Why is the universe comprehensible? by Ian Durham

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

Dear Ian,

I am very glad that you were able to submit an essay to this contest.

I was delighted to read it and, as expected, it was interesting and thought-provoking, which I think are the two most important qualities.

That being said, you can correctly infer that it has me thinking, which means I have a lengthy response.

In the essay, you focus on the topic of questions, which is rather dear to my heart. It is, interestingly, the reason that I got into quantum foundations in the first place. When I was at NASA Ames, I was interested in designing intelligent instruments so that our probes could be more autonomous and function more effectively at greater distances from Earth, such as Jupiter and Saturn (which have round-trip light travel times of anywhere from something like 2 to 4 hours). Being expert in Bayesian data analysis, and familiar with the various foundations and derivations of probability theory, I wondered if there was some way to consistently quantify the relevance of questions, so that our machines could compute with questions and thus decide which experiments were most relevant to the mission. This was a way of automating experimental design.

You won't be surprised to learn that you can derive a calculus for relevancy by considering the underlying symmetries among questions. And, it was while discussing this over dinner, that I casually mentioned to Philip Goyal that we ought to be able to derive the Feynman rules similarly. As you know, we succeeded at that.

Back to questions.

In my work, I settled on defining questions in the way suggested by Richard T. Cox (1974) where a question is defined as the set of all statements that answer it. Read that previous sentence several times until you understand it, as this idea is critical to much of the commentary that follows. In terms of lattices, questions are then downsets of logical statements on the Boolean statement lattice (if that helps).

Since questions are sets of statements, set union and set intersection result in a logical OR and AND for questions. However, one can show that there is no negation, so that algebra is NOT Boolean. (Sadly, Cox got this wrong, despite the fact that he had published a proof that the algeba could not be Boolean. He was just TOO familiar with Boolean logic.) I was able to show that, based on Cox's definition of a question, the resulting algebra is the Free Distributive Algebra. There is an OR and AND operation, but no negation (https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0403089).

The symmetries of this algebra result in a quantification (think, measure), which I called relevance, which has a Sum Rule and a Product Rule, and a Bayes theorem. Relating this relevance to the probabilities of the statements that define the question results in relevances being entropy (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20040081076.pdf). Beware there are a few conceptual mistakes in this paper, since the question algebra is kind of upside-down from what you would expect thinking Boolean. These are most corrected in (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15-Valuations-on-Lattices-%3A-Fuzzification-and-its-Knuth/a92e2780f218dc1b177f5f6778c42162465fad58). I am now working on an updated paper that fixed these problems.

Whew! That is a lot of background, and this is now more of an essay than it is a commentary!

You really get into questions when you discuss Comprehensibility.

You note that the answer to "What is the color of my hair?" will never be "narrow" or "dog". Logically, it couldn't be, because none of those answers would be members of the set that define the question, nor would they, by themselves, imply any statements that answer that question. But you are not as interested in the underlying logical, as you are the physicality as in the outcome of an experiment.

This is where your essay relates more to the relevance of experiments (which I would call experimental questions) to the issue that you want to resolve. An experiment that could result in an answer "narrow" or "dog" would have a very low relevance to the issue "What color is my hair?" And you would be foolish to perform such an experiment, and certainly would not expect the experimental result to be relevant to the question. For this reason, I would not say that experimental tests do not tend to remain within the physical context because of a principle. Instead, I would say that the experiments are selected, or rather, designed, so that their results are expected to be most relevant to the issue to be resolved. This is designed to work.

When discussing Comprehensibility, you say "By simply asking a question, we immediately establish a context which limits the scope of the inquiry." This is exactly right! I would turn that around and be more pragmatic saying, "the context, or the scope of the question, defines the question."

There were also many side points that you made which resonated with me.

At one point you discuss computing the digits of pi and how one might decide how accurate a certain computation was. This is an interesting question, especially since you discuss computations in different number bases. I wondered if you were aware that in base-16, the Nth digit of pi can be computed independently from the others. there exists a formula, called the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe (BBP) formula, which can be used in base-16 to compute the nth digit of pi independent of the other digits (Bailey, Borwein, and Plouffe, 1997). In base-16, the digits of pi are absolutely predictable. (Perhaps the lesson is that we should be working in base-16 rather than a base system determined by the number of digits possessed by the common ancestor to the modern tetrapods.)

I like your example of calculating 1/10 exactly on a computer. I have used this as a demonstration on Computational Physics that computers do indeed make errors and that (physicist) programmers need to be aware of how those errors happen and propagate.

I also liked your comment that "anyone who has spent any time in the laboratory will attest to the fact that the real world is far messier than theory would have us believe". I think of this fact every time that I see Stern-Gerlach experiments described in theory papers. There are always two neatly separated beams of sliver ions... yeah, right!!! I took an experimental course on quantum photonics last year so that I could incorporate those experiments into our Advanced Physics Lab course. It was a joy to do those experiments myself: delayed choice, Bell inequality, etc. It was also astonishing to see that some of what theorists say happens in an experiment really doesn't. It made me appreciate that one problem with theoretical QM is that the theorists thought experiments are often just wrong. QM theorists should really do QM experiments to build up an intuition because some of the intuition we have been taught is simply wrong. But that is another commentary altogether!

Your comment about John Wheeler's stance that the answers to binary questions were the basis of all that exists is interesting in this context. I need to give this some careful thought. But at first sight I feel that this may be a truism in that questions are sets of statements. So what Wheeler is saying could be rephrased as saying that the statements that we consider as possibilities form the basis of our knowledge of what exists. My response to such a rephrasing, "Well, I should hope so! Otherwise, you have missed something!"

Further along in that paragraph, you mention that some of physics might be unknowable. This is Shcumacher and Westmoreland's Information Isolation. We can't measure quantum phase, only phase differences. Yes! My thought about this is that the phase does not matter as much as the phase difference. Again, a matter for more careful thought!

Later you talk about truth and non-commuting observables. However, I think of these observables as incommensurate descriptions (think the FT). If two descriptions are incommensurate, then you cannot expect to use both descriptions simultaneously. How relevant is this to Godel? I am not sure. Again, some careful thought is called for. But it might come down to it not being appropriate to assign truth values to descriptions.

Thank you again, for an impressive and thought-provoking essay. I think that re-reading your essay with the ideas of question-statement duality in mind, would be helpful. There is much to ponder here!

Thank you!!!

Kevin

PS Sorry to respond to your essay with an equally long essay!

Hi Ian.

I enjoyed this.

Your conclusion is remarkably similar to mine, though you get there through a different route.

Couple of questions/comments:

You write that "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."

This seems to imply some realm of "things in themselves" (independent of context/questions/etc). I doubt Wheeler would have thought that, being influenced by Bohr and all. "It from Bit" also means "No ifs if no Bits".

You also write: ""Yet it is wrong to say that there was any change in the underlying physics between then and now. What changed was our knowledge of that physics, i.e. we increased our information."

Well now: given what you say, the fact that contexts have changed, so that the kinds of questions we put have changed (on which we must agree to generate objectivity), you might say that the physics has changed too as a result of that. In Eddingtonian terms, the "Physical Universe" changes between then and now.

Best

Dean

Sneaky indeed.

Just a quick follow up: you write "On the other hand, it's useful to note that really the physics itself *didn't* change. Newton's laws are as true now as they were then"

True, but, if we push the Eddington line, it's because we still know how to ask those questions and construct those experimental contexts (and agree on the invariants) as before.They are now stable, in terms of phenomena generated. Though that aspect has not changed, there were new phenomena (e.g. QM) that were generated as a result of new contexts/questions that could be posed, and on which objective agreement is reached. So the Physical Universe has expanded its list of characters and its plot.

I know you are not buying into something as extreme is this kind of Eddingtonianism, but it seemed that you wanted to say that the objective facts were in some sense co-created by the subjective elements along with the universe. In this sense, I think you might have to say there is change in the objective facts as the subjective elements change.

Cheers

Dean

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.

Hi Ian,

Thank you for a wonderfully written essay. I enjoyed it and I am largely in agreement with your conclusion, particularly when you wrote ``The fact remains that in order to say we comprehend some element of the universe we must necessarily obtain some information about that element. But obtaining that information is a physical process that necessarily has a context which constrains the nature of that information; the very act of acquiring information shapes the information acquired''.

This is an excellent point and the principle of comprehensibility is certainly a reflection of the physical limitations handed down by the uncertainty principle. As you point out, if the context of the questions being asked don't agree because we choose two incompatiable measurements---say x and p---then their is a fundamental limit to the comprehension we can achieve.

You then moved onto the price about the price of comprehension which fundamentally boils down to errors arising due to incompatible measurements. As you point out, if I'm computing pi to 50 trillion decimal places using two different algorithms, then surely they will reach different conclusions if they are not identical.

The uncertainty principle is certainly the fundamental limit of your essay, as it it in contextuality. If you ask an incomprehensible question, then it requires an infinite amount of energy to extract all the information about a particular variable. That is, localising your particles position does requires that you infinitely squeeze along p.

I largely agree with you and your essay and wrote a very similar essay focusing on the limits of computation, although focused from the perspective of open systems and dissipation---the errors arising from incomprehensible questions if you like---titled noisy machines. I hope you get a chance to take a look!

Well done on the great essay! I really enjoyed it!

Cheers,

Michael

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

Dear Ian,

This is a well-written essay for a general science readership that explains and defends thought provoking ideas. In other words, a perfect fqxi contest essay. It was fun to read and I think you had fun writing it. I hope you do well.

You do blame the state of the Physics on observers in the Universe, but your statements would offend only people in that category. On the serious side, the mechanics of creating valuable questions is the most important skill needed in science.

Sincerely,

Jeff Schmitz