Conversations On-Line
Intuition Network: Physics - open forum
10
Subject: math vs experience Date: 12/01/96
"First Principles of Real Behaviors"
Barron,
My only defense of my ideas is the Bucky Fuller "more with less" approach.
All of known (encountered) existence is an on-going interplay of transiting forces. I
don't know when Prigogine wrote his "ethical" remark, but I can tell you that in
1991 [(c) 1992] I wrote, "I challenge the theorists and experimentalists to be able
to even explain *the WHY* of why we are making (all) these enormous (exploratory) efforts
in the first place. What is it, in the
machinations of the heart of atomic and sub-atomic structuring and activity, that
eventually leads to "us" ... what we are ... and the things we do? All the
diversity of mental activities that our species displays, including the effort to
understand the "effort to understand"."
It isn't denotable by any simple singular mathematical equations. Such criteria just happens to be the current standard of evaluation per western science. What the math *must* do, however, is be as open to internal information trans-relationships as the universe it is expected to model.
The universe functions quite well employing the relational dynamics that are describable by the language of mathematics. But it never has needed our level of sentient observation to "be" or to act out its existence. All this talk about human conscious being the "maker" of wave collapses is sheer egotistical lunacy. Math is just our way of coping with the experiencing of those pre-extant forces. And waves get collapsed by the interaction of the participants (what I call "Heisenberg Intersections") themselves. Our interventions may set up the conditions for the collapse, but the devices we contrive to interact together accomplish the acts we observe, not us.
And, the dynamic activities found in atomic structuring, have their counterpart in every social and conceptual act that humans are involved in. An enactment of entropy on one level of organization co-creates a negentropic action relative to the next larger hierarchy of organization.
Plain and simple as that.
Molecules *negentropically* form when the valence electrons of their constituent atoms are *entropically* redistributed around the member atoms rather than the original few. You can give all the QM descriptions of the process you want, there is still a net thermodynamic behavior of the electrons.
In the same way, if you have a product negentropically localized around yourself, and I have money localized within my control, and each of us redistributes our "commodity" entropically away from us towards the other, then "we" become entropically "bound" in a relationship called Commerce.
What do you think ball games essentially are? The same thing. Entropic distribution of a ball which "binds" together teams and games. There may be "social" and "psychological" reasons involved also, but even there, interpretations can be made to correspond with that basic principle of functioning.
What I've attempted to do is find a way of wending my way up through the various hierarchies of organization, keeping an eye on the presence of that basic principle. And I find it everywhere. But on our level it is present with dozens and hundreds of individual "local entropies" impacting what seems to be simple straight forward events. The entanglements are only "computable" by using fuzzy logic weighting-functions, and even then our accuracy can only be asymptotically close. Because algorithms are limited. They can never be as informationally-complete as the existence they are supposed to model. But still, we are that much closer to appreciating the core dynamics of existence, and the importance of "options" and statistical potential, as given systems encounter to rest of co-existence.
Our "morality", all our "philosophy", is a product of the behaviors found in atoms, and within them. It's what we are made of. We are not alien to our own construction. If this vision of ourselves as part of the universe enables me to talk conversantly about economics as about metabolic pathways as about holographic sonoluminescence, I am very happy with my perceptions.
We are simultaneously "processors" and "enactors" of
information/energy. More intricately sensitive to the "carried"
information than any Artificial Constructs currently made. Organic sentience is affected
by the flow of impulses streaming along dendritic lines, a surge of "thought"
may shift the growth pattern of a neuron in a way that no copper wire or embedded strand
of
silicate meshed inside a chip will ever be able to adjust to from a bit-stream. So all the
hoopla about "computability" or not, is misplaced. The more valuable way of
looking at events is the pattern of their relationships over time, the ebb and flow
patterns present.
My sentient consciousness isn't this flip-flop inside a microtubule, or that one, but
the larger coherent pattern globally organized (Baars) and enacted, that not only
"handles" information flowings, but is reactive to it as it travels my
neural-retes. This is where Scott focuses his attention... on the larger assemblies.
Pen, Stapp, Sarfatti, et al are not "inaccurate" that sentient-type
activities occur at the quantum level - I am the first to stand up and say that such a
notion is obvious and needs to be explored - but the extent of the
"consciousnesses" are different for diverse levels. There is no way that an atom
or molecule has an organizational complexity sufficient to retain the amount of
information which an organic brain has the capacity of holding and
processing.
But the BEHAVIORS are the same. The COHERENCES are the same. The RELATIONAL DYNAMICS are the same. The "mathematics" are the same.
Our current math is weak and inconsistently structured. We apply meanings and qualities in a haphazard manner, even as we try to be ultra-methodical and accurate. Just take a look at tensor-metric math. It codes and compacts variables in such an intense way as to make infinities fit into singular terms. It then formulates multiple compactions that resemble "densities". It looks for patterns within this new re-organization. A change or alteration of any one factor *immediate* enacts a corresponding alteration in every other component member of the compaction. "Normalization". But is that immediacy found in nature? Tensor-metric math can do Bohmian transluminal manipulations and superstring supersymmetries like a baby can shake a rattle. But where is "c" in those formulae? If the math doesn't contain an important element that it is supposed to model or deal with, then isn't the accuracy of our interpretations suspect?
There better be a damned good reason to exclude the "rate of information transmission", or we better start including it. Is it even reasonable to address the possibility that there might be a speed limit on how fast information flows through "formulae"? Can such a notion even make sense?
Well, if math is to mimic "reality", we ought to readjust our view of "reality", or, the language of mathematics and its incipient "meanings".
It's of no small importance or note, Barry, that my version of all this can account for
the mystery of the triple-polarized filter experiment, where, starting with 2 orthogonally
placed filters which completely block a beam of light, that placing a third random-angled
filter in between the original 2, that the beam is reconstructed existing out past the
last filter.
| | | | |
------->|- - - - - >| becomes ---->| | |----->
| | | | |
(without Bells, Bohms, or whistles)
...... ..... ...... ......
Just rambling through the dusk, in the shadow of Bogart's ghost.
Hoping, as we all are, to leave a guide post for our progeny to follow, and hope that they remember us with affection for having made the efforts.
Jamie, Ceptualist