Philosophy and Psychology

Obvious Leo wrote:Lee Smolin is not the only one beginning to think that sacking the philosophers might have been a dumb idea.

Physicists are and do like to listen philosophers of science. I am referring to Mach. We can see it in General Relativity and Einstein, or for instance by Wheeler and Feynman: "A time-reversal invariant theory is more logical and elegant. Another key principle, resulting from this interpretation and reminiscent of Mach's principle due to Tetrode, is that elementary particles are not self-interacting." Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler–Feynman_absorber_theory

They do listen.



Sincerely,
Zlatan

Heraclitus is one of my most significant philosophical mentors, Zlatan, because I regard him as the first true process philosopher amongst the ancient Greeks, although some might award this honour to Thales. I do attempt to unify a great many concepts in my philosophy which at face value might seem to have little to do with physics. However I do not express a left-field view when I claim that a true cosmological model must necessarily include an explanation for the existence of life and mind because within the last decade many of the most prominent illuminati in the physics priesthood have expressed exactly the same opinion. I include Brian Greene, Frank Wilczek, Jakob Bekenstein, Lisa Randall and Paul Davies in this number and I've probably left a few out. The tide is turning in physics and the eternal verities are no longer seen as the certainties they once were. Lee Smolin is not the only one beginning to think that sacking the philosophers might have been a dumb idea.

Obvious Leo wrote:My philosophy is by no means original but rather a compilation of many ancient philosophies interpreted through the prism of modern physics. If it appears complex this is only because I haven't explained it well enough...

The philosophy you are presenting embodies many things.

"Lovers of wisdom ought to be very much inquirers into many things." Heraclitus
Source: lyceumphilosophy.com/?q=node/32

Sincerely,
Zlatan

Zlatan. My philosophy is by no means original but rather a compilation of many ancient philosophies interpreted through the prism of modern physics. If it appears complex this is only because I haven't explained it well enough, because to me it is the epitome of simplicity. All one needs to do is get rid of the idea of the universe as being a PLACE and supplant it with the idea of the universe as being an EVENT which the observer perceives as a place. The universe is simply that which is continuously coming into existence at the speed of light, which is synonymous with the speed at which time passes, which is moderated by the cosmic metronome of gravity. The rest is just detail.

Obvious Leo wrote:“All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity in conformity with the order of time”.....Anaximander.

Leo,
Your philosophy is original and complex. Thank you for your answer.

Here is an interesting link which explains some reductions of space coordinates by holographic approach. There are also some notions of the theoretical physicist who assumes that Prof. Hawking is now placing deterministic chaos inside the Black Holes.
Link> profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity-space-astronomy-and-cosmology/black-holes/black-hole-information-paradox-an-introduction/

Sincerely,
Zlatan

Zlatan. One of the more vexing difficulties which I’ve encountered in various forums when explaining my spaceless universe paradigm is a reluctance by readers to take me literally. There are no abstruse metaphors to be plumbed when I define the process universe as a non-linear computer, a Universal Turing Machine and a Mandelbrot set. It is quite literally to be understood as all of these things and thus a computer which programmes its own input. Turing, von Neumann, Shannon, Prigogine and others have laid all the mathematical groundwork for such systems but it is most exquisitely and simply modelled in Conway’s Game of Life. This is the fractal world of the grav-time continuum, a world which evolves increasingly more complex sub-structures within itself over time for the simple reason that it cannot do otherwise. My universe is a reality MAKER where the most fundamental unit of physical reality is a quantised time interval.


This is a starkly different world from the teleological entity defined by spacetime physics, which is inescapably predicated on Newton’s assumption of Intelligent Design, because mine is a law-derived reality which depends on only the single meta-law of Boolean causality at the Planck scale. All the various particles, forces, fields, etc which physics then uses to describe the physical world are nothing more than phenomenal representations of this meta-law in action because the universe simply makes itself at the speed of light, a speed which can be quite literally defined as the processing speed of the cosmic computer, the fundamental mechanism of which is a binary logic gate. When I say that the so-called “laws of physics” are nothing more than the invention of physicists I intend to be taken literally. My model has no need of such confections because my goal is merely to provide the ontological underpinning for the epistemic world of the observer.

There are no laws of physics, objects of physics, mathematical constants, or even equations in my model because these things become entirely emergent observer constructs, but this is not to say that such a world cannot be modelled mathematically. There is an entire field of science to which physics remains oblivious, known generically as non-linear dynamic systems theory, which models various self-organising systems in great detail. This is a mature science with a rigid methodology and it is used to model every naturally occurring process in the physical world and yet physics does not use this methodology to model the physical world itself. This is no trivial oversight because by not doing so physics ignores the most astonishing property of the universe, namely that it is evolving from the simple to the complex, in direct contravention of the second law of thermodynamics.

Complexity from chaos is as fundamental a mathematical law as 1+1 = 2. It is the only law necessary to explain the universe we inhabit and the only one possible to explain our own existence within it.

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve”.....Max Planck.

I claim that Max was wrong in this pessimistic assessment because he could only visualise a deterministic world in terms of Newton’s law-derived linear reductionism. The Universal Turing Machine, however, does not obey the laws of physics. It MAKES the laws of physics by redefining determinism.

“All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity in conformity with the order of time”.....Anaximander.

Zlatan Stojanovic wrote:

Mayflow wrote:I shall have to designate you and Zlatan as forum philosophers here and this is certainly a topic I wish to bring to greater prominence and interest.

Thank you Mayflow!
Sincerely,
Zlatan

You are certainly welcome, my new friend. I have another forum where I think Jonathan has been the only one to post on lately, but I think he can verify I am much different than normal forum admins and mods. I believe fiercley in personal freedom for all. Good people and free minded people do not need rules other than those in their own hearts, which they will obey but not force on others. You may consider this a philosophy of mine.

Mayflow wrote:I shall have to designate you and Zlatan as forum philosophers here and this is certainly a topic I wish to bring to greater prominence and interest.

Thank you Mayflow!
Sincerely,
Zlatan

Obvious Leo wrote:Time is NOT a Cartesian dimension because Cartesian dimensions are bi-directional whereas a causal universe cannot be.

My dear friend Leo,

I have also been thinking more lately about mathematical descriptions when time coordinate becomes spacelike (in context of Universe and Hawking notions: "In Euclidean space-time there is no difference between the time direction and directions in space." Chapter 8 p. 8. I do not know how the physicists completely explain its physical meaning, but its formalism agrees with some of my conceptions of Reality. I do like formalisms; perhaps they are showing the true way toward our Reality,

P.S. I must ask, when you say that Universe controls its input, are you referring to something else besides autonomy?

Sincerely,
Zlatan

Obvious Leo wrote:G'day all,

I've been travelling abroad and neglecting my new friends on this friendly site. I've also been relishing the opportunity to stop thinking about the existential nature of space and time and focus on more important matters such as family and friends, but unfortunately now that I'm home again it's gotta be straight back to business.

Einstein knew his maps from his territories and made it clear enough throughout his life that the GR spacial curvature was not to be regarded as a physically real construct but only as a mathematical tool. My claim is that it is the failure to maintain this distinction which has driven physics into the conceptual cul-de-sac within which no unification model can be attainable. Einstein also knew right from the outset, as did Henri Poincare, that Minkowski's mathematical sleight-of-hand in representing time as a Cartesian dimension was the central flaw in the spacetime paradigm from which all the counter-intuitive absurdities of QM would ultimately derive, along with those of GR.

Zlatan. You find my spaceless universe model counter-intuitive and I don't deny that it takes a bit of getting used to. However it becomes very intuitive indeed once we include the nature of the observer's cognition into the physical system under observation because cognition is not a spatially extended phenomenon. It is solely a temporally extended phenomenon which projects a spatial extension onto its external environment. Essentially what I'm saying is that physics has got the universe arse-about. Minkowski correctly concluded that time and space are mutually exclusive and thus he made time relative to space. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction embellishment was just an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig which only made matters worse. All the questions of locality and non-locality in QM from which the various hidden variables mysteries derive can be sheeted home to this metaphysically nonsensical spatialisation of time. The most magnificent of scientific theories can be brought to its knees by a single inconvenient fact and for over a century a glaringly obvious inconvenient fact has been steadfastly ignored. Time is NOT a Cartesian dimension because Cartesian dimensions are bi-directional whereas a causal universe cannot be.

I said elsewhere that physics is attempting to force the universe to conform to the 4D manifold by brute mathematical force and I stand by this heretical claim. However I do agree with Minkowski that time and space are mutually exclusive and both cannot possibly be physically real. I am adamant that the Cartesian space is purely an artefact of cognition and thus an observer-derived abstraction, and that therefore the ding-und-sich of our physical universe is a fractal continuum of time and gravity, which I define as the elephant in the room of GR.

I am hopeful that in a more congenial forum such as this there may be some with a more flexible turn of mind to consider the implications of my hypothesis. It transforms our universe into an entity of such sublime austerity that it simply cannot be wrong. Every single counter-intuitive absurdity in physics simply vanishes as if by magic and it restores the human will to the nature of the human experience. It strikes me that if this can be achieved simply be re-defining the Cartesian space this is a very small price to pay and the counter-intuitiveness of doing so passes very quickly, believe me. For a long time now I have been quite unable to see my world any other way.

All quite interesting, I only understand a teeny bit of what you say, but it seems not strange on this forum that there is much doubt here on the GR and time is a 4th dimension of space theory. In my old forum I once had (well it is still alive) I designated Jonathan as forum physicist, I shall have to designate you and Zlatan as forum philosophers here and this is certainly a topic I wish to bring to greater prominence and interest. I am also going to soon delve into the Spiritual aspects of things. Always things to do here!

ps You are with family and friends here too, and you should feel at home here.

G'day all,

I've been travelling abroad and neglecting my new friends on this friendly site. I've also been relishing the opportunity to stop thinking about the existential nature of space and time and focus on more important matters such as family and friends, but unfortunately now that I'm home again it's gotta be straight back to business.

Einstein knew his maps from his territories and made it clear enough throughout his life that the GR spacial curvature was not to be regarded as a physically real construct but only as a mathematical tool. My claim is that it is the failure to maintain this distinction which has driven physics into the conceptual cul-de-sac within which no unification model can be attainable. Einstein also knew right from the outset, as did Henri Poincare, that Minkowski's mathematical sleight-of-hand in representing time as a Cartesian dimension was the central flaw in the spacetime paradigm from which all the counter-intuitive absurdities of QM would ultimately derive, along with those of GR.

Zlatan. You find my spaceless universe model counter-intuitive and I don't deny that it takes a bit of getting used to. However it becomes very intuitive indeed once we include the nature of the observer's cognition into the physical system under observation because cognition is not a spatially extended phenomenon. It is solely a temporally extended phenomenon which projects a spatial extension onto its external environment. Essentially what I'm saying is that physics has got the universe arse-about. Minkowski correctly concluded that time and space are mutually exclusive and thus he made time relative to space. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction embellishment was just an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig which only made matters worse. All the questions of locality and non-locality in QM from which the various hidden variables mysteries derive can be sheeted home to this metaphysically nonsensical spatialisation of time. The most magnificent of scientific theories can be brought to its knees by a single inconvenient fact and for over a century a glaringly obvious inconvenient fact has been steadfastly ignored. Time is NOT a Cartesian dimension because Cartesian dimensions are bi-directional whereas a causal universe cannot be.

I said elsewhere that physics is attempting to force the universe to conform to the 4D manifold by brute mathematical force and I stand by this heretical claim. However I do agree with Minkowski that time and space are mutually exclusive and both cannot possibly be physically real. I am adamant that the Cartesian space is purely an artefact of cognition and thus an observer-derived abstraction, and that therefore the ding-und-sich of our physical universe is a fractal continuum of time and gravity, which I define as the elephant in the room of GR.

I am hopeful that in a more congenial forum such as this there may be some with a more flexible turn of mind to consider the implications of my hypothesis. It transforms our universe into an entity of such sublime austerity that it simply cannot be wrong. Every single counter-intuitive absurdity in physics simply vanishes as if by magic and it restores the human will to the nature of the human experience. It strikes me that if this can be achieved simply be re-defining the Cartesian space this is a very small price to pay and the counter-intuitiveness of doing so passes very quickly, believe me. For a long time now I have been quite unable to see my world any other way.

Well its a programming experiment that shows that relativity is based on mutually exclusive premises. Relativity is illogical when the 3rd (or more) object is introduced.

An object simply cannot have two velocities.

Relativity gives two velocities when an object is measured in relation to two other (differently moving) objects, as the first object will have two different velocity reductions as per the Lorentz formula.

Perhaps read it again.

Kant's space is refuted by General Relativity.

Einstein's theories on Relativity consist of premises that are mutually exclusive.

THE RELATIVE POSITION CONTRADICTION

This problem further explains how the various premises that comprise Relativity
are mutually exclusive to one another.

Consider this straight line:
Objects C & B are accelerating towards object A under the force of gravity.



Thus object C has a different acceleration in relation to A than it does to B.

Now, according to Relativity, the adjustment made to the velocities would
therefore be different depending on which object it is accelerating towards.
The two measurements have a different nearness to the velocity of light,
so the Lorentz formulae will reduce velocity differently.

Object C is said to undergo a lesser reduction in velocity in relation to A than
it does to B. This is because C is further from the velocity of light when it
moves in relation to A, than when it moves in relation to B.

So! The change in velocity of object C under the effects of Relativity
would then be different in relation to the two other objects.
The result would be that object C has a different position in relation
to the other two objects!

So how can an object be in multiple positions relative to two different objects?

Once more, Relativity causes a blatant contradiction.

But Newton expressed deep concerns that his work
should not be interpreted to mean a clockwork-like mechanism.

The notion that the universe is in the shape of a 4-d sphere entails
that we cannot conceptualize a 4-d form if we are thinking with a 3-d brain.
A 4-d entity cannot be contained within a 3-d entity anymore than a
3-d entity can be contained within a 2-d entity.

Obvious Leo wrote:Bell's argument also fails on aesthetic grounds because it reduces a human existence to a meaningless exercise in Sisyphean absurdity. Any philosopher willing to embrace the notion of superdeterminism should reach for his hemlock without delay.

I will quote the author on Wiki:

"Bell's theorem depends on the assumption of "free will", which does not apply to deterministic theories." … "Although he (Bell) acknowledged the loophole, he also argued that it was implausible." … "It is unlikely for the hidden variable to be sensitive to all of the same small influences that the random number generator was."
The content in parenthesis is mine. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

Loophole def.: "an error in the way a law, rule, or contract is written that makes it possible for some people to legally avoid obeying it" Source: merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loophole  

The Wiki author has said for hidden variables that they are implausible/unlikely, not impossible,

The superdeterminism physicists are much more philosophers. They and the word approximation are strangers, they seek for perfection.

I understand that you are going beyond the Kant's notion of a priori space, because it is Newtonian and not grounded on Reality. Kant's space is refuted by General Relativity. It is interesting argument, but you cannot expect that (those) physicists, who are unfamiliar with Kant's work, will think thoroughly of your argumentation. I can follow your thoughts, and you have interesting observations. It is philosophy. I cannot describe to myself, how things can actualize interaction in spaceless theory. It is counterintuitive      

Sincerely,
Zlatan

Jonathan Ainsley Bain wrote: Is it even possible to analyse something as mystical as free-will?
Surely the mystical can only be experienced?
And yet. That very idea defies itself in the writing of it.

Jonathan ,
Thank you for your contribution to the topic.

Ah, yes, the free will…

But some physicists are not introduced how much the concept of free will is embodied in the physical theories. I will explain it referring to some Leo's words.

Sincerely,
Zlatan

All very thought-provoking.
Much of it boils down to the question of why it is that
some people choose to think, and others do not.

Could it be that the only act of free will we can ever have is:

To think further, or not?

After all, we cannot know about that which we have not thought about.
So any act of choosing to think about something requires a leap of blind faith.

Though I tread recently on the unsettling ground of
how psychology interacts with diet.

Specifically: if we eat food that is not good for our
particular state of biological being our thoughts are stunted.
Still this only partly addresses the problem
of why some choose to think and others not.

Is it even possible to analyse something as mystical as free-will?
Surely the mystical can only be experienced?
And yet. That very idea defies itself in the writing of it.

A further point I forgot to make. Bell's argument is a superb illustration of the difference between reasoning and rationalising. Bell is using his logic to validate his theory rather than requiring his theory to validate his logic.

Zlatan. Bell's argument is inelegant because it is unnecessary. It assumes the Newtonian reductionist paradigm a priori and extends it to the absurdity which Laplace did, where the universe is seen as analogous to a gigantic unwinding clock. However the logic of it is irrefutable if the spatial extension of matter and energy is anything other than the construct of the observer. In the Santiago model of cognition the spatial extension of matter and energy is regarded as exactly this, a construct of the consciousness of the observer with no ontological provenance. In the Santiago school observer consciousness is a purely temporal phenomenon, which incidentally also rids us of Chalmers' "hard problem" of consciousness, an anachronistic venture into Cartesian dualism with more than a hint of the occult.

Bell's argument also fails on aesthetic grounds because it reduces a human existence to a meaningless exercise in Sisyphean absurdity. Any philosopher willing to embrace the notion of superdeterminism should reach for his hemlock without delay.

when you are explaining the concept of free will of the individuals, why you are away from Quantum Mechanics' argument.


“There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the ‘decision’ by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster-than-light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already ‘knows’ what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.”


Sincerely
Zlatan

Mayflow, very interesting link, 

Sincerely,

Zlatan

Well I do have a turing bot... http://pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=e8d6db6a7e36950b

AI is of course a rather interesting thing.

Zlatan Stojanovic wrote:

Thank you Leo,

Thank you Mayflow

 

Both, Kant and Freud, were aware of high determinism of Reality. But, both of them believed in free will. Freud's psychoanalysis i.e. its technique helped us to free ourselves from such determinism.

If I have understood you Leo, your Universe is a kind of oscillatory Universe, and it is final cause by itself. To reformulate Spinoza: Natura est Deus.  

 

Regards,

Zlatan

Yes, Zlatan. I get the feeling that you've got a pretty good idea of where I'm coming from. The universe sufficient to its own existence was Einstein's dream in his quest for the unification model and such a universe is intrinsically Spinozan and non-teleological in its character. It has its obvious analogue in modern physics where the cyclical universe, colloquially known as the "bounce" or "bang/crunch" model is steadily gaining in acceptance. However Spinoza substitutes the notion of transcendent cause, as represented by Aquinas, Descartes and Newton with the notion of Immanent cause, which constitutes a re-definition of determinism. Non-linear, or chaotic, determinism is compatible with the notion of free will because it defines cognition itself as a non-linear process. This more nuanced understanding of consciousness was very carefully elaborated by Maturana and Varela in the "Santiago School" of cognition and this more sophisticated approach has rapidly gained acceptance in many modern philosophies of mind.

It has also been enthusiastically adopted in modern information theory, in particular by researchers into artificial intelligence. They attempt to mimic the processes of mind by adopting such techniques as neural network programming using evolutionary or learning algorithms, and underpinning such a methodology lies a very simple principle. Free will and intelligence are simply two different expressions of the same thing because minds are intrinsically self-programming. There is a sublime elegance about such a theory of mind because the Spinozan cosmos is also intrinsically self-programming, although I hasten to deny that I regard the universe as a mind any more than I would regard our self-programming planetary biosphere as a mind. Instead such a non-linear paradigm defines the universe quite specifically as a Universal Turing Machine, the eternal and cyclical reality maker which programmes its own input.

I suspect that the philosopher/biologist is more naturally attuned to the notion of a cosmic aesthetic than the hard-nosed mathematical physicist who tends to align his focus along the more traditional epistemic channels. However I reckon the physicists have much to learn from the biologists because the biologist knows full well that the science of life is fundamentally an information science. How could the science of physics possibly be any different?

 
 

Mayflow wrote:Leo, I think you border on Zen thought here.

I've paddled in many philosophical pools in the course of my journey, Mayflow, and found that cause and purpose are not the same. Only organisms with minds are capable of goal-directed activity, whereas mother nature just does what she does. Attributing a purpose to nature was probably one of the first impulses of homo sapiens after he evolved the capacity for abstract thought and for many it remains deeply embedded in the human psyche. It was this impulse which drove man to concoct the vast suite of gods, fables and myths to account for the intrinsic order he could observe in the physical world. To primitive homo it was inconceivable that such patterns of organisation could emerge spontaneously without the invisible hand of a divine plan, and this myth remains alive and well to this very day in the modern science of physics. However the biologists know differently because they define determinism differently. To a biologist the divine plan of the physicist is a creation of his own mind and the order in our physical world does indeed arise spontaneously.

I absolutely agree that at the heart of all the mysteries in science lies the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. Elaborating the distinction between objective and subjective reality has exercised the thinking of every major philosopher in history and I still reckon that none have explored this theme more thoroughly than Immanuel Kant, with the possible exception of Ghiyath ad-Din Abu'l-Fath 'Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyam Nishapuri. No scholar should be expected to commit such a convoluted collection of words to memory so this bloke is nowadays simply known as Omar Khayyam. Omar is only one of my gurus but he remains a significant one.