X-rays from atomic systems could reveal new clues about rival quantum theories

The following story was recounted by physicist Christopher Fuchs fairly recently in his massive 2014 arXiv paper My Struggles with the Block Universe: In 1972, the late physicist John Archibald Wheeler asked his students to write all the equations of physics they knew on sheets of paper, and he placed all the papers in front of the classroom of students, and he then repeatedly commanded the equations to fly. When the equations repeatedly failed to fly, he commented to the assembled students who must have been thinking that Wheeler had gone off his rocker: “You see, these equations can’t fly. But our universe flies. We’re still missing the single, simple ingredient that makes it all fly.” https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/John+Wheeler

And also fairly recently, physicist Blake Stacey noted in 2016 that Wheeler had made the same point when he was interviewed in the documentary The Creation of the Universe (1985) (https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/John+Wheeler):

There’s nothing deader than an equation. You write that down in a square on a tile floor. And on another tile on the floor you write down another equation, which you think might be a better description of the Universe. And you keep on writing down equations hoping to get a better and better equation for what the Universe is and does.
And then, when you’ve worked your way out to the end of the room and have to step out, you wave your wand and tell the equations to fly.
And not one of them will put on wings and fly.
Yet the Universe flies!
It has a life to it that no equation has, and that life to it is a life with which we are also tied up.

Nothing has changed since 2016. Wheeler nailed it when he noted that equations CAN’T represent a moving world. Despite maybe containing delta symbols which purport to represent number change, the equations of physics CAN’T represent a moving world. There exists no set of equations that can represent a moving system. Equations are not the type of thing that can be used to represent the source of movement.

“SPONTANEOUS electromagnetic radiation”, “dynamical wave-function COLLAPSE” (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.250203 ) are all about movement aspects of the world that CAN’T be represented by equations. Nevertheless, physicists are seemingly continuing on their Quixotic quest to try to force equations to represent a moving world.

Similarly, equations can’t be forced to represent (the separate issue of) how the world knows itself, starting off with how it could be that at a very basic level the world knows its own categories and numbers.

The issue of how the world knows itself (consciousness) and the issue of how the world moves itself (in response to this knowledge of itself), are, clearly, TWO SEPARATE, BUT CONNECTED, ISSUES. But neither of these aspects of the world can be represented with equations.

Lorraine Ford
What is the consequence of what physicists believe about the world?

Most physicists religiously believe that every detail of current events, including the current wars in the world, were determined since the beginning of time. And FQxI physicists Greene and Carroll are not embarrassed to tell the people of the world that, no matter what you do (e.g. rape, murder), your behaviour will always be an inevitable outcome that had been determined since the beginning of time, due to the physics of the world.

The above nonsensical ideas about the world are clearly a direct consequence of physicists’ beliefs that a set of equations is all that is needed to describe the behaviour of the world.

The complete and utter nonsense of this equation-based-belief was noted many years ago by the late physicist John Archibald Wheeler. In fact, equations don’t “fly”, you can’t make a viable moving system out of equations alone, you also need non-measurable elements, i.e. logical connectives, as computers programs have shown, in order to make a viable system.

These logical connectives (symbolised as (e.g.) IF, AND, OR, IS TRUE, and THEN) represent a necessary aspect of any viable world-system, and these symbols are the very symbols that can be used to model consciousness and free will in the world.

And clearly, when you’ve actually got an actual model of consciousness, as opposed to the Markovian probability nonsense that has NO actual model of actual consciousness, it can be clearly seen that it is not consciousness that can be described as “causing collapse”, it is only free will that can be described as “causing collapse”.

Lorraine Ford
Freed of the philosophical red herring of how consciousness might “feel”, the necessary function and utility of consciousness and free will in the world-system is laid bare.

The necessary function and utility of consciousness and free will in the world-system is representable by symbols like: IF, AND, OR, IS TRUE, and THEN.

When you’ve actually got an actual model of consciousness, as opposed to the Markovian probability nonsense that has NO ACTUAL MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS, and as opposed to the Orch OR model that has NO ACTUAL MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS, it can be clearly seen that it is not consciousness that can be described as “causing collapse”, it is only free will that can be described as “causing collapse”.

Lorraine Ford
When it comes to consciousness, physicists and mathematicians are blind to the fact that it is NECESSARY that the foundations of the world have knowledge of its own categories, numbers and relationships. The world couldn’t operate if it literally had zero inkling of its own categories, numbers and relationships. If the world literally knew nothing, it couldn’t operate, and the world literally wouldn’t exist.

Unfortunately, physicists and mathematicians have told themselves quite a few fairy stories about the world:

1. A fairy story about mathematical systems: Physicists and mathematicians have never been able to face up to the experimentally demonstratable fact that physics and mathematics falls into a heap without the consciousness and agency of physicists and mathematicians. Physicists and mathematicians are part of the system of representation, and when physicists and mathematicians mentally excise themselves from the picture, leaving only the mathematical symbols, the symbols alone do NOT represent a viable system.
2. A fairy story about themselves: In their puffed-up self-importance, people, including physicists and mathematicians, are unwilling to accept that something very small at the foundations of the world must also have a level of consciousness.
3. A fairy story about out-of-this-world explanations: Physicist Roger Penrose, one of the originators of the Orch OR idea about consciousness, believes that you need out-of-this-world solutions to explain the world. With out-of-this-world explanations for the world (e.g. almighty Gods, Platonic realms, computer programs that control the world) you can make up any old story.

The only genuine issue with consciousness (and agency) is how to represent it, and in this respect, computer programs have shown the way. However, if the basic function of consciousness is represented using symbols like AND, OR, and IS TRUE, it is clear that consciousness is not a thing that can have any effect on the world. Only the basic function of the world representable as IF…THEN… can represent something that has an effect on the world.

Lorraine Ford
There is a suggestion that consciousness causes the “collapse of the wave function”.

But what is the basic FUNCTION of consciousness in the world?

It can’t be assumed that an equation represents anything more than the relationship between low-level categories that physics has experimentally found. It can’t be assumed that, as well as relationship, this equation also represents the world having a knowledge of its own relationships, categories and numbers. A knowledge function can’t be assumed, especially remembering that physicists and mathematicians provide the “knowledge function” for their own symbolic equations, and the equations alone do not represent this “knowledge function”.

Clearly, the function of consciousness, the necessary amenity that basic consciousness provides to the world-system is:

• Providing the “IS TRUE” point-of-view knowledge aspect of a particular situation in the world, as opposed to the purportedly existing “is possible” aspect of a particular situation in the world.
• Providing the necessary collatory aspect of the world, representable using the symbols “AND” and “OR”, because many things (representable as numbers that apply to categories) are true at once. For every small part of the world, consciousness puts everything together in one collated point-of-view outlook.
• In living things, via both the “IS TRUE” aspect and the collatory “AND” and “OR” aspects, consciousness provides a way of analysing and organising the many items of low-level information that are simultaneously true, thereby allowing the organism to distinguish and identify larger objects in its surrounding environment. Note that these objects don’t need to be labelled/ named in the way that human beings would do.
• In living things, having distinguished and identified larger objects in the surrounding environment (e.g. trees, predators), consciousness informs the agency aspect of the world (representable with IF…THEN… symbols), where the agency aspect of the world would be used to (e.g.) escape predators that have been identified in the surrounding environment.

Clearly, only the IF…THEN… agency aspect of the world, informed by the consciousness aspect of the world, could cause the purported “collapse of the wave function” (if such a wave function does in fact exist).

Lorraine Ford
Re: the idea that consciousness is a type of thing that emerges from “wavefunction collapse”:

There is more similarity than difference between low-level entities like particles, atoms and molecules on the one hand, and high-level organisms the other hand:

• The difference is merely in degree, i.e. in the larger number of collated particles with more levels of logical organisation in high-level organisms, compared to the low-level entities.
• The similarity is in an entity’s ability to apprehend its surroundings (which is the functional aspect of consciousness), and the entity’s ability to jump the numbers that apply to its own categories (which is the functional aspect of agency).

However, people pooh-pooh the idea that a low-level entity could apprehend its surroundings and/or jump its own numbers:

• Functional consciousness: The idea that a low-level entity could know itself and its surroundings kind of got lost in the longstanding conviction, of mathematicians and physicists, that mathematics is the thing that has the property of knowing itself and moving itself. This longstanding conviction that mathematical relationships have the miraculous property of knowing themselves and their surrounding categories and numbers, obviates the need for the low-level entities to know themselves and their surroundings.
• Functional agency: The idea that a low-level entity could jump its own numbers kind of got lost in the conviction that no entity at the level of a particle was capable of jumping its own numbers, and the conviction that the world is full of things that just jump and “collapse” for no reason, with nothing being responsible for all the jumping and collapsing.

Not only is there the pooh-poohing of low-level entities, but on the other hand there is the adulation of mathematics in the idea of emergence (which is actually all about the entirely superficial appearance of a thing):

• The idea is of an emergent consciousness that is non-functional and disconnected from the nitty-gritty categories and numbers of the real world.
• This idea seems to have taken hold due to the non-functional, and disconnected from the nitty-gritty, “strange attractors” that emerge in complexity theory when algorithmically-derived points are plotted on an x and y graph.

The pooh-poohing of the entities that actually exist in the world, in favour of the mathematical relationships that exist in the world, is where mathematicians, physicists and philosophers have gone horribly wrong in their estimation of the nature of the world.

Lorraine Ford
Re the idea that consciousness could emerge from “wavefunction collapse”, continued:

It comes down to this: as is already known by mathematicians, at the foundation of every mathematical system there necessarily exists a stripped-down “IS TRUE”/ knowledge/ consciousness aspect.

This stripped-down “IS TRUE”/ knowledge aspect is necessarily the foundation of higher-level consciousness.

Stripped of the bells and whistles of high-level consciousness, consciousness has an essential function in the world: an “IS TRUE”/ knowledge function.

Represented by the “IS TRUE” symbol, at its foundations every mathematical system has, or assumes, a knowledge aspect. But when it comes to the real world, physicists, mathematicians and philosophers seem to have forgotten about this basic requirement of mathematical systems.

Lorraine Ford
Re the idea that consciousness could emerge from “wavefunction collapse”, further continued:

At the foundations of mathematics, quite apart from the relationships/ equations, and quite apart from the highfalutin jargon, you’ve got something that knows what is true, and something that moves/ chooses. Quite obviously, and quite apart from the highfalutin jargon, the something that knows what is true, and that moves/ chooses, is the human being doing the mathematics.

However, the point is that no matter what the equations are, the equations can never represent these two separate but necessary aspects: the thing that knows what is true, and the thing that moves/ chooses.

And the other point is that the thing that knows what is true (consciousness) can never emerge from the thing that moves/ chooses (a movement that, in the real world, might be described as “wavefunction collapse”).

When it comes to the real world, why have physicists, mathematicians and philosophers forgotten the foundations of mathematics?