[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 5 - Kierkegaard, responsible free will and the meaning of the new transition in science

[Alex Hankey]

Dear Stuart and other friends and colleagues,
Consciousness as we experience it cannot be understood properly from the
second or third person perspectives.
The ancient Vedic civilisation got it spot on when it held that only
internal awareness developed through
the practice of 'meditation' starting after awareness has been internally
directed by using Yoga's
Fifth Limb (called Pratyahara) can achieve this. I have been teaching
Pratyahara in
the form used by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi since 1971, and I can show how
it fits the definition given in Pada II of Patanjali's 'Yoga Sutras':
'Directing Awareness Inward away from the Senses'.
>From the first person perspective, it becomes clear that consciousness is
capable of 'Knowing Itself Directly without Intermediary'. Then
'The Self knows Itself by Itself'. That means that the Self
constitutes a Perfectly Self-Observing System.
The consequence of that is an explanation
for how wave function collapse occurs.
A serendipitous, unforeseen result,
making the model appealing.
After all, in Jon von Neumann's 'Mathematical Principles of Quantum
Mechanics'
the ability of consciousness to reduce wave packets is completely accepted,
and
it can be said of von Neumann that he never got anything (seriously) wrong.
Here he was entirely in agreement with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
The next steps are to link this phenomenological picture into mathematics
of biological regulation, in nervous systems, etc. In that regard, Jeffrey
Goldstone whom I first met as an undergraduate at Trinity Cambridge
gave me an invaluable hint - the Neural Net - Spin Glass identity.
The detailed physics of this last section is not difficult to give.
All best wishes to one and all,
Alex (Hankey)



On Fri, 12 Jan 2024 at 19:48, Stuart Kauffman <stukauffman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Lou. I agree that the discovery of mathematics is often not
> deductive, and I need better to understand what you say below. I do mean
> what I am saying about Mind, entanglement, and more. I have long adopted
> Heisenberg’s interpretation of the quantum state, 1958, as potentia.  Dean
> Radin and colleagues have powerful experimental data that deserves to be
> considered on some of these issues. Some if this is in the Kauffman Roli
> paper, “What is Consciousness?” recently published in the LInnean Society
> journal.
>
> Best to all.
>
> Stu
>
> On Jan 11, 2024, at 11:37 PM, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Stu,
> My feeling (and I mean feeling) is that you are right Stu, but you choose
> rhetoric that leads you into mistakes.
> The purpose of mathematical models is structural and sometimes deductive.
> We are concerned primarily with language where the words have meaning and
> definitions can be
> elicited. I suspect that you have been seduced by some notion that
> mathematics is only a deductive or computational enterprise, but it is much
> more than that at the level of the distinctions that it studies via the
> definitions and constructions that are made. The error that can then result
> is to throw away too much. And start making up words that in fact have no
> meaning such as “mind is quantum”, “mind entangles with the world”, “we
> collapse the wave function”, “we experience the single state as a qualia”.
> By the time you start talking this way, you have left the grounds of
> discourse with discrimination, for rhetoric for which some will applaud you
> and others will scorn you.
> (Again I am probably over my quota and can send again next week.)
> Best,
> Lou
>
> On Jan 11, 2024, at 6:21 PM, Stuart Kauffman <stukauffman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Gordana I completely agree. Moreover, the Third Transition claims to
> demonstrate that the evolving biosphere is a non-deducible propagating
> construction, not a deduction, not a COMPUTATION at all. The grounds to
> think human mind is a computation are being erased. We do not create
> meaning by deducing, we create it as living organisms acting in the world.
> “Meaning” is to ME, acting and doing in my world, for all living creatures.
>
> Andrea Roli and I wrote a further paper, “What is Consciousness?",
> published in the Linnean Society recently, 2023 Vol 139.  We jury rig. Non
> - embodied Universal Turing Machines are algorithmic and cannot jury rig.
> Embodied UTM in robots can jury rig a bit, but far too slowly, we think.
> We suggest mind is quantum, it entangles with the world, we collapse the
> superposition wave function, and we experience the single state as a
> qualia.
>
> And Kirkegard was exactly correct as are you.
>
> Stu
>
> On Jan 11, 2024, at 4:07 PM, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic <
> gordana.dodig-crnkovic at mdu.se> wrote:
>
>
> On 9 January 2024 at 18:32 (below) Stuart wrote:
> ”(...) responsible free will? Glad to argue for this. Gordana?”
>
> "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards"
> Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen JJ:167 (1843), Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter,
> Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, Copenhagen, 1997--, volume 18, page 306.
>
> Life cannot be understood forwards since we cannot know all possible
> consequences of our present decisions. Despite this, ethical practice has
> found pragmatic solutions. For example, a popular ethics topic today is AI,
> a technology that is developing incredibly quickly. We have no idea what
> will come next year. Yet, people have started thinking about future
> scenarios, challenges, possible pitfalls, etc. Societies want to prepare
> even under uncertainty. We do this all the time.
>
> Ethics is a distributed intelligent learning adaptive system.
>
> The question of predicting a system's future behavior also relates to
> research. The paper "A third transition in science?" relates both to the
> methodology of prediction and the direction of the new transition in
> science, a post-Newtonian paradigm.
> The current paradigm shift is occurring in the material sciences—physics,
> chemistry, biology—as well as in other forms of knowledge production and *meaning
> creation*.
>
> At the foundation of information, there is the concept of 'meaning'.
> This meaning is tightly bound to values, but that is a subject for a new
> discussion.
>
> Gordana
>
>
> *From: *Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Stuart Kauffman <
> stukauffman at gmail.com>
> *Date: *Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 18:32
> *To: *Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com>, 0 <stukauffman at gmail.com>
> *Cc: *fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>, Andrea Roli <andrea.roli at unibo.it>
> *Subject: *Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 5
>
>
> Lou how splendid!  I fully agree and perhaps even more. Wheeler’s
> wonderful 20 questions is, as you say, OUR joint *conscious *construction
> of what will become. What becomes did not yet exist.
>
> The clearest physical example is exactly the evolving biosphere. Whatever
> the Actual biosphere is now, it enables an un-prestatable Adjacent Possible
> into which it literally physically constructs itself. What is Actual now
> must be stable enough to enable what can next arise. The same thing occurs
> in the evolving global economy. Goods and services that now exist enable
> the coming into existence of new, non-prestatable, non-deducible
> complements and substitutes, screws and screwdrivers - screws and nails.
>
> We do not know what is “in” the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. We do
> not know the sample space of the process, so can have no probability
> measure nor even define “random”.
>
> It is critical to our discussions to get beyond formal deductions.
> Evolving life is an evolving physical, in part, construction.
>
> Beyond the way the biosphere physically constructs itself without appeal
> to MIND and consciousness, we also are conscious, choose and act. Ask any
> Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs. They cannot deduce - compute “The
> risk”.
> As Soren Kirkegord roughly said, We live our lives forward into mystery.
>
> Uhoh, responsible free will? Glad to argue for this. Gordana?
>
> Stu
>
>
> On Jan 8, 2024, at 8:38 AM, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Stu,
> The constituents of your Kantian wholes still obey the laws of physics. I
> am made of atoms and molecules.
> In studying mathematics the structures obey the axioms I have chosen to
> study, but they are not so constrained by them that they do not have
> surprising behaviour.
> The prime numbers obey the Peano axioms but that does not make them staid
> and predictable, quite the contrary. Novelty arises in relation to
> constraints.
> Look at the molecular biology. We are pretty damn sure the the molecules
> in the cell obey physical law all the way down to quantum mechanics. And
> those molecules have evolved into the dance of life. How those evolutions
> occurred is your fantastic study AND all that occurred as far as we can
> tell with no violation of physical law.
>
> I see that every even number not equal to 2 is the sum of two odd primes
> (in many ways!) I also see that whenever this happens it happens within the
> rules of arithmetic. The rules of arithmetic do not deny this phenomenon,
> but it may well be that they neither predict it or make it possible for it
> to be deduced from them. That is the way things are. Constraints are part
> and parcel of creativity.
>
> Ah, but you ask Why can Physics have constraining laws? Ha!
> Note that in the Feynman Path Integral version of QM the “particle” does
> whatever it likes.
> The laws arise from the phase relationships of the particles that arrive
> at a given “place” in conjunction with assumed properties of “observers”.
> Wheeler in his book on Gravity (Misner, Thorne and Wheeler) speaks
> eloquently about “Law without Law”.
> I suggest you read John Wheeler who, in my opinion has the best answer to
> this question in terms of his
> Parable of the Game of Twenty Questions.
> I can send you my paper related to that but it will be too long for this
> email.
> Excerpt included below.
>
>
> 86. Here is a remarkable story told by the physicist John Archibald
> Wheeler about a Game of Twenty Questions (Davies, P.C.W and Brown, J. R.
> (1986)): “ Then my turn came .... I was locked out an unbelievably long
> time. On finally being readmitted, I found a smile on everyone’s face, a
> sign of a joke or a plot. I nevertheless started my attempt to find the
> word. ‘Is it an animal?’ ‘No.’ Is it a mineral?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it green?’
> ‘No.’ ‘Is it white?’ ‘Yes.’ These answers came quickly. Then the questions
> took longer in the answering. All I wanted from my friends was a simple
> ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Yet the one queried would think and think before responding.
> Finally I felt I was getting hot on the trail, that the word might be
> *cloud*. I knew I was allowed only one chance at the final word. I
> ventured it: ‘Is it *cloud*?’ ‘Yes,’ came the reply, and everyone in the
> room burst out laughing. They explained to me that there had been no word
> in the room. They had agreed not to agree on a word. Each one questioned
> could answer as he pleased – with one requirement that he should have a
> word in mind compatible with his own response and all that had gone before.
> Otherwise, if I challenged, he lost.
> This surprise version of Twenty Questions was therefore as difficult for
> my colleagues as it was for me ... What is the symbolism of the story? The
> world, we once believed, exists *out there *independent of any act of
> observation. ... I, entering the room, thought the room contained a
> definite word. In actuality, the word was developed step by step through
> the questions I raised ... Had I asked different questions or the same
> questions in a different order I would have ended up with a different word
> ... However, the power I had in bringing the particular word *cloud *into
> being was partial only. A major part of the selection lay in the ‘yes’ or
> ‘no’ replies of the colleagues around the room ... In the game, no word is
> a word until that word is promoted to reality by the choice of questions
> asked and answers given.” Wheeler’s allegorical fable was intended to
> illuminate the conditions of the quantum physicist. In quantum physics no
> phenomenon is an actual phenomenon until it is observed and agreed upon by
> all the physics colleagues. The story just as well illustrates the world of
> social interaction.
> 87. My thesis is that all attempts to find stable knowledge of the world
> are attempts to find theories accompanied by eigenforms in the actual
> reflexivity of the world into which one is thrown. The world itself is
> affected by the actions of its participants at all levels. One finds out
> about the nature of the world by acting upon it. The distinctions one makes
> change and create the world. The world makes those possibilities for
> distinctions available in terms of our actions. Given this point of view,
> one can ask, as one should of a theory, whether there is empirical evidence
> for this idea that stable knowledge is equivalent to the production of
> eigenforms. In this case we have only to look at what we do and see that
> whenever “something is the case” then there is an orchestration of actions
> that leaves the something invariant, making that something into an
> eigenform for those actions. The eigenform thesis is not itself a matter of
> empirical science. It is a matter of definition, albeit circular
> definition. Another point of view is that the empirical evidence is all
> around you. Examine any thing. How does it come to be for you? Investigate
> the question and you will find that thing is maintained by actions. The
> action could be as simple as opening your eyes and looking at the cloudy
> sky. With that action, the cloudy sky comes to be for you. I do not assert
> that this is the usual scientific explanation of cloudy sky. But if you
> want to work with such things then it is usually even more transparent. The
> sharp spectral lines of Helium are the result of setting up a very
> particular experiment that produces them. The experiment, its equipment,
> the scientists and all that is needed to perform it is the transformation
> whose eigenform is the spectrum of Helium.
> 88. It is a fruitful beginning to look at present scientific endeavors and
> to see how they are interrelated and find connections among them, to engage
> in meta-scientific activity. This can reveal how theories, seemingly
> objective, actually affect the world through their very being, and how
> these actions on the world come to affect the theories themselves. In
> exploring the world, we find regularities. It is possible that these
> regularities are our own footprint. In the end we shall begin to understand
> the mystery of the eigenforms that we have created, constructed and found.
> (LK in Constructivist Foundations, Vol. 11, No. 3)
> This is of course related to Wheeler’s “It from Bit”. Each question gives
> a bit of information. The whole pattern of questioning gives the resulting
> world of “everything that is the case”. The striking thing in the parable
> is the lack of causality, and the philosophical question: How much comes
> just from our demand for consistency? And you will note to what great
> lengths we go as (mathematical) scientists to preserve consistency even in
> the face of acausality.
> Best,
> Lou
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 7, 2024, at 7:27 AM, Stuart Kauffman <stukauffman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Thank you Lou. I agree. Creativity is not deduction. Given what you write,
> Andrea and I claim to have shown that no laws at all entail of the
> evolution of the biosphere which is a non-deducible, propagating,
> construction. Assume this is correct. But physics DOES HAVE LAWS THAT
> ENTAIL. So  if Andrea and Stu are right and physics with laws is right, why
> can physics have entailing laws but not the evolving biosphere. One answer
> is that living organisms really are Kantian Wholes with Catalytic and
> Constraint closure, that can evolve new boundary conditions creating novel
> phase spaces, that can evolve and create ever-new phase spaces by *selection
> on the whole, which is downward causation* for those feature that survive
> and propagate best in the current context - and there is no prior
> description of what the current context will become.
>
> But even if Andrea and I are right about evolving life, why can PHYSICS
> have entailing laws?
>
> All very odd.
>
> Stu
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Alex Hankey M.A. (Cantab.) PhD (M.I.T.) DSc. (Hon Causa)
Board Member Ayushman India (https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.ayushmanindia.in__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!TfNf1cxU2Mz8xe3RigSqeyXJ9jlsPQJyFUhinTzAAqheFYgP9tmnoaPw9aHnTycPsTCW1wE04aCtctbge-VWLw$ )
Teacher Yoga Pratyahara and True Dhyana Meditation (50 years)
Professor Emeritus of Biology,
MIT World Peace University,
124 Paud Road, Pune, MA 411038
Mobile (Intn'l): +44 7710 534195
Mobile (India) +91 900 800 8789
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2015 JPBMB Special Issue on Integral Biomathics: Life Sciences, Mathematics
and Phenomenological Philosophy
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