• The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    The measurement of you is not separate from what you measure, and the measurement of what you measure is not separate from the measurement of you.

    Consciousness is rooted in non-local measurement.

    Adding to this perplexing complexity is the strategic incompletion of consciousness:

    It counter-balances what I say above to the effect that the non-locality of consciousness protects against the very measurement it seeks to achieve.

    Measurement is containment, and consciousness must include a portion of measurement as containment in order to be intelligible and therefore meaningful, but it also must strive against the final closure of complete containment (Russell’s Paradox).

    The intentional elusiveness of consciousness is why it’s so hard to define. It can be itself only by avoiding being contained conclusively. That’s why you can imagine yourself as a Grizzly bear roaming through the woods. In so doing, you’re amusing yourself via shape-shifting. What you can imagine you are is limited only by your imagination, which deftly employs strategic incompletion against the final closure of complete systemization.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Since there are statements true but unprovable, there seems to be a disconnection between truth and proof.

    Has the meaning of this disconnection been examined?

    For example, if there is non-symmetry between a true conclusion and its logical derivation, can we ask whether this suggests semi-validity is a reality thereof?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    The sentient human looks out at the world with resolution, having made a decision to follow along a chosen path.

    As the journey progresses, the world gives feedback regarding the soundness of the path chosen. Some of the feedback encourages the journey forward; some of the feedback discourages the journey backwards.

    Incompleteness is a strategy for keeping the journey alive in the face of good/indifferent/ bad.

    Incompleteness is the guardian of a creative future because it’s the guardian of unlimited possibilities. Remember, when the human makes a decision, it compels QM to resolve possibilities into material facts. Well, incompleteness eschews material facts, so an open palette of possibilities is preserved.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Your individuality is best kept undecidable to the degree you can manage undecidability of identity within a pragmatic world constantly demanding logical decisions.

    Every individual struggles with his/her natural state of disequilibrium, an essential property of individuality. Tell as much truth about your individuality as you can withstand. In most cases, your disequilibrium with the world will be judged benign. In the minority of cases only, does the state imprison or execute individuals whose disequilibrium of individuality is judged malignant.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    The duty of each human individual is to tell narratives that entertain other individuals.

    Entertainment is that simultaneous, dual motion out of the self/into the self.

    When we connect with the world, our life is enriched by becoming what it has been not, and it enriches the world by giving of itself to the world that which it has been not.

    Entertainment is what we do to forestall living in solitude. When you entertain someone with a narrative, you make your greatest gift, your attention to the world.

    The communion of human individuals through entertainment is a banquet of the highest food, the gift of your serious attention to another sentient. This is such as we do here at TPF.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Incompleteness is the stage upon which creative action plays. Creative action and the stage of incompleteness occur simultaneously because creative revelation, by definition, is not foreseen, and thus the revelations of creativity cannot be known according to space and time and location until revealed creatively.

    Creative revelation is radiation penetrating convention and thus amounts to highest adventure.

    Creative revelation foments naked mind that returns the witness to first birthing into the world totally unknown.

    We have to continue our rebirthing with naked mind bathed in creativity in our bid to fend off death.

    Human looking at the world is rooted in the semi-symmetry of the disequilibrium making a unique individual possible. There will always be a chase between what exists and what can be known by the individuality that perturbs what it seeks to know with its inviduality.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    You ask about the relationship between the questioner and the material world as seen through the lens of QM.

    QM presents a menu of possibilities that can be calculated, with nothing definite about time, place and state of physical systems that give material things their attributes and behaviors.

    The questioner wanting something, makes a decision and then takes action to achieve the goal determined by the decision. QM uncertainty resolves into a definite event under the power of a sentient human who has made a decision. Decision making is an act of will.

    It is the act of will that throws the power switch to the “on” position that resolves QM uncertainty into material fact.

    The nature of the questioner determines the nature of the question, and the nature of the question determines the nature of the answer.

    If the future doesn’t exist, then the will bends the symmetry of spacetime into a disequilibrium that moves toward an answer.

    All “answers” are rooted in the disequilibrium that converts QM uncertainty into material fact.

    As the Buddhists declare, material facts are neither universal nor eternal because of the disequilibrium that causes their emergence.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    Strategic Incompletness wisely keeps human individuals from knowing themselves finally.

    In this way, the individual can always go forward into the future armed with the panoply of unlimited possibilities.

    Strategic Incompleteness (SI) keeps human out of the reach of the calculus. You can’t sum human to a limit because of thoughts, ideas and feelings,

    The mass of consciousness is sagaciously hidden from the calculation with strategic absence, so there’s always something that remains beyond the reach of measurement.

    This is part of the end game of entropy and thermodynamic resistance to completeness of measurement, which is to say completeness of system.

    The impossibility of complete measurement of consciousness goes heads up with the scourge of infinity as the diplomat who sticks his head into the lion’s mouth.

    By seeming to be massless, NI uses escape from complete system to also sidestep the ultimate unwieldy mess of infinity.

    Incompleteness resembles undecidableness, but the former is creatively future looking, whereas the latter is simply stuck.

    Henry Stapp QM Demands non-Physical Consciousness
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    When sentient human looks into the imperfect mirror of nature, as rendered by the senses, it’s a case of unlimited consciousness strategically incomplete facing unlimited possibilities strategically incomplete.

    Strategic incompletion forestalls complete systemization, a phenomenon, if allowed to occur, that would foreclose on originality and would thus trap existence within bounds, thereby preventing an unlimited way forward.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    When the sentient human looks into the imperfect mirror of nature, as rendered by the senses, s/he sees an imperfect likeness of what we can assume to be the source of the likeness, originality, which is to say TIS.

    Thoughts, ideas and feelings are necessary because the decidability of what the originality of TIS examples materially must be chosen. A decision about what exists materially must be made.

    It is the uncontainableness of TIS i.e., unlimited possibilities, that demands the decision.

    This is Aristotle’s Agent Intellect meets Intelligibility.

    Life and sentience require unlimited possibilities incompletely contained strategically so that intrinsic entropy can be overcome in successive stages such that no complete systemization can endstop the future.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    QM launched a revolution when is made science shake hands with humanities by insisting that cognition is integral to the causal process that determines the final state of a system operating through changes.

    Who_What poses the question that activates QM towards a measurable probability of a particular final state outcome of a system?

    The questioner who does an experiment to get an answer poses the question that activates QM processes towards a final state of the system i.e., an answer.

    How does the questioner make a decision about what question to ask? The questioner exercises his/her will.

    Use the link below to listen to Henry Stapp.

    What Poses the Question?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    Henry Stapp (click link below) gives us a talk explaining the causal force of consciousness upon physics via the asking of a question. When a sentient forms a question based upon a need, that expression of meaning from information determines the state changes of physical system towards an end state.

    There is no simple situation of a Deist omnipresence who creates an initial state and then withdraws to eternal silence, with a materialist nature-as-system proceeding through state changes that populate physics.

    The Schrödinger equation addresses the involvement of the observer with-a-question within the causal structure of physics. Cognition shaking hands with physics produces the events of experience.

    If the equation linking cognition to existential is an imperfect symmetry, then the interweave of matter, force and thought is an entropic system with information-heat-loss that maintains fundamental incompleteness. Cognition and existential approach each other, but we don’t know completely any systemization of this linkage.

    The undecidability of the systemization of the cognition_existential interweave keeps us alive and going forward.

    Consciousness>Question_Outcome
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    Science Vs Humanities

    “What” as a pronoun characterizes the focus of discovery within the sciences:
    • What exists
    • What functions and behaviors do things exhibit
    • What’s the relationship between parts and wholes
    • What populates the big picture

    “How” as an adverb characterizes the focus of discovery within the humanities. The center of action, the actor giving meaning to the verb, emerges as the enduring point of view of the personal self in possession of a unique personal history. In short, “how” describes “what it’s like” to be a self with its own point of view, feelings, values, and judgments. Personal narratives have a short list of major turning points within the personal history of of an evolving self. This evolving self typically narrates the “how” or the “what it’s like to be” of:
    • Birth
    • Knowing oneself as separate from the world
    • Friends & Foes
    • Goals
    • Sexual awakening, rite of passage (adolescence) into adulthood
    • Work, love, marriage, family, home, world
    • Letting go of children
    • Retirement, old age
    • Death

    Science and Humanities are the two great modes of consciousness and behavior.

    These two faces of reality look across the 180 degrees of line separating the circle of wholeness into the two semi-circles of the facing realities.

    The focus of this conversation has been the mirroring of the two realities facing each other: “things-in-themselves (TIS) and consciousness (NI:natural intelligence).

    “What” is about the content, nature and workings of existence.

    “How” is about the conscious experience of what exists, especially including the existence of the self-referential self.

    When “How” and “What” face each other, there is an equation that establishes itself as the connection linking the two half circles together into wholeness.

    The “What” and the “How” share an essential attribute: incompleteness. This incompleteness characterizes how they examine “What” and “How” respectively, and also how they perceive each other. They both spin out narratives that have no ending.

    It’s an outrageous violation of convention and common sense to say of existence in general that there is no wholeness.

    Complexity, however, can be thought about in a way that makes this very suggestion.

    The mirroring symmetry of NI looking at TIS is degraded by entropy. In consequence, humans do not see the existence of the world, the “What” of the world completely.

    Instead, humans see a sample of TIS. This sample has a compression algorithm that ejects some of the information of TIS.

    General existence, acting through entropy, makes the incomplete transfer of information across the line dividing the semi-circles necessary, and it stands as the main premise motivating my initiation of this conversation.

    Life will always ask you questions you can neither answer nor avoid. These unanswerable questions elevate life to something more than information. They are the spine of your personal history. They introduce you to three things you must try to make peace with while you live: what you know is incomplete, what you are is incomplete and the world is incomplete.

    All three categories are waiting for you to add something, so try to be creative.



  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    Imagine a math space such that : 6+9 =/= 9+6; semi-symmetrical mirroring.ucarr

    As jgill clarifies, this is a non-commutative operation.

    What happens if we change the operator:

    6+9 ~ 9+6

    This is what I mean by semi-symmetrical mirroring. Since an equation exemplifies symmetry, as noted above (with some wiggle room) by jgill, we can take a statement of approximation of equivalence to be an expression of an an equivalence within a margin of error. So, let us imagine in the above statement the left side of the equation is approximated to the right side of the equation, as expressed by the right side of the equation, with, say, a 4% margin of error for the uncertain value of the right side. Instead of a discrete value, the right side is a range of possible values.

    When Natural Intelligence (NI) looks at things-in-themselves (TIS), the rendering of TIS is an approximate mirroring which can be called semi-symmetrical mirroring.

    We see the world through our senses and our brain as a sample of overwhelming complexity made manageable by the sample. Well, the sample is a compression algorithm, and a compression algorithm cannot compress all of the overwhelming details of uncompressed reality, and thus our perception of the world, which for us is insuperable, is necessarily incomplete.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Does an equation exemplify symmetry?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Imagine a math space such that : 6+9 =/= 9+6; semi-symmetrical mirroring.

    So, TIS =/= NI, and the difference i.e., imprecision_incompletion, keeps the generative narrative of cognitivity-supported human life going without a discrete ending.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    The relationship between things-in-themselves (TIS) and NI is semi-symmetrical mirroring. This discrete symmetry transformation across the change from TIS to NI might be related to non-commutative geometry.

    Example: Gödel’s Incompleteness shows semi-symmetrical-like “mirroring” of an axiomatic system’s functions and derivative functions thereof not covered in the grounding functions. The semi-symmetrical inconsistency is general to first-order logical expression.

    Math, like NI spins out a generative (first-order) narrative incommensurable with its source. The narratives of NI do not end, as designed by strategic incompleteness.

    The material parallel to logical semi-symmetry is the entropy of inherently incomplete systemization.

    If the 2nd law of thermodynamics is true, then there are no complete systems.

    There is no complete work, so there can be no working towards completion of anything (GUT, T.O.E.).

    Yes, Incompleteness Cosmology is bad physics. Elegant simplicity and the wholeness of validity are idealizations.

    What we can know is always incomplete due to semi-symmetrical mirroring between TIS and NI.

    Strategic Incompleteness lends a hand to skepticism.

    If formalisms in their abstraction start looking too much like immaterial coefficients of generalizations of properties of TIS, a violation of naturalist materialism, then perhaps arguments can take recourse to the incompleteness of semi-symmetrical mirroring. Since there is no complete agreement between TIS and NI, the reality of the appearance of immaterialism might be undecidable.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    The uncertainty, or imprecision of our knowledge of things in themselves is another support for strategic incompleteness.

    The narratives of NI can’t end. Things in themselves, like their cognitive parallels, axiomatic systems, fund the generative narratives that make intelligent life possible.

    Logical incompleteness, like Standard Model measurement uncertainty, stand as evidence we don’t and can’t know things in themselves directly or completely.

    Speculation tells me knowing being not strategically incomplete parallels acceleration of matter to light speed; the equation goes to an unmanageable value.

    This excess of matter and info, present stragically absentially, is always partially accessible and, as suggested by entropy, no systemization is perfectly efficient i e., no system is complete.

    The second law of thermodynamics leads directly to Gódel’s Incompleteness.

    Perhaps l should look at dark: matter_energy through this lens.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    What would it be like to thwart materialist objectivity?

    It might be like: moving a step further towards the T.O.E. and then losing your train of thought towards the big revelation as your little daughter tip toes into your study. You’re smiling as she’s holding up your glass of lemonade from her birthday party.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    If you think my exam of the chief difference between “what” and “how” (i.e. what it’s like knowing the what of the world of my knowing) trivial, then the sense of omnipresence imparted to you by the expansiveness of your NI re: your boundless cognitive travels, puts a smile a on my face.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Our context is talking about the interweave of existing things and NI (natural intelligence). This approach is intended to aid in our examination of the big differences between the “what” and the “how.”

    As we’ve been talking about the “what,” we’ve been looking at the boundary of NI. I see it as the world of the pure “what.” This is a world without NI and without AI.

    When we speculate about the nature and content of this world, of course we’re doing it within the scope of NI. This leads me to say we don’t and can’t really know a non-NI world. While it’s easy to think we can imagine this world as an earth-like planet devoid of life, it might be the case our NI mechanisms involve heavy filtration and alteration of incoming signals. This might distance us greatly from the raw signals. Also, even as we think about this possible distance, we’re, again, thinking about it within the scope the NI that makes our thoughts possible.

    For these reasons, I speculate to the claim our NI is for us insuperable. So, yes, non-NI might be an obstacle in the form of a boundary.

    It’s extremely interesting to me you see the knowing capacity of NI as a powerful tool that pushes aside obstacles. We know NI overcomes obstacles, so it’s interesting to think it cannot push aside itself, and thus, ironically, its greatest obstacle might be itself.

    Also interesting is how this irony re-enforces the thought the experience of NI instills a feeling of omnipresence about itself, as well as imparting a feeling of omnipresence for the subject of the NI, namely, the self holding possession of the omnipresence of the NI.

    The enthusiasm about finding the T.O.E. is more evidence of this.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    I’m going to try NI for natural intelligence.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Insuperable in my context here is simple: you can’t know things outside of being cons, so you can’t know yourself outside of being cons, so as long as you persist as yourself, the cons that empowers you to be yourself is, for you, insuperable.

    The Hard Problem acknowledges that what it’s like to be an enduring self is resistant to the objective exam and manipulation of materialist science.

    A big part of the reason for the hardness of the problem is the insuperability discussed above. Another problem of materialist science vis-a-vis selfhood is the insuperable selfhood of the scientist thwarting materialist objectivity.

    This conversation is an exam of how the the two great modes differ, and The Hard Problem is that difference under a microscope.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    For the sentient being (presumably alone in creation the category capable of science/humanities) cons being a state insuperable (you can’t know outside of it), thus finds cons omnipresent.

    This is the strong argument for the omnipresence of cons.

    If you believe existence is complete, i.e., not strategically incomplete, then knowing the universe exists means knowing everything about existence in terms of a categorical abstraction or set, with a microscopic volume of concrete details filled in. Via abstraction, cons is omnipresent.

    This is the weak argument for the omnipresence of cons.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Your definition: “ln so far as subjects are self-reflexive… also has subjective constituents.” does a good job of describing what’s on my view screen as I try to examine the differences between science/humanities.

    I now see that science is bounded by the cons of the scientist.
    Since an insuperable subjectivity never grants access to things-in-themselves independent of observation, the omnipresence of cons limits science and epistemology to the human narrative, and this tells us why narrative can be generative.

    Every human individual has a generative narrative of sincere beliefs. These beliefs construct the individual’s world. If you believe humans are individuals, then you see why warfare can never be eliminated; there can never be a utopian social contract.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Humans will forever fight over morals because adaptation is ruthless and desires are dictatorial.

    The social contract is a necessary prerequisite for a peaceable society, so an effort towards moral standards is also necessary.

    For me, independence = distinct things running on parallel tracks that don’t intersect. The tracks might converge and diverge at points along the way.

    Regarding “from within,” knowing, i.e., cons, is insuperable. As for the question of the existence (ex) of an external (ext) world, this conversation is deeply concerned not with the question of an ext world , but with the deep interweave connecting the two. This translates to the question of the two great modes: subjective/objective.

    I suspect what QM has done, in essence, is manipulate quantity, i.e., discrete measurement, towards existential ambiguity. That’s fascinating because scientific discovery of discrete particles for seeming continuities like radiation and vice versa for seeming things like elementary particles was a drive toward definitive boundaries, with opposite result of real boundary ambiguity affirmed.

    Is a purely objective world out there? The answer to this question is ambiguous, and cons plays a central role in the fact of existential ambiguity instead of discrete boundaries being the picture on the scientific view screen.

    Part of the difficulty of The Hard Problem is the global question whether cons is insuperable. If it is, then the “what” of experience is forever compromised by subjectivity who partially contradicts and nuances it.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    You’re right. The wording is redundant. I used the modifier because I was trying to reckon with whether you think causation natural and physical. This attempt was made in the wake of your statements about formalisms.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Right now I’m going with the notion consciousness independence cannot be certified from within consciousness. It seems to me that knowledge can have no relationship with consciousness independence (CI) because knowing keeps the observer walled-in on all sides by consciousness (cons), so non-cons is forever inaccessible to cons.

    This argument applies largely- but not wholly- to language, with the possibility of thinking and knowing outside of language acknowledged.

    Why do you think cons-embedded language can interact with a non-cons world without perturbing it fatally?

    To ask it another way, why do you think an unknown world can persist as unknown once you’ve observed it?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    I’ve been wrong in claiming existence and consciousness are biconditional.

    They are linked, but they remain distinct. They are not interchangeable.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    At the very least, there’s the appearance that conscious beings are conditionally confined to a biconditional link to existence because their presence perturbs consciousness-devoid spacetime out of existence.

    Even thinking about consciousness-devoid spacetme perturbs its ontic status as no object of consciousness remains unperturbed.

    This because consciousness is uncontainable.

    So the presence of consciousness makes existence of consciousness-devoid spacetime undecidable.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    If it’s logically sound to think humans, being conscious, cannot experience and thereby know a world devoid of consciousness, then there’s the question whether we can certify the existence of a world devoid of consciousness.

    Can we then generalize this uncertainty to conjecturing whether the presence of consciousness anywhere precludes a world devoid of consciousness anywhere?

    This argument stands upon the foundation of the standard model being universal physics.

    To clarify, the question is whether a consciousness-bearing natural world anywhere necessitates all other worlds be consciousness enabled.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    Regarding existence and consciousness being biconditional, I’m thinking about early earth. Is it that we assume early earth was inhospitable to life and therefore we also assume a long period of earth history devoid of life?

    So then the assumption is life arose from non-living earth dynamics.

    This takes us to a pivot point transitioning earth from being devoid of life to being life-bearing.

    Next we have scientists discovering physical evidence of life’s evolution from non-life.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    If a dynamical system evolves to a level of complexity beyond measurement within its parameters, does that mean it can’t be cyclical?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    In the case of dynamics with an axiomatic system logically incomplete , is causation thought to be in effect, but its info too complex for measurement ?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    You do think state changes of a system are tied to complex dynamics?

    You think complex dynamics include multiple causes for a specified effect?

    If so, has it been observed that sometimes increasing complexity generates to much info to account for all of it within the parameters of the complex system?

    If so, can we say entropy sometimes blocks us from making a determination of causality?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    I’m trying to say you think causation a part of nature, but not a part of physics. I understand this to be the meaning of: the physics of
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities
    I’m wondering if conventional wisdom thinks causation a part of physics, and if it’s thought causation directly the report of empirical experience.

    It’s hard to think about the world without consciousness or causation, and that’s why this thought experiment is fun.

    Consciousness and existence being linked biconditionally is radical conjecture.



    You don’t allow that causation is a part of the physics of nature.

    What might it be a part of?

    When hydrogen interacts with oxygen and water is the result, that this is a chemical reaction that is not also a case of causation as a part of the physics of chemical reaction gives me something to think about.
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Might causation be mind dependent, and perhaps emergent thereof? In a world without consciousness, might there only be sequencing of events?

    Does consciousness mandate causation as a part of the pattern recognition it can’t live without?

    The teleology of human consciousness inserts causation into a neutral glob of things?
  • The Sciences Vs The Humanities


    Okay, mind is emergent from non-mind.

    Is causation an emergent phenomenon? Or Is it just part of the physics of nature?

    When the wind moves a rock, and it rolls downhill, and we say the wind caused the rock to roll downhill, are we describing another part of the physics of the event, thus making causation somehow physical (and teleological), or do we assemble a continuity, a narrative, that is strictly a cognitive event?