I could not isolate your response , please respond directly and briefly as you are a busy buddy addressing me by name! Up to you to ignore if feel so!

Dear Tejinder,

In a reply I referred to your sentence "I fully agree with you that the `current border between past and future is the only fixed point'."

Perhaps this reply got lost for unknown reason although I got a confirmation. Did you read it nonetheless?

Maybe it was taboo to blame Einstein for writing "past, present, and future"?

I criticized that the present is strictly speaking not a state but just the border between the past and the future. The present is a fuzzy notion that may include parts from both. There is no extension between the past and the future.

A point is something that has no parts.

Eckard

Dear Tejinder Pal Singh Ji:

I enjoyed reading your essay and introducing the fundamental concept of thing-law. I also share common interest in your research to explain the QM measurement problem or collapse of the wave function. I have developed a relativistic model to resolve the measurement problem and explain inner workings of QM in my paper - What is "Fundamental" - Is "C" the Speed of Light?. It also resolves several paradoxes of physics theories and cosmology.

I would deeply appreciate your comments/rating on my paper and would like to keep active communications with you on your ongoing research. You can contact me at avsingh@alum.mit.edu.

Best Regards

Avtar Singh

    Sorry, the link is not working. Please go directly to my paper.

    Thanks

    Avtar

    Dear Avtar,

    Thank you for your kind remarks and for reading my paper. I look forward to reading your essay.

    My best regards,

    Tejinder

    Dear Singh Saheb,

    Excellent write-up ! These words carries more weight as it comes from a Professor like you working in one of premiere Research Institute in World. It is one of the best essay submission in this context. I share the underlying thought process ingrained in your essay.

    I have also expressed my views about the mysterious nature in the submission

    https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2998

    I strongly believe that we Human are a self-hypnotized species - the existing knowledge base with us is too minuscule to appreciate the complexities of Nature. We have a long way to go.

    With Best Wishes

    Brajesh Mishra

    Working as Director

    Department of Telecommunications, GoI

      Dear Brajesh,

      Thank you so much for your kind remarks on my essay. I totally agree with you that we know very little; most remains to be known and discovered.

      I look forward to reading your essay.

      With regards,

      Tejinder

      Tejender, you raised a query about cosmic consciousness vis a vis human consciousness. Universe at creation had a low entropy which is constantly increasing eversince the the moment of creation. Naturally, there was a level of consciousness possessed at start but with increasing entropy, the level of consciousness will change. Universe at start had the knowledge built in that a human intelligence will evolve way way later. Then only it can appear as it happened about 15000 years back. Thus entropy implicitly contains cosmic consciousness which then distrubutes itself as life appeared in the form of plants/herbs, animals and human beings with our ancesters that evolved too!

      Dear Narendra,

      Hello. I do not really have anything more to say on consciousness at this juncture, other than what I said in my essay. I did come across this paper

      Consciousness and Entropy

      and related papers by these authors, but I think these are at this stage ongoing studies. Also, they talk of entropy as a measure of consciousness, not entropy AS consciousness.

      Regards,

      Tejinder

      Hi Tejinder

      I like your essay, especially the conclusion since my idea confirms it. Many FQXI essays in past and present confused issues and instead of making them clearer, they made it all mysterious, mystic and what not, and forget how science does the remarkable job it has always done.

      Anyway see if my essay makes any sense. Thanks

      https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3127

      Dear Adel,

      Thanks so much for reading my essay and for your kind comments. I am very pleased to note from a first browse of your essay that we agree on the principal conclusion as to how the physical and mathematical worlds relate to each other. I will read your essay soon.

      Best wishes,

      Tejinder

      Dear Prof. Singh,

      thank you for sharing this interesting essay.

      I would be glad if you find a moment to go through mine, as well, and to have a discussion about convergences and differences between our works.

      https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3017

      All good wishes,

      Flavio

        Dear Tejinder Pal Singh,

        i very much enjoyed your essay. You start with the most obvious, namely consciousness, the latter being the crucial tool for at all making some statements about whether or not an external reality has some fundamental properties or not.

        Albeit your attempt to find a fundamental grounding for all of reality is well layed-down and reasonably argued, please allow me to make some critical comments and to ask you some further questions.

        You are led to conclude that the mathematical world and the physical world are one and the same. But according to your pleadings from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, there must be an exception from this identity. You identified this exception as consciousness. The latter must be viewed as an exception from the stated identity of mathematics with physics, since not all mathematical structures in the external world can be considered as being conscious.

        It follows that for the case of aggregates of matter that are not conscious, you define mathematics as identical with physics, hence laws and things are one and the same.

        For those aggregates of matter which are conscious and self-aware, you assume that things and laws have to be described in complementary terms, namely as things *and* laws - until they can be finally understood to be fundamentally identical.

        Let me now suppose for the sake of my arguments that our understanding of consciousness would be such, that there is no difference between a mathematical and a physical description of it, because these both descriptions are identical.

        Then, there are mathematical laws (the dynamics of the brain) which compress and encode parts of themselves, and also can decompress and decode parts of themselves. Since decoding and encoding are algorithmic tasks, you define the human mind as a dynamical algorithmic task. The latter is surely time-dependent. In contrast to that, you define consciousness (the watcher) as a timeless observer, at least until this observer dies.

        In summary, the human mind as well as the accompanying consciousness are time-dependent mathematical structures. In contrast to this, the mathematical world must be timeless.

        My question to you now is if you consider what you call the 'mathematical world' to be timeless or do you consider this world as evolving and transforming with time? Since you equate the world of mathematics with the world of physics, I am led to conclude that your definition of a mathematical world implies the latter to be in constant transformatory activity, embedded in a background of some time-evolution. Even if all possible mathematical relationships would reside in a timeless, infinite platonic realm, nothing in this realm indicates that those relationships have to become self-aware at some point in time.

        So I conclude that self-awareness is a fundamental aspect of the world of mathematics and that this world is a world where 'things' - means 'laws' - change according to some property called time. Is this also your view that you intended to express with your essay?

        Hope you can clarify these points,

        best wishes

        Stefan Weckbach

          Professor Singh,

          You are a good writer and your work is pleasant to read, but for the life of me I have no idea how it connects in any way to physics or science, or how to connect some of the leaps of connection between paragraphs. How math became reality by the end of your essay seems to have a lot more to do with your excellent (and they truly are) skills as a writer than any kind of logical argument that I was able to discern.

          I should note that after witnessing a few days of the Hunger Games rules of this competition, I abandoned any interest in "winning" this absurd contest and chose to go back to my role as a an associate editor-in-chief for a technical magazine: Assessing what I actually am seeing in these essays, not trying to build alliances.

          You are a really good writer, and you sound like a really nice person. However, since your essay lacks anything but your writing skills to tie the arguments together, I would discard it within five minutes for its lack of providing anything fundamental other your personal and philosophical perspective -- which is fine, but in the end it's just that: Your opinion.

          Cheers,

          Terry Bollinger

            Dear Professor Bollinger,

            Thank you for reading my essay, and for your criticism. I will try to reconstruct in brief my line of reasoning, and perhaps then you could point out specific criticisms.

            1. There is a physical universe around us, and we use experimental data about it to discover laws of nature. We use our mental faculties (mind) to do so. This same mind has thoughts and feelings, and this same mind also does something as precise as mathematics.

            2. How does the mind do all this? How does it convert experimental data into laws? How do thoughts and feelings arise? How does the mind do mathematics? Is mathematics invented or discovered? If it is discovered, where was it before we discovered it? I think these are fair questions to ask, in a contest such as this one. As an answer, I do not offer a rigorous mathematical theorem or a new law or theory which you could test experimentally. Science is not yet advanced enough for that, with regard to these questions. But I would not call my answer my opinion; with the dictionary meaning of opinion being `a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.' It is not fair to say that my essay is not based on fact and knowledge! If anything, it is based only on fact and knowledge. You can call my answers my philosophical perspective perspective; I am fine with that. But to say that it is not science nor physics is also not fair, as I will try to justify below. A good part of what I say is based on my earlier peer reviewed publications, and the rest are new ideas in science and philosophy, which provide a basis for further work.

            3. We all are self-aware beings. I am proposing that self-awareness and mind are distinct and separate entities. I discussed more in support of this in my Ref. [1]. Now, how does one prove something like this? Above all, I appeal to personal direct experience, and that makes it an experiment! A large school of thought agrees with this distinction.

            4. Separating self-awareness from the mind provides a helpful framework to understand how mind converts things into laws. Self-awareness assigns a dual interpretation to an active neural pathway: it is a thing as well as a law. You could call this a hypothesis, but please do not call it an opinion! :-)

            The thing-law interpretation is assigned to thoughts, physics laws, mathematical theorems. Honestly, I find it very convincing, and it clarifies a whole lot of confusion for me.

            5. The neural pathways for thoughts are no different in structure from the neural pathways for mathematics, as far as we know, through experiments in neuroscience. Then, if thoughts reside *in* the pathways, then it seems reasonable maths also resides in the pathways.

            6. But does the mind create mathematics, the way it creates thoughts and poems? This as you know is a controversial question. I myself wrote in favour of this view, in a previous FQXi essay. But I am no longer comfortable with that view. Different human brains are so different in their connectivity, that it seems incredible that all brains create the same universal mathematics. So I am *suggesting* that brains discover mathematics. But to believe that mathematics is Platonic is what I would call an opinion. Nobody has ever seen the home of mathematics. Thus, it seems very plausible that just as neural pathways have a dual thing-law interpretation, the physical world also has a dual thing-law interpretation. Is this not more reasonable than Platonism, and more reasonable than `minds create universal mathematics'?

            7. In the world around us, why do we not `see' maths in the things? Because things live in space and time, but maths does not live in space and time.

            8. The distinction between matter and space-time is true only as an approximation, in physics. As I have rigorously argued in my Refs. [6]-[9] and [11]-[12], one cannot make such a distinction in a deeper theory which addresses the problems of quantum mechanics. This deeper theory makes experimentally falsifiable predictions which are the subject of several ongoing experiments worldwide.

            9. If matter cannot be distinguished from space-time, then we have one entity, matter-space-time, and another entity, the mathematical description of matter-space-time. If maths is Platonic, where is its home? Matter-space-time is all that we have, where to ask maths to live, unless we wish to invoke something unscientific. And how do we describe matter-space-time rigorously: not through some fundamental building blocks of matter living in space-time, but through the mathematical equations alone. In that sense I am suggesting that we should no longer make a distinction between mathematics and physical reality, once matter ceases to be distinct from space-time.

            10. I readily admit that a great deal more needs to be done before the above ideas become a scientifically accepted theory. But the ideas are rooted in science and philosophy.

            Please let me know what is it that you find objectionable in the above.

            I am grateful for your kind appreciation of my writing skills! :-)

            My best regards,

            Tejinder