The Present State of Physics, Mathematics, and Science

Oops,

"survival is logically favoured over distinction"

should read

"survival is logically favoured over extinction"

Hi Stefan,

Yes, people need to worry, and act, in order to ensure their own, and their loved ones, survival. But I guess I was talking about a type of personal angst about the status of one's own existence in the whole scheme of things. I guess I don't question my own, temporary, existence as being a normal part of the whole scheme of things.

Our views of the world, everything we know and think, has been built out of analysing the "inputs" from our senses, mainly light and sound waves. We don't directly see or hear anything; instead, we collate and analyse primitive light and sound waves in order to see and hear, and via this analysis we discern trees and cars, and letters, words and sentences. And we further analyse words and sentences, and other aspects of what we see and hear and sense, and we build up a picture of history and politics and religion etc. Our whole view of the world has pretty much been built out of collating, analysing and summarising primitive, base-level, light and sound waves.

I think the sheer complexity of the above mental/ logical structures that individual human beings have built for themselves, and too much information continually coming in from the senses, and the logical juggling that is required in order to operate in a complex human world, will inevitably lead to various forms of human angst.

But I think the interesting questions relate to the type of world we live in:

1) Physics can't explain how the world could be such that people could have been genuinely responsible for flying planes into the twin towers.

2) Forget about high-level consciousness, physics can't even explain low-level consciousness i.e. the ability of the world to differentiate (discern difference in) its own relationships, categories and numbers.

I think you and I agree that physics can't explain the existence of genuine agency and consciousness.

Hi Lorraine,

thanks for your reply.

Concerning "normal", some physicists would say that "normal" is everything that can be captured mathematically, hence "normal" for physicists is "stable patterns" (aka "laws"). Additionally these physicists would say that there are no "not normal" things existent, because they can't exist - per definition. Consequently they say that everything can be captured mathematically, in principle.

Sabine Hossenfelder for example in her video about free will argues that there isn't that free will, since in a strictly deterministic world "will" can't be free, whereas in a random world free will couldn't be "will" (and also couldn't be free in the sense humans think they have free will).

Sabine Hossenfelder says claiming that humanly experienced free will is real and not an illusion is against established science and hence is a false assumption. She claims that scientists KNOW that they can derive from the physical laws of the many constituents the brain is made of (and reality is made of as a whole) what the whole object does.

But this is unproven and in my opinion also an unprovable claim, since no one at present really knows that human beings really CAN derive from the physical laws of the many constituents the brain is made of what the whole object does. That claim has for starters to be proven true by comparing a (unimaginably complex) mathematical prediction to an (impossible) experiment.

Sabine Hossenfelder nonetheless arrives at her conclusions by using an unknown, or better termed an impossibility, for redefining that in-principle unknown as a known - thereby circumventing that impossibility. She assumes that everything that exists is "normal" and that "not normal" things do not exist. But this is only a belief, founded in the assumption that "causes" in no way can be "causa finalis". For deciding what is "normal" one had to have something to compare it with. Hossenfelder seems to define the fact that there at all exists this world as being "normal". But how could one do that convincingly without comparing our world at least with some other counterfactual, "not normal" worlds?

The fact that somebody put a turkey in the oven that now is deliciously brown and crispy must, according to Hossenfelder, be considered as being caused by the strictly deterministic interplay of an unimaginably huge amount of single particles and their interactions and by nothing other. The counterfactual element of such physicist lines of reasoning come in by belief and by definition. They say that we KNOW whereas they merely believe to know, for example they believe that a deterministic world - maybe together with some interplay of quantum mechanical uncertainty of particle behaviour - is all that exists and all that can exist in principle. Again, to make such a huge claim one had to have something to compare our world against - and that something can always only be a counterfactual thing in our minds when it comes to compare a totality to some other "totality".

Hence, although I agree with you that

"physics can't explain the existence of genuine agency and consciousness."

or more elaborated physics can't explain the existence of Boolean logics these physicists use every day, I would not agree with you that world views only come about by analysing input from our senses. These world views often also have to come about at least partly by beliefs, since otherwise we just had to have one world view, namely the one that consistently and completely answers all questions that can be meaningfully posed about our world and about existence in general.

There is undoubtedly much fear in the world, presumably in part because humans are able to believe certain things that in reality are no facts. I am unable to sort out all these facts from fictions, since I am a person that itself only believes in something and does not believe other things. Again, for deciding whether my beliefs are reasonable one had to sort out facts from fictions, one somehow had to prove all beliefs to be wrong other than the one that then remains!

So, deciding which beliefs are true and which are false amounts to being a matter of provability, whereas I have argued in several posts and replies that I think that provability has its in-principle limits. For example how could one ever prove that a certain line of reasoning of a human being was unambiguously caused deterministically exclusively only by an exactly definable precursor particle configuration in the brain? Or how could one ever prove that Boolean logics (your IF...THEN connections for example) can emerge exclusively only out of particle configurations? For being able to do this I think one at the same time had to answer the question why there are these deterministic laws at all - and one had to do this with using Boolean logics! - what then simply would amount in the statement that Boolean logics cannot explain its own existence other than by circular reasoning.

Nonetheless it is this kind of circular reasoning that is adopted by the deterministic world view in that it presupposes what it wants to prove. I tried to make this clear with the example of how Sabine Hossenfelder handles the possibility of human free will - it is defined as impossible due to the "self-explanatory" power of strict determinism. However, when asking whether or not that strict determinism really can explain itself, then one must confess that it cannot be "self-explanatory" as long as it does not explain the existence of Boolean logics as something that meaningfully emerges from the underlying mathematical laws of that strict determinism. Thereby I do not mean from the discipline of mathematics as such, but from the distinct physical laws that so far had been discovered.

It may be that due to in-principle unprovability of certain things we are forced to believe in certain things to control human angst (fear). The question then would be why there are people that are more or less free from that human angst. I think that one answer could be that they may not think too much about what we discuss here. Or in other words that they rarely do ponder about profound "if...then" questions because they consider them as relatively useless - for themselves.

That's another rather lengthy post from me, but I think my lines of reasoning have to be considered when thinking about free will and whether or not one should define it as an illusion or defining it as really being existent in this world (to a certain degree of course).

Stefan,

There is no point minutely analysing and discussing the details of what physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder, and others of that ilk, say. Because none of those people can explain how the world could be such that people were GENUINELY responsible for flying planes into the twin towers.

Genuine responsibility means that people have a genuine effect on the world, something that can only be symbolically represented as people assigning numbers to their own variables, for the variables that represent their own bodies. Physics does NOT allow people to assign numbers to their own variables, i.e. physics does not allow genuine responsibility.

Let Hossenfelder, and others of that ilk, FIRST define the physics of genuine responsibility; let them FIRST say what genuine responsibility looks like.

Instead, Hossenfelder and others of that ilk, are doing a PR job on a physics that clearly can't explain how the world could be such that people were GENUINELY responsible for flying planes into the twin towers.

Similarly, Hossenfelder and others of that ilk, can't explain how a differentiated system could differentiate (discern difference in) it's own relationships, categories and numbers.

But I wouldn't bother with the concept of "free will": the concept of "free will" is a dog's breakfast.

Hi Lorraine,

I agree and I also agree about the PR that comes along as enlightenment (at least in the case of that free will video).

I agree that explaining consciousness and the non-existence of free will exclusively only by the mathematical laws of physics (hence without somehow introducing a natural law of Boolean logics into these physics equations and some a priori property of awareness) looks really like a hard problem. I have no clue how one ever could do this convincingly, so I am curious about how people that claim free will to be a deterministically happening illusion like to do that.

From time to time I stumble across certain inconsistency pearls that may at least partly reflect the present state of physical thinking.

When asked about her thoughts on the possible emergence of consciousness, Sabine Hossenfelder says during this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=walaNM7KiYA) that

"I don't think that consciousness is all that mysterious"

and

"it comes from the way that complex systems process information I would say and at some level it becomes beneficial for the system in terms of natural selection to have a self-monitoring process"

What? A self-monitoring process? In a reductionistic and strictly deterministic world? Really?

Hossenfelder believes in a world view that says that strictly deterministic processes exclusively govern everything that happens. Each tiny particle has, does and will execute one and only one precisely defined (predetermined) reaction whenever it interacts with some other precisely defined particle. These other particle (or particles) themselves are predetermined to act on other particles in the same sense - all this is, according to that strictly deterministic world view, predetermined.

Hence, in a strictly deterministic world nothing can be monitored or controlled by any "self-monitoring" process per definition, it only seems so for us since we cannot calculate in advance what we will do. What we will do is, according to the world view of strict determinism, already completely predetermined and really needs no "monitoring" at all, and least of all some "self-monitoring" - and the same then must also be true for "natural selection"!

Therefore, there is also no "benefit" for anything to be gained by certain behaviours - compared to some other behaviours, not even for a thing to self-monitor itself with the help of some "consciousness". In a strictly deterministic world one cannot compare one behaviour with an alternative behaviour, since in that world there cannot be any alternatives per definition. The best example for that is the comment you just read, since the production of that comment is then also predetermined (at the time of the Big Bang).

So, consequently, in a strictly deterministic world, if you don't like my comment, you couldn't really compare my comment with what you would like better and then criticize it on that basis, since there hadn't been alternatives for me to write something other. But eventually you will do exactly that - criticising my comment because due to strict determinism your behaviour is also completely determined.

The same then must also be true for the answers of Sabine Hossenfelder in that interview. Consequently, by answering the questions during that interview, Hossenfelder is predetermined to give certain answers - and no others. But what sense does it make to inconsistently answer the question about consciousness by introducing some non-existent and nonsensical "benefit" other than that answer had to be considered as having been predetermined since the Big Bang?

The answer to that question is that it makes no sense, since in an assumed-to-be predetermined universe, consciousness cannot have any "beneficial" function. This shows me (by the "grace" of determinism?) that the whole interview cannot really say something reliable about consciousness other than it cannot have any beneficial function.

As regards to at least the answer of Sabine Hossenfelder to the question about consciousness, her answer seems to prove that, namely that there are only mysterious correlations out there since the Big Bang that no "consciousness" can control and which do not guarantee that every predetermined information processing (called "consciousness") is guaranteed to come to an overall logically consistent result (output).

Stefan and Lorraine,

I don't know if Sabine Hossenfelder's world view is 'strictly' deterministic, I'll let anyone defend their own thinking. I do however agree that the concise argumemnt Stefan has just presented holds in that a strictly deterministic universe (which has long been abandoned even by local realists) would naturally follow to a condition of 'non-freewill' and any monitoring in a self referential system would be akin to nothing more than viewing home movies after the fact.

So the question then becomes something like; To what extent do determinants operate effectively (as in cause and effect) and what happens when they don't for no reason at all? Why must we religiously adhere to an expectation that the universe always works perfectly? If not, then, what?jrc

Hi John,

I think that your question about perfection / imperfection does only make some sense in a world where people's thoughts and behaviours are not predetermined, but arise to a certain degree from free will.

Nonetheless, perfection / imperfection are clearly relative terms, are human value statements. We have no universal ruler that defines perfection so that we can deduce from that what imperfection should look like.

So I would skip these two terms and ask what other universal values could there exist in a world where there is a certain degree of free will available for everyone. I think one such value could be truth. Whatever that universe is and whatever makes it possible for it to have a certain degree of free will available within it would be considered by me to be a truth.

I think the question then is whether or not truth is something that must be extrapolated to be even valid beyond space and time, beyond physicality. But I also think that already within physicality, especially within human society, truth seems to me to play a crucial role. People usually don't like lies, for example lies that come from the government, lies that come from friends and loved ones, lies that come from statements that the one making them labels them as "scientific" whereas they clearly are merely beliefs.

Anyway, most people I think would prefer truth over lies when it comes to evaluate what OTHERS say. Nonetheless I think it is undeniable that most people also regularly lie to themselves at certain occasions and at such occasions lying is considered by them better than truth, what surely is another value statement made by them.

Although I think it really sometimes is a matter of personal judgement whether or not one "should" at all bother about what is true and what is a lie, or alternatively what is true and what is false, I also think that to make at all distinctions that could be destined to be objectively true, one had to presuppose or to refuse at least that logics is somewhat mandatory, independent of the fact that we can make logical errors in our thinking. Since this is a personal decision, it seems to me to be a matter of belief whether or not one thinks the status of logics should be somewhat mandatory. Hence, it seems to me to be a matter of subjective choice and taste whether or not one wants objective truth (to the extend that one at all can determine its objectivity) to play a mandatory role in one's life. Science seems to me to have subscribed to that idea of objective truth, at least to a certain degree.

As it also is with religious beliefs in God, some people also may be agnostic about the status of logics and objective truth and some surely never thought about it because one cannot objectively determine that status. Therefore, for these people the whole quest about perfection, God and transcendental truth are meaningless academic questions due to the fact that their existence / non-existence never can be proven.

At the other hand, these people nonetheless came to the truth about that unprovability by using logics as if it would be a somewhat mandatory thing. So, obviously when asking questions and expecting some valid answers to "exist somewhere", we naturally have to assume that logics has some mandatory powers. Hence, I think that for the case that you expected a meaningful answer to your "what?" question about the consequences of an "imperfect" world, it seems to me you had to presuppose that logics has some mandatory powers. If you haven't had such expectations, then it may be possible that you merely wanted to know what answers come in, independent of whether or not they are logical. Moreover, it is impossible for me to really know why and with what assumptions in mind (if at all) you asked the "what?" question. But I would consider it an interesting question concerning the ontological status of truth and logics.

So i would say, although the answer to the question "why bothering about certain things being true or false" may be a purely subjective one, the truth about these things may itself not be subjective, but only the "bothering or not bothering" aspect, means our subjective values, evaluations about certain things. It is clear to me that Sabine Hossenfelder's statement can be perfectly understood when she says that consciousness

"comes from the way that complex systems process information I would say and at some level it becomes beneficial for the system in terms of natural selection to have a self-monitoring process"

as such a subjective value statement, since she uses the terminology "I would say". It is clear to me that this statement makes no sense other than being predetermined at the time of the Big Bang - when Sabine's video about "free will" has indeed captured the truth, namely that we live in a strictly deterministic world. So with my comments about her video statements i merely try to make some sense out of what she says there (and surely out of what you wrote) and i think that is perfectly legitimate to do.

Stefan,

The Present State of Physics does not address the philosophic questions that have been perennial since antiquity, a Truth in mathematics is about the form of argument about the axiomatic relationships employed. Perfection may well be subjective in the relentless efforts to excuse the inequities and tragic natural disasters great or small which harass humankind in a universe believed to be the creation of an omnipotent all-knowing supernatural force. Science confines itself to only questions about the natural world, and admittedly gets down into the weeds of conjecture beyond what can be reasonably projected from what has become the conventionally accepted experimentally supported theoretical truisms. In context to the stated question in my previous post, perfection was clearly meant as a measurable observation that would be expected to always operate within the set parameters of predictive observation. The threshold frequency of the photoelectric effect, for instance; do we really know that any frequency specific to a pure sample of target substance will and does ALWAYS unerringly cause the ejection of an electron? That is a causal relationship, but what if sometimes an atom that could, should, and would react to the frequency quantum in a photoelectric interaction, simply doesn't.

Quantum Mechanics doesn't address that possibility, QM works in aggregate statistical probabilities and explains anomalies as attributable to a range of variability in the frequency source and or sample purity. That methodology IS assuming that everything always operates unerringly, that the universe itself is absolutely perfect. That was my point. jrc

Hi John,

yes, the universe may work in an imperfect manner, I would and could not exclude that possibility. The question that I then would ask is whether that would have any impact on human logical thinking - if consciousness and logic are produced according to how materialism tells us. Clearly, an answer would presuppose to somehow know how logics comes about in the first place - and if logics is not impacted by imperfectly acting microscopic causes and effects in the brain, then these imperfections may themselves be the "causes" why logics works reliable in the first place - and with its help we can ask the question whether or not microscopic causes and effects work like we think they work. All a bit weird, but you are right, epistemologically there are no guarantees that could exclude any imperfections a priori, especially when they occur without any reasons at all - since then there are no reasons existent to exclude such imperfections.

Lorraine and Stefan,

You are quite right, physics cannot explain human consciousness at any level. And yes it calls into question if there is any way that we might know if what we think is at all correct to any case under consideration. But then that was precisely the question that spawned the Socratic Dialogues in the first place. Onward! through the fog!

Did you ever wonder how those cheap electric toothbrushes work? You know, the circular brush rotates a little one direction and then back the other way. I'm about to the point of breaking out a replacement, it was on special for $4.99 and has a second replacement head. So when my current one gives up the ghost I'm going to crack it open and look. Reason? Not simply idle curiosity. I got to thinking about the superposition of spin angular momentum that we are confronted with in Stern-Gerlach experiments (remember - electrically neutral silver atoms with an unpaired electron in the outer shell, not lone electrons) and the pseudo-vector that is created between the atom and the fields when the atom encounters the effective margin of the magnetic field arrangement. We find ourselves in the bewildering mess of both spin and orbital angular momentums and the observable behaviors of rotational fields both electric and magnetic. But even if we shrug and accept that QM can't concisely say what a particle is, but will accept that there are electron shells in the atomic structure, then how does the uni-directional rotation of the impeller shaft from the motor in the handle to the brush head couple with the cylindrical drum of the brush to make it rotate back and forth ?!

Neat eh! I'm thinking that one quick and easy (cheap to manufacture) way would be to cam the end of the impeller shaft in a slot in the drums circumference so that it turns one direction during one half rotation of the impeller and the other direction during the other half of the impeller's rotation. And we would have the classic rotational chirality that so stupefies description when we try to describe the interaction of fields in rotation. I have to refresh with illustrations of field direction of rotating charged particles and the whole routine every time I attempt to visualize S-G. But superposition resulting would be time dependent and the toothbrush mechanical example may well apply to the spread of the plots, with a possibility of some atoms not behaving well. I think its kind of evocative. :-) jrc

31 logical fallacies in 8 minutes

SR, category error and duck test. 'On the electrodynamics of moving bodies'.1.measurement of a material train. 2.measurement of the seen image of a train. These are not equivalent methods. Like should be compared with like. Duck Test (not a valid test) 'If it looks like a material train and sounds like a material train, it is material train', NO. The seen colours and heard sounds are qualia. Products of observation, generated by the observer. Being distant from the train the seen image is also smaller than the material object. The 'train' appearing in the generated virtual spacetime observation product.it does not have the chemical composition of the material train, being generated from processing of nerve impulses-that have resulted from sensory inputs. Assuming the seen train to be equivalent to a material train is a kind of category error. I have called it categorization error, as the different categories have not been differentiated.

The trains are illustration of the methods and issue with it,

Actual method set out-

" (a) The observer moves together with the given measuring-rod and the rod to be measured, and measures the length of the rod directly by superposing the measuring-rod, in just the same way as if all three were at rest.

(b) By means of stationary clocks set up in the stationary system and synchronizing in accordance with § 1, the observer ascertains at what points of the stationary system the two ends of the rod to be measured are located at a definite time. The distance between these two points, measured by the measuring-rod already employed, which in this case is at rest, is also a length which may be designated "the length of the rod[//i]." Einstein. That there is the error. My emphasis in italics.

(b) By means of stationary clocks set up in the stationary system and synchronizing in accordance with § 1, the observer ascertains at what points of the stationary system the two ends of the rod to be measured are located at a definite time. The distance between these two points, measured by the measuring-rod already employed, which in this case is at rest, is also a length which may be designated "the length of the rod." Einstein.

That there is the error. My emphasis in italics.

"Current kinematics tacitly assumes that the lengths determined by these two

operations are precisely equal, or in other words, that a moving rigid body at

the epoch t may in geometrical respects be perfectly represented by the same

body at rest in a definite position" Einstein. On the electrodynamics of moving bodies.

The assumption is incorrect though.

Hi John,

I did not quite get it what your idea / proposal / question with the example of the toothbrush and the link with quantum mechanics should evoke. Can you state that idea more explicitly?

When thinking about all kinds of possible imperfections that may happen for no reasons at all, these possibilities are surely a challenge for reasoning itself. Since logics is about linking reasons to come to results, I think the end of logical deduction is reached when thinking about things that exist / happen without reasons. In this respect, interestingly logics itself is able to capture its own limits: if the input (the initial assumption) is "no reasons existent" then everything could follow (but surely mustn't) from that. At least what surely follows is that whatever output (conclusion) that kind of reasoning will generate, it must be considered true without any reasons (if true and false do not somehow coexist in a kind of "superposition"). In other words, operating logically with "no reasons existent" generates a similarly closed "self-explanatory" world view as for example the deterministic world view does.

But this is exactly what we anyway intuitively have experienced long ago intellectually: an existing God without any reasons to exist, a deterministic universe without any reasons to exist, physical laws and logics without any reasons to exist, an eternally existing universe of any kind without any reasons to exist and so on. When thinking about (scientifically inspired) claims, we cannot other than use reasoning. Because if there are no reasons for a certain claim - or the only "reason" is that what is claimed should be true for no reasons at all - then any meaningful thinking about the assumed truth of that claim is doomed to be unreasonable in the first place (although that claim may indeed be true - for no reasons!).

Obviously logics has its limits and it can determine them quite well (if we do not introduce some conspiratorial bugs in the brain / mind due to imperfections in the fabric of reality). Nonetheless it also has some power to handle the situation, since the fact that there are things whose reasons cannot be captured by human logics (for example the above mentioned claims about God, the universe and all the rest) does not automatically mean that these things exist without reasons. Maybe human logics is not equipped in any way to figure out certain fundamental truths about existence. I know that many scientists would deny this and think (maybe due to the huge efforts in the sciences) that the human mind is generally able to somehow penetrate all of these fundamentals. But I would consider this a rather anthropocentric point of view in that it defines human logics as a kind of universal ruler: there may be reasonable things that lie beyond the light cone of human logics to ever truly grasp them only with the help of human logics. This could mean that there could exist a kind of logics that is not human or more than human or in other words something that is more intelligent than our human logics.

Hi all, it is a beautiful philosophical discussion. You tell things very interesting Stefan about this kind of infinite eternal consciousness intelligent creating this physicality. The actual logic indeed has its limits , probably due to these limitations in knowledges . That is why probably too we cannot really reach this consciousness. I have thought a lot about all this, why we are , why we evolve, why we exist and from What ? It seems odd for me and it is just my opinion of course to be a mathematical accident from a kind of energy that we cannot define.

Now the real big question if this energy transforming and coding it is how is really this transformation of E and what is really this infinite eternal energy. I don t consider that it is an infinite heat personally, but an infinite eternal energy of consciousness and this thing so needs a center physical to send the codes, informations in the particles. WWe arrive so at an enormous difference with the photons alone and the fields and strings oscillating, vibrating.

We have so several different possible interpretations about this universe.

1 is it a mathematical accident from a kind of infinite heat

2 is it a mathematical accident from an other kind of infinite or not energy

3 is it a physicality from a kind of heat utilising the photons and so the strings in oscillating them to create the topologies, geometries, matters, fields. There we can too consider a god or not.

4 is it like in my model made of spheres 3d and 3 ethers sent from the central cosmological sphere , a kind of super matter energy and so it is there that the energy of infinite eternal consciousness in 0D transforms and codes

5 is it a geometrodynamical system with points replacing the strings and so we have the same kind of reasoning than qwith the strings.

6 is it a kind of pure mathematical universe and so we have multiverses, and so we are inside one of them, how to consider the infinities and the infinity so ?

7 is it a thing still different than all these ideas ?

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