Dear Dejenie, I hope that I am wrong, but if we continue to be unable to make an attractive picture of our intuitions about the truths of Nature, most people will continue attached to religious explanations and fighting for apparently different Gods. My hope is that if scientists adhere to the self-organizing view and to the concept of an immanent God (a God that emerges from collective consciousness), then it would make no sense to fight for different transcendent Gods. 

1-laws of nature: unknowable; but we can build testable models (example: newton's law of inertia "a body at rest tends to stay at rest while a body in motion tends to stay in motion WORKS, until you approach the speed of light) which work until a new better model explains aspects previously unexplained (eg, Newton's law if inertia is good since, speaking for myself, I do not in my world approach the speed of light, but needs to be subsumed within Einstein's theory of relativity)

2-all information collected by Homo sapiens sapiens is limited by (a)what we can measure; (b) our culturally and historically derived assumptions--Niels Bohr wrote about

Article Quantum Explorers: Bohr, Jordan, and Delbrück Venturing into Biology

The above does not minimize the importance of developing models that can be tested: it does reject the false idea that revealed truth has or will be delivered to us (a false idea over which wars continue to rage)

Alfredo,

It might be thought that there is an ambiguity in your question. Laws are not observed, but only the phenomena that observe them. One might here be asking a question about the origin of explanation or theory, e.g. Darwinism or Quantum theory. Or one might be asking about the origin of general (universal?) patterns in nature themselves. If I understand correctly, you are asking about the latter. With regard to the latter, the question seems not so much about origination (except, as you've suggested, on a supernatural reading) as about ultimate foundations. And this question seems to be either an empirical question about the most general principles of nature or a question about justification. If the latter, we seem to be back to our first sense of asking about origin, namely, origin of explanation or theory. Perhaps there is something I have said that might help you clarify your aim.

Epistemology: something we need to think about more.

I am a "fan" of Karl Jaspers (see attached)

Article Descriptive psychopathology, phenomenology, and the legacy o...

Maybe 'laws' of nature are self-creating regularities - as in the Uroboros image of the universe as a snake eating its own tail. This would put them on a par with Prigogine's self-organizing dynamic states, though dependent on a rather different picture of temporality from the standard one. I don't think any of the older thinkers got near this sort of recursive picture which was best illustrated by Douglas Hofstadter in his 'Godel, Escher, Bach.'

Dear Ian, Chris and Lewis,

Ian, the question is about the origin of the pattern themselves (not about the origin of the theories about them).

I would agree with Chris´s answer if it was not tautological. I was actually thinking of primitive elements of Nature that combine to generate the world of experience (an "alphabet" - or Plato's Ideas in an Aristotelian interpretation - as Forms).

Lewis, I fully agree that revealed truths contribute to human conflicts. However, the human mind has not been successful in providing alternative sound explanations.

We can find for each law or principle sparse attempts to give naturalistic answers, but they are not much convincing! For instance, in the XIX Century Meyerson tried to explain all conservation laws on the basis of the Principle of Identity (assumed in Aristotelian Logics). With the elaboration of Non-Classical Logics (that violate that Principle), why these laws and principles were not discredited? If the Principle of Identity is not necessary for logically correct thinking, why should we assume the conservation of matter, energy (1st Law of Thermodynamics), movement (inertia), etc.? 

Hi Alfredo,

Recursiveness isn't tautology - it's spiral not circular. The Uruboros image applies to the structure of temporality, not to the patterns and behaviours generated within that overall structure, which include ourselves of course along with the 'objective' world. Maybe it would help to envisage ourselves as miniscule contributors to universal Aristotelian 'final causes'. This would still leave questions as to the origins of a 'primal chaos' but would offer an approach to understanding its subsequent (from our point of view) organisation.

Dear Chris, the tautology would be to explain self-organization by means of self-organizing activities... In the history of the concept of Self-Organization, Hal Ashby made this criticism to Heinz von Foerster (see link below). I understand that recursiveness is not circular, but to be explanatory it is necessary to formulate the recursive function ranging in a set of variables. How to define these variables? This is the implication of the question. It is so difficult that most people, scientists included, who think about this problem prefer to call God. 

https://emergentpublications.com/ECO/ECO_other/Issue_6_1-2_17_CP.pdf?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Dear Alfredo, the discussion between transcendent and immanent postures is a classical one, as you rightly point out. As such, they are inconmensurable - at least to-date.

I would like to shift to your last comment. First, as you know, there is no one single interpretation of self-organization. In any case, I would never claim that self-organiztion is to be explained by means of self-organized activities.

One good example about this is showing how self-organization arises from catalysing and self-catalising networks. That is, f.i. what Kauffman does.

On the other hand, Prigogine shows that self-organization emerges as a result of non-equilibroum dynamics.

Back to the main issue, the question remains, is there a possibility of overcoming the transcendent-immanent controversy? 

 This is an interesting and relevant question, Dear Alfredo. As far as I suppose, the best way that we still currently have to understand the laws and principles of nature, and eventually to advance step by step for the understanding of its origin is through the scientific method. However much humility for not trying to give steps larger that of what we can affectively achieve is required. Sometimes, it looks that some incredible conclusions developed on the basis of mere speculations/conjectures are advanced as absolute convictions.

Dear Carlos, the Kauffman book "Origins of Order" is a reference for this discussion. He departs from genes and assumes the 1 gene -1 protein relation (the old "dogma" of molecular biology). Then he constructs an adaptation landscape in which each living system has a capacity of survival depending on the possibilities of phenotypic plasticity on the basis of combinations of its genes - and calls this process "self-organization".  It is a very simplified version, but has a good purpose, you know: to provide a complement to Darwinian mechanisms. The latter are believed to be efficient to select systems, leading to the extinction of the non-selected ones, but they do not explain the origin of biological order. Kauffman's attempt in this book was restricted to biological self-organization, but I know he is now interested in cosmological issues. Some time ago I opened a RG question on the concept of "Poised Realm" that he proposed and got a patent (I cannot imagine the usage he intends for it); the RG question is still active, but although Kauffman has a RG page he does not seem to be interested in discussing there. I already sent two invitations to him. I will return to the immanent-transcendent issue in another post.

Dear Alfredo, such is indeed the case. A number of other friends and colleagues do have a page on RG, too. And yes: they too refuse to participate in the discussions.

I personally participate just for the fun. Many questions are sheer opinions: f.i.: do we need a definition of art? what is life? do scientists cook? etc. I know I may get many down-votes for this comment. I do not judge those posts. In fact I almost never participate in them.

I'd love to dig a little bit too in the hardcore of the discussion you offer to us all. I shall come to that later on. Cheers!

Dear Antonio,

This is a REALLY OPEN question! Thanks for your encouragement.

Speculations and conjectures are highly fallible and should be carefully evaluated. I think RG is useful for scientists and philosophers to discuss these difficult issues that would not be a part of a scientific publication - and would need lot of further elaboration to make a philosophical publication. 

Part of the problem is that the scientific method helps to understand the laws and principles, but not their origin. Even cosmological models are based on the laws and principle, leading to conjectures as the Big Bang - not to what could have existed before the Bang...

An exception is Brian Greene's String Theory - he departs from a primitive set of elements (strings) and attempts to build the observed reality from interactions of these elementary strings. The problem with this theory is that he relies too much on assumptions of hyper-symmetry, leading to prediction of many kinds of particles that may not exist at all...

My problem is that I am not satisfied with nihilist philosophers as Nietzche and Sartre. For Nietzche, if God does not exist, there is an eternal cycle of "the return of the same" - no spiral (as claimed by Chris), but just a closed circle. For Sartre, human achievements are not only against (mistaken) concepts of God but also against Nature. I will discuss this nihilist concept of transcendence in my next reply to Carlos. 

Dear Carlos, you asked about ways of overcoming the dichotomy immanent-transcendent.

I did not elaborate much on these concepts, but they deserve more comments.

It is possible to conceive transcendence without God - this is the case of Sartre's existential philosophy, which (enigmatically) conceives transcendence as "nihilification"(a jump into nothingness).

My personal preference is an immanent God, but in this case God would not be the creator of reality; on the contrary, God would be one of the products of the self-organized evolution of reality. This is Einstein's kind of God, not the God of religions.

Below I paste a summary of my philosophical approach, Triple-Aspect Monism. I already posted it in another RG thread, but nobody seemed interested. I also sent it three times to a Google list that discusses science and religion, but the moderator understandably did not post to the other members...

"Dear All:

I would like to introduce the main ideas of a philosophical framework called "Triple-Aspect Monism" (Pereira Jr, 2013; 2014). It is compatible with a forthcoming chapter with Ram Vimal and Massimo Pregnolato (Pereira Jr., Vimal and Pregnolato 2016). 

The proposal is intended to overcome the dichotomy of Materialism X Idealism, as well as the conflict between Theism and Atheism.

Nature is conceived as the totality of existence; a mind-independent eternal reality, composed of interacting, self-organizing elementary energy waveforms (like the "strings" of M-Theory). These elementary waveforms can be compared to the "alphabet" of reality. They exist eternally in potential states; their different combinations define different kinds of evolutionary processes that occur in different regions (for instance, in the planets of the solar system). The possible interactions of elementary waveforms define the state space of Nature. 

The potential states are actualized in three aspects (ontological categories), according to an order (each aspect being a condition of possibility for each other).

The first or immediate actualization of the big system is the physical aspect, characterized by the presence of matter. All systems composed of matter/energy are physical. In the universe or multiverse, there are regions where only the first aspect is actual.

The second actualization is form/information. This aspect contains all laws and principles of Nature, mathematical relations, logical inferential rules, information patterns, etc. The rules do not exist in the void, they are the results of the systematic self-organization of the elements of Nature. This aspect was largely developed with the emergence of biological systems that exchange all kinds of signals internally, with other similar systems and with the physical environment.

The third actualization we know about is feeling/consciousness. It occurs when a system feels the information it processes. Feeling is an affective state characterized by the capacity of the information to affect (or to cause, in the sense of Aristotle's Formal Cause) the physical structure of the system in a non-linear fashion (like Bernard Baars' Global Workspace, which defines a threshold for conscious activity in information processing systems - the difference is that his theory is cognitive, while mine identifies feeling as the mark of consciousness).

As far as science goes, there is no other ontological aspect to be assumed as a necessary concept for the scientific explanation of reality. 

God and spirituality are contained in the third aspect. God is real as an intentional object of desire of human consciousness.

Spirituality is the art of feeling. All kinds of artistic experience are based on feelings, and can contribute to improve human spirituality. Meditation techniques also can improve the art of feeling. Religion is a social phenomenon that provides opportunities of sharing feelings (faith) and improving them (praying).

Best Regards and a Happy 2016!

Alfredo Pereira Jr., PhD, L.D.

Institute of Biosciences

São Paulo State University - BRAZIL

Pereira Jr., A. (2013). Triple-Aspect Monism: A Conceptual Framework for the Science of Human Consciousness. In A. Pereira Jr. & D. Lehmann (Eds.), The Unity of Mind, Brain and World: Current Perspectives on a Science of Consciousness (pp. 299-337). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Pereira Jr., A. (2014). Triple-aspect monism: Physiological, mental unconscious and conscious aspects of brain activity. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, 13(2), 201-227.

Pereira Jr., A; Vimal, R.L.P and Pregnolato, M. (2016) Can Qualitative Physics Solve the Hard Problem? In: Poznanski, R., Tuszynski, J. and Feinberg, T. (Eds.) Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach. Singapore: World Scientific."

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Pereira & contributors,

At the opening of this thread you ask,

What is the origin of the laws and principles of nature?

Laws and principles, on one reading at least, are formulations in language, and one might read this question as concerned with the origin of our formulations: the various laws and principles of nature stated in text books, perhaps, or elucidated in various scientific or philosophical papers and books. That is an interesting kind of question, I think, and one might take up varieties of answers: psychological answers, perhaps, or sociological explanations, maybe. Or again, one might look to elucidate the means and methods employed in the various sciences and scholarly disciplines which culminate, on occasion, by presenting laws or proposed laws and principles of their various subject-matters. There is certainly sufficient precedent for pursuing those sorts of questions.

However, given the explanation of the question and the subsequent replies, it seems that something else is wanted here. So let me try to reformulate the question a bit to get at the apparent objective, as distinguished from the kind of question sketched in my paragraph above. One might ask, instead, What is the origin of the regularities in nature which are represented (or purported to be represented) in our various recognized or accepted laws and principles regarding nature and natural events?

This question is perhaps a bit wordy, but it also strikes me as an interesting kind of question which might, indeed lead off in to the directions of replies above, concerned with transcendence or immanence, causes outside or inside of nature in some suitable sense.

One way to look at the question is in terms of contemporary physical cosmology. There are specific regularities of physical interactions (laws) associated with each of the four known or recognized (physical) forces of nature; and in accordance with contemporary cosmologies, associated with the "big bang" theory, and related hypotheses, there was an original unity of the four forces (gravity, electro-magnetism, the weak force and the strong nuclear force) in a regime of extreme high energies. Subsequently, as things cooled off, the four forces separated out by a process of "symmetry breaking" with the result that they each came to operate distinctly. On this account the origin of the fundamental regularities of physics, associated with the laws of the four forces, was in "a regime of extreme high energy" --where each of the distinctive forces fails to operate in accordance with their separate, recognized regularities, or one might say, where the four forces do not exist separately. 

I am sure that this kind of answer will not satisfy everyone, and perhaps there are variations on the initial question which I have not recognized here and which need to be elaborated. For one thing, we tend to think that not all laws of nature are physical laws, and much more could be said on that theme. But it seems worth emphasizing that the question might be understood in the ways I have outlined above. 

Consider, briefly a related point. We recognize various chemical regularities, sometimes expressed as a matter of laws of chemical composition or chemical reaction. But above a certain energy level, the chemical elements cannot exist. It stands to reason, then, that in the early universe, there was nothing to exemplify the (presently) recognized regularities or laws of chemistry. In that sense, the laws of chemistry did not hold.

I hope some of this may prove useful.

H.G. Callaway

Alfredo,

Regarding Triple-aspect monism,

1) Is the existence of matter presumed to be eternal?

2) While the first aspect may be a necessary condition for the second, and the second for the third, your overview does not indicate that the former is a sufficient condition for the latter. Shouldn't sufficient conditions be part of the statement of origins?

Regarding the initial question I tend not to be able to say much about any fundamental order but more about the order we see and code into theories. If we could experience the universe as one big happening, we would simply know it all. But to do that we our brains would have to be the universe. Since we are not that big and must fit our knowledge into a very small entity we must impose a kind of data compaction order, which is then our theory. That is the order we can grasp and we are the creator and god over our own models.

Alfredo: I have a question regarding triple aspect monism. I can see two aspects one our subjective experience and one our objective explanations. One can take an objective view point and see the world in front of our noses as objective reality. Or one can take a subjective view point and see those same experiences as symbolic representations. That seems to me to be aspects i.e. different views of the same thing. Is the third aspect in your theory qualify as being a different view or is it simply an additional property. Its the use of "aspect" that gives me trouble.

Dear H.G. Callaway, many thanks for the rephrased question, I will add it to the Intro.

Your thoughts are welcome! A good remark about laws of chemistry and - indirectly - about the principle of conservation of matter. A classical Materialist view is not sufficient to account for the complexity of reality and for the pathways of evolution.

The next question would be: is "high energy" (implying more than high temperature, I guess) the contemporary "apeiron" (the primitive stuff from which everything springs)? And what is the relation between high energy and low entropy? We have discussed this problem before, but no acceptable solution for the reformulated question in view. 

One of the issues is that if the four physical forces are somehow fused, we lose some of the different interacting elements we could have to construct a self-organizing explantation of the process of evolution of reality. Maybe the big difference between a theological and a self-organizing explanation of the origins of order is that God is a single entity, while self-organization requires a plurality of (to some degree) independent elements to interact and make things emerge!

Dear Ian, many thanks for two excellent questions.

1) In TAM matter is not eternal; it is only a phase in a larger process that begins with a kind of "high energy" initial state of pure potentiality - however, it is a necessary phase for the other phases to become actual;

2) They are not sufficient. For instance, in a planet where material systems are in thermodynamical equilibriium, nothing more happens! In this planet, the evolution of reality stops in the first phase (aspect). In other planets, there may be low entropy, and then the second aspect becomes actual (for instance, chemical clocks spontaneously appear). Complex patterns are formed = the second aspect is present, but it is not sufficient for the third aspect (feeling/consciousness). Something more is needed: systems able to feel the messages (in the example: to recognize the regularities in the chemical clock). In our planet, the pathway that leads to the third aspect (consciousness) is the emergence of living systems and biological evolution.

However, as long as there is life and consciousness in our planet, sufficient conditions should have been attained here (but not in other planets of the solar system, as far as we know). Besides information (in the DNA, RNA, proteins, etc.), living systems are characterized by metabolic cycles that may have begun with primitive acids (as proposed by some scientists in the "RNA world" explanation of the origin of life). What are the sufficient conditions for the emergence of these metabolic cycles? Nobody knows with certainty, but the answer is not far from current scientific approaches based on physical-chemistry and adaptive systems theories. 

The identification of sufficient conditions for consciousness is far more difficult. According to my approach, it is related to the existence of feelings, which are related to wavelike processes that affect living systems (and possibly other, similar in this regard, but not-living systems). Plant tissue, having the morphology of a syncytium, may probably be able of forming hydro-ionic waves that would correspond to a primitive sensibility to conditions as environmental heat or sound. In the brain and body of animals, sentience is possibly related to wavelike activities in glial cells, extracellular and cerebral fluids, blood and muscles. The evolution of neuronal networks endow animals with more and more powerful cognitive capabilities that diversify the capacity of feeling that begun with plants. In the human species, consciousness is cognition with feeling (or feeling improved by cognition). The sufficient conditions for this evolutionary process encompass a series of factors that I will not be able to describe here - in fact, it is hard even to imagine!

Dear Wolfgang, thanks for expressing your trouble with TAM.

I do not define the aspects in their relation to the process of knowledge. In classical Theory of Knowledge, there is a knowing subject and the objects of cognition.

I define the aspects in a dynamical ontology, where they correspond to phases in the evolution of reality. The first phase is matter/energy. All systems we experience in scientific contexts have this aspect; otherwise, we could not measure them. Both subjects and objects of knowledge actualize the first aspect. The subject has a body and the object has physical properties.

The second aspect is form/information. Again, both subjects and objects have it. Biological systems have it in their DNA, protein conformation and electrostatic active sites (that allow the lock-and-key biological signaling), etc. The objects too: from the regularities of physical processes to information processing machines. However, actualizing the second aspect is not sufficient for the third (for being conscious).

The third aspect is not symbolic (syntactic), but depends on feeling. Also the third aspect has a subjective and an objective sides! The subjective side is the feeling Self, while the objective side is composed of the contents of conscious experiences (representations, images, symbols, all kinds of patterns that appear in our conscious experience - including esthetical and ethical forms). 

Therefore, the categorization made in TAM seems to be orthogonal to your distinction of subjectivity and objectivity.

Dear all,

The laws in which nature functions that are truths of nature are form nature it self, they are very many, complicated and simple, almost impossible  to know and describe  precisely, but the written expressions we humans put them as laws and principles of nature originate from our limited understanding of the physical world through intuitions, described by mathematics and verified to a certain degree of precision by empirical testing. 

Dear Dejenie, I hope that I am wrong, but if we continue to be unable to make an attractive picture of our intuitions about the truths of Nature, most people will continue attached to religious explanations and fighting for apparently different Gods. My hope is that if scientists adhere to the self-organizing view and to the concept of an immanent God (a God that emerges from collective consciousness), then it would make no sense to fight for different transcendent Gods. 

Dear Alfredo, I personally buy the immanent version, too. However, the issue is not who buys what and why. Certainly an immanentist view of nature is hard to match with a creationist conception of the world. The philosophical tradition about it is long enough, even though not so well known. In the western thought it all begins recently with Spinoza, although many other traces can be identified before.

Being as it might be, a self-organized view of nature is much more tenable with a dynamic view, rather than with necessity and determinacy.

I'd like to re-phrase the issue thus, if allowed: Is the world logical? That is, does nature have already a logic? If so, the task of mankind consiste in unveiling, digging or uncovering such a logic. Now, in case the world is not logical and nature does not possess a logic of its own, then the task of science, philosophy and the arts consists in bringing, putting, or implementing a logic, then. (I personally have my own take here, but that is not the issue, other).

Not to mention that good spearhead science does not talk about laws any longer, but about patterns. The shift seems quite suggestive, I believe.

Dear Alfredo,

A belated reply to your post of 19 hours ago about self-organizing recursive functions. So far as I can see, Ashby did not consider any concept of 'final causes', which indeed can only exist if time is less linear than is usually supposed. If, however, one allows for some such possibility, it is then possible to suppose that we ourselves make a small contribution to defining the relevant variables, in a kind of reversal of the cosmological 'anthropic principle'.

Dear Chris, are you thinking of Cramer's Transactional interpretation of quantum theory? 

It is summarized in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation

In our special issue of Quantum Biosystems (see link below) more than one author used this interpretation. It may be a good solution, although I suspect it is the same Uroboros myth in a new version! What do you think?

http://www.quantumbiosystems.org/eng/index.php?pagina=4

Dear Carlos, I do not agree with the transformation of the question into a question about the world being logical or not, because we already know that it is. The very existence of laws and principles of Nature tells us that it is. The problem is to understand the origin of these regularities.

Nature's logics is probably not the kind of closed logics Hegel thought of (it is a dialectical logics, and, therefore, spiral-like, not a closed vicious circle, but Hegel thought it as being closed in the sense that the final step - the Absolute Spirit, or human self-consciousness - resumes the beginning - the Absolute Idea, or God's thinking).

After studying self-organizing systems for 35 years, I am convinced they have an "open" logics (dynamical interacting independent units generating new phenomena) that is still not well understood, but one that we can understand. Cournot's concept of chance may be the best approximation to this open logics we have. It is not really a concept of chance, but the concept of a semi-deterministic process of interaction of statistically independent units, generating what Lungarzo and I called "relational collectives" (see link below).

I am not sure if the process of generating Nature's order implies some kinds of non-classical logics. The main intuitive idea is that the order of Nature would derive from chaotic dynamic interactions of elementary stuff. To make this process possible, the elementary stuff cannot be so undetermined as Anaximander's apeiron. We need a model of elementary units similar to string theory. I am glad to see that Wolfgang Baer opened a RG question about the origin of strings. If we are not able to find a sound solution to these problems of the origin of natural order, we should at least know more about our limitations.

Article A cournotian approach to the emergence of relational collectives

Alfredo,

I hope you'll forgive my putting my comments in the form of questions. I am an outsider to this area of discourse, so I am in the position of a student. 

So the account of origins will be descriptive and thus empirical in the sense I intended above? If so, the emergence of laws might then depend to some extent on context. For example, were we permitted to image the emergence of a non-carbon based life form, the origin story would be different from the sort discussed so far (as least in the "second and third aspects")? 

If this were allowed, are you contemplating general laws of emergence? or patterns (here I adopt the term Carlos has used) of emergence more specific to local contexts? 

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Pereira  & contributors,

I am not sure how far you may want to pursue the point here, but you comment concerning entropy struck me as interesting. You wrote:

The next question would be: is "high energy" (implying more than high temperature, I guess) the contemporary "apeiron" (the primitive stuff from which everything springs)? And what is the relation between high energy and low entropy? We have discussed this problem before, but no acceptable solution for the reformulated question in view.

---End quotation

There is a more or less standard answer to your question regarding the relation of high energy and low entropy. You write of seeing "no acceptable solution for the reformulated question in view," but it is unclear, to me at least, how weighty the problem may be in your perspective. I don't see contemporary physical cosmology as put in question on these grounds, or at least it strikes me that some additional argument would be needed.

The more or less standard answer comes from Roger Penrose. The idea is that though there is indeed a high entropy component to the postulated "high energy regime." from which the four know forces, and related particles are thought to emerge sequentially, still there is also a low entropy component. Specifically, as soon as massive particles emerge, given just minimal lack of uniformity in their distribution, perhaps due to quantum fluctuations in the background, we get a situation of low gravitational entropy. This starts to increase due to gravitational clumping, with the eventual emergence of stars and galaxies. In some sense, then, the useful energy in the universe is a consequence of the low gravitational entropy at the point when massive particles emerge in nearly uniform distribution.

One tends to think of a random distribution of hot gas (in a box, in the usual picture), say, as a situation of maximal or high entropy; but given just minimal lack of uniformity in the distribution of a large mass, spread out over the entire volume, this represent a high gravitational potential energy and low gravitational entropy. As the mass begins to clump, entropy increases.  

So the idea is that the low initial entropy of the universe is, or is chiefly?, a matter of low gravitational entropy. Have you taken this argument into consideration in your expressed doubts? Any thoughts?

H.G. Callaway

Dear Ian, I will try to answer:

1) The account cannot be empirical, because we do not have sources of information (maybe we have, but have not recognized them as such). It must be compatible with available evidences. We would need to describe a state of affairs that generates (in the sense of Chomsky´s generative grammar) Nature´s regularities. I actually think of a generative mechanisms composed of an alphabet of elementary waveforms and their free, self-organizing interactions. The model would be similar to current views of epigenetics (a set of elements - the genome - that dynamically interact internally and with the environment, making new structures - the phenotype - emerge);

2)  Yes, the emergence of laws is context-dependent, because the elementary stuff is not sufficient to drive the process deterministically; the direction of evolution depends on contigence; the whole process is semi-deterministic (in this regard, the model may be different from Chomsky´s, but I am not sure if generative grammar is really deterministic);

3) The origin of a non-carbon forms of life would be different from carbon-based forms, but if these non-carbon systems besides being alive are also conscious, they should satisfy the conditions for the emergence of the third aspect. More precisely, for an electronic robot to be conscious it has to be provided with a mechanism for feeling (this mechanism is absent in current prototypes of conscious robots - this is my opinion, but it was disputed by Pentti Haikonen in our private e-mail discussions - he argues that his robot feels pain - see link below);

4) The question about general laws of emergence is relevant, and - in the context of a theory of self-organization - maybe equivalent to the question about the origin of Nature's order. Unfortunately, my intuition is that there are not general laws of emergence, or - in other words - emergences, in a Cournotian approach, are strong in the sense defined by Achim Stephan (not reductible to previous states). This issue leads to the discussion of the structure of time, as Chris Nunn does. However, if the factors that determine the quality of emergent phenomena were completely random, an answer to the proposed question would be actually impossible. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gOWCVfnN-E

Ooops, dear Alfredo. I wouldn' t be that sure that the world already is logical. The best proof about the doubt is precisely the emergence of non-classical logics as in contrast to formal classical logic (FCL). The world is not deductive, and instead various deductive systems are possible. Whereas as the semantics of FCL is the real world as such (or the world überhaupt), the semantics of NCL is the possible. For example...

Dear Alfredo,

I would agree that it is almost certainly wrong to see God as outside his universe. I think in a way that idea can only arise from a false presumption that the relation of God to universe is one of token cause to token effect. I see God more as reasons - which have no place in time or space and are a bit more like types, although they are not what we normally think of as types. I think if you look for origins of reasons, as others have intimated, you tend to end up with an infinite regress - you just have the reason for the reasons. 

Whether reasons are 'immanent' I am not sure because I am not sure what that means.

My other thought is that 'self-organising' may be too general and too strong. Most of the universe may be pelting off into nowhere in order to leave an empty desert at zero degrees Kelvin. That seems more self-disorganising. Isn't self-organising by definition a special case - dear to our hearts but not to be found much in a New Jersey parking lot on a wet November Tuesday. The dynamic world seems to be self-conserving, in that electrons do not just lie down and say 'can't be bothered now' but the dissipative non-equilibrium model would suggest that the self-organising bits are just the lucky few?

I do like the idea that as scientists we can all club together and have the same God, though. So much more civilised and polite - and also comforting. Maybe we are growing older.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Edwards,

Nice to see you back here. I thought your comment, as follows, significant of the plausible limits of the "self-organizing" universe:

You wrote:

Most of the universe may be pelting off into nowhere in order to leave an empty desert at zero degrees Kelvin. That seems more self-disorganising. Isn't self-organising by definition a special case - dear to our hearts but not to be found much in a New Jersey parking lot on a wet November Tuesday. The dynamic world seems to be self- conserving, in that electrons do not just lie down and say 'can't be bothered now' but the dissipative non-equilibrium model would suggest that the self-organising bits are just the lucky few?

---End quote

Of course, no one really know what would happen as the universe as a whole approached "zero degrees kelvin." I think that absolute zero is physically impossible, in any case. But its certainly a grim prospect. Eddington was content to think that the "running down of the universe" was a one-off matter, though others have speculated on cycles. We may never know, its all trillions of years off, on the most reasonable accounts. 

It looks like we might have to be content with some self-organizing in the universe, against a bleaker, thermodynamic background.

H.G. Callaway

I think that the word God is too much or too less to consider the operation of nature. I think that this semantic resource has lost its meaning today, in the debate about what is reality or what is nature. However, the debate about God is very present, if we locate the context of subjectivity in the plane of morality and conduct and human and social expectations.

Some exits have been made since political philosophy or philosophy of morals who tried to separate the public domain of the domain of the subjective beliefs. This output tried to confine the individual the source of your choice, so that this choice does not conflicted with other choices based on the findings made by the scientific activity, for example.

I do not know if it's the best way out. The only thing I know is that if anyone needs God, then search for it no matter if within religions or beliefs in the most hidden. I see no insurmountable conflict between religious beliefs and other values ​​supported by other knowledge systems. As Max Weber said, modernity lives in continual conflict between gods and demons!

I think this is an improper question. The laws of nature do not have an origin other than the fact that everything that exists has a nature (called the law of identity).  The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. (See Ayn Rand), Actions are based on the nature of the entities that act. Any other approach would imply mysticism but then you would have to throw reason out the window and deal in fantasy.

Dear Edwin, 

Thank you for the criticism. Your position seems to be the same of Emile Meyerson. In this case, how do you take into account the existence of Non-Classical Logics - coherent logical systems that discard the Principle of Identity?

Dear Carlos, you wrote: "I wouldn' t be that sure that the world already is logical. The best proof about the doubt is precisely the emergence of non-classical logics..."

Alfredo's reply: Non-Classical Logics is logical!

Dear Jonathan,

Self-Disorganization is a kind of Self-Organization where/when the order/quantity of information of the system decreases. It is different from Hetero-Organization (when the order increases because of the action of an external agent) and Hetero-Disorganization (when order decreases because of the action of an external agent). These four modalities were identified by the French-Brazilian philosopher Michel Debrun.

In the context of our discussion, "Immanent" means "embedded".

Your contributions to the debate are always appreciated.

Dear All:

I must mention that the deepest contemporary approach to the issues raised by the question is Joseph Brenner's book "Logic in Reality". It is freely available in the Internet (see link below) - the author also kindly sent me the Brazilian version. I just read some pages and discussed some ideas with him. It is too early to evaluate the proposal, but we seem to have a minor disagreement. I tend to combine an evolutionary perspective with the Spinozian Sub specie aeternitatis approach (see the second link below for this Latin expression), while Brenner departs from a simple initial state to construct the complexity of reality using Lupasco's non-classical logics. The problem I see in his approach is to explain how logical rules are immanent to reality (or how they are embedded in Nature in the initial state; if they are not contained as a possibility in the initial state then the system is not able of self-organization). In contrast, for a self-organizing approach that is based on eternal potentialities there is no problem of defining an initial state that encompasses all possible developments of the system.

http://14.139.206.50:8080/jspui/bitstream/1/1430/1/Brenner,%20%20Joseph%20-%20Logic%20in%20Reality.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_specie_aeternitatis

I don't know what non classical logics are but I do know you cannot escape the law of identity--if a thing is, it is something in particular--if it is nothing in particular it is nothing- you cannot get around this by word games which I suspect  is what is going on-

Dear Edwin,

Before contemporary logics (formal logics that violate one or more of the three Aristotelian principles - Identity, Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle) the whole history of philosophy has moved around this debate, beginning with Parmenides' emphasis on identity and Heraclitus' emphasis on transformations that keep a "Logos" invariant. If you think non-Parmenidian thinking is a word game, it is your choice.

[New comment added in January 7] It is necessary to distinguish the Principle of Invariance from the Principle of Identity. Scientific laws are based on the Principle of Invariance. The Principle of Identity is trivially false, since it states that an entity is always identical to itself. When a person dies, or when a child is born, or when a biological species is extinct, or a new species appears, the Principle of Identity is violated. The Principle of Invariance states that everything changes in time, but among the changing patterns we can identify a second-order pattern that remains invariant. What is invariant is defined in reference to what is not. For instance, in Newtonian physics, the spatial position of a body changes, but the change occurs in a fixed rate (velocity). The velocity changes, but the rate of change (acceleration) may be invariant for some time. Physical forces are based on invariances, in the sense of proportions between some events (causes) and other events (effects).

Dear Alfredo,

I prefer immanent to embedded. The former I do not understand. The latter I suspect to be deliberate obfuscation, at least as commonly used. Embedding is something that we do with matter as naively conceived. To descend from a sophisticated view of the world, whether Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, or Kant to 'embedding' seems a bit like descending from the cooking of Yottam Ottolenghi to burgers and French fries.

Dear Jonathan, there is no deliberate obfuscation. For instance, genetic information is embedded in the DNA. The sequences of molecules "encode" a pattern. This is not a naive concept of matter; on the contrary, this is the hylomorphic Aristotelian concept in new clothes. Matter is "possibility of being" and always contains the possibility of actualization of many Forms. In other words, Forms or patterns are embedded in material systems. How the Form "acts" on Matter is a perennial issue. With molecular biology, generative grammars and Turing machines we are beginning to understand how it happens. My 10 y.o. son has no problem in transferring (e.g., downloading) a complex dynamic pattern (the Minecraft game and its "Mods") from a material system to another material system. When he installs the game in his computer, the game is embedded in the computer. If you prefer to say that the game is "immanent" to the computer it is your choice.

A free access paper by RG active researcher Marc Tessera (attached)

Alfredo,

My answer to your yesterday's question about whether I think Cramer's 'transactional' interpretation might provide a sufficient basis for the universal operation of Aristotle's 'final causes' and the emergence of regularities that we sometimes think of as laws of nature got lost for some reason, so here it is again.

My prejudice is that Cramer's picture, a bit like the 'eternal inflation' variation on Everett's 'many worlds' (which could also do the job since all possible worlds are said to exist), comes into the 'clutching at straws' category. But I guess we're all into that in this context. My own straw clutching involves supposing that there are two different sorts of time - the metric time of relativity theory and a supposed 'real', albeit subjective, time that exists independently but can feed back to affect dynamics occurring in metric time.

The bonus over Cramer, perhaps, is that it suggests a basis for the universal temporal reference frame that seems to be needed (see e.g. Johann Masreliez' work, though I think his specific proposal for a fifth 'scale' dimension is possible overkill and also implies conflicts with observation)

Alfredo,

 I am not sure that understand you fully. The laws of nature are human inventions. They are the result of statistical investigations of natural processes. But I think this was not the kind of answer you asked for. 

Well, there are rules, principles and may be also laws. If not we wouldn't exist. 

If the question is much deeper and you asked why we can find such principles in nature your question is philosophical or on a meta level. So we leave the area of science an we only can speculate, belief or hope. 

May be your suggestion is much deeper, you could ask " why is there anything and not even nothing." 

Dear Edwin and Alfredo, there are some non-classical logics which do not respect the principle of identity. Such is, f.i. the case of intuitionist logic.

On the other side, one cannot easily claim "NCL is logic", for precisely different notation forms are possible. Hence, that claim is just void. In other words, the great thing about NCL is exactly the acknowledgement that a plurality of logics is possible.

I open a post on NCLs some time ago. Almost no one replied/commented to it. This shows that not many people are truly acquainted with the subject. No problem about that, of course.

If there is non identity logic then this wipes itself out--the claim and defense of non identity logic would mean that the claim itself has no identity.

Dear Wilfried, I stated explicitly that this is a philosophical question. There are philosophical methods that can provide better answers than pure speculation. The philosophical/interdisciplinary method that I defend consists of elaborating philosophical theories on the basis of scientific concepts. For instance, the quantum wavefunction is a scientific concept; relating it with Aristotle's potentialities is a philosophical/interdisciplinary approach. As most scientists are not accostumated with this kind of reasoning, they may well consider it as a modality of metaphysics (in the Kantian sense of the term), but it is not. It is based on physical considerations, not on principles "beyond nature". I classify Sartre's question "why there is being, not nothing?"as a metaphysical question. The question I make here does not belog to that category of questions. The question here is about the processes that lead to the regularities of nature studied by science. Many scientists and philosophers assume that the answer is "God created the world this way". If we are not satisfied with this kind of answer, how to explain the origin of current Nature's order on the basis of Nature's own evolutionary process? This is the question.

Dear Edwin, you are confusing the identity of statements (their truth value) with the identity of the referents. There are Non-Classical Logics (as Temporal Logics) that deny only the identity of referents in time. For instance, a living system is (considered to be) never identical to itself in two temporal moments. The classical example is Heraclitus' river that is never identical to itself each time it is observed. It is also possible to have a logics that accepts that a statement can be true and false at the same time, under the same conditions. This is, in a sense, the basis of Hegel's dialectical logics. In contemporary logics, this would correspond to the family of paraconsistent logics, logical systems that allow contradictions (if they are restricted to some parts of the system, and, therefore, they do not imply the inconsistency of the whole system - then the name "paraconsistent").

My point is that these non-classical logics are compatible with scientific reasoning. Therefore, the Principle of Identity is not the basis of scientific laws and principles.

Dear Carlos, you wrote: "one cannot easily claim "NCL is logic"".

Alfredo's reply: As far as NCL are formal systems that allow pragmatically efficacious and efficient inferences (including scientific inferences), they are as logical as classical logics. The plurality of logics we find in the contemporary philosophy of science is healthy; no privileged one can be claimed to be "the logics". All them are logical.

The interesting conclusion for the philosophy of science is that laws and principles cannot be based on a specific approach to logics; other justifications for the laws and principles should be pursued.

If quantum mechanics is right, the world is a fluctuation of nothing into a lot of somethings with opposite sibns of their properties in order to preserve the original tptal nothingness. Much ado about bothing or "maximum effect, minimum outkay".The large number of things is just an increase in entropy whicjh means that the probability increases with the number of possibilities. Thus the world is created by entropy with the constraint of total nothingness.

Dear Harry,

Many thanks for raising this highly relevant and controversial issue!

I understand that the assumption of nothingness is an interpretation of quantum theory, not an implication (theorem) of the theory.

Philosophically, alghough there is a nihilist current that would appreciate this interpretation, for me (at least) it makes no sense that reality is a fluctuation of nothingness. There are two better options:

1) The traditional Creationist view (God creates Nature with its order - laws, principles, regularities - and the resulting chemical elements, biological species, etc.) that works for common sense and for many scientists with religious tendencies; and

2) The alternative self-organizing view that I am advocating here.

In the latter view, a realist interpretation of the quantum wavefunction is more adequate. The wavefunction is conceived as composed of real, interacting, superposed and entangled elementary waveforms that exist eternally. We cannot observe elementary waveforms directly. Reality, as observed and studied by science, is always a combination of these elementary waveforms. At each observation act, the complex of interacting waveforms decoheres, generating a macrostate with fixed properties (quantitative and qualitative). We can directly measure only these resulting macrostates.

I am not sure that Harry is quite right to say everything cancels out. All energy values are positive, with the odd exception of certain Bose ground states I think. And matter and anti-matter forgot to quite cancel out so we have more of the former I think. And I suspect that in field theory a patch of nothingness would be a seriously real issue with a strongly positive value for absence creating a gross asymmetry that would entail a mode of excitation.

I worry that Harry is using too thing-ist an approach?

Dear Jonathan, Nevertheless the world is a free lunch. The overwhelming amount of matter was annihilated by antimatter yielding a tremendous surplus of photons over particles. What is left is probably something that has a property balancing another opposite property. The world is a free lunch. Its total energy equals zero. Gravity is a nrgative energy balancing all the existing poitve energy, Even if you believe in God. He created the world out of nothing.

Alfredo,

thank you for clarifying your question. Sorry to say, but I doubt in the possibility of an answer. We cannot look behind the mirror in analyzing the reflection of light rays. It is like mathematics. You never can prove the mathematical axioms with math.

We just have problems answering the question "what is reality?" As long as we have no answer to this question, it does not make sense to ask about the origin of natural laws, which date back to the interpretation of human observations of the behavior of things we do not understand really.

Quantum mechanics shows us our limitations hardly. It is a mathematical model, but what is a wave function? Mathematics not an natural thing. What about the entanglement of quantum objects over almost any distance? Very mysterious. Or the string theory: what's about strings? We do not know. 

Nevertheless, you can of course ask the above question. However, I consider it is a waste of energy. There are so much enigmatic miracles in this universe. Let us try to solve some of them.

Alfredo,

the laws in physics and also the quantum mechanics are mathematics. We use mathematical systems which shows a behavior similar to natural things we observe in physics or other sciences. But don't forget - it is mathematics, that is a human build model of the behavior of real things we do not know. No physician is able to answer what is an electron really. We are not able to answer questions like "what is mass" or "what is charge" and "why attract plus and minus each other". If we assume the particle zoo everything is (nearly) quite easy. But now we have dark energy or dark matter we do not know what it could be. So many questions.

You cannot start science or the universe with nothing. Nothing is not another king of thing. It is no thing. The concept itself could not be even be formed unless there was something. Nothing pre supposes that there is something. So we can say that there is no thing of a certain kind in a certain space. Or we can talk about zero in math: it is a absence of a unit. Zero presupposes than there are units.  Reifying zero or nothing leads to a dead end. For example, the universe cannot have been created out of nothing. Causality pre supposes existence..

The "Laws of Nature" are simply a result of our observations of what nature does.

Glen: I agree. I would say it is our discovery of how nature works.

Dear Edwin,

Even as a non-thing-ist I am pleased to agree with your point about nothing starts from nothing. 

Dear Wilfried:

You are stating your belief that the question has no answer. To make a philosophical argument out of the belief, you need to show the reasons why a answer is not possible.

However, at this moment we already have six answers (below). if we have six answers, then the question is answerable - except if you prove that all these answers are wrong!

Candidate causes of Nature's order:

a) God;

b) Nothingness;

c) Identity (the Laws and Principles are ultimate realities, like axioms);

d) Circularity (the literal Uroboros metaphor);

e) Spirality (small regularities feed themselves to become large regularities in time);

f) Self-Organization (there are primitive and eternal interacting elements that generate the laws and principles).

Jonathan: What is a nothing-ist?

Dear Artur,

Can I classify you in the Identity explanatory category (letter "c" in my last message above)?

Dear Edwin,

A non-thing-ist (to be read 'non(thing-ist)' ) should not be confused with a nothing-ist.

Dear Edwin, Jonathan is attached to a "process view" or reality, one that denies the relevance of concepts such as "substance' and "property", as (not) explained by Whitehead in his conference/book "Process and Reality".

Dear Alfredo,

Aren't your categories d, e and f aspects of the same hypothetical dynamic?

Dear Chris, They are variations on the same theme, but the underlying mechanisms are thought to be different. Combinations are possible, but for analytical reasons I am not accounting for them yet.

Category "d" is the closed circle; the defenders assume that there is no real change in time; the laws and principles of Nature compose cycles that return to the same previous states (Nietzche's view); the changes are apparent (while for "c" - Identity view - there are not even apparent changes).

Category "e" is your spiral. It suggests a mechanism by which small variations feed back positively and build themselves as the laws and principles as we know them. Maybe Charles Saunders Peirce is in this category, since he claims that laws and principles are 'habits'' of the universal Mind that change in time. Also Darwinian evolution with its gradualism may be placed here.

Category "f" is idiosyncratic because it combines the existence of eternal principles (Platonism in the Aristotelian interpretation) with a dynamical process of self-organization based on Cournot's concept of independent interacting elements. I am not sure if I can place other researchers except myself here. 

I should add another category ('g') to accomodate other concepts of self-organization, as for instance Erich Jantsch's book "The Self-Organizing Universe", Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's "autopoiesis", Henri Atlan's "order from noise", Per Bak's "self-organized criticality" or Herman Haken's "synergetics".  I have studied all these authors before formulating my version of self-organization that appears in Triple-Aspect Monism.

I do not understand what a process view of reality is. A process has to be a process or action of something--processes cannot be disembodied.

Dear Edwin, I am fond of Whitehead's discussion of feelings in Nature in his provocative book, but agree with you that processes cannot be disembodied.

Jonathan will probably argue that the concept of a body is compromised with naive Materialism. i have discussed this issue with him before...

I have argued that the scientific description of natural processes uses the concept of mathematical function, which depends on set theory, which depends of an assumption of independent elements.

I do not see a problem from materialism. I view consciousness as an emergent property of the brain but not reducible to it. I can expand if anyone is interested.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear all,

I just watched the following BBC documentary on contemporary physical cosmology for a second time. It strikes me as well worth a viewing, if some readers have not seen it. It runs over n hour, though there are also excerpts available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPv1sjMv37w

The basic question posed is "What happened before the big bang?" and I think some may be surprised at the question but also, perhaps, at the scientific humility involved in asking it --and in the variety of possible answers considered.

One may still have favorites, of course. But at the least, this video documents the changes that have taken place in physics over the last decade. 

H.G. Callaway

Dear Edwin, Non-Reductive Physicalism (NRP) was my preference before I began to build Triple-Aspect Monism. Do you have good replies to Jaegwon Kim's criticism of NRP (link below)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaegwon_Kim#Argument_against_non-reductive_physicalism

Dear H.G, here is the text below the documentary and some comments made in the You Tube discussion section:

What Happened Before the Big Bang BBC Horizon Documentary

They are the biggest questions that science can possibly ask: where did everything in our universe come from? How did it all begin? For nearly a hundred years, we thought we had the answer: a big bang some 14 billion years ago.

But now some scientists believe that was not really the beginning. Our universe may have had a life before this violent moment of creation.

Horizon takes the ultimate trip into the unknown, to explore a dizzying world of cosmic bounces, rips and multiple universes, and finds out what happened before the big bang.

Neil Turok, Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, working with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, has proposed a radical new answer to cosmology’s deepest question: What banged?

Answer: Instead of the universe inexplicably springing into existence from a mysterious initial singularity, the Big Bang was a collision between two universes like ours existing as parallel membranes floating in a higher-dimensional space that we’re not aware of.

One bang is followed by another, in a potentially endless series of cosmic cycles, each one spelling the end of a universe and the beginning of a new one. Not one bang, but many.

Sir Roger Penrose has changed his mind about the Big Bang. He now imagines an eternal cycle of expanding universes where matter becomes energy and back again in the birth of new universes and so on and so on.

Comments: 

Naimul Haq

One of the mysteries of black holes, recently alluded by Susskind, is that black holes are entangled, and just might hold an explanation how big bang/s occurs.

troy davey

I'm not convinced. If the theory is wrong because the maths says a infinite equation is wrong. Yet is mathematics itself not infinite? This new theory of inflation seems to have been developed to fit a finite maths equation. Should the maths answer to nature rather than the other way around?

lezamac6

the BBT Only Describes the evolution of the universe, it does not explain the creation, Thats where all the theories fail to answer

qin fu

before big bang there is nothing and nothing is gravity , gravity creates energy and energy is string theory.

lezamac6

gravity can not exist from nothing

lezamac6 3 dias atrás

gravity can not exist by its self, string theory is interesting yet still does not explain where the energy comes from

qin fu

dark matter is exacly like our shadows. it is dark so we can't see . what pushes our universe apart i think it is gravity, light, matter. all of these.so why do universe move and expanding? for there must be movement there must be energy and suns have alot of energy. gravity creates energy and energy creates matter . matter can be carbon, hydrogen or smaller particles or waves. matter that pushes matter that goes into darkness is dark matter. when matter PUSH other matter , universe is expanding , the push of matter is what you call dark energy in space. big bang just a big star exploding upon dying when it gets too big and is not the beginning, beginning is infinite like eternity that goes around a cycle. gravity creates energy, energy creates matter and matter creates gravity. the question is what came first in the cycle?

Mathew Bissell

We cant see or prove black holes exists. X-rays can easily be emitted by Neutron stars or what not. I stand by my statement because the math breaks down and becomes non sensical. Even Einstein himself doubted the existence of black holes, speculating they could exist but (paraphrasing his quote) " God doesnt throw dice"... We invented new particles and theories to fit things that we dont understand. Electro-Magnetism and plasma based science provides answers where mainstream science does not. Even this video shows how lost mainstream physics are. To this date, there is no definitive proof of black holes, or dark matter, or dark energy. As far as Im concerned its still sci-fi. How can you say black holes exist or dark matter? We cant observe them..and there are other forces that fit the definition.Its really a name game. BUT remember this....if the math breaks down to infinite's...its a good sign youve taken a wrong turn. On other hand...I provided a vid with a theory that can be tested and proved. Its in my first comment, not this reply. Im currently working on my physics to better prove what Im saying. Dont be brainwashed. Critically think. How many times have they revised theories?? Plus gravity is a weak force compared to electro-magnetism...Black holes make absolutely no sense...as well are dark matter or energy. Its made up..

Saulius Bazas

+Mathew Bissell I agree with you and not agree: We cannot see black holes, i hope i do not need to explain why...you are right Einstein doubted...then science found good reasons to say that they actually exist, we do not see them, but we see what is happening around them..nowadays it is full of publication on that... the unknow starts when we try to explain what is happening inside black holes or what happens after "horizon of events", but that is another story and we can only speculate...you are right dark matter and energy is still a theory, but basic science approach is to prove that it is not exist and once it is not done, you can not say that is just fantasy...you never know it might actually exist, or you might be right and we will need a radical new way explain how universe works. Second, electromagnetism and gravity is very different story. We know that electromagnetism is a force, and gravity is just not really a force, it is an outcome of how massive objects affect a space-time itself. Once you get few object with mass in space they start "interacting", but not by means of force, but they creates consequences of space-time which appears to us as interaction. NASA lately proved that space can be bend, and expecting that in far future we will be able to use that as space travel without a need of high speeds. I am sure you can find this online! By the way do you know that GPS have to do quit a bit with this theory? otherwise it would be useless... Ok now fun part. Electromagnetism and plasma based science? WTF is this? Electromagnetism have to do with plasma here?? Plasma is just 4th state of matter: very hot gas. How many times have they revised theories?? Enough. And nowadays science is very open minded. Radical ideas are accepted and developed.. it is not a fucking middle ages man.. people just simply wanna know..that is it.

Tut, tut, Alfredo, get the facts right:

a "process view" or reality, one that denies the relevance of concepts such as "substance'

is not right:

The monad, of which we here speak, is nothing but a simple substance... Monadology 1.

If a process is the action of a body then it means nothing to say it is embodied because it is just the body acting. A monad is associated with a body, or aggregate of other monads but it is not the body, nor a process of the body nor embodied in any sense I know the meaning of.

I don't think embodied has a real meaning that anybody has ever given an account of.

But this is all beside the point of the thread.

Dear Jonathan,

If I failed, then please explain your "process" view to our colleagues...

About "embodied": I claimed that forms or patterns (not processes) are embodied, and gave examples. A game software can be installed and operate in several personal computers. It becomes embodied in these physical systems. if you disagree, please tell me what is wrong with the example.

Jonathan,

you said: " a monad is a simple substance". (Leibniz, 1714)

Well, Leibniz spoke about the last elements of reality - but what is this?? We just have problems to answer about the chemical elements or their sub-particles. What the hell are simple substances?

You are a philosopher, Alfredo, so you should have an idea! A chemical element is a substance in the modern usage, not in the philosophical usage. It is a type or kind of stuff. A simple substance in 1640-1720 at least was an entity or individual that dependent for its nature on nothing other than itself and God. As I understand it this was chiefly designed to deny that an aggregate was to be included because an aggregate depends for its nature on parts. Starting with Descartes's Meditations, which was, I believe, hoped to be a primer for Sorbonne students on what physics was really about, we have the admission that physics can only really be about mathematical patterns of dynamic relation and the 'I' that observes. The materialishness of matter was to be ignored, as clearly something one could not rely on being anything other than an appearance to the I. It was to be thought of as a reflection of a dynamic disposition, which Descartes only really enunciates clearly in his letter to Hyperaspistes - the tendency to exclude other similar material aggregates from a domain of space - otherwise known as 'extension' but better termed antitypy. Extension became unsustainable as a concept by 1660 so Leibniz replaces it with 'primary force'/'entelechy'. It is all very plainly written down in the texts.

A few points:

1) the universe is everything that exists so there cannot be multiple universes-such an idea has no intelligible meaning-

2) the universe can take many forms (maybe more than we know) such as visible entities, dark matter, dark energy ( if they exist), neutrinos or stuff we have not yet discovered-- but nothingness can never be a starting point- you cannot go anywhere from there except into mysticism- causal explanations are based on the law of identity--what a thing is determines what it can do or will do

3) the universe cannot have an  age--time is a concept of motion so it presupposes that something exists- why is there something rather than nothing is not a valid question-

Dear Jonathan, we are interested in your philosophical conceptions, not Descartes or Leibniz views. I am a philosopher, not a historian of philosophy. What would a monad/substance mean in the context of contemporary science and philosphy? I already know that you agree with a post-modern concept of God, now please let me know your answer to the proposed question. Your answer cannot be "God" in the sense of Descartes or Leibniz. What remains of their substances/monads as primitives entities without their God?

Dear Christian,

Humility aside, what do you think of Penrose's new concept of a cyclic universe?

Dear Edwin, some remarks on your remarks:

"1) the universe is everything that exists so there cannot be multiple universes-such an idea has no intelligible meaning"

Alfredo: This is a semantic issue. Researchers who defend the multiverse assume that the universe is not "everything that exists". 

"2) the universe can take many forms (maybe more than we know) such as visible entities, dark matter, dark energy ( if they exist), neutrinos or stuff we have not yet discovered-- but nothingness can never be a starting point- you cannot go anywhere from there except into mysticism"

Alfredo: I am in agreement until here.

"- causal explanations are based on the law of identity--what a thing is determines what it can do or will do"

Alfredo: I disagree here. There are several issues related to the concepts of causality, identity and determinism. I have already commented on the aspects of this discussion that are relevant to the question.

"3) the universe cannot have an  age--time is a concept of motion so it presupposes that something exists- why is there something rather than nothing is not a valid question"

Alfredo: Yes, I must agree. However, there is a sense in which time is relevant. In my proposed framework, there are eternal elements that combine to generate the observed reality. The combination process is progressive, leading to the actualization of new aspects (for instance, compare the Earth before and after the appearance of living systems; or before and after the appearance of the Human species). Therefore, Earth has ages, as the term is used in Geology. The same applies to the Solar system or any part of reality, because there are progressive transformations that occur in time.

Did God create space? Is space the mediator between God and the physical, material world?   The theory of creation by large scale vacuum fluctuastion at zero total energy presupposes the existencence of (a fluctuating) empty space (called false vacuum). The energy of the enormous amount of particles created by this fluctuation is supposed to be exactly compensated by their (gravitational) interactions which is necessary for the sustainability of creation without violating the HUP. But how did the original empty space arise?

Dear Harry, yours is a good argument against the creation of Nature by God. Fortunately, this is not my hypothesis!

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Baumgarten,

Thanks for your comment.

It may be that what one sees in such documentaries depends in part on what one brings to them. I saw some considerable scientific humility in the variety of approaches. It was definitely part of the message that people were willing to question the big bang idea. Again, alternatives to string theory were definitely on display.

I thought this documentary particularly good, and otherwise, I would not have recommended it. But I imagine that opinions may differ.

I suspect you missed part of the point of it? On the other hand, I payed no attention to the commentary so generously quoted by Pereira.

Sorry if you were disappointed.

H.G.Callaway

I do not know what could be meant by a multi universe if the universe is everything that exists--this does not make sense to me--it seems like a science fiction idea someone made up--ok for science fiction- in the same category as time travel-

Alfredo: yes the earth has an age because it came into existence  (from what I am told) from gases etc. The gasses had to exist. And maybe the gasses were caused by something else--but no matter how far back you go, you cannot start with nothing unless you believe in God which I don't (and which would not work anyway because then God would have had to have been created--maybe by another God??? This gets you nowhere

Dear Alfredo,Why do yo think that this is an argument against the Creation of Nature by God? Do you believe in a material or pantheistic God? Not in a God who created the world ex nihilo and controls it by  by a field called divine Providence, which is like the all-permeating space? The creation must take into account the laws of nature in the form of interactions because otherwise there would be nothing to bring about self organization.The laws of nature are nothing else than the properties of the created nature. Note that space as consdered here is NOT an intuition, as Kant called it.

First of all we have ask: If laws of nature really exist? If the world has mathematical structure?

We know answers for these questions to some extent only.

We know a few basic features of the matter, which were never breached in our experience and experiments. Even more, we have grounds to believe, that if these features would disappear, the matter could not exist at all and fore sure the world would not be mathematical. But we know, the world is mathematical to some extent.

Most visible feature of the universe is it symmetry on the fundamental levels. As Emma Noether has shown the consequence of the symmetry are the laws of conservation. From fundamental translational and rotational symmetries arise the laws of energy, momentum and angular momentum conservation. SUc(3)xSUL(2)xUY(1) symmetry is the gauge symmetry of standard model in quantum field theory. We are looking for supersymmetry (SUSY) in order to formulate the quantum gravitation theory.

The question arise if there are some higher level laws of nature, which “tells” the matter it should exhibit such symmetries? It seems, not. Nothing indicate this. That's just the way the matter is…

But the consequences are serious. Further consequence of the symmetrical word are the repetitiveness of observed phenomena which evince as “cause and effect” nature of the Universe. We believe, everything have the cause and the same causes will each time yield with the same effects.

Are these symmetries of the space and quantum fields explaining the diversity and complexity of the World? This diversity is result of symmetry breakdown rather. And, are these symmetries explaining mathematical nature of the Universe and accordance of the matter behavior with our simple models and theories created by mankind?

It will be shown by future investigations. But if we remember about the symmetry as the base of our models we can't believe longer in Plato ideas of independent existence of mathematical constructs.

We will not discover nothing more in our approximate equations. Nothing more, that all phenomena go each time in the similar way and not depend where it goes and what is the angle of our observation.

In fact, it is not imperative. May be in whole cosmos there are not two identical places and the same angles of view. It is our next approximation, assumption, hypothesis and we write it in short by symbols in the form of symmetry.

PS

This is translation of the part of my paper: "Semblions of words. The language of natural and artificial neural networks".(to be published)

Dear Erwin, please take a look at the argument in defense of the multiverse by the authors in the link below.

I think I have made explicit that my preference is for a self-organizing universe based on eternal elements that combine to generate the observed reality. In this view, God can be considered as a product of consciousness, not as the creator of the world. This concept of God is not the one we find in religions.

[Added later: It would correspond to the "Holy Spirit" of the Holy Trinity of Catholicism, but in a non-official interpretation that puts the higher ontological density on the Holy Spirit, considering the Father as a potentiality and the Son as the carrier of the message about the potentiality, as suggested in Pereira Jr, 2013 - chapter on Triple-Aspect Monism in the book The Unity of Mind, Brain and World - see my RG page for this chapter).

http://www.quantumbiosystems.org/admin/files/QBS%206%20(1)%20115-130.pdf

Dear Harry, some answers to your questions:

"Why do yo think that this is an argument against the Creation of Nature by God?"

Alfredo: Because - as you wrote - the creation would have taken place at some empty space; therefore, God did not create space.

"Do you believe in a material or pantheistic God?"

Alfredo: I believe in a God that is not material, but results from the evolution of Nature.

"Not in a God who created the world ex nihilo and controls it by  by a field called divine Providence, which is like the all-permeating space?"

Alfredo: This is the concept of God that I reject.

"The creation must take into account the laws of nature in the form of interactions because otherwise there would be nothing to bring about self organization.The laws of nature are nothing else than the properties of the created nature. Note that space as consdered here is NOT an intuition, as Kant called it."

Alfredo: I propose that self-organization is based on eternal interacting elements; that the laws and principles of Nature are generated by the self-organizing process; and that God comes at the end of the process, as a product of consciousness.

Nature is self organizing in only one sense--because of the law of identity everything obeys causal laws--there is nothing random in the universe and disorder in that sense is not possible and not conceivable- (I am not a materialist but that is another story)- I have no interest in reading anything about multiple universes-if someone wants to summarize it in a couple of sentences, ok-

Dear Edwin, it seems to me that your last answer displays a tendency to dogmatism...but OK, this is a very open thread and I thank you for exposing your view.

A philosophical discussion of Everett´s multiverse (see link below) is one of the most/must-read papers of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/62/1/99.full

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Pereira,

You wrote:

A philosophical discussion of Everett´s multiverse (see link below) is one of the most/must-read papers of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

---End quotation

Yes. Very interesting. Isn't there anything you want to say about this end of things? Plausible, implausible, popular, or a minority view, just what is needed, or something to be avoided? What's your take on the Everett interpretation? I'm sure we can all read the journals.

H.G. Callaway

Dear H.G., I am not an expert and also I do not like the popular interpretation (the Copenhagen epistemological view). My take is that the many worlds exist one at a time, as different epochs/phases of the evolution of the universe. At each moment there is only one world with all its complexities. If we assume the perspective of eternity, the many worlds exist as a succession of epochs.

Hang on a minute. Everett is the precursor to many worlds but that is quite different from multiverse - are we getting confused?

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Pereira,

Thanks for your reply. I think you've done a good job replying to many questions and objections on this thread! Its a very large, complicated and speculative topic. Various directions of response were to be expected. I think it important to keep in mind just how speculative the recent developments regarding "new physics"-- beyond the standard model of particle physics-- have been/can be.

I must admit that you are much more willing than I to engage in a religious topic with many strangers! Where I come from, people are generally much inclined to change the topic when such questions come up in less familiar social settings. They are bound to evoke a great variety of fiercely held answers or convictions.

I wonder, though, if there might not be a book in this direction that you might want to publish.  My own related books have been chiefly historical. But I should perhaps mention that R.W. Emerson stands pretty close to your sketched positions. 

Open discussion like this one are best at turning up the papers and projects which we might and perhaps should take up, IMHO.

H.G. Callaway