Sentience, the ontology of experience by Cristinel Stoica

Dear Vladimir,

Thank you for the careful reading and for the comment with the feedbacks. You quote that I said "In fact, the reason why science was so successful is precisely its ability to ignore the nature of things, and focus on their relations.", and you say "I believe that it was the cognitive attitudes that were laid down at the beginning of the scientific revolution of the New Time ("Physics, fear of Mathaphysics" and "Hypotheses non fingo") impeded the development of science. Unfortunately, the mainstream in science has always dominated. " I don't see this as contradicting what I said, I said it was successful, you said it could have been more succesful :) You said "Unfortunately, the mainstream in science has always dominated." Well, this is by definition. That people are changing their minds very slowly, this is not characteristic to the mainstream, rather to most of us, mainstream or not. I believe there is an evolutionary reason why people change theid mind with difficulty, which doesn't mean it's a good thing, but only that stubborn people survived and passed their genes, even if they were wrong in some cases, the point was that their ideas worked well enough to survive. About stubbornness, for example, I can't say that I change my mind easily, and not because I am always right :)

You said "But Galileo Galilei specified which language Nature speaks: "The book [of Nature] is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. ""

Maybe he specified these because this is what he knew at that time. Now we know more, but of course tomorrow we will know even more. However, there is a definitivity in the universal algebra and model theory: they are universal, and we have some metatheoretical results that are universal because of this. For example, the model existence theorem. So even if we will understand them better in the future, metatheoretical results are here to stay. But this doesn't mean that triangles are not essential somehow. They are, as well as simplicial complexes, their generalizations. Infinitesimally, this is how we can understand differential forms. Also, the metric in General Relativity can be understood as an infintesimal Pythagorean theorem in an infinitesimal Minkowski spacetime. Triangles can be used to understand the Born rule too. They're practically everywhere, indeed. We just learned to consider them understood to the level that we no longer draw or even mention them, because we just take for granted that others know this.

Thanks again for your comments. You promissed "differences in our views". They surely must be differences, but with what you wrote here I pretty much agree :) (unless your words have some subtle meanings which I am missing) I'm looking forward to read your essay!

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Edwin,

I don't think it's a matter of interpretation or opinion here, but I don't mind you having a different opinion. Michelson-Gale experiment gives result as predicted by some aether theory. But the same result is predicted by special relativity, which I think you know but just can't believe. Other Sagnac type experiments are as well consistent with special relativity. Now, you seem to find essential that some experiments confirm a prediction of an aether theory, but you seem to find less important that all experiments we know are consistent with special relativity, or with general relativity if gravity is important, without doing any tricks. I don't think there's an aether theory able to explain the same many phenomena with as little assumptions, and in general aether theorists tend to be blocked in time over 100 years ago, ignoring how many tests of the predictions of relativity+quantum mechanics were done, basically the entire body of physics since then confirmed it. So basically you'll have to invent all sorts of tricks, different for different situations. Rube Goldberg aether machines to explain each experiment from those that special relativity explain with a single set of principles. In my opinion, you and other people doing this are doing something useful trying to find such theories, and I'd be the first to say that it requires great ingeniosity. And I won't be so surprised if some new effects can come out of this, although I'd be surprised if these would refute relativity. My only expressed objection to the statements about special relativity in your essay was that it is not what you made it to seem - a cartoon caricature that has nothing in common to how me and others see relativity, but thanks for the tireless and inventive efforts to make us look as some idiots who conspire to oppress real scientists like aether theorists :). Minkowski explained how these things come neatly into place if we admit spacetime and the 4-dimensional ontology that follows from this. I'm glad you took my advise to read Vesselin's essay, what did he reply to your comments? For me, relativity falls in place pretty well and has all figured out neatly, at least as long as quantum gravity effects can be ignored. Me, like others, are aware that relativity may not survive, especially since it may be the case that it needs to be quantum. But quantum field theory itself is also an argument for relativity, so maybe they are not as incompatible as they appear to us. We'll see. You seem to find support in some things Rovelli said, so I think that, if you are in tune with him, since he's editor in chief at Foundation of Physics, you may have some good chances to publish there. I also checked your updated essay, for the case 2 substrate example you mention. I think it's much more ellaborate than what I mentioned in my other comment about those 3 people I heard recently mentioning a relation with gravity, who didn't show anything as detailed, to my knowledge. Good luck!

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Edwin,

Actually, I found your "cartoon relativity" thing humorous. I think you're a guy with great sense of humor, I'd probably love to have a beer with you someday. When reading, sometimes I tend to imagine the author as giving a talk, which was also prompted to me in your essay by the Susskind video, so I imagined you could be a stand up comedian (I love those guys). So, while I know very well what I understand by relativity and Minkowski spacetime and change of reference frame and how velocities are composed, while doing a certain thing I do when listening to other's opinion (which is to try to see the world like them), I couldn't help feeling the amusement you may have felt while writing this, and also imagine the laughs of your audience, those who think like you do about these. This doesn't mean I agree, because while I try to imagine myself in the shoes of other people, I don't forget myself. But by no means I found what you said offensive. I'm not in the business of PC police, this is a thing that sucks out the fun out of anything. I just saw your depiction as not reflecting what me and other people understand by relativity. To me, this is important in the sense that me, like anybody else, I'd like others to see how marvelous some things are, or at least how they appear to me. And relativity is marvelous, in my opinion. A fair representation would help people see this. Not as ultimate truth, but as appreciation for what it is. I see it as pervading the entire body of physics. Even if we think about quantum. The types of particles, classified by spin, as well as their free evolution equations, follow directly from Poincaré invariance, as shown by Wigner and Bargmann. Trying to explain this as a 3+1 symmetry doesn't work, because of the way C, P, and T symmetries work together, which makes sense only under the 4-dimensional Poincaré invariance. To me this is just an instance of how marvelous relativity is. This doesn't mean that I don't try to appreciate other ways to see the world, this is why I said that I appreciate the ingeniosity with which people try to come up with alternative experiments and explanations, this looks to me like a McGyver approach to science, which is spectacular and surprising. So, while I'd love others to see how marvelous relativity appears to me, I'd never push a hypothetical button that would make everyone accept it without judgment. As I said repeatedly, I think it's necessary to have people testing various alternatives, challenging relativity and anything else. And even if a God would exist, bearer of the ultimate truth, I think that even that God should be challenged, as much as possible. And since people who believe something tend to strawman the opposite beliefs, I can't trust the supporters of a theory, being it relativity, to seriously try to challenge it. So who's left to do this job wholehearted, if not those who don't believe it? Now, this is a difficult thing to do, and I don't refer here because the theory is infallible, but because indeed we tend to think this to be a closed subject long time ago. Most researchers want to move forward and build something on this foundation, and in fact there are already several floors of the building, and most of us want to work at building the topmost floor. I take it as a personal quest to try to go constantly down to the foundations and review it, in fact some of the things I did and I'm currently working at are just the result of the reconsiderations of some widely accepted points of view, which became mainstream due to historical accidents. So I fully appreciate what you're doing, and I'd thank you on behalf of science, even if I am not entitled to speak on its behalf. If it would be by me, there would be at least a journal dedicated to alternative explanations of relativity or of anything else, and maybe a department in each large University, which would at least help professor and teacher test their understanding in debates. Even if most would turn out to be wrong, I prefer people to realize this by working it out, rather than taking it for granted. As Jung said (and I'm fully aware I am quoting him out of context, but it applies very much here), "Beware of unearned wisdom", which in this context to me it means simply don't take knowledge for granted, but only after you challenged it and arrived at the same conclusion, no matter how difficult it is. Otherwise you'll just overburden scientific research and increase the confusion. I feel no shame in admitting that, as a kid, I tried to challenge relativity in various ways, including by conceiving some atomic structure of space, and I tried this untill it fell in place for me and my "ground state" is just what I understand now by relativity. I did the same with quantum. On the other hand, in the process, I developed my own tools to question the foundations, which are neither infallible not at least the best. And, aware of my limited time and the many things I have to do or I want to do in this life, I had to choose between being an "educator" and an "explorer". And my own structure is not that of an "educator", this is why I don't care to get into debates, I am more attracted to do my own things, to fight my own battles. But make no mistake here: I fully appreciate what you and others try to do, as I explained above.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Gemma,

Thank you for reading and making interesting comments.

1) While dictionary is circular, this doesn't mean it doesn't say anything, just that it says only about the relations. Self-references are unavoidable in some cases, and they show something about the system, but not about anything else. I agree with you that Hofstadter makes excellent points in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and in "I'm a strange loop" takes this kind of self-reference as an explanation of consciousness. I understand this still in the relational, i.e. "easy problems", and to me real semantics has to do with the "hard problem". In my longer essay The negative way to sentience I spend more time with such questions, but the main point is that what I mean by semantics is not something that we infer about a dictonary, because this kind of inference comes from identification meaning based on the very way we give meaning to the world. So we project it, it is not determined by the dictionary.

2) Model theory deals with just this kind of things, and it works. The point being that a structure that exists doesn't have inconsistent facts. If you add on top of the sentences expressing facts other sentences, that introduce additional constraints, like in the case of Russell's paradox, then you'll get paradoxes. But such sentences are expressions of facts of the world. So I am not worried about this. If the world is inconsistent, then the principle of explosion guarantees that everything and their opposites is true and false at the same time, and we will have nothing to talk about, not even relations, because there would be no information.

3) I think this is precisely the case. I doubt there is an universal of an apple, we just experience various instances of apples, train our neural networks, so that it starts to "recoginze" apples. But not because there is some universal of an apple preencoded in the network, or to which we have acces in a Platonic world. It is interesting that in many cases of autism, this mechanism doesn't seem to work so easily, they have problems with "generalization", and when they overcome it, it is because of much more training than it takes to neurotypicals.

Now to the comments.

1) I share your view, to me is something marvelous. I don't think that everybody does, since I've seem some strange reactions to this idea :)

2) My point is quite as old as statistical mechanics, I understand that Flavio takes it one step further.

Thanks, for your excellent comments and questions! I'm looking forward to read your essay!

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Heinz,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting.

> you don't show why this situation [that we are somehow caught in our private worlds] does not degenerate to solipsism.

Well, we are somehow caught in our private worlds, but I didn't intend to address solipsism. I didn't consider it necessary, because I don't propose that only the subjective exists. I don't reject for example the fact that we can know something about the "objective" world, I just explain that what we can know about it are just relations, not the relata. In particular scientific knowledge is of this kind. And since this is independently verifiable, as I explained in the essay and more in my longer essay, clearly I didn't propose that only subjectivity exists. But if you think that I missed something and there is a danger of solipsism in my essay, you are welcome to explain.

On the other hand, on a funnier note, I think it doesn't hurt to reexamine the possibility of solipsism once in a while, rather than taking by default the position that it is absurd. We spend a lot of our time asleep and dreaming. It's a good point to ask ourselves once in a while if the people with whom we interact are independent sentient beings, or just figments of our minds. This may be useful in a nightmare for example, because it can allow us to wake up or to take control of the dream. Or even just to have a lucid dream, for fun, self-exploration, or preparation for a future event by "simulating" it in the dream. Taking the default position that solipsism can't be true makes us more prone to take seriously whatever bad characters we meet in our dreams, and suffer in that illusion instead of enjoying it by taking control. Other things that help this consist in looking for inconsistencies. The habit of observing inconsistencies helps us get lucid in our dreams.

Another point from the comparison with the dreams is the following. Suppose we have an argument against solipsism. If we apply it to a dream, it should not work, because, well, the other people in the dream are not real. But for an argument to work in some instance and not work in another one, there should be a difference between the two situation. If the dream is self-consistent like the reality is, what difference would be? So, my claim is that the only difference you can notice by passive observation is one of consistency (you can also actively make experiments in the dream, e.g. trying to do things that are impossible in reality, which in general break the self-consistency of the dream). This means that no refutation of solipsism can do better than checking the consistency. Or, in my essay, I didn't reject the consistency of the world, I even took it as a principle. Being trapped in our minds doesn't lead by itself to solipsism any more than being trapped in the house.

> Further, isn't sentience a high level (reflective) idea over the immediate experiences of an observer? Can a reflection be foundational?

Well, what I understand by "sentience" in my essay is "what makes experience possible", or "the irreducible part of consciousness". I tried to explain it more in my longer essay, where I "defined" it like

Nondefinition 1. In the following, I will call sentience the ingredient that makes experience possible. Whatever this ingredient may be, I'll not try to define it.

So I don't understand by sentience "a high level (reflective) idea over the immediate experiences of an observer". If you categorize it as "reflection", of course it can't be foundational. But I don't do this. It's a category mistake to identify what I mean by "sentience" with what others, who use it as a "reflective idea", mean. I had to use a word, some use "consciousness", but this indeed is in large part reflective. Rather than inventing a new word, I repurposed "sentience", and explained what I mean by it.

Thanks again.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Luca,

Thank you for the comments and particularly for challenging and putting at test the statements in my essay. You wrote:

> However while I completely agree with your Principle 1, I do only agree with principles 2 and 3 with some qualifications, that might not correspond the picture your wording suggests.

I don't think principles 2 and 3 apply only "with some qualifications". Here is why. Suppose you have a model where the laws change in time, as I understand to be the one you propose. Also suppose that at each time the state of the world is represented by a different mathematical structure. But this is still a dynamical system like the ones in my essay. Simply, you still have a state, even if it corresponds to a different mathematical structure, and you still have a rule that shows how one state connects to the next one, even if this rule changes in time. And you don't contradict Principle 2 The collection of all true propositions about our physical world admits a mathematical model. Here's why. The collection of all propositions true about the world also include time specific propositions. All propositions about facts of the world valid at a time t have to be consistent, and admit a mathematical model, because this is a result from logic, it's not a postulate I want to impose (so you can't break it). There is also a larger mathematical model, corresponding to all true propositions, for all times, collected together. They can be for example of the form "At the time t things were such and such". To this collection of propositions corresponds a larger mathematical structure, valid for the entire history, and which includes as substructures those valid for each particular time. So Principle 3 The physical world is isomorphic to a dynamical system P is not contradicted.

From your comment I understand that the symmetries at some time give the objectively knowable relations, hence a mathematical structure realizing those relations. And that symmetries can change. You say that this is due to the environment, so I take it that your system is not isolated, it's open. A question may be, what if you take the whole system? Will it's laws still change? But anyhow, let's focus on the possibility that you take it as open, or that even if you take the total system, its symmetries change for some reason. But when you say that the symmetries determine the objectively knowable relations, I understand from this that there is a procedure X which, given the symmetries, gives the relations, like a function relations=X(symmetries). So at least X is not changing, just its argument. Now, when you say symmetries, in general they correspond to transformations of some space (not necessarily the "physical space", it can be a space of other parameters). For example, the system may have rotational symmetry SO(3) at some time, and this be broken in a future time, so that the symmetry reduces to rotations around an axis. But this is just like in usual physics. You can have a large group of symmetries, and a particular state may not be invariant to the full group, but only to a subgroup. So, from changing symmetries I don't think it follows a change in the laws. But, as I explained, even if the law changes in the most crazy ways, there will still be a dynamical system P and Principles 1-3 will still hold. You wrote "I hope this made you curious about my essay". Yes, I am looking forward to read your essay.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear David,

Thank you for the comments! You ask an interesting question: do you think it might be possible to do the reverse: so, to start with consciousness and explain everything else? I agree that we only seem to have conscious perceptions to work with as a starting point for making any theory. And indeed, whatever we learn about the world, and whatever theories we make to explain it, this is based on consciousness. But if someone would ask a stronger question, that we can explain everything about the world just from consciousness, in the absence of any perceptions of the external world, this would likely not be enough. But from perceptions and consciousness, we can do a lot of things, and we know the results obtained so far are obtained like this.

You make another interesting point here I think it would be fair to say that quantity, direction and change are a part of conventional physics and they are also things that can be directly experienced, i.e. they are also part of consciousness. I guess it's about what Kant calls "a priori" cognition, which exists before the experience, and we map to the "a posteriori" cognition that follows from experience associated to perceptions. This is an interesting idea. It may be difficult to prove in practice, but I think it worth being investigated seriously. Thanks for suggesting me your essay for more details.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Luca,

Thank you for the additional details. Your explanations about the Poincaré symmetry requiring that "space must be almost empty and gravitational forces not to strong" make sense to me. Then you say "Now imagine at a time 0 a model P0 is realized, such that principle 2 and 3 hold approximately within P0." I don't understand what it means for principle 2 to hold only approximately. You mean that P0 is not logically consistent? Because if "the collection of all true propositions about our physical world that apply at the time t0" is logically consistent, then it admits a mathematical model. Also, what you mean by P0, is the same what I call "P" but valid at the time t0? Because what I call "P" is a dynamical system, so principle 3 holds. Another thing you say makes me interested. You said "Reversely events of the past (P0) can be explained or even retrodicted from within P1" I tried to see what you mean by this. I checked your essay, and now I know what you mean, although I don't think it is as crazy as you said :). Nevertheless, as I explained, even if the theory changes in time, it can't break principles 1-3 unless it is not self-consistent. I like what you said, "on a fundamental cosmological level I imagine some crystallization process, that brings more and more complex structures to light", and I agree with this. Thanks again for the comments and good luck in the contest!

Cheers,

Cristi