Dear Jochen,

Good to see you, and thank you for the careful reading of my essay.

> I think you may want to accept the first thesis---your S essentially being the intrinsic properties grounding the relational mathematical structure of P

By S I mean the "speakable" related to sentience, but not sentience itself. Sentience is the ontology of S. I find that the most natural solution is S=P.

> I think the resulting panpsychism or pan-experientialism faces some difficult challenges, such as the notorious combination problem.

I think the same. I think S=P is like pan-experientialism, but I don't think it faces the combination problem, because I don't think there are separate units of sentience, rather sentience is the ontology of both S and P (is this different from "grounding our models"?). I think fundamental sentience faces another problem, which I called "the climbing problem" in my extended essay The negative way to sentience. But, while this is a problem, it allows Hypothesis 1 to make empirical predictions and be falsifiable, which I think it's a good thing.

> if two people are led to similar views along independent routes, one just might hope that there's something worthwhile to find at that destination

Indeed, this qualifies as "intersubjective verification", which I mentioned in "The negative way to sentience". If you have comments, I look forward to hear them, no matter if you disagree, I have this on ResearchGate with the words "comments welcome" in the title, since I'm still collecting feedback. At the same time, I'm looking forward to read yours, and I expect, based on your previous ones, that I will love it.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

Thank you for the careful consideration of my essay. Based on your comment, I think we both take the position that S=P and sentience underlies them.

> You have defined VERY NICELY what is NOT consciousness in general. Very good!!

I guess you noticed that I took a neti neti (नेति नेति) path, as the title of my longer essay, The negative way to sentience, suggests.

> Hope you can spend a little time on my essay to see how the above definitions in more detail.

I'd love to!

> I hope to have lively discussion with you on your thinking.

> Best wishes for your essay!!!

I wish the same to you too! Take care!

Cheers,

Cristi

Respected Prof Cristinel Stoica,

You got a wonderful interest in Indian Philosophy , and tried to add mathematics in that too! I just saw your paper negative Philosophy, I will study it little later ... Very Good!!!

I don't know How much deep you went into "neti neti (नेति नेति)" path.It is a difficult path. There is positive path also. It is called "observer becomes observed", do you know that??? Of course it is also a difficult path. There are 1000's of 'Rishi's each and every one had his own path!!!

Ultimately you have to find your own path to Nirvana............

Best wishes

=snp

Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

Please call me Cristi. Thanks for your appreciation, it's reciprocal. Indeed, the "negative path" is normally used in the sense you mentioned, as a way to Nirvana. What I mean by negative way or neti neti in the context of my longer essay is mainly science as a negative way. Science allows hypotheses then rejects them. Most powerful results come as no-go theorems, which is also the theme of this contest. The body of science grows, which gives the impression that it's a "positive growth", an accumulation of knowledge. But positivism is no longer the way of science. In some sense the body of knowledge is growing, but the attachment to the accumulated knowledge is not in the spirit of science itself, which works by negation. All of the models and theories are to be seen as provisional hypotheses, always in search for contrary evidence. It's the way of skepticism, in the proper meaning of the word, which is the same as in negative mysticism, but applied to science. As for neti neti as a personal path, my ego probably wants a piece of Nirvana too :) I have no worries about this, my ego is just an ephemeral cloud on the blue sky. It's a form of experience, I take it as it is, with the goods and the bads. Nature built these neural networks as a form of life, and as neural networks, they are made out of biases. But a cloud can neither help nor do any harm to the unchanging blue sky, it's just a playful fluctuation of oblivion which gives too much importance to itself :)

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Christi,

thanks for your reply. I had misunderstood the precise meaning of your 'S'---it seems to me, you use it to refer to the relational structure of 'sentience'? If so, then I guess what you mean by 'ontology of sentience' is what I mean by 'structure-transcending properties'. I had thought you were using S to refer to this ontology itself, as sort of a set in want of a structure, with P being a structure of relations in want of relata, then using one to fill the other's gap.

As for the combination problem, I think I don't quite grasp what exactly you mean by the term 'ontology of sentience'. Do you mean it in the sense of a singular experiential reality? If so, then it's not obvious to me how (what appear like) individual minds emerge from this---something I think I've seen called the 'separation problem' instead. Perhaps you can take a suggestion from Bernardo Kastrup, who argues that we're all essentially schizophrenic 'alters' of the cosmic mind? (https://iai.tv/articles/why-materialism-is-a-dead-end-bernardo-kastrup-auid-1271)

I'm gonna go have a look at your longer treatment.

Cheers

Jochen

Dear Jochen,

Indeed, I think we can only talk about the relational structure of sentience. I tried to be more explicit in the longer article, where I discuss that we can only research "the crack". The purpose was to see what can be done by limiting, or rather by being limited to talk only about relations, not about ontology. Kastrup is the closest to how I see it from what I've read, but I think it's "metaphorical", and still at the level of relations, because "metaphor" is all that we can do about it. But I'd rather say it in another way. Suppose you're a materialist. Based on materialism, you would attribute a certain materialist ontology to a rock, a piece of ice, water, or steam. You would see it as derived from the fundamental ontology of the elementary particles. Then, if you try to replace "matter" in the materialist ontology with "sentience", you'd have of course a problem, the combination problem you mention. A better way than materialism is physicalism, and to think of particles as excitations of the quantum field, so to think of objects like some stable excitations/fluctuations of the vacuum. Then, you don't combine, it's just the field, not a combination of particles. Then, the ontology doesn't rely on a bottom-up approach starting from particles. Now replace the physicalist ontology with sentience. This would reduce the combination problem, at least apparently, since you have just a field, out of which separate fields are apparent. But the real problem is the problem of climbing: how does fundamental sentience climb the structure, from the fundamental level, to the coarse grained level that we call brain, to our minds? This view of excitations/fluctuations with the coarse graining is a metaphor that is similar to Kastrup's I think, but closer to what I mean, yet not quite what I mean, which I think it's unspeakable. The closest to what I think the explanation is, is contained in my previous essay, Indra's net, particularly in note 8, which is about the equivalence class of germs defining the holomorphic field. I didn't include this in the essay or even in the longer essay, since I wanted to allow for more options, even though I prefer S=P, and since I wanted to see how far we can go just from the most inevitable principles, i.e. by avoiding speculations.

Cheers,

Cristi

Hi Christi

I enjoyed your essay, but in terms of consciousness, there is demonstrably an AI analogue to this problem, which is in the interconnectivity of synapses in the human brain, i.e. in terms of the universe, the issue can be related to the density of neuronic pathways.

Finding a counter part to this issue of interconnectivity to bits, and logic processors as to the human brain may be the way to extend this sort of modality to cosmological structures. I.e. we may be looking at the wrong places for determining the minimum structure needed for self awareness

It is, in a sense directly related to the problem of what makes an entity self aware.

In animals, i.e. Cats and Dogs, it shows up if an animal can recognize its own image in a mirror reflection. To a degree some dogs can do this, whereas cats flunk the test and try to go behind a mirror to identify if there is another cat present. Whereas the great Apes definitely DO have a working ability to recognize themselves in a mirror.

So what is the threshold in terms of interconnectivity of some sort of cosmologically based "thinking " structure ?

I do not know and I doubt anyone has addressed that issue in terms of biophysics. But if they did find a way to quantify interconnectity of structure with self awareness, they then would be able to map the measurable biological markers of signal interconnetivi5ty of structure with a minimum threshold allowing consciousness.

That issue of a minimum level of interconnectivity of "thinking" or neuronic structure may be later, in some sense after we know more about what causes cognition and self awareness be mapped directly upon what we know about cosmological structures

This is my speculation. It is meant to be in tandem with your investigations

Andrew

    Hi Christi

    I enjoyed your essay, but in terms of consciousness, there is demonstrably an AI analogue to this problem, which is in the interconnectivity of synapses in the human brain, i.e. in terms of the universe, the issue can be related to the density of neuronic pathways.

    Finding a counter part to this issue of interconnectivity to bits, and logic processors as to the human brain may be the way to extend this sort of modality to cosmological structures. I.e. we may be looking at the wrong places for determining the minimum structure needed for self awareness

    It is, in a sense directly related to the problem of what makes an entity self aware.

    In animals, i.e. Cats and Dogs, it shows up if an animal can recognize its own image in a mirror reflection. To a degree some dogs can do this, whereas cats flunk the test and try to go behind a mirror to identify if there is another cat present. Whereas the great Apes definitely DO have a working ability to recognize themselves in a mirror.

    So what is the threshold in terms of interconnectivity of some sort of cosmologically based "thinking " structure ?

    I do not know and I doubt anyone has addressed that issue in terms of biophysics. But if they did find a way to quantify interconnectity of structure with self awareness, they then would be able to map the measurable biological markers of signal interconnetivi5ty of structure with a minimum threshold allowing consciousness.

    That issue of a minimum level of interconnectivity of "thinking" or neuronic structure may be later, in some sense after we know more about what causes cognition and self awareness be mapped directly upon what we know about cosmological structures

    This is my speculation. It is meant to be in tandem with your investigations

    Andrew

    Dear Cristi,

    thank you for great essay, very well argued and clearly written. Although I was not particularly familiar with systematic developments on the hard problem of consciousness, I think you provided an excellent analysis and good food for thought.

    I particularly appreciated your clean-dut discussion on how science is only about relations. And in particular your phrase: "We can compare nature with a book written in a language that we don't understand. Science is a way to decode the book. It proceeds by identifying various words in various contexts, and the result is a dictionary, along with some grammar rules. Each word in the dictionary is de fined in terms of other words, but there are no primary words whose meaning we understand."

    Best of luck for the contest!

    Flavio

      Dear Cristi,

      Thanks for your appreciation also, your essay is wonderful !!.

      You are correct about negativism in science. This happens and continues to happen in Physics. I got my personal experiences in my life for the last 40 years or so. Whatever the Ethical Values I kept, whatever the foundational principles were used, whatever the physical cosmological philosophies were used, whatever the predictions that came true, for Dynamic Universe Model an N-Body problem solution, whatever I got is kicks on the back, never any back patting. I am sorry about this bla bla bla.... Now I got everything positively. I did this work on Gods guidance, I will leave everything on him, I did this work for the development of science and betterment of humanity. My problem is over....

      I am requesting to see a paper on a universe model proposed by Dynamic Universe Model

      https://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/2018/08/new-paper-model-of-universe-as.html

      Hope you will have a visit at my essay and leave a suitable comment....

      Best Regards

      =snp

      Hi Andrew,

      Thank you for the interesting comments, which are complementary to the focus of my essay, in tandem, as you said.

      > in terms of consciousness, there is demonstrably an AI analogue to this problem, which is in the interconnectivity of synapses in the human brain, i.e. in terms of the universe, the issue can be related to the density of neuronic pathways.

      Certainly, there must be a structural side of the problem, the physical correlates of sentience. You propose a measure of this, the density of neural paths. Another one is the Phi proposed in Integrated Information Theory.

      > It is, in a sense directly related to the problem of what makes an entity self aware.

      Yes, self-awareness requires structure, to be able to include a self-representation. When I say "sentience" I mean the ontology of the structure, "what is like to be", whether self-aware or not.

      I think the so called "easy problems", those related to structure, functionality, behavior, are not easy at all, not understood yet, but understandable in principle, and they are important.

      Thanks again for considering my essay and for the comments! I'm looking forward to read yours.

      Best regards,

      Cristi

      Dear Flavio,

      I am happy to see you here again with an essay. Thank you for reading my essay and for the comments. Since you liked that passage, let me provide one from John von Neumann: you don't understand things. You just get used to them. It's a though I had independently, but I found out that he said it long before, referring to math. I think it applies much more widely. Perhaps most clearly it applies to the foundations of quantum mechanics :)

      Thanks again, I am looking forward to read it! Good luck with the contest to you too!

      Cheers,

      Cristi

      Dear Cristi,

      I am just repeating this post please....

      Thanks for your appreciation also, your essay is wonderful !!.

      You are correct about negativism in science. This happens and continues to happen in Physics. I got my personal experiences in my life for the last 40 years or so. Whatever the Ethical Values I kept, whatever the foundational principles were used, whatever the physical cosmological philosophies were used, whatever the predictions that came true, for Dynamic Universe Model an N-Body problem solution, whatever I got is kicks on the back, never any back patting. I am sorry about this bla bla bla.... Now I got everything positively. I did this work on Gods guidance, I will leave everything on him, I did this work for the development of science and betterment of humanity. My problem is over....

      I am requesting to see a paper on a universe model proposed by Dynamic Universe Model

      https://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/2018/08/n

      ew-paper-model-of-universe-as.html

      Hope you will have a visit at my essay and leave a suitable comment....

      Best Regards

      =snp

        Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

        Thank you for the comment. Because we moved the discussion here, let me also bring the paragraph where I mention science as a negative way.

        What I mean by negative way or neti neti in the context of my longer essay is mainly science as a negative way. Science allows hypotheses then rejects them. Most powerful results come as no-go theorems, which is also the theme of this contest. The body of science grows, which gives the impression that it's a "positive growth", an accumulation of knowledge. But positivism is no longer the way of science. In some sense the body of knowledge is growing, but the attachment to the accumulated knowledge is not in the spirit of science itself, which works by negation. All of the models and theories are to be seen as provisional hypotheses, always in search for contrary evidence. It's the way of skepticism, in the proper meaning of the word, which is the same as in negative mysticism, but applied to science.

        What I mean by science as a negative way is in the sense of via negativa, applied to the study of reality rather than theology. I didn't call science a negative way because it rejects people's novel proposals of theories in favor of the "mainstream" ones. I called it so because it keeps testing itself, or at least it is supposed to do so. And because it is never definitive, even though many think it's definitive, and many did so through the entire history of science. So, to make it clear, I didn't complain that it is negative in the sense you mention, although this may be true as well. If I would make a complaint against the scientific community, is that it is not negative enough, but in the sense I meant for the word "negative", not in the sense of rejecting new ideas.

        Most of those interested to contribute to science, both gifted amateurs and professionals, have difficulties to get enough attention. Few are those blessed with the attention. Not getting attention is not a proof that the theory is wrong, getting high positive attention and esteem is not a proof that it is right, although it's a proof that at least it's interesting enough to enough scientists. A sure way to be ignored is to not master properly the field, in the most technical details. But mastering it and even solving some good problem is not a guarantee of success. And nice words said by even some authorities don't guarantee success either. They have to cite the work, to join it and develop it in their own papers. Very few are lucky like this. Most published papers are read only by reviewers, and even so, sometimes only superficially. A lot of brain power is used to produce new research, very little of it receive the light of other conscious beings. Who knows what gems are hidden and lost forever in someone's drawer, or even published in a journal but never understood by others.

        Cheers,

        Cristi

        Dear Prof Cristi,

        I just cant under valuate your knowledge by calling you just Cristi!

        I am just replying your post above please.... Just because the reply posts are not visible directly. Thank you for replying me here.

        You are correct, the negative way of science has both the meanings, mainstream which is powerful will reject the new ideas, as well as science has the inherent way of testing the new theories in the negative way to see that if the theory withstands or not, as you discussed in your essay.

        Well supported theories may not be correct some times, as well as correct theories may not have the luck. You have well analyzed the present situation in a nut shell. Some people just dont have LUCK, like me!!

        I appreciate your essay and your way of writing in a best manner!!

        I want to see your well learned comments on my essay soon...

        Best

        snp

        Dear Eckard Blumschein,

        Maybe. My experience doesn't go back to those time. So for the original meaning I trust etymologists, and they say

        "observation as the source of knowledge; actual observation; an event which has affected one," from Old French esperience "experiment, proof, experience" (13c.), from Latin experientia "a trial, proof, experiment; knowledge gained by repeated trials," from experientem (nominative experiens) "experienced, enterprising, active, industrious," present participle of experiri "to try, test," from ex- "out of" (see ex-) peritus "experienced, tested," from PIE *per-yo-, suffixed form of root *per- (3) "to try, risk." Meaning "state of having done something and gotten handy at it" is from late 15c.

        Words evolve. Take for example the word "calculate" from the title of your essay. Its etymology goes back to "calculus" = "pebble stones", but now it's used in a much wider sense than counting pebbles.

        But I'll leave such debates to linguists. The way I use the word "experience" is closer to the way it's used here, and I don't tie it particularly to memories or expected future processes.

        Cheers,

        Cristi

        Dear Cristinel Stoica,

        I very much appreciate your "maybe". You wrote elsewhere:

        " As humans, very early in life we become aware that events that already happened cannot be changed, and that future events, although unpredictable, can be influenced by our present actions. This intuition is so deeply hardwired in our world view, that it seems unnatural to even question the idea that past and future do not exist, but only present does."

        What a mistake! Sorry, I am almost never using such emphasis.

        However, my concern is not linguistics, and I wrote "calculate" not as to consider the TND flawed as does Peter Jackson. As an engineer, I can only analyze a part of a growing "block" of more or less memorized data from past processes. The fuzzy notion present has no logical place between past and future.

        Cheers,

        Eckard

        Dear Eckard Blumschein,

        > As an engineer, I can only analyze a part of a growing "block" of more or less memorized data from past processes. The fuzzy notion present has no logical place between past and future.

        This makes sense. To connect it with my essay, the memories and the growth you mention happen at the coarse grained level.

        Cheers,

        Cristi

        Dear Cristi,

        I really enjoyed your essay. Thank you for submitting it. I really like your closing remark that the ontology of S could very well equal the ontology of P. It's surprisingly intuitive, though only after hearing your argument for it.

        I had a couple questions. You say sentience is the ontology of system S. Are you claiming that science can not make any progress explaining an ontology? Can the hard problem ever be explained through science in your view, possibly indirectly? You say P is a mathematical structure in search of an ontology, do you think it will ever get there?

        I try to avoid this type of soliciting, but if I may be so bold to ask, I would love your feedback on my essay. I am still a student, and you have experience thinking about the structure of reality as being mathematical in nature, which is a large part of my essay. If you have time of course.

        All the best,

        Ernesto