Fundamentality Here, Fundamentality There, Fundamentality Everywhere by Marc Séguin

Hi Marc,

I was reading the first part of your concluding section on metaphysics and thought to myself, 'that sounds like Zen emptiness.' So I felt vindicated when I got to the end, and the interpretation 'dynamic emptiness' appeared, which has abundance of meaning for me, as I expressed in my essay entry.

And I particularly like your 'turtles' figure--every step seemingly becoming more fragile, further removed from the source turtle. This would miss the point, though, that the structure is not hierarchical; feedback mechanisms give every turtle access to the source.

Tres jolie, monsieur. A first class essay.

Tom

Sorry, secure link. https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3124. Also, I meant figure 1 for the turtles.

Hi Marc,

well written essay. Other figures are thinkable than your figures 3 and 4. In my essay I try to defend a positivist view on physics, as good as this is possible, where the fundamental concepts depend on their observability. However the means of observation must be describable by these fundamental concepts. So the figure we get here is a circle.

Best regards,

Luca

Dear Marc,

thank you very much for your essay, it's a very interesting text and a concise summary of the subject, it should be read before all the others as introduction as well. It's for sure one of the best essays I've read so far.

You write that

> Something is truly fundamental if it could not have been otherwise.

and, since everything could be otherwise (also this statement!), you argue that we should consider 'nothing' as candidate for being fundamental. I reach similar conclusions through my analysis of Nagarjuna's philosophy and absolute relativism, and I try to handle its paradoxical consequences.

I find also very interesting when you write

> the infinite ensemble of all abstractions is a unique construct that contains, overall, zero information .

But I have to read your essay "Wandering Towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Mathematical Laws Give Rise to Aims and Intention?" to fully understand what you state.

All the best!

Francesco D'Isa

Dear Marc,

there is a central notion resp. concept in your essay that, formally speaking, seems to undermine the turtle pile as well as the ape chain. The notion 'abstract', I believe, doesn't support what you intend to express. For instance, you say: "Being abstract, it can exist by itself, ...". Also the notion 'purely abstract structure' doesn't make much sense when these structures are placed between 'all=nothing' and the 'fog of metaphysical handwaving'. Here is my argument:

'Abstract' derives from Latin abstrahere, which means to withdraw or to isolate from. So we can, for instance, abstract weight, shape, atoms, (infrared)waves, etc. from a cow just because they are already there (thanks to our forebears), i.e. abstraction is a posteriori! Then "Being abstract, it can exist by itself..." is a contradiction in terms, because 'it' has been withdrawn from something else by something else and it follows that the abstract cannot exist by itself. So, I think that your turtle and ape chains fail on meaning.

Heinrich

Dear Marc Séguin, after reading your essay, I thought that you should definitely get acquainted with New Cartesian Physics. Look at my essay, FQXi Fundamental in New Cartesian Physics by Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich Where I showed how radically the physics can change if it follows the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes. Evaluate and leave your comment there. I highly value your essay; however, I'll give you a rating as the bearer of Descartes' idea. Do not allow New Cartesian Physics go away into nothingness, which wants to be the theory of everything OO.

Sincerely, Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich.

Hi Marc Séguin, hope you are well and find the time to reply. I've made some annotations in a comment above and would be happy if you would be able to reply. Best wishes, Stefan Weckbach.

Dear Marc, thank you very much for your reply. I just want to annotate that within such an infinite set of abstractions, there must be some information according to which abstractions can get conscious and which not. Otherwise all abstractions are somewhat conscious of themselves in the sense that "oh, I am an abstraction". If I am indeed an abstraction, this information must be somewhere in the infinite realms of abstractions. This information can only be zero when the claim that I am an abstraction is empty, means consciousness is something other as we assume it to be - or every abstraction is conscious. If consciousness would be of that kind, means an abstraction thinking that itself is an abstraction, the very term 'abstraction' gets void as long as there are other abstractions that aren't able to become conscious. Either all abstractions are 'conscious' or none of them are 'conscious'. If parts of them are 'conscious', then there must be some information about which parts, and how and why they are destined to be able to be conscious of themselves.... and realize that they are 'abstractions'. Isn't the whole term 'abstraction' itself an abstraction for something we just don't understand, namely the fundamental underlying ontology of reality? If yes, this term does self-confirm itself to reliably catch some ontological truth, albeit it merely self-confirms it character as a container for something we do not yet understand. These are just a few toughts... in my own approach I try to exemplify these thoughts with a certain deduction scheme. I would be glad if you would be able to comment on my own approach - best wishes from germany, Stefan. P.S. Sorry for the missing blank lines - i left them out, because the fqxi formatting system has a bug (hope that AI will work more reliable some day :-)

Dear Marc Séguin

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

Professor Seguin,

This is a very thought provoking essay, so I thought I might offer a few that come to mind...

Your metaphysical handwaving seems to assume there is that "purely abstract structure" in the "All=nothing." Yet wouldn't all that abstract structure equally cancel out to nothing as well? Is there some platonic math hiding in zero, or does it arise with the divisions, distinctions and interactions arising from that total equilibrium? Wouldn't it be even more fundamental if you could describe the process by which even that mathematical structure comes into being, from the zero up? For example, say there is just the fluctuating vacuum. Such that it is only energy and the forms expressed by this energy. For instance, temperature would be an elementary description, thus form of this energy. Given the energy is dynamic, it is constantly changing form. Simple as that seems, it opens a Pandora's box for physics, as it creates the effect of time. Since there is only the energy, it is always and only present, thus "conserved." Now our awareness manifests as flashes of perception and so we think of this point of the "present" flowing past to future, which physics codifies as measures of duration, but the far more logical explanation is that it is change turning future to past, as in tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. Duration is simply the state of the present, as events coalesce and dissolve. This makes time an effect of action, similar to temperature. As evidence of this underlaying dichotomy of energy and form, consider that after a few billion years of evolution, we developed a central nervous system, specializing in processing form/information and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process energy. Consider as well that the seat of this information processing, the brain, is divided into two hemispheres. The left, linear, sequential, rational side effectively equates to the sequencing of time, while the right, emotional, intuitive, circular feedback side effectively equates to thermodynamic feedback loops. E.O. Wilson described insect brains as a thermostat, but they have been shown to have the ability to count, as a navigation tool. Navigation is logically the substrate of narration and thus logic, history and civilization. Consequently the fundamentality of time to human existence, sort of like the earth as the center of cosmic perception. So if time is really an effect, where does this leave space? Is it reducible to geometry, or is geometry a mapping of space? Which is truly abstracted from the other? We could as easily correlate measures of temperature and volume, using ideal gas laws. Might it be that space is that physical zero? The all=nothing? The vacuum might fluctuate, but first you need the vacuum.

Emergence and other features prove that a reductionist approach with the Standard Model as its foundation does not work.

Quantum mechanics is not a general framework, quantum mechanics is just a kind of mechanics. And quantum field theories are not build over quantum mechanics. In fact, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are two disjoint theories as Dirac correctly mentioned.

Elementary particles are not quantum fields. There are misguided attempts to interpret particles as excitations of associated fields, but this is physically meaningless. First, those excitations do not correspond to real particles but to unphysical bare particles. Second, fields are unobservable by definition, what we really measure in experiments are particles. Third, those fields are based in approximations like models of infinite chains of harmonic oscillators.

Wave-particle duality is a misnomer based in a misunderstanding about quantum theory. Particles always behave as particles. That wave-like phenomena refers to the collective behavior of ensembles of particles.

Electrons and anti-electrons are not localized "disturbances" or "bundles" in the electron field. Even ignoring that the Standard model deals only with unphysical bare particles, those "disturbances" cannot be localized in the model, because "x" and "t" in the Standard Model are dummy parameters not related to physical space and time coordinates.

"Because of the well-known incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we simply do not know how to satisfactorily describe

gravity as a quantum field." We know how to describe gravity as a quantum field, as a spin-2 field, in the quantum field theory of gravity. The problem is on that people that pretends to quantize General Relativity. That people is trying to quantize geometry.

Of course, the Standard Model is not fundamental, but not only because of the large number of constituents. Considering the "Super Model" as a "Theory of Everything" would be so incorrect like the past half dozen of occasions that physicists believed they had explained everything or were close to explain everything.

There are good reasons why chemistry is not simply called "molecular physics" and they are not historical: e.g., nuclear chemistry and supramolecular chemistry deal with something more than just molecules. The claim "chemistry should be nothing more than electromagnetism and quantum mechanics applied to protons, neutrons and electrons" is so wrong like when Dirac pretended that the "whole of chemistry [is] thus completely known".

Biology is not applied chemistry, but that does not mean that we have to appeal to the anthropic 'principle' to explain the origin of life. The 'principle' is a mere tautology, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know.

Contrary to what a reductionist as Steven Weinberg claims, thermodynamics is not deduced from statistical mechanics alone. Statistical mechanics requires of a previous knowledge of thermodynamics principles and laws, and that is why some scholars prefer the term statistical thermodynamics to refer to this fusion of disciplines.

Weinberg himself tried to deduce the second law of thermodynamics (in the form of H-theorem) from "the level of the elementary particles": he claims that the second law is a consequence of unitarity; he could not be more wrong! Weinberg even pretends that his H-theorem is more fundamental than the theorems "derived in statistical mechanics textbooks", because textbooks use the "Born approximation", whereas he does not. What the reductionist does not mention is that textbooks often deal with condensed matter situations, where the scattering approach that he uses is invalid, because interactions are persistent.

Finally, add my vote "no" to the poll of if consciousness is more fundamental than space/time/matter. Consciousness is an emergent property of matter.

Marc, It is good to see you back with another strong entry. I like your idea of no information meaning the whole ensemble of all abstractions, but where can you go from there? If each abstraction [math]a[/math] has a probability [math]p_a[/math] then they can be selected on the basis of that measure. Add the constraint that our experience has to take place in a habitable universe and you are done. The information gained in selecting an abstraction with probability [math]p_a[/math] is [math]I=-\log_2(p_a)[/math] in bits. Where then does the probability come from? Doesn't that require some arbitrary information about the universe? That would spoil the philosophical approach rather badly. The solution is to invert the problem and use the information content to determine the probability so [math]p_a = e^{-\ln(2)I}[/math] The information [math]I[/math] is the length of the shortest description of the abstraction in bits and if [math]S=i\hbar \ln(2)I[/math] the whole thing turns into a simple path-integral-like sum over the ensemble. A whole universe from nothing in one easy step.

Hi Philip, you have successfully proven that it is possible to link some unknown but assumed to be existent and exclusive abstractions like information and probability to derive the ultimate unknown abstraction, nothing = something. However, the question remains, do we really know what 'something' is in-itself and do we really know what 'nothing'is in-itself? Surely not, since we even do not know what the term 'information' should mean to discriminate between 'nothing' and 'something'. According to the zero-information approach of Marc, nothing must be something, it merely cannot be fully formalized in bits or other formal systems, since it has zero bits of 'information', zero bits of formalizable content. This tells me that the whole menue of 'nothing' as well as that for something cannot be completely understood by human beings with only the menue card at hand.

Every shortest description of 'nothing' or 'something' must remain incomplete, since it neither can determine the essence of either of them, nor their relationship other than concatenating two unknowns to come to a third unknown. Otherwise one could say that the shortest computer program that is able to emulate 'nothing' has exactly zero bits and is complete - and that therefore an infinity of such programs run unnoticed permanently on our computers, non-existing programs that emulate, well, 'nothing'.

I think the failure here is to assume that undefinable, unknowable things must necessarily be equal to non-existent things and that non-existent things must necessarily be equal to unknowable, undefinable things. But this would mean that the non-existence of a real elephant in my room is an unknowable thing and that there could well be a real elephant in my room, albeit in a rather undefinable manner... so, just a moment... where are you...elephant...at least there is the potential for such an elephant to be here, since I have enough space in my room... and you are invited to guess whether or not there is indeed an elephant in my room at the moment - and state some probabilities for either case. The big question is, I think, which things we should reasonably consider as non-existent and which things we should reasonably consider as existent, but undefinable.