Re: [Fis] _ Interlude: emotional shock

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Karl,


On 31 Mar 2016, at 17:30, Karl Javorszky wrote:



In the present Interlude after the session chaired by Lou on  
Symmetry and before the coming one, allow me to enlarge on something  
Bruno raised.


Bruno wrote:


Then this confirms the "computationalist theory of everything",  
which is given by any formalism, like Robinson Arithmetic (the rest  
is given by the internal machine's phenomenology, like the one  
deducible from incompleteness). Indeed, in that theory, the stable  
(predictible) observable have to be given by a statistics on all  
computation going through our actual state. This (retro-)predicts  
that the physical obeys to some quantum logic, and it can be derived  
from some intensional nuance on the Gödel self-referential  
provability predicate (like beweisbar('p') & consistent('t')).


In quantum mechanics without collapse of the wave during  
observation, the axiom 3 is phenomenological, and with  
computationalism in the cognitive science (the assumption that there  
is a level of description of the brain such that my consciousness  
would proceed through any such emulation of my brain or body at that  
level or below) the whole "physical" is phenomenological.
Physics becomes a statistics on our consistent sharable first person  
(plural) experiences. With "our" referring to us = the universal  
numbers knowing that they are universal (Peano Arithmetic, Zermelo  
Fraenkel Set Theory, viewed as machine, are such numbers).


An actuality is a possibility seen from inside, somehow, in this  
context or theory (QM without collapse, or Computationalism).


Personally, it seems that quantum mechanics, when we agree on the  
internal phenomenological of actuality in the possibilities,  
confirms the most startling, perhaps shocking, consequence of  
computationalism (digital mechanism). Note that it does not make the  
physical itself computable a priori.


Of these thoughts, let us focus on the following:
“…. when we agree on the internal phenomenological of actuality in  
the possibilities, confirms the most startling, perhaps shocking,  
consequence of computationalism (digital mechanism). …”


Now how does “shocking” enter a discourse on quantum concepts and  
the idea that there is knowledge and wisdom in them there natural  
numbers?




Obviously, and let us thank Bruno for having pointed it out, there  
is an element of reticence, unwillingness, resistance and  
protracted, unpleasant surprise in the thought that Life, and the  
world in general may be much more mechanistic and trivial than  
thought before.




The person pre-shock believes in something, the person post-shock  
knows that he has been robbed a dream. It is like a child has to  
realise that Santa Claus is not a real person, and that little  
babies do come about the way they come about.


Many ideas have to be laid to rest during the process of  
familiarising oneself to the idea that the glue that holds the world  
together – and within it, our ideas about the world – is best  
described by the well-known form of a+b=c as known from good old  
elementary school.




Discussing what forms and appearances the order can produce which  
rules Nature, and within Nature, us and our thoughts, is  
unfortunately equivalent to discussing, what kinds of order we can  
look into and discover within a+b=c,  as this old, well-chewed bone  
is the backbone of rational concepts.




The disillusionment will be individually instrumented for each of  
us, as Tolstoy had said about the unhappiness of families, each in  
their own way. The resulting – remaining – denotation, after having  
lost its connotations, will be made up of the simple grey, standard,  
industrial units of abstraction, order as a running fight among, and  
a compromise between b-a, a-2b, a+b, 2b-3a, and the like.




Please accept my apologies for the shock the insight may cause that  
we are indeed just an experiment in combinatorics, and probably the  
elves, fairies, trolls and unicorns do not exist neither.





Thanks for this comment Karl. The biggest shock I was alluding, and  
which I get myself before I realized that it was confirmed by quantum  
mechanics (without collapse) is that not only nature or the material  
world does not exist per se, at least not ontologically, but only  
phenomenologically (through a notion of sharable first person  
experience) but in the fact that the usual mind-brain or consciousness- 
matter identity link is broken, and that "my" particular current  
experience is related to an infinity of relative brains- 
representations existing in arithmetic. Bryce DeWitt explains how  
shocking it was for him when he realized that at each instant he is  
multiplied/differentiated by 10^100+ copies, and with only the  
mechanist assumption that multiplication/differentiation is up into  
the infinite (aleph_zero or aleph_one).


That can also be used to show that the physical reality cannot be  
entirely computational, 

Re: [Fis] Fis 25 / 9

[Stanley N Salthe]

RE: The organization of bodies of knowledge in the sciences takes place at

another level than the integration of cognition in the body of an

individual. One cannot reduce the one level to the other, in my opinion.

Which research program of these two has priority? How do they relate ?

potentially differently ? to information?


ME: My Cambridge colleague, Madan Thangavelu, holds that the structure of
knowledge in both human brains (and human organizations), and in' bodies of
knowledge' in the sciences, is fractal.


STAN: I don’t think that “fractal” answers Bob’s question. In fractal
organization there are no ‘levels’ as used by Bob.  Bob’s “levels” would
exist in a compositional hierarchy, wherein levels cannot communicate in an
interactional sense, but, rather, communicate indirectly, with the upper
level imposing boundary conditions upon a lower, while a lower provides raw
materials that might become organized by those boundary conditions.

STAN

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 1:30 AM, Alex Hankey  wrote:

> RE: The organization of bodies of knowledge in the sciences takes place at
> another level than the integration of cognition in the body of an
> individual. One cannot reduce the one level to the other, in my opinion.
> Which research program of these two has priority? How do they relate ?
> potentially differently ? to information?
>
> ME: My Cambridge colleague, Madan Thangavelu, holds that the structure of
> knowledge in both human brains (and human organizations), and in' bodies of
> knowledge' in the sciences, is fractal.
>
> It is certainly true that the structure of creative ideas and new projects
> emerging from individuals and corporations has a fractal kind of
> distribution, and as a consequence, has to be assessed using a Herfyndahl
> index rather that the mean and standard deviation of a normal distribution,
> or their analogues for experimentally encountered non-normal data
> distributions. (Better the square root of the Herfyndaho index, since this
> can be additive when combining distributions.)
>
> --
> Alex Hankey M.A. (Cantab.) PhD (M.I.T.)
> Distinguished Professor of Yoga and Physical Science,
> SVYASA, Eknath Bhavan, 19 Gavipuram Circle
> Bangalore 560019, Karnataka, India
> Mobile (Intn'l): +44 7710 534195
> Mobile (India) +91 900 800 8789
> 
>
> 2015 JPBMB Special Issue on Integral Biomathics: Life Sciences,
> Mathematics and Phenomenological Philosophy
> 
>
> ___
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>
>
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Re: [Fis] Fis: 25/7

[Madan Thangavelu]

*What is Physics? The Biological Aspects of the "Non-Living" Universe.*

Dear Plamen,

Perhaps the time is ripe for a Biologist / Life scientist to write a short
book titled

*"What is Physics?"*
A good model on how to approach this is know to all (and available here:
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf).

First published in 1944 (based on lectures in 1943; and ten years before
the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA!) - the are several
sections here which are invaluable to remind that new knowledge can
surprise us in strange ways.  For instance, the section titled:  *Maximum
size of a gene!*

Based on what we know today it is evident that human knowledge has not
stayed at that level expressed in 1944!

Biology is reminding us constantly to reach for rules at the sub-Planckian
scales (both space and time beyond the Planck scale)

To a Biologist, sentiments conveyed in Wojciech Zurek's Letter to Nature
(2001)  "Sub-Planck structure in phase space and its relevance for quantum
decoherence." seems so much like what happens in the inside of cells but at
a meso-macro level!

Reminds one of some of the early exchanges and thoughts that Brian
(Josephson) has rehearsed with some of us and also alluded to in *Conrad,
Home & Josephson (1988)* and implications for appreciating the subtle
(beyond the physically 'tiny') and beyond and the



* "common substratum"That the common substratum, the subtle and the human
mind (currently externalised), has a structure, and a common structure,
the same internal structure "and neither on its own contains the full
story" needs appreciating better.*Life and biology offer the best probes
for the subtle and beyond.





Thanks to Guy (Hoelzer) for mentioning Deacon.  I copy below two excerpts
to add to my comments:

*"The Sacred Emergence of Nature"* (Ursula Goodenough, Washington
University in St Louis, goodeno...@wustl.edu & Terrence W. Deacon; 2008)

*PDF available at:*

http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066=bio_facpubs

>From the paper:

Emergence as a General Concept
...

Emergent properties arise as the consequence of relationships between
entities.

Robert Laughlin (2005) intriguingly suggests that emergent properties arise
even at the level of relationships between subatomic entities—indeed, he
suggests that the very ‘laws’ of nature may prove to be emergent—but since
we are not trained in discourse at this level, we will begin with
relationships between atoms.

Another excerpt:

As different species’ genomes have been sequenced, an initially surprising
finding
has been that complex organisms don’t have all that many more genes than do
simple
organisms. A unicellular alga, for example, has about 17,000 genes, and a
human has
about 23,000 genes. Moreover, well over half of these genes encode
‘housekeeping
proteins’—actin, myosin, metabolic enzymes, and so on—that are present in
both
kinds of organisms. What has happened during evolution, then, is not so
much the
acquisition of new genes as changes in the patterns of expression of
existing gene
families such that *novel combinations of proteins appear in a given cell
at a given*
*time, interact with one another, and generate novel emergent properties.*


On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov <
plamen.l.simeo...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Alex and FIS,
>
> what I can only say as (now) qualified non-expert in QT is that points
> 1-13 embrace a period in scientific research of really great minds (I did
> not see Feynman”s name in the list, but he is certainly meant under
> “others") a little bit more than 100 years. Please excuse my doubts, but I
> simply cannot start believing that human knowledge will stay at that level
> for ever. Some day there will be certainly another revolution in physics
> and/or biology or even another discipline that could embrace the 13 domains
> as special cases. I cannot understand why (quantum) physicists are
> sometimes so egocentric like monks with their domain that they try to
> explain even the behaviour of viruses with quantum interactions. I
> apologise for hurting someone’s feelings.
>
> Plamen
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 2:39 AM, Alex Hankey  wrote:
>
>> RE: I am not sure that QT is the ultimate theory of all things, but I
>> think
>> the effort is worth doing it, since we hardly have anything else to step
>> on
>> now.I invite all those interested in this endeavor to join hands!
>>
>> ME: Speaking as a theoretical physicist with 45 years experience and deep
>> interests in the foundations of physics and the origins of quantum theory,
>> I should like to comment that to really understand quantum theory so as to
>> see how to patch up its faults is not easy, and requires many years study
>> in many different subfields.
>>
>> It requires deep knowledge and understanding