On the Fundamentality of Meaning by Brian D. Josephson

Aditya Dwarkesh

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

Stefan Weckbach

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

Ulla Mattfolk

I did a study of how we can understand the 'Life-force' as something fundamental, like a quasistate giving rise to the 'fundamentals' of bosons and fermions, constants also maybe, that we have today. And 'mirror-states' formed by chirality, still not symmetric. So much has been done since the Days you came up with Josephson junctions and superconductivity. Still the thinking continues in old tracks as by speed alone.

Hope you can read through my essay and give your opinion too. Many thanks for your contribution.

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3093

What is Life? A theory of 'More than everything'.

Ulla Mattfolk.

Ulla Mattfolk

May I say something...

There are so much we don't yet know.

We cannot say what is consciousness, if such even exist.

We cannot say what is information, and how it is related to above. Is it inherent or emergent?

We cannot say what is top-down causation, but something should be there as a guide, it is just Logic reasoning. Emotions maybe?

We cannot say if AI can actually THINK or do they just 'process information'. Can they make thought 'jumps' like we? And how make them emotional (following the top-down causation....)?

Yes, there is much we don't know, just BELIEVE in.

Ulla Mattfolk

Brian Josephson

You appear not to comprehend the fact that evaluating your work takes time. Money is not the issue.

James Rose

I've been fascinated since the 1996 "Towards a Science of Consciousness", finding out that Brian branched out to explore the more personal. meaningful, interpretive aspects of sentient experience. And have been grateful for the few minutes of conversation at various conferences - such as in Holland with the topic of Emergence.

I wholehearted agree that conventional science modeling is insufficient, and likely has some deficiencies in it for it to grasp, let alone express and discuss, the grandeur of our universe .. which by default has to include .. 'fundamentals'.

I am curious Brian, why you didn't reference/mention cybernetics? "Meaning" is a very valuable qualia to include in any TOE. And I think, as many do, that a physics-based criteria for a TOE is to not only exclude the associated relevance of all the vaster complexities and tiers of organizations, but, to mentally dismiss all of that with the wave of a verbal hand,"Those are -just- emergent properties, secondary and 'less' in value or importance in some sense, to the primal constructs of existence."

Not so, not so at all. Because we would otherwise have to posit that emergence produces novel 'fundamentals' or entity/relations that have no relevance or precursive presence in the preceding tiers and events and processes.

Your stressing the word "meaning", is something that Wiener and cybernetics identified as -very- relevant. In fact, I would suggest "meaning" is a word that conveys that association relationship as a synonym .. "relevance". Even if experienced in other frames of reference ... colors versus wave lengths ; language~music versus 'vibrations'. Because each tier of organization has its own sensing~engaging apparatus .. organelles, as it were.

Your designation of Josephson Junction (JJ) ... is a quantum states mechanism of data transference .. meaningfully retained data sets .. from transmitter to receiver.

And so I enjoy your efforts to awaken thinkers to that truth. Behaviors and actions in one tier of existence has interpretive coherent cybernetic -relevance- in other tiers of complex structures .. and should be naturally appreciated as shared interrelated .. associated .. qualia~phenomena~data.

A physics only 'TOE" is, as another friend of mine describes .. really a narrow blindered .. theory of SOMEthings. Even if everything is constructed of those minimalist particles ~waves. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) should more properly be called SI .. SIMULATED intelligence. Especially since life sentience is structured as 'hardware is software', versus hardware carrying software. JJ's are a seminal example. Sender~receiver states change across a separation. They physically fundamentally "re-form" .. and the information moves along -as- the new quantum states or metabolic structures changes.

So somewhere, somehow, deep inside the physics events, are unconsidered 'relevances' .. natural meanings that the particles and waves have with each other. Which are the "primitives" .. which have the capacity to cybernetically contribute to next tiers of organization, as they interact into higher complications .. of added relevance.

James Rose

(*apologies for any typos :-) )

Brian Josephson

Re your: 'I am curious Brian, why you didn't reference/mention cybernetics?', the arguments are to a large extent cybernetic in character, but biosemiosis is a more precise indication of what is involved, and so I used that term instead.

James Rose

Ah, I see. I don't specifically mention cybernetics in my essay either, but do consider the current question vis a vis cybernetic/semiotic concerns through the ideas of Benj Whorf from the 1930's ; as one aspect of 'fundamental'.

If you have time, I'd be grateful for your thoughts on my submission "Physical Fundamentals, Math Fundamentals, Idea Fundamentals - Have We Spotted Them All?"

Whorf was essentially a professional linguist, but I found certain of his insights important and very applicable for improving how we frame general research methodology for any field - not the least, disparate subjects without obvious connections, but yet having underlying shared properties.

Many thanks, James

Narendra Nath

Yes, i agree time does come in. I thought otherwsie as the term 'cosulatancy' is used commercially while we academicians talk of collaboration and discussions. Kindly spare time if you can to comment on our essay here!

Brian Josephson

I do get a lot of people writing in similarly asking for me to comment on their work and feel like I am being treated as a consultant since, as is the case with your essay, a quick look most often (but not always) doesn't disclose anything of interest to me so the collaboration/discussion possibility that you refer to does not arise. I had hoped that, in the light of my initial 'no comment', you would not try to press me further.

John-Erik Persson

Josephson

Thank you for the link to the analogy between water dops and pilot wave theory.

Josephson and Sarfatti

Bound electrons can generate (by energy from the ether) POTENTIAL forces that contain information (polarizing ether particles) without transporting energy. When this information hits a charge (our detector) the force becomes REAL. The measurement CREATES the force.

What do you think?

Best regards from John-Erik Persson

Lawrence Crowell

Brian,

This idea of physical semiotics strikes me as similar to what Lucretius meant when he referred to the "swerve." His idea was there was noting but atoms and void, where these atoms moved through the void and collided and interacted with each other. He then made this suggestion that these atoms would in some way swerve in response to conscious activity or free will.

Semiotics is the interpretation of symbols. Of course in a syntactic system this can be done with a Turing machine. Often when people refer to semiotics they have the idea of semantics and meaning. Lob's theorem is a way of expressing Godel's second theorem in a modal logic framework, which because of the role of possibility is seen as having a semantic meaning.

Quantum measurement and the existence of a stable classical(like) basis is not something that can be derived from first principles of quantum mechanics. A quantum measurement is a case where a quantum state is encoded by quantum states. This is a form of quantum self-reference. Quantum states are qubits that obey quantum postulates, or physical axioms, that in this circumstance leads to incompleteness. This appears to reflect the dichotomy between the quantum and classical worlds. We are at a possible situation where this is a form of this semantics or Lucretius's swerve.

Cheers LC

Brian Josephson

Dear Lawrence,

I myself don't accept QM as being fundamental, but your point generalises, in that one has one system that can encode another. You seem to be aiming for the question of the 'reality of possibility', which is a component of Ruth Kastner's transactional interpretation which is consistent with my own in that it involves systems exchanging information to decide which possibility to realise. But real possibilities don't have to involve QM: one could for example imagine a robot that could determine through observation that certain things could happen some of the time and also investigate the possibility of influencing these probabilities. Semiotics in such a context serves as a language that can help analyse such situations, e.g. by treating some control variable as a sign that is interpreted by a suitable system. Biology and QM would both make use of such mechanisms. My apologies if I'm missing the point you're trying to make.

Lawrence Crowell

What you write here is fairly close to what I was referring to. It is a case of QM having some semantic soundness. Read Olaf Dreyson's paper. I wrote a long comment on his blog site as well. This concerns the possible Turing/Godel implications of QM. My comments I posted a number of times failed to appear right.

I am not certain whether QM is absolutely fundamental or not. So far there are no evidences which suggest QM is some effective theory of wave dynamics.

Cheers LC

Anthony Garrett

In what way, please, does this essay further the basic process of physics - the dialectic between quantitative theory and experiment - so as to improve the accuracy of our description of nature?

It would be helpful to have a definition of "meaning" in any essay that discusses it.

Brian Josephson

In retrospect, I should indeed have mentioned that meaning is the property that signs have that distinguishes them from information in general, and you have to get to p.4 before I get into the question of what a sign is:

'Note here the relevance of 'cue elements' (in other words signs), interaction with which is a necessity to assure successful performance'.

As regards how the concepts discussed in my essay 'further the basic process of physics', this is most simply illustrated with the analogy of computer software. One could in principle explain the behaviour of a computer in a mindless way by calculating the sequential effect of each instruction of the compiled code in turn (as per 'shut up and calculate'). That is the physicist's style. But in practice one studies the source code, together with any comments provided by the programmer. In other words, knowing what the code means helps one figure out what is happening (which is for example a necessity if one has to figure out why a program is not working the way it should).

This shows us that situations exist that can best be understood by taking into account meaning, as opposed to mere calculation. Now if nature is in some sense alive at a fundamental level then we may similarly be able to make sense of it better in terms of accounts that take advantage of the concept of meaning.

It is worth noting in this connection the related point made by Penrose, whereby physics is determined by mathematical laws, the mind makes mathematics and physical processes give rise to mind, where in the making of mathematics by the mind the meaning of mathematical language plays a key role. If this is correct than meaning plays an essential role in physics.

Note also my concluding comments starting 'science does however possess tools that should prove adequate to taking these ideas further'.

Kevin Knuth

Dear Prof. Josephson,

Thank you for your very different and refreshing essay. I very much like the idea of focusing on "doings", and in fact, the title of one of the first sections to my 2013 FQXi essay (https://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Knuth_fqxi13knuthessayfinal.pdf) is "An Electron Is an Electron Because of What It Does".

The relation between biology and physics is a subtle one. There is, of course, the idea that at the foundation biology is governed by physics. But then I have come to view many of the "fundamental" quantities in physics (position, duration, velocity, momentum, energy) as representing the relationship between an object and an observer, which is why each of these quantities is observer-dependent. Given that the observers we are familiar with are biological, the description of an object-observer relationship (physics) may well have features that reflect the biology of an observer. Or maybe that is what is meant as biology. There is much to contemplate here, and I should probably take David Mermin's statement to heart and

"Shut up and contemplate"!

Thank you for an enjoyable, insightful, and refreshing essay.

Sincerely,

Kevin Knuth

Brian Josephson

Why biology is central (with a little help from ('oppositional dynamics')

Thanks for your comments, Kevin. I've used 'central' rather than fundamental in my title as I think that that better characterises its role (and that of meaning), in the same way that gravitation plays a central role in determining planetary orbits, and electron pairing in the context of superconductivity.

I've looked at your own essay and see that it goes some way to treating some of my ideas more precisely, e.g. your coordination which is similar to Yardley's oppositional dynamics. It is even possible that her circling could be used to define in more detail the nature of space. One further thing that plays a central role is the system-process link I discussed in my ffp15 talk, and attach one of the slides concerned here (I hope to be successful in this) -- this is one of a number of such reciprocalities discussed in my talk.

A key point is that such relationships amount to a new mathematical concept, though one might need to have a more precise way of specifying 'system' to achieve this. One additional key point is that the development of relationships is assisted by mechanisms appropriate to the context, and I don't think you have included the processes by which coordination develops. This is not impossible -- it's in essence an algorithm that does it. But in the end there may not be proof: Yardley notes that proof and truth support each other and one may in the end have to take it axiomatic that particular mechanisms are effective (though one never knows). One might even have a situation like the Riemann hypothesis where a lot of mathematics is founded upon a result that no-one has yet managed to prove!

Brian Josephson

This *** web site deletes your input if you do something like forget to deal with the verification process (a pretty serious defect IMHO). In view of past irritations I was backing up the text, but forgot to reenter the attachments. In ase it doesn't work, again, you can get the slides at http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/Documents/Spain-2017.pdf and it is slide 10 I was referring to.Attachment #1: Slide10.jpg

Steven Andresen

Dear Brian D. Josephson

Just letting you know that I am making a start on reading of your essay, and hope that you might also take a glance over mine please? I look forward to the sharing of thoughtful opinion. Congratulations on your essay rating as it stands, and best of luck for the contest conclusion.

My essay is titled

"Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin". It stands as a novel test for whether a natural organisational principle can serve a rationale, for emergence of complex systems of physics and cosmology. I will be interested to have my effort judged on both the basis of prospect and of novelty.

Thank you & kind regards

Steven Andresen

John-Erik Persson

Josephson

We cannot see the light. We see electron's behavior when they are exposed to light. So, Planck's relation dE/df=h can be an electron property.

Regards from John-Erik Persson

Brian Josephson

Maybe, but I can't see its relevance. Perhaps you meant this to go to a different thread.

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