New Substack Post

Part IV turns to consciousness—not as an observer of the world, but as the physical event through which a world becomes determinate. What appears is never given all at once, but gathered through reduction, guided by what matters. The familiar divisions between mind and body, subject and object, are not fundamental, but arise when this process is mistaken as complete.

https://substack.com/@jsw21/note/p-194975102?r=2jtjh&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Sean Carroll and the Naivety of Mathematical Reductionism

This a response to a short YouTube clip:

The originating quantum physicists, such as Wigner, Heisenberg, and Bohr, for example, were strong enough to face and deal with the philosophical dilemmas that arose from their observations and discoveries.

In Heisenberg’s “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics”, which was a response to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”, he demonstrated that QM had obliterated subject/object metaphysics, introduced the unfathomable role of consciousness, and the impossibility of any rational model to be sufficient to fundamental reality. He concluded with the statement, deeply unsettling to naive realists such as Carroll, that physics can no longer claim to be a study of nature, but is confined to a study of how physicality is known through human conditions of perception and thought.

In Wigner’s writings from 1949 to 1961, Wigner (a seminal Nobel-Prize winning mathematical physicist) took a critical look at physics adopting mathematics as its language. Building off of Poincare’s “Four Geometries” and his own account of the approximate nature of number as a pragmatic adaptation of the primarily esthetic nature of mathematics, he demonstrated that mathematics was a game with invented axioms and rules, and chosen problems (or events) with which the mathematician enjoyed displaying his cleverness. In adopting mathematics as its mode of expression, physics also became a parlor game of sorts, with axioms being presented as “fundamental laws of nature”, limited to carefully chosen events, and clever solutions invented out of new rules and axioms increasingly removed from anything in reality, such as complex numbers. This led to his Empirical Law of Epistemology, which showed any rational system to be approximate due to the approximate nature of numbers, and tightly limited in space, time, and chosen event. As these limits are exceeded and new events are introduced, entropy inevitably increases and the system breaks down. And as was the case case with Heisenberg, Wigner also didn’t shy away from the mysterious role of consciousness in the process.

Today, we mostly find physicists more desperately limiting chosen events and dismissing those things that they cannot explain in order to create somewhat fantastical theories, all of which are no more than groundless metaphysics. The best exception to this sad state of affairs is probably Carlo Rovelli, although even he doesn’t rise to the level of the originators of early 20th Century.

Carroll complains of amateurs nosing around in physics, but he doesn’t even rise to amateur level in the philosophy that underpins his questions and answers. He could only be characterized as naive. None of us has any understanding of consciousness or the arational nature of quantum reality on the other side of the density matrices. He has a naive assumption of concerning the ability to describe fundamental reality with mathematics or any systematic explanation. He has no idea what Heisenberg meant about physics no longer able to claim a study of nature. From such a position, it would be foolish to proclaim any unitary theory of existence.

Response to a Christian Nationalist on the Totalitarian Nature of Metaphysics

This is from a closed-group online discussion with a Christian Nationalist concerning the totalitarian nature of the metaphysical framework of Christianity. Due to the non-public nature of the conversation, I present only my response.

This first response focuses on your first few paragraphs concerning the nature of totalitarianism, Because of the excessive length of the past replies, I will limit this response to those paragraphs because it is the nature of totalitarianism that needs to be addressed before we can adequately address all that followed.

You start with an assertion that there is a distinction between illiberal and totalitarianism, but fail to tell what the difference is, so I will just set that aside and discuss your attempt to tell us what totalitarianism is, and your claim that it doesn’t include Christianity.

Your reference to Arendt and Conquest gives us a superficial description, but tells us nothing about the nature of totalitarianism. I started with Heidegger’s thoughts on this because the nature of something tells us more and might even cause some correction of the superficial description. I had asked you to critique that ground of my position and to try to justify logic as a mode of explaining reality, but you failed to do either. You simply repeated you assertion that my. “View that Christianity is totalitarian for positing objective truth, beauty, and goodness is simply not true. Furthermore, if your reason for this is appealing to a relativist axiology and epistemology, that is even more contentious”. Your introduction of axiology to characterize my thinking here is further evidence that you failed to grasp my meaning, but perhaps we can correct that misunderstanding as part of what follows.

All you presented beyond your simple denial and a superficial definition was a reference to a difference between illiberal and totalitarian, and a comment that Locke and Smith were both Christians, While the latter point is certainly true, I can only guess at what relevance you thought it might bear here. Perhaps you meant to imply that Christianity can’t be totalitarian if certain liberal thinkers were Christians, but that is an obvious fallacy. I never implied that all Christians were totalitarian as there is a difference between the totalitarian nature of the metaphysical construction of Christianity, and individuals who identify as Christian. Differences in interpretation can certainly occur individually, and it is important to note that starting with the Enlightenment most of those differences concern a liberalizing thrust that is condemned by those who describe themselves as traditional or orthodox. And rightly so, as this liberalization indeed strays from the Western metaphysical construction of Christianity.

I am convinced that your absence of a critique on the Heideggerian demonstration of the totalitarian nature of metaphysics and the inadequacy of logic to describe reality stems from your lack of knowledge about it. I did ask you read a short essay of Heidegger’s, but there is no indication that you have. This and what you refer to as contentious relativism cannot be fully rendered in this post, but I will give a brief outline of it. We can then dive further into any aspect as required.

1. Heidegger saw the danger of metaphysics in its reductiveness. What had earlier been physis was split into physics and metaphysics, where physics is reduced to mere superficial interchangeable objects, and Being is displaced to an imaginary metaphysical realm beyond the mere physical. Logos, which was the experience of meditation on Being in its fullness in this world, was reduced to “the cheap acid bath” of logic. This cheap acid bath, ungrounded by the fullness of of Being, was free to spin off any sort of pretense of answering the mysteries of Being and nature of reality. These were systematic constructions that claimed to produce a unitary explanation of reality, and with evermore complicated designs. What this was in essence was a determining subject imposing a logical order on a manifold and largely hidden reality, as opposed to the pre-Socratic logos of receiving truth through physical thought experience. In short, this was what Heidegger frequently refers to as subject/object metaphysics, where our connection to Being is severed, resulting in our perception of the world reduced to an imposing subject experiencing the world as object in opposition. A forcing of order instead of a “Letting” of reality.

Heidegger’s method is not one of propositional logic due to its inadequacy to describe reality, but rather through thoughtful (poetic) presentation of experience and its traces left in language itself. This brings us to totalitarianism. Keep in mind that Heidegger wrote entire books about what I am about to summarize in a couple sentences and I would be happy to expand on any of this, but this will need to suffice for the moment.

Totalizing is a word often used to describe elevating an idea to such primacy that it obliterates all else. This necessarily occurs in any metaphysical construction through a unifying explanatory idea. The construction itself presents itself as a totality of existence. The primary idea enacts a totalization to maintain the apparent unification of reality. From within the metaphysics the obliteration of all but the idea through the totalization blinds the inhabitant of the metaphysic to the multiplicity of reality and therefore to the error of the metaphysic itself. This inevitably leads to clashes with other metaphysics, and more importantly, with reality itself. It is a short step from this totalization under threat to totalitarianism. For Heidegger, Christianity was once such a threat, but saw in his time the major totalitarian threats as Communism and Nationalism. Today, Christianity has reappeared as an ally of Nationalism.

The totalizing idea of Christianity is a perfect god which forms a reductive notion of one truth, one good, one beauty. Over the centuries an elaborate metaphysical structure has been constructed from this idea. When it was able to, it enforced totalitarianism on its subjects, and in various instances seeks to again. That is simply the nature of totalizing metaphysics. Communism and Nationalism are prime examples.

2. Over the past 140 years what Heidegger points to as the full manifold nature of reality beyond any logical reduction has born born out in physics and neuroscience. Again, entire books are written on this as well as the entire field of modern physics, but here I will simply cite some of the most important examples from physics.

In the late 19th Century Poincare wrote his “Four Geometries” where he showed that perfectly consistent geometric systems could be devised from contradictory premises, giving a hint of the arbitrary nature of systems. Between 1949 and 1962, Eugene Wigner elaborated on this, showing mathematics (and formal systems in general) to be an esthetic game where mathematicians posited arbitrary maximums and rules and showed their cleverness in their manipulations. Very little of this had any relation to reality but was an esthetic game. Number itself was only an approximation and a rational construction. He demonstrates how physics through its adoption of the language of mathematics, itself became an esthetic game employing non-physical things such as complex numbers. By including entropy into the mix, he devised his Empirical Law of Epistemology, which shows all rational systems to be arbitrary as to chosen events, approximate from the nature of number, and limited in scope (space and time). Inevitably in every such system as chosen events (information) increases, or the temporal/spatial frame of reference increases, the order begins to pull part and entropy increases back to the primal chaos of reality.

At the same time, Heisenberg picked up this same theme and again showed any order to be a result of consciousness. The implication for Heisenberg was that no unitary explanation of reality was ever possible, and more importantly, physics no longer could claim to study nature, but rather was a study of our conscious interaction with nature. Today this idea has been further devolved by Carlo Rovelli through his Relativist Interpretation of Quantum, depending heavily on quantum field theory starting with quantum fields of energy as primary and constantly spewing chaotic spin (quantum) foam from which temporal complex organizations arise. Any system or experience of time is necessarily connected to perspectival consciousness entangled with the universe and engaged in an extreme reduction which he calls blurring.

This is the state of our knowledge of physical reality in the 21st Century and needs to be addressed head on. It does not suffice to merely dismiss it as contentious.

Toward a Philosophy for the Quantum Age

This is an introductory thought on the need for a new philosophy for the quantum age, in response to this question to me on Twitter:

Isolated quantum systems observed in their eigenstates appear to be in thermal equilibrium because their momentum/energy has been transferred. What links the moments? What is the link here, between quantum coherence and the statistical features associated with thermal dynamics?

I want to be sure we’re not conflating things here. Did you mean the probabilities of perceived wave collapse or in the process of entropy increase? Let’s start with wave collapse to Eigenstate. What we’re up against here is our lack of the language to properly discuss this, which mostly shows in our conflation of terms used differently in coherence and decohered environment, such as real, cause, event, probability, world, universe, wave, energy, etc. And along with that is the continued attempt to understand the quantum in classical terms. As Anton Zeilinger has noted, Kant was the philosopher who grounded the world of classical physics and we now need a Kant of the Quantum. I would include relativity too, but this leaves us in uncharted territory forging our own paths.

On the quantum side we can know almost nothing except what we observe in collapsed particles, which hints at superposition, entanglement, arationality, and lack of causality, spacetime, and entity. We cannot conceive this and any attempt to do so will be wrong because any such conjecture will necessity be in the form of our subjective sensibilities of space and time and governed by our innate reason, which cannot grasp a state of arationality and lack of spacetime. We inevitably revert to spatial/temporal metaphors. We take all that to mean all possibilities exist in timeless, spaceless relation of superposition, but it is important to keep in mind we can only refer to it negatively. We cannot validly describe anything positive about its nature. This is what I refer to when I speak of fundamental reality, and refuse to repeat the error of metaphysics by imagining it any further.

What we observe on our side of the gate of decoherence are probabilities of finding particles upon decoherence. These probabilities are expressed in density matrices which illustrate our imagining of how particles are allowed to pass through the gate into the decohered environment. There are various theories of how this works, but we know that the possibilities are guided by what is yet possible in the decohered environment and initiated by an observer. But even at this, things become hopelessly murky and lead to a lot of bad metaphysics; and this murkiness begins with the nature of the observer. Wigner, among others, believed that it is our consciousness that initiates decoherence, and there are echos of that in Penrose; but most physicists today resist that idea. I believe their resistance is motivated by the felt need to maintain the physical world as separate from our consciousness and objectively knowable. The stability of their profession as it is known today depends on it, but I believe Wigner was probably right. More on that later.

We now know that particles are just localized increased energy along the waves of quantum fields. These quantum field waves are the most fundamental existence we know on our side of the gate, and we need a term other than fundamental existence to distinguish it from the fundamental quantum existence. We can’t yet call it fundamental reality, however, or we run into confusion of the definition of “real” in physics, which is having two measurable properties – the minimum requirement for a real entity. Leggett has demonstrated that reality does not exist at this level. All we have are energy waves and the ephemeral and chaotic quantum foam it continuously spews and reclaims. Everything we encounter is a temporary self-organization of the various frequencies unique to each field out of this churning chaos. Everything emerges from this sea of foam and waves. And everything eventually returns to its chaos. This tends to refute metaphysical inventions such as many-world theory, which sees superposition as something more than mere possibilities of particles appearing, and instead takes it to the level of the famous cat – an entire world existing in quantum state, and each world itself splitting off with every new event into complete other orthogonal worlds. This imagines that our reductive representational world actually changes fundamental reality (as I defined it above). I suggest rather that the only change occurs on our side of the gate. Where spacetime and causality do not exist, there can be no change. What we experience is merely a mental construct from a greatly reduced array of possibilities in the decohered environment. Other worlds may exist, but only as the construct of other conscious beings with no connection to ours. Nor does panpsychism or cosmic consciousness exist – at least not at this fundamental level, as consciousness itself is an emergent self-organized energy event. That is the error of metaphysics, which physicists increasingly fall into while feeling their way through the murkiness. It seems more the case that decoherence only occurs at the particle level, and we make of it what we will through emergence. Again, more on that to come.

But the murkiness still remains, all due to the murkiness of the nature of the observer. From here we can’t see our way to what it means to emerge from chaos and return because the nature of the self-organized order itself is somehow entangled with our perception of it. And that’s the case all the way back to initial decoherence. Even when we measure a particle, we are entangled with the apparatus. We cannot know of any wave collapse without our participation in the collapse. And there is no unmotivated justification to claim such a collapse ever happens without our participation.

As Zeilinger noted, Kant was the philosopher of the world of classical physics, and much of what he wrote is outdated by the 20th century discoveries; but not his epistemology, with which modern neuroscience is very much in accord. What if we are to take seriously his prescient demonstration of the subjective nature of space, time, and reason, our world as representation, and the illusions created when reason is applied beyond sense data? In the updated version, our consciousness is an evolved reductive mechanism that takes raw sense data, reduces it to what is most important for survival in the immediate environment, and draws it in the imagination through, color, extension, Individuation, and sequence as it orders certain chosen events into a picture of a world amenable to our actions and predictions. This is our objective/rational universe, and exists only in our mental representations. If humanity were to perish, so would this entire universe. What would remain is that unknown fundamental reality.

This rational/objective mode is not our only means of knowing, and not even the most profound or true. I will explore that in the next entry to this blog. But for this mode, our reality is defined by pragmatism – true is derived from the useful. And the useful is determined locally among a few chosen events. Expand the frame of reference and its usefulness disappears along with the constructed logic of the associations. Entropy increases as we head back to the quantum foam.

But rather than this insight clearing the murkiness, the mystery of existence becomes yet darker. At the center of this is consciousness of the observer. By all appearances, consciousness is a very recently-evolved energy event. Everything we can encounter is an energy event. We measure the energy of conscious states. If we cut off the supply of energy, consciousness dissipates into the environment – available for new events. As such, consciousness cannot be fundamental – we have never observed it apart from a highly evolved living organism, despite the fanciful metaphysical inventions of some. But then, there is nothing more irresistible to the metaphysician than consciousness, in which inheres the same mystery as quantum reality. Only a small part of our mentality is revealed, and as in fundamental reality, the more that is revealed, the more we become aware of the immensity that remains concealed. Our concealed mentality makes the decisions for which our rational consciousness takes credit after the fact. If there is a personal identity, it lies in the unconscious, unknown to us. We meet ourselves only in dreams where spacetime is twisted and rationality is tethered. And then, only fleetingly. We are as much a mystery to ourselves as is fundamental reality. We only see what is passed through the gate, and from that we construct an identity. We know ourselves as a novel we write daily until the day we die.

The great mystery veiled in our murkiness lies within this consciousness. It brings about decoherence in quantum entanglement. It is – we are quantum. Penrose has proposed that our entanglement with an event creates our consciousness – an event of mutual relationship between fundamental reality and our uniquely organized energy event. Our mentality begins with this great reduction from All to our tightly limited universe, and proceeds through the further reduction of attention to limited portions of sense date, which are again reduced to object, concepts, and ideas in the Kantian sense. But the real secret lies in that initial reduction from fundamental reality. To what extent are space, time and causality real or merely imagined sensations – existing only our minds as do colors? Is there something of fundamental reality that actually exists as space, time, and causality in emergence from the quantum foam, or merely just our way of creating sensation?

To answer this we would need to step outside of our consciousness, which makes the question unanswerable. But the inevitable breakdown of all rational systems over time, as new information overwhelms the arbitrarily chosen events at the beginning and expands the frame of reference to the breaking point, suggests that all that determines our universe is no more externally real than the color red. But that doesn’t mean it is purely our invention either. Our sensation of red is determined by a set frequency of light.

The murkiness here only darkens. Our sensations are caused by something in which we stand in mutual relation. Our consciousness is more than a computation machine, but rather a special type of event entangled with everything else. It is energy, as is everything we encounter. But fundamental reality always conceals more the more it reveals. Even if we accept energy is the essence of consciousness and our universe, the enigma merely shifts to the nature of energy. Defining it as the capacity to do work, or measuring it does nothing to answer that question, and we come no closer to primal truth without coming to terms with that mystery. We have merely chased it all the way to the gate, but struggle to ask it the right questions.

Increasing the accuracy of particle measurement, spinning theories of everything, or inventing wild metaphysical tales will never illuminate this murkiness. The Kantian model will continue to provide pragmatic benefit, but has outlived its claim to discover the truth of reality. That is only to be found in a deeper understanding of our own consciousness in relation to a larger chaotic reality. An esthetic rather than ascetic sounding of the vibrations we are in relation to the reality antecedent to the idea. A radical rethinking of what we are, reality, and what it means to know.

Logic is as primitive as the most primitive human. A gross simplification to something a limited mind could grasp. The next step in our thinking would be to move beyond the computational mechanism of reducing the world to atomistic facts and placing them in a logical order. We know there is no one unitary space time, no one privileged perspective, and no possible systematic explanation of everything. The next phase is to enhance our ability to understand the world in accord with relativity. A world in constant flux seen equally validly from many perspectives. An awareness that there are no atoms, just relations of events, and events are never static. We already have this ability to a degree, which is what we see in great art, poetry, and music. The perspectival play and motion of art. The relational play of harmony in music both in the movement of melody an tension of chords. The music of poetry in its harmony among words and layers of meaning within the word.

In doing so we disentangle from the treacherous web of the most skillful and pernicious of the Sophists. Philosophers lie, and so we must think like poets.

Response to a question on Twitter: What is a Universe.

This is a response to this thread on Twitter: https://x.com/whigbobkendrick/status/1743844383714165074?s=61&t=uHGWh-oiEnXu09KtKoJkFA

As I mentioned before, I am writing a book on the modest topic: what is a universe? Universe is the real scope of your thinking here, so I will start with a few remarks on that topic. We are accustomed to thinking of a universe as the all-encompassing reality, and distinct from ourselves. We can muse about the existence of other universes as separate self-encompassing realities, like ours but with differences. Or we can posit another metaphysical realm that governs our universe, but in all these cases the universe is seen to be what exists prior to us. Really, what we view as the universe only exists in our minds. Of course, there is an existence outside our minds, but whatever that is, it is not our universe.

To be conscious is a radical act of reduction and creation. To start, our reality consists solely of a decohered environment, an unimaginably tiny slice of what lies beyond the gate of decoherence. What lies beyond that gate is the totality we can never know, but denies the properties of our universe. Consciousness begins with that fundamental reduction. Even with that, we can only perceive what interacts with the electromagnetic spectrum or imagine that for which we detect gravitational effects. Most of what exists does not so interact and we remain blind to it.

The acts of reduction and creation continue in our understanding. Our brains receive electrical impulses as raw material for sensations – the creation of perception of an event. The sensations are perceived in space and time, which itself is an artifact of our universal creation, not fundamental. In so doing we abstract from the sensation to ever higher concepts. Abstraction is the mental act of reduction. Our universe is a gross reduction imagined in our sensibilities and mentations. We construct small or temporary orders – a universal mise-en-scene updated by generations to suit contemporary tastes. It is our home; the comfort, support, and familiarity of where we dwell. In that sense it is reality for us; and we are right to take it seriously, rearrange the scenery and make it our own. But error and hubris also lurk in that sense. If our world changes in the reduction to Eigenstate, then fundamental reality also changes in the same way as our world, and we dream of multiworlds, like ours but different and orthogonal. The error is to think our reality is fundamental reality. We confuse the two as a matter of course.

Reality in totality, if such a word were apt, is different. If we were to die off as a species, our universe would die with it. Perhaps there would survive dog worlds, or rat worlds; but not our universe.

The talk of a universal mind falls into this error. What reality would it see? Our universe? Would it grasp the universal chaos as chaos, or amuse itself with endless creations of illusory patterns and orders? What about all the reality outside our universe? Would it include quantum reality?

But then, how do we understand consciousness? The only consciousness we know is reductive and ensconced in space and time. It cannot be separated in one isolated and static moment outside time because it consists of time itself. Our world is one of becoming – of waves, not atoms. There is no now without a then. That precludes deconstruction into atoms of facts.

It seems to me you are imagining something quite different from consciousness. Consciousness is more invention than grasp. We don’t even know our own selves. Most of our mental activity is unconscious or preconscious. That larger hidden activity is really us, but we have never met except in dreams, where space and time become are distorted and logic has no sway; and even then only fleetingly. The self we know is a novel in progress, being written daily until the day we die.

As for singularities as primordial concept exploding into extension, it find that interesting and bears future discussion, but I would at this point just add that the current consensus is that the universe, whatever that may be, did not inflate from a singularity but rather erupted from a flux in the chaos of a quantum field. Both Hawking and Penrose have moved in that direction. But then, the systematic explanations of physics come and go, all of them wrong but the best offering up world-changing insights. At least within the boundaries of our universe. The difference in our universe between singularity and quantum in relation to your interesting idea is that there is no mass in the endstate of maximum entropy, and infinite mass in a black hole.

Part 2: Response to Dr D on the Question of Creatio ex Nihilo

This is a response to Dr D’s comments on the prior post.

Response to a Question on Twitter Concerning Creatio Ex Nihilo

I’ll quickly note where we seem to agree:

We are fundamentally quantum beings in quantum relationship with the rest of reality.

This enables free will as a function of quantum indeterminacy

Our universe is actualized through an observer out of fundamental quantum reality.

Our consciousness is a reversal of entropy. (You stated that life itself was the reversal, but I see life as a limited and temporary self-organization of energy, the same as all other events, that eventually dissipates into the general environment. It is our consciousness that decreases entropy in the event of decoherence as the first in a series of reductions.)

The core of our disagreement comes about where you wrote:

– The onset of creation is akin to a blueprint, a conceptual framework based on a transcendental function.
– The universe unfolds according to this virtual fractal template (think Mandelbrot)”.

– The next creative step requires energy and specific motion to become actualized.
– The observer required by the Copenhagen interpretation (collapse) is a specific limitation.
– It is actualized through the observers described in “creation”
– we interact with a quantum interface at the cellular level continuously. 👇🏼

Our original question concerned creatio ex nihilo, to which I responded with a clarification of “thing” and a model from which things emerged through decoherence as self-organization of energy that precedes things. Reality is divided by the impenetrable wall of decoherence into classical and quantum realms. We can never conceive of quantum reality because it denies our evolved categories of understanding: time, space, reason. We can only “know” what appears to us after decoherence. Information theory is one viable approach to understanding our decohered universe, but tells us nothing about origins, which stubbornly lie on the other side of the wall. This eliminates the possibility of appeal to a “transcendental function”.

If such a blueprint or conceptual framework exists, it only does so after decoherence, as it depends on mathematics which cannot exist without spacetime. It also leaves open the question of its ontology – whether is is an order we subjectively impose on reality or is an actual feature independent of our consciousness. I contend that any question of origins not only lies forever beyond our grasp, but is a nonsensical question. Absent spacetime, origin is not a valid concept. Speculation transcending our representations of the decohered universe will never rise beyond ungrounded metaphysical assertions. They can never be true as they all rely on our imposition of evolved conditions of thought onto the quantum realm which denies them. This is true for Mutliverse, Multiworlds, gods, and even the current attempts to look for geometric order in the chaos of quantum reality. The Copenhagen Interpretation of no interpretation at all remains the most intellectually honest, if eternally unsatisfying. I stand with Feynman that we need to accept ultimate incomprehensibility of fundamental reality and focus on what is present in our decohered environment.

From a philosophical perspective, this forces us into the mystery of decoherence as the presentation of things in the world, whether as Heidegger’s Golden Horizon or Zurek’s density matrices, pointer states, and redundant copies of information. Either can tell us important things as long they resist metaphyisical speculation attempting to transcend our decohered environment. Any attempt to describe fundamental quantum reality by means of our innate conditions of thought can only result in error – Kant’s transcendental illusion.

Information theory can have value as a mathematical and metaphorical explanation of mechanics within our decohered environment, but also has serious problems as you present it. The first is that it contradicts the most fundamental reality we have discovered within decoherence: quantum fields. Quantum fields exist as wave energy upon which particles appear and disappear into our environment like foam bubbles on the wave of the sea. You presuppose a metaphysical blueprint preexisting these waves. There is no ground for this assertion. Rather, all we can start with is energy waves and particles that exist as local points of quantum increases in energy. It is from this chaotic quantum foam that things emerge as events of self-organizations through the interplay of the quantum fields. It is more likely that the inherent possibilities in each chance encounter of fields (event) determines what appears to us, not a predetermined blueprint.

The term “information” is itself problematic. It can be used in multiple senses, but originates with a sense of learning by a consciousness observer. Uses other than that are metaphors that play on that sense. Generally, physicists use it in the sense that events among entities (or systems) leave traces that can be read. Therefore, information can arise as relations among systems, not the entities themselves. This blurs the role of consciousness in information, as seen in the continuing disagreement over the role of our consciousness in decoherence. To assert information without our observation is to propose the ungrounded metaphysical assertion that things can have an awareness; or to merely describe a physical event metaphorically.

Here I’d like to expand Donald Hoffman’s metaphor of consciousness as a graphic interface, which is really a grossly simplified version of Kant’s epistemology cloaked in contemporary imagery. The incomprehensible stream of 1’s and 0’s are reduced through a logic analogous to our innate conditions of thoughts to pixels on a screen, which we intuit as icons analogous to representations. The icons have no real existence outside the representation, but also are not totally arbitrary – they are determinations from real information – the 1’s and 0’s. Human consciousness is thus a highly reductive adaptation for the purpose of simplifying our environment to something we can manipulate and predict to our advantage. It has proved useful within a very thin sliver of reality, but wide enough to allow us to avoid predators, capture pray, and plan for future events such as rain or cold. It knows nothing, however, about the ultimate realities of 1’s and 0’s.

Those curious beyond mere survival, however, have the opportunity to study the screen itself and discover the fundamental pixels. In so doing they can map out relationships, measure and label shapes, discern colors, etc. And from that they can even begin to derive some of the logic that creates these measures and patterns, analogous to our deriving mathematics and logic. But we can also see the error of going beyond that to projecting onto the 1’s and 0’s themselves, whose existence we know nothing about. (A point of breakdown in this metaphor is that the computer code has a designer, whereas there is no ground for assuming this in reality).

At the core of this is reduction, which defines our universe. Perhaps, as Penrose speculates, consciousness itself is created at the moment of entanglement and reduction to Eigenstate. That moment of decoherence is the initiating reduction of quantum chaos to an entity in our decohered universe. Going further, this massive sea of quantum foam must be processed through our understanding through further reduction as icons or representations. And it is the relationships among these that we represent to ourselves as systems, and time as the eventual disordering of these systems. As more entities enter the environment in Eigenstate, the more entropy increases. Further, the more events taking place within our perceived system, the more “information” is introduced and entropy increases.

As Rudolf Clausius demonstrated with his deck of cards, the order of a system is arbitrary, and each arbitrary system has its own degree of entropy and its own time. In all of this there is one common factor: our reductive consciousness. The implication is that what we think of as the universe is really the analog of the computer screen. Only real in our imaginations, but representations stemming from a real physical reality with which we entangle. We are at the same time that with which we entangle and the inhabitants of our representational universe that can elicit the illusion of separation – the error of subject/object metaphysics that underlies our understanding yet today. With this realization, there is no valid reason to think our representational universe actually changes coherent quantum reality, just as the icons cannot change the code. Fundamental existence remains as it is outside time, causality, space, beginning or end. Entirely incomprehensible to us representationally (scientifically or metaphysically). To posit multi-worlds, or multi universes, for instance, is to misunderstand what a universe is. It is transcendental illusion to posit another world like ours splitting off at an orthogonal at decoherence because the universe only exists as such as our representation. Perhaps there are other reductive beings representing their own universes, but not as an orthogonal, as even Hilbert Space is confined to a study of our own pixels.

Response to a Question on Twitter Concerning Creatio Ex Nihilo

This is my response to a fundamentally important question from the Twitter handle Dr.D.

“The idea that no time, no information and no mathematic(s) exists outside of ST (spacetime) is an argument for creation ex nihilo, isn’t it?”

It would be easy for me to simply say no, not necessarily, but it wouldn’t be a valid answer until we first more closely examine the question.

The first and most difficult problem is the word “nihilo”. In Latin it means “small or insignificant thing”. We find similar ideas throughout Western Languages, such as English “nothing”; German “nichts” from Old German ni + wicht (“not a thing”, cognate of English “naught”); Spanish “nada” from Latin res nata (a thing of insignificant or trifling birth); Norwegian “ingenting”, again “no thing”. I could go on, but this should make the point that it has long been ingrained in our most basic thought of existence that reality consists of “things” and the absence of reality is dismissed as “no thing”. “Ex-nihilo” resides in that same understanding of existence as “something out of nothing”. Below I’ll explore the difficulty in that understanding that leaves us struggling to describe reality as revealed in the 20th Century revolutions of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

The second problem is the question of “argument”. That causation, entities, number, information, etc. don’t exist outside space time is in itself not an argument, although it can have implications. It simply is the observation that those things require succession and extension, which are solely modes of time and space. We cannot have number, or position, or event without spacetime. And with no event, there is no information. This is critically important, however, because it is becoming accepted among physicists through experiments and observations that spacetime does not exist in the most fundamental level of existence we know of – quantum coherence. That implies that these things only emerge after decoherence in our environment. Easily said, but this ultimately brings us to the ultimate mystery: The impenetrable wall of decoherence. But that is a much longer and fascinating story.

If we are to inhabit a world of thing and nothing, we need to take a moment (or millennia or two) to ponder the nature of a “thing”. There is an odd, although rarely noticed, confluence between Romance and Germanic Languages (and perhaps others) of the original sense of “thing”. In today’s everyday sense “thing” refers usually to a static object – a definable entity. It has lost its original sense of “gathering”, hints of which still reside in words such as Scandinavian “Allting”, which is the gathering of the parliament, or more infamously as the Italian Cosa Nostra – our gathering of our thing. The greatest poets, however, remember that “The play is the thing”.

A thing is the play of a gathering, which confronts us with a surprising confluence among the latest notion from quantum physics as emergence from an event of the self-organization (gathering) of quantum field energies; Heidegger’s thinking of thing as the gathering of elements of Being out of an event (Ereignis); and the originating notion of gathering. All describe the emergence of a thing as an originating event. We might be tempted to say: a thing from no thing, our own being confined to the reductive metaphysical prison of thing as existing object, and no-thing as unreal.

Hence arise the dilemma and present crisis of physics itself. Coherent quantum existence is real, but contains nothing of “thingness”. Our universe emerges from it as a thing, but not from another thing; and yet an existent reality. The first order problem, and source of all metaphysics as an error, is the complete unknowability of this quantum existence, making any speculations senseless. We are able to say no positive notions of this quantum existence, but only what it lacks. It lacks spacetime, but that gives us not even a glimpse of what that existence is. Similarly it has no causality, individuation, rationality. But what it actually is cannot be said because we cannot conceive it. Our conditions of thought evolved for practical survival through reduction of sense data to simplified and selective representations in space and time. We literally cannot conceive the absence of space and time, which becomes apparent in our sole reliance on spatial-temporal metaphors. Waves, fields, electron clouds, quantum foam, and even the word “quantum”. Our entire universe, of which we are a part, is but an extreme reduction of reality, a blurring out of everything not necessary to a perception of a subsystem. Subsystems are arbitrary in nature, determined for practicality and dependent on perspective and our conditions of thought. They are also all we can know. Physicists tell us we only know about 5% of what makes up our universe, the rest being non-sensible dark matter and energy. That is hardly even the tip of the iceberg, to use a temporal-spatial metaphor.

Origins beyond our our spatial/temporal bounds and conditions of thought will remain nonsensical to us, as will anything like an ultimate reality or origin. That might be bad news for physics and those who persist in the errors of metaphysics, but great news for those who live to experience the freedom and joy of our brief lives. Our lives at core are songs, dance, and love. Precise measurement emerges only as a practical means to sustain that experience. The joy comes from the eternal mystery.

Transcript for YouTube response to Craig Reed on Immaterial Objects and Atheism

Craig Reed video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iUWV1zBrh5Y&feature=sharec

My video: https://youtu.be/x2GYy-HjVn0

The Christian apologist and thinker Craig Reid posted a video a few months ago of which I have only recently become aware. Titled “What is the Status of Immaterial Objects Given Atheism”, he presents a challenge to the twenty or so smartest atheist thinkers, of which he includes me, although seemingly as an afterthought:

Happy to be included, I don’t consider myself primarily to be an atheist thinker, but a thinker who is an atheist. My focus is on how to bring about a post-metaphysical approach to reality, not on theology. I lost interest in the question of god long ago. Moreover, I hold philosophy of religion in low regard and wouldn’t necessarily suggest seeking the answers from its practitioners, who largely remain remote from the most urgent thinking of today.

Craig starts his video with this:

Craig starts off with the question: What is the status of immaterial objects given atheism? I find this an odd question. It starts with the non-compelling presumption that there are immaterial objects, and then tries to make this into a theological question. This question properly concerns metaphysics, not just theology. As we will see, his chosen example of an undeniable immaterial object turns out not to be as applicable as he thinks. He goes on to further clarify:

….

He focuses on the laws of logic as his example of lack of verifiability, immaterial, invisible, and transcendent, and therefore not consistent with atheism at all. Actually, his description of logic is neither consistent nor inconsistent with atheism, as he actually concedes at one point:

It remains possible for an immaterial truth to exist without a god, but that isn’t the most salient issue at play here. What this all turns on is the ontology of logic. Craig claims to make an ontological argument, but in his argument ontology is diminished to the simple question of does it exist or not. But that question omits the all important ontological issues of what and how? Despite his claim, nobody doubts the existence of logic. The question is: what is it and how does it work? Central to this is the applicability of logic to reality. (And of course, we would need to explore the question of what is real.)

Craig seems to naively adopt the rationalist belief in the transcendental existence of Ideas independent of a thinking subject – a view long since dismissed among most serious thinkers. By the way, the philosopher Bas C Van Frassen gives an accessible account of the failure of science and philosophy to show a sure relation between logic and reality other than as a purely utilitarian tool for survival, and not ultimate knowledge, in his essay “The False Hopes of Traditional Epistemology. But the point here is that Craig is wrong to claim that critics of rationalism simply deny the existence of logic, but rather the question centers on the what and how.

What follows is a grossly abbreviated and simplified response, but should anybody wish to go more deeply into this, either in conversation on this channel, or privately, I would be happy to do so.

Craig reprises the no longer important debate between rationalism and empiricism and mixes a position from both sides. In assuming innate knowledge of transcendental truths he hearkens back to Plato’s remembered Ideas. His focus on logic draws on the empiricist tendency of Aristotle to reason from physics, which supposes a rational universe and the infallibility of reason. Both, however accept logic as a valid method for understanding the universe. Rationalists employed deduction from primary transcendent ideas and empiricists primarily employed induction from observation, but until Hume came about there was little question of the ability of logic to describe the world as it is. Craig himself appeals to this necessity to describe the world as it is, so let’s start there.

The first mistake is to assume we have a stable and correct view of the world as it is, which even a brief overview of philosophy and physics should easily correct. Because no such thing is possible it is necessary to understand that past philosophical views arise historically according their contemporary state of scientific understanding. Aristotle is remarkable for his thought within the best scientific understanding of his day, which was his own physics; but his physics has necessarily become obsolete over millennia. That means we need to formulate our positions today on what is known at the edges of quantum physics and relativity. To that point, I find amusement in the efforts of those attempting to rescue Thomism, for example, from current knowledge rather than acknowledging that if Aristotle were writing today his works would be entirely different from what we know of him. Aristotle was a man in time doing the best possible with what he had, and his philosophy is not timeless truth. And so is the case for thinkers today. For me, modern physics is most fascinating for what it cannot answer.

Kant’s attempt to rescue objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism necessarily conceded so much ground that metaphysics itself finally foundered. Reason and its subordinate categories of the understanding, along with the intuitions of space and came to be seen as innate a priori structures of human consciousness. Their purpose was to make a representational order out of the jumble of sense date we receive from our surroundings. This representational world was something drawn in our imagination, and not reality in itself, but it sufficed for us to maintain ours survival. The ontology thus appears: 1. Existence? Yes. 2. What? Innate structure common to all human subjects. 3. How? Reduction of chaotic sense data into recognizable representations somewhat obedient to our logical manipulations.

Implication? Reason is empty without sense data. Intuition without reason is blind. Thus transcendental reasoning falls by the wayside as groundless and necessarily leads to transcendental illusion, or the illusion of reason, which Kant illustrates in the four antinomies.

But this leaves us in existential quandary. How good is our vision emerging from reason applied to sense data? Hume started us on the necessary skeptical inquiry concerning the applicability of our reasoning to reality as it is. Kant compromised by considering our representational creation as our proper world, where we live forever oblivious to the noumenal.

This position reached a crises mid 20th Century with quantum mechanics. Philosophers such as G.E. Moore and Hans Reichenbach strove mightily to save science from this chaos, much as Kant tried to secure if from Humean skepticism, and as Thomists try to rescue Aristotle. But others, such as Wigner and the later Wittgenstein were already acceding to the inevitable. Wigner’s Epistemological Law of Empiricism describes all rational/mathematical systems to be approximate, arbitrary as to chosen events, and bounded tightly to limits of space and time. Once we transcend those limits the logic of these apparent system pulls apart. Even worse, drawing from Poincare, multiple systems can equally describe the same spatial/temporal events. In a similar manner, Wittgenstein’s neatly ordered world of atomistic facts in logical relationships exploded to bits, and came back to together as commonly-shared word games.

Kants representational world finally showed itself as a useful, pragmatic fiction, but one that formed the basis for survival. And so today we look at the ontological question for reason from the viewpoint of our best science. From evolutionary biology, logic is an evolved trait that was largely responsible for our successful adaptation. From neuroscience, it is largely as Kant described, an innate structure to order the confusion of sense data and enable more or less intricate reasoning of probabilities in order to anticipate and plan. From physics, it is our reductive capacity that somehow participates in wave collapse – the only known mechanism for the reversal of entropy, which creates our world. This capacity reduces information, but complexity is then reintroduced into the environment over time, fueling the inescapable and relentless increase in entropy by which we approach the fundamental chaotic state of nature. Or as Carlo Rovelli explains in his relativistic interpretation, the blurring of reality to a minuscule subset we view as a subsystem in space and time – a creation through ignorance in the most literal sense.

No, nobody is claiming logic doesn’t exist, and we all necessarily use it because that is the innate mechanism of our consciousness. But it fails your test of describing world as it occurs. It creates the representational world we know, but is useless in the face of ultimate reality and has no existence outside of our thoughts, much as the color red only exists as our sensation. In any case, it has nothing at all to do with the question of god.

Response to Fr. MacMillan on Fundamental Existence and Knowledge

This is my response to the all-important question posed by Father Adam MacMillan on social media – a medium insufficient to a proper response. Fr. MacMillan asked:

“No it doesn’t have meaning at the quantum level, but why is the quantum level the fundamental level? What if the fundamental level is the human level, and it gets less fundamental in either direction? Hence why relativity and quantum don’t reconcile?

How human consciousness relates to fundamental reality and the irreconcilable natures of quantum physics and relativity have been the leitmotif of my own thinking going back decades to conversations with Leon Lederman at Fermilab in ‘81/‘82. Lederman’s life work was the pursuit of the Grand Unification Theory. Arguing from Poincaré’s Four Geometries and Wigner’s Epistemological Law of Empiricism, I maintained that such a theory was impossible. In the intervening decades my thinking on this has broadened and increased my conviction of this position. From what you wrote, I assume we agree on that fundamental irreconcilability, but differ on the role of a god/creator, and how our consciousness plays into this mystery.

If your suggestion is right that human understanding is the fundamental level, it would seem to follow that our correct view of existence should be capable of understanding it all levels. If our perspective is the fundamental truth, then everything should accord with it. But it doesn’t, which to me suggests that our limited conditions of objective thought are at fault. Let me suggest another approach to this.

The emergence of Quantum Mechanics a century ago was a detonation far more devastating than the atom bomb. Far more than just two cities, it obliterated any possibility of a “worldview”. Before going further, however, it is important to note that QM is a purely classical interpretation of a nonclassical reality. It is a measured quantification of probabilities seen from our emergent consciousness of classical events that points to a reality that violates our very conditions of thought. Rationality in the form of the principle of non-contradiction, locality (and now the very notion of space and time), and causality fail to penetrate the impermeable wall of decoherence. That is why the Copenhagen Interpretation remains the only viable approach. Bohr was a staunch Kantian who refused to project objective categories of thought onto the noumenal. Any attempt to describe quantum reality would necessarily be a projection of our conditions of thought onto an inconceivable reality, and therefore necessarily be wrong. Transcendental Illusion. Thus: shut up and calculate.

We can, therefore, only know of this reality negatively: without causality, without order, without time or space, etc. When we do attempt its description, it is necessarily with inadequate metaphors bound in space and time. Waves, quantum fields, superposition, events, etc. Even the name of “quantum” physics is inapt, as quanta don’t exist as separate entities (number), but simply in our measure of a quantum energy spike along a wave. We simply have no entry into this reality, which has had the unfortunate effect of much of physics descending into its own retreat to metaphysics. In too many cases physics has become the modern Scholasticism, with mathematics as its holy scripture creating ever more fantastical structures, and ending in meaningless conversations of how many worlds can fit on the head of a graviton. In short, the imposition of Ideas rather than knowledge from experience. Bacon would be aghast.

It seems to me the case that our consciousness, at least our objective reasoning, is an adaptation from mammalian consciousness to reduce the environment to carefully selected objects in a small subsystem we can manipulate for advantage. It has nothing to do with ultimate reality, and everything to do with survival. Objective thinking was of practical origin and that remains its primary characteristic; and reduction is the mechanism. Reduction from quantum superposition to eigentstate; from entanglement to causality. And from sensation to object, and from object to idea – all out of harmony with the underlying reality. In front of us (an unavoidable spatial metaphor not to be taken literally) is this incomprehensible reality known to us only as the tiniest reduction that we experience as space, time, color, and substance. We are literally blind to almost everything “in front of us”. Our “world” operates as it does because we interpret the energy we sense as small subsystems. Going back to Wigner, when we expand beyond that limited time, space, and chosen events the order dissipates and chaos recovers what belongs to it. As in the cases of QM and Relativity. A more contemporary expansion of this would be Carlo Rovelli’s Relativistic Interpretation where time and understanding rely on “Ignorance” of almost everything in existence.

But there is another aspect of human consciousness where you and I meet again, although with different interpretations: The more primordial mode of esthetic experience. It is here your most important question of all finds its rightful ground: “What if the fundamental level is the human level?” But of course we are – how could we be otherwise?

We are fundamentally entangled with all the rest of existence and not separate from “nature” in the way subject/object representation leads us to believe. In the less reductive event of esthetic experience we are aware of an immediate connection, and profoundly. The sensation of color or music is a direct response to the flow of energy that entangles us, and far more powerful than a concept of measurement and calculation. Or an Idea. You and I both search for a path to the holy, and we both look to human experience to provide that path. But as I see it, the trick is to resist metaphysical projection, by which I mean attributing our representational conditions of thought where they have no application. The idea of a creator, or a beginning at all, is such a projection that uproots us from the ground of experience. The hints that quantum reality provides deny such projections, and the insistence of a god, or creator, or rational explanation is the error of our impudently telling existence what it is. To listen esthetically/non-metaphysically, however is to listen to what existence has to tell us. This is what we need to learn to hear the fundamental reality in which we are already a part. “Too late for the gods, too early for Being”.

Perhaps still too early, but there are hints left for us along the way. Authentic esthetic events that point to a fulfilling of our true nature. Beethoven, Shakespeare, Blake, and Van Gogh immediately spring to my mind. Wittgenstein was resigned to our being limited to just pointing at the mystery, but I insist music, poetry, and art are our true modes of pointing – which is not really pointing but a mutually entangled communication.

And here we finally meet at the most profound experience: love. But then I’m an unapologetic and unreconstructed hippy from the Summer of Love, when Being did shine through for a brief moment and the music become so think in the air we couldn’t help but sing. But too early, and soon we retook shelter in the dark. We weren’t ready. That revelation, however, remains as one more trace pointing the way.

Which leads us to our final question of intentionality. I suspect it is so as our being is an instance of fundamental existence striving to experience itself, with man being one stop on that journey. And that is the fount of the holy drawn from the very essence of fundamental existence in which we share as part of fundamental existence. At at the font is overwhelming love, which we are yet too weak to be.