Edwin,
I re-read your essay with increasing interest and frustration with my limited fluency in math. I dealt with vector calculus a bit in my years as a graduate student in economics, but it was at the level of "math for social sciences." I hope nevertheless, despite my lack of technical expertise, to be able to make a few comments that you may find stimulating.
First, Full Disclosure: I come to the discussion from a worldview heavily influenced by my Catholic background and some intense personal experiences which convince me that in addition to there being something "out there," there is also something "over there." I believe, in a nutshell, that the universe is not indifferent to our being here, that it responds to us, and that, in a real sense, it is here for us. On the other hand, I do not believe in supernatural intervention in the course of events in this world. In my view, phenomena are strictly of this world. I do not reject the power of prayer to influence events, but I believe this power, such as it may be, works through natural causes that are part of the structure of physical reality.
Regarding the local vs. non-local nature of reality:
I first came across this issue in the mid-1980s, just several years after the Aspect experiments in Paris had convinced most physicists that the Bell inequality does not hold, and that reality, contrary to the EPR position, must therefore be non-local. At the time I had been reading [or reading about] David Bohm with great fascination, not being aware, of course, where the intellectual fault lines separating the major issues and combatants lay.
What interested me in the idea that physical reality could be non-local is the need I felt, absent
supernatural intervention or revelation, for the universe to connect agents with the consequences of
their actions as a means of generating knowledge, self consciousness, and ultimately, empathy and a sense of moral responsibility. To me it seems that the possibility of moral action, something readily observable in our world, even in its negation, requires that the consequences of an act would have to be present in some sense immediately--much like the elements in a geometric structure are present all at once. Einstein's General Theory would offer an example of such a structure, where individual events separated in our view by vast stretches of space and time are connected immediately in the eternal present of four-dimensional space-time. It seems to me that if consequences are not somehow implicit in conscious acts there is no basis for moral responsibility and no need for consciousness, and, as that great myth of creation put it, no need for or even the possibility of the knowledge of good and evil. But if the future is, in principle, unknowable, as I argue it must be if the universe is to accommodate free will, the very geometric structure that somehow does away with past and future and places all events in a kind of frozen simultaneity would also have to be dynamic, that is, it would also have to permit reality to evolve forever out of the changing potential that is our experience of the present. To become conscious we would have to be able to experience and actively participate in our becoming, rather than just being. We would have to be able to change as a result of experiencing the consequences of our actions.
The behavior of time seems to hint that these seemingly contradictory requirements--the instantaneousness of events in a geometric structure and the evolution of that structure, with effect following cause--may be accommodated in the physical universe. Effects--consequences--propagate in the physical universe at the maximum speed permitted by special relativity, betraying reality's dynamic nature, rooted in a kind of locality, which is needed to ensure causality, etc. Yet, from the perspective of the force-carrying particles that that project effects over long distances--the photons for example, and the presumed carrier of the gravitational force, the graviton--the time needed to travel any distance between emission and absorption, between cause and effect, is zero. Therefore, from the perspective of the parts of the presumed mechanism that connects cause with effect, there is, as Newton observed, spooky instantaneous action at a distance. Despite Einstein's best efforts, both special and general theories of reality seem to leave the door open to the Zen-like possibility that physical reality is both local and non-local, perhaps as the need or circumstance requires.
In addition to these hand-waving and rather intuitive arguments for non-locality, there also seems to be a hint in the mathematics of classical physics that reality is non-local, at least from my limited layman's understanding of the calculus of variations. How, for example, does the electromagnetic field calculate the path of a bolt of lightning to ensure that the electrons flow along the path of least resistance? Don't both ends of the integral have to be known for the calculation to be done? The consequence--the path chosen--has to be known in some sense before it can be identified as the path of least action. Or did I miss something here?
Incidentally, the day I followed up your first comment on my essay I found that link to the blog with Jay Christian, which I followed for some time. You probably understand now that possible problems with Bell's proof do not have much impact on my experientially-motivated intuition that reality is in some sense non-local.
Regarding how consciousness couples with matter, individuals as foci of consciousness, and related topics:
I really like the idea of a C-field and your assertion that consciousness is fundamental. I also believe that consciousness is fundamental, and that by taking this position we are rushing in where angels--but not Teilhard de Chardin--fear to tread. I must admit that I don't yet quite get how the C-field emerges or is generated from the gravitational field in your analysis, but this personal blind spot is not that significant to me, given all the other things about mathematical physics I cannot follow. For my own consumption for many years I have thought of "will" as a real physical force, analogous to gravity in many respects, which operates on events at the micro or quantum level. The force of one's will would be a function of one's level of consciousness, much like gravity is proportional to mass/energy, but, unlike gravity, it would be possible to shield events and systems from this force, turning it on and off, as it were, by acts of will. We are, I suspect, a long way from being able to specify this force mathematically, but some kind of dimensional analysis should be possible. There are, after all, a lot of observations and reasonable conjectures we could make about this hypothetical physical force that are closer to phenomena than the speculations of M-Theory with all its mathematical wizardry.
Perhaps you noticed in my essay that I speculated that in a world with free will there could be no such thing as a completely random event. Instead of looking for hidden variables, perhaps Einstein and Bohm should have been looking for a hidden force, except that the force of our wills is not very well hidden. We project it into the world all the time, and the world responds. I am convinced that the world attends upon us, waiting to reconfigure itself as best it can to the shaping force of our wills, subject to the constraints placed by other wills and the potential residing in the present.
In addition to believing that consciousness is fundamental I also believe that individuals, which I refer to as foci of consciousness in my essay, are fundamental in the sense that they, unlike previous candidates for fundamental particles, cannot be sub-divided or analyzed into constituent parts. There is no such thing as half an individual, nor does anyone seem to have an idea of what the constituent parts of an individual, as distinct from an individual's body, might be. You can have essentially the same relationship with half a loaf of bread or half an apple that you can have with the whole loaf or the entire fruit, but you cannot even find half and individual, or even half a dog. We might seem to be playing with words here, but words are close to experienced reality in a way that math cannot be. Math, moreover, in its present state of development, seems peculiarly ill-suited for dealing with the individuality, particularly when the subject is an individual that has achieved a level of consciousness that we recognize as personhood. The relation "is equal to," for example, is totally useless except in the trivial sense that a person may be considered equal to his or her self. But it is precisely at the level of a person, by our hypothesis, where we would expect to find the most obvious evidence for of the force of will.
Identifying individuals, particularly individuals that have developed self-consciousness, as the origin of the force of will, much as massive bodies may be thought of as the origin of the force of gravity, would be one of the 'dimensions' or characteristics of will that theoreticians would work with in attempting to specify it in such a way that experimentalist could begin designing ways to measure it.
Note that the number of individuals may be hypothesized to be a conserved quantity, at least locally or in a closed system. For example, according to official casualty figures, when the Titanic left Queenstown, Ireland on April 11, 1912, it carried 2,224 individuals among its passengers and crew. When it sank on April 14, 711 of these individuals were rescued and taken to New York by the Carpathia, leaving 1,513 individuals unaccounted for. These missing individuals constitute a prima facie case for the violation of the presumed conservation law. But what if we stay with our hypothesized law for the sake of argument, to see where it leads?
I am reminded of the way Pauli used conservation laws to predict the existence of an elusive, difficult to detect particle that he posited would carry off the momentum missing in certain interactions involving other fundamental particles. Electric charge was conserved, so, he reasoned, the hypothetical particle would have to be electrically neutral. Mass also seemed to be conserved within the limits of experimental delectability, so the elusive particle would have to have no rest mass, like the photon, or would be very light. Note that if Pauli had questioned the law of conservation of momentum he would not have been able to predict the existence of the neutrino. Similarly, theorists who do not accept the law of local conservation of individuals, at least as a working hypothesis, cannot predict the existence of--much less describe--the elusive particle that carries off an individual at the moment of death, often referred to as the soul.
It is easy to see my Catholic heritage seeping in here. But it's also easy to see why hard scientific evidence for the existence or non-existence of the soul is so difficult to find: The theoreticians have given the experimentalist almost nothing to work with.
For about 30 years now I have experienced a personal phenomenon that could easily be written off by skeptics as "mere coincidences." But it is not so easy to be skeptical of one's own experiences--or even necessarily the best course of action--when these experiences are common occurrences, when they fit into well-defined patterns, and when they have an important emotional component. I am in the early stage of writing a book in which I develop these ideas, my worldview. This gestating book would benefit greatly from critical comments by physicists, mathematicians and other scientists, which is the reason I decided to enter the fqxi contest--to make contact with people like you who might be willing to comment. I have given my slowly emerging book the tentative title: Our Different World: Exploring the Moral Foundation of Physical Reality. The title is a play on the idea that most scientists consider the world indifferent to our being here. I touch upon this topic in my essay when I note that the very indifference of all but one of the laws of physics to our presence is what makes them available for our use. We could not work with tools that have an agenda!
I hope to begin posting drafts of chapters for comment this spring, and hope that you will stick with me, as your time and schedule permits. I will also post a copy of this reply as a comment on your essay.
Thanks again for taking the time to read and comment on my essay, and for your welcome reply to my response to your comment.
