why FQXi decided not to immediately show this key posting of you.

    Regards,

    Eckard

    Dear Jochen,

    Your essay is very beautiful! My compliments.

    My starting point in my essay is somewhat similar to yours - emergence of self-awareness as crossing of a critical threshold during evolution. But then I drifted off in a different direction :-)

    My best wishes for your success in this contest.

    Tejinder

      Dear Jochen - fantastic essay! Beautifully written and very interesting!

      It also seems to me we have a large overlap in our ideas: What you call "a world without models" is pretty similar to what I call "a fundamental Universe".

      There are two important differences, though:

      1) It seems to me that for you the different "models" (what I call "realities") are equally fundamental. This would allow for strong emergence, though, which I believe can be no part of any sensible, scientific world view. What is your stance on this issue?

      2) I'm more optimistic about the limitations of science. So I would not a priori agree that no model can reflect the world as it is. Wouldn't you agree that by the fact you are able to speculate about the "world without models" you are already creating an (albeit very imperfect, of course) model of this fundamental reality? It depends on what you mean by "reflect", I guess.

      (You might be in line here with philosopher Markus Gabriel who claims that the world does not exist, though).

      Apart from that, while I agree that consciousness, memory and "conceiving of oneself as separated from the world" are closely related (my last year's entry in collaboration with psychologist Marc Wittmann discussed exactly this issue - they are not the same. For example, the problem of the sphex wasp seems to be mainly due to a limited memory and not so much due to a lack of consciousness or a lack of concept of being separated from the world. As I'm very interested in these topics, can you elaborate a little more or hint me towards some literature here?

      Btw, I noticed you got your PhD from Düsseldorf. Are you still based in Germany?

      Best regards from Dortmund! Heinrich

        I enjoyed going through with some ease with your contribution. Classical analogs are what makes the predictons of Quantum Mechanics relate we humans with our daily life experiences. To me QM is struggling to evolve still as it is attempting to tackle Gravity! It is called the weak force but it is the force that keeps our Universe together, not that much the other three force fields that deal better with microscopic world mainly.When we were being taught this subject over 60 years back at Delhi University, our good teacher used to cite hermits and their humble abode. He got his doctorate in Germany. I too have visited your country mainly as a tourist and found how much you love beer and food that accompanies the drinks.

        May i request you to clarify if we can treat QM as a full fledged theory like the classical Physics. To me, QM has been truly a life of an hermit who lives in a humble home nearer a forest rather than a city or township! It has not satisfied Albert Einstein though he was one of the founder. He was reluctant to begin with and then continued to keep that spirit till his end!

          Dear Tejinder,

          thanks for your kind words! I'll have a look at what you're doing with the 'phase transition'-imagery. In some ways, I wonder if one couldn't develop that metaphor in a more rigorous way---Tegmark, of course, has already proclaimed consciousness to be a 'state of matter'. So perhaps we're just one early pocket of self-awareness percolating in a universe about to transform. Ah well, that might make a good plot for a science fiction story, at least...

          Dear Heinrich,

          thanks for your interesting comments! I'll have to have a look at your 'fundamental universe'. And you're right, I did read Gabriel's "Warum es die Welt nicht gibt" exactly because I also perceived some kinship in his ideas, but found it ultimately rather disappointing.

          Regarding models and strong emergence, well, it depends what stance you take. The traditional view would be that models possess some immediate correspondence with the things they model, at least up to some suitable approximation, and that thus we should consider the entities they posit, and the explanations they provide, as giving us some insight into what really goes on in the world. Here, I think, strong emergence is troubling: in some sense, there would be certain things that violate Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason---facts about the world that would obtain without any answer to the question of why they should.

          In some sense, though, this is also true in classical reductionist ideas---after all, if everything can be reduced to some set of base facts, then those facts themselves admit no further justification. From this point of view, strong emergence maybe doesn't seem that much worse---it merely adds additional 'fundamental' facts that obtain at some higher level of coarse-graining, for instance.

          But in my view, all models are inaccurate to some degree---every model is incomplete by necessity, just as all axiomatic systems (of sufficient power) are. The world admits no more of a single model than mathematics admits of a single axiom system.

          Are then facts that fail to fall under the purview of a given model strongly emergent? From the point of the view of the model, you might say so: after all, within that model, there is no way of reducing them to fundamental facts; they're true for no reason.

          But this tells us something about the model, in my opinion, not something about the world. In other words, it's our problem, not that of the world---just as the fact that there is no single axiom system for all of mathematics ultimately may be considered a limitation of human mathematicians; if we weren't limited to finitely specifiable, effective systems, these problems wouldn't exist. So I think that if my thoughts entail strong emergence in some sense, then one also should think that mathematics contains strong emergence. But then it seems to me that's just fine, after all, mathematicians have still been able to make great strides in mathematical understanding post Gödel. (In that manner I, too, am optimistic about the progress of science---our understanding of the world will continually increase, but I don't think it will come to a true end point, although for all practical purposes, it eventually may.)

          (By the way, have you seen Sabine Hossenfelder's take on strong emergence in this contest? I think it's a clever idea, although ultimately, I don't believe it really buys the necessary elbow room for things like free will.)

          You're right also to point out the difference between consciousness, the sense of self, and so on. I wasn't intending to suggest an equivalence here, but I think there is a sort of progression---in order to be properly called 'conscious', you need to have a sense of self, and in order to have that, you need to be able to conceive of yourself as an entity distinct from the rest of the world, and in order to do so, you need to be able to model the world as sort of a container with you in it. Each lower rung is necessary, but not sufficient, for the next one. (As for literature on the subject of consciousness, I can't really claim to be an expert, but if you haven't read it, I still think that Jaegwon Kim's 'Philosophy of Mind' is one of the best overviews of the subject, and contains many references for further digging into the topics you find particularly interesting.)

          There's also an issue regarding what constitutes a model that you highlight. In some sense, a brick is a model for our solar system---we could use it, say, in a model of the nearest couple of star systems. That empty beer bottle over there is Alpha Centauri, the football is Epsilon Eridani, and so on.

          Undoubtedly, however, it would make for a very bad model of the solar system. That's because only its most elementary structure---the quantity, its being 'one thing'---is represented. So it's not clear in how far my talk about 'the world without models' is itself something of a model.

          In particular, one also may talk about 'the round square cupola of Berkeley college', but does that necessitate a model of it? Can one model impossible objects? I think that one instead has models of its parts, or understands its properties individually, without really being able to put things together---so one knows (by model) what 'round' means, what 'square' means, what 'cupola' means and so on; but one can't really put these together, since that would be an impossible object. I think one understands 'the world without models' in a similar way.

          Grüße zurück aus Köln,

          Jochen

          Dear Narendra,

          thanks for your comment. My essay isn't really all that concerned with quantum mechanics, but regarding your question, well, it depends. QM is certainly a different kind of theory than classical mechanics---after all, it generally can only give probabilistic predictions, while classical mechanics comes with a (to some) reassuring certainty (at least in principle).

          But that doesn't mean it's not a full fledged theory. If by this you mean a mathematical apparatus, and a way to connect the mathematics with observation (sometimes called the 'minimal interpretation' that makes the difference between physical theories and purely mathematical frameworks), then QM is just as reputable a theory as classical mechanics.

          If you want further to know 'what it all means', however, quantum mechanics seems much less amenable to intuition. But is that the fault of the theory, or of the human mind that isn't used to it? I don't have an answer.

          Dr Szangolies,

          While I admit that your title scared the bejeebers out of me, I really liked your essay! Then I noticed that you are information theorist, which likely helps explain why I so many of your points resonated well with me.[1]

          Your points about the unavoidable incompleteness of our models is dead on, and also the tip of a fascinating and huge iceberg of related points. Life itself has a huge incentive to make those models as effective as possible, and the universe has this peculiar habit of lumping together at multiple scales (nuclei, atoms, molecules, "blobby molecular thingies" (viruses up to blue whales), planets, all of which can be modeled more effectively because "at a distance" the require fewer bits to model.[2]

          Your conclusion is good and interesting, though I do think your lead up provides an opportunity for an even strong ending. If you think about the history of modeling, and in particular modeling in topics such as physics, the very act of trying to build necessarily incomplete models has force people to look for special rules that help overcome that incompleteness by applying to an exceptionally large number of situations. That in turn helped create the suite of modeling tools, such as mathematics, that in turn seem to connect us more deeply with the "whatever it is" in the universe that makes it work uniformly and predictable.

          In other words, the constraints imposed by having to use incomplete models seems to help filter out and clarify rules that are in some sense more fundamental. I think your argument heads in that direction, and helps make that overall point, even if not explicitly.

          So again, thanks for a great essay that was fun to read and makes some deep points.

          Cheers,

          Terry Bollinger

          ---------------------

          [1] My own essay. "Fundamental as Fewer Bits" (topic 3099) is centered around the Kolmogorov variant of information theory.

          [2] Henry W. Lin, Max Tegmark, David Rolnick. Why does deep and cheap learning work so well? (on arXiv) See the sections on renormalization and scaling.

            Dear Jochen Szangolies

            Just letting you know that I am making a start on reading of your essay, and hope that you might also take a glance over mine please? I look forward to the sharing of thoughtful opinion. Congratulations on your essay rating as it stands, and best of luck for the contest conclusion.

            My essay is titled

            "Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin". It stands as a novel test for whether a natural organisational principle can serve a rationale, for emergence of complex systems of physics and cosmology. I will be interested to have my effort judged on both the basis of prospect and of novelty.

            Thank you & kind regards

            Steven Andresen

            7 days later

            Hi Jochen:

            You mention - " Among them is the problem of fundamentals: since every model of the world reduces to some set of fundamental facts, we expect the same thing to hold of the world as a whole. This, however, ultimately confuses the map with the territory."

            I agree with you except that the relative fundamentals can be bridged with an ultimate absolute fundamental as depicted in my paper - "What is Fundamental - Is C the Speed of Light". that describes the fundamental physics of antigravity missing from the widely-accepted mainstream physics and cosmology theories resolving their current inconsistencies and paradoxes. The missing physics depicts a spontaneous relativistic mass creation/dilation photon model that explains the yet unknown dark energy, inner workings of quantum mechanics, and bridges the gaps among relativity and Maxwell's theories. The model also provides field equations governing the spontaneous wave-particle complimentarity or mass-energy equivalence. The key significance or contribution of the proposed work is to enhance fundamental understanding of C, commonly known as the speed of light, and Cosmological Constant, commonly known as the dark energy.

            The paper not only provides comparisons against existing empirical observations but also forwards testable predictions for future falsification of the proposed model.

            I would like to invite you to read my paper and appreciate any feedback comments.

            Best Regards

            Avtar Singh

              Dear Terry,

              I have to admit that I chose the title in order to add a little shock value---so I'm at least somewhat glad to see it worked in your case! You seem to have recovered OK, though. ;)

              Thank you for persisting through the shock, and your comments on my essay. I agree that what I'm hinting at is just the tip of the iceberg, and I'd give several non-essential organs in order to take a look at the whole edifice.

              Using compressibility/Kolmogorov complexity in order to qualify more 'fundamental' levels of description is a worthwhile project, I think. I wonder, are you familiar with the story of Leibniz and the inkblots? Chaitin likes to tell it. Basically, Leibniz noted that if one randomly splatters ink on a page, then there won't be any description of the pattern they make that's much shorter than just noting every individual stain; but if there is a law behind their distribution, then that law will make for a much more concise description. It's almost all in there, nearly 300 years ago!

              Anyway, sorry for taking so long to reply; I'll have a look at your essay, maybe I'll find the time to comment there, too.

              Cheers,

              Jochen

              Jochen,

              When I click the direct link to "Conscious Entities", it does not work, because there is no ":" after https! Just to let you know... You may want to correct the link, so more people can access the interesting conversation over there!

              Marc

              Thanks, Marc, for pointing this out! Although I'm not sure how this happened, since I just copied and pasted the link... Anyway, for anybody interested, with any luck clicking here should get you to Peter's discussion of my essay.

              Dear Avtar,

              thank you for your comment! I'm glad you found something you agree with in my essay. I'll have a look at yours---maybe I'll find something to agree with, too!

              Dear Jochen,

              It is fun to be able once again to ponder the really big questions of existence with you in this contest! As I mentioned in my answer to your post on my essay's thread, I read your essay with great interest when it came out (I even referred to it in my essay's bibliography), but I have since been caught up in a several last-minute "emergencies" at work and it is only now that I have found some time to comment and rate essays.

              Beside our mutual appreciation of Zen philosophy, I agree with you that we share many common views about epistemology and fundamentality, and that we both believe that "everything" has zero information content and is equivalent, in a deep metaphysical sense, with "nothing". Going through your essay, I find many statements and ideas that I am fully in agreement with:

              - The only way we interact with the world is through models, more precisely, mental models (the pictures we have in our minds of the outside world);

              - Models are computations (your proposition 1);

              - Every computation can be thought of as implementing a computable function, and can therefore be said to model the abstract structure defined by that function;

              - Sometimes, a computation models an object system.

              But there are other claims you make that I am not quite convinced of:

              - Every computation is a model (your proposition 2), more precisely, a model that is linked by an encoding/decoding relationship with a PHYSICAL system (your figure 2): "in order to implement the encoding [of an object O to a model M] computationally, we need a physical system P whose states are mapped to some computation C."

              - Only by interpreting a given system as modelling a certain abstract structure is that system turned into a computer: therefore, computation is a mind-dependent notion;

              - Qualia (our phenomenal experience) connects our mental models to objects in the world.

              I always thought that qualia were themselves our mental models... If they are merely connections between our mental models and the objects in the world, what then are our mental models exactly? Mere abstractions that we are unaware of? Patterns in our brains? (but then, it would be something physical...)

              That being said, I quite like how you analyse the thorny issue of philosophical zombies by comparing it to Gödel incompleteness:

              "For any formal system F of sufficient strength, there exists a sentence, G, such that G can neither be proven nor disproven from the axioms of F. Consequently, the axioms are consistent both with F's truth, and its falsity. In a broadly similar way, the phenomenal facts cannot be derived from the physical facts; the latter are consistent both with their presence and absence."

              ... which renders undecidable the question of whether a being that acts as if it is conscious is conscious or not. Nice parallel!

              On the other hand, I do not think that the hard problem of consciousness can be dissolved simply by saying that it is merely an artifact of how we use models to explain the world. You say that "mistaking our models for the world itself" is what "makes a spooky mystery of conscious experience". My disagreement on this probably stems from the fact that I do not understand the distinction you make between qualia and our models of the world...

              In part 5 of your essay, you tackle directly the essay contest question "What is fundamental?". I like your starting quote from the Dàodéjing about the nameless and the named, and how you reformulate it: "Before the world was ever conceived of as something, when it just was, there was nothing but the world; afterwards, there are plants and birds and rocks and things".

              I agree with you that information enters the world as it is being modelled, and that what is fundamental for a given model is the minimum of information associated with it. But is it the case that information ONLY enters the world as it is being modelled? I would agree, but ONLY if we define the world as the totality of all existence, this totality being a "Maxiverse" that contains overall zero information (as I argued in my previous two FQXi essays).

              On that subject, you did a very good job of explaining what is, for most people, unintelligible nonsense, the deep metaphysical truth that " 'everything' has no information content at all, since it must have the same information as its complement, i.e. 'nothing'." Your examples with the prime numbers and the sheet of paper ripped in two are well chosen.

              You write that " 'Fundamental' information is thus a feature of models, but not of the world they model, that is introduced only by the necessary incompleteness of every model". It reminded me of a quote from the 1984 cult movie "Buckaroo Banzai": "In my experience, nothing is ever what it seems to be, but everything is exactly what it is." ;)

              You say that any answer to the question "What is fundamental?" seems to immediately invite the follow-up "Why this?". I completely agree, and this is why, along with Philip Gibbs, I share the belief that true fundamentality should not be "in any way accidental or arbitrary" ... In the end, could it be that everything/nothing is the only thing that can be said to be truly fundamental?

              I love how you conclude your essay, by asking "What would the world without models be like?", and by answering that it would be like "the Buddhist notion of 'no mind' or 'no self', in which the 'emptiness' of the world, i.e. its lack of any fundamental nature, is manifest. Everything that we perceive then arises in a process of 'dependent origination': just as the shapes of two pieces of torn apart paper, or two subsets of the natural numbers, depend on one another so do the model and the thing modeled."

              This concludes my comments on your essay... but I cannot end there, because I also want to say something about the fascinating exchange that you had with Philip Gibbs on your essay's respective threads. I found that some of the things that you discussed there were even more interesting and pertinent to this year's topic than what you wrote in your essays... This led me to think that in an ideal world, each FQXi contest would be followed by a "rematch contest" where we could submit revised essays (or new ones) that take into consideration what we learned by reading and discussing each other's essays!

              Here are some of my favorite quotes from you in these conversations:

              "I'm now leaning towards agreeing with Whitehead regarding 'misplaced concreteness': in the end, it's at least an idea worth exploring that we're making certain issues too hard on ourselves by placing too much value in the constructs we can form to grasp the world."

              "This is like with Gödel's theorems: we won't find a single axiomatization of all of mathematics, it's simply too rich for that. Likewise, we can't tell a single story covering all of physics---reality is too multifaceted for that."

              "As to what reality is---well, my answer is essentially that the question is misguided. There's no 'fundamental nature' of reality; the most we can say is that relative to a certain point of view, a certain set of truths obtains. (...) the basic idea recurs throughout Western philosophy---there's some kind of stuff, or more than one kind of stuff (as in, e.g., Cartesian dualism or other pluralist ideas), and everything else is made from that stuff. Eastern philosophy, especially in the Buddhist tradition, is more flexible there. The idea that there could be some such fundamental nature, some stuff that underlies everything else is denied. Rather, everything is ultimately 'empty'---free of fundamental nature---and what exists arises in a process of 'dependent origination'. "

              "The only thing you could say when asked to define the world, its fundamental character, whatever, is literally nothing. (...) 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."

              The last two passages, in particular, resonate with the co-emergence hypothesis that I presented in my essay in the last FQXi contest.

              The way you propose to go forward is intriguing:

              "As a guess of 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."

              It's funny how I was just recently thinking along the same lines as your last sentence: I was despairing at my own shortcomings when confronted with the already enormous knowledge base in fundamental physics, and with all that is yet to be discovered and understood, and I was thinking that only an augmented human mind (or the minds of our hopefully benevolent future robot overlords) could ever hope to truly grasp it all!

              Congratulations for submitting a great essay and for the time and effort you take in conversing with other participants. I hope your essay gets into the "finals" -- aren't you a FQXi member yet, since you won one the first prizes last time? There are so many fine essays this time, the final judging will be hard!

              All the best,

              Marc

                Dear Jochen and Marc,

                in fact this essay contest was a real pleasure for me, since I learned a lot about different viewpoints on the issue of fundamentalism and its possible consequences.

                I can only agree with Marc on his list of favorite quotes.

                I also share the view that "true fundamentality should not be "in any way accidental or arbitrary". This seem to conflict with the fact that identifying some fundamentals seem to be always relative to some initial starting assumptions.

                Could it be that this relative arbitrariness isn't so arbitrary as it may seem at first glance? At least it seems to me that whatever is constructed, depends on some fundamental construction process. This process, so it seems to me, operates by replacing certain starting assumptions with some others. If we define 'starting assumptions' by say, being some causally effective initial conditions, by replacing them we also replace the causal structure that was there before.

                Even for the case that we adopt to the starting assumption that the principle of deductive explosion should be choosen as an initial condition, if we do so we must replace the 'law of non-contradiction' by defining it as merely a special case and of limited causal efficiency for the ontology of the world.

                In this sense, I suspect that whatever starting assumptions we choose, the very process of doing so implies the replacement of some starting assumptions together with their formerly assumed causal universality.

                What if external reality is not that different in that respect? I can imagine a world where a universal causally effective relation besides another universal causally effective relation is temporarily paused (although probably only for a tiny fraction of the whole interaction process) in favour of the latter and vice versa.

                If we would look at such a dynamics from a coarse-grained viewpoint, we would probably conclude that we found a certain reliable rule in nature, albeit we cannot detect that this rule only comes about by some temporarily paused other rules.

                I think it is worth thinking about what it probably could mean for some matter, or alternatively for some quantity of energy to temporarily loose some rule and be left just with the remaining rules for its behaviour. From the point of 'misplaced concreteness', maybe this could allow for a solution of understanding 'superpositions' being reduced according to the environments current state of causally effective set of rules at the time of some interaction. This would probably not even need a kind of well defined rhythm for some rules to be paused, since it could be possible that another rule (a meta-rule if one likes) determines when to pause and when not. The 'problem' of a strict determinism is not solved by this - unless one assumes that the 'beables' that are subject to such rules have a kind of sense about every context they are in, but due to some equivalence principle may not be able to unequivocally determine the proper context and therefore create a new context by pausing some behaviour (rule) instead of continuing it or vice versa.

                Agreeable, this is a somewhat very speculative idea and also somewhat anthropic, since it mirrors the mechanics and errors of the human mind itself to identify some 'real' (fundamental) context. Nonetheless I think that it may well be reasonable to view our reality as a kind of context translation process that yields, at higher levels of awareness a kind of creativity and results in real causal efficiency, even if in error about the real context.

                Anyways, I find the idea of some rules pausing (or not pausing) at a fundamental level due to some rather subjective evaluation of some context quite appealing. I think such a reality would be hard to detect, probably or surely only on some microlevel. Maybe the formalism of quantum mechanics without some collapse extensions would be consistent with such an interpretation?

                Any thoughts about this? - are very welcome!!

                Best wishes,

                Stefan Weckbach