Fundamentality Here, Fundamentality There, Fundamentality Everywhere by Marc Séguin

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.

Hi Marc,

I will refer to your comment a couple of replies above and to your comment here.

O.k., agreed. We then have to re-define the terms mathematics, structure, relationship to 'enable' consciousness, means to be consistent with it. Since consciousness is qualitatively different from non-conscious 'abstractions' (non-concious abstractions cannot built for example a Boing 747 and have no Qualia - at least this is the most reasonable induction by observing non-conscious matter), we are talking not anymore about quantities and self-consistency of formal systems, but about different qualities of them. Surely, a certain amount of complexity needed for a 'thing' to be conscious is a quantitative statement, but it is surely also a qualitative statement, a statement that make a qualitative difference.

So, in another somewhat ambigous manner, your informational approach states that strong emergence is fundamental to consciousness, since it is another quality different from non-conscious 'abstractions'. If an 'abstraction' can realize its own 'essence', namely being an emergent abstraction, then it really gets paradoxical, since the starting premise was that all abstractions are a complete ensemble, existing somewhat in a timeless realm with eternally fixed 'qualities'. Human recombination of some of them does not change or add something to this eternal realm of abstractions. Hence some 'strong emergence' does not fit into your picture. But nonetheless, a structure that is complex enough to become aware that it is a structure, is a qualitative, an analytical insight into fundamental reality.

You wrote

"Yet, for me, the only thing that could possibly be truly fundamental must be unique and non-arbitrary, hence, contain zero information, yet explain everything. It is such a high-level (or you could say low-level) approach to the problem that most would considered it meaningless (or at least, useless)... But from an ultimate/metaphysical perspective, could it be just simple (and crazy) enough to be true?!"

O.k., once more agreed. But now you give a good reason for defining God as being truly fundamental, not in its more traditional definition, but simply as a truth which is at least totally conscious of two truths, namely of itself being THE fundamental truth and that he / she is conscious about this fact - and nontheless being able to explore a realm of itself that this God knows is non-conscious, unconscious so to speak. This God for example can re-define and re-structure some non-conscious realms of himself to become 'physical' - without in the first place having to know what these non-conscious parts of himself are in detail. He only knows the results a posteriori by realizing that they are consistent with the observations that they have a consistent dual meaning in reference to his own truth, namely a realm where time is present and things, although being temporal truths, do change according to their temporal relationships. Altough it may seem that such a God has merely discovered such a 'physical', self-consistent realm within himself, its free will to examine its 'non-conscious' realms may have lead to construct such a realm in the first place instead of discovering it. And additionally such a God may be well aware that he / she has constructed its own yet non-conscious extensions. This is also a kind of bootstrapping facts from nothing. This God may simply imagine something and decide that this imagination should have a permanent reality, he may not even hold this reality permanently in his conscious awareness, but it could well be delegated into some sub-realms of himself (the latter he may or may not have also created in the first place).

The same seems true to me for your approach, since it re-defines things to be consistent with consciousness, without having to figure out in the first place whether or not 'consciousness' can at all be put into a sufficiently consistent and complete 'mathematical' pattern that unequivocally also contains some signs of Qualia. To be honest, I do not believe that such a mathematical pattern can achieve more than pinpoint to some neuro-physical correlates, not even to all of them, since brains, albeit being similar, have some delicate differences when it comes to certain areas of activities. Similar approaches delegate the problem of consciousness into a sub-realm of mathematics.

Once more I would like to say that the imagination involved in this - and foremost the Qualia of at all being able to imagine something like a God - seems to me to be the main reason for being able to at all create a consistent enough induction scheme that seems to realistically invoke what is truly fundamental. And in some sense you are right with your approach, since it subsumes all of reality under a common principle, the better known things as well as the yet unknown things. Every attempt to state what is truly fundamental must as well subsume some unknowns, since we are not all-knowing beings. But we can simulate that we already know everything, at least in reference to the truly fundamental basis of existence. This is not much different from a God which simulates some things for the sake of them staying permanently in his / her realm of experience or existence.

In summary, I think that your approach, albeit I am not comfortable with it (but others may also be not comfortable with the notion of God), is not totally senseless and I agree that maybe reality is more crazy than we suspect it to be. A reality where crazyness and rationality may well coincide into a perfect whole and we realize that both terms - crazyness as well as rationality - are just limited terms to describe one and the same matter of facts. I am not against crazy ideas, indeed i like them!

Marc, thanks for having replied, so I can make more sense of your motivations to take the approach you did.

Best wishes,

Stefan Weckbach

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. Do not allow New Cartesian Physics go away into nothingness, which wants to be the theory of everything OO.

Sincerely, Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich.

Dear Marc,

thank you very much!

Have a nice day,

Francesco

Marc,

Does such information exist without a medium? Is there structure in the void?

Abstraction is necessarily abstracted from our experience and while it is defined by its consistency, is it completely logical? Consider the idea of a dimensionless point as an abstraction of location; If it has zero dimension, does it really exist, any more than a dimensionless apple? It is a multiple of zero and last I heard, any multiple of zero is still zero. Obviously it is more conceptually efficient to overlook this than deal with insisting on some infinitesimal dimensionality, but does that negate zero being zero, or is something being ignored?

How about the idea of space as three dimensional; Isn't it really just the xyz coordinate system and a mapping device, rather than foundational to space? Presumably volume, thus 3 dimensions, is prior lines and planes? Consider that any such coordinate system requires the 0,0,0 center point and multiple such points can exist in the same space, just as people all exist in the same space and are the center of their own coordinate systems. Lots of political conflicts revolve around different coordinate systems being applied to the same space. Are longitude, latitude and altitude foundational to the surface of this planet, or just a mapping device?

Obviously nature is incredibly complex and the patterns and laws we manage to extrapolate from it are also complex, but are they prior to nature, or an expression of its regularity?

Wouldn't it be even more foundational if we could explain how these abstractions emerge from ever more basic patterns, than assuming they exist in some platonic realm? Is there proof of that realm, or is it just belief?

Regards,

John

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3039

Hi Marc:

Congratulations on intriguing and well-written essay.

Building upon your statement - "......try to make sense of these diverging views while attempting to distinguish between epistemological fundamentality (the fundamentality of our scientific theories) and ontological fundamentality (the fundamentality of the world itself, irrespective of our description of it).", 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 paper 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

Prof Marc Séguin wrote on Feb. 1, 2018 @ 21:49 GMT

Essay Abstract

Very nice OP ...."The question "What is fundamental?" elicits widely divergent responses, even among physicists. The majority view is that the mantle of the most fundamental scientific theory is currently held by the Standard Model of particle physics, and will eventually be passed on to its successor, a "Super Model" that will incorporate quantized gravity and explain current mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. But many disagree with this straightforward, reductionist viewpoint....."

I hope you will not mind that I am not following main stream physics...

By the way...Here in my essay energy to mass conversion is proposed................ yours is very nice essay best wishes .... I highly appreciate hope your essay ....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

Hi Marc,

It is treat to be in another contest with you.

Could I summarize your diagrams as follows:

If you climb down the stairs (turtles) you favor small scale cause. If you climb up the stairs (monkeys) you favor large scale emergence.

Or is this a little to simplistic?

I have a tendency to climb down the stairs. I think you may find my essay interesting.

I think your essay could be a "crystal clear" introductory course to the sciences.

Thanks,

Don Limuti

Dear Marc,

thanks for the intriguing essay! However, I always have to smile a little when I hear somebody claiming that 61 is too 'large' a number of constituents for the Standard Model to be fundamental---given that it could just as easily have been thousands, or millions, or billions, it seems actually rather an astonishingly small number!

But still, there are of course plenty of reasons that the Standard Model should not be expected to be fundamental.

You mention the generation structure as similar to the order of the periodic table, hinting at something more fundamental, and I think there's something to that---to me, it's always been a terribly frustrating element of the SM: it's kinda like, being out of ideas like a washed-up Hollywood producer, nature decided to capitalize on its greatest hit with two unnecessary sequels that introduce litte novelty except for packing a heftier punch. That alone is reason enough for me to want the SM replaced by something neater!

Going further, I think we share some common ground in thinking about epistemological fundamentality, and in particular, in terms of 'everything' being essentially of zero information content, and our models of the world ultimately containing information because they only pick out some part of it, being themselves only incomplete descriptions. Although I come at it from a very different angle, it's intriguing that we should find some common ground there. There's even a little Zen in my essay, too!