Dear Conrad,

I have finally managed to come back to your essay. Really interesting, and fluent to read, congratulations! And the basic idea, that of co-emergence of observers and contexts, is - I believe - a deep and crucial one. So I start by saying that I truly like your idea of contextuality, including the complementarity (and perhaps circularity) between the main characters exchanging information and the contexts in which they move. If I only managed to set the necessary and sufficient conditions that define contexts in specific situations, I would be able to make huge progress in many questions, including several of my ongoing research projects. I have been working on this front ever since last year's contest, and it has actually made a difference in the way I stand before my work. So thanks for that.

Now going to the details, there are two points that I am still pondering.

First, I am not sure that our universe needs to be exactly the way it is for it to "work". I do agree that a small change in fundamental constants would blow ourselves up. Yet, I do not see why perhaps a larger change of constants carefully tuned in some other region of parameter space could not give rise to some other interesting universe. One containing subsystems (as ourselves) that wonder about their ontology. They need not be based on the chemistry of carbon, they may well be completely different, as long as they have the enough complexity to have the feeling they exist. I have the impression, however, that the number of interesting universes is vastly smaller than the number of possible universes. Not that I have made the calculation, this is just an impression. But I am not sure we need to justify why things are exactly the way they are in order for existence to be possible. Maybe there is a certain range of alternatives. So when you say "I want to ask what it means - and what it takes - to be a foundation for a world like ours", I am not sure we should aim at exactly a world like ours, or to a somewhat broader set of worlds containing the interesting stuff. If we only aim at exactly our world, I fear we might be restricting ourselves to certain particular choices that are not actually fundamental. My project, however, requires us to define precisely what I mean by "the interesting stuff", or what you mean by "a world like ours". Which worlds are those?

Second, and assuming we already know which those worlds are, I would suggest to do the search in the opposite direction. Instead of starting from all possible universes and trim them down to get to our world, I would try to define the set of worlds we want to arrive at, and work backwards. Like those children puzzles that look like labyrinths with several entrances and one exit, where you have to draw the path that takes you from one entry to the exit. They are easier to solve backwards, because the problem has a definite target, but the starting position is undefined. The necessity of each decision thus becomes more evident, because an alternative decision would take us away from the target. I know this may well have been the path in which you thought your deduction, and then you wrote the final version in the forward direction. For me it would have been instructive to know your internal backwards process, so as to follow it more transparently.

This year I will be rating all essays at the end, because last year I was left with the sensation that my criterion evolved as time went by, and my marking was inconsistent. But rest assured you'll get a good one from me!

I've still not been through Marc's essay, but will do so very soon. See you there!

inés.

    Hi onrad Dale Johnson

    Nice analysis...." Clearly our universe has this sort of functionality, though we take it for granted. Yet there are strong arguments that only a quite complex and finely-tuned physics could accomplish this. The question then is how a self-determining system like the physics of our universe could have come to exist."

    Here in my essay energy to mass conversion is proposed................ yours is very nice essay best wishes .... I highly appreciate hope your essay and hope for reciprocity ....You may please spend some of the valuable time on Dynamic Universe Model also and give your some of the valuable & esteemed guidance

    Some of the Main foundational points of Dynamic Universe Model :

    -No Isotropy

    -No Homogeneity

    -No Space-time continuum

    -Non-uniform density of matter, universe is lumpy

    -No singularities

    -No collisions between bodies

    -No blackholes

    -No warm holes

    -No Bigbang

    -No repulsion between distant Galaxies

    -Non-empty Universe

    -No imaginary or negative time axis

    -No imaginary X, Y, Z axes

    -No differential and Integral Equations mathematically

    -No General Relativity and Model does not reduce to GR on any condition

    -No Creation of matter like Bigbang or steady-state models

    -No many mini Bigbangs

    -No Missing Mass / Dark matter

    -No Dark energy

    -No Bigbang generated CMB detected

    -No Multi-verses

    Here:

    -Accelerating Expanding universe with 33% Blue shifted Galaxies

    -Newton's Gravitation law works everywhere in the same way

    -All bodies dynamically moving

    -All bodies move in dynamic Equilibrium

    -Closed universe model no light or bodies will go away from universe

    -Single Universe no baby universes

    -Time is linear as observed on earth, moving forward only

    -Independent x,y,z coordinate axes and Time axis no interdependencies between axes..

    -UGF (Universal Gravitational Force) calculated on every point-mass

    -Tensors (Linear) used for giving UNIQUE solutions for each time step

    -Uses everyday physics as achievable by engineering

    -21000 linear equations are used in an Excel sheet

    -Computerized calculations uses 16 decimal digit accuracy

    -Data mining and data warehousing techniques are used for data extraction from large amounts of data.

    - Many predictions of Dynamic Universe Model came true....Have a look at

    http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/p/blog-page_15.html

    I request you to please have a look at my essay also, and give some of your esteemed criticism for your information........

    Dynamic Universe Model says that the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation passing grazingly near any gravitating mass changes its in frequency and finally will convert into neutrinos (mass). We all know that there is no experiment or quest in this direction. Energy conversion happens from mass to energy with the famous E=mC2, the other side of this conversion was not thought off. This is a new fundamental prediction by Dynamic Universe Model, a foundational quest in the area of Astrophysics and Cosmology.

    In accordance with Dynamic Universe Model frequency shift happens on both the sides of spectrum when any electromagnetic radiation passes grazingly near gravitating mass. With this new verification, we will open a new frontier that will unlock a way for formation of the basis for continual Nucleosynthesis (continuous formation of elements) in our Universe. Amount of frequency shift will depend on relative velocity difference. All the papers of author can be downloaded from "http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/ "

    I request you to please post your reply in my essay also, so that I can get an intimation that you replied

    Best

    =snp

    Dear Conrad,

    I read you article a while ago and annotated it, but only now, at last, have I found time to comment on it! Sorry for the delay...

    As our conversations during the last contest attests, we do share similar views about what an "ultimate", maximally explaining theory should be. I like your focus on the functional importance of interactions, measurement and communication, as essential features of any universe that can self-determine itself, and thus be truly said to exist.

    I find the scenario that you sketch (interaction - reconnection - balancing opposites, etc...) bold, ambitious and thought-provoking, and I realize it is just one conceivable scenario. But some aspects of it I find a little difficult to grasp or make sense of. For instance, I'm not sure I would agree that "before there were any atoms in the universe, physics as we know it would not have been definable". Surely, an universe made only of photons would still have measurable properties, for instance, the relationship between the wavelength of the photons and the expansion of space... Could it be that, instead of having to reach at least atomic-structure level to be defined, a universe has to reach consciousness-level in some of its sub-structures? As you know, this is the thesis I find most believable, the existence of conscious sub-structures being the very condition that makes a mathematical structure become, "seen from the inside", a physical universe...

    I agree with you when you say that it is "perfectly possible for any kind of system to emerge within this chaos, so long as it could provide its own constraints", and that we live in such a self-defining system. As you so eloquently put it, we can think of our laws of physics as "selection rules, picking out random events in an underlying chaos that just happen to fit together, making contexts for each other [...] in the big picture everything happens, but only what happens to follow all these rules can make any definite impact on other things. The rest remains "virtual" - a subliminal ocean of indeterminate events."

    Your concept of the "Archaeology of Physics" is fascinating... it would be indeed amazing if we could find "layers of pre-metric structure" in the basic structures of physics today. You mention that electromagnetism could be such a pre-metric level... perhaps... but I have to confess that I found this part of your argumentation a bit strange and hard to make sense of. It is, of course, extremely ambitious to imagine how the physics of our universe could have, in a certain sense, "evolved" out of chaos. I will keep thinking about it...

    Of course, that's what the best essays in this contest do, make you think... Thank you for, once again, a strong entry. I hope that my up-vote will give you a little bit more visibility...

    Marc

      Dear Inés,

      Thanks for your very encouraging comments. The support from you and Marc in particular, in the last contest, gave me the nerve to attempt something in this essay that I knew would be difficult for readers to follow, so I'm not hoping for high ratings. But it seemed important that I try to show how these ideas can at least in principle be useful in explaining the strange combination of theories on which physics is currently founded. Hopefully, a first step toward a clearer and more coherent presentation.

      In response to your particular comments:

      >> If I only managed to set the necessary and sufficient conditions that define contexts in specific situations, I would be able to make huge progress in many questions...

      I'm very interested in how this problem appears to you. We have amazingly powerful tools for analyzing certain aspects of the world - involving entities with intrinsic properties in one-on-one relationships with each other, where the context is defined by abstract parameters (like space, time, temperature). The challenge is to develop adequate tools for dealing with systems more generally. In physics, biology or the human world, relationships depend on a context of other relationships, and of other kinds of relationships... and the contexts that relationships make for each other are rarely reducible to any simple structure of parameters.

      Physicists tend to bracket off the question of context, treating "the measurement problem" as a technical issue in quantum theory, with little relevance to other lines of research. I imagine that in neuroscience the problem of interdependent contexts is much harder to ignore. Generally, the difficulty in understanding contexts is not only their complexity, or interdependence, but also that they involve multiple layers of functionality that are hard to sort out. I have some ideas about a categorial framework for distinguishing levels of functionality, along with the layers of context-structure that correspond to each... as exemplified none too clearly in Part II of this essay. This obviously needs a lot of work and a fuller presentation, but I hope someday to make it useful.

      >> First, I am not sure that our universe needs to be exactly the way it is for it to "work"... I do not see why perhaps a larger change of constants carefully tuned in some other region of parameter space could not give rise to some other interesting universe... My project, however, requires us to define precisely what I mean by "the interesting stuff", or what you mean by "a world like ours". Which worlds are those?

      I agree that there could well be very different kinds of self-defining worlds - worlds "like ours" only insofar as the various kinds of information that define them would all be measurable in terms of each other. Maybe that could be done without atoms, or in a completely different spacetime - I don't think "fine-tuning" offers any evidence against this possibility. But the fine-tuning of the one universe we can investigate does strongly suggest that the requirements for any system that supports quantitative measurement are both stringent and complex. That gives me hope that eventually we'll be able to explain most of the diverse complexities of physics in our universe as necessary to enable this one particular informational system to define and communicate itself.

      >> Assuming we already know which those worlds are, I would suggest to do the search in the opposite direction. Instead of starting from all possible universes and trim them down to get to our world, I would try to define the set of worlds we want to arrive at, and work backwards... For me it would have been instructive to know your internal backwards process, so as to follow it more transparently.

      That makes very good sense... to start by formulating general conditions for any self-determining system. I wish I could have done that... but at least it's something to work toward. Meantime, it would have helped a lot to explain my internal process. Basically, I began with a schema worked out over many years for describing the stages of emerging functionality in systems of relationships - the "categorial framework" mentioned above. That gave me a map for laying out the "forward" approach, starting with "anything goes" - the superposition of all possibilities. The problem is that to explain this map would require a more philosophical context and a much larger scope - so again, something to work toward in future.

      I truly appreciate your making the effort to consider these issues with me. And by the way, evidently you found time this past year to dive rather deeply into the wonderful world of quantum theory! Hope you've been having fun in other ways as well.

      Conrad

      Dear Marc -

      I'm deeply grateful to you and Inés for taking my efforts seriously, and I realize that's not easy to do. I was determined in this essay to sketch out my draft "archaeology of physics" even though I knew it would be hard to follow, mainly to overcome my own doubts that I could make it seem sensible at all. Since I've worked hard to make all my previous essays cogent, I felt this time I could reach a bit further, expose something that's very much work-in-progress.

      I was very glad that you found connection between our perspectives on many points... but I'll focus here on what you found problematic.

      >> "I'm not sure I would agree that 'before there were any atoms in the universe, physics as we know it would not have been definable'. Surely, a universe made only of photons would still have measurable properties, for instance, the relationship between the wavelength of the photons and the expansion of space..."

      The notion that atomic structure is needed to make any kind of information definable is surely hard to swallow. In our universe, photons have wavelengths that get red-shifted with the expansion of space, and that doesn't seem to have much to do with atoms. But I don't see how anything at all would be measurable in a universe made only of photons. Unless there's something to detect the photons, and something to measure space and time, I don't see how wavelength would be definable.

      The historical aspect of my claim seems more glaringly wrong. Our best theories tell us that all kinds of particles, even a lot of helium nuclei, were out there interacting at high energies in very complex ways, long before there were atoms. No one seems to wonder why all this pre-existing structure turned out to be perfectly arranged to make atoms... but I think my approach to this makes sense, and is quite in keeping with the evidence of "delayed choice" experiments in QM. That is, before the emergence of atoms, all kinds of interaction-structure were possible. With the emergence of a context in which space and time and material structure were finally determinable, only the past history that produced atoms could be relevant as a basis for the future history of our universe.

      >> "Could it be that, instead of having to reach at least atomic-structure level to be defined, a universe has to reach consciousness-level in some of its sub-structures?"

      When I first read that, I thought you were suggesting there could be sub-structures at the sub-atomic level that were in some sense "conscious". Probably that's not what you have in mind... but anyway, I went back to your last essay on "Wandering Towards Physics" to check on how you use that word. By the way, I was again really impressed by the scope and depth of that essay, a masterly piece of work! And from your initial quotation from Fuchs to the end, you treat consciousness as a matter of having a "first-person" point of view, "from inside" the world. You also sometimes include "self-awareness" as a criterion.

      It seems fairly clear that a photon doesn't have a point of view, or if it does, it's limited to a view of two simultaneous instants, its emission and absorption. Electrons and other fermions are in contact with other particles over time, and constantly change their internal phase in response, and are also self-interacting. With atoms we have intensely self-interactive nuclei and electron-shell structures that exchange compound messages (photons carrying linear and angular momentum) with other atoms, as well as providing the basic structure needed for any kind of clock or measuring-rod. So maybe it does make sense to think of "self-aware sub-structures" as emerging here in stages. In any case your notion of "co-emergence" is appropriate to describe the way various kinds of primitive structure make contexts that help define each other.

      >> "... it would be indeed amazing if we could find "layers of pre-metric structure" in the basic structures of physics today. You mention that electromagnetism could be such a pre-metric level... perhaps... but I have to confess that I found this part of your argumentation a bit strange and hard to make sense of."

      It's obviously my fault, not yours, that this is hard to follow. My first two stages in Part II are at least a bit plausible, and the last two are just hand-waving, with no real attempt at explanation. But I knew I'd have trouble with the section on electromagnetism, which is very awkwardly half-explained. Pre-metric electromagnetism is indeed a thing - unfortunately all the papers I've found on it are very technical, and I haven't yet been able to translate them into a clear mental image. I would at least have liked to make a complete inventory of this system of mutually-defining, bilaterally symmetrical variables, but didn't have the time or space even for that.

      Maybe I also failed to make clear that I consider the universal attraction of gravity and the balancing expansion of the universe, the phase-interference of quantum systems and the gauge-symmetries of the nuclear forces all to be layers of pre-metric structure in our current physics. The great obstacle to here is my lack of clarity about how the final stage might work, to quantify all these diverse aspects of the world and incorporate them into the structure of atomic interaction in continuous spacetime.

      I have to confess that I still feel doubtful whether I can make these conjectures clear and presentable. Happily, the standards for these contest entries are not so rigorous! It makes a great difference to me to get these thoughts into print and in public, though I know I'm presuming more than I should on the patience of my readers. It makes it more possible to envision what a really successful version might look like.

      Again, many thanks for your help -

      Conrad

      Conrad,

      I was intending to give a detailed response to your essay this evening, but I can't. Why? You are saying a lot of important things, and it's going to take me a while both to digest them and to understand them fully. While it is a secondary issue in terms of rating essays, I also suspect (but am not quite sure yet) that we share a number of important ideas, but express them in somewhat different ways.

      Meanwhile you get a 9 from me for factual accuracy, understanding of the topic, depth of analysis, clarity of writing, and what I would judge a nicely novel approach to how "fundamental" physics came about in our universe. Good work.

      Cheers,

      Terry

      Hey Conrad, you are too modest! I think you make an important contribution! Whether other readers notice it or not, I cannot say. But in my humble opinion, you are taking the path that needs to be taken, that is, get one's hands dirty in the attempt to really exhibit the consequences of the hypothesis that our universe might be, as Wheeler put it, "a self excited circuit". Or, in your words, that the universe is the way it needs to be in order to be observable from within. We may later discuss whether the exact path you have taken is the most convenient one, whether we should start from one end or from the other, but ultimately, those are implementation details. The important thing is that all of us who like the self-excited idea really engage ourselves in defining the implications of that idea, and come up with some concrete consequences. Otherwise, we simply remain at the enunciation stage, where we make the self-excited statement, and that's it. Your essay is very important as an attempt to go further.

      I myself have been trying to think about these consequences ever since I read Marc's and your essays last year. My dream would be to deduce certain properties of the world around us (some characteristic of the basic equations, the 4-dimensional structure of spacetime, or some other aspect) from the self-excited hypothesis. Needless to say I have made little to no progress. What I am demanding is very difficult! But we must still try, and your essay is one such attempt. From my side, as I commented above, I would start at the other end, for which we need to list the requirements for conscious observers to exist. The ones I have come up with are roughly the following:

      - observers must be small compared to the whole. This means, the whole cannot be conscious, only small subparts can.

      - observers must have a sense of identity, some sensation that certain parts of the world constitute an "I", and all the rest does not. I believe that both sensory systems and the illusion of free will are required for the notion of I to emerge. One must realize that one can control certain parts of the universe (some of our thoughts, some of our movements, etc.) and not others (the parts that are outside ourselves).

      - observers must have a memory. Memory is required for two things. First, for the notion of "I" to emerge. Second, for the world to be observed and kept track of. If we forget everything instantly, then there is no way to model the world.

      - The requirement for memory to exist implies two things. There must be something like time, and such a time must have a well defined direction of flow. I tend to think time must be a 1-dimensional "thing", but to be honest, I am not sure what this means. Could time have more dimensions and still be time? If time has a direction, then there must be irreversible aspects in the evolution of things. The universe must start with order and tend to disorder, at least, when observed at the scales of observers. The storage of information in memory is an irreversible process, so time must be perceived as flowing in the direction of increasing disorder.

      This is as far as I got. As you may have noticed, these requirements are not carefully defined, and probably there are more to be set. I just want to mention these thoughts to you, so that you realize that (a) you are not alone in the search for consequences of the self-excited hypothesis, and (b) that I find the problem very difficult, and am myself pretty much stuck in the search.

      Ok, I send this for the time being, and hope to be able to write to you again soon, to tell you why I believe this duality between system and context is important in my research. I first need to polish the ideas! It's quite amazing how unpolished our thoughts can be, if we do not share them!

      More soon!

      Inés.

      Conrad,

      Like a "once upon a time" narrative, clearly explaining the story of our development without the need for fancy formulas. It's a story that tells itself with a natural force of symmetry and structure, almost like it was constructed by an unseen master builder with natural fine-tuning. The fundamental thing is that it was an accident -- or was it?

      Enjoyed your narrative. It rates well. I never considered this story myself. Hope you can check out my story.

      Jim Hoover

      Dear Conrad,

      Good to hear from you - I have happy memories of the 2012 essay contest, and the discussions we had, particularly with four of us - You, me, Edwin and Daryl Janzen. It felt good as I had been working alone for too long. There were also occasional posts from Ben Dribus and George Ellis.

      Thanks for your comments on my essay, much appreciated. I've just read yours, and will read it again - it's very far-reaching, and is thought provoking - it makes one stand back further than usual.

      Correct me if I'm wrong - you're talking about emergence, and mechanisms for the emergence of, among other things, time. But you're not talking about time emerging from the standard four-dimensional block of block time, which means your view is not the view that I've been arguing can't be true.

      My argument against emergent time, if it's seen as coming out of the standard interpretation of SR, is that the laws of physics were frozen into the time sequence of the block at a deeper level than anything like a 'flow of time' that somehow emerged later. So if we think an apparent (or real) flow of time, like the one we seem to observe, emerged, we're then left with a coincidence to explain - why was what emerged so appropriate?

      If it emerged at a shallower level, it would have been largely unconnected with the laws which it then neatly allowed to function. And yet the laws look like they were waiting for it to arrive. No-one has refuted this argument so far, though some have said they like it. One physicist said the coincidence might be explained by anthropic reasoning - that's not my view. My view is NOT that is shows time to be fundamental, but just that time looks unavoidably more fundamental than some of the laws.

      Returning to your essay, you seem to be doing something a bit like Lee Smolin's attempt to find a way for the universe to have created itself in a series of stages, with his 'cosmological natural selection'. Am I right? It seems that way. There also seems to be an analogy between a living system and the universe - perhaps it's only an analogy, or are you saying that it's more than that?

      The emphasis on measurability and the self-defining aspects of a system, obviously seems to come at least partly from QM. If it comes only from QM, my view is that we shouldn't infer too much from a mystery that is still unsolved, and unexplained. But perhaps you take more of a range of sources than just QM, and perhaps the analogy that relates us to the wider universe is a part of that.

      Incidentally, I don't agree that we have enough to explain the foundations of physics within our current theories - the mystery about energy that I've outlined in the last few paras of my essay shows, for me anyway, that there are still major unknowns to be discovered.

      Anyway, wishing you the best of luck... good to read your essay, I'll read it again.

      Cheers, Jonathan

        Jonathan,

        Your comments are much appreciated! For now, just a brief response to a couple of points:

        You're right that my emphasis on measurement comes from quantum theory. Since I've developed that connection in previous FQXi essays, this time I focused instead on fine-tuning and the argument from the context-dependency of information. But once I finally pull all this together, the title might well be Why Quantum Mechanics Makes Sense - arguing that any universe in which any kind of information is definable has to have a foundation much like QM, particularly as regards the role of measurement.

        I think the reason measurement still seems like an inexplicable mystery is that its functional role hasn't been appreciated. We still tend to assume things "just exist" in themselves, without needing any context to define what they are. "Observing" then seems merely incidental to physics, and the object-observer relation gets discussed with no consideration for the informational environment that makes it work.

        Lee Smolin's book on The Life of the Cosmos made a case that we need something like a theory of evolution to answer the big ""Why?" questions in physics, and I certainly agree. But his theory of self-replicating universes seems far-fetched to me, partly because it requires so many assumptions about black holes and inheritance of variation that have no solid basis in established theory. More importantly, I think there's an important evolutionary aspect to physics that's grounded not in replicating information, but in measuring and communicating it. I discussed this in my last essay on the Accidental Origins of Meaning, talking about the ways natural selection works in physics, biology and human communication. I also wrote about QM in an earlier essay on The Evolution of Determinate Information. What I've tried to outline here is something more primitive, the emergence of basic features of our universe that precede the beginnings of quantitative measurement.

        Looking forward to further discussion in both our threads - and thanks again!

        Conrad

        Hi Conrad,

        I'm wondering what you think time emerges from, I have trouble seeing time emerging from anything static. But if it emerges from something that moves, then time exists already, so one still needs to explain it. That why I don't think emergence works in the context of time, certainly not for the apparent flow of time, and to me not for its direction either (which I'd say is a far smaller mystery). I think when we eventually understand time, we'll also understand its consistent direction. And probably not before.

        I agree it's surprising that the universe is measurable, definable, and (as others have also said) comprehensible, but I don't find a need to see it as having made itself so - I'd say the more surprising thing is that we can find out about it, and work things out about it - from our end. That's a more conventional view than the idea that it comes from both ends. I guess to me the universe is mostly hardware, though QM does suggest what used to be called the software/hardware entanglement.

        Anyway, best wishes, Jonathan

        Hi again... good question! No, I don't see time as emerging from anything static... or moving. I imagine the beginning as a plenum of happening, but with no given order or connection between events... hence no definable space or time. The events that make up our observable universe are a very tiny subset of these events, that happen to be able to define their order and connection, by conforming to the laws of physics.

        So don't I think of the emergence of time as something that happened once and for all, way back when. I agree it doesn't make much sense to say, there used to be a time when there was no time, and then time began to exist. Rather, the emergence of time keeps on happening in every local present moment. The laws of physics guarantee that in every situation, there's some way of defining what happens next.

        At the level of classical physics, this works so well that we can imagine the laws as divinely ordained from the beginning; we can imagine that things automatically "obey" these laws with mathematical precision - though in fact, it would take a vast computing power to calculate the real-time motion of just a handful of particles. At the quantum level, it becomes clear that something different is going on - contexts are being set up that randomly choose a particular outcome, passing that information on to other contexts where other choices can get made. In the deep quantum vacuum anything is possible - but the only possibilities that can participate in our observable world are those that help keep the process going... "time" being one basic aspect of this process.

        Don't know if that will make sense to you, but that's my thought. And that's why I think of defining and measuring as fundamental - because I don't see anything as "hardware" that just sits there and keeps on being itself "over time". Incidentally, I noticed in your last comment to Marc Séguin about the map and the territory - "that something, somehow, was doubling as its own description." That might apply here: the universe is what it is, insofar as it's able to describe itself. Information about things doesn't just "exist" in the things themselves; it also gets communicated out through contexts of interaction that make it physically observable to other things, and therefore meaningfully definable. Otherwise its "existence" would be an empty concept.

        Thanks for giving me another shot at this...

        Conrad

        Hi,

        well I'm beginning to understand more about what you mean. Events can happen, but if they're not connected up in a definable way, then space and time don't exist. To me though, space and time exist without anyone there to define them (and without anyone struggling to define them, as we have on this planet).

        And I think if an event can happen, then you already have time at work. It seems you think that only if events happen in an order does time exist. So to understand any view of time, perhaps one needs to know the minimum needed to make time exist.

        But what we have in the universe now, with the order of events, and how they relate across distances, is either Minkowski spacetime, or something that closely mimics it. I'd say the latter, but either way, we have a complex structure surrounding time now, or seeming to. I guess to you that's a small area of definable structure, in a sea of chaos. It sounds like an anthropic type view, but I think it's not, rather as Lee Smolin tried to avoid anthropic arguments.

        Anyway, to me the universe is a lot of physical systems, some of which we understand, and some of which we don't yet understand. I think we can get a glimpse of what's likely with the ones we don't understand, by looking at the ones we do. And they all turn out to play by a set of physical rules, and these rules turn out to have straightforward reasons behind them, which make sense.

        Now it's true that QM seems very weird, but so have lots of things in the past, and the ones we managed to explain all had explanations that were more physically understandable than they perhaps seemed at first. That doesn't mean that everything else has to be that way as well, but to me it makes it more likely... hope that makes sense.

        Yes, the map and the territory was an old idea I had in the late '80s and early '90s, and I do think that something is doubling as reality and information in QM, so perhaps that suggests something weirder than what I've said... but perhaps still something clearly understandable. Anyway, cheers,

        Jonathan

        Dear Conrad

        If you are looking for another essay to read and rate in the final days of the contest, will you consider mine please? I read all essays from those who comment on my page, and if I cant rate an essay highly, then I don't rate them at all. Infact I haven't issued a rating lower that ten. So you have nothing to lose by having me read your essay, and everything to gain.

        Beyond my essay's introduction, I place a microscope on the subjects of universal complexity and natural forces. I do so within context that clock operation is driven by Quantum Mechanical forces (atomic and photonic), while clocks also serve measure of General Relativity's effects (spacetime, time dilation). In this respect clocks can be said to possess a split personality, giving them the distinction that they are simultaneously a study in QM, while GR is a study of clocks. The situation stands whereby we have two fundamental theories of the world, but just one world. And we have a singular device which serves study of both those fundamental theories. Two fundamental theories, but one device? Please join me and my essay in questioning this circumstance?

        My essay goes on to identify natural forces in their universal roles, how they motivate the building of and maintaining complex universal structures and processes. When we look at how star fusion processes sit within a "narrow range of sensitivity" that stars are neither led to explode nor collapse under gravity. We think how lucky we are that the universe is just so. We can also count our lucky stars that the fusion process that marks the birth of a star, also leads to an eruption of photons from its surface. And again, how lucky we are! for if they didn't then gas accumulation wouldn't be halted and the star would again be led to collapse.

        Could a natural organisation principle have been responsible for fine tuning universal systems? Faced with how lucky we appear to have been, shouldn't we consider this possibility?

        For our luck surely didnt run out there, for these photons stream down on earth, liquifying oceans which drive geochemical processes that we "life" are reliant upon. The Earth is made up of elements that possess the chemical potentials that life is entirely dependent upon. Those chemical potentials are not expressed in the absence of water solvency. So again, how amazingly fortunate we are that these chemical potentials exist in the first instance, and additionally within an environment of abundant water solvency such as Earth, able to express these potentials.

        My essay is attempt of something audacious. It questions the fundamental nature of the interaction between space and matter Guv = Tuv, and hypothesizes the equality between space curvature and atomic forces is due to common process. Space gives up a potential in exchange for atomic forces in a conversion process, which drives atomic activity. And furthermore, that Baryons only exist because this energy potential of space exists and is available for exploitation. Baryon characteristics and behaviours, complexity of structure and process might then be explained in terms of being evolved and optimised for this purpose and existence. Removing need for so many layers of extraordinary luck to eventuate our own existence. It attempts an interpretation of the above mentioned stellar processes within these terms, but also extends much further. It shines a light on molecular structure that binds matter together, as potentially being an evolved agency that enhances rigidity and therefor persistence of universal system. We then turn a questioning mind towards Earths unlikely geochemical processes, (for which we living things owe so much) and look at its central theme and propensity for molecular rock forming processes. The existence of chemical potentials and their diverse range of molecular bond formation activities? The abundance of water solvent on Earth, for which many geochemical rock forming processes could not be expressed without? The question of a watery Earth? is then implicated as being part of an evolved system that arose for purpose and reason, alongside the same reason and purpose that molecular bonds and chemistry processes arose.

        By identifying atomic forces as having their origin in space, we have identified how they perpetually act, and deliver work products. Forces drive clocks and clock activity is shown by GR to dilate. My essay details the principle of force dilation and applies it to a universal mystery. My essay raises the possibility, that nature in possession of a natural energy potential, will spontaneously generate a circumstance of Darwinian emergence. It did so on Earth, and perhaps it did so within a wider scope. We learnt how biology generates intricate structure and complexity, and now we learn how it might explain for intricate structure and complexity within universal physical systems.

        To steal a phrase from my essay "A world product of evolved optimization".

        Best of luck for the conclusion of the contest

        Kind regards

        Steven Andresen

        Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin

        There's this basic notion that things either "exist" or "don't really exist" in some absolute sense, so that space and time can "exist" whether or not there's anything happening in them. Alternatively, there's the idea that space and time "exist" only as the structure of relationships between things and events. I go further, suggesting that space and time exist insofar as the structure of relationships makes them physically measurable. And this depends on a lot of other things being measurable too.

        But I don't think we humans add anything necessary to this picture. When we observe things, we're just using the contexts physics already provides.

        I imagine that QM will cease to seem weird when we've thought through the problem of what it takes to support a universe where everything is measurable in the context of other measurable quantities. QM is, after all, essentially a method for predicting measurement results. It gets weird when we try to interpret it as describing things that "exist" apart from any context that can measure them.

        Thanks again,

        Conrad

        That makes better sense of what you've said before - it reminds me of RQM, and also of your essay in 2012, which we had an email exchange about after the contest. Yes, I do think that kind of approach works well. I'm not sure how things should be defined, but it fits with a number of things we know about already, such as aspects of SR. Anyway, wishing you all the best.

        Jonathan

        Conrad, I have now read your essay after replying to your comment in mine. I am glad to see that some of my reply fits with some of your ideas.

        I like your physics archaeology and the sense that all levels are part of the picture. The sections about networks and loops also rang true to me, but the ideas are still a little too vague to really get a handle on. I hope you will be able to take them further.

        Dear Inés,

        Thanks so much... it feels splendid to have partners in this quest. Your note makes clearer to me what you mean by "searching in the opposite direction." And your thoughts about what it takes to make a conscious observer are very interesting - I particularly like that "the illusion of free will is required for the notion of I to emerge." It's not just Input/output, in other words, this business of sensation and control, there needs to be a sense of agency, maybe even of overcoming frustration, consciously choosing, etc. But it seems to me a very positive outlook that sees the value in some of our illusions.

        "Consciousness" has of course a very broad range of meaning... especially, I would think, for someone professionally occupied with the neural networks both of humans and invertebrates. My sense is that the most important thing needed for the "I" to emerge is a certain kind of back-and-forth connection with "You". For us, this is the kind of connection in which language naturally grows; we learn to see the world as we learn to listen to others and talk with them about what's going on. But I think there are deep analogies between what we do and what happens in physics, between atoms. My thought has been, if we try to identify all the most basic requirements for what we humans do, and also for what atoms do, this gives us two very different and complementary perspectives on what it means and what it takes to exist.

        Just by the way, the more I think about atoms, the more amazed I am at how unappreciated they are. We used to think of them just as irreducible bits of various types of matter... but then, as soon as we found out that was wrong, we got involved in going deeper. And the subatomic world was so completely intriguing and unexpected... that atoms themselves fell into the background. It's somehow been nearly overlooked, that all this complication is needed to make atoms work the way they do, in so many ways. If there's no "I" there, exactly, there's certainly a remarkable back-and-forth connection with the world, with other atoms.

        When you get a chance, I would really like to hear your thoughts on "system and context". I happened to run across your 2013 paper on Noise Correlations in Neural Decoding - way over my head, of course, but just the abstract is so interesting! If there's any possibility at all of "decoding" the crosstalk of neurons, it seems very important to be able to ignore the broader context of correlations. So I can at least begin to see how this issue appears in your work.

        Thanks again - Conrad

        Dear Conrad Dale Johnson, your essay is a scientific picture of the world, in which is the main question - What does it take to be physically fundamental? I'll try to answer it as it looks New Cartesian Physics, which is based on the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes. For a long time believed that the Foundation for fundamental theories is matter, an attribute which had mass. Once there was a formula of mass - energy equivalence, and mass lost the status of a value characterizing the amount of matter, about it rarely began to remember and physics has lost the Foundation. Any theory of everything is created in such circumstances would not be fundamental. The principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, according to which physical space is matter and matter is space that moves, gives us the Foundation for fundamental theories.

        When Copernicus asserted that the Earth revolves around the Sun, he had to add that along with the Earth revolves around the Sun, all the solar space. Space is what created the universe. Time is a synonym for universal movement of the physical space. Thus, space is the Foundation for fundamental theories. Space contains information about the development of the Universe. Space is the body of God.

        The principle of identity of physical space and matter allows us to extend physics to living matter. For this we need to pay attention to the fact that matter within the body is the same as outside the body. Our brain creates an image of the outside world not within themselves and in the space around them. This way the outside world has an active nature, as it controls the body.

        New Cartesian Physics needs your support to develop further. Visit my page and give your assessment there.

        I hope on highly appreciate her ideas.

        FQXi Fundamental in New Cartesian Physics by Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich

        I wish you success! Sincerely, Boris Dizhechko

        Conrad--

        Interesting and enjoyable essay. I don't have the time and energy to record all of my thoughts on it, so I'll just ask one question that I think is interesting. Do you regard the narrative you offered here as being compatible with the more conventional narrative of spontaneous symmetry breaking at later times and lower energy regimes in the evolution of the universe, or would you regard it as a competing and incompatible alternative to that narrative? Your thoughts on this will be illuminating.

        I hope you have time and inclination to take a look at my essay too. It is quite different from yours but I suspect you will enjoy it and find it stimulating. Thanks.

        --Greg