To be or not to be strictly deterministic? by Stefan Weckbach

Stefan Weckbach

Essay Abstract

The task of this essay is to examine the possible discrepancies between a strictly deterministic description of reality and quantum mechanics with no hidden variables in its interpretational framework. We start this paper by considering some general lines of reasoning about what can be known or not known in principle. Thereafter we analyze certain contradictions which we have obtained from our considerations about what can be known or not known in principle and examine their possible consequences for the framework of a strict determinism as well as for a framework with random events incorporated. We compare these findings with human experience as well as with the limits of logical consistent inferencing. Furthermore some consequences of multiple coexistent finite or even infinite universes are examined. Finally we arrive at the conclusion that for our hitherto most successful scientific theories to be true and consistent, it is necessary to assume the existence of consciousness to be at least as fundamentally necessary as these theories seem to be.

Author Bio

Stefan Weckbach works as a media engineer and administrator at Gustav-von-Schmoller College in Heilbronn, Germany. His main scientific interests are mathematical undecidability, algorithmic information theory, questions concerning consciousness, human free will and logics. Additionally he is interested in various interpretational questions of quantum mechanics.

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[deleted]

Eng. Weckbach, How can your assertion be falsified? If it cannot be falsified then can it be 'scientific' (after Sir Karl Popper) and, if not, physics? Thank you.

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Dough Huffman,

thanks for your comment on my essay and your emphatic and necessary question about it. No question is senseless, but leads in most cases to a better understanding, not only of the questionable issue but also of the issue of the question itself. So i will communicate you my point of view on that.

You find the answer to your question at page 8 f. of my essay under my *summary*.

Clearly according to Popper theories have to be falsifiable. This follows directly from the obvious asymmetry between the knowable and the unknowable (see therefore page 2 of my essay). Whoever claims to have found a TOE - THE TOE - has - according to the previous lines above - to deliver the possibility for his/her theory to be falsifiable.

But in the lines of reasoning in the last break of this comment lies a subtle difficulty. A TOE - THE TOE (or whatever you will name it) cannot be falsified anymore (if it is indeed THE TOE). It can only be verified in an endless chain of experiments. So you will never know if the TOE you are examining is THE TOE, because you can't exclude a priori the possibility of an existing case in which your theory could be indeed - some day far away - be falsified, but you also cannot exclude the possibility that you have indeed found THE TOE and therefore the chain of the verifying results of your experiments will never end. That's a variation of Alan Turing's famous "halting problem" (as you surely heard of).

So you have asked not for the fasifiability of a TOE, but in general of a theory, you are absolutely right insofar as you are refering to human experience and not to a theory of falsifiability.

But: As far as i know, Popper never understood his demand for falsifiability as a theory out of itself but more as a logical inducing-sheme. Besides that, our human experience tells us that Popper must have been absolutely right. But the latter *induction* is only once more grounded on our human experience, especially our experience of the main issue of all science: reapeatability and the underlying rules of it. But as far as i know, nobody until now can expose in wich relationship all the possible rules and exceptions are and if every rule that exists can have and has an exception (and especially: If the latter would be the case, if this meta-rule itself could have an exception [maybe in form of THE TOE?]).

So, to make a short story out of it all, in my essay i tried to expose the limits of what can/cannot be known in principle. My personal conviction is, that the question for a detectable valid TOE belongs to the things that can't be answered finally by human beings as far as this TOE only refers to the physical realms of reality with its limited amount of accessible information. And it is exactly this reality which has something like *time* in its framework and therefore you'll never know - the future of it all and all its - possible - exceptions. Tbanks for your interest in my essay.

Sincerely

Stefan Weckbach

[deleted]

Hi Stefan. I am glad that you seek to truly open your mind, as this is expressed by the bold scope of your essay. Too many physicists and mathematicians tend to approach things too narrowly (and inconsistently).

I will offer some helpful, basic, and accurate suggestions/ideas for your kind consideration.

1) Dreams make thought more like sensory experience in general (including gravity and electromagnetism). Dreams improve upon (or add to) the integrated extensiveness of thought, being, and experience. (Please remember/see my prior posts to you in this discussion as well.)

2) The growth of the child from the [approximate] center of the body is very significant.

3) The comprehensiveness and consistency of both intention and concern are central to our growth, consciousness, and life.

4) The dream combines and unifies opposites, as this is why dream experience is different from that of waking. For all intents and purposes, we are so smart that we are stupid in the dream.

Please see my two articles:

The Dream Fundamentally Balances and Unifies Gravity and Electromagnetism

The Disintegration and Contraction of Being and Experience.

I have written much more on all of this.

What we are concerned with here could not be more important, especially in this day and age.

Stefan Weckbach

Hi Frank, thank you very much for your encouraging words.

I think the narrowly and sometimes inconsistently approaching of things which we yet don't know for sure is a natural feature of what you called the "integrated extensiveness" of human thought.

Only by grasping some borders we are able to differenciate. The problem is, to come as a start to the point where borders can be recognized clearly. Logical thought is grounded at opposites, as you correctly mentioned in your comment and can be tackled by creativity. Creativity in my opinion is in turn characterized by temporarily relinquished borders - for whatever reasons.

As for the problem of randomness/determinism in quantum mechanics, it seems at first glance that these two opposites are mutually exclusive alternatives. In my paper i tried to expose that this mustn't be the case. In the thread "Is the world made of wave-vectors?" someone has mentioned that the question of this thread is indeed wether possibilities are ontological or epistemic. My answer to that is that the question could be wrong, because neither randomness nor determinism can explain sufficiently our human experience of making decisions and therefore guide our scientific understanding of the world by that in an asthonishing and verifiable way. So for me, there must be an exception of the tertium non datur in the whole question and i guess, for human beings and for the whole animated nature in the sense of animals etc., there could be a continuum from determinism to more and more freedom of individual decisions.

I have some questions about yours statements made above, but i will therefore firstly read your suggested articles, which i can't do the next days because i am in a time-intensive working-phase.

"What we are concerned with here could not be more important, especially in this day and age"

Be asure of the enormous importance of the issues you are concerned with, cause we are at a critical point of our whole evolution (as far as i can evaluate this objectively).

Thanks again for your helpfull comments and suggestions which i will check out next days.

[deleted]

Hello! Your title brings to mind some sonnets I penned for the late John A. Wheeler.

For some reasons I wrote a lot of sonnets that first year in grad school--often during quantum mechanics. At the end of the semester, when the professor was passing out the exams, he looked at me and said, "You will do very well on this! You took many notes!" I guess he thought I was taking notes the whole time. I've never been much of a class learner, but I made up for it by staying up late, reading the quantum texts. It wasn't always efficient, but here're some of the poems I wrote in quantum mechanics--I sent them to Wheeler during that first year of grad school:"

"cxl.

Now suppose we have a hole in a slate,

A photon from a source passes on through,

And it darkens a grain on a film plate,

To say it went through the hole would be true.

Several photons pass through, we wait a bit,

And quite a simple pattern we do see,

A bright spot directly behind the slit,

Fading away as you move outwardly.

We choose to add an additional slit,

The photon seems to have a decision,

It must choose one of them through which to fit,

For photons are not allowed to fission.

But now there are fringes, common to waves!

In this manner, can particles behave?

cxli.

What's seen is an interference pattern,

Which is common to every type of wave,

On the vast ocean or from a lantern,

This is the way every wave does behave.

Though you think particles blacken the spot,

Between the source and plate light is a wave,

As to its whereabouts we can say not,

Such is the way reality behaves.

These ghostly facts are true of all matter,

Electrons and protons and you and me,

We're but empty waves that somehow matter,

Striving to comprehend reality.

Wavy winds blow, our consciousness is lit.

It makes up our mind, our minds make up it.

cxlii.

"The question is to be or not to be,

Whether it is nobler within the mind,

To believe in indeterminacy,

Or refute that God plays dice in the wind.

Are there many worlds, or only just this one?

And is Schrodinger's cat alive or dead?

Of p and x, can we only know one?

And of Wigner's good friend, what can be said?"

He smiled and said, "no question, no answer,

This above all, science holds to be true,

Love is in the mind of the romancer,

And the kind of love determines the view."

He looked up to the sky, a sky few see,

A sky filled with a child's curiosity."

Best,

Dr. E (The Real McCoy)

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/238

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/432

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Dr. E (The Real McCoy),

thanks for your pretty good, refreshing and humorous sonnets about the big question (to be or not to be... :-) I like it cause it reflects my own surprise about QM, its efficiency and its mystery.

I think i took the title for my essay out of my unconsciousness from some variation of another title about a puzzle with the three doors for which two of them have behind them each a goat but only one door has behind it the first price - a car. It was a puzzle that was presented by Marilyn vos Savant in a magazine called "Parade Magazine". That title was something like "to switch or not to switch" and surely can be still be googled.

In conjunction with my essay (or just only in conjunction with the title of my essay) it is a great honor for me to have someone here who worked with John Wheeler. I know not much about him historically, but only that he was an ingenious thinker who liked to take "Gedankenexperimente" to the extreme to see where they can lead.

His "idea of an idea"-Idea i noticed as well as some other aphorisms of him to think about.

In my essay i tried to come up with another idea to take to the extreme, my "consciousness"-approach. Like Steven Weinberg once wrote (i think it was in the american scientific magazine at the end of 2002 or at the beginning of 2003) "...to construct a unified theory of all fundamental forces, physicists need radical new ideas".

Well, i didn't tried exactly this cause i haven't developed a new deterministic theory of all forces, but only took his statement about a radical new idea seriously. I really don't think that he could be very much thrilled about what i wrote if he would take a look, but that's my contribution to the contest and the very pulsating subject of it.

I am not sure by reading your comment if John Wheeler liked your sonnets at the end of your grad school, but i assume he could very much.

Best,

Stefan Weckbach

[deleted]

Hi Stefan.

1) You said:

I think the narrowly and sometimes inconsistently approaching of things which we yet don't know for sure is a natural feature of what you called the "integrated extensiveness" of human thought.

Nice job. You clearly see how "narrow and inconsistent" go against "integrated and extensive". There is no better way to understand or phrase it when it is said that the integrated extensiveness of the thought(s)/thinking is improved in the truly superior mind and in the highest/true/ideal form of genius.

The best understanding/thinking will necessarily be similar to the best understanding/description of physics. Accordingly, electromagnetism and gravity (at bottom) add to the integrated extensiveness of space and experience -- and thought as well. Note the connection here with dreams, genius, the unconscious, and sustained (yet balanced) energy -- and with the aspects/words "powerful" and "compelling" as well. What may be called our memory is a very powerful tool for predicting what may happen on the basis of what has happened and is happening. Memory integrates experience, hence the connection with genius and memory --- but this is in regard to the increased intentionality of genius -- yet this is even related to forgetting/creativity/instinct(s) as well (on balance). See how the dream relates to added intentionality of experience while involving a relative reduction in experience.

Integrated, simple, and relatively extensive explanations.

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Frank,

for your assumptions there maybe would hold the same critics as for my own "consciousness"-approach. The main problem i see within our considerations is that they are - at least at first sight - obviously "anthropic" (in the meaning of self-referential conclusions based only on our limited and tiny human experience). But we surely bear in mind that the appearance of consciousness and the properties of consciousness in general maybe cannot be considered (in reference to the deeper understanding of the *physical* laws) only by our own conscious experiences. There may exist other forms of conscious beings in our universe that have a totally different perceptive framework as we have and thus come to other conclusions about the underlying reality.

Though it is true that dreams are in most cases concerned with emotions rather than with rational considerations, this has a hand-tight reason for human beings. Because the brain has to assimilate the experiences of its "owner" and cannot do this without evaluation of the chances for surviving in the future. And evaluations are based on emotions due to the lack of rational information about the future and its input. Also in the state of sleeping the brain disactivates the most body functions for the aim of recovery. That you are able to fly in your dreams for me is a consequence of not being able to access the feet of your *real* body, because your body's locomotor system is suppressed during dreams for the aim of not acting out uncontrolled behaviour in reality and injure your members of the clan that sleep very next to you (our injure yourself by some uncontrolled action). In the dream, the brain cannot differenciate between its virtual body and its physical body (though the experiencing self stays the same), because the physical body is *completely* mapped in the brain.

But this comment is written by a person who hasn't much experience with various dream-states. I only heard of cases where people can have lucid dreams. I heard of some cases where these dreams were so realistic that one has to test if one indeed is dreaming or not by making a gravity-test: jumping up and seeing if one is flying away or falling back down to the ground.

For all these reasons i cannot conclude an assumption you made in one of your papers, namely that "the dream offers an expanded (yet relatively unified) understanding of physics." Understanding and experience for me are two different issues and dreaming of Einstein's GR or Special Relativity doesn't - in my opinion - automatically lead to the understanding of the subtle and well thought-out rational concepts of one or both of them.

Understanding in my opinion afforts the involvement of rationality, though human rationality is surely limited in many ways. But the success made by ingenious physicists, proven by our everyday-experience with the fruits of these discoveries, hence with all of our modern-life equipment, our moon-landing and many more wouldn't be possible without strictly separating dreams from our wakening-experiences. The latter have some stable and repeatable rules, dreams may have rules too - for example that they are strongly based on associative thinking and emotions - but emotions in many cases can lead to false conclusions. That's the reason why i am cautious with extrapolating some subjective experiences with main focus on emotions, be them dream-like or religious.

For me, that doesn't mean that there couldn't be a deeper connection between the bare fact of physical existence in general and the bare fact of mental existence. That is clearly expressed in your next to last paragraph of your paper "The Dream Fundamentally Balances and Unifies Gravity and Electromagnetism". Your last paragraph of this paper, beginning with sentence 2, could in my opinion maybe in the future be an important ingredient for the further understanding of the bare fact of existence at all (but maybe also not).

My conclusions on all that are, though i do not agree with you in many points, i really agree with you that consciousness (and surely also dreams) could be more than senseless epiphenomenons in a senseless world (the questions for me is, in wich way they could be *more*). Some evidence for this comes from the so-called "near-death experiences", where people were able to grasp visual informations that couldn't have been achieved by their physically bodies. So, the whole issue of consciousness, the universe and all the rest remains exciting for me and is worth thinking and researching about.

My best wishes for you and your further work from

Stefan Weckbach, Germany

[deleted]

Dear Stefan,

I have a question: so do you ultimately think we should have hidden variables or not? Is Gerald 't Hooft's approach of recovering quantum mechanics as an emergent theory from determinism a valid program, or is decoherence the correct approach? In other words, should we obtain quant mechanics from classical mechanics or the other way around?

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Florin,

thanks for your questions.

I am not versant with 't Hooft's theory, so i can give no comment on that.

Your last question is mind-boggling and i have no definite answer to it in terms of already established theories. Maybe QM can finally be obtained through both directions in a way that is yet hard to imagine for us (me). But anyway, i think both or one of the two approaches need - to be successfull in a strictly mathematical sense - to be deterministic in the old classical meaning of a "clockwork-universe". My conviction is that the Newtonian paradigm of this Clockwork-universe is a relict of the beginnings of systematic science and that there exists something that is in conflict with this framework, namely QM.

But this must not be the last word in searching for a derivation of QM from other strictly mechanistic systems. Maybe one of the approaches you mentioned will be successfull. But i am not sure if in that case they also could explain the questions of free will too (and its related problems).

The question for me is, exists there a set in ultimate reality (ultimate reality itself) wherein all possible distinctions (be them mathematical or physical) are already drawn. I don't belive in such a scenario but on the other hand i cannot exclude it by exposing a rigorous deterministic and hence mathematical disproof of determinism other than i did with logics in my essay. I think we have to wait until all deterministic theories that want to explain Bell's results in a local and realistic way are found to be invalid by experiment. Until that happens, i never would say that for example 't Hooft's or yours approach isn't a valid program.

I think we need a deeper explanation of QM, be it with hidden variables (in the sense of hidden deterministic, hence fixed properties of mere physical entities) or without them.

Thanks for your questions and your comment.

Stefan Weckbach

[deleted]

Dear Stefan,

I have another question for your essay. You talk about consciousness and you also cite Chaitin's algorithmic information theory. There is some tension about the two when you consider the problem of creativity. How is creativity possible for people and not for computers? (we know that computers are not creative precisely because of the algorithmic information theory). Is this related to QM in any way for example? I am very interested to find out what are your thoughts in this area.

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Florin,

Thanks for your questions. I will try to answer them as good as i can.

creativity for me is possible due to an in-built ability of conscious observers to choose between some alternatives. That's a way to define the somewhat misleading term of "free will". The more alternatives a conscious observer has in its internal rooms, the more freedom he has.

Additionally, creativity demands for its appearance the temporal loss of former borders. For me, this is the main ingredient of creativity.

Leaving away borders can have many different results. Some of them are of course not very healthy and constructive, others are astonishing and constructive in the meaning of extending our perceptions, values, frameworks and insights as well as possibilities to verify/falsify things.

To be able to leave away some borders in a *free act* of personal (more or less) conscious decision of interest, there must exist an "empty space" within the observer and also interwoven with its environment, which i would like to label with the term "undefined". This empty space enables creativity by moving borders (surely in the limits that are allowed by the up-to-date physical laws). Maybe these laws can also change whitin (very long) time-scales, maybe not.

The undefined area to which i refer, for me could be a fractal part (quantitatively and qualitatively) of the original "oneness" from which all reality flows and is gradually incorporated into every physical entity to different degrees. That's my understanding of the "interwovenness" of the things in space-time with the things out of space-time. The question of wether this fractal structure is finite in itself or even infinite in the sense of an infinite self-recursion then depends in my opinion on the question of how many conscious entities do exist in ultimate reality. But: As mentioned at your essay page here at FQXi i don't believe that the very term of infinity is a thing that can be used to deduce reality down to it's grounds.

Now coming to Gregory Chaitin's findings. In my opinion, Chaitin's results reflect not so much the deterministical, mechanical part of deduction, but more the axiomatic part of the whole story. For me his findings are a well thought-out scheme that reveals for me that deductions have their in-built borders. Because you can say that putting in 10 pounds of axioms will only result in a 10 pound theoretic framework.

It seems to me that this must be also the case for Chaitin's own framework, which is built on logical dependencies combined with physical dependencies. But you cannot say for sure *which* axioms to choose to arrive at some consistent as well as observationally *verifiable* AND at the same time *falsifiable* result, until you waited for the time passed by and spares either the verification or the falsification of the consequences of these axioms.

For me, it says, although you can know, that you don't no some things of interest, you can't really know what the future questions and answers are with which we could be confronted. The latter could possibly also be an expression of creativity.

A short remark on comuters and creativity: Although we must strongly conclude that computers, if they reapeat the same calculation, in every case come to the same results, we cannot conclude out of this that the underlying quantum mechanical processing in every repeatable case goes the same paths to obtain the same results.

[deleted]

Hi Stefan and Florin. IN GENERAL, the greater the integrated extensiveness of being and experience (including thought), then the greater is one's autonomy. Now also consider: The dream and genius demonstrate that more must be forgotten in order for new experiences to obtain; but a superior integration and familiarity of experience serves as the basis (or substituted requirement) for this forgetfulness that involves this extension of experience. Moreover, the ability of thought to describe or reconfigure sensory expereince is ultimately dependent upon the extent to which thought is similar to sensory experience. We are outsmarted in the dream --- so smart, it could be said, that we are basically (or generally) stupid. However, the dream combines and includes opposites, and this is not only the connection with creativity; but, importantly, this is why dream experience is different from waking. The integrated extensiveness of thought/thinking is improved in the truly superior mind.

The natural and integrated extensiveness of being and experience go hand in hand -- in and with time as well. So (moreover), since the self represents, forms, and experiences a comprehensive approximation of experience in general, the Common Chimpanzee is in the middle of (between) our dreaming and waking experiences. Their being and experience is more extensive than that of our dreams. (Note the 90 degree angle -- hint: gravity --- of our waking and dream experiences.) We are more conscious in conjunction with experience that is (on balance) more unconscious -- comparatively, in our dream and waking experiences. Accordingly:

1) They live two thirds as long as we do, comparatively (in captivity, of course).

2) They walk at about a 45 degree angle --- and this is associated with the reduction in their range and extensiveness of feeling. (Thoughts and emotions are differentiated feelings.)

3) Their body length is about two thirds of ours.

4) Another example, when they want a banana, they extend their arm in a closing of the hand/fingers that is between our grasping and pointing.

NOTE: We spend one third of our lives sleeping. (Sleeping includes dreaming.)

The comprehensiveness and consistency of intention and concern in relation to experience in general has everything to do with:

Emotion that is comprehensive and balanced.

Advanced consciousness (and thought).

Language.

Wonder.

Dreams make thought more like sensory experience in general (including gravity and electromagnetism).

Also....Dreams are visible and invisible. The body is invisible and visible....

The requirement of the unification of gravity and electromagnetism is a larger and smaller space AT ONCE. This is why the energy level and lighting of the dream is perfect and constant. Look at the feeling and brightness of electromagnetic space -- from photons to the Sun --- invisible to blindingly bright; and how this is associated with feeling.

I have extensive writings that thoroughly reinforce, extend, and link what I have said in this post. Before you try to pick it apart, carefully consider what I have said.

Thought, emotion, feeling -- a very fundamental and important division/union of our being and experience.

I am here to teach, and to learn as well. Do not try to excessively criticize my work (I also mean by this, that is, in the absence of any agreement and/or questions) -- as some other thinkers on here have unwisely, disrespectfully, and wastefully done time and time again.

As you two are aware: It is much be easier to be critical than correct.

I welcome your thoughtful questions, criticisms, and thoughts on all of this.

Thank you very much for your kind consideration. You both have some interesting ideas; and I am concerned with the depest and most foundational aspects of our being and experience; and you two appear to be concerned with this as well.

Here, in closing, is an accurate, expanded, clear, and important definition/understanding of memory:

"Memory integrates experience and is necessary for the improved integration of a greater totality of experience; and here lies its connection with the advancement of consciousness and genius. Memory increases (or adds to) the extensiveness, desirability, predictability, and intentionality of experience. Memory is an aid with regard to the extensiveness of intentionality in regard to experience. The loss (or reduction) in both memory and the intentionality of experience that occurs in the dream helps to explain why we are basically (or significantly) without the use of our body therein."

Note how dreams are similar to memory.

Jayakar Joseph

Dear Stefan Weckbach

I think the theory of evolution describes evolution more in locality rather than in universality on considering the coherency of events of an object with the events of Universe. In this perspective I have great appreciation on this article that describes the probability of 'integrated extensiveness' of borders of all theories that explains the phenomenology of nature for proceeding towards TOE in neutrality along with quantum mechanics.

With best wishes,

Jayakar

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Jayakar Johnson Joseph,

thank you for your encouraging words which pleased me very much!

As i tried to express in my essay, i think that we arrived at the utmost limit of the applicability of the old paradigm of exclusive determinism in nature.

If one presupposes such a strict determinism of nature and at the same time believes in the ability of mankind to discover the TOE some day not far away, one would presuppose with this also the circumstance that the discovery of this ultimate reality (TOE) by an epiphenomenon (human consciousness) was written down at the very beginning of the evolution of the whole universe (or maybe multiverse). The question then is, what kind of nature this ultimate reality is, if it enables such things like the discovery of it's "whole nature" by an epiphenomenon. This question must be answered, otherwise we cannot speak of the discovery of the nature of ultimate reality and something is still missing. But if we can answer this question (i don't believe that we can do this within the limits of determinism because i don't believe that the world is merely deterministic), we stand before the paradox that a strictly deterministic process can grasp itself in the form of a subset of itself (subset in the sense of human beings and/or in the sense of a fraction of the multiverse). Furthermore it is questionable for me, how reliable these deterministic lines of reasonings are, if they are merely prepared at the very beginning of the universe to only being consistent, but cannot tell us something independent about their necessity. In this case, consistency would be equivalent with necessity and as we all know, there could be many various systems that could be consistent but mustn't be at the same time necessary in the sense of "ultimately real". So, i think there are some necessities within the nature of ultimate reality, but these necessities cannot be concluded mathematically. To nonetheless trying to do that, one would manage to use quantum mechanics to deduce the necessity of quantum mechanics itself and if that could be possible, in my opinion would be the same paradox as proving a consistent system to be necessary. The latter paradox is so, because an exclusively deterministic-based (mathematical) proof cannot prove the exclusiveness of (universal) determinism (and therefore its exclusively necessity). That's the problem with hidden variables in quantum mechanics and a description (in the meaning of "interpretation") of quantum mechanics without those hidden structures.

It seems to me, that the decision between consistency and completeness (the latter in the sense of logical necessity) shows that both alternatives lead to a - necessary - extension of our deterministic world-view. Furthermore it seems to me that only a reference frame of a partially non-determinism can lead to and account for the assumption of the necessity of a partially non-deterministic reference frame for ultimate reality but not the other way round as i tried to show in my lines above when i illustrated that consistency alone does not tell us something about ultimate necessities within ultimate reality.

With best wishes from Germany,

Stefan Weckbach

[deleted]

Dear Stefan,

Thanks for your note on my essay.

I'm afraid I don't understand your main point.

Are you saying it is not possible to prove there are no hidden variables?

IF so, I don't agree.

I agree that consciousness is as basic as "matter." But the trick is to prove it from the mathematics of quantum mechanics plus observations.

Casey Blood

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Casey,

thanks for evaluating my essay.

The main point of my essay is that an exclusively deterministic-based proof (like a mathematical proof) cannot prove the exclusiveness of determinism nor can it prove the exclusiveness of non-determinism (or at least the existence of a partially non-determinism).

One cannot conclude out of this that therefore the world is necessarily *not* strictly deterministic. But when looking at multiverse-theories with their somewhat absurd consequences for human reasoning (coming to the "real" description of the world as a multiverse via the lack of free will? - in this case the initial conditions of our universe had to be very very special i guess and the whole quantum mechanical probability-concept would be absurd, because we cannot conclude out of the mere consistence of the multiverse-approach that a multiverse is necessary or even "true"), i came to the conclusion that thinking of a strictly deterministic system reflects rather the one-dimensional idea of the determinism-program of the thinker's mind than it does reflect the structural conditions of reality.

One structural condition of reality is surely that it can comprehend itself - at least to a certain level - via observer-like properties. Otherwise we wouldn't and couldn't speak of structural conditions of reality at all and couldn't predict physical events by mere deductions (for example via Einsteins equivalence principle). I guess that every substructure of reality can also at least perceive to a certain level its structural environment from what it emerges.

One can comprehend emergence in such a way that it not only generates observers which are the more conscious the more complex their "environments" ("brains") are (that is the usual scientific explanation for consciousness), - but also the other way round:

Out of the basic level of reality (transcendend consciousness) there can emerge logical dependencies, physical laws, matter, energy and more and more complex "material" interactions that lead to complex physical behaviour that seems to be in contrast with consicousness.

"I agree that consciousness is as basic as "matter." But the trick is to prove it from the mathematics of quantum mechanics plus observations."

I am not firm enough with physics and especially quantum physically behaviour in all its details to go this way, but i think i understood where you want to go. There aren't much alternatives left to consider to be "rational" and in accordance with human experience as well as with experimental results. My main point was to abandon the claim that we live in a world that is strictly deterministic right from the very start of all and to examinate an alternative that could preserve free will (to a certain degree).

Arjen Dijksman

Dear Stefan Weckbach,

I've read your essay. The subject of consciousness and its contradiction with mathematically formulated physical laws is a difficult one. Si I admire those who try to tackle it. I've never tried for myself because I couldn't relate it to the "hard experimental facts". So I was very curious at page 6 when you write: "So at that point of this paper it is inevitably necessary to link our coarse-grained results to the subtle hard facts of quantum mechanics". I must admit that I was a bit left on my hunger, because I couldn't see which experimental facts you invoked in the last pages. Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend aren't exactly what I call experimental facts, but illustrations for interpretations. Could you be more precise?

By the way, I gather FQXi essay quotes and publish them on my blog and twitter profile in order to promote the contest. Do you mind if I publish some of yours, linking of course to your essay? For example: "there is no direct path from our abstract knowledge to ultimate reality".

Best regards,

Arjen Dijksman

Stefan Weckbach

Dear Arjen Dijksman,

thanks for checking out my essay.

Yes, you can set quotes from my essay on your blog and twitter profile and link them to my essay here.

"I must admit that I was a bit left on my hunger, because I couldn't see which experimental facts you invoked in the last pages. Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend aren't exactly what I call experimental facts, but illustrations for interpretations. Could you be more precise?"

First, if one takes for granted that decoherence and non-local entanglement are facts, then at least Schrödinger's cat can be explained via decoherence. The cat's state is always measured automatically via it's environment, there is no conscious *human* observer necessary to decide between the two possible mutually exclusive states of the cat. There may be exceptions from the decoherence-mechanisms and the discovery of such exceptions may be a question of time. Maybe.

The problem that is left is, what causes a single quantum outcome to take exactly the observed value and no other value? There are two possibilities. Firstly, one can assume that there are hidden variables that govern the quantum behaviour in detail and therefore the quantum mechanical, probabilistic description is incomplete and has to be altered to a strictly deterministic mathematical formulation (if possible). Secondly, one can assume that the single quantum mechanical events are in most cases without any cause, means *irreducibly random*. Both alternatives have serious problems. The first case does conflict with human self-impression of free will and nonetheless has to be figured out yet, because such a strictly deterministic formulation that is consistent with locality and reality doesn't exist yet. The second case leaves us with a fundamental lack of reason in physics/reality (the first case does so too, because though a strictly deteministic description could be possible, it doesn't explain why it's possible and why a strict determinism leads to the right human conclusions about it).

My approach was to find another explanation that does not contradict the hitherto most improved scientific theories, namely quantum mechanics and evolutionary theory - without giving up the free-will postulate made by everyone of us via our daily experiences.

Alan Aspects experiments with bi-particles has shown, that bell's inequalities are violated up to an amount of about 33%. I tried to deduce in my essay at page 8 that this amount coincidences with every bi-structured conditional statement and it's *possible* exceptions. Unfortunately i am also left on my hunger by trying to elaborate my approach and generalize it to three-particle cases or higher cases, because i am not firm enough with the mathematics needed and also not with the experimental results and their logical conclusions. Analyzing a more-particle system is a very difficult task, but there is some success by Zeilinger and others to do it. I hope and surely wish, that those expertes could prove my surely vague intuitions by examining the logical relations of such experimental setups.

My approach is to assume that every elementary particle has a certain "awareness" - surely totally different from ours, but a vital impuls in itself to decide in *some* situations how to behave. This is a somewhat panpsychism approach and i do not claim that it turns out to be the ultimate reality. But i strongly believe that we have to consider all *possible* cases to come closer to our question from what stuff ultimate reality is really made of - for the case that ultimate reality is really a unity and not only a random aggreation of mutually exclusive rules that emerged out of nothing and randomly fit in our universe in a way that camouflages consistency.

Thank you again very much for your interest in my essay.

Best,

Stefan Weckbach