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

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 Tejinder

Indeed we are "in agreement about your "vertcal fundamental perception, we use different words and...In causal emergence I see "steps" fromwhere new phenomena can emerge (like in the essay from Eric P. Hoel last year.

I don't get this Wilhelmus :-) What did you mean by the `time-restricted' part of consciousness, or `total consciousness'?

Sorry for the error in my expression here, with the "restricted part" I mean the consciousness as we are experiencing it in this specific emerging reality. Total Consciousness as I see it is OUTSIDE all the restrictions like time and space , outside our emerging reality. It is beyond the Planck area (however area is not a good description) that I call Total Simultaneity. "Here" all realities ra emerging like LOOPS. (see my essay). And here again we agree both it is about the "things" that go beyond our comprehension, and it is good that we both can say "I don't know"

best regards

Wilhelmus

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

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

I will add my vote that FQXi disqualify the 1-bombers. jrc

Professor Singh,

One thought to consider about time, thought and consciousness is that while consciousness goes from one thought to the next, these thoughts coalesce and dissolve, hence consciousness goes past to future, while thought goes future to past.

I think there is a lot about time that needs to be reconsidered. Is it really the Newtonian,narrative flow, which physics codifies as measures of duration, or it just change and our perception is flashes of sequence?

We still see the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

Dear Tejinder,

This was a beautiful journey, starting from the apparent duality between things and laws, and arriving to their unity using arguments from physics. Also I think the notion of "law" you use unifies "meaning", "qualia", "physical law", and "mathematical truth" in a natural way. While I was reading in your essay the paragraph about stars and the motion of Mars, The Motion of Stars started to play in my music player, adding a soundtrack to your insightful thoughts, and reminding me how music is one of the purest examples of law. With this essay, I realized how much your apparently diverse interests visible in your articles and essays converge and become different paths of the same trip to the oneness (by the way, the Collatz conjecture is considered by some a mathematical illustration of oneness). Thanks again for the intellectual and spiritual breakfast at the beginning of my day!

Best wishes,

Cristi

I subscribe to your request to FQXi, as it happened to me and others about the same time.

May i interject re. consciousness. There are a variety of levels of this entitiy. It can be defined as per Dictionary meaning of this word. Human beings and our predecessors came into the scene only 15/20 thousand years back. At the te same Universe has been existing in its present form since millions of years. Intelligent life also could be existing else where than our Earth with our Sun as star. Consciousnees for individuals exists as 'awarenss ' level. It varies on a tremendous scale amongst us too. For example, i rate our ancesters back 3 to 5 thousands years back, as having far greater insight than most of us have about LIFE. There is internal as well as external life. Science governs the latter while the former is governed by Spirituality, unlike religions practiced today! As the Universe shows a logical growth from its start billions of years back, we should wonder about its Creator, if we believe that nothing has not created every thing! Thus there exists a cosmic part of consciousness which has created the Universe. We call it GOD. Today, humans have various levels of it! Starting at lowest level are the animal instincts then going up we have a normal being and then we have men of wisdom. Finally, i prefer to call them the Great Rishis that existed well over 3 to 5 thousand year back who composed the Vedas and Upanishads. For myself i can say that reading an Upanishad and comprehending it to my better limit, it took me through repeated stages of studying such ancient scripts for comprehending and understanding the same to the best of my ability!