The Ultimately Possible in Physics by Sascha Vongehr

Dear J.C.N. Smith!

Thank you for your interest.

Your attitude is not old fashioned and you must have not understood the gist of the essay if you suspect me judging so. On the contrary, your standpoint is increasingly selected for. What we personally and as a community are thereby becoming increasingly cognitively closed to is the fact that under these by you desired circumstances one cannot actually spend time on "seriously addressing the many unresolved questions of science" and moreover the allowed questions of science are pre-selected (we cannot even, are effectively not allowed to even ask certain serious ones!). Seriously scientifically addressing an issue involves being mentally not constrained too much towards considering a wide range of solutions. Especially the parsimonious ones may not be taboo if one is a serious scientist.

Your comment is of course a case in point, since you find it necessary to post a distracting and somewhat emotional comment. I would like to remind all that especially in the context of my essay it is of utmost importance to focus on the scientific content, to pose direct, on topic questions etc. Anything else just shows that the commenter has apparently not only misunderstood the gist of the essay but moreover is fulfilling his/her evolved role by functioning towards suppression of any "uncomfortable" aspects.

S

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you for your question.

One example (so that would be already "a single thing") was presented, namely the argument that "superstructures gain stability from the well-being of their components". However, your motivation, as I understand it, is to test whether there is any substance behind my "many such places" where I refer to issues well beyond the scope of a short essay. Therefore, I will highlight another aspect. To keep it interesting, I hand you one that further argues against my own position:

In order for a system (e.g. flower or society) to direct other systems (e.g. bees or humans), it is much easier to make a few actions/locations attractive (sweet pollen / reward) than to somehow render everything competing unattractive (bitter / extensive body of prohibitive law). This "efficiency of attraction" would be one aspect of many to be considered and quantified when pondering whether any co-evolved systems are likely to encounter more pleasure than misery.

I provided only aspects that argue for well-being, but of course, most humans just claim to be well (it is the thing to say) while actually people are in pain and increasingly depressed, especially in the upper-middle and middle class of the "first" world. The biggest and fastest growing religions live from pure fear. Therefore, obviously many uncomfortable aspects must belong to "the full range".

Is this "back up" sufficient? Maybe I should also clarify the aspect that I already presented:

Some think that the situation of our body's cells are similar to what humans may be inside society (or sub-society like the scientific community), i.e. the superstructure provides everything the sub-systems want and the subsystems do whatever they want, however, they only want what they ought to want. I do not want to argue for or against this picture here, but merely point out: Such a situation is neither a state of happiness (rather one of plain ignorance (unconsciousness) concerning what the superstructure actually is) nor is it a desirable state from a westernized point of view (there is no "freedom" in being designed to only want exactly what you are supposed to).

Sascha

Dear Irvon E. Clear!

Thank you for your interest in my work, your comments, and for asking relevant questions that give me the opportunity to clarify some positions.

"there are many other possibilities."

Yes there certainly are others, but not "many" since the scenarios given were quite general already (including many ways the cookie might crumble in bloody detail). However, as pointed out in the essay, though maybe not clearly enough, I wanted to aim at the posed question in the context of this contest (not shoe in my favorite subject). That meant to firstly write only about the most likely scenarios, secondly to concentrate on the aspects that relate to ultimate physics, and lastly I pointed out darker aspects in order to counterweight and probe the FQXi's community's bourgeois PC culture.

"Where is the physical measure and consideration of these"

The measure-problem issue is currently dominated by those who believe that some counting in a real (reality) multiverse will be possible. It is beyond the scope of 10 pages and indeed apparently beyond the intellectual capabilities of nowadays selected for career physicists to address this problem in any other way but by some naïve realist position (read naïve-realist position, not naïve realist-position), and in this way one cannot solve it. I refuse to waste my short life on pseudo problems, but on the other hand, I cannot argue stuff that will only get me stigmatized as some esoteric wing nut, crackpot or whatever, which scientists are fast to do whenever something does not fit into in-vogue positions (and the very last(!) I want is to hand ammunition to creationists etc., who have great ability for misinterpreting). Thus, I refuse to even touch the measure-problem in public (work on that goes into my drawer).

"possibilities is that physicists will realize that they can never ultimately answer why something exists."

It seems you refer to some category mistake (is existence possible?) which I, please excuse my frank words, squarely count to the pseudo problems that constitute confused terminology (here mingling categories of modality) put into a form that looks grammatically like a question. You may strongly disagree with me, but it is anyways not an issue that we should discuss in this thread, because it is not related to my essay I believe; or maybe you can clarify the relation?

"we base our beliefs on accurate observations of our environment"

That is what people, and apparently still most scientists, still believe, although many scientific fields (sociology, biology/psychology, philosophy, ...) have long since elaborated that such a perspective is little more over and beyond us fooling ourselves.

"A society of individuals that is focused on realizing individualized possibilities will not lead us to an inevitable extinction"

This touches on so many issues, for example on the dichotomy between what a system claims or even honestly believes is its function (e.g. "realizing individualized possibilities") versus the actual functions carried. I can only very generally answer this by encouraging everybody to look into "society" as a general system that evolves and to get away from anthropocentric viewpoints. This is not to claim that I know much better ("I am not as anthropocentric as you, look how clever I am" - which seems to be some of the glee underlying many a physicist's arguments nowadays). No no - the main point is that the more we look at the problems the way you do, the sooner we will be extinct (which it seems you do not desire for whatever reason).

Sascha

Dear Terry Padden!

I did not write a "polemic", some "rap", or "anti-establishment nihilism". I plainly addressed the question asked, namely what is ultimately possible in physics, and I did so to the point, not trying to shoehorn in my favorite pet-subject, as the majority of contributors to this contest seems to be unable to refrain from. I would enjoy people praising me for addressing the subject, for not compromising, for original ideas, for scientific exactness in my arguments, for many such aspects, but I must reject your praise. Let me try to address your points:

"1. You write "Nowadays, to have any chance of being taken seriously by physics, that social class, we need to subscribe to a certain kind of naïve realism." PLEASE let me in on the secret, what kind?"

There are many kinds of naïve realists. For example, there is the lay-man's kind of hardly ever doubting that everything just "exists" right out there just like it seems. The kind I referred to is the one that physicists all more or less (must) subscribe to, namely accepting that the plain existence of reality out there is certainly not as unproblematic as it seems to lay people, but nevertheless insisting on that stuff is "really actually out there" (e.g. galaxies beyond the Hubble horizon, parallel worlds, dead baby universes, dimensions, ...) and sufficiently real to the extend that we could even count them, for example to establish statistical ensembles that lead to meaningful probabilities entering arguments engaging anthropic principles. This is still naïve in that one feels that it makes sense to defend the position "X is really actually there". Some take the position that we must defend this in order to stem the tide of pseudo-science, but this is just like trying to protect kids by insisting that LSD or MDMA are addictive - they find out that it is not, think all else is also stupid misinformation, and spark them blunts right up. An educated realism sets itself apart by only talking about what you can actually usefully talk about and is distinguished from esoteric idealism (free will and spirit type of nonsense) by operational arguments when it comes to measurements for example. Apart from this, I plainly refuse to get into any discussion about "realism" - it is a complete waste of breath and I have never seen anybody changing her mind on it anyways - just like about other religious issues, normal humans are unable to be rational about these issues. Physicists belong into the normal category here.

"How rough are the 3's over there? ..."

Sorry, I do not understand this, nor expressions like "is that a chad I see before me?". Please rephrase these so that an international audience can participate in the discussion.

""That is NOT a SENTENCE !" You have left out a comma. Pure genius. Who is your agent?"

Sorry for the comma that may be missing - if that is what makes the sentence "genius", it was unintended. The bare truth, in as far as there is some, without sugar coating; this obsession has driven me my whole life, and so there cannot be an agent, because one cannot make money or a career with the truth. I have been tempted to use my skill to write this kind of shocking stuff you seem to enjoy or to be a career scientist and author a lot of research papers. Maybe I will pursue such strategies if I should fall on hard times, although supplying uninsured people with the means to self medicate is a more ethically justifiable way to riches than expanding the emptiness of the pseudo-intellectual universe. Anyways, as far as matters stand now, I can concentrate on what matters to me, and I hoped to have eliminated eloquent rhetoric from the essay. People are plainly mistaking the absence of PC and the desire to formulate in exact terms for anti-establishment wickedness, which in a sense of course it is, but it is an unavoidable side effect of calling a spade a spade, not the aim.

If you like nihilistic writing, I am afraid you have to be patient, because that stuff goes into my drawer and there it stays until after my death. I also doubt you would really like what I write in those pleasurable nightly hours when juggling language to defecate down on the bourgeoisie comes before science, because we are more sexually driven animals than basically all but the bonobos, and they are not as perverted as we are.

Respectfully

S. Vongehr （风洒沙）

Dear Terry Padden (anonymous Oct 14)!

Your comments make me wonder what essay you are talking about:

"However I do consider your essay to be overtly political (i.e. about power and its uses) - and not about the subject of physics but about the profession of physics."

Physics is currently something physicists do. What influences physicists also influences physics. Not to grasp this is very naïve indeed. After that, my essay is not even about human physicists but about general structures, so you are wrong about that it is focusing on a profession. Especially concerning the ultimate physics, what constrains the ultimate are the constraints on those evolved systems that are (effectively) involved with it.

"That still seems to me to be a willful misreading of the terms of the competition."

I have spent a very large portion of the essay, basically almost half, explaining exactly why this reading is most relevant to the question (indeed the actual, mature understanding of the question). It is certainly a lot more relevant to ultimate physics than most of the other essays on those questions, often pseudo questions, that will not interest anybody in the future.

"Your essay is full of implied and unsubstantiated charges that professional science and physics is other than normal."

You may ask for those places where you are missing substantiation, as other people here have done already, and more substantiation than is possible in 10 pages may immediately be supplied. My essay is NOT saying that physics is other than normal. My essay is saying exactly the opposite: It is a normal, usual coevolving system. This is almost the main point. Apparently, you did not understand the essay at all.

"Your essay, if it does anything, is merely descriptive of the status quo."

How is an essay talking over several pages about what will happen in the future about the status quo? How are any of the "sovereign overarching systems" examples or cybernetic organisms involving scenarios about the status quo? Which essay are you talking about? Mine?

"There is only one kind of Naive Realism."

I gave you already two kinds. The result of differentiating depends on the resolution aimed for. A difference is where terminology draws a line in order to address a subject with finer resolution than that achieved without that distinction. So, if I want to distinguish 100 kinds of different naïve realisms, I am free to do so. I have sufficiently explained (see comment above) why a certain kind of realism can be called naïve. There is no "international" accepted standard that fixes the term "naïve realism" in the way you suggest.

"Look it up on Wikipedia. Inside the quote marks is a quotation from a play called MacBeth"

I know all this, but I refuse to use such knowledge just in order to join some upper class snobbery. Therefore, I often feign ignorance about what people shove down our throats as "good literature". Such knowledge is mainly used to paint over the fact that the bearers of this "knowledge" are mostly complete science illiterates. It is a technical world now and scientific knowledge should define who is an intellectual, not some big name dropping quotations. My point is: If you want to converse with me here on this public platform, make it so that my Chinese colleagues can follow the discourse without having to google all day.

"You accuse me of being PC."

I did not!

General remark: Your comment is over several long stretches about you not feeling happy, needing humor, being unsatisfied with the status quo or whatever. Sorry about this, but here is not the place to help you with such. You even state that such would be my problem, too. This is at most a projection of yours. Please calm down, switch the rationality unit back on and read what is actually written. You are talking to a real scientist here, not just a paper producing career physicist, but an actual scientist who identifies himself through his obsession with scientific rigor! So please cut out the touchy feely parts and get down to business. If you have any comments on the substance of the essay, requests to further substantiate certain aspects, or even actual disagreements with certain inferences developed in the essay (say those where I show that something like suicide follows quite logically), then you are very welcome to address them directly with scientifically mature argumentation. Anything else belongs into a private email exchange maybe. In order to address the topics directly, I strongly suggest to first understand the gist of the essay.

Sascha Vongehr (风洒沙)

Dear Terry Padden (and all further potential commentators):

Yet another commentator went from praise in an initial comment to ripping the essay apart in subsequent ones; not because of increased understanding (which would be recommendable) but plainly because I did not participate into some creepy "your work so fine, now praise mine" honey around the beard smearing. Such praise-to-rip turn proves that the initial comment already cannot have been about the essay, but at most about a fast between the lines skimming and misunderstanding. So once more in all clarity:

"If you have any comments on the substance of the essay, requests to further substantiate certain aspects, or even actual disagreements with certain inferences developed in the essay (say those where I show that something like suicide follows quite logically), then you are very welcome to address them directly with scientifically mature argumentation. Anything else belongs into a private email exchange maybe."

Thank you all, Sascha Vongehr (风洒沙)