Chaos, Consciousness, and the Cosmos

Dan, Edwin:

Dan: I haven't been following your previous discussions. I wonder, concerning your message here, how free will is evidenced. I think free will is a certainty, so my question has nothing to do with arguing against free will. It is just that if a thought can effect the outside world, that in itself does not, I think, demonstrate free will. I see the effect of free will as having occurred before the thought. Can you say some more about your perception of free will?

Edwin: Excellent post. I think that there are no effects that stop abruptly and completely. So, I think everything has an effect on everything else. Obviously that effect can often be imperceptible to us. However, the universe clearly knows what it is doing. I do think that consciousness has its own effects. I can't express that in physics lingo as you can; but, I think many of us and perhaps even all of us, though some might choose to resist admitting it, have had experiences where coinicidence becomes seriously questionable. I know I have. For anyone else reading this and thinking that I am speaking about something supernatural, I speak only about that which is clearly natural. If the unnatural mechanical theories appear natural to you, then, that is something you will have to defend. However, intelligent free thoughts are natural. I will defend that statement.

James

Dear Friends,

I also need to read these PEAR results. I have always said that experiment is not as fundamental as we normally believe it to be, because of the question of "What to leave in? What to leave out?". This is clear in Supercollider Physics whereby we impose "cuts" to elliminate signals that we believe (according to the theories and Monte Carlo simulations that we are trying to confirm?) are unwanted. It is natural to throw out those oddball 3-sigma-plus events, but are they goofs or are they history-making new physics?

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Edwin,

I'll try to read your "Gene Man's World", but I've really fallen behind in reading most of the new essays.

There never seems to be enough time to do everything.

James,

I tend toward the deterministic view of reality, but in the presentist camp rather than the block universe camp. In other words, the world exists whether we are there to witness it or not. Since we are here to witness it, and even if only the present exists, determinism still implies that we are not free to choose, that choice is only an illusion which I don't agree with either. So, we have a simple experiment, that shows that conscious choice alone is enough to effect the outcome. Then is reality fundamentally indeterministic or is it only indeterministic when consciousness is present? The simplest experiments with unusual results that don't fit into our current scientific paradigms usually mean we're missing something profound.

I don't claim to be an authority, by any means, but you wrote a couple of things I would like to ask you to clarify. You wrote "I think free will is a certainty, ..." and "I see the effect of free will as having occurred before thought." Free will seems more than plausible, but why is it certain and how can it occur before thought?

Dan

Dear Dan,

I will hold off temporarily explaining free will from my perspective (Although you can read about it at http://newphysicstheory.com/Human_Free_Will.) I think, following Edwin's recent requests for clarification, that thought is the conscious result of a very complex process. I see the process as occurring at the subconscious level, and, the result emerges as a thought at the conscious level.

I did not understand your response:

"Since we are here to witness it, and even if only the present exists, "determinism still implies that we are not free to choose, that choice is only an illusion which I don't agree with either. So, we have a simple experiment, that shows that conscious choice alone is enough to effect the outcome. Then is reality fundamentally indeterministic or is it only indeterministic when consciousness is present?"

What does this have to do with free will?

James

Edwin,

Firstly, I will re-read your essay to enable a proper comparison in the sense you describe. I feel however that you have unnecessarily multiplied the assumptions Verlinde makes, as I see most of your points to be things that "fall out" of the re-formulated theory in a consistent way. There is no doubt that he makes a minimum of two assumptions, that of the holographic principle, which although unproven seems well motivated to me based on black hole physics insights and the Unruh effect. I don't see entropic gravity as a new force, any more than entropy itself or osmosis for that matter. I also believe that the "equipartition" rule (point 18) is not necessary to obtain the derivation.

As you rightly say, information is "about" things, and I interpret "information" in Verlinde's theory as just representing degrees of freedom in the same sense as it is applied to black holes for example or even statistical mechanics eg Maxwell's Demon storing "information" about kinematic *degrees of freedom*.

I also feel that all of our theories (including yours) can only *in principle* be representations of an underlying reality. We cannot have non-perturbative access to that reality of "things", as everything we "measure/observe" must be contextual to our "detection" method and in turn subject to our unique (human brain) perception.

When "drawing a map from territory" we are really only specifying a 2D geometry to project back to 3D geometry. An equivalent analogy for a full "map back to territory" (thermodynamics back to Newton) would require further information such as physical composition to be specified on the 2D surface where the holographic principle would still hold. Verlinde does have a problem with *specifying* the "potential" on the screens but this is not actually necessary for the derivation, nor is knowledge of the Unruh effect really, although you would hope for a full explanatory version of the theory at some stage!

Cheers

James,

From what little I have read, it has everything to do with it. It seems to me there was a recent article on this website that reported on the work of a couple of mathematicians that showed that free will was possible only if quantum theory is truly indeterminate. I'll have to review it and check out your website. It appears you have a better understanding and have pondered such things much more than I have. I think it's an important philosophical question, since how would anyone's life truly have any meaning without it. It seems absurd to contemplate its non-existence, but I would like to see both sides of the argument, to see if I can determine why anyone would think otherwise and to determine where the logical error(s) exists.

Dan

Dear Dan,

"It seems to me there was a recent article on this website that reported on the work of a couple of mathematicians that showed that free will was possible only if quantum theory is truly indeterminate."

Ok, I see where you are coming from. I do understand that there is a point of view that if outcomes are uncertain that this allows for free will. Personally, I do not see free will resulting from uncertainty. It appears to me to be one more of those mechanical approaches that assumes a connection to life and intelligence. I see no pathway connection at all from mechanical theory to explanations for life, intelligence, and free will. I do not see anyway to credit uncertainty with the meaning generated as free will. I see free will as being deliberate. We deliberately form conclusions, a number of which are examples of free will. In other words, we are not chained to the past. We can will that our thoughts be new and progress as we move into the future. We deliberately or intuitively add new parts to past knowledge.

James

For science to permit the possibility of consciousness, much good will follow.

"He, and others, have even calculated the probability that consciousness--in the form of thinking, disembodied brains--can be momentarily produced by quantum fluctuations in an empty universe."

Anything beyond that should be referred to the theology department or the appropriate experts. If we do it this way, then everyone is happy.

I would post a warning sign that says:

WARNING: Do not feed the disembodied consciousnesses. Consult appropriate experts.

The physics community should permit its students, faculty and members to pursue a spiritual journey of one's choosing.

Jason,

I believe that science permits the possibility of consciousness, but physics in particular, has no way to define it in a concise and fundamental manner. That's why I believe the PEAR results are important. A simple series of events, a human operator, and a consistent outcome per the operator's intention, volition, will, etc.. Now, someone just has to explain it. It's a subtle phenomena though, as it has only been shown to work on the electronic random event generator responses. Can you imagine if this could be developed on the macroscopic scale? All of the casinos would go broke. Red, red, red...

Dan

Roy,

Thanks for that response.

Yes, by presenting every assumption in the order that he makes them, I've somewhat overstated the number because of redundancy. I'm not sure it shrinks to 2 however.

I see his assumptions [2..4] as a leap of faith. Assumption [4] is probably the weakest, since as I remarked, the mass/area relations can be found with no mention or use of the concept of information. If then the fact that both mass and entropy are additive is used to assume some equivalence that leads to the Holographic Principle, this may or may not be appropriate.

We may misunderstand each other on the issue of 'territory from a map". You seem to view it as an 'inverse mapping': "a full 'map back to the territory' ...would require further information such as physical composition to be specified." But I am not referring to a "map back to the territory"; that implies that both territory and map exist and are somehow isomorphic. I am referring to what I interpret as an increasing tendency to start only with a map and use this to 'produce' the territory [versus starting with territory and producing a map.]

It seems that many are starting with information and trying to create physical reality. Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe" may be a prime example of this. Some seem to expect symmetries to give rise to particles, rather than the other way around. Maybe I'm misinterpreting them. Anyway, what I am objecting to is any attempt to create physical reality from information. Korzybski was addressing such confusion between representation and reality, imo. To expect to derive physical reality from info is as if physics is saying "In the beginning was the Word".

The map is figuratively and literally derived from the territory. The territory can never be derived from the map. One can't start with a Texaco map and create the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes.

And even if information is understood to be 'about' things, it is very hard for me to swallow Verlinde's fourth assumption: "info about particle location is stored in discrete bits on a screen", with or without assumptions [5] and [6].

In trying to understand where these ideas come from, they seem to be a generalization of Cauchy's integral formula

f(a) = (1/ i 2pi) Contour_integral [ f(z)dz / (z-a)]

which applies to "conservative" potentials. That may be why it is necessary for Verlinde to begin by introducing an 'effective' force that is conservative macroscopically. Cauchy shows that every interior point can be determined by the points on the boundary.

Susskind, in "Black Hole War", claims that "the entropy of a black hole is about equal to the area" and also that "hidden information is proportional to the total length of a string" and, since "the mass and entropy of a string are proportional to its length" [then] "entropy must be proportional to the mass" [later mass^2].

If, per Verlinde, both entropy and mass are additive, then an increase in mass might be made to imply an increase in entropy. Whether this is physically meaningful inside a black hole is questionable, especially so if it depends on the existence of strings, and even more so if [Susskind:Cosmic Landscape] "the quark ends [of the string] are most likely to be found far away *at the very edge of the universe* [his emphasis].

In The Automatic Theory of Physics I discuss a Monte Carlo Random Walk procedure that, in walking from an arbitrary point f(a) to a boundary, pretty much reproduces Cauchy's integral formula. To go from these connections to strings is a very big step.

I believe that by mistakenly assigning physical reality to information, sometimes treating it like a particle, sometimes as energy, and assuming things like [5], physicists are building castles in the air or perhaps a house of cards. In my opinion 'qubits' may be less a physical reality than a consequence of the incredibly complex 'apparatus' used to prepare them--without this apparatus, there may or may not be 'qubits'.

The more physics comes to depend on 'out of this world' ideas, such as the Multiverse and the insides of black holes, the farther out on a limb it climbs. In the worst case, like Climate-gate, there will be a crash of public confidence in such outlandish theories, that come to be seen as indistinguishable from other religions.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

My pleasure. I first became aware of this phenomena back in the late '80s on a TV program by David Suzuki called "The Nature of Things". This was a science magazine based out of Canada that covered nature and science in general. I still remember watching a demonstration of the phenomena in action and was "blown away". I never knew the details until I happened upon their website years later. Most scientists shy away from anything considered "paranormal" due the stigma that attached to it. I find it fascinating and use logic and judgement to determine if something unusual deserves further study and contemplation. In other words, don't always believe the skeptic's POV. They're usually happiest with the status quo.

Dan

Edwin,

Angels dancing on heads of needles is unimportant. In contrast, knowing whether or not a disembodied soul can sustain existence has significant consequences on how we view death. Entire cultures, civilizations and world spring up over that question.

Dan,

Physicists should perform thought experiments that analyze claimed paranormal activity. Paranormal activity falls under the topic of physics. Instead, the physics community thinks about time travel which has not been observed. I guess it safer that way.

Correction: "Entire cultures, civilizations and world religions spring up over that question. "

Jason,

In my opinion, a calculation based on "An infinite number of parallel universes in which hallucinating brains can pop out of empty space" has no connection to souls, or to anything real. But that's just my opinion.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

"...a calculation based on "An infinite number of parallel universes in which hallucinating brains can pop out of empty space" "

I think this easily goes beyond opinion. I think it is a clear logical refutation of the practice of imagining that ideologically desired answers, that are otherwise unattainable, exist somewhere out in the foggy swamp of unwieldy complexity.

James

Jason,

I agree that paranormal phenomena should be taken seriously by scientists. The two biggest issues with the various phenomena labeled as paranormal is the stigma that is attached to them and the fact that they are not easily studied via the scientific method. How do you get definitive, confirmable evidence to a phenomena that almost always atypical, heterogeneous, and transient in nature? Instead of scientists, we have "enthusiasts", some with very little, if any, scientific training and even less credibility looking for and gathering evidence. Throw in the jokers, pranksters, hoaxers and the skeptics (who can always find another explanation, no matter how far-fetched), it's no wonder many serious scientists discount them out of hand. This is why I consider the Princeton group to be courageous pioneers of a phenomena that still eludes easy explanation, and they've had their fair share of critics also.

Its kinda off subject, but since we're already there, one phenomena which does have definitive evidence that something truly unusual is occurring is that of crop circles. It has been reported that these were all created by a couple retired English pranksters and their copycats using nothing but strings to lay out a pattern and using boards with rope attached to each end to trample down the crops. This explanation does not account for the enigmatic nature of a genuine crop circle.

With genuine crop circles you get crops that are not bent nor broken, but lay down because they were subjected to a large source of energy that actually "fuses" the crops in their horizontal positions. They are often seen with expulsion cavities at the nodes of the plant. The soil in the circle has a high concentration of magnetite compared to the soil outside of the circle. And the crops are not killed in the process, but continue to grow. You would not have learned any of this if you had watched the National Geographic TV program entitled, ironically enough, "The Truth About Crop Circles" because they didn't report any of this! It's either extremely poor journalism or a deliberate attempt of disinformation by a producer with alternative agenda or views. If you care to see some of the real evidence, you can see for yourself at: http://www.bltresearch.com/index.php

There's a lot of bogus websites out there where people are trying to "cash in". This site is different and has a lot of good information and evidence of the genuine phenomena.

Dan

Dan and Edwin,

I think it comes down to this. The scientific community can either:

A. detect the existence/presense of any/all existing phenomena or

B. is very certain of the phenomena that it has confirmed.

The scientific community either cannot or is unwilling to do both. In other words, science cannot claim authority as to whether or not something exists. Three headed flying monkeys probably don't exist. But science lacks the authority to declare that they don't exist; science can only shrug and say that it hasn't seen any.

On a more serious note, science has no authority to declare that, God, aliens, big foot, ufos, ghosts, marshmellow men, pixies, sand people, or multiverses DON'T exist. All science can say is that it hasn't seen any of these.

My point is that skeptics have no scientific basis upon which to lecture us on what does not exist.

By the way, tractor beams physics exists.

OK, one quick comment and then I'll let the physics discussion resume. If you want to test the existence of the paranormal, reach out to a higher power, of God and good, and ask for assistance, help and inspiration with: physics. That is the test. If you start coming up with amazing ideas and plowing ahead of your peers, then you have your proof.

If a technician with two bachelors degrees can come up with a tractor beam by asking for help, what can a real physicist come up with?

Have you ever considered that the Big Bang might not be the origin of the universe, but the origin of consciousness? The expansion of the universe might be our conscious slice moving, literally, at the speed of light? This limit in speed may be dictated by the speed that our conscious slice is moving in the un-movable universe. And, it may explain the arror-of-time?

carmen_putrino@yahoo.com