On the Fundamentality of Meaning by Brian D. Josephson

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

Brian -

I was quite interested in your essay, and took a look also at your slide presentation and Hoffmeyer's "Semiotic Scaffolding". I have some familiarity with this line of thought going back to Gregory Bateson, whom I had pleasure of studying with in my grad school days. I've also written about meaning as fundamental in physics, making some analogies with biology (the links are below). -- --

So I agree with your general perspective - to quote one of your slides, "Reality resembles an orchestrated dance, more than it does something constrained by the rigid equations that are the norm in the physics paradigm." But I don't think semiotics gives us a deep enough concept of meaning to make the connection with physics, or to explain why we have these particular equations rather than others. -- --

At a basic level, what makes something meaningful is not that it signifies something else - rather, what's needed is a context in which it can make a difference to something else - which also makes a difference, in some other context. The physical world obviously provides such contexts, that make all the various parameters of physics meaningfully definable and observable. The context in which any one thing gets measured always consists of other things, measured in other contexts. And when it comes to quantum systems, these contexts clearly play a key role: the determinacy of any given parameter of a system depends on there being a physical context that can measure it. -- --

We usually think of measurement only at the level of signification - in that our measurement results tell us something about the system being measured. But that implies that the system was already in some well-defined state prior to the measurement. While that makes sense for classical physics, it's evidently not the case in the quantum realm - so I think we need to understand measurement at a deeper level. My my current essay discusses what's needed in the structure of physics to make any kind of information meaningful or measurable. I also explored the kinds of meaning built into the mathematical language of physics in an earlier FQXi essay. In The Accidental Origins of Meaning I compared the different ways in which meaning arises in physics, biology and human interaction. -- --

Thanks for contributing this essay - I appreciate your bringing this kind of perspective into the mix. -- --

Best regards, Conrad

Josephson

You asked about the relevance if h is an electron property. The important consequence is that there is no longer evidence for light quanta, quantization is produced in the electron.

Regards from ____________ John-Erik Persson

Dear Dr. Josephson,

I am going to suggest an addendum, which is that biological processes, help physical systems cohere and have a complete information conservation process, from beginning to end of their evolution and that biological/ mind processes are part of a way to use self organizing criticality as a way to have completeness and conservation of INFORMATION, from beginning to end of physical system evolution

I.e. the physical system is complemented by biological processes, for the same of information conservation in physical processes.

If one takes this analogy, what I tried to do in my paper was to ascertain a similar dynamic as to the cosmological constant as initially formed.

I did that via Klauders quantization of the inflaton field.

In my paper, the Enhanced quantization plays a role very similar to what you are doing with biological processes.

I would welcome you critiquing my essay as of December 21st, with this in mind

THank you for your conversations in FFP 15, they were a gem

Andrew

Dear Professor Josephson

An interesting and thought-provoking essay especially with the analogy between biology and physics which is very different from the way biology is usually reduced to physics. I just wanted to note that one of the earliest thinkers on Physics, Aristotle, considered the universe more like an organism.

Best Wishes

Mozibur Ullah

Dear Prof. Josephson,

thank you for this cleverly argued essay. If you have a bit of time, I would be glad if you can also go through my essay. I look forward to discuss our works.

Good luck,

Flavio

It intrigues me to note that you mention terms like 'edge of chaos'. Please elabortae for my clarity if we can differentiate between chaos of different degrees. Also, we may follow with similar procedure to consider Order and its degrees of less and more! We conducted an experiment where we mixed random events being sensed with different lower and lower degree of regular or ordered events. Chi square test clearly indicated such a mix taking place even at extremely low mixing % of regular pulses!

Thanks, Brain for your pertinent response. I hope Biologista along with Physicist colleagues may investigate such border line situations experimentally in order to clarify the siyuation. My youngdr colleague researches inmicro biology and your suggestion can be persued further!

Dear Brian,

I made similar assumption on central role of biology and I attempted to investigate such fundamental biological fact as Homochirality. I had found that Homochirality could be used also as heuristic in Number theory ( an existence of odd perfect numbers, fundamental theorem of arithmetic and ABC conjecture ) - please see my essay " Fundamentalness of Homochirality ". I suspect that fundamentalness of biological Homochirality also could be connected with an idea of violation of symmetry in physics.

Generally,a central role of biology is easy deduced from my Quantum Idealism ( article published in Russian Uspekhi Physics in English in 2003,12 with support of Vitaly L.Ginsburg Nobel Prizer in physics 2004). I think your idealistic attitude is also important in understanding your biosemantics.

With the best wishes

Michael A.Popov

Brian,

I like the idea of mathematics as 'something that life does' because it makes no value judgment. After all, rape is something life does, too. Makes it possible for me to separate mathematics from mathematician, and accept Bieberbach's results without imposing my own prejudice against Nazis and rape. I take it, that you mean that meaning is an objectified thing--a higher meaning than any one person can impose. After all, some deem Nazis and rape 'something that life does' and are proud of it besides. One is reminded that philosophy was once known as moral science.

" ... something that sufficiently evolved life does because in the appropriate context so doing is of value to life." Ultimately. The jury is out on the context for 'sufficiently evolved'. And no research mathematician proves theorems because she thinks it will add value to life--though it does, in the long run. Theorem-proving is 'something that life does' and it gets the mathematician through life. Perhaps its value is just that.

There is no doubt in my mind, though, that meaning precedes the construction of a mathematical object. I embrace your premise.

All Best,

Tom https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3124

Hi Brian:

I fully agree with your statement - "... there are intriguing parallels between

the quantum and biological domains, suggesting that there may be a more fundamental level underlying both."

I would like to draw your attention to the missing fundamental physics governing - "What causes a photon to accelerate to the speed of light?" My paper - "What is Fundamental - Is C the Speed of Light". describes the fundamental physics of antigravity missing from the widely-accepted mainstream physics and cosmology theories resolving their current inconsistencies and paradoxes. The missing physics depicts a spontaneous relativistic mass creation/dilation photon model that explains the yet unknown dark energy, inner workings of quantum mechanics, and bridges the gaps among relativity and Maxwell's theories. The model also provides field equations governing the spontaneous wave-particle complimentarity or mass-energy equivalence. The key significance or contribution of the proposed work is to enhance fundamental understanding of C, commonly known as the speed of light, and Cosmological Constant, commonly known as the dark energy.

The manuscript not only provides comparisons against existing empirical observations but also forwards testable predictions for future falsification of the proposed model.

I would like to invite you to read my paper and appreciate any feedback comments.

Best Regards

Avtar Singh

Brian,

Are you familiar with Brian Rotman's "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics"?

*Mathematics as Sign*, Rotman, B., Stanford University Press, 2000.