Dear John,

Thank you for having read the essay and for your comment.

Yes indeed the Copernicus model was less accurate than the Ptolemaic one and it could be refuted on various empirical grounds (like absence of parallax). That is the reason why we said in 1st paragraph on page 3 that "despite having no empirical evidence" Copernicus still insisted his view was correct; and many followed him in the following centuries.

As for the parallax, as far as my understanding is concerned, it was certainly considered as a silver bullet by people opposed to a Copernican view but Copernicus himself had an argument to explain the absence of observed parallax with respect to the background of the fixed stars (which can be found in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) which was that the stars of the background of the fixed stars were so distant that a parallax was simply not observable. The absence of parallax was then used to infer the size of the universe. That's what I would call turning the tables!

As you may know this lead to further major problems with regards to the size of each individual star within the background of the fixed stars. Namely, a single star was then expected to be larger than the Solar System. This compelled Tycho Brahe to propose an alternative geo-hello-centric view in which such problems would not occur.

In any case, since as you say the parallax was only observed in 1830, the absence of parallax did not prevent many scholars, including Newton, to adopt a heliocentric view. The way it was done was precisely by overhauling the way to infer the laws of Nature.

Now, if your comment implied that the presence/absence of parallax constituted an absolute observational means to assert who is moving, I would disagree. For the parallax argument to make sense, one still needs to assume that the background of the fixed stars is actually fixed. If this assumption is lifted and this background has no special property then nothing can be derived from observing a displacement of one of the stars.

Best,

Fabien

Dear Fabien

Nice and well thought essay. You deal with several important topics; particularly the topic of consciousness. I disagree with the statement that science leaves some problems to philosophy. I think it is the opposite way, for the last 5 centuries science has taken from philosophy many unresolved problems and have solved some of them. I conceived science as an evolved philosophy, after all philosophy also have tried to understand the world. I have a couple of books that deal with the most important problems in philosophy (authored by George Moore and Russell, respectively) and most of these problems have not been solved. For instance the problem of space and time, have been led by physics in the last 3 or 4 centuries, philosophers have contributed almost nothing to these concepts. Unfortunately, in my opinion, philosophy is nowadays more a reviewer of science than an author of science.

You deal with the topic of geocentrism and heliocentrism which is very interesting. In my essay I give a short discussion on absolutism and relativism; perhaps you may be interested in taking a look at my essay. I would be glad to see some comments from you.

Good luck in the contest!

Israel

    Dear Fabian and Matthew,

    I like your title: "...taking a stance about undecidable issues. I treat essentially that issue in my essay Deciding on the nature of time and space where I deal with the issue, "which world view is real?". I invite you to read it and welcome comments.

    I think it's appropriate that you apply these ideas to the problem of consciousness. You discuss various concepts and note that some strong forms of panpsychism suggest that electrons have some degree of consciousness. To my way of thinking panpsychism is more of a field phenomenon, and the primordial field is gravity, whose nonlinear self-interactions can be thought of as implying a minimal 'self-awareness'. Any moving mass density, such as the extremely dense electron, will induce local gravitomagnetic circulation in the field, thus 'coupling' the matter to the consciousness field and at the same time providing a deBroglie-like wave associated with the particle. This posits a Wheeler-like universe in which consciousness exists at the creation and evolves to the present.

    One can only hint at this in a comment, but the idea answers some of Chalmers 'hard' problems. I address similar issues in The Nature of Mind, which had the top community rating in the 2016-2017 contest.

    Good luck in the contest, you're off to a good start.

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Dear Israel,

      Thank you for having taken the time to read our essay.

      With regards to your comment on science versus philosophy. Would you have an example in the last 5 centuries where science has brought definitive closure to a philosophical question?

      Many thanks.

      Best,

      Fabien

      Dear Edwin,

      Thank you for having taken the time to read our essay. I hope you did find some propositions in there insightful.

      With regards to your field view of panpsychism where gravity would relate to consciousness, would you agree to see this as a form of functionalism as we describe at the end of our essay with IIT or Tegrmark's pattern of communication channel ideas for example?

      That is to say, a given pattern of the gravitational field will correspond to a certain degree of consciousness.

      Or am I missing something?

      As a personal side note, I am quite sympathetic to the idea of a field of consciousness. The point is whether this field is already described by our physical theories or whether one needs to add a new one.

      Many thanks for your insights.

      Best,

      Fabien

      Thanks.

      Apologies, I was addressing your "empirically undecidable" issue. Between the 2 models, it eventually became observationally decidable.

      RE: EPR

      Another conclusion is EPR is true with ALL interactions occurring at speeds >> c (non-local). Newton's planet model works if the gravity speed >>c as van Flandern and others measured.

      Thanks for you insights. I wish you had said a bit more on the crisis in physics (GR vs QM - which or neither or both as part of a larger model). For example, Newton had his gravity in Principia but followed it with an aether model which suggested the same cause of gravity (big) and diffraction of light (small) with corpuscles warping the aether and the aether directing corpuscles in Opticks.

        John,

        Unless I made a mistake in my last observation I do not believe this is the case. It is not absolutely decidable on the sole observational basis. One needs to assume the background of the fixed stars to be fixed for the parallax evidence to actually make the problem decidable from astronomical observations.

        If the stars in the background are not fixed, the reality of their observed motion from the Earth becomes as undecidable as that of other planets and the Sun.

        So, you are right that it did support a non-geocentric view but this was not for free.

        Best,

        Fabien

        John,

        Thank you for suggesting further ideas.The GR vs QM would fit within the problem of contrastive underdetermination and we can interpret the current programme of find a theory that combines the two as the belief that there is "better" theory, in some sense, than the existing alternative of having GR and QM kind of separate. The request for unification appears to me as an aesthetic constraint.

        I have read Optiks some time ago and light as being made of particles is only addressed in the last book from what I remember. I do not recall the aether argument. Would you have a link to suggest where these ideas are explored further?

        Thank you.

        Best,

        Fabien

        Newton "Opticks" 1730 edition, book number: 0-486-60205-2 (Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1979) (careful - different editions have different Query numbering)

        Qu. 1 Masses bend passing light and amount inverse to distance.

        Qu. 3 Light passing close to edges are diffracted in fringes.

        Qu. 4 Light path begins to bend BEFORE reaching body or slit.

        Qu. 5 Light heats mass.

        Qu. 6 Black bodies absorb all light.

        Qu. 8 Black body radiation.

        Qu. 11 Sun and stars are black body radiators.

        Qu. 17 suggested the corpuscles are pushed around (divergence of the aether's density) by waves that "overtake" the rays of light - Because this aether also causes the gravity effect, the waves in the aether travel faster than light - its not a big stretch to say MUCH faster than light.

        Qu. 18 suggests a Medium that refracts and reflects light that allows light to heat effect bodies.

        Qu. 19 suggest the refraction of light implies differing densities of the Medium.

        Calls it "...this aether Medium..". Density of the aether GREATER in "...free and open spaces void of air and other grosser bodies...".

        Qu. 20 the density increase (ie divergence) refract light.

        Qu. 21 Aether rarer within dense bodies and increase with distance and "...thereby cause the gravity of those great bodies; every body endeavoring to go from the denser parts of the medium towards the rarer?". Also suggests light travel faster in the void (denser parts of the aether). Hence today we see the Shapiro delay. Also suggests the aether is so rare as to not impede the planets revolution (no aether wind).

        Also, video showing diffraction using a toy computer simulation following Newton's queries:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMAjKk6k6-k&t=18s

          Dear Fabien and Matthew

          Traditionally, philosophy has tried to give a description of the universe, understand it in all aspects: economic, natural, social, cultural, abstract, etc. However, since the enlightenment, science started replacing many branches of philosophy. Science can be understood today as an evolved philosophy. In other words, philosophy is just a primitive way of doing science. Besides the methods used by philosophers, scientists also used math and experimentation. For this reason science has been more successful than philosophy in understanding the world.

          Philosophy started "dying" in 1686 when Newton taught us how theories have to be done. Before Newton people did just philosophy. Newton put philosophy in mathematical formulations and carried out experiments to quantitatively verify theoretical predictions. Thanks to this, we have made great progress in our endeavor to understand how the universe works. Topics that were discussed in philosophical circles were later addressed in scientific terms, that is, formulated in mathematical terms and measured with precision. For instance the concepts of space and time were advanced by relativity, we now know that they depend on speed and gravity. Achieving this level of knowledge was the result of studying electromagnetic effects in systems in motion. This understanding would not be possible by mere philosophical methods. The nature of matter is another traditional philosophical problem that has been largely advanced by science in the last 3 centuries. Other topics include the essence of life and consciousness, just to mention the most relevant.

          Regards

          Israel

          Dear Fabien,

          Probably I would say that the complexity density of a given pattern will correspond to a certain 'degree' of consciousness. The most 'dense' or complex patterns exist in the brain where we find the highest degree of consciousness.

          You agree that a consciousness field is not unreasonable and ask whether this field is already described by our physical theories or whether one needs to add a new one. Charmers thought that we needed a new one and thought that physics 'left no room' for a new field.

          In 2006, when I was lead to the idea of a new field, I asked myself how this field could interact with matter. If I thought 'raise my arm' I wondered how the thought actually exerted any force on matter to start the bio-chemical-mechanical process. It took less than an hour to derive a formula for the force of a consciousness field on matter, based on a change in the local field, that was analogous to the electromagnetic force on charge. Similarly, the motion of mass induced a change in the local field, thus inciting awareness of the moving matter. We don't really want to be made aware of matter that isn't changing with respect to us.

          It actually took a while for me to realize that the equation I had worked out thinking the problem through in all it it's aspects was actually written down in 1885 by Oliver Heaviside based on his formulation of gravitational theory in analogy with Maxwell's electrodynamics. The more I analyzed the situation, the more every aspect fit together.

          In other words, I did not sit down one day and think, "maybe gravity is the consciousness field'. Instead I worked out the simplest equation that exhibited all the properties the consciousness that I thought consciousness must have and then found out that the equations described the gravito-magnetic field of Heaviside that also are the 'weak field' equations derived from Einstein's general relativistic field equations. In other words, I was dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that gravitomagnetism fills the bill perfectly.

          Also in 2006 Martin Tajmar measured this C-field in the lab and then 2011 Gravity Probe B detected this field. Eventually, after everything fit perfectly in place, I accepted this ideas, and it has provided the most comprehensive understanding of consciousness that I have come across.

          Along the way I realized that physicists, always projecting structure on the world and thinking that this actually describes the world, had misunderstood the 'weak field' equations of relativity. To simplify the non-linear field equations they simply linearized the equations to describe the 'weak field'. Since the equations are no longer self-interactive, they believed the field is no longer self-interacting. This is foolishness. Changing the equations to simplify the calculations does not change the nature of the field. A self-interactive field remains self-interactive. It only means that one must iterate to restore self-interaction to the calculations. Also significant is that it is not mass in the equations but mass density. Physicists again foolishly think that the gravitational field is only significant for large masses. False -- it is density that drives the gravitomagnetic field circulation, hence electrons and atoms induce changes in the local field.

          The book I wrote describing this theory of consciousness is "Geneman's World", ISBN-13: 978-0-9791765-5-5, in 2008. My first FQXi essay in 2009 was on the Physics of Consciousness but only ten years ago it was not cool to talk about consciousness in physics. I am quite pleased to see that this topic is now 'respectable'. Believe me, it wasn't.

          Warmest regards,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Dear Israel,

          Thank you for your reply.

          Of course Newton's work constitutes a breakthrough of a sort that by no means we wish to diminish (and we absolutely don't in our essay).

          Have you read Mach's critique of Newton's work by any chance?

          Best,

          Fabien

          Dear Fabien

          I have, Why? I actually talk about it in my essay.

          Regards

          Israel

          Hi Fabien,

          Thank you for the essay, I enjoyed it very much!

          Do you think it would ever be possible to reach an end to science? To answer in a satisfactory way all or most questions that are able to be answered? And How do you you feel Godel's undecidability and Turing's uncomputibility fit into science, if you feel they do at all? Would love to hear your opinions on these topics.

          Best regards,

          Ernesto

            Dear Ernesto,

            Thank you for your comments. We do hope you found some aspects insightful.

            With regards to the "End of Science", with the thesis we defend in our essay, it is possible to reach a state where scientists believe that "they have got the whole picture right" and maybe what remains to be done is just getting better and better quantitative agreement between theory and observations. It is unclear whether the remaining quest driven by quantitative agreement can ever reach an end though. That being said, even if most scientists believe that the "End of science" is reached, it does not follow that philosophers agree and nor does it follow that future scientists are going to agree either. There are at least two situations that come to mind where scholars thought that "we have got the whole picture right" and yet that was not the end of it. The end of the 19th Century and the pre-Renaissance period. Copernicus is a very interesting example because, although he motivates to some extent his theory based on disagreement between observation and the Ptolemaic model, his main drive was reportedly the antiquity texts of the Pythagoras school that had been translated from Greek and Arabic (leading up to Renaissance movement) and lead him to look at the world from a unique vantage point with respect to his contemporaries.

            Although this is much more complicated than what I am going to say here, one cannot dismiss the influence that Eastern philosophy has played on the development of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920s, in particular when it comes to the development of the Copenhagen school.

            With regards to Turing's uncomputability, we think it plays a very practical role in many problems of physics where one wants to infer the infinite time and/or infinite size limit of a system; which is relevant to computer simulations but also to experimental works as well. Alongside Goedel's incompleteness theorem it also gives trouble for answering fundamental questions on the spectral gap. Note that for the latter example, extrapolating to infinity is not the only issue. The point is that it is undecidable to know which finite system size can actually reproduce the real system the model is trying to characterise (https://www.nature.com/news/paradox-at-the-heart-of-mathematics-makes-physics-problem-unanswerable-1.18983).

            Beyond the above detailed example, what has come from Goedel's proof of his incompleteness theorem and from other examples such as the Barber's paradox etc.. is whether some self-referential questions can put physics in some problematic situations. A somewhat recent article claims that indeed QM runs into problems when we try to "apply it to itself" so to speak (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05739-8).

            Hope that answers in part some of your questions.

            Best,

            Fabien

            Dear Fabien,

            thanks for your reply. I'm desperately trying to juggle different conversational threads in this contest, so I apologize if I might sometimes take a while to respond.

            I think that the issue of losing the substance of a question due to a 'translation' into the scientific realm is an important one---and incidentally, I agree (and have made the point a few times myself) with your example of Zeno's paradoxes. In a sense, the mathematical 'answer' doesn't really tell us anything at all about how motion is possible; it gives a description, but does not really dispel the mystery. That description, of course, can also be had by simply moving to the other side of the room, or overtaking tortoises (I tried it, it's possible---how's that for empirical philosophy?).

            That said, the questions spawned in the scientific realm are in themselves important ones---not least because answering them allows us to build nice things, like computers and rockets. So I think, we must find a way to keep both in view---not in the competitive sense that's often on display in the present discourse, with scientists belittling philosophers as having nothing to say with many words, and philosophers deriding scientism (both of which are, incidentally, sometimes also valid complaints), but rather, in a mutually reinforcing way.

            The German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker coined the term 'Kreisgang', literally something like 'circle-walk' or 'circumnavigation'---we return to the same topics, with a deepened understanding, and lift them again onto a higher level of appreciation. This is something that, I think, we should strive the interaction between philosophy and science to further---the philosophical questions spawning scientific investigations, which in turn help us to rephrase the philosophical issues, and so on.

            Perhaps there's some way of expressing this more clearly; I shall think about that.

            Cheers

            Jochen

            Dear Jochen,

            Yes I totally agree with your view here. I do believe scientific questions are important, first because they allow a given perspective to be followed through and through for a relatively long time. Second because, from them, may emerge new philosophical questions too. And third, because ultimately they strongly participate to enrich our understanding of a topic.

            Reading on the history of science, scientists in the first half of the 20th century were, for the most part, all versed in literary subjects and very much so in philosophy. Later on, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (whose writings I do enjoy very much) did try to bring closer philosophy and the sciences and was somehow disappointed at the lack of literary culture of the new scientists he saw emerging in his time.

            That philosophy appears to be entirely separated from the sciences and possibly "dead" appears to me as a somewhat recent (post-war) phenomenon that has been further fuelled by events like the "science wars" in the 1990s and by the two-culture paradigm. Whether this schism will survive the various challenges that we have to face nowadays, which call upon moderation, humility and collaboration from all sides, we will see.

            That being said FQXi does manage to bring like-minded people from philosophy and the sciences by making them interact on questions where there is still much contention or where an apparent consensus can be looked at with a more critical outlook. That is an opportunity that should not be missed indeed.

            Best,

            Fabien

            7 days later

            Dear Fabien,

            You said above that your are quite sympathetic to a field of consciousness. Some new information became available 3 days after your comment, and I have included it in my re-written essay. It is now the last 3 pages of my essay. I do think that you would find it worthwhile to read these 3 pages.

            Best regards,

            Edwin Eugene Klingman