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Despite what physicists might say, the actual physics' view is that the universe is like a perfect machine that is fuelled by number change: i.e. the equations of physics would indicate that an initial number change is the fuel that perfectly drives the universe forever afterwards. In this view, quantum mechanics might be seen, by some, as an anomaly that will be brought into line just as soon as the right equations are found.

The physics' view is that initial number change is the perfect fuel that runs the universe ever after, and no number-change (i.e. fuel) top-ups are ever required. But what if top-ups are required in the form of quantum jumps of number? It seems more likely that the number jumps of quantum mechanics are the essential sources of change in the universe [1].

But what is causing quantum number jumps? Seemingly the only candidate is matter itself. So instead of the view of physicists and philosophers, including physicists Anthony Aguirre [2], Sean Carroll and Carlo Rovelli [3], of a numb, dumb matter that is ruled by laws, and where genuine free will [4] is an impossible anomaly, we come to the view that matter itself has the free will to "jump the numbers", i.e. matter itself is driving change in the universe.

The above post was from me, Lorraine Ford.

Above post continued:

1. Note that time, energy, mass, and position etc, are in effect merely categories that can be represented by numbers; time, energy, mass, and position can't themselves cause number change: a lot of people get confused by this issue. Similarly, law of nature relationships are merely relationships: they can't cause number change.

2. Cosmological Koans, https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3261

3. First Things First: The Physics of Causality, https://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/236

4. Free will: "The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate", https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/free_will (Oxford dictionary)

    • [deleted]

    My view is that physicists are making this idea of time way harder than it needs to be. Specifically, my comments are:

    1. I may not be understanding this correctly, but do physicists think that the equations of physics work fine when time runs backward and forward because they can put negative numbers in their equations and still get some result? To me, it seems like just because a person can change the sign of the time variable in an equation doesn't mean that time itself runs backwards. The equations involving time and time itself are two different things. An analogy might be if I have the word "house" and find that I can say the word backwards just fine, "esuoh", but this doesn't mean that a house actually can turn into an "esuoh".

    2. To me, time is not fundamental. It's just a function of physical things happening (e.g., physical change/events happening). If there were absolutely no physical change in the universe, there would be no time. This explains why time is moving irreversibly from past to future: because things, or events, keep happening. To go from future to past, there would have to be a reduction in the number of things, or events, that have already happened in the universe. This doesn't occur. Even if the events of a process look like they're happening in reverse, like if a broken cup spontaneously reassembles, this doesn't mean that time is going backwards; it just means that additional physical events are happening that reassemble the cup and that happen to look like the previous events going backwards. But because physical change is still happening as the cup is reassembled, and the number of events is still increasing, time is still moving forward.

    As to why there was very low entropy (disorder) at the beginning of the universe, this makes sense to me if the universe started from a single existent entity which then somehow proliferated to produce more entities that are in our current universe, there would have been initially a very low amount of disorder as well as a very low number of changes/events at the start of the universe. Starting from one entity seems to me to be the ultimate in unification, which is what many are after.

    3. I find it ironic that physicists like to dabble in fields they're not expert in, like why humans perceive things and what consciousness is, but if experts in those fields like to dabble in physics, physicists call them crackpots.

      I have a problem with the notion of time in the multiverse scenario that Sean Carroll prefers as a valid interpretation of quantum mechanics.

      To illustrate the problem, let's do a gedankenexperiment:

      Suppose that tomorrow i will go to the quantum laboratory and make a superposition experiment with two distinct possible outcomes. No matter what measurement outcome i will see tomorrow, my "clone" will the the complementary outcome.

      My question now is: does this clone already exist today? If yes, in what sense does it exist already today?

      If not, i must take the usual narrative of a branching universe seriously (for the sake of the argument) and infere that a whole universe is generated at the moment the wave function collapses.

      The puzzle now is twofould, namely who was the original person in the lab and who is the clone. If i am the clone then i merely have a false memory about my past - i did not live that past but the original did live it. The clone therefore lives in a virtual reality equal to a boltzmann brain that believes its full blown memory about the past indicates that it lived it in the past.

      If an infinitude of "original me's" has lived my life from birth to tomorrow (when i go into the lab and perform my experiment) and after the experiment one of those "original me's" is differentiated from me (by seeing the complementary measurement result), I have to ask in what sense it was *not" me before the measurement outcome took place. Are there an infinitude of identical universes stacked upon each other at every point in time? And last but not least - does the formalism of quantum mechanics indicate in any way that such an infinitude of identical "copies" is inherent in the superposition that will take place tomorrow?

      I would be thankful for some enlightening answers.

        4 days later

        "does the formalism of quantum mechanics indicate in any way that such an infinitude of identical "copies" is inherent in the superposition that will take place tomorrow?"

        No. See my comments here

        Rob McEachern

        These interviews of Carroll and Rovelli are both quite interesting since they show two very smart people with many related but very different narratives about the nature of reality. Narratives with measurement are what guide science and without measurements, there really is no role for science. However, narratives without measurement are what guide philosophy and there are philosophy is a perpetual discourse among many very smart people about the nature of physical reality.

        "Every philosopher believes they are correct in disagreeing with every other philosopher and so only one philosopher could ever actually be correct." Paul Skokowski.

        Neither Carroll nor Rovelli acknowledge the unknowable precursors that result from quantum phase correlation and superposition, but both accept the notion that the universe changes and that outcomes all have precursors, i.e., cause and effect. However, they do not discuss the two very different kinds of changes that make up things that happen: First there is the very slow change of the universe due to gravity; Second, there are the very fast changes of atoms due to charge.

        Black holes are endpoints of time and space, but black holes are still subject to the slow changes of universe matter and action. In mattertime, the universe pulse destiny is a single black hole and that destiny births the next antiverse/universe pulse. An antiverse expansion is the first half pulse that grows with antimatter precursors then a universe matter pulse decay is the

        second half pulse.

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          Hi Kate, BTW re. your "Does drinking a glass of red wine with dinner make you live longer? Does it make cancer cells less likely to grow?". "In its Report on Carcinogens, the National Toxicology Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services lists consumption of alcoholic beverages as a known human carcinogen." https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet

          Worth knowing I think. However it may reduce likelihood of other stress related illnesses.

          But the philosophers belief in the correctness of their disagreement could be wrong. E.g. Sometimes people are talking about the same things in different words. And so there need not be just one correct philosopher. I think the statement by Paul Skokowski is just a put down regarding philosophy; as if the explanation of things is unimportant. Is agreement without understanding, or the attempt to understand, better? I think not.

          Dear Georgina,

          Please remember that: Cogito, ergo sum is (sic) a Latin philosophical

          proposition by René Descartes usually translated into English as "I think,

          therefore I am". The phrase originally appeared in French as je pense, donc je suis in his Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed. Wikipedia

          René would have been closer to telling the truth had he averred: Je suppose que,

          comme tout le monde sur la planète "I guess, just like everybody else on the

          planet does." All philosophers and theoretical physicists would come closer to telling

          the truth if they would only preface all of their remarks with the term:

          "I guess." Professor Markus Mueller of the Vienna Institute for Quantum Optics

          and Quantum Information has confirmed to me by email that all philosophers and theoretical physicists have always guessed about the real structure of the Universe. But he insists that he only makes "good" guesses, not arbitrary ones.

          Joe Fisher, Realist

          The 2019 FQXi conference [1] has pinned this article [2] to the top of its twitter page. The speakers and attendees have spent a lot of time trying to decide what life, agency and free will are, and whether they are compatible with current physics, or whether new physics is required.

          But the topology of life, agency and free will is completely different to the topology of determinism:

          .....Determinism means that laws of nature determine all outcomes for matter.

          .....Agency/ free will means that matter itself determines some of its own outcomes. This is new physics only in the sense that it is a different view of matter.

          The other issue is that the nature of life, agency and free will is only representable as (but not determined by) algorithms; the nature of life, agency and free will is not representable as equations and numbers alone. Yet there is no way that equations and numbers can transmogrify into algorithms. This is new physics only in the sense that the behaviour of matter needs to be represented by algorithms.

          1. Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World, 20-25 July 2019.

          2. First Things First: The Physics of Causality, https://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/236 .

            Does this mean all of your statements about reality will be prefaced with "I guess" from now on?

            Philosophers are never wrong, they just never completely agree...

            Thinking you are right is a natural part of consciousness, but is subjective and a natural part of philosophy. Being right is a part of objective agreement with others, which philosophers never seem to have and only comes from the measurements of science.

            ...however, it is not possible to know all of the precursors for agency/free will...otherwise, agency free will would also be determinate.

            This is why quantum uncertainty plays a key role in agency/free will...

            a month later

            NATURE made the only version of reality VISIBLE.

            Joe Fisher, Realist

            4 days later

            I read Sean Carroll's piece in the New York Times. Very insightful. I would say we'll probably never have a complete theory of quantum mechanics because there is always more to know about different dimensions, or degrees of freedom. Quantum mechanics happens at 10 ^-35, but there are other degrees of freedom above and below this dimension. Sometimes when these dimensions interact, we have interesting things, like reverse causality in the transactional interpretation of QM. When the pilot wave or DeBroglie wave extends to infinity, QM kind of can't be complete. Descriptions of other dimensions are not static. Neither are relations between degrees of freedom.

              Hi Joe,

              I agree somewhat. I question some of the specific terms you use, like unnatural. I think what Von Neumann and the non-Copenhagen schools taught was that there was a natural, real aspect to QM wave functions. For Von Neumann, it was geometrical. We're beginning to see the confluence between physical properties and numerical properties, such as the interesting research out of Princeton last year about prime numbers being encoded in special crystals.