Why is the universe comprehensible? by Ian Durham

Sabine Hossenfelder

Thanks for a comprehensible essay!

Ian Durham

Thanks for the comprehensible reply! ;)

Steve Dufourny

Lol let s go for a comprehensible politness inside a private small Community satisfying their own friendships , and I know that you don t like me both of you, on face book also, you Sabine because I have asked you to give maths about a good idea of you and a friend, a girl arrives and makes a hormonal comportment and after I have answered , because this girl had testoterones, so I was adapted to her. I know that the women must be strong inside this Community but in these conditions it is odd, You have blocked me to protect your friend and you beleive also that you are maybe special ? and you Mr Durham you don t support neither me nor my thewory because we have discussed many years ago here on this platform and so you have encoded bad things about me and now you cannot change your opinions about me both of you, this Vanity is a real global problem, because even now if my theory has evolved and is relevant, you don t accept neither me nor my works, it shows that your Vanity is stronger than your humility recognising the relevances, for me you are neitehr good teachers, nor thinkers altruist and universal, you just want to be recognised in trying to be celebrities , but I am frank, you are not Einstein, Planck, Newton,Heisenberg, Feynmann, Lorentz, Galilei, Godel,Maxwell,Schrodinger... you are just members of a small Community trying to be revolutionary, but no, sorry , I know that my Words can irritate you but be sure, work your Vanity and don t be angry and try to discuss , do you fear of Me or what , do you fear to discuss in transparence? me I want well but there are limits, I never begin these kind of discussions and you know both of you why I speak like that, now if you are real universal thinkers able to share ideas in transparence and go deeper , show me your real heart and relevance. And don t complaint on FQXi , we are I repeat on a transparent platform where the strategies of discriminations and silence don t exist,so be transparent without fear and respectfull if it is possible of course. Never underestimate a general work and the evolution of people, never.

Steve Dufourny

You know, what I tell is simple, instead to improve the sharing of ideas and this evolution, so you decrease it in having these kind of vanitious comportments simply, it is sad because now due to this, you cannot change your opinions and choices and discuss in transparence because this Vanity eats you and this anger against me. What I tell is true and you know it, and now in logic you have 3 comportments, the silence like if you were wise and more intelleigent but it is just your choice, not a truth, or you can compete and try to give me a lesson just due to this Vanity still and competition of intelliegnce or you can be humble and tell me , steve you exagerate there, we have nothing agianst you and we know the generality of this universe, the humility and this universalism and we are civilised and can discuss about things without fear, you see ? it is Always a question of psychology, but when we speak about this free will or the comprehensibility, so let s admit that this human psychology is non deterministic about many choices of comportments. I Think that you are better than these vanitious conmportments and that you can evolve and be deterministic , it is your choice now, show me who you are really, we are not in a game of vanitious competition but we search answers to this universe and its main unknowns and the complementarity is Always the best choice to reach relevant innovative results, I d like to know your general universal philosophy , don t fear to discuss, and show me what are these foundamental objects also for you, it d be easier to go deeper.

Steve Dufourny

Me personally I have nothing against nobody, I just Always discuss in respecting at the begining the people, I am not perfect and I know that in the past I was rude sometimes on FQXi, I was not well I have lost all my familly more other serious problems, but I have evolved and I am more quiet and civilised. I never make a kind of competition or a fight, but I can adapt me quickly in front of vanitious persuded and we know all that inside our Community it is the most vanitious Community in theoretical physics, but I am a nice guy netheir better than my fellowman nor more skilling, we are all equals after all. Be real universalists and be relevant in physics, it is just this that I want to explain you. We learn all Days and we share ideas to explain our unknowns for a better world. I insist about this Vanity destroying all on this Earth and Dividing, it is sad.We are not on this Earth for this, we are here on Earth to optimise what we can optimise with the deterministic Tools that we have around us with sciences and consciousness simply.

Steve Dufourny

And still a small thing to tell, you Mr Durham I saw on Facebook that you have put a Picture for your profil, RESIST, well are you a real relevant rebel of is it just to try to be what you are not ? because I have created a group on face book and here also to discuss about global rational solutions for this planet and I beleive strongly that the sciences Community, a part must take its responsabilities to convice this UN, so if your Vanity and anger against me are not too much important and that you want to improve this planet, so don t hesitate to give your ideas on this group, Global collaboration because we must act with sciences and consciousness, sometimes the personal opinions and Vanity are not important but the fact to change what we can yes. You Mrs Hossenfelder I have seen in the past that you have created a song with a Little bit of rebel in the clothes , I play guitar and piano and I love the rock, blues and others, I write poems and pieces of theater, so come also in this group and show us your rebel ideas agianst the stupidities of this global system that we can improve. Sometimes we must be frank and forget I repeat this Vanity, show me what you have in the stomach , after all to be or not to be, I am not arrogant, I just adapt me to past comportments. But we can be friends if you can work like I said this Vanity and false opinions about me, me I am a nice guy , seeing spheres everywhere I can understand that it irritates lol but I am a nice guy able to be cool , logic, respectfull, rational, ...and able to make a difference between proved laws, axions, equations or assumptions, I never affirm assumptions, I just discuss.

Steve Dufourny

Lol, don t worry , don t be troubled, Like I said I am a nice guy, I just catalyse you in psychology to know more about you, I beleive that you could be relevant in sharing ideas on the group in forum, ultimate reality, global collaboration, I search skilling thinkers able to create global deterministic solutions, after all it is important to change this planet, I beleive that you can fight this Vanity and accept to follow this group , In all case, more we are , more we shall success to convice this UN, I am a cool guy, a Little crazy :) but nice , be sure , too nice even tell me my friends, after all we are all linked on this sphere Earth, humans no? let s have a free will, universal and altruist without Vanity and let s act for this planet,the consciousness and the intelligence after all are Tools , what are we if we don t act, optimise, improve what we can improve . The individualism, this Vanity, this competition, the materialism, the celebrity, it is nothing after all generally speaking , isn t it ? you can do it , you can fight this Vanity and change your choices and opinions, it is not easy I know but it is possible and comprehensible :)

Ian Durham

Hi Steve, I am not sure what you mean when you keep leveling the charge of "vanity" at me. If it is because I have not responded to you yet, please excuse me. I'm just having a hard time following what you're saying and so I don't have anything to add to the conversation yet.

Steve Dufourny

Hi Professor Durham, I can understand your answer. I fight myself my defaults and we try to evolve and be humble in continuing to search our place inside this universe and why we are , I told all this because you work about this free will in fact, I have remarked that this Vanity is an important paramter to take into account considering the free will and I tell this for all persons , myself also, I have remarked that the education, the psychology, the encodings in our Environments create a free will about the beliefs and choices, what I tell is that this free will is under a pure psychological persuaded state for us. A sure thing is that this evolution and wisdom and this consciousness can permit a kind of humility and can change the opinions. That must be taken into account for me in the algorythms about this free will. An AI cannot really have this free will, it is probably just for these biological Creations. The determinism can converge with this consciousness evolving correlated with the universal deterministic truths, it is this that I tell, it exists things deterministic and other no and the choices can converge. The Humans generally are non deterministic , probably our global system creating this fact and our Young age at this universal scale. We are not robots but humans , there is a big difference. But we evolve. Like I said I have nothing against nobody, hope it is the same in the other sense, I am a nice guy, sometimes a Little bit crazy and arrogant but I work on me. I beleive returning about my Project to convice this UN that it is important, hope the thinkers and others shall be ok to follow a group of global collabotration without Vanity, because here we speak about the well of all and not about us, I just want to create a mannifest of solutions, Concrete and deterministic where the sciences and consciousness are the main chielfs of orchestra, I hjave remarked that this Vanity is a very big problem when you try to unite, it is odd, the persons have difficulties to follow, hope that their free will and choices can change, we must sometimes forget our own Lifes and work in team and complementarity for the common interest , general and global here, this planet must be optimised for me and the responsabilities of real universalists, skilling thinkers are essential.Alone I cannot convice and make all.

Georgina Woodward

Your point about consistency of reality is good. To reality check the second observer must generate the same observation product. Did you see that? may give a negative or positive response, if 'that' is for example a moving hare. Not having seen it does not mean there was not a hare in the first person's viewpoint. A subjective, uncorroborated viewpoint is not necessarily wrong. Replicating experiments many times helps by getting many corroborating results, if the experiment works, which minimizes the impact of erroneous ones. As you point out consistency of the meaning of language is also very important. That is where the issue of ambiguity comes in. The language of Physics does not usually distinguish between potential sensory information in the environment and the product generated by an observer. eg. Light, sound, smell, frequency.

Steve Dufourny

Hello, indeed it is sure that the mathematics are important and essential like the experiments to prove our assumptions, works, extrapolations, physical works and papers, but they can also imply confusions and false roads also.

I beleive strongly that the physics are the pure deterministic road and the maths a Tool wich must ne utilised with the biggest wisdom mathematically, physically and philosophically. The maths for me are not the main essence of this universe, but the physics yes.

Regards

Jason Steinmetz

I will begin by quoting Wolfgang Pauli (in a letter from Pauli to Niels Bohr, quoted from Wolfgang Pauli: Writings on Physics and Philosophy):

"..., it seems to me quite appropriate to call the conceptual description of nature in classical physics, which Einstein so emphatically wishes to retain, "the ideal of the detached observer."

It appears that this debate is on-going because it seems like many, if not most, physicists still emphatically wish to retain this conceptual description and call it objective reality.

You wrote: "If the Principle of Comprehensibility is valid it would seem to imply that there might exist problems that are undecidable for physical reasons. That is, if Wheeler is right and all that exists derives its very existence from "apparatus-elicited" answers to yes-or-no questions, then there are elements of the physical universe that are simply unknowable. Furthermore, the origin of that unknowability is both logical and physical. Some aspects might be unknowable because we cannot construct an algorithm that is guaranteed to lead to a correct truth value for some truth-conditional statements. Other aspects might be unknowable because the universe's fundamental fabric is such that no machine can be constructed to produce a correct truth value for some truth-conditional statements. These are distinct points unless the universe itself is a Turing machine."

That certainly is the question, is it not?

You wrote: "Any attempt to comprehend it must necessarily depend on the fact that we are a part of it. Indeed the very act of comprehension is itself a part of it and is thus shaped by it."

And this is the answer to the question, but is really an answer or is it just an unsubstantiated statement; a means by which to attempt to comprehend reality?

Certainly a very interesting and insightful essay. My only complaint is that it does not go far enough. I wish you the best in the contest.

Ian Durham

Thanks for your comments, Jason. I agree that I probably could have gone further, but I was pushing the page limit as it was and had to cut several references just to fit that on a single page. Perhaps in a future form I will expand on it.

Yutaka Shikano

Hi Ian,

This is the good essay while the essay contents themselves feel to be different from the contest title. I would like to ask you about the relationship between this context and anthropic principle.

Best wishes,

Yutaka

Ian Durham

Hi Yutaka! It's great to hear from you! I think the contents of my essay are directly related to the contest though, since I am essentially presenting a physical analogy of Gödelian incompleteness. But anyway, as for the anthropic principle, that's a good question. I do personally think that there is an objective reality outside of human existence and perception. That is, I absolutely believe that the universe will continue to be here once humans are long gone. But I think my aim with this essay is, rather, to say something about the limits of human knowledge, which is entirely different from the limits of objective reality.

John Vastola

Your central question seems to me among the most important in all of science! Did the universe have to be comprehensible? I don't think it did, since physics allows us to conceive of all sorts of crazy alternatives (many of which do not include us); this makes us quite lucky.

I also wonder about whether science can really be reduced to sharply worded and contextualized questions. I am inclined to believe that it can, for the most part, but it's hard to think of a way to test a philosophical claim like this.

Great point about it being important for observers to have some kind of consensus (for example, on the meaning of a question and whether a given test is appropriate for determining an answer); this is something I never thought about before, possibly due in part to physics thought experiments tending to only consider one or two observers at a time. If you had to define scientific knowledge, would it be something like a collection of 'justified' consensus beliefs among some particular group of people?

John

Ian Durham

Hi John,

Thanks for the comments!

"If you had to define scientific knowledge, would it be something like a collection of 'justified' consensus beliefs among some particular group of people?"

To some extent that's essentially what the anonymous reviewer (quoted by Eddington) said: science is the rational correlation of experience. But Eddington takes pains to define what each of those terms actually mean and so I think it's important to note that it's difficult to reduce it to a singular sentence. It is entirely possible for a group of people to act irrationally while thinking they are acting rationally. There is a certain level of "good faith" that is built into this entire enterprise. That is, we are assuming that the majority of scientists are acting in good faith.

Flavio Del Santo

Dear Ian,

thank you for an(other) excellent, very enjoyable essay.

I particularly liked your lapidary concluding remark "The universe has fundamental limits baked into it. But it is these very limits that allow for the universe to be comprehensible."

Best of luck for the contest!

Cheers,

Flavio

Ian Durham

Thanks Flavio! Best of luck to you as well! (Your essay is on my reading list for this week...)

Ian Durham

Dear Jochen,

My apologies for taking so long to respond. I have been busy wrapping up the semester and trying to hire a new faculty member, all while stuck in my house. Anyway, I agree with much of what you said.

"But I think maybe that's your point---this analyticity is precisely what hampers our inquiry into 'the things themselves', so to speak. "

Exactly!

Thanks again for your great comments!

Ian

Syed Raiyan Nuri Reza

Dear Professor Ian Durham,

It was a joy reading your essay, and I think your emphasis on how we posit scientific questions, and how it constrains scientific answers is brilliant!

Though, if I hazard a guess as a layperson ( I am merely an undergrad), that would anchor science to logic and mathematics at a formal level, would it not?

And perhaps make the 3 un's constraining factor in our scientific quest?

Lastly, I want to give praise to your conclusion:

"Like the god Odin from Norse mythology, who is said to have

sacrificed an eye in order to attain wisdom, our quest for comprehension limits our very ability to

comprehend, and the universe remains always partially veiled."

My submission co-authored with my brother ( Rastin Reza) speaks of an veil, and we argue such a veil concealing nature is inherently mathematical.

I hope you find time to read it.

Kind Regards,

Raiyan Reza

(PS: Both my brother and I are open to the idea that our guess based on our rudiment knowledge is crude and of course, reading all the marvelous entries at FQXI, along with further readings in, will lead us to re-evaluate our stance)

Ian Durham

Thanks for your comments Syed! I think you make a good point. It is possible to interpret what I say as formally anchoring science logic and mathematics, though I think it would be in a rather unusual way. It might be more correct to say that logic and mathematics are anchored to physics, rather than the other way around. Just a thought. Anyway, thanks again for the comments!

Syed Raiyan Nuri Reza

Dear Professor Ian Durham,

Thanks for replying and sharing your thoughts!

Well, the way I interpreted this is when posing questions and constraining the universe of answers, we make sure it corresponds well to certain underlying grammar and semantics; and thus physics gets anchored to logic and mathematics.

In other words, science is projection of our observation onto the canvas of formal systems, such as logic and mathematics; hence why I stated physics gets anchored to mathematics and logic rather than the other way around.

In many way your work resonates well with Wittgenstein's seminal work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus where he emphasis the centrality of language in understanding the world.

Best Wishes,

Raiyan Reza

Ian Durham

Hmm. I'll have to think about that. It's a very interesting observation. Thanks for offering some stimulating ideas!

Syed Raiyan Nuri Reza

Dear Professor Ian Durham,

Thanks!

And, I am glad you found my remarks worthwhile.

Best,

Raiyan Reza

Steve Dufourny

Well, I beleive that you have some good ideas and you are a member but I am going to be frank, you beleive that you are special ? you seem to have a kind of Vanity, you beleive that you know better the generality of this universe, answer to what I tell and respect the ideas of others and answer them, if you dislike my reasonings and theory, try to critic correctly in forgetting this problem of Vanity, the problem is Always the same , people Thinks that they are better and it is not the case in fact, you speak about the comprehensibility but you cannot be comprehensible in respecting the people, and it is not comprehensible, I spoke about the Vanity and you prove that you are not comprehensible due to this parameter, The same problem exists inside the sciences Community, we are all persuaded but it exists real humble thinkers and the fake ones who don t understand neither the humility nor the universal altruism. In fact don t never forget that a theory evolves like all and if you dislike my theory in having encoded bad opinions about me, so try to discuss in transparence instead to make your comportments of vanitious like if you were special. For me I am frank, you fear maybe to answer and develop in front of me and transparence. I repeat you are not special, you have just some good ideas in details. Work your Vanity , be respectfull and try to answer about what I have explained. We are here on a platform relevant and transparent with a Community to learn, teach, discover, not to be on a platform to satisfy a small Community and memebers. If this planet is in this state, it is due to this parameter, the Vanity, greed also and the lack of universalis, so your free will must take into account this, because the Vanity changes the choices and opinions , do you agree?

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