What is possible in physics depends on the chosen representational formalism by Lev Goldfarb

A fascinating essay! I certainly agree with your suggestion that if the road we currently are on is not taking us where we want to go we should considering taking a different road. Having never previously thought in the terms you present, however, I must admit to needing much more time and thought even to begin to absorb what you are saying. Your comment that " . . . we should consider the possibility of replacing the ubiquitous form of numeric representation by its structural, or relational, generalization" seems as though it might echo the concept of a "Machian" way of viewing the universe in purely relational terms, which strikes me as being a constructive way to proceed.

I was intrigued, too, by your observation that in your way of looking at things the conventional view of time is, as you say, "simply obviated." This happens to be the underlying theme of my own essay, 'On the Impossibility of Time Travel,' which also appears among these essays. There is a saying that when a person has just purchased or been given a shiny new hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. Consequently, I can't help wondering whether our two apparently different perspectives might have some sort of symbiotic hammer/nail relationship. Perhaps a possibility at least worth considering.

Thank you for a thought provoking essay.

Working with similarities was a long time suspicious in physics and science, because similarities had a strange flavour like alchemism and other esoteric issues.

For me it seems that similarities are somewhat necessary in our universe, because with their "counterpart", namely differences, they built a structural unity. So i am not surprised that someone has worked out these dynamics in detail, because for me it's at least natural that form and content go hand in hand, as well as quality and quantity.

As far as i have understood your main concerns in your paper, i think that it hits some profound, universal facts and therefore it's no wonder that your "Hammer" could hit many nails at once. Maybe there are many philosophical questions open to ask about your concept, but i think, at first blush, you stand on solid and promising ground with your framework and i started to like it. So thanks for the contribution!

Dear Lev,

"but gradually I began to see that such powerful capabilities couldn't have been evolutionary acquired by biological species *unless* they were guided by 'similar' informational 'mechanisms' permeating the nature."

Yes. And your *unless* reads for me as a *must*, so you probably must have been brave enough to follow your intuition, which seems to me to be in good accordance with concepts like Darwin's, maybe Zurek's and maybe even with the holographic principle of 't Hooft and Susskind (at first sight).

I am aware of the fact, that similiarities can be also misleading, seeing them in our minds although they aren't really there in nature. this could be the case for my own approach (see therefore my essay website here), in which i tried to describe my own view of the main informational structure of the universe (and that view of mine could be in certain parts surely considered as irrational by some readers).

I am sure that your concept differs from mine in some points, but i am not yet able to grasp these differences properly, because your paper isn't that easy to read and i think i must access therefore your other papers first. One question that is of interest for me is, if in your concept there is a way to represent properly the qualia of one's conscious contents (for example the human's impression of the colours that seem to be equal to almost all human observers). If they are equal (similar?), there must be equal chmical processes in the brains or at least equal (similar?) excitation patterns (that - more or less - have been found for other human thought-processes). But what is it that makes our straight impressions of light, smell, sound and flavour - i guess these properties *must* also be "just" informational representations in your framework. The question for me is what they represent - and if they represent theirselfes (partly), what are they "theirselfes". Or formulated in general: What are representational patterns about? (i guess, partly they are about themselves). That's a somewhat Kantian question, but if i don't ask questions, i won't get answers.

Dear Lev,

thanks for your comments. I am impressed by your framework and its rigorousity.

By contemplating the meaning of the term "information", it became clear, at least for me, that it has a very close relation to the term "definition". Information in my view is a *specific*, well-*defined* perspective of at least "interaction" (and maybe also of evaluation [and therefore "meaning" too]).

The most *specific* perspective that we know could be that of living beings, in the sense of qualia (meaning: *how* it is to perceive the color blue, red, green etc. or hear a sound out of a first-person-perspective).

This "how", which is related to our qualia, isn't describable mathematically in a numeric manner (in my opinion). But nonetheless it could be understood by some non-numerical framework like yours. Maybe it could be some day not only understood, but also be describable in a non-numeric framework. Your framework implies that one can't prove mathematically that there are certain things that aren't describable mathematically in the old-fashioned way (means in an objective manner). To be able to although re-present them, you must describe these *specific* things in another way to make obvious that there exist specific things as well as common properties of these specific things, that aren't describable mathematically. A hard task in my opinion but a promising, too, for the following reasons:

1. Presupposing "events" automatically inserts dynamics into a description and is in accordance with our perception of a dynamical universe.

2. Presupposing "classes" automatically inserts structure into a description and is in accordance with our perception of physical and mental structures.

3. Presupposing "classes" to have "common" formative, or generative history solves the puzzle of Gödel's undecidability-theorem, because the latter becomes *relative* and therefore relatively irrelevant for a certain *specific* perspective.

4. Presupposing "classes" that have "common" formative, or generative history also solves Bertrand Russell's famous antinomy of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Because the main *property* of a set that does not contain itself is the fact that it does not contain infinitely many times infinitely many objects. The latter would be the case if a set would contain itself as an element. Because that set would contain itself again as an element and so on. So, the formative criterion for the solution of this puzzle is to see that it differenciates between the finiteness of identity and the infiniteness of differences. And therefore Russell's set of all sets doesn't contain itself. It has to obey the structural rules that are valid for its own elements, namely not to contain infinitely many times infinitely many objects.

5. Presupposing "events" can only be more than an empty intellectual concept if they potentially could be experienced by "someone/something" without altering them (but altering the observer) or if the experiencer of the event is a specific part of the event. Otherwise the very notion of an event would be a meaningless term right from the start for human beings, because presupposing something that has no consequences for an observer and his observations can hardly have provable, or at least, can hardly have obvious consequences.

Dear Lev,

Can you please answer a couple of questions about your approach?

1. How is the evolving transformations system similar or different from the modular programming paradigm?

2. Can the evolving transformations system provide a true representation of quantum mechanics, or only of a hidden variable approach to quantum mechanics?

Thank you.

Dear Lev,

Thank you for your answers. In my first question I was simply referring to the pre object oriented way of writing software and it looked to me you can implement any concrete ETS process naturally as a C program for example. (Of course I understand that ETS is more sophisticated than that in its aims.)

For the second question, I was wandering how an event based mechanism can manage to model quantum mechanics predictions? For example, we can do a computer simulations of the Schrödinger equation, but in there we impose quantum mechanics from the outside. The strangeness of quantum mechanics is due to its use of complex numbers. Going outside the number road, are you relaxing the inherent quantum mechanical properties stemming from its use of complex numbers? If yes, do you have to add external constraints to recover QM's predictions, or do you still recover all QM predictions from the intrinsic ETS properties?

If there is somebody interested in: There exists an event-based model to simulate QM-experiments, and those simulations have already been done successfully. Look here for further information and for the flash-applications and Java-codes.

Dear Lev and Stefan,

Thank you for your answers. I am not sure event based systems can recover all predictions of QM, In Stefan's link the state of the system was given by 2 consecutive states (n) and (n+1) and this resulted in oscillations after the equilibrium state was achieved. In other words, it was only an approximate modeling of QM. My expectation is that any event based description of QM will lead uniquely to a hidden variable theory, but if anybody manages to prove it otherwise, I will be very interested to read about it. The closest result I am aware of is Joy Christian's claim of disproving Bell's theorem, but his argument had a conceptual flaw correctly pointed by one of his critics.

Anyway, although I am skeptical, I find the ETS idea worth of consideration and exploration and I wish you both luck in this contest.

Sorry I had typo (missing a word). The last line should read:

I wish you both good luck in this contest.

You seem to me to be doing something similar enough to category theory that you have to take account, in future, of what is being done in that approach. You need, at least, to differentiate your approach from the category-theoretic approach, if you wish to place yourself in an academic context. Try, for example, A prehistory of n-categorical physics. There's a lot there, and it's hard math, but I think you can only benefit from looking at category theory at whatever level you can make contact with it.

Thank you Florin, my best wishes too for your own concept presented here at FQXi!