Hello AzureFlyingfish. I enjoyed reading your essay and agree with the concept that the fundamentals of changing should be included in science. I also agree that the fundamentals of changing can incorporate the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and general relativity. However, the statement “ we can have no experience or understanding of the outside world except that of change.” Is too all inclusive for me. My work shows that the world/cosmos is both qualitative (changing) and quantitative (unchanging). Each of these share the same fundamentals and both are needed to fully explain the origination and functioning of the the universe and its contents. I agree that two key factors need to be initiated 1. Finding the “correct formulation” that includes changing and 2. Someone needs to construct a scientific theory that includes the formula for successful changing.

My essay in this competition introduces what can be done to construct the scientific theory of successful creation - which I believe includes successful changing. Successful creation creates/becomes the “formulation” of the the universe and its contents - all of which are both qualitative and quantitative. I would appreciate it if you would read my essay and then discuss with me the similarities and differences of our essays as well as how the combination of ideas can improve each of the individual contributions.. The title of my essay is “Could Science Be Different And Improved? Yes. A Specific Proposal.
Regards. FlaxTern

David Jewson
Your approach to revising the foundations of physics is radical, but without an ontological justification (ontological basification).
Quantum theory and General relativity are phenomenological (parametric, operationalist) theories without ontological substantiation (ontological basification). Therefore, as a result, fundamental science is going through a conceptual-paradigmatic crisis, which manifests itself as a "crisis of understanding" (J. Horgan "The End of Science"). "trouble with physics" (Lee Smolin "Trouble with physics").
At the heart of fundamental science, the Great Ontological Revolution has matured, which will give a new ontological basis: an ontological framework, carcass, foundation for the entire system of knowledge. And as a result, a "super-unified field theory describing both physical and semantic manifestations of the World" will be built - a model of the "Self-Aware Universe", as bequeathed by the mathematician and philosopher Vasily Nalimov (V. Nalimov, 1996).
In the same direction, the ideas of the Nobel laureate in physics Brian Josephson, set out in the essay "On the Fundamentality of Meaning".
Obviously, when building a new model of the Universe as an eternal holistic process of generating more and more new meanings, forms and structures, it is necessary to remember the precepts of John Archibald Wheeler:
"We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself."
"To my mind there must be, at the bottom of it all, not an equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we discover it, will be so compelling, so inevitable, that we will say to one another, 'Oh, how beautiful. How could it have been otherwise?_'"
Good luck in the competition!

    Dear Flax Turn,
    Thanks for reading my essay and for all your comments, which I really do appreciate. I have read your essay and you have given me a lot to think about and I would very much like to discuss it further. I think you can email me at AzureFlyingfish@temp-fake-email.fqxi.org. As an example, the point you make about the qualitative (unchanging) and quantitative (changing) is one of the very interesting things I came across myself when thinking about all of this. A colour, such as 'blue' is definitely qualitative - there seems to be no dispute about. We experience it in consciousness as something that 'is', that doesn't have a number and doesn't change. But, paradoxically' blue is also a frequency - a changing number, and in that sense something completely qualitative is also completely quantitative. I found this very odd and disturbing, and it leads me back to your essay where the C* elements are both quantitative and qualitative. Something to think about!

    All the best, AzureFlyingfish.

    Dear Vladimir,
    Thanks for your comments which were very helpful (and I'm very pleased someone has read my essay!) I love John Wheeler and, as you probably noticed, referenced him in my essay. You are quite right, the idea of change doesn't immediately provide an ontology of the world, i.e., what it is that exists in the world. If you are an 'idealist' you can say the world is made up of 'ideas', or rather all the things you experience, such as 'green' or 'blue', and that would be a type of ontological explanation (would you agree?). But colours also have a frequency, so, in a way, they are also change, and then saying the word change is simply the same as saying colour (and vice-versa) and, therefore, is a type of ontological explanation - or is that just semantics? So, I guess, in that way, the idea of change does provide an ontology of the inner 'conscious' world simply because it is another word for all the things, such as colour, that make up that world. But you make an interesting point in that if the change in consciousness is modelling the real world (the world outside our brains) then it must be modelling change in something, but change in what? As in the story of the alien's room in my essay, it would seem impossible to give an answer to that question - so, bizarrely, nobody can know what is changing on the outside world, and then the outside world has no ontological explanation. But the key thing is, does that practically matter? Probably not!

    I thought you might find this interesting (or challenging!) as it calls into question the very idea that an ontological basis for the world outside consciousness is required or even possible.

    Thank you again for your comments and all the best,
    AzureFlyingfish

    "There is then a relationship between the time
    that passes for an individual bee as measured by its social interaction (let’s call it bee-time), and
    the speed the swarm travels, i.e., the space the swarm travels through per second (let’s call it
    swarm-space). So, as swarm-space increases, bee-time reduces. Swarm-space and bee-time are
    then intimately connected, one varying with the other. It is then easy to see that they are both an
    aspect of (i.e., the result of) the same thing: a universal speed of change!"
    I appreciate this passage in your article. I think it speeks about group speed (the speed of th swarm bee) and phase speed ( the speed of an idividual bee). In quantum theory (De Broglie theory) the square of the speed of light is equal the group speed times the phase speed. If a particle is in rest than its phase speed is infinite i.e. it is present in all space so by analogy bee-time tends to a constant. If the group is in its maximum (tends to the constant of relativity) than the phase speed tends to the same constant so the swarm-bee have no presence in space and it becomes present only in time . There is a certain duality between unity and multiplicity and this requires a certain uncertainity in space and in time. We will never get an harmonic oscillator with a precise frequency: it is only theoritically. This suggest to me the idea of ApriCot in this Competition that every particle have an identity in space and another identity in time i.e. a quadri-vector identity. The identity in space for example can be the contribution of many possible states of particle in space (Dirac kets) and the identity in time is also the contribution of many states in time. What we measure is a classical result which translate exactly the Bhor principle of correspondance.
    What we luck in physics theory?. It is clear that if a particle can be in rest in space than it also can be in rest in time. A particle have quadri-vector identity and this identity in time is equal to the speed c times its inertial time, the identity in space is equal to the group speed times its inertial time. The ratio between the quadrivector momentum and the quadrivector identity is a new universal constant. It is a very simple idea that likes John Wheeler but which I present is not philosophy it is really physics.

    7 days later

    Hello AzureFlyingfish Did you receive my email? Let me know. FlaxTern

    Greetings. Not sure I understand some things you mention. Starting with the proposal that ‘science should be the study of change’… But isn’t it true that, in reality, science, in great part, studies change? As a scientist, I have always been studying/characterising changes!
    Then, “the idea of material ‘stuff’ seems so deeply rooted in our physics that it might seem impossible to remove it and replace it with change”… But, isn’t it material things that will change? Something has to be the thing that changes, or not? For instance, when later you say that about “voilà—this description doesn’t need the photon at all, it just needs the idea of change leading to new change”… But it needs the photon as the maker of those changes. That’s why retinal cells specialise in interpreting, so to speak, that thing we call photon. These cells don’t “interpret” gravitons (to be precise, the final interpretation of those photons and frequencies you mention is in the brain). So it seems to me one needs the “material stuff” that changes, whatever the name we choose to give to that material stuff.
    And with respect to “nobody knows why that mathematics works” , well, it works because we have modelled natural phenomena using models that work! Math is our construction and it is tailored to model what we wish to model. The surprising thing would be if it were not working!
    What I think I understand is the logic behind your proposal, logic I share in that everything changes ―this, in fact, is a very Buddhist principle! I agree with the proposal that studying relations among things ―that is, the way these things interact and therefore change as interactions normally cause changes― is a most fundamental aspect. In fact, time is nothing more than our way to capture the change in things, so you can dispose of time as well. If you are interested you can read this article (written by a past FQXi contestant) to see that time is not needed to describe change https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-an-illusion/

    Dear KakhiHeron
    A quadrivector identity is an interesting idea which I will need to think about!
    The idea for the swarm of bees came from Feynman's description of a simple photon clock where a photon bounces back and forward between two mirrors with one bounce being one tick of the clock (so many fractions of a second). When the clock accelerates, then the photon has to take a longer route between the mirrors and so the ticks slow down and time appears to have slowed down. Using this simple model it is possible to deduce Einstein's time dilation equation. So, when time slows down with the Feynman clock, there is nothing particularly special or unusual happening, it is simply due to the geometry of the situation. However, it does depend on the timing elements of the clock (the photons) all moving (or changing) at the same speed. A little bit of investigation shows that having a physics where all fundamental things travel at the same speed is a physics that entirely agrees with the equations of relativity - which is an interesting discovery (I can email you the mathematics if you are sceptical!) and, incidentally, would fit with the idea that change travels at a single speed.

    Dear LilacSeahorse,
    I very much like Buddhist ideas and will certainly look at the article you suggest which looks really interesting.
    You are quite right, scientists have always studied change, and, of course, it is only common sense that something must be changing. But what if there are two worlds, a model 'dream' world inside our heads and a real world outside our heads - and we are trapped in that inner world? It would be like being trapped in a room and having to watch a tv picture of the outside world. Although you could tell how the outside world was changing from how all the tv's pixels were changing, you couldn't say what those pixels were representing, i.e. what it is that really exists in the outside world. It's the same if you look at a model of DNA made out of ping-pong balls in that the ping-pong balls themselves aren't telling you what they are representing (something round? Maybe, maybe not). So, the title of my essay should really be 'Is change all we can know about the outside world?'.
    I also agree that the creation of new change should have a cause. In the case of light, you could call that cause a photon, but the word 'photon' doesn't seem to add anything much and doesn't change the calculations, so it is probably more honest to say that the cause isn't known just yet. If you believe in the Big Bang, then that is the greatest creation of new change, but no one really knows the cause of that huge new change.
    Lastly, when I said 'nobody knows why the mathematic works' I simply meant there is currently no good physical explanation for the mathematics of quantum theory. This is what Feynman says in his book QED. He called the mathematics absurd and said that no one, not even the most learned professor, had a good explanation for why it worked. It was the same when Balmer discovered a formula for the spectral lines for the hydrogen atom - he knew the mathematics worked but didn't have a good explanation for why it worked. So, you could say mathematics become a model of the world when there is a good explanation of why that mathematics works, but up until that point it is a mysterious procedure!
    Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful comments - I have found them very helpful.

      David Jewson
      I think teh title you now mention is more accurate: "'Is change all we can know about the outside world?'. And I would say yes, without hesitation. If you read some parts of my essay (The inevitability of our current approach to science and the search for the simplest perspective to comprehend nature), you will see that this is basically what I mean although instead of "change" I use words like "relations" or "interactions", but after all it is the same thing as interactions always cause changes (somehow I find it difficult to think about an interaction with no change, and I have tried! Even my "interaction" with politicians cause a change in me, in that it emphasises my conviction that they do not see past the end of their noses... or the four years ahead in government). I also acknowledge the fundamental importance of studying relations because those are the only things we can perceive, as some scholars that I mention in my essay already told us.
      Somehow I think we almost never perceive the essence of things, be they particles or people, we only perceive their properties, which interact and therefore changes come into place. When you perceive a tomato you see the colour because of the properties of its skin reflecting that light, you smell it because of the properties of the chemicals, and so on. But, what is the essence of a tomato? Things to ponder in a sleepless night!
      And finally, as a neuroscientist I can assure you that what you say about reality being created in our minds is true. I always call the brain the ultimate illusionist... Nonetheless, our created model inside our minds has some mappings with the "real reality" outside... whatever that is.

        8 days later

        Dear LilacSeahorse,

        I thoroughly agree with you!
        I've read you really interesting essay and have left a comment on how I think neuroscience could make a difference.

        Dear LilacSeahorse,

        I read the article about time as you suggested. Strangely and unexpectedly, I found myself agreeing with it. You may have noticed that, in my essay, I suggested everything at the fundamental level travels at the same speed, This means that the distance one fundamental thing travels exactly matches the distance any other fundamental thing travels. This then dispenses with the need for a separate concept of time as, in effect, everything exactly 'times' everything else. Brilliant! Thank you.

        quote
        This essay argues science should be based, not on the idea of material things, but the idea of ‘change’. We are all born into this world on our own and have to make sense of it out of the only thing we have available—our perceptions: things like colour and sound. These perceptions have been created by our brain to model the real world, but this model can only work because the way our perceptions change can precisely model the changes in the outside world. We can have no other experience or understanding of the outside world except that of change. It is, therefore, simply not possible to describe that world in terms of material things, as we can have no knowledge of what it is that exists in the outside world, but only knowledge of how it changes. Perceptions themselves describe that change. Red, for example, has a frequency, i.e., it can be described as change.
        end of quote
        Yes, but we already do this. What blinds us to this development is that technology is a spin off of scientific advancement and in the early to Mid 20 century technology exploded. As did break through science

        However, technology and Science are NOT the same thing.

        What we can do is to firmly make a separation between technology and science and to imbue the public
        especially with this difference.

        The mixing up of the two has lead to a plethora of crackpot conspiracy theories and a distrust socially which
        lead to as an example the anti vaccination movement.

        This is a really well written paper that makes great use of examples from physics. I enjoyed reading it!

        I'm not sure about the argument for the main conclusion, which is on page 2: "Our conscious world is then entirely built out of change". This conclusion is drawn from the premise: "when we experience colours, we are experiencing a frequency". The idea is that since "frequency is another word for cyclic change", the world we experience is made of change. But I don't think that when we experience colours, we experience frequency. Rather, we experience surface properties that reflect light at certain wave lengths. By "red" I just mean that feature of objects that reliably causes red experiences in normal observers. Changes are involved in that surface property, and in the sensory processing of it, but it doesn't mean change is all that we experience. I'm also not sure how you would deal with other features of experience, like the arrangement of the visual field or the retinotopic map.

        But let's say we grant the argument. I'm not exactly clear on what follows. Claims like "red is change, green is change" (p3) do not seem informative. Informative explanations still seem to require an account of what is changing. For example, in neuroscience we want to know what is changing in the brain when one is seeing a colour. Ultimately, I wondered if you were aiming to propose some form of structural realism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/

        Hello CoralBear, before our author answers, I would like to point out that the nervous system (brains particularly) needs change to experience things... You probably are familiar with the typical situation where a constant stimulus stops being perceived. Also, you may know about the Ganzfeld experiement (here it is how to do a simplified version at home
        https://www.webmd.com/brain/what-is-ganzfeld-experiment). If stimuli remain constant, brains start to create their own realities, so somehow brains need change. And of course, those changes out there are translated into other changes in here (in nervous tissue function). It is precisely the interrelation of the environmental changes and those in the brains (fluctuations of neural activity) that determines whether an organism is fit or not, adaptive behaviour needs a correct interpretation of environmental changes for which, I venture, you need important changes (fluctuations) in neural activity. With little fluctuations, or variability, in neural function, say during coma, sleep or epileptic seizures, normally unconsciousness ensues.

        Hi, Interesting and unique approach. I agree that 'change' is a very valid way to look at nature and the universe, in so many different ways, most of which you identify! But I have sense that those intelligent aliens may have influenced your thinking for the better. Certainly the one I 'interviewed', or who communicated subliminally seemed to suggest change may be valid for ALL physics; c changing to new LOCAL c in moving systems, i.e. QM particle states being CHANGED (+ to -) by A&B's detectors 'flipping' them (explaining 'entanglement'!) etc. There may be even more to change than you suggest! But you DO suggest our 'foundations' may need to be changed. Well done. A novel and interesting approach which may be right on target.

        Dear MagnoliaCentipide,
        Thanks for your comment and sorry for the late reply. What you say reminds me that the most important things in most people's lives are their friendships and personal relationships. I like the philosophy of John MacMurray which suggests that if science has a point, ultimately that point should be about improving what is really important to people, i.e., friendship. I haven't really considered how muddling science up with technology might play into all of this and lead to the crackpot theories and social distrust you mention, and it all sounds really interesting. I'm hoping your essay might have something more to say about it and and will give it a read to find out!

        Dear CoralBear,
        Thank you for making some really important points which is I have also really struggled with. Our science is based around the idea of things and that idea is deeply set in our psychology, and ,because of this, when I started thinking about change I thought that that the perceptions in our consciousness, such as red, were 'things' and were code for what was going on in the real world outside our heads. Then I realized they could be a code just for change, so, for example, when there is a change of a particular frequency in my brain I might experience red. Red then remains a 'thing' that is code for a certain type of change, i.e., red is my human experience of change. But then I thought that as red seems to have no other properties, or perform any other function than describing change, that describing it as 'a thing' doesn't really add anything, and it would be simpler to just say that red is change. In a similar way, one might ask what it is that is changing in the world outside our heads. So, you might then say that is the 'aether' that is changing or 'the CoralBear field' that is changing - but these ideas don't add anything new so one might then wonder if they have any value at all. This realization was a sort of epiphany for me, as it led me to think that 'things' aren't actually necessary to describe our world and, bizarre as it sounds, instead of experiencing things, we experience change. However, if you prefer to think of red as 'a thing' I think that is perfectly justifiable. I also agree that change has to take place in a space, so you also need the idea of space as well as change. I can understand it when you say objects in the outside world are what really exist, so, for example, a table is what really exists. But a table consists of empty space and point particles. You can imagine those point particles being 'something' but I would say it is equally possible to describe them in terms of the changes they cause, i.e., solely in terms of change. You might think that this is all just a matter of definitions, but it turns out that describing physics in terms of change gives a completely different picture of the world we live in, which I have found refreshing and revealing (but I am biased!). This is especially so as it then seems possible to describe the world without all the weird conclusions that come from describing it in terms of things.
        The article on structural realism (which I didn't know anything about) looks really interesting and I will look at it carefully as I sure I could learn something from it.
        Thank you, and also thank you LilacSeahorse for your further comments, I am very tempted to try the Ganzfeld experiment! I think the link between consciousness and neural activity is fascinating and hides some deep secrets!

        Dear ThistleLion,
        Thank you - I think you are the first person to ever say my ideas might be 'on target', so I feel quite overwhelmed!
        I'm glad you mentioned entanglement, as I think it's yet another area where using change to describe physics gives a completely different understanding of what is going on. If you imagine change in the world being like waves in a pond, with different waves in that pond will be crossing each other and either adding or subtracting from each other at different points in the pond, then, in a sense, all the waves are entangled with each other. It is this kind of entanglement that is absolutely key to the operation of a theory of change. However, the current understanding of entanglement depends on there being 'things' with certain intrinsic properties that move from A to B, and, for quantum theory to be true, this assumption unavoidably leads to very weird conclusions, for example, that information can pass instantaneously between two particles, whatever distance separates them. However, by using the idea of change along with the idea that the mathematics of quantum theory is describing that change (and so dispensing with the idea of 'things') it seems possible to reach an understanding of entanglement that is not the least bit weird and where there is no instantaneous transmission of information, although I realize a much deeper analysis would be required to make this sound at all convincing! However, I truly believe that a new approach using the idea of change could solve many of the fundamental problems in physics in a straightforward way while avoiding the need for many of the 'magical' conclusions that basing physics on the study of 'things' has required.
        Anyway, thanks for your comments which are much appreciated.

        P.S. I'm glad I'm not the only person who talks to aliens!

        An interesting essay, but I found it a bit unfocused. What does it actually mean to base science on the idea of "change," e.g., how might science be different, what different actions would scientists take? The essay raised these questions and seemed to promise answers at the beginning, but ended by just saying science surely should be different, but in an unexplored way.

        E.g., at one point, the essay addressed the material issue that it's hard to describe what subatomic particles actually are, but then said it's easy to describe them in terms of change, because "change is what is directly experienced by human beings as perceptions." But change at the level of subatomic particles is no more "directly" experienced by humans than the material realities of particles are; a person seeing a sunset can be said to experience the changing electromagnetic fields or experiencing the arrival of physical photons, but neither explanation is immediately evident to the untrained eye seeing the sunset. If mere experience is not enough for science (and I don't think the essay is claiming that) then how does it actually help to focus on "change" rather than on "things"? At the end of the day, you're making theories that go beyond your individual experience, and it doesn't seem to matter to me if those theories start with this nebulous idea of change or with theorizing microscopic objects.