Things, Laws, and the Human Mind by Tejinder Pal Singh

Dear Tejinder

Indeed the mind is total different from the "I", that is why I say ; You won't find the announcer inside the radio" You say "Enter Consciousness "The Watcher", but isn't the watcher inside our emergent reality also an "EVENT" ? Of course you are aware of the study of Hammerhoff and Penrose where a bridge is perceived between the micro and the macro reality . see also this link

Your "vertical fundamental" perception is the same reason that I am in favour "Causal Emergence".

You mention "Only the mind knows time; consciousness does not know time." I would like to say : The time-restricted part of consciousness that is the origin of the "I am" is a part of the TIMELESS Consciousness (Total Consciousness).

I enjoyed travelling together with you and appreciated your participation highly.

I hope you will find some time to readmy essay "Foundational Quantum Reality Loops" where I try to give an answer to your question "Understanding how consciousness emerges as a state of matter is unfortunately beyond the scope of the present essay, and we simply assume the watcher as a given"

best regards

Wilhelmus de Wilde

Dear Professor Tejinder Pal Singh,

Reliable evidence exists 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.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Thank you for your comment on my essay! I answered there.

bests,

Francesco

I think that reductions are trivial and they look successful because they omit something. A physicalist view might propose that mathematical objects exist only mentally and the mind is just a brain state. This is the materialist answer to "what is fundamental". More interesting, even if not very convincing, is the inverse reduction made popular lately by Max Tegmark's "mathematical universe hypothesis". So, either maths and physics are objective and the mind is subjective, or perhaps physics is fundamental and all the rest is just a complication. I have been trying to argue that in order to have two things you need a difference - which is a third one, something you might find uninteresting or irrelevant but which is nevertheless mandatory. This is a functional viewpoint which can be sustained, while the substantial approach tends to collapse.

And Thank you for reading and commenting my essay.

a.l.

Hi Tejinder, I like your essay very much.

Although your classification into categories of of things and laws works, I think the names themselves might be ambiguous and cause confusion if this is used elsewhere. At first I didn't like the use of 'thing' as it seemed to belong to objects but I see that it can be extended to related ideas. Space would be thing-where, time thing-when, motion thing-happening, object thing-exists. All sorts of 'thingness', which is a term you use later on. Law too seems, at first, to belong to specific kinds of prediction or decrees of how things should be. Yet, the contents of the set of law such as qualia and measurables are (to some extent) predictable consequences. At first you have all of mathematics in there but later it seems there is a question of the whereabouts of maths' natural home.

The separation of motion, thing(-happening), from law, velocity, is useful. Distilling thing(-exists) into quantity is a mental process. Taking your example of a brick, without the mind there is just the brick and not the distilled quantity. Distilling thing(-happening) into a singular measurable involves some kind of measurement process, which need not be entirely mental treatment of sensory input but also some kind of interaction with the measured. Yet, the outcome of the process and any additional treatment such as calculation does end up with a mental 'product' that is known. Which is distinct from the thing. Taking the example of velocity, without the decision of how it is to be measured, that is 'relative to what?' the motion is undefined, not distilled into a singular value .

Up until you start to blur the separation of mind-brain and consciousness law, and thing, I am in broad agreement. The spacetime you propose I can see relates to your previous work, in references. Certainly time needs to be non commutative because when things happen is very important. Such as the building of the sequence of a protein chain. Having a sequential, non commutative time does not, as I see it, mean that "everything happens at once" but merely that it is the same time everywhere, yet things still happen over the passage of time. Nevertheless, I realize you are talking about your own specific model.

Mathematics can be 'distilled' from observations of nature and then be used to compare similar circumstances or objects. That there is similarity or sameness of the mathematics seems to me to likely be a consequence of the similarity of what is compared rather than the mathematics being causal. All exponential growth of what ever kind is mathematically similar not because the 'numerical pattern distillation' is causing it to be but because of the similarity of the happening; hence the 'distillations' are the same. I think that is agreeing with your idea that the mathematical answers are in the things themselves (bricks example). Which it seems is true for quantities but not measurables which are relational.

Good thought provoking read. Kind regards Georgina

Dear Tejinder Pal Singh,

Your conclusion:

„In trying to understand how the human mind converts things into laws, we are led to conclude that the mathematical world and the physical world are one and the same."

It's the same as my conclusion in the previous FQX-i contest.

Interesting is the Collatz conjecture, which ends with 16, 8, 4, 2. Not knowing about that conjecture I have assumed the importance of number 16(2^4) in the article „Two Significant Cosmological Masses", http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Research%20Papers/View/5752

I appreciate your essay.

Regards,

Branko

Dear Professor Singh,

Thank you for the insightful thoughts. I just happened to reach to your conclusion " In trying to understand how the human mind

converts things into laws, we are led to conclude that the mathematical world and the physical world are one and the same", and, to my small surprise, this is pretty much what I had conveyed in my essay. Its definitely a positive sign!

Sincerely,

Siddhant Bahuguna

Hi Tejinder,

Your essay was entertaining. I enjoyed your rather mildly solipsistic (with respect to mathematics) take on the whole thing, since my own viewpoint also has a dose of solipsism.

You say:

"the mathematical world and the physical world are one and the same. The search for this union is what we would like to call fundamental. Everything springs from this union."

Wouldn't incompleteness theorems and Gödelian results cause heavy limitations on the amount of help mathematics can give us with physical reality? What are your thoughts on this?

Regards,

Aditya

Dear Tejinder Pal Singh,

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.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Dear Siddhant,

Thank you for your remarks, and for pointing me to your essay. I gave it a first read just now, but I need to get back to it later to understand what you are trying to convey.

Best,

Tejinder

Would like to piggyback on this and add that my own essay's rating has also suffered heavily in this, going straight from 7.3 in 3 to 6.0 in 4.

Dear Prof. Singh,

Your essay makes interesting observations about a number of different topics.

You seem to suggest that the conscious mind is distinct from the brain. In my FQXi essay last year, "No Ghost in the Machine", I took the opposite viewpoint. I argued that consciousness reflects a specific brain structure that evolved to create a dynamic model of the environment which recognizes self, other agents, and objects.

You also question the foundations of quantum mechanics and space-time, but you seem to accept the orthodox statement of the problem. On the contrary, my essay this year, "Fundamental Waves and the Reunification of Physics", argues that both general relativity and QM have been largely misunderstood. QM should not be a general theory of nature, but rather a mechanism for creating discrete soliton-like wavepackets from otherwise classical continuous fields. These same quantum wavepackets have a characteristic frequency and wavelength that define time and space, enabling GR without invoking an abstract curved spacetime.

This picture has no quantum entanglement, which has important technological implications. In the past few years, quantum computing has become a fashionable field for R&D by governments and corporations. But the predicted power of quantum computing comes directly from entanglement. I predict that the entire quantum computing enterprise will fail within about 5 years. Only then will people start to question the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Alan Kadin