On the Fundamentality of Meaning by Brian D. Josephson

Dear Professor Josephson,

I am interested in your work presented here, also because I have my own, scientifically rigorous arguments in favour of the probable existence (necessity) of "other", biologically active levels of reality, not (yet) directly observable, but ontologically real. And I obtain this conclusion with the help of extended (reality-based and causally complete) mathematics of "unreduced dynamic complexity", corresponding to the description at the end of your essay abstract. You can find some major points in my essay here, with much more details in references therein. This is to say that the necessary mathematical framework may already exist, with clear signs of its efficiency. And what's interesting, it is the same one that helps to clarify "quantum mysteries" and other accumulated "contradictions" of standard science framework at "usual" fundamental levels of physical reality.

I wanted to bring to your attention...

There has just appeared an essay by Todd L Duncan entitled "What if Meaning is Fundamental?" asking as you do if meaning is an attribute fundamental to Physics.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Professor Josephson

Ive admirred your Essay ( as all your works!) I am also in opinion that "biologisation) of science can help to understanding it

My best regards

M.Kozłowski

Emeritus Professor Warsaw University

An individual is considered to have a body, mind and the soul. The last can be taken as the life force that mediates between body and soul to provide pathways that we chose and take in our lives. I wish to raise the question if the Nature followed some super logic to create this marvellous Universe for us to understand and comprehend through science alone? What you think consciousness plays in relating matter/energy with the spirit. Can spirit lend human consciousness to comprehend cosmic consciousness of Nature itself?

Prof. Josephson,

If you really want to irritate people enough for them to take notice, why not raise the issue as a point of philosophy, rather than science?

For one thing, what you propose is the source of consciousness as an element, rather than an ideal and that is a very real threat tot he logic of monotheistic religion. That a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.

Given that religion is a top down cultural frame, it would also bring up some basic social and biological issues. Such as that good and bad are not a cosmic duel between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological and emotional binary of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

Though in order to function as a coherent entity, a society needs some basic moral compass. Hence top down religious institutions.

This would open a very large Pandora's Box, but it might also give humanity some clue as to why life has so much grey areas and complexity. Looking around the world today and the impending limits being approached, we might need to wake up a little more.

Get that ball rolling and the scientists will have to take notice.

Dear Brian D. Josephson,

I read your essay and the accompanying comments here. Good that you question a lot which is held to be true at the present by many scientists.

According to Yardley's Circular Theory, I just want to annotate that the American poet T.S. Eliot seemed to have expressed the circular movements of the analytic (and emotional) mind in his poem "little gidding" by writing

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

In my own essay here, I trace back all formal systems (including antivalent logics) to a circle, the latter being the beginning of mathematics and logics as we know it. Of course, I use the circle merely as a metaphor, a container that encapsulates the deeper meaning of existence beyond any formal systems. Goethe did a good job in his Faust to show how formal systems (preconceptions) have a grip on one's mind:

"Where sense fails it's only necessary

To supply a word, and change the tense.

With words fine arguments can be weighted,

With words whole Systems can be created,

With words, the mind does its conceiving,

No word suffers a jot from thieving."

I would be happy if you would read my essay and comment on it.

Thanks for the courtesy of NO COMMENT. Pleease do visit our essay in the names of Anil Sashtri and myself as i welcome your most critical comment!

Professor Josephson,

That was somewhat in jest, but only somewhat. The fact remains the current scientific belief is that processing information leads to consciousness, aka, "Artificial Intelligence." Rather than the more information focused of us expressing our consciousness by processing information.

One would suspect a fish identifies consciousness with swimming. Much as those more physically inclined understand muscle memory as a conscious feedback loop, as knowledge is mental feedback. Think how much knowledge is subconsciously processed, aka insight.

So the question is how to create a large enough discussion to bring some number of people around to seeing it from the other direction and that would be to argue it philosophically. That of consciousness as bottom up process, leading to the ability to process information, rather than a top down frame, defined by information.

Given the monotheistic assumption of a top down, "all-knowing absolute," As Pope John Paul 2 described it, there is a large apple cart that could be unsettled for a large number of people who are spiritually inclined, but don't have much use for organized religion.

Just offering up some strategy.

Regards,

John

We are all working for the good of humanity and fellow feelings among professionals. A University Professor offers consultancy to his juniors without worrying about money! i too feel sorry in my own way!

Dear Professor Josephson,

One obtains an enormous sense of aesthetic satisfaction when one draws parallels between the cosmos and the self.

I would say that you are traversing the road less taken by attacking the notion of meaning in your analysis; I myself have also taken a rather language-oriented path, one that is less heavily laden with ontology than one might expect when speaking of 'Fundamentality'. There are some very strangely indirect but greatly interesting similarities between our trains of thought, beginning with (but not limited to) our focus on meaning. (I would be happy to hear your thoughts on it.)

I am unable to recall where I read this particular observation, but I think it is quite apt in this context: While biology, the science of life, seems to be heading full throttle towards an entirely physical description of consciousness, physics, the science of the inanimate, seems to be leaning more and more heavily on it!

As I stated previously, it seems to me that an analogy of the sort you make is quite unconventional, but in light of the previous observation, it is one I find immensely fascinating and would love to read more about.

To put it in shorter and simpler words: I like your essay.

Regards,

Aditya

Dear Brian, thanks for having skimmed my essay, happy about that! I have not read Ilexa Yardley's multitude of books from amazon, only visited her website. But in the look-inside versions of her books, however, I can see that she writes in a kind of trance-language, means dense-packed words, meant to be suggestive and invoke something. The circulary theory heavily depends on our ability to draw a distinction, since this is all we have available to come to some conclusions. I think Yardley's words suggest that, albeit our distinctions can be freely choosen (best examples are the multitude of answers here in the current contest to what is fundamental), the act of making a distinction is the 'ever' invariant part of it - together with the criterion of consistency and the rules of logic.

I think Yardley's attempt is a reformulation of George Spencer-Browns "Laws of Form", although expanded to all kinds of human affairs other than hard science (in the sense of maths and logics). Since we obviously are indeed to a certain degree free to choose our starting axioms and with it create formal systems ("whole systems of words" in Goethe's sense), my own approach also does use distinctions as indications and vice versa - just in the sense Spencer-Brown does. But my approach does not evaluate formal systems as fundamental in the same sense Spencer-Brown does purport it with his laws of Form or Ilexa Yardley does. My approach tries to trace back those abilities to make distinctions to a realm that has as its fundamental distinction the one between consciousness being able to question some truths within this realm - namely free will to choose between mutually exclusive alternatives - and consciousness being able to further stick to those truths. In the former case, a phenomenological realm apart from the realm of fundamental truth is the necessary consequence. In other worlds, entities which question the fundamentality of the entity that brought them into being - God - will preceive their new "formal system of opposites" as the real deal.

This is not hanging on to some fairy tales, but if you look around, you will see the world as a fallen one. Surely, all the suffering and the evil works of some people may be perfectly consistent with what the latter presupposed in the first place, namely that God is dead. But I think we have to take into account - and carefully examine - some possible counterexamples, like for example near-death experiences and their ability to gain some verifiable information independent from brain functioning and / or the physical senses. I do not intend you to answer to these annotations, but would be happy if you could nonetheless re-read my essay in light of this - since I did not manage to put all I wrote here in the essay as it stands. I merely tried to open a perspective for a view that can transcend our self-contained and self-resembled systems of scientific explanations without having to have a near-death experience or some kind of revelation, but only by the help of logics and the inner awareness that there has to be some fundamental truth about our existence that also incorporates consciousness as well as meaning. My approach is in some sense fundamentally reductionistic, in that it reduces antivalent logic and mathematics to be only of a temporal validity in a world that facilitates itself as rather irreconcilable than complementary to the realm it departed from. It only seems otherwise, because we are to such a huge extend embodied within complementary phenomena and therefore embodied within relative thinking about all things. Near-death experiences show at least that this kind of thinking must not reflect the true circumstances under which we are here - although some more eastern philosophies tend to purport a view that everything is relative and therefore everything is true or likewise false / absurd. It is no wonder that eastern philosophy hasn't found the "real Tao", since eastern philosophy heavily abstracts from concret human conditions of fear and survival to the deduction that the latter should be merely illusions, coming from nowhere and going to nowhere.

Finally, thanks again for having skimmed what I wrote for this contest.

Best wishes for your own approach!

Stefan Weckbach