Saturday, July 11, 2020

Do we need a Theory of Everything?

I get constantly asked if I could please comment on other people’s theories of everything. That could be Garrett Lisi’s E8 theory or Eric Weinstein’s geometric unity or Stephen Wolfram’s idea that the universe is but a big graph, and so on. Good, then. Let me tell you what I think about this. But I’m afraid it may not be what you wanted to hear.


Before we start, let me remind you what physicists mean by a “Theory of Everything”. For all we currently know, the universe and everything in it is held together by four fundamental interactions. That’s the electromagnetic force, the strong and the weak nuclear force, and gravity. All other forces that you are familiar with, say, the van der Waals force, or muscle force, or the force that’s pulling you down an infinite sequence of links on Wikipedia, these are all non-fundamental forces that derive from the four fundamental interactions. At least in principle.

Now, three of the fundamental interactions, the electromagnetic and the strong and weak nuclear force, are of the same type. They are collected in what is known as the standard model of particle physics. The three forces in the standard model are described by quantum field theories which means, in a nutshell, that all particles obey the principles of quantum mechanics, like the uncertainty principle, and they can be entangled and so on. Gravity, however, is described by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and does not know anything about quantum mechanics, so it stands apart from the other three forces. That’s a problem because we know that all the quantum particles in the standard model have a gravitational pull. But we do not know how this works. We just do not have a theory to describe how elementary particles gravitate. For this, we would need a theory for the quantum behavior of gravity, a theory of “quantum gravity,” as it’s called.

We need a theory of quantum gravity because general relativity and the standard model are mathematically incompatible. So far, this is a purely theoretical problem because with the experiments that we can currently do, we do not need to use quantum gravity. In all presently possible experiments, we either measure quantum effects, but then the particle masses are so small that we cannot measure their gravitational pull. Or we can observe the gravitational pull of some objects, but then they do not have quantum behavior. So, at the moment we do not need quantum gravity to actually describe any observation. However, this will hopefully change in the coming decades. I talked about this in an earlier video.

Besides the missing theory of quantum gravity, there are various other issues that physicists have with the standard model. Most notably it’s that, while the three forces in the standard model are all of the same type, they are also all different in that each of them belongs to a different type of symmetry. Physicists would much rather have all these forces unified to one, which means that they would all come from the same mathematical structure.

In many cases that structure is one big symmetry group. Since we do not observe this, the idea is that the big symmetry would manifest itself only at energies so high that we have not yet been able to test them. At the energies that we have tested it so far, the symmetry would have to be broken, which gives rise to the standard model. This unification of the forces of the standard model is called a “grand unification” or a “grand unified theory”, GUT for short.

What physicists mean by a theory of everything is then a theory from which all the four fundamental interactions derive. This means it is both a grand unified theory and a theory of quantum gravity.

This sounds like a nice idea, yes. But. There is no reason that nature should actually be described by a theory of everything. While we *do need a theory of quantum gravity to avoid logical inconsistency in the laws of nature, the forces in the standard model do not have to be unified, and they do not have to be unified with gravity. It would be pretty, yes, but it’s unnecessary. The standard model works just fine without unification.

So this whole idea of a theory of everything is based on an unscientific premise. Some people would like the laws of nature to be pretty in a very specific way. They want it to be simple, they want it to be symmetric, they want it to be natural, and here I have to warn you that “natural” is a technical term. So they have an idea of what they want to be true. Then they stumble over some piece of mathematics that strikes them as particularly pretty and they become convinced that certainly it must play a role for the laws of nature. In brief, they invent a theory for what they think the universe *should be like.

This is simply not a good strategy to develop scientific theories, and no, it is most certainly not standard methodology. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Relying on beauty in theory development has historically worked badly. In physics, breakthroughs in theory-development have come instead from the resolution of mathematical inconsistencies. I have literally written a book about how problematic it is that researchers in the foundations of physics insist on using methods of theory development that we have no reason to think should work, and that as a matter of fact do not work.

The search for a theory of everything and for grand unification began in the 1980s. To the extent that the theories which physicists have come up with were falsifiable they have been falsified. Nature clearly doesn’t give a damn what physicists think is pretty math.

Having said that, what do you think I think about Lisi’s and Weinstein’s and Wolfram’s attempts at a theory of everything? Well, scientific history teaches us that their method of guessing some pretty piece of math and hoping it’s useful for something is extremely unpromising. It is not impossible it works, but it is almost certainly a waste of time. And I have looked closely enough at Lisi’s and Weinstein’s and Wolfram’s and many other people’s theories of everything to be able to tell you that they have not convincingly solved any actual problem in the existing fundamental theories. And I’m not interested to look any closer, because I don’t also want to waste my time.

But I don’t like commenting on individual people’s theories of everything. I don’t like it because it strikes me as deeply unfair. These are mostly researchers working alone or in small groups. They are very dedicated to their pursuit and they work incredibly hard on it. They’re mostly not paid by tax money so it’s really their private thing and who am I to judge them? Also, many of you evidently find it entertaining to have geniuses with their theories of everything around. That’s all fine with me.

I get a problem if theories that despite having turned out to be useless grow to large, tax-paid research programs that employ thousands of people, as it has happened with string theory and supersymmetry and grand unification. That creates a problem because it eats up resources and can entirely stall progress, which is what has happened in the foundations of physics.

People like Lisi and Weinstein and Wolfram at least remind us that the big programs are not the only thing you can do with math. So, odd as it sounds, while I don’t think their specific research avenue is any more promising than string theory, I’m glad they do it anyway. Indeed, physics can need more people like them who have the courage to go their own way, no matter how difficult.

The brief summary is that if you hear something about a newly proposed theory of everything, do not ask whether the math is right. Because many of the people who work on this are really smart and they know their math and it’s probably right. The question you, and all science journalists who report on such things, should ask is what reason do we have to think that this particular piece of math has anything to do with reality. “Because it’s pretty” is not a scientific answer. And I have never seen a theory of everything that gave a satisfactory scientific answer to this question.

261 comments:

  1. We're still discussing consciousness? And PhysicistDave are your "inner experiences" qualia?

    How about we run PhysicistDave's experiment in reverse?

    Start with one Searle Chinese Room. Replace it with an appropriate silicon-based counter-part. Replace that with a real neuron. Repeat ~200 times. Do we end with a C. elegans (sans a body; it's an extremely well-studied nematode worm), in terms of consciousness? Could we?

    Lather, rinse, repeat ... do we have a Drosophila melanogaster (also a very well-studies animal, fruit fly)? A Mus musculus (a lab fave mouse)? Canis familiaris? We know that this last one, the domesticated dog, has qualia (or at least PhysicistDave strongly implies they do), otherwise one cannot torture a dog, right?

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  2. Dave,

    Re artificial neuron chips that respond to electrical signals from the nervous system, and give out signals to the nervous system:

    Many people have prostheses, like lens implants (for cataracts), cochlear implants (for hearing problems), artificial hands and limbs, teeth, and hearts. Just like the old wooden leg prostheses, still used in parts of the world today, prostheses are a non-living zone. Human beings find these things very useful, and adapt to using them, but no one ever pretends that these things are as good as the real thing, i.e. the original part.

    Your imagined scenario of replacing every neuron one by one with a neuron chip is a scenario for replacing living cells with dead zones, which superficially have the functionality of a living cell, but are not living.

    A living cell (e.g. a neuron) is a thing, fuelled by an energy source, that acquires information about itself and its surrounding environment, and responds to this information. It’s clear that complex molecules and their interactions are required in order to know and respond to complex information scenarios. This is in contrast to the relatively simple wires and transistors in artificial neuron chips which can only process simple electrical information, though just like in other computers, the wires and transistors can be made to symbolically represent and process the complex information scenarios that a living neuron would have had to deal with.

    So I would think that point-of-view relationship and number information (possessed by particles, atoms, molecules, cells etc), as opposed to symbols of this information, is what basic consciousness is about. I would think that consciousness requires no miracles, but that consciousness can’t be separated from the “substrate”: wires and transistors don’t have the necessary properties to possess much actual information (as opposed to symbols of information). But complex molecules can somehow possess complex relationship and number information which is the foundation for building higher-level consciousness.

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  3. Hi folks,

    Right after my last brief comment on this subthread I went on “vacation” (ha ha) to do a deep dive on qubits and QC. Thus I very nearly missed this 3-blogs-back, 15-comment, highly interesting, and respectfully done multilog on the nature of consciousness. I’m not sure how it ended up as a subthread under one of my comments, since I had no recollection of even mentioning consciousness, but I enjoyed reading it!

    Lorraine, I think we are in agreement in the sense that I don’t think of bits as physical objects, either? To me bits are just metrical units, not objects. They only provide a useful way of measuring persistence of classical details (history).

    Austin, I don’t claim to fully understand your particular approach to the Glashow-based taxonomy of the fermions. But I think we fully agree that this fascinating set of unexpected fermion symmetries is both important and insufficiently explored. Glashow certainly did not bother to expand on it! But given that he had just helped found quantum chromodynamics, I don’t think that’s surprising. When you have just completed a beautiful and much-loved cathedral, you tend not to then say things like this: “Hey, this is great and thanks for the Nobel Prize, but howzabout we now start over again from scratch, only this time based on a highly unexpected set of inter-fermion charge symmetries and this mnemonic hunch I have? Oh, by the way, I should probably also mention that my hunch doesn’t even respect the number of fundamental forces…” Golly gee whiz, what a surprise that he chose to pass on that opportunity!

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  4. Terry, My idea that electric charge is not fundamental came from my building a preon model. I have four preons that can build all Standard Model fundamental particles, but it is the properties of the fundamental particles which are interesting. The full set of fundamental properties I originally used were electric charge, spin, weak isospin, colour, handedness and matter/antimatter. But that reduced to spin, weak isospin, and colour after I gradually realised that the other properties were not essential. (Completely side-stepping mass of course.)

    It is easy to build electric charge from colour charges using your Glashow cube, or my simple Rubic cube. I further removed handedness and matter/antimatter labels when I realised that colour/anticolour also equated to matter/antimatter for that bit of colour information. So anticolour equates to antimatter for that one bit of information. But, just to make string theory more complicated, that makes the bit 'red' (= 1) a compactified 12 dimensional space of red + antigreen + antiblue where each colour occupies an independent 4D spacetime. The extra complexity generates the appropriate group structure. Every spacetime has its own time direction (for matter), but that means our spacetime's time arrow does not control individual particles' time arrows.

    Further, weak isospin has the property of electric charge but needs to be kept as a separate fundamental property, probably because it is built separately into the particle.

    So that just leaves colour and spin (and mass). I believe spin is constructed like colour, so that is another 4D required. That means that - spin equates to antimatter for 'spin'. And in my preon model the + and - photons are built using antipreons of one another. I did get the mass property out of my model but not as an intrinsic property and not as a linear property. (Preon-antipreon pairs seem to generate mass.)

    My ideas on the Glashow cube(s) were a recent follow up of your comments. You mentioned quaternions with matter and antimatter in different quadrants. I suggested using geometric algebra as an alternative and maybe easier route. Lawrence, in the next thread has mentioned, AdS and dS spaces which I think may be relevant too, and maybe links micro. and cosmo. regimes. And why stop at quaternions when you could use octonions! I am not sure what an opposite property is for the Glashow Cube (matter v antimatter) but in my preon model it is simpler and dependent on time's arrow, which is independent for a particle of the time arrow of the universe it is embedded within.

    Austin

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  5. JeanTate asked me:
    >We're still discussing consciousness? And PhysicistDave are your "inner experiences" qualia?

    Hi, Jean!

    Yeah, I think they are “qualia,” though it is notorious that people argue over exact meanings in this area. I meant to refer to any sort of interior experience of which one can be conscious, including feelings and sense data as well as ideas and thoughts.

    What is the difference between ideas and sense data? I'm not sure: my guess, for what it is worth, would go along with the empiricist tradition that thoughts are sort of pale reflections of sense data.

    But I am far from certain of that.

    By the way, apologies for not replying to the questions you raised earlier. All of them are excellent questions, and, of course, what is most frustrating is that it is unclear how to answer any of them!

    But I do not think we should allow that to cause us to dismiss such questions. Comte, after all, was sure we would never know the material makeup of stars, although Fraunhofer had already made the key discovery that actually made that possible!

    So, perhaps your earlier questions can be answered in some way we do not yet anticipate.

    As to reversing my and my friend's thought experiment, I suppose we could simplify this by just asking if we could ourselves build “wet-ware” neurons that are essentially the same as biological neurons, hook them together, and end up with a conscious brain.

    I would think, in principle, that we can, although this is, of course, an empirical question.

    So, where does the “consciousness” of such a brain come from?

    Well, my main argument against the “functinalists” is that they are assuming something that needs to be proven, but they could be right. Maybe the right functioning gives consciousness.

    If that turned out to be true, I, as a physicist, would like to know more details. “Function” is not really a term in contemporary physics. A tree stump that just accidentally happens to grow into the same shape as a stool carefully carved by a human carpenter could be physically the same as the stool, even though the stump is not a “stool” until people choose to view it as such. So, I'd like to know the laws that describe and explain how the functioning of some physical thing results in consciousness.

    Or perhaps there really is something special about neuro-transmitters and the weird voltage-gated ion channels in neurons and all the rest that makes consciousness possible in “wet-ware” and not other substrates. Of course, if that were shown to be the case, any scientist would plead for an all-encompassing theory to explain it all.

    Or perhaps (let's pretend we are Descartes again) proto-consciousness is just floating around out there waiting for a substrate to latch on to so that it can actually function. Maybe, if Penrose is right, microtubules are just the hook the proto-consciousness needs, and there is no such hook in silicon electronics.

    The truth, I would guess, is something else that no one has yet thought of (who thought of quantum mechanics before we were forced to it by Nature?).

    My general plea is that we should try not to pretend that real questions are not questions at all or that we have trivial solutions, whether with the mind-brain problem, or the quantum-measurement problem, or, for that matter, quantizing gravity or the issue of dark matter or any other scientific problem.

    It seems to me that science cannot progress by denying that our ignorance really is ignorance. We move forward by admitting our ignorance and then trying to figure out how to reduce that ignorance. Amazingly often, we have actually succeeded: Nature has been unreasonably kind to us in giving us little unexpected prods now and then such as Fraunhofer lines, the paleomagnetic stripes on the seafloor, the precession in Mercury's perihelion, the spectrum of hydrogen, and so much more.

    All the best,

    Dave

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  6. PhysicistDave3:27 AM, July 25, 2020

    But, Dave, you claimed that you could refute by logical proof the possibility of conscious experience being weakly emergent from a physical brain. Of course, you don't have such a proof - it's a ridiculous claim. But that is what you claimed and I'm still waiting for this amazing proof after endless, meandering, irrelevant comments from you.

    "When I have tried to point them to such discussions by very eminent scientists (e.g., Nobel laureates such as Wigner or John Eccles)"

    The latest neuroscientific results represent the most we know about conscious experience (beyond our subjective experience). What people from the past who knew nothing about neuroscience claim about conscious experience is completely irrelevant.

    It is not inconceivable that conscious experience will be explained in neuroscientific terms from the structure of the brain. And you have failed to provide your claimed refutation of this - because there isn't one and no reason to think there ever will be.

    The logical refutation, please, Dave. No more waffle.

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  7. PhysicistDave2:24 AM, July 18, 2020

    "Well, the discussions here have convinced me to start writing a book explaining why naive physicalism fails from the viewpoint of mathematical logic, electronic circuit design, and contemporary physics...I' plan to credit you and Steve Evans for helpful conversations,"

    Let me be even more helpful, then, and repeat the advice I gave to Phillip Helbig. Don't write this book, you'll be wasting your time. Dr. H's summary of current knowledge - that as far as we know everything, including conscious experience, is weakly emergent from physics has no counter-arguments. It's on the money.

    There's enough crank nonsense published as it is ("A Fortunate Universe", "Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook"), don't add to the mass of garbage.

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  8. Steven Evans wrote to me:
    >But, Dave, you claimed that you could refute by logical proof the possibility of conscious experience being weakly emergent from a physical brain.

    Hi, Steve!

    Hope you are doing well.

    Yes, I have such a proof, and I have explained it many times: you just understand too little math to grasp it.

    I am sure that you comprehend as a general principle that there are proofs you lack the ability to understand: I have a proof, for example of how to derive radiation fields in EM from some simple axioms (no need for Maxwell's equations). You and most non-physicists here know too little physics to understand that proof, but that does not mean I lack the proof. (E.g., if Sabine looked at that proof about EM, she would find it very straightforward.)

    Anyway, I will reiterate the logical theorem relevant to the mind-brain problem again, but you will still not understand it because you lack the requisite knowledge of math.

    Suppose you have an axiomatic system: ZFC, first-order Peano arithmetic, the Standard Model of physics, whatever you want. You have some axioms, rule of inference, etc.

    Now, suppose that some term – say the Jabberwocky words “slithy” or “tove” – does not occur in the axioms or the rules of inference or the premises of an argument. Then it is a theorem that that term cannot occur in the conclusion of the argument except in a trivial tautological context (if the argument is valid and the axiomatic system is consistent).

    This is a very, very basic theorem in the mathematics of logic that is supposed to be obvious to anyone who knows anything about logic.

    This is just putting into formal terms Hume's argument that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”

    Now, physicists, going back all the way to Galileo, have intentionally eschewed any terms in physical theories that refer to interior experiences: this has proven to be enormously successful, saving us from all those yucky, subjective things that plague the human mind (and, as I suggested with the word “yucky,” this is one of the reasons a lot of us went into physics).

    This then provides an obvious application of the general logical theorem: because the laws and terminology of physics rigorously eschew subjective terms relating to interior experiences, those terms cannot occur in a non-trivial way in conclusions drawn from the laws of physics.

    In plain English, the laws of physics, because of the restriction on the terms occurring in those laws, cannot make any predictions about interior experiences.

    This is the result of the basic theorem of logic I explained above. There has never been and never will be an exception to that theorem, any more than there will ever be an exception to the unique prime factorization theorem for the positive integers.

    I know you know too little about theorems in logic to grasp this – nothing I can do about it. It is a valid theorem, known to everyone who grasps basic principles of deductive logic.

    I actually think that if you consider this not in the mind-brain context but in the is-ought context or the “slithy toves” example, you can probably understand it. But you have an emotional barrier to grasping it in the mind-brain context.

    Bu the way, as I mentioned to Lorraine, I am writing a book to explain what math, physics, and engineering says about the mind-body problem, and I plan on thanking you and Lorraine for helpful discussions (I'll make clear that you tend not to share my views).

    If you object to my mentioning our discussions, let me know.

    Dave

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  9. Steven Evans,

    I think that the information content of conscious experience could potentially be represented as the result of lawful relationships, algorithms, variables and numbers.

    But there is no explanation for why the result of lawful relationships, algorithms, variables and numbers would be subjectively experienced.

    Contrary to what you say, conscious subjective experience can never be explained in neuroscientific terms, or any other terms, from the structure or processes of the brain. It’s only the information content of conscious experience that can potentially be explained.

    You’ve seemingly got 2 ways of explaining subjective experience: 1) information was always subjectively experienced; or 2) subjective experience of information content miraculously “emerged”.

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  10. Hi Dave,

    We're now in >200 territory, so effective discussion here is ~at an end.

    Thanks to your comments, I spent several pleasurable hours recently, reading up on consciousness (per philosophers), qualia (ditto), brains, evolution (per scientists), etc.

    Is consciousness a modern era's élan vital, with qualia playing the role of organic molecules? Maybe a bottom-up approach to building a brain from components (neurons, chips, whatever) would be a shorter path to resolution than your top-down one? Sorta like urea being easier to make than DNA.

    We know that evolution is conservative; having found something which works, stick to it. So the major brain structures evolved a long time ago (some even deep in the pre-Cambrian, it seems). If we humans have consciousness, surely ragworms must also? It's hard to be sure, of course, but the functions of these structures likely also changed little over 400+ million years.

    Plants evolved a different (set of) mechanisms than brains for suviving, including how to communicate things like "beware! leaf-eaters are attacking!". And there are animals without brains, starfish for example.

    So if it is morally wrong to torture a dog, isn't it also morally wrong to torture a ragworm?

    Re: the experience of pain, how do we know that starfish and azaleas do not experience pain? True, whatever pain they may experience, it's not pretty much as we do.

    I think philosophers should get out more, open the mouths of a few horses perhaps and actually count the teeth.

    I mean, there don't seem to be any stamp collectors! No one seems even interested in collecting qualia ("if Guugu reflects inner experience, their relative direction qualia are rare!"). Let alone any Linnaeus ("a multi-tiered taxonomy of qualia? Are you nuts?!").

    So too with consciousness ... beyond some fuzziness over boundaries, it's binary to a philosopher it seems. Maybe it can vary by degree (a fully awake, healthy adult human has more consciousness than any ragworm), but even contemplating how to order it (ragworm<fruit fly<mouse, say) let alone quantify it seems just too hard. Consciousness as a heterogeneous thing? Get back to the laboratory you scientist you!

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  11. @PhysicistDave: one more thing about qualia/inner experiences, physics and medicine: I think part of a doctor's training is how to ask questions about qualia (symptoms which are subjective experiences, nausea say), combine the answers with (semi-)objective findings ('the stomach feels distended', '25x20mm opacity in CT scan image 102'), arrive at a diagnosis, and recommend treatment. True, physicians are not physicists; equally they are not philosophers.

    So, at least some qualia are quite real, and at least some kinds of scientists have rich experience studying them. Why not extend/build on this?

    I'm surely missing something ... what?

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  12. Steven Evans and JeanTate,

    Re the information content of conscious experience:

    A large living organism is made up of trillions of cells, each of which is an organism in its own right. A multicellular organism is not duplicating functions by micromanaging every cell.

    Clearly, a multicellular organism must run on need-to-know, executive-level information and decisions, with both bottom up and top down supply of information. In general, the executive-level of a multicellular organism could only be aware of, and deal with, executive-level information. Obviously, the case of slime moulds and plants shows that the executive-level information issue is more complex than this.

    But in general, “executive-level information” must be the way to describe the information content of the feelings and subjective experience of animals ranging from (e.g.) ragworms to fish to human beings. But the information content does not explain why the information is subjectively felt and experienced.

    What Dave says is correct: “In plain English, the laws of physics, because of the restriction on the terms occurring in those laws, cannot make any predictions about interior experiences.”

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  13. PhysicistDave4:56 AM, July 30, 2020

    Dave, but you are talking about axiomatic logical theories. Physics has not been completely axiomatised, and even if it were, it would only be true up to finite precision. So what you claim does not necessarily apply to Physics, because anything derived logically would ultimately have to be confirmed by observation anyway.

    Empirically there is no evidence of any contribution to the mind but the physical brain, and there is no evidence of strong emergence in Nature, so it is reasonable to summarise this as: *as far as we currently know* the mind is emergent from the physical brain.

    Your argument does not refute this for the reasons given, which I have repeatedly written and you repeatedly ignore. Nature appears to have produced conscious experience out of matter. The fact that you personally can't figure out how is neither here nor there.

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  14. Lorraine Ford11:04 AM, July 30, 2020

    "But there is no explanation for why the result of lawful relationships, algorithms, variables and numbers would be subjectively experienced."

    Currently, there isn't. But that doesn't necessarily mean there won't be in the future. Either way, the physical brain appears to be the only input in producing the mind.

    "conscious subjective experience can never be explained in neuroscientific terms,"

    OK, now you just need to provide evidence for this claim, publish it and then you can collect your Nobel Prize.

    "subjective experience of information content miraculously “emerged”. "
    Where "miraculously" = you can't figure it out. Neither can neuroscientists working at the edge of knowledge. But the point is that neuroscientific analysis of the brain is far from complete.

    You are making unjustified claims. There's no point to that when Phillip Helbig does it, when crazy Luke does it, when Dave does it and now when you do it. Let's all stop with the unjustified claims.

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  15. Lorraine Ford8:29 PM, July 30, 2020

    'What Dave says is correct: “In plain English, the laws of physics, because of the restriction on the terms occurring in those laws, cannot make any predictions about interior experiences.” '

    You and Dave can repeat your unjustified claim ad infinitum, and are well on the way to doing that, but it remains an unjustified claim. People like Galen Strawson even make whole careers out of repeating this particular unjustified claim, although I tend to think of him as a tax thief.

    No more unjustified claims, please.

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  16. Steven Evans wrote to me:
    >Dave, but you are talking about axiomatic logical theories. Physics has not been completely axiomatised, and even if it were, it would only be true up to finite precision. So what you claim does not necessarily apply to Physics, because anything derived logically would ultimately have to be confirmed by observation anyway.

    Now, we are finally getting to our point of disagreement. I am talking about what can be logically deduced from the known laws of physics. You have some idea of something else you call “Physics”: I literally do not know what you are talking about, and I do not think you do either.

    You seem to think you know something about this thing called “Physics” beyond the known laws of physics. Please fill us in: inquiring minds want to know.

    All I myself have been claiming is that the laws of physics as they are actually now known cannot explain consciousness. If you are granting that point, we are in agreement.

    And, contrary to what you say, if the interest is in what can in fact be logically derived from the known laws of physics, that is a matter of logic, which does not need to be checked by empirical observation up to some level of precision. Logic is a priori.

    I do think that you have misunderstood me all along: I have only been talking about what the existing, known laws of physics can explain. And that is a matter of logic, not observation.

    Observation may, and hopefully will, someday give us new, modified laws of nature. But that does not and cannot change what can be logically derived from the laws of physics as we know them today.

    Are you clear as to what I am claiming now? I am just making the point that the existing laws of physics, as we now understand them, logically cannot explain consciousness. That's all.

    I am not making a claim about future laws of nature that may (I hope will) explain consciousness.

    I do think that future laws of nature that explain consciousness may not strike most people as “physical” laws, but that is largely a matter of word usage.

    Steve also wrote:
    >Empirically there is no evidence of any contribution to the mind but the physical brain, and there is no evidence of strong emergence in Nature, so it is reasonable to summarise this as: *as far as we currently know* the mind is emergent from the physical brain.

    I doubt that the phrase “strong emergence” is meaningful. As far as I can tell, it just means “We do not yet know the laws of nature that explain this phenomenon.”

    No one understands consciousness. No intelligent person seriously claims to. Somehow, from that ignorance, you think it follows that “*as far as we currently know* the mind is emergent from the physical brain.” That makes as much sense as saying that since no one understands dark matter, “*as far as we currently know* [dark matter] is emergent from the physical brain.”

    That which we do not know, we truly do not know! You re resistant to that: you want to insist that our ignorance of the nature of consciousness is evidence that it “is emergent from the physical brain.” Our religious and spiritualist friends are just as sure, with just as good a reason, that our ignorance of consciousness proves that consciousness is not completely dependent on the brain.

    I prefer to say, “I wonder how consciousness works, since clearly no one understands it now” and leave it at that.

    But both you and our spiritualist friends have compelling religious reasons to not leave it at that. And it is fruitless to argue with religious dogmatism.

    All the best,

    Dave

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  17. PhysicistDave says "I am just making the point that the existing laws of physics, as we now understand them, logically cannot explain consciousness."

    That is a false claim. Just because we don't know how to apply the existing laws of physics to produce consciousness does not make it logically impossible to do so.

    The vast majority of proofs and explanations do not require new laws of physics, or mathematics, to prove.

    People come up with amazing mathematical proofs, or new statistical methods or distributions, without introducing any brand new laws of arithmetic, statistics or physics.

    All you can say is that you don't know how to apply the laws of physics, as we currently know them, to get from atoms to consciousness and you don't think anybody else does either.

    It is equally fallacious to claim "No intelligent person seriously claims to [understand consciousness]" The "No True Scotsman" fallacy; you have no idea what is in the minds of every intelligent person on the planet, and claiming any scientist that believes they have a handle on consciousness is "stupid", for all time, is just asserting a baseless claim that consciousness cannot be explained by current physics.

    Another fallacy: 'That makes as much sense as saying that since no one understands dark matter, “*as far as we currently know* [dark matter] is emergent from the physical brain.”'

    False. We have billions of points of evidence that the physical brain is involved in consciousness, and that interference with the brain's operations (by physical injury, electrical interference, chemical interference as with anesthetics, disease and atrophy, oxygen starvation, etc) can interfere with, or terminate, consciousness. We have no such evidence, ZERO, for dark matter.

    We DO know that consciousness is dependent on the physical brain functioning correctly.

    We have no evidence it is dependent on anything ELSE we can observe.

    We have no evidence it relies on any new physics.

    It is logically correct to say that as far as we know, consciousness is an emergent property of the physical brain. That fits the evidence.

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  18. Dr. A.M. Castaldo wrote to me:
    >PhysicistDave says "I am just making the point that the existing laws of physics, as we now understand them, logically cannot explain consciousness."

    >[Dr. AMC] That is a false claim. Just because we don't know how to apply the existing laws of physics to produce consciousness does not make it logically impossible to do so.

    I provided a proof based on a very basic theorem of logic: if the premises of an argument and the axioms you are assuming do not refer to some term, then that term cannot appear in a conclusion (except in a trivial, tautological manner). If you do not understand that theorem, you are ignorant of very, very basic principles of logic.

    Dr. AMC also wrote:
    >All you can say is that you don't know how to apply the laws of physics, as we currently know them, to get from atoms to consciousness and you don't think anybody else does either.

    Wrong again. For example, the axioms of Euclidean geometry cannot prove anything about the Greek gods, except in a trivial manner, because the axioms of Euclidean geometry do not mention the Greek gods.

    This is very, very elementary and very, very obvious to anyone who knows anything about logic.

    Logic can prove a priori that certain conclusions cannot be derived from certain premises. You seem unable to grasp that basic principle.

    Dr. AMC also wrote:
    >It is equally fallacious to claim "No intelligent person seriously claims to [understand consciousness]" The "No True Scotsman" fallacy; you have no idea what is in the minds of every intelligent person on the planet, and claiming any scientist that believes they have a handle on consciousness is "stupid", for all time, is just asserting a baseless claim that consciousness cannot be explained by current physics.

    Wrong again.

    I can reasonably say that no intelligent scientist thinks the moon is made of green cheese.

    I bet you agree with me

    If you know of some intelligent person who seriously claims to understand consciousness, tell us who that person is. I've never heard of him. Prove me wrong!

    Dr. AMC also wrote:
    >We DO know that consciousness is dependent on the physical brain functioning correctly.

    How do you know that consciousness does not survive death so that it can exist without a brain?

    You may have your doubts about that (I do, too), but you do not know it.

    For some reason, you and Steve have a deep desire to make claims to know things about consciousness that you do not know. Steve has made clear his reasons: his religious beliefs.

    I do know a great deal about the currently known laws of physics, so I can confidently present rigorous proofs as to their limitations, as I did above. By the way, this is done all the time: there are lots and lots of proofs of things that cannot be derived from certain premises in physics (off the top of my head: the Coleman-Mandula theorem).

    But people do not try to deny Coleman-Mandula, because no one has deep personal feelings on the subject. My proof is much simpler than Coleman-Mandula, but it upsets people because it violates their religious dogmas. (Yes, everyone: I know how SUSY implements a work-around: it does not violate Coleman-Mandula.)

    Neither you nor I nor Steve understands how consciousness works. I am content to follow Wittgenstein and say, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

    But, you and Steve and several others here seem to have an irrepressible urge to claim that you “know” things that no human being knows. I am content to say, “I don't know.”

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  19. Steven,

    Re Steven Evans 10:20 PM, July 30, 2020 and Steven Evans 1:47 AM, July 31, 2020:

    I am not “making unjustified claims”.

    The information content of consciousness, as reported by people examining their own subjective conscious experience, is the clue.

    Clearly the basic information content of animal (including human) consciousness is directly derived (via the physics) from the surrounding information environment of the animal. This information content can be represented with words (by human beings), and it can potentially be represented as being the result of lawful relationships, algorithms, variables and numbers.

    But subjective conscious experience is not a measurable variable like mass or charge: subjective conscious experience is in effect knowledge of the measurable variables and numbers and lawful information relationships.

    This knowledge of the measurable variables and numbers and lawful information relationships must seemingly be an aspect of matter, or at least it is not separable from matter.

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  20. PhysicistDave3:19 AM, July 31, 2020

    "All I myself have been claiming is that the laws of physics as they are actually now known cannot explain consciousness. If you are granting that point, we are in agreement."

    Dave, I have noticed you make good contributions on this site regarding technical points about quantum theory, but..

    On this point you claimed that you can provide a logical proof that refutes the possibility of conscious experience being weakly emergent from a physical brain. No sane person believes your ludicrous claim,

    but anyway that's your claim so either provide a formal logical proof or you are a liar and a time-waster.

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  21. Dr. A.M. Castaldo6:53 AM, July 31, 2020

    Quite right. He has been told this 2 dozen times. It's now not an argument about evidence, but, as with Phillip Helbig and Luke Barnes, a psychological issue.

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  22. PhysicistDave: Ha ha ha, No.

    "[If a term, eg 'slithy'] does not occur in the axioms or the rules of inference or the premises of an argument, that term cannot occur in the conclusion of the argument except in a trivial tautological context."

    I call BS. You have forgotten definitions.

    For example, I cannot, off the top of my head, tell you who first defined the notion of an orthogonal matrix, but somebody did, didn't they?

    Once I have defined an orthogonal matrix, I can then prove a theorem about an orthogonal matrix not immediately apparent from its definition, such as that its determinant is +/- 1.

    Defining an orthogonal matrix does not demand any new rules for linear algebra, nor is the definition self-referential. Presumably, somebody noticed a property of some simple 2x2 matrices and generalize it to any size of square matrix and proceeded to prove things about orthogonal matrices. Perhaps even the definition emerged through cycles of proof and refinement. I don't claim this WAS the case, but if true it wouldn't surprise anyone, anybody that has investigated something new understands that definitions and properties can evolve with understanding.

    Consider the Aurora Borealis. We don't have to know what it is before we name it. We just need some agreement amongst some of our fellow scientists about what IS, and IS NOT, an instance of Aurora Borealis.

    Obviously, now that we DO know what it is, the Aurora existed for millennia without anybody being able to explain it. It wasn't even named until 1619 by Galileo and his ideas about it were wrong. But it was a clearly observable unique phenomenon.

    In the early 1900s Kristian Birkeland (A Norwegian scientist) first correctly explained what the Aurora Borealis was.

    Consciousness is a named and observable phenomenon, not rigorously defined, like the Aurora Borealis. But understood, a girl drawing a picture is conscious, a printer is not. We don't need rigorous definitions to roughly distinguish Conscious from Unconscious, just like we did not need rigorous definitions to roughly distinguish the Aurora from a Rainbow.

    But just because we don't have rigorous definitions does not mean we cannot engage in cycles of investigation and definition until we DO have rigorous definitions, and then propose and prove theorems based upon those definitions.

    None of that demands any new rules of physics or new rules of logic or mathematics.

    Therein lies the flaw in your "proof", you have forgotten the role of definition. To claim that physics cannot prove anything about Consciousness, because Consciousness is not mentioned in the axioms of physics, is just as patently absurd as claiming in 1850 AD that physics would never be able to prove anything about the Aurora Borealis, because it was not mentioned in any axioms, and was only described in non-rigorous terms. People claiming that in 1850 would be wrong.

    The same may be true for Consciousness in 2020. Cycles of experiment and clarifications might define it and bring Consciousness into the realm of currently known physics. It took Birkeland understanding solar wind, magnetic fields, particles, the geomagnetic field and his own observations to understand the Aurora.

    It is entirely possible that we only lack a good definition of consciousness, and a scientist with interests in the fields needed to form a coherent theory.

    I don't have to prove somebody on Earth fits that bill or has a theory, you have to prove it is impossible for any such person to exist at all, and you haven't done that.

    The flaw in your theory is that you have forgotten the role of definition in scientific discovery. Recognizable phenomenon without a rigorous definition, like the Aurora, may still be eventually scientifically explained without changing any of the rules or axioms of mathematics, logic or science.

    You cannot rule that out, thus I repeat, your claim is false.

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  23. Aside from the possibility that everybody is on lockdown, the reason this back and forth on consciousness has gone nowhere is the difficulty of producing actual evidence. So the arguments have devolved into trying to say something about consciousness on non evidentiary grounds.

    The two possibilities seem to be either that consciousness is entirely physical or its not. Mostly its straightforward if consciousness is just the physical product of biology.

    However, if someone wants to say something along the lines of consciousness is the product of physical processes plus something else out there, then the argument becomes more amorphous. It becomes like trying to handle jello without benefit of the tin in which it was frozen. You poke it and prod it and its just a shaky mass that falls apart in your hands. So how can you make any argument based on logic or anything else when you don't know the qualities you are dealing with? It doesn't fit, it doesn't follow.

    The following thing I got from Lawrence. Really smart people who have a solid area of expertise, seem sometimes to fall into the trap of believing they therefore are qualified to opine on areas in which they are not experts. That's why physicists are at disadvantage opining on biology. However, this discussion is way past its prime, so if there are any biologist out there please hold your fire and let this thing die a natural death.



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  24. PhysicistDave9:01 PM, July 31, 2020

    'but, you and Steve and several others here seem to have an irrepressible urge to claim that you “know” things that no human being knows. I am content to say, “I don't know.”'

    Dave, is there any chance you can stop lying through your teeth?

    You are not saying you don't know, you are claiming that you have a proof that it is logically impossible for the mind to be weakly emergent from the brain.

    So provide the effing proof.

    Except no-one with 2 brain cells to rub together believes there is such a proof, so stop being a child and admit you were wrong.

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  25. Steve Bullfox5:04 PM, August 01, 2020

    "the reason this back and forth on consciousness has gone nowhere is the difficulty of producing actual evidence"

    Every single observation of the natural world ever supports the thesis that all natural phenomena, including the mind, are physics or weakly emergent from physics. That's plenty of empirical evidence. The only difficulty is with some people's inability to think straight.

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    Replies
    1. Steven Evans,

      Re “Every single observation of the natural world ever supports the thesis that all natural phenomena, including the mind, are physics or weakly emergent from physics”:

      Not so when it comes to consciousness.

      1. Only the information content of consciousness can potentially be explained as being the result of lawful relationships, algorithms, variables, and numbers.

      E.g. many thousands of photons, reflected from a tree, interact with the eye, and are in effect algorithmically analysed by the brain/mind, and end up as one item of information: “tree”. Many such items of information, e.g. “tree” “sky” and “car”, are part of the information content of one consciousness. (Presumably there is some sort of living-Boolean AND operation going on in the brain/mind.)

      The problem is, of course: how and why do new (in effect) algorithmic analysis steps come into existence?

      2. It is assumed that information outcomes for particles, atoms and molecules involve exactly the same sort of lawful relationships, algorithms, variables, and numbers as those that occur in living things (including human beings). But it is assumed that particles, atoms and molecules do not experience this information content.

      The problem is, of course: why do living things experience the information content, when particles, atoms and molecules do not experience exactly the same sort of information content?

      Delete
    2. Lorraine Ford10:19 PM, August 02, 2020

      More unjustified claims. When will you give it a rest? Just making random claims with no justification is pointless.

      " Only the information content of consciousness can potentially be explained as being the result of lawful relationships..."
      So you keep stating without any justification.

      "The problem is, of course: how and why do new (in effect) algorithmic analysis steps come into existence?"

      If the brain can perform algorithms then clearly it has the ability to create algorithms to perform.
      "But it is assumed that particles, atoms and molecules do not experience this information content."
      Yes, empirically, broadly speaking, only brains have been observed to have conscious experience. No-one but lunatics like Phillip Goff, paid with my taxes, thinks atoms are conscious.

      "The problem is, of course: why do living things experience the information content, when particles, atoms and molecules do not experience exactly the same sort of information content?"
      Because the structure of the brain is what instantiates conscious experience, and an atom isn't a brain. Congratulations, too, on asking the most stupid question in the history of humanity. A Ferrari is made of atoms, but you can't drive around in an atom, either. Are you really this thick?

      Delete
    3. Steven Evans,

      That's the very point that your poor old illogical brain can't seem to understand: Brains have NEVER "been observed to have conscious experience". Conscious experience CANNOT BE OBSERVED. Conscious experience is self-reported. However, the CONTENT of conscious experience is clearly logically and lawfully derived.

      ALSO, it has been assumed that (e.g.) particles do not experience lawful information. Lawful information is derived from experiment, but any potential conscious experience of this very limited lawful information by a particle CANNOT BE OBSERVED, and it cannot be self-reported.

      Delete
    4. Lorraine Ford5:01 AM, August 03, 2020

      More unjustified claims. You simply do not tire of making them.

      " Conscious experience CANNOT BE OBSERVED"
      Writing it in all caps doesn't make it true. Conscious experience has not been observed, at least not in full detail; but that doesn't mean it cannot be observed. That's just your, yet again, unjustified claim.

      "Conscious experience is self-reported."
      So far, but the analysis of the brain is not complete, so it cannot be ruled out that conscious experience will be objectively observed. In fact, all empirical evidence suggests so. There is even objective evidence of conscious experience which suggests facts about it which we don't know ourselves e.g. where exactly in the brain it takes place.

      "but any potential conscious experience of this very limited lawful information by a particle"
      There is no reason to think this is anything but nonsense. All empirical (including self-reporting of certain creatures) evidence tells us that a mind is emergent from a brain.

      You continue to make unjustified claims. Writing some words in capitals doesn't provide justification.

      Delete
    5. Steven Evans,

      What you say is nonsense:

      “Conscious experience has not been observed, at least not in full detail; but that doesn't mean it cannot be observed … it cannot be ruled out that conscious experience will be objectively observed. In fact, all empirical evidence suggests so…”

      Delete
    6. Lorraine Ford10:35 AM, August 03, 2020

      "What you say is nonsense:"

      OK. Now you just need to provide a reason to support yet another unjustified claim. Otherwise you are just a liar like Dave.

      Maybe we should maintain a list of liars in these comments:

      Philip Goff
      Phillip Helbig
      Luke Barnes
      Dave Miller
      Lorraine Ford

      Delete
    7. There’s the flat-earthers, the “sovereign citizens” who won’t wear face-masks, and then there’s Steven Evans and the other worshippers of the “consciousness equation”: the supposedly-existing lawful relationship(s)/ algorithm(s) that can transform billiard balls into subjectively experiencing entities.

      First off, the consciousness-equationers need to decide whether the consciousness outcome should be represented by a single variable with an associated set of numbers, or the consciousness outcome should be represented by a set of variables with associated sets of numbers (where these variables exist as lawful mathematical or logical relationships).

      Steven Evans, you don’t need to wait for your elders and betters to tell you how to think. So: 1) Will you represent subjective conscious experience as a single variable, or a set of variables; and 2) How do you measure these variables?

      Delete
    8. Lorraine Ford8:30 PM, August 04, 2020

      "So: 1) Will you represent subjective conscious experience as a single variable, or a set of variables; and 2) How do you measure these variables? "

      What on Earth are you wittering on about, you moron? There is no representation of conscious experience in terms of matter.

      But you claim that there **cannot** be any such representation, so tell us how you know this and stop being a lying, trolling time-waster. I'm not claiming anything.

      Delete
    9. Steven Evans, there’s no need to have a fit.

      You say: “I'm not claiming anything”. However, every outcome of lawful relationships between variables, and interactions between matter, will also be variables and numbers that apply to matter. So if you say that subjective conscious experience “emerges”, then you are either talking about miracles, or you are talking about a subjective conscious experience that can be represented by variables and numbers that apply to matter.

      Delete
    10. Lorraine: An emergent conscious experience would arise from an arrangement of matter, as does life itself, or the function of any machine.

      You can indeed apply numbers to a bar and fulcrum that represents the emergent properties of a lever, we do that all the time. But those "lever" numbers are largely independent of the numbers associated with the atoms making up the bar and fulcrum.

      Independently, the bar is just iron, and the fulcrum is just granite. Examining them separately will give you no hint of the numbers related to the lever, unless you take the arrangement of bar and fulcrum into account. Then you can describe a lever in terms of basic physics.

      Consciousness will be the same way. We can use physics to describe cell processes, but that is like using it to describe the iron bar. It is unlikely to tell you much at all about Consciousness.

      I claim Consciousness emerges from the arrangement of cells and the cycles of their signaling. With fine enough probes we might discern the maths and statistics of consciousness, as a cyclic network of cells.

      But like the maths of levers, those numbers will not relate directly to any matter, and will have little to do with the math or physics of cellular activity; they will be the math of graphs and networks and information exchange.

      The math, constants, equations and algorithms involved in consciousness will be their own thing, and may well be independent of whether the functioning of the underlying cells is biological or synthetic. Just like the body employs plenty of biological levers, which have been successfully replaced by synthetic ones.

      Delete
    11. Lorraine Ford10:35 AM, August 05, 2020

      "there’s no need to have a fit."
      I beg to differ.

      " However, every outcome of lawful relationships between variables, and interactions between matter, will also be variables and numbers that apply to matter. "

      A cell in a human body is made of matter. It's not immediately obvious from its complex functions that it's just a pile of atoms though. You can move from the laws of Physics to a description of a cell via Chemistry, Biochemistry and hierarchies in Biology.

      **The same may apply to the mind. You, like Dave, make the strong claim that this is impossible, but like Dave you provide no reason.**

      Can you see the word "may" in the sentence above?


      "or you are talking about a subjective conscious experience that can be represented by variables and numbers that apply to matter. "
      Of course, this has not been ruled out. You are saying it has been ruled out but provide no evidence, no reason, no argument.

      13.7 billion years ago there was a quark-gluon soup. As far as we know, that has just been rearranged in an expanded space-time. All current empirical evidence suggests this rearrangement alone has lead to the mind. There is nothing else there but matter, energy and space-time.

      Delete
    12. Dr Castaldo,

      There is nothing out there in the universe keeping tabs on the patterns or “arrangements of matter” that you refer to. You are talking about a category of information that doesn’t exist; and non-existent information has no effect on the world. There is no such known-to-physics category of information as “pattern” or “arrangement of matter”: there is only (e.g.) relative position information.

      Discernment of pattern or “arrangement of matter” requires analytical steps to be taken, and it requires comparison with pre-existing knowledge of patterns that are significant from the point of view of an entity. There are no shortcuts to this type of information: pattern or “arrangement of matter” information does not just automatically exist.

      Delete
    13. Steven Evans,

      You seem to be saying that the chemistry and biology of cells and other living things involves entirely new powers unknown to physics. I.e. you seem to be saying that what is happening in cells and other living things cannot be reduced to (what we would represent as) lawful and logical relationships, variables, numbers and quantum mechanical interactions.

      But I would think that there are no new powers involved, and that everything can be reduced to normal lawful and logical relationships and quantum mechanical interactions which, despite the complexity within cells and living things, are producing nothing but normal types of outcomes.

      Delete
  26. Steve Evans,
    Perhaps I was inarticulate. I agree nearly 100% with you on religion and consciousness. I was addressing two aspects of the discussion of consciousness. First the difficulty of producing evidence that there is something non physical about consciousness, and second, that the whole discussion lacks detailed evidence. Very little about the evolution of consciousness, how consciousness is different for different species, how the body effects the mind and therefore consciousness, what is the root of consciousness, and so on and so forth.

    Also, I think Super Dave has the germ of a good idea with what I believed the called a translational dictionary of consciousness. I thought of it instead as a transactional summary of observable behaviors evidencing consciousness. There is a very good chance that somebody has already done something like that, but I don't know of it and it has not come up in this discussion.


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    Replies
    1. Steve Bullfox3:08 PM, August 02, 2020

      I wasn't particularly disagreeing with you. The difficulty of producing evidence that there is something non-physical about conscious experience is probably because there is nothing non-physical about it. There is certainly zero evidence that there is something non-physical about it - all empirical evidence suggests it's physical.
      A transactional dictionary will not be required ultimately if conscious experience is physical, and all current empirical evidence suggests it is physical.

      Delete
  27. Dr. A.M. Castaldo wrote to me:
    >[Dave] "[If a term, eg 'slithy'] does not occur in the axioms or the rules of inference or the premises of an argument, that term cannot occur in the conclusion of the argument except in a trivial tautological context."

    [Dr. AMC] I call BS. You have forgotten definitions.

    Actually, I set you up for that: I was just waiting for you to bring up that issue of definitions.

    You lose again.

    In logic, definitions are just abbreviations: you can always eliminate the defined term and replace it by the elementary terms.

    And then my argument clearly goes through.

    Thanks again for falling into my little trap and further proving that I am correct.

    “Veni, vidi, vici.”

    ReplyDelete
  28. Lorraine Ford9:04 PM, July 31, 2020

    And, surprise, surprise, you spew out more unjustified claims.

    "But subjective conscious experience is not a measurable variable like mass or charge:"

    So what? Neither is a cell in a human body, but a cell consists of matter and its functions can ultimately be written in terms of the behaviour of matter, theoretically at least.

    "subjective conscious experience is in effect knowledge of the measurable variables and numbers and lawful information relationships."
    Which all the current empirical evidence suggests is instantiated solely in matter.

    "This knowledge .. must seemingly be an aspect of matter, or at least it is not separable from matter. "

    More unjustified claims. There is no known such "aspect" of matter, and the only input to the mind we know of is matter. Therefore, as far as we know, conscious experience is weakly emergent from Standard Model matter alone. Is conscious experience an illusion of some sort, no-one knows, but as far as we do know, it is 100% made of matter.

    If you think there is some undiscovered "aspect" of matter, or the mind is made of something other than matter, let me know when you've found evidence and **not before**.

    No more unjustified claims, please.

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  29. PhysicistDave5:23 PM, August 02, 2020

    Dave, you are a liar. You claimed to have a logical proof that it is impossible that the mind is weakly emergent from the physical brain, but have failed to provide such a proof.

    No-one can trust any comment you make from now on as you are a liar.

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  30. PhysicistDave:

    Actually, I set you up for that: I was just waiting for you to bring up that issue of definitions.

    How delightful; now we move from the realm of bullshit to lying bullshit! You set no trap, you made a fatal error, and unlike a real scientist, you cannot admit when you are wrong.

    Dave claims: In logic, definitions are just abbreviations: you can always eliminate the defined term and replace it by the elementary terms.

    We are talking about scientific investigation. Before we understand a phenomenon, there is no rigorous definition of it. Consider "Dark Matter."

    It isn't "dark", it is invisible, and it may not even be "matter", in fact it is just a label for a collection of observations that do not seem to comport with the laws of gravitation described by general relativity.

    Which makes it ill-defined. As was the Aurora Borealis, before it was explained. That was experientially defined; not logically defined.

    Much like "dogs" before we knew of DNA. We could and did study dogs, but the definition of dogs was "You know, dogs."

    Because the definition of "dog" is an experientially defined mental model of animals with related features that is generalized and labeled 'dogs' that lets us distinguish dogs from non-dogs. The mental model matches pekingese and mastiffs, bulldogs and greyhounds, dogs with or without tails, dogs missing a leg or an ear. But not cats, even cats bigger than dogs. There is no worded or logical definition of "dog" that can replace the word dog in a logical argument.

    You are wrong, and digging your hole deeper. Ultimately language, even scientific language, depends ultimately upon experientially defined concepts, mental models that label a pattern of relationships with an arbitrary word.

    It is why we can translate languages; "perro", "hund" and "dog" are all labels for the same (to close approximation) generalized experiential mental model of a species of animal.

    Experiential models are not expressed in words, and thus cannot be substituted into a logical argument. Before Birkeland, the definition of Aurora was experientially defined, but he managed to study it scientifically anyway.

    Newton studied Gravity, scientifically, as an experientially defined phenomenon. Before any laws, and while admitting he did not know what it was in any terms other than experiential terms. He never defines gravity or what the motive force actually is; all he produces is "laws" that fit our experiential observations.

    Consciousness is also an experientially defined phenomenon, we have a mental model of it, which we cannot accurately and fully express in words, that lets us distinguish "conscious" from "not conscious" in the vast majority of cases. We may disagree on some border cases; whether ants are conscious or not, but the large area of agreement allows us to study it, without any definitional substitute. As we study Dark Matter, dogs, the Aurora, and Gravity.

    You may understand the math of physics, you certainly have not thought much about science and thinking, and I don't believe you are a scientist I can trust to engage in an honest debate.

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  31. Steven Evans (July 30, 10:11pm):

    Empirically there is no evidence of any contribution to the mind but the physical brain, and there is no evidence of strong emergence in Nature, so it is reasonable to summarise this as: *as far as we currently know* the mind is emergent from the physical brain.

    A similar claim could have been made about the neutrino, the electron, the neutron, the muon, and any other particle or phenomenon prior to its empirical discovery. Surely in something as poorly understood as the subjective experience of consciousness, one cannot confidently claim that 'lack of evidence' is 'evidence of lack'? One could equally say that *as far as we currently know* the mind is only partly emergent from the physical brain. We have no definite evidence for either position, so where does the confidence come from to make your strong claim?

    The strongest argument I've seen for consciousness being a purely biological phenomenon of the brain starts by recognizing that, according to our fundamental physical theories (which are established by extremely strong evidence), matter participates in only four fundamental interactions (five if you include the Higgs potential). By far the most important of these for brain function is electromagnetism, since it mediates all chemical and conduction phenomena. Hence any interactions between our minds, bodies and environment can involve only those interactions, whether it is sensing, acting or thinking. This leaves no place for 'outside' influences that don't involve the fundamental interactions. Since consciousness is clearly an internal (subjective) experience, it must be contained within our bodies, presumably only in the brain. QED (?!).

    Well, not exactly... I'll claim that in an important sense it relies on circular reasoning. Since I can't think of a simple yet understandable abstract argument for saying that, hopefully a more concrete proposal will do the job. A warning: I'm not aware of this particular argument existing in the literature (although it may), so "what you see is what you get."

    A central idea of 'gauge field theory' is crucial. Specifically, postulate an internal or gauge symmetry that a matter field obeys when it interacts. A standard example is a local U(1) symmetry of a matter field: at every point the field is 'required' to be insensitive to changes e^{i\phi(x)}, where \phi(x) is the phase angle of the matter field at the coordinate x. One imposes the U(1) symmetry by suitably modifying the field Lagrangian to make it insensitive (invariant) to \phi(x); this involves introducing a new field A(x)^\mu, its first derivatives and a charge Q. The new field is the vector potential of electromagnetism, so in this way the local U(1) symmetry 'implies' Maxwell's equations. Of course, Maxwell's equations alone don't fully describe electromagnetism; the Lorentz force law is also needed.

    This is standard stuff so far. Crucially it assumes 3+1 dimensions; it also assumes Minkowski space, but that isn't important here. It is relevant to my example below by abstractly relating local symmetries to interactions. Since electromagnetism is the crucial interaction for brain function, and presumably also consciousness, that will be the focus.

    [To be continued]

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  32. [cont'd]

    The idea is to posit a new interaction in d+1 dimensions from a carefully chosen higher symmetry group, analogously to the above procedure, such that the new interaction has some 'overlap' with electromagnetism in 3+1 dimensions. Presumably d > 1; otherwise the new interaction would almost certainly have been detected experimentally by now. The central idea is that the new interaction can be projected from d spatial dimensions onto familiar three-dimensional space, such that by removing the 'extra' d-3 spatial dimensions the resulting interaction field can crudely mimic the electromagnetic field. By superposing with the usual electromagnetic field the new, projected field can mediate influences from the d+1 dimensional entities that generated it, and thereby slightly modify the chemical and electrical processes in the brain.

    Likewise, the field due to neural processes in the brain would superpose with the projected new field, so that the dd+1 dimensional entities could detect the modified field and incorporate it into its own motions. Hence the interaction between the brain and the hypothetical higher-dimensional mind would be bidirectional, as required for the higher-dimensional mind to be relevant.

    The idea requires additional assumptions. First, almost everywhere the projection of the new field onto 3+1 dimensional spacetime must be completely uncorrelated with our familiar matter fields; otherwise it would manifest in phenomena outside the brain. This is a reasonable assumption if we assume that the projected field only has an effect when it is in some sense 'resonant' with the matter on which it acts: that is, the higher-dimensional mind must 'intentionally tune' itself or correlate its interaction field to the brain matter on which it is acting. The brain can amplify small influences, so the interaction can be limited and still have an effect. Second, we can't artificially restrict the complexity of the higher-dimensional mind -- in principle (!), it could be highly complex with very complex interactions that can readily interpret complex brain processes and similarly induce complex, low-amplitude changes in many neurons. And third, we can't arbitrarily assume that the higher-dimensional mind is composed of matter like what we know, nor that its interactions with matter must be readily detectable in conventional experiments. Maybe you can think of additional crucial assumptions, such as the a priori existence of the required symmetry in d+1 dimensions.

    So that's the proposal. How does that indicate circular reasoning in the 'brain only' argument? Basically, the usual argument assumes that normal matter -- matter described by the standard model of particle physics -- is the only source of interaction fields that can influence the brain. Thus all mental processes, including consciousness, must lie completely within the brain. But such reasoning assumes what is to be demonstrated: by asserting that a complete description of brain processes is provided by the electromagnetic interaction, the standard model particles that interact electromagnetically, plus quantum mechanics, an immediate implication is that non-brain contributions to consciousness can't exist. It is basically a proof by assertion.

    Side note: I believe a similar proposal indicates that the usual argument against free will is also circular since the underlying assumptions are similar in both cases, i.e., that our 3+1 dimensional 'reality' is a closed system. Of course, one can always redefine free will and presumptuously claim that all possible dynamic processes are also deterministic (and thus antithetical to free will), but that would tautologically make the notion of free will meaningless.

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  33. Dr. A.M. Castaldo7:28 AM, August 03, 2020

    I wouldn't engage any more Dr. C. As well as being competent in the technical details of quantum theory, Dave is also a lying troll.

    He has claimed 30 times to have a logical proof (not an argument, but an actual logical proof) that the mind cannot be weakly emergent from the brain, but has failed to provide such a proof.

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  34. In response to:

    "we are talking about the issue of how those interior feelings are possible in a universe that is, certainly, largely physical.

    You do not have to participate in that discussion. But, if that is your intent, it would be nice for you to own up to it."--Dr. Miller

    I have explained my position on that issue at this site several times, as nicely as I can (better than some in that respect, in my biased opinion). One last try:

    My position is that interior feelings as we experience them given the physics of our biology are basic properties of this universe, the same way the scent of a rose is. Which is to say a rose could conceivably smell like an orange and vice-versa (with their same chemistry and our same nervous system) but that would be a different universe.

    That scent evolved for the biological function of attracting pollinators, as did our own interior sensations for various useful purposes. There are other chemicals which our biology does not detect but other biology could. The basic philosophical point I take from this is that to experience something there must be an experience, i.e., a sensation of some kind associated with it. To say we could have been zombies with no sensations strikes me as a contradiction in terms. No sensation = no experience = no detection = no information on which to act. (Presumably the fictional zombies of philosophers work by magic which needs no rules. The original voodoo version were puppets controlled by a separate sensation-bearing intelligences.)

    (What about emotions? As I understand it, they are caused by chemicals released by glands in response to certain stimuli which gets us back to biological evolution selecting for useful functions. Dr. Dimascio argues based on case studies that emotions play a major role in how we make decisions.)

    Further, if the sensations evolution gave us were developed by trial and error selection from the sensations available in this universe, there is nothing we could do to alter those sensations (make a rose smell like a orange) except to alter the biology of roses or ourselves or both. So the only way we have any sort of grip on them is through our scientific understanding of how they correlate to physics/chemistry/biology, and that is how we should study them.

    Other creatures with different biology have different sensations, e.g., birds can see about two more distinct shades of colors than we can. That is, we know they can detect them and it seems reasonable to assume they "see" them.

    Computers with their different structural physics will not experience the same interior sensations we do, but given sensings mechanisms they will be able to sense visual, auditory, and tactile data, and thereby experience them in some fashion also. How will a rose smell to them? As long as we (humans and computers) can both detect the scent and agree that it comes from a rose, such knowledge is all either of us needs to function in this universe, and I believe all we can know.

    @ Marty Tysanner: I agree that all "proofs" are somewhat circular in that they depend on their assumptions, but I don't think science depends on rigorous mathematical proofs of hypotheses. The word is often used colloquially to indicate something more like "convincing evidence". I and others, including neuro-scientists such as Dr. Steven Novella of the "Neurologica" blog, think there is a lot of evidence against mind-body dualism. However, there is always the possibility of some unknown phenomena which has escaped our detection. Meanwhile, I learned today that GPT-3 has written functional computer apps based on verbal requests for them, such as a manager might give a programmer. (It still makes many mistakes, as do humans. Its biggest source of error seems to be a built-in assumption that it knows enough to take a stab at an answer to anything, and unlike AphaGoZero it has been given no means of testing its answers and developing skills by trial and error.)

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  35. Steven Evans wrote to me:
    >On this point you claimed that you can provide a logical proof that refutes the possibility of conscious experience being weakly emergent from a physical brain. No sane person believes your ludicrous claim,

    Well, I actually dislike using the terms “emergent” and 'emergence” simply because they mean different things to different people.

    What I have proven is that the currently known laws of physics cannot explain consciousness.

    You and Dr. AMC do both seem so ignorant of logic that you do not see how such proofs are possible.

    I'll give a simple example:

    Consider the premises:
    A) All dogs are mortal and all cats are furry if and only if all birds have feathers.

    B) Fido is a dog if and only if Cissy is a bird.

    Now there are various conclusions that can be deduced from these premises, which I will not try to enumerate.

    But there is one conclusion that it is quite obvious cannot be deduced from these premises:

    C) Socrates is mortal.

    How can I be so sure?

    Because Socrates is not mentioned in the premises!

    A term not mentioned in the axioms or the premises cannot occur in the conclusion, except in a trivial, tautological manner. (E.g., we can deduce that “Either Socrates is mortal or Socrates is not mortal,” because that is trivially tautological and follows from any premises or no premises at all.)

    I am pretty sure that you and DR. AMC do grasp that basic point with statements A, B, and C above.

    So, why are you two not willing to apply the same point to the issue of physics and consciousness?

    You've already told us: for some reason, you have an all-consuming hatred of Christianity that is so large that you have advocated preventing the printing of books that might somehow increase Christian belief.

    That is unfortunate, though I suppose no stranger than the behavior of most “True Believers.”

    Anyway,, if you have the courage to think outside your box, let me know if you accept the principle I have stated with respect to statements A, B, and C above. And, if so, why not apply the same principle to the mind-brain issue?

    By the way, you are helping a lot with clarifying points I need to cover in the book! Thanks so much for all your help.

    All the best,

    Dave

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  36. Hello Sabine, I have a question that I think is related to the idea of a theory of everything. The idea that smaller particles "make up" larger particles is a strong paradigm that has its roots in our evolutionary history. Do you think abolishing this paradigm would be possible? Can there be a completely symmetrical causality independent of scale or a unified causality independent of scale? How would it be for physics to abandon the axiom that smaller things make up larger things?

    I am interested in this because our understanding is not evolved for learning about the fundamental forces of the universe or to understand everything, we are evolved to survive in Earth and in our local environments. As such, it would be absurd to think that the hunches or unconscious prejudices of human mind would have anything to do with the underlying and unobservable principles (i mean in a large scale).

    So, I believe the universe or the fundamental forces or rules it is subject to for whatever reason, does not have a way to observe or experience the "idea" of scale. So it would be required to have a unified set of rules. This is the connection I make with the unified theories.

    Another aspect of the case is that, everything we can think and can know of are just derivations of the language of our mind and perception. I think even the ideas of "small" or "divisible" are highly dependent on our intelligence and its structure and perhaps unique substance. We have the division and seperation of things because we have to eat, escape, run, survive, count hostiles, etc. The very initiation of any idea comes with the will to survive. It has nothing to do with fundamental structure of the universe. But then, if the universe and whatever we will observe in our time in it are derivations of our language, that means we are only looking inwards and exploring these derivations and have no way out. If so, it means that whatever theories and whatever limit we will reach on physics are deducible from the structure and starting conditions of our psyche. Our unconscious have always been projecting a past and future for us, in the form of gods and aliens. Sorry if I strayed too much from what I was saying, I am watching your live panel on PBS Space Time and it is extremely distracting right now, hahah. Thanks for this blog and the opportunity to directly ask you questions.

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    Replies
    1. Hello Adramelekh,

      You're right. You're absolutely right. We're not designed to understand the universe.
      That's why scientific progress is so difficult to achieve.

      With your
      "The idea that smaller particles "make up" larger particles
      is a strong paradigm that has its roots in our evolutionary history."
      you pretty much hit the core of the current physical problems with small objects like electrons and photons.

      If there's a paradigm shift in this point,
      this will be the end of string Theory.

      Have fun
      Stefan

      Delete
  37. PhysicistDave5:23 PM, August 02, 2020

    “Veni, vidi, vici.”

    And here it is, Caesar Dave's "logical proof" that it is impossible for the mind to be weakly emergent from a physical brain:

    "If a term, eg 'slithy' does not occur in the axioms or the rules of inference or the premises of an argument, that term cannot occur in the conclusion of the argument except in a trivial tautological context."

    Behold the genius of the great Caesar Dave.

    Don't mention that Caesar Dave is just assuming conscious experience cannot be derived from physics, and so is simply assuming the answer.

    Doh! Thick as pig-sh*t.




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  38. Marty Tysanner7:41 AM, August 03, 2020

    " We have no definite evidence for either position, so where does the confidence come from to make your strong claim?"

    It's not my claim, it is Dr. H's. And it's not strong. As soon as one says "as far as we know", one is of course covering oneself. So what's the point of saying it? Well, it's just saying the mind is not necessarily the mystery many claim it to be.

    The strong claim is being made by PhysicistDave, who claims to have a logical proof refuting the possibility of the mind being weakly emergent from a physical brain, but of course no such logical proof exists, and he has failed to provide one and is simply lying.

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  39. PhysicistDave12:53 AM, August 04, 2020

    "What I have proven is that the currently known laws of physics cannot explain consciousness."

    No you haven't. You are a liar.
    You have simply assumed that what we are subjectively aware of as the mind cannot be derived from physics. But that's the question. The question is whether the mind can be derived from or is weakly emergent from Physics.

    You have claimed to have a "logical proof" of this but have provided no such proof.

    You are a liar.

    ReplyDelete
  40. Steven Evans wrote to me:
    >Don't mention that Caesar Dave is just assuming conscious experience cannot be derived from physics, and so is simply assuming the answer.

    Show me the formal derivation that starts with premises that do not mention subjective experience and draws a valid conclusion that does refer (non-tautologically) to subjective experience. You cannot do so and no one has ever done so.

    I have given a valid mathematical proof showing why you can't.

    Steve also wrote:
    >Doh! Thick as pig-sh*t.

    Perhaps. But if the truth is pig-sh*t, it is still the truth. I do, though, appreciate the... pungency, if not the logic, of your response!

    The point I am making is essentially the same point Hume made on the “is/ought” problem. For well over two centuries, philosophers have been trying to escape Hume's argument. They have all failed.

    I think part of your and Dr. AMC's confusion may be that I have never been addressing whether brains alone do or do not produce minds. Maybe they do, maybe not.

    I am addressing solely the issue of whether existing physical theories can or cannot explain consciousness. As a matter of formal logic, they cannot.

    I think it is worthwhile focusing, as a matter of logic, on the explanatory power of existing theories. I think perhaps you do not share that interest.

    You have not answered me as to whether it is okay to acknowledge you in the book for all of our useful discussions. If you do not answer one way or another, I will feel obligated to thank you, while acknowledging that you have different views from mine.

    All the best,

    Dave

    ReplyDelete
  41. PhysicistDave12:53 AM, August 04, 2020

    "A term not mentioned in the axioms or the premises cannot occur in the conclusion, except in a trivial, tautological manner. "

    What are you talking about, you complete halfwit? So a "cell" in biology is not a physical object because the term "cell" is not mentioned in the laws of Physics?

    I think you might be mentally retarded, Dave. I'm going to write a book on mental retards. Thanks for providing subject matter!

    ReplyDelete
  42. PhysicistDave2:52 AM, August 05, 2020

    "Show me the formal derivation"
    It is not me who is claiming to have a formal derivation. It is you. And you *still* have failed to provide one. You are simply a liar.

    "I have given a valid mathematical proof showing why you can't."
    Boll*cks, you have. You are an inveterate liar. Where have you written any Maths, you liar?

    "The point I am making is essentially the same point Hume made on the “is/ought” problem."
    That has nothing to do with whether the mind is derivable from Physics. A cell in Biology is physical but it would be tricky to describe it mathematically and derive it from Physical laws with current computing power. But it is considered possible to derive a description of a cell in terms of the laws of Physics, theoretically at least.

    "I am addressing solely the issue of whether existing physical theories can or cannot explain consciousness. As a matter of formal logic, they cannot."
    Have you ever seen any formal logic?? You have provided none. If the mind is weakly emergent from the physical brain, which empirically is a possibility, then theoretically at least the mind, just like a cell, can be written in terms of the laws of Physics. You have not refuted this as "a matter of formal logic". You have written no formal logic, and continue to tell lies lie a little child.

    "I think it is worthwhile focusing, as a matter of logic, on the explanatory power of existing theories. I think perhaps you do not share that interest."
    More lies. You have not shown that the mind cannot be derived from the laws of Physics.

    Nobody is asking you for waffle about the LA riots, or Hume's ought/is or all the other irrelevant drivel you have written.

    You claim to have a formal logical proof that it is impossible for the mind to be weakly emergent from a physical brain, that we absolutely cannot derive the mind from Physics.

    Nobody believes this ludicrous claim, but OK, stop writing "Hume" and "ought/is" and provide the formal logical proof you claim to have.

    Otherwise you are simply a liar and everybody knows it.

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  43. My final contribution to the discussion on consciousness would be to suggest that its better to not write anything on line that you would not say to someone standing close enough to punch you in the nose.

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  44. Just came across this condensed version of Jürgen Schmidhuber’s talk on art, beauty and it's relationship to data compression and learning. Maybe beauty in physics works the same way.

    ReplyDelete
  45. Here is the link https://vimeo.com/8561647

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  46. @Prof. David Edwards

    "By Godel's Theorem the currently axioms for arithmetic can only be empirically assumed to be consistent but cannot be proven to be so from more reliable axioms."

    Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem tells that consistency of Arithmetic System is unprovable within this System, UNLESS this System is inconsistent.
    I would like to inform about the paper: T. J. Stępień, Ł. T. Stępień, „On the Consistency of the Arithmetic System”, Journal of Mathematics and System Science, vol. 7, 43 (2017), arXiv:1803.11072. There in this paper, a proof of the consistency of the Arithmetic System was published. This proof had been done WITHIN this Arithmetic System (the abstract related to this paper: T. J. Stepien and L. T. Stepien, "On the consistency of Peano's Arithmetic System" , The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 16, No. 1, 132 (2010)).

    ReplyDelete

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