Many thanks for your thoughts, Jonathon. Rather than saying one should cast one's ideas in quantum language, I'd suggest one should complement them with quantum language and insights. So one might say that 'vibrations' are part of the picture and that there is a real collapse process under certain conditions, relating in Barad's terms to the actions of agencies. But then (connecting here with the approach of Stapp, who argues that mind is not included properly in QM) one would have to ask what is agency? Can decoherence theory really do this, or does it get one into issues with many-worlds? Also, I think it is an essential to start off with the correct picture, and people will make the effort to learn the basics once they start to see that the semiotic picture initiated by Peirce is the way ahead.

One more point: I don't know if it was in the draft that I sent you or not, but at one point I included reference to the link between a statement by Yardley ending with the crucial phrase ad infinitum, and the concept of fractality or scale invariance. I've realised now that this is very relevant and will detail it separately. Let me say here just that it can be thought of as a radical extension of Feynman's idea 'there's plenty of room at the bottom!' (in effect an anticipation of nanotechnology).

I'm sorry you can't see what I wrote as being an extension of what others have written.

In regard to your questioning the fundmentality of meaning, I offer the following quote by Lewis Carroll (to some extent implicit in the blurb relating to this essay):

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all."

Apart from that, I agree that relationships are important. A number of different concepts are all tied in together.

Apologies for misspelling your name (it was the keyboard what done it!).

Thank you for your nice reply, that's a wonderful quote for sure.

> Apart from that, I agree that relationships are important. A number of different concepts are all tied in together.

I agree as well, my text for this contest is a philosophical attempt to consider them fundamental.

All the best, and thank you again,

Francesco D'Isa

Turtles all the way down, Plenty of room at the bottom, and all that.

Here are some comments that may help picturing my proposals (by a modest amount, at least). The above are both references to the idea that important things including organised activity can be going on at deep levels of reality, as does Bohm's idea that I quoted: 'meaning is capable of an indefinite extension to ever greater levels of subtlety'. Yardley goes a little further:

An entity is always part of a process, a process always part of a system, which is always part of an entity, process and system, ad infinitum, to zero, and, then, one.

The 'infinitum' is important here, suggesting something of the order of fractality (structures at all length scales), a well known concept in physics. So there are entities, which have two aspects: system, which emphasises structure, and process, which is what that structure can accomplish. There is circularity in that not only do systems give rise to processes but processes develop their underlying systems. More confusingly, an entity is not really a thing but more a 'doing', as I discuss in the essay. The situation is well described in the lyrics of a song by Trish Klein: 'everything changes in so many ways, everything rearranges, some things stay the same'. Here 'staying the same' is an abstraction, as when we speak of a specific person even though there is constant change at all levels.

And why are there these constantly changing but in some ways staying the same 'entities'? That's because there are emergent mechanisms that achieve this: 'entities are always part of a process'.

The above picture, with its many interrelationships, is a confusing one and yet makes quite a bit of sense, whereas conventional QM doesn't. As Feynman once said: 'If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics'.

    Version with notes at bottom of the page instead of end

    The rules require notes to be at the end, but if people prefer them to be at the bottom of the page I've uploaded an alternative in this format to PhilPapers, downloadable at https://philpapers.org/rec/JOSOTF. I may later upload an extended version with additional thoughts such as those presented here, keeping the essay as it is. I've also uploaded this version to the physics preprint archive, but ...

    /gripe begins

    ... the archive moderators, bless their tiny minds, have 'put it on hold' rather than making it public right away as is the norm. I gather from Ginsparg that all abstracts are run through an 'intelligent algorithm' to decide if a paper is OK. If the algorithm says it is unsure then it goes to arXiv's moderator team who scratch their heads when they look at my input. The perfectly reasonable conference proceedings 'Consciousness and the Physical World' was stuck on hold for 2 whole months before the moderators decided it was OK for the world to have access to it.

    /gripe ends

      Professor Josephson,

      One way I see processes and entities being distinct is that they effectively go opposite directions of time.

      Think in terms of a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the process points the other direction, consuming material and expelling product.

      Life is similar, in that individuals go from birth to death, their lives being in the future to being in the past, while the species is constantly moving onto new generations, shedding old.

      The relationship between consciousness and thought compares as well, as consciousness moves onto new thoughts, past to future, while the thoughts go future to past.

      It is not as though one exists without the other, rather they are two sides of the same coin. Process is bottom up dynamic/energy, while structure and form are top down framing. The relationship, as it interacts and feeds back on itself, functions like a convection cycle, energy expanding out, as structure precipitates back down.

      Consider as well the basic aspect of galaxies where radiation expands out, as mass precipitates in.

      Thank you for participating in this contest.

      It is a brief, interesting and rich in content essay; I have to digest it.

      The semiotic approach, if I understand well, applied to the physics it is like a physical system influence (it is coded) in the experimental observation.

      If the biosemiotic was applied to robotics, using the parallelism with the new functional genes and agents, then would the robot evolution be possible, with a complex scaffolding?

      The simulation of the Caenorhabditis elegans could provide some information on the semiotic scaffolding of Openworm project?

      I think that biosemiotic work well in biology, but the writing of a differential equation for a dynamics system is not semiotic for mathematical symbols?

      Regards

      Domenico

        Regarding arXiv shenanigans...

        This is precisely why Phil Gibbs founded viXra, the alternative academic archive, because many people including full professors have found similar problems, suffering rejections, delays, or reclassification of preprints to gen-ph even when those same papers were later published in respected journals. There seems to be no recourse or protocol for the redress of grievances either. Raising an objection has gotten some people banned from arXiv entirely. This is why I am part of the support team for viXra, and will not even consider submitting papers to arXiv.

        Regards,

        Jonathan

        Excellent!

        I'll be interested to see what develops, or to research further myself how fractality enters the picture. I see that as nature's way to squeeze more detail into a smaller space, or to compress details appearing in higher dimensions onto the lower-dimensional structures and constructs.

        All the Best,

        Jonathan

        p.s. - no offense taken

        I'm aware of viXra, but that doesn't have the feature that arXiv has that subscribers to a given list get daily lists of new abstracts, which is why reclassification combined with 'this paper is inappropriate for crosslisting' is so regrettable. Actually, there is an appeal process you can find if you look in help, something like emailing moderation@arxiv.org, and I appealed successfully once this way when a submission of mine was totally barred.

        If you have a bit of time to spare, you might find the following articles enlightening in regard to arXiv:

        arXiv unloaded

        Covert censorship by the physics preprint archive (extract follows)

        It is just an ordinary day at the headquarters of the physics preprint archive. The operators are going through their daily routine and are discussing what to do about recent emails:

        'Some "reader complaints" have come in regarding preprints posted to the archive by Drs. Einstein and Yang. Dr. Einstein, who is not even an academic, claims to have shown in his preprint that mass and energy are equivalent, while Professor Yang is suggesting, on the basis of an argument I find completely unconvincing, that parity is not conserved in weak interactions. What action shall I take?'

        'Abject nonsense! Just call up their records and set their 'barred' flags to TRUE.'

        'And here's a letter from one 'Hans Bethe' supporting an author whose paper we deleted from the archive as being 'inappropriate'.'

        'Please don't bother me with all these day to day matters! Prof. Bethe is not in the relevant 'field of expertise', so by rule 23(ii) we simply ignore anything he says. Just delete his email and send him rejection letter #5.'

        Vital resource should be open to all physicists

        Prof. Josephson,

        In my opinion, Life is but the normal extension or evolution of what the universe does. Life is a recipe for an even better dispersion of energy in space and time than that of the simple black body. As for "simple", I am getting to it in my essay. I am taking the old "substance" and "cause" approach and it gives interesting insight in the matter.

        All the bests,

        Marcel,

        Thanks for replying Brian,

        I agree that with arXiv as the de facto standard; it has become a vital resource that should be open to all physicists. If our work is perfected and polished enough to be published in a proceedings volume or journal, or to appear as a chapter in a volume of academic work, it is wholly inappropriate for the arXiv folks to pass judgement that unduly restricts access or relegates papers to a category like gen-ph where they may never be found.

        It is well-known that it is nearly impossible to get a paper posted in hep-th unless it has a String Theory lineage. I have met and/or heard lectures by some of ST's most prominent figures, but I think it is a grave mistake to regard it as the only game in town. I can see why people like Geoffrey Dixon become curmudgeons, because they are not taken seriously by mainstream scientists regardless of the predictive power their proposed framework offers.

        So I am not convinced that arXiv could ever be fair or will ever live up to its mandate and promise. It is a good idea gone bad!

        Regards,

        Jonathan

        I've just heard from the moderators, thus:

        The moderators determined that your submission was in need of significant review and revision before it would be considered publishable by a conventional journal.

        Idiotic, isn't it! Almost certainly their system flags my submissions for review when anyone else's would get by with no problem.

        And thank heaven for PhilPapers! But of course there's our university's archive system that I can use but I tend to keep that for special situations.

        By the way, my ffp15 lecture, as you know, covers this material in considerably more detail. They did post the video on youtube, but not in a very useful form. I was promised they'd put in the slides but it looks as if they didn't get round to it. Accordingly I'm working on this myself and with luck will have it on CU's media server today or tomorrow. I think this will be easier to follow as it goes into more detail, and will post the details when it is there.

        My experience with arXiv.

        I'm not too disappointed by the system of segregation (leter # 5), because I'm not the only one. But the system of endorsement has touched me. As a meteorologist, I do not even know physicists who could endorse for me. When I thought to go to the Department of Physics in my town, I first read the articles of potential endorsers. Dean published article in which he discovered a significant value of 1000 * alpha. I know the importance of the fine structure constant, but who can explain the importance of the number 1000 in physics? Then I decided not to ask for endorsement. Not only has the scientific untruths published on arXiv, there are obvious errors in calculations that reviewers did not notice.

        There is at least no segregation at viXra.

        Regards,

        Branko

        Professor Josephson,

        This is of interest to me:

        "And why are there these constantly changing but in some ways staying the same 'entities'? That's because there are emergent mechanisms that achieve this: 'entities are always part of a process'... "

        And indeed, physics giants have often come to discoverys with thinking about processes, not about things (Newton, Kepler, Planck ...). The entire Boskovic Philosophiae naturalis is about the forces that drive nature. I think that Bošković anticipated much of what was later discovered, probably regarding the topics of your essay too. My question is:

        Why is Boskovic very little quoted in modern science? And

        Do you agree? Plancks units are 'entities that are always part of a process'. So there is no beginning of the universe with the Planck time. Planck time rather is an entity in the flow of the universe.

        Regards,

        Branko

        Professor Josephson

        Thank you very much for a deep and thought provocative article.

        A short question: Do you think that we could change causality in Bohm's theory? Instead of a wave guiding a particle we could assume a particle to generate a real wave function. Think about a boat moving in water.

        Best regards from ______________ John-Erik Persson

          Jack Sarfatti is the main defender of the original Bohm theory (not the later Bohm that I quoted), so you need to ask him.