No. Mind in movement creates.

if we believe that consciousness is the result of process. — bahman

I believe it is the other way around.

Marx wants us to be free, but also sometimes seems to be arguing that we are slaves of history. — Londoner

This is the inevitable problem with any philosophy that attempts to make evolution mechanical in nature. They call upon people to act against the inevitable?

Could we agree that everything is interacting with each other? — bahman

Absolutely. It's defining precisely what those interactions are that create an ontology.

If the process is one of endless self-differentiation over time then one would expect to find infinite variation of pattern and structure within cosmology, organismic forms, consciousness and culture. — Joshs

Which is what we perceive. Just an endless series of forms being created in the universe. Some forms having more persistence because of habitual learning.

We are asking why there is just not one consciousness since there exists only one process. — bahman

One can look at it as one process or many. It is a matter of perspective. One can say I see many processes (the heart beating, the blood flowing, the lungs breathing, etc.), or one can say they is only one process - living. One cannot be divorced from the other and there is no reason to even try.

However all "universes" are in fact an "aspect" of the same "thing" in MWI! — boundless

The problem with this "thing" is that the ontology of life becomes unknowable and unintelligible. As does determinism, it makes rubbish out of the meaning of life, philosophy, and science. Understanding this, even Everett didn't try very hard (not at all) to defend it as an ontology. He just saw it as mathematical equations that worked out fine for his theses. Invisibility, illusions, are just Alice in Wonderland holes. They are good stories. Once you travel down them as ontologies, everything, including science, becomes meaningless. Are we trying to understand the nature of nature or is it something else?

So that fdrake's preposterous ontology does not become codified in this thread:

1) There is a unique ordering of events in experienced time, the time of duration. This is the time in which Poor Tim died by the simultaneous closing of the electrical circuit.

2) There is a measurement problem which science can't solve because it cannot precisely synchronize. clocks. This is all that STR addresses. STR has no ontology. It's a problem with measurement synchronization. Sci fi lovers just made up this stuff about going backwards in time and stuff.

As long as people look at a mathematical symbol T and consider that real time, because someone called clock time real time, there will be instant confusion and lots of sci books. The ordering of events in my life is the real ordering of events in my existence however it might be measured by someone else, and sometimes I'll be killed by these ordering of events which are really happening. They aren't some measurement equations. Events really happen but it is difficult if not impossible to synchronize clocks as to measure when they happened.

To describe MWI as simply one universe, masks entirely the sheer audacity of the model. The paper I referenced actually goes through the trouble of trying to leave disect what the model is implying, ending with the implication that Everett assigned no ontological value to his invention. The difference between Bohmian Mechanics and MWI it's that one can actually contruct an ontology around it that fits experimental evidence and makes sense. At the same time BM is real, causal, and allows for creativity. It is not one of these heavy-handed, fantastical, deterministic theories that lies contra to everyday human experience.

Yet despite not being actual, it has actual effects. — Andrew M

The quantum potential had possibilities? That it's all. Ontologically one can say that the human mind considers possibilities but only one is actually acted upon. MWI says all are acted upon. That is a huge difference. In Zeh's attempt to make Bohmian Mechanics deterministic, which it isn't, he misses the whole point.

Yes, MWI doesn't need a guiding wave, it only needs a googleplex of universes which apparently even he described as fiction.

I finally found someone who had gone through the calculation of how many universes exist based upon the MWI.

Making Sense of the Many Worlds Interpretation
Stephen Boughn1
Department of Physics, Princeton University and
Departments of Astronomy and Physics, Haverford College

The number here calculated was:

N~10 to the 10th to the 80th power. " A plethora of universes, indeed!"

"Another problem is how are we ever to identify universes like ours with people
like us in the nearly googolplex of universes included in the universal wave function.
This is often referred to as the problem of identifying a preferred basis in Hilbert space.
Clearly most of the universes will be chaotic and bear no resemblance to the one in which
we live but there will still be very many with nearly identical copies of ourselves. A great
deal has been written about how one might identify such bases or equivalently how
universes such as ours naturally emerge. I’ll briefly discuss this issue in Section 5.
Everett, for his part, didn’t worry about the problem and maintained that all components
of all bases are “actual” universes in the same sense. He even supposed that occasionally
different universes could interact with one another. Deutsch (1997) maintains that the
phenomenon of quantum interference is evidence of precisely this sort of interaction."

Now this is interesting, since Everett appears to back away from assigning any intimidating to his interpretation :

"Another indication of Everett’s take on
realism appeared in the second appendix to the preliminary, long version of his thesis.
The title of the appendix was “Remarks on the Role of Theoretical Physics” and in it he
notes:
The essential point of a theory, then, is that it is a mathematical model…
However, when a theory is highly successful and becomes firmly
established, the model tends to become identified with “reality” itself,
and the model nature of the theory becomes obscured. The rise of
classical physics offers an excellent example of this process. The
constructs of classical physics are just as much fictions of our own
minds as those of any other theory we simply have a great deal more
confidence in them. It must be deemed a mistake, therefore, to attribute
any more “reality” here than elsewhere… Once we have granted that
any physical theory is essentially only a model for the world of experience,
we must renounce all hope of finding anything like “the correct theory.”
Everett seems to be telling us that the notion of a universal wave function is actually just
a “fiction of our own minds”.

This last point had always been my point? Mathematical equations are fictions of our minds. No ontology can or should be assigned to mathematical symbology.

hypothesis of scientific realism at all costs. — Wayfarer

It's not scientific realism, since Bohmian Mechanics does that. It is determinism without the observer that is draw. As I mentioned in my other post, determinism pretty much eliminates philosophy and science as a preferred path for studying nature since either and both are simply Illusions.

That you are observing something that you are not accounting for means you are missing something. A good metaphysics accounts for everything, no Illusions, no ignoring.

If you say there are no waves you are missing a lot. I believe most people will see waves.

Look at an ocean and then try to find a line of demarcation between the ocean and the waves.

No. The first question is whether ocean has consciousness and if not why? The second question is why there is not only one consciousness when there is one process? Everything is related to each other. — bahman

If you try to create lines of demarcation between the ocean and the waves, you will be frustrated. Oceans and waves are continuous?

So the question is whether the ocean is made of waves or very the waves create the ocean? I see no difference.

What I am arguing is that there should be one mind since there is one process. — bahman

in way yes, because it can be considered all one process. But consider this. You observe a football team acting out a play in unison or an orchestra creating a sound in unison, are these examples of one process and one mind? in a way yes, because one cannot find a clear line of demarcation between the individual and the whole. But we cannot ignore the contributions of each mind exerting individual will. They blend, just like the cells in the body. It is a blended monism.

I gave you the consequences of trying to preserve the block universe. You can't without ignoring quantum theory. Ellis's attempts are more in track, but while he is reluctant to say so (he describes it as a revision), he just dismantled the block universe and Einstein's determinism.

So do you wish everyone to pretend that Relativity's block universe ontology is fine and quantum theory is all wrong? Just say so. Say you would like us all to ignore the elephant in the room.

Everett's equations (interpretation) is the only one that is fully deterministic because everything that the universal wave function describes actually happens as described. It is all real. The problem however is what happened to the other versions (infinite versions?) of myself and everyone else and everything else? We can't see them or measure them? (This really makes the issue of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, Relativity's counterpart seem trivial in comparison).

It seems that they are all "somewhere" in other "worlds" or "universes", depending upon how one wishes to conceive of am infinite number of splitting real things which in turn are splitting all the time. To some, this ontology may seem "extravagant", to others just another mystical attempt by scientists to preserve determinism. Of course the toughest problem for determinists is to weld together Everett's equations with Relativity's block universe. How does one do that? Ugh. I guess the standard answer is that quantum theory and Relativity live in separate universes.

Science can be fun.

No, I just don't trust you or Rich to have anything I would find worthwhile to say on the topic — fdrake

Well, we did hear from Ellis (no slouch) and other physicists on the subject. But your quest is a noble one. To do what Einstein couldn't do, which is to make Relativity compatible with quantum theory. I believe your approach is probably better, just ignore quantum theory and build your block universe anyway. That is what you are desperately trying to preserve, isn't it? A block universe in a universe defined by quantum theory indefiniteness. Tough job, but heroic nonetheless.

No proposal of new universes. It is not an ontological assertion. — noAxioms

The precise ontology of Everett's equations can of course remain a mystery. However, there are some clues as to what he might have been thinking:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5dh/the_many_worlds_of_hugh_everett/

"Byrne writes of Everett's views: "the splitting of observers share an identity because they stem from a common ancestor, but they also embark on different fates in different universes. They experience different lifespans, dissimilar events (such as a nuclear war perhaps) and at some point are no longer the same person, even though they share certain memory records." Everett says that when a observer splits it is meaningless to ask "which of the final observers corresponds to the initial one since each possess the total memory of the first" he says it is as foolish as asking which amoeba is the original after it splits into two. Wheeler made him remove all such talk of amoebas from his published short thesis."

"Byrne says Everett did not think there were just an astronomically large number of other universes but rather an infinite number of them, not only that he thought there were a non-denumerable infinite number of other worlds. This means that the number of them was larger than the infinite set of integers, but Byrne does not make it clear if this means they are as numerous as the number of points on a line, or as numerous as an even larger infinite set like the set of all possible clock faces, or maybe an even larger infinity than that where easy to understand examples of that sort of mega-infinite magnitude are hard to come by. Neill Graham tried to reformulate the theory so you'd only need a countably infinite number of branches and Everett at first liked the idea but later rejected it and concluded you couldn't derive probability by counting universes. Eventually even Graham seems to have agreed and abandoned the idea that the number of universes was so small you could count them."

Those scientists who refuse to confront Everett's Interpretation and equations for what they are, are merely trying to save the only deterministic interpretation of quantum theory while avoiding the ontological mythology of everything constantly splitting into probabilistic infinities. The only question that remains is how large are the infinities.

In Bohmian Mechanics the wave function describes quantum potential at both slits - which are the "potential" worlds or branches that are in superposition. Zeh describes them as "empty" wave components since they don't specify where the actual particle is (this is instead specified by the Bohmian guiding function). — Andrew M

A "potential world" (what we see in our minds as virtual action) does not entail an actual world (the MWI) solution. I read Everett's paper, and clearly his ontology is poles apart from Bohm's description and equations. Bohmian Mechanics had no need for an infinite number of universes and measurements which is why he described his interpretation as causal and not deterministic. Zeh wants to make it deterministic which is why he is attempting to create the equivalence. Everett's interpretation stands alone in this regard, and after reading part of his original theses, my eyes glazed over at how extravagant it really was. Really quite an imagination compared to the simplicity of the Bohm model.

Which is why discussion is pointless - because if that is true then there is no means of ‘persuasion by rational argument’. You can’t change someone’s mind if there’s no mind to be changed. — Wayfarer

I guess determinists don't realize (because it had been determined so) how meaningless is everything that say or do. It has sunk in because the Laws of Physics doesn't allow it to be sink it.

I hope you don't exhaust yourself in this quest. There are better things to do in life then try to make sense out of a theory that a) really has been of very little use other than fodder for sci fI stories b) contradicts itself c) creates more paradoxes and problems than it solves d) is on the way out.

Definitely a useful thread in demonstrating that Relativity is an ontological mess, with some nominal usefulness as simple transformation equations that no one really understands. Bergson analysis was spot on and Ellis, reluctantly, is going down that path. No block time, only frozen (memory) time.

The way I view it, is that our memories persist in the fabric of the universe and these memories (call it Karma if you wish) stay with us as a transcendental life passing through multiple physical lives. We actually experience this as inherited or innate traits and skills.

. In any case if the observer of relativity is real, he certainly "knows" the "events" — boundless

Yes, they perceived in memory.

herefore each observer has its associated "perspective" on the world (or even its own "world"). — boundless

Yes, this is unshared memory. Still embedded in the universe (holographic) but inaccessible to others (most of the time) because the brain "frequency" is more or less unique for each person.

Again the "flow" is a property of the "changing world" and not of the observer itself. — boundless

There is flow everywhere. Internal memory and external (the objects). We feel time as duration when internal memory changes. These changes can be caused by flow anywhere (internal or external) because it is fundamentally all memory.

If one views everything as memory imbued in the fabric of the universe and the brain as the access wave (holographic reconstructive wave) for this memory everything becomes clear. As for SR and GR, they are so convoluted and distorted, they cannot be used to understand anything. Quantum yes. Relativity no. Relativity is best understood as a way to transform events between frames of references as a way of explaining (and this is important) only why people way perceive simultaneity differently. It is a measurement issue that Relativity addresses. It had nothing to do with real time and had no ontological value.

If Poor Tim is hooked up to a circuit that is completed if two lightening bolts hit it simultaneously, Poor Tim is dead, no matter what someone in a distant planet may see. There is real duration in life and it v is not dependent on whether someone's clocks see it differently. Really, don't assign any ontology to Relativity or else you will never have a clear ontology of your own.

I'm saying that the whole rest of the universe apart from our personal experience is demonstrably deterministic — Pseudonym

Ain't so. All modern physics and technology is based upon it ain't so. There isn't one Interpretation of any theory any where on this Earth that holds that the universe we live in is deterministic. What's more there is zero evidence for a deterministic universe which is why there probably isn't a theory for it.

And if the universe was deterministic, then everything becomes irrelevant since there is no Law of Physics that says bouncing particles have to reveal the truth to anyone. It's all an illusion.

You are not claiming that your consciousness is mine? There is of course a line between me and you. You have your personal world and I have mine. Our thoughts and feelings are different. — bahman

There are definitely different memories which define who we are.

There are definitely different Minds to access these memories (consider them all sharing the same holographic memory fabric. This also differentiates.

Now comes the tough part. The individual minds (consider them the waves) appear to also be connected as one Mind (the ocean). There doesn't seem to be a way to get away from this. So we can are individuated (via memories) but we share the same pool as one (the holographic universe). This is the way I see it.

Science can therefore make predictions (which is its job) about what we 'are' going to do and how we 'are' going to feel in certain circumstances. — Pseudonym

Really? What kind of predictions? How we are going to feel if we drown? Or maybe the level of ecstacy if we win $100 million. Maybe we should study the effects of losing a parent? Sadness? Grief?

I just read a study that predicts lonely people tend to be less happy than people with a large community of friends. And what are we supposed to do about this if we have no choices? If we are just neurons that are slaves of those Laws of Physics? What's the point?

As H. D. Zeh (the discoverer of decoherence) puts it:

It is usually overlooked that Bohm’s theory contains the same "many worlds" of dynamically separate branches as the Everett interpretation (now regarded as "empty" wave components), since it is based on precisely the same ("absolutely real") global wave function. — Andrew M

I have no idea what he's talking about. Maybe it's overlooked because it doesn't exist. The guiding wave and the wave perturbation are real and do not branch because there is no collapse of the wave function. The wave function in Bohmian Mechanics becomes a quantum potential so it really isn't a wave function any more.

The "real quantum potential" just is the branching wave function, so it's just Everettian worlds by another name. The additional postulate is that the quantum potential guides (non-locally) the particle that is observed. — Andrew M

There is no "collapse" into an infinite number of universes. It is real but still probabilistic in that some areas are more likely than others.

One only has to look at standard educational curriculums to understand how the science industry (and it is a massive one) has co-opted the entire educational system and sets itself up as the sole arbiter as to how life began and evolved, and it is parroted on almost all forums. The guidance to educators specifically targets any opposition, how to respond to it, and advice on how to make sure students come out thinking "right", only they come out impoverished of life. And the thing is, the scientific explanation of life is a phoney, baloney, fabrication. One can summarize the whole ball of wax as "kids, it just happened by accident". There is no allowed room for doubt. Either give the right answer or fail. Now we get the same stuff as adults, only I didn't give a heck then about giving the right answers and kowtowing to the hatchet men and am sure ain't going to give a heck now.

remember SR being treated as a minor point — Moliere

If the twin paradox was mentioned, that is not a minor point. However. If SR was treated as simply a measurement problem, with no ontology, then indeed it is minor.

Instead we observe that consciousness is personal and local. How do you resolve this problem? — bahman

I observe consciousness pretty much everywhere interacting with no clear line of demarcation.

GR's problem with time and quantum theory. If I've analyzes Ellis' new model, it can be seen that it v is much closer to Bergson and Robbins then it is to Einstein. He pretty much dissolves Einstein's deterministic universe.

http://discovermagazine.com/2015/june/18-tomorrow-never-was

"What’s most disarming about the block universe, remarks Ellis, is that unlike a movie that plays through a series of successive instants, there is no special point in time that all inhabitants would agree on as “now” — no unique marker that separates the fixed past from the open future."

"There’s more. Just as the students would disagree on whether the clock tower was to Ellis’ right or left, depending on where they stood, two people in Einstein’s block universe could even argue over the order in which events occurred. To one person, the Trinity clock might strike 2 p.m. before Ellis finished his last sip, and to another, the bell chimed only after he was done."

"In the block universe, then, what someone perceives as the future is what someone else saw as the past, depending on the person’s position and motion. Events that have yet to happen for one person, it appears, have already happened for another. The future, though it remains unknown to you, seems to be written already. ... Einstein himself described it thus: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”"

"Ellis’ new model .. argues that Einstein took that concept too far. There’s no need to assume that the fourth dimension must already exist out into infinity. Thus Ellis’ model has one crucial difference from Einstein’s: The future boundary does not encompass all that will ever happen.

"Thus Ellis’ model has one crucial difference from Einstein’s: The future boundary does not encompass all that will ever happen. Instead, the leading edge of space-time marks the “present” crawling outward, moment by moment, transforming tomorrow’s maybes into yesterday’s fixed happenings. “Tomorrow there will be one more day in the universe than there was today,” says Ellis. “The past is real and can have had an effect on us today, but the future cannot influence us because it does not yet exist.”"

" In Einstein’s view, these events — and all future events — coexist. But in Ellis’ picture, both events must lie in the portion of the evolving block that houses the past; they are fixed into reality before information about them reaches anyone. Similarly, in Ellis’ view, two observers can disagree on the duration of an event, but only if that event has already crystallized into the past."

"If Ellis is correct, how does he explain the mechanism that causes the front edge of the universe to push forward? “The surface is where the uncertainty of the future changes to the certainty of the past,” says Ellis. He found hope in another branch of physics, well known to physicists, where a transformation from uncertain possibilities observably becomes a fixed reality."

"Quantum experiments give Ellis the heart to believe that time is real and Einstein’s simple block universe is wrong. “Some physicists say that the future is already written into today, but I think that they are not taking quantum uncertainty seriously,” says Ellis. “Quantum uncertainty, to me, says the future is not determined until it’s happened.” He contends that at the front edge of his evolving block universe, the uncertain future crystallizes into the past through a sequence of microscopic quantum events. "

"And he scoffs that the burden of proof should lie not with him, but with those who claim that time is a mirage of our own making. After all, Ellis says, not only does his model gel with quantum experiments that appear to show that time is real, it also encapsulates our common sensations, “which is tested every day, by everyone, whenever anything happens.” Life itself is an experiment that backs his view.

"With this in mind, he quotes from the ancient Persian poet Omar Khayyam’s musings on the visceral difference between what has gone and what is yet to come: “The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on: Nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.” Then, with a guttural laugh, Ellis throws down a challenge to his critics: “If you don’t believe that, then you go back and change the past!”"

Could it be looked at as a complex version of schizophrenia? You have to admit, life would be pretty boring without some imaginary friends... — CasKev

Yes, I believe the drug and psychiatric industry would endorse this point of view. As far as I can tell, everything is wrong about everyone nowadays and needs to be corrected by someone in the business.

Here is another article from physical.org that questions time as conceived of in spacetime. If one is familiar with Bergson, as Stephen Robbins is, one can readily see how this new, non-GR view of space-time, including its resolution of Zeno's paradoxes fully conform to the author's point of view.

https://phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension.html

The problem of the fixed block universe ontology of GR does not explain the nature of a quantum unfolding universe. Some if the issues are discussed here:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/

The ontological status of space-time as conceived of in GR is quite open to question.

Another consequence of GR, should we believe in its ontology,c is that the experience of life is an illusion, as described in the following article. So, we are to believe in invisible forces that comprised 95% of the universe that are guiding our lives in a block universe that is creating illusions of time. This deserves scrutiny, which is the objective of Stephen Robbins' papers and videos.

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time

"From this block time perspective, time, as we experience in the block universe, is an illusion. "It's not a real, fundamental property of nature," says Cortês. The ticking of time, our experience of time passing, is only because we are stuck inside the block universe, moving forward along the dimension of time. "The fact that we experience moving forward in the block but not outside it comes from the fact that the block picture treats time just as another spatial dimension, and we can step outside of it. Time is not pervasive."

I would like to add to the paper referenced in the OP, these two videos created by the author of the paper, Stephen Robbins. I believe these represent his most current thoughts.

https://youtu.be/mcMnn5TpqT0
https://youtu.be/RjQg8on4yS0

They are each over 1.5 hours in length so quite difficult to summarize, especially since they are very dense in information.