True Emergence

Dialectics not Mathematics

In a recent YouTube video out of California, the Quantum Loop Gravity tendency in Modern Physics claims its own Theory of Emergence, in a slick, but totally uninformative video presented by a pretty girl. As the author of the 2010 The Theory of Emergence, and also a physicist myself, I am of course, bound to comment.

You can watch it here, if you must!

I will not go through the details of that video, for they are both insulting to their overtly intended audience - "the layman", and packed-full of unestablished assumptions - all restricted to a multi-dimensional Mathematics, and "caused" or "selected-from Random Chaos by a Universal Consciousness"(?). 

Good Lord.

Frankly, this is not worthy of a detailed criticism, but it does use the same rhetorical methods as Trump uses in the political sphere, which indicates the methods to be used to convince the uninformed, without ever actually informing them!

But, its claim to a "theory of emergence" must be torpedoed by someone, such as myself, who has been involved, all his adult life, in revealing the damaging errors both in Formal Reasoning, Politics and even Science, due almost-wholly to the inadequacies of Mathematics in explaining Reality. Indeed, to even limit it, temporally, in that way, reduces its major significance over the last 2,500 years.

Ever since the creation of Mathematics by the Ancient Greeks, its enabling distortions in representing Reality, not only greatly expanded its pragmatic use, but also revealed a means of relating individual "discoveries" into an extendable and consistent intellectual discipline. And, these were very quickly carried over into Reasoning to produce Formal Logic. And later, became similarly built-into the new discipline of Science.

Yet, almost immediately, after the initial gains were achieved, the Greek, Zeno of Elea, had revealed major errors in Reasoning, when addressing Movement, in his work on Paradoxes. And, these were never properly addressed, for over two millennia, until Hegel, the German idealist Philosopher stumbled upon the major flaw - Formal Logic did NOT ever address Qualitative Change!

Indeed, to construct the founding discipline of Mathematics to actually work, all Qualitative Changes were prohibited, and, in addition, all Forms were changed into only perfect versions. Mathematics was never a description of Reality-as-is!

And, in its changed state, it had been made to conform to The Principle of Plurality - where those assumed features were mandatory: they alone, in fact, gave Mathematics its consistency and extendibility! But, in carrying over the properties of Mathematics into defining Formal Logic, they also implanted these same restrictions into it too. And, later the same disabling features were delivered to Science as well, as Formal Logic was the required reasoning tool.

Consequently, Science could only make any progress at all if the situations to be investigated were constrained to only deliver such features. It would only work within Stable Situations.

It was The Science of Stability!

Now, let's be crystal clear: "What is an Emergence?"

In my book, as the author of The Theory of Emergence, it is when something qualitatively different emerges out of a seemingly persisting stable situation, changing things permanently. But, for all those who depend upon Mathematics as the unifying "consistent" basis of their studies and determinations, such Qualitative Changes are summarily banned! Their pluralist basis (Mathematics) always requires Stable situations: so what must they mean by their claims to deliver Emergences?

Well, in spite of deliberate obfuscation, the designers and deliverers of this video use the oldest trick in the book. They first allow such a mess of complication, that almost any outcome seems to be possible, and they put down what selects from this enormous menu of possibilities, to a "Universal Consciousness" (which they insist is not God), but a product of the overall entire-causing-system, that can then choose the actual outcome.

Now, what is my alternative?

All pluralistic Laws, as dealt with as above, have limits to their applicability. We call them Singularities, and if delivered of the appropriate values of the involved parameters. which take the situation to those terminations, then the equations give meaningless results - like infinity for example.

Clearly, to a Holist, such as myself, the domain of applicability of their strictly-pluralist-equation has been exceeded, so it no longer describes the situation. The boundaries of the required Stability have been exceeded, and the Stability dissociated!

Close to that boundary, in non linear cases, the limited region of Mathematical Chaos, can be encountered, but not for long, for the situation quickly descends into what seems to be Total Chaos..... but, then coalesces into a new relation in a different Stability.

And, "How does that occur?", you will quite rightly ask!

It occurs because in Reality-as-is, there are many simultaneous relations all-acting together, but they DO NOT just sum, as the pluralists insist - but both affect and change one another, some co-operating, while some are opposing.

Indeed, for a time these always changing mutual modifications do deliver something like "chaos" - but only until they form a new self-maintaining system, when seemingly damaging changes in one, are compensated for by consequent opposing changes in another.

Indeed, Hegel's simplification of this was his Interpenetration of Opposites, the simplest examples of which are the Dichotomous Pairs, discovered by Zeno, and explained in terms of mistaken or absent premises, by Hegel.

In place of the idealistic and pluralist conception of an Emergence, may I offer The Trajectory of an Emergence, shown above. It is clearly no magical conversion, but a complex transition, involving a dynamic change between two Stabilities.       
    

Special Issue: Iteration

ITERATION

This special issue explores the idea of iteration in Mathematics and Philosophy. 

In Mathematics it is a way of trying to find answers through repetition, but it certainly isn’t the usual way of using equations. Originally an invention of pragmatic engineers it then became an extension of Mathematics, giving birth to all manner of wonderous inventions, from fractals to Chaos Theory. It is a fascinating area for sure, but it isn’t what the mathematicians like to pretend it is.

Iteration is a descrete way of approaching the continuous - and a static way of dealing with movement and change. It embodies all the chaos, paradoxes and infinite blow-ups you’d expect from such internal contradiction.

The papers in this short collection are presented in a different way from the usual updates. For it is such a difficult, and yet crucial, area that “the latest” seems both too esoteric and too abstract, and its relevance not immediately apparent.

It certainly wasn’t obvious to me! It has taken about 30 years for me to finally begin to understand iteration’s importance, in providing a very different approach to both Reasoning and Science. So, clearly, delivering the latest developments, without some idea of how it was finally achieved, would also leave most areas unexplained and unaquainted readers cold. So, this collection spans, one way or another, all the significant steps in that ascending trajectory.

First of all, these papers are not part of a complete and final narrative. They, instead, each and every one, come out of an only partly referred-to past, which had certainly left the necessary traces-and-questions in my head, but not yet upon the written page. Nevertheless, the fact that each poses as yet unanswered questions, does ultimately connect up with later papers, and, as it does so, begins to light-up a wholly new path towards Truth, inaccessible from the usual approaches.

As a whole, it brings together the inadequacies of disciplines that cannot deal with real Qualitative Change, such as Mathematics, with the finding of evidence for possible solutions actually within the very tricks and extensions that infer something beyond those steadfast limits, and which become attempts to solve the inherent problems of that discipline’s usual and in fact essential approach.

Indeed, as Hegel had always insisted, progress only resides in what appear to be untenable contradictions.

Read more

No Future

Abandoned mall in the USA

No Future Under Capitalism

....for Anyone

The Economic System of Capitalism must have a Market for what it produces. So, primarily, that means people to buy its products.

But, just as important in determining its imperatives, is how it works economically, based upon both the Financial Requirements side and on the Necessary Results side: it must attract the necessary investment to finance both the Means of Production, their regular updating to stay competitive, and have enough overall Profits to pay the required Dividends to its Investors.

But, it must also have Labour to carry out its productive operations: and that must be as cheap as possible.

Now, the main problem since its inception has never changed!

Most of the customers (ultimately) will also be those producing the products. It, therefore, presents the major unavoidable contradiction in Capitalism. For, keeping wages as low as possible, while having enough customers with money to buy the products are, ultimately, diametrically opposed requirements.

Do you require a proof?

For, the whole 300 years of its History, Capitalism has hit this contradiction every few years, when it inevitably suffers a Recession, Depression or even a Slump - and when it does large numbers of workers are sacked, and find new jobs almost impossible to find.

The corner was often turned by taking on the unemployed at much lower wages, so a new balance could be achieved, and these would be at different companies to those from which they had been sacked. Indeed, these "Down-Turns" were frequent enough, for an ever present Pool of the Unemployed to be regularly used in this way!

Now, a purely single area Capitalism, could never grow enough for the new Employing Class and their investors, so they extended their reach to ever new areas, both in their own Country, and then abroad. And, as those exterior countries had been conquered by the so-called Metropolitan Capitalist Hubs, both cheap raw materials and low-wage workers could be easily maintained there.

Abandoned mall in China

This is the Imperialist Development of Capitalism, as very successfully employed by England (and later by the following United Kingdom).

And, interestingly, this was significantly modified by the United States of America, by constantly extending its boundaries to the West and South, disposing of the indigenous populations, as it did so, and distributing of the taken land cheaply to the torrent of poor workers from the East of the USA, and to similar immigrant people from Europe.

But, in addition, both of these nations largely solved their most pressing problem, by resorting to wholesale slavery, to provide "owned labour" both in America in their Southern States, and by Britain in its Caribbean Colonies.

Of course, such "solutions" were always only temporary! For the imperatives of the system, necessarily re-asserted themselves all the time. And, with the end of Imperialism after the Second World War, those means were also curtailed - to be replaced by the installing-and-supporting of corrupt regimes in the ex-colonies to act as well-paid intermediaries.

Indeed, for both the colonial owners and the USA there was also the threat of Socialism, following the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and the forced "socialisation" of Eastern Europe. For then, America, in particular, embarked upon an almost constant set of wars to prevent any further extensions, and set up militarily-supported Capitalist alternatives instead.

But, the underlying drive of Capitalism always-and-inevitably re-asserts itself, and whatever modifications are instituted, nothing can replace the need for Profit!

Equally the essential contradictions can also never be resolved within Capitalism: for even in War, the usually resorted to "final solution", the soldiers required are once again the ordinary Working People - and to fight they have to be armed!

It was just such "people-in-arms" that carried through the Russian Revolution.

Think about it! 

Why were Nuclear weapons invented?

The promise of war without soldiers

Why are wealthy Americans armed to the teeth, and increasingly live in effectively "gated communities"?

Why must there always be an Enemy, threatening the status quo?

Why has America got by far the mightiest Military in the World?

Who is really threatening America?

It is you!

What the capitalist rulers fear most is the mass of ordinary workers finally rebelling!

So, how about a future without Capitalism?

Abandoned mall in Austin Texas has been transformed into a community college

Re-using dying malls

Penrose and Ideality

Why Cosmology is Irretrievably Broken

As a serious and active theoretical physicist and mathematician, I have been inevitably driven to Philosophy, in order to try to explain the many apparently unavoidable contradictions encountered literally everywhere in both of these disciplines. And, it was there, within Philosophy, that I had been irrefutably presented with a damning indictment of both the bases, and of the assumptions, underlying these disciplines, which are also present, in the usual Basic Formal Logic type of reasoning used there too.

Such an extreme realisation was, itself, of course, a very long way from being an immediately-arrived-at conclusion. For, on the contrary, those very same now-rejected beliefs had been, without any doubt, a tremendously empowering past achievement by Mankind, and had led to significant progress in their attempts to make sense of their finally coming-to-be-thought-about World.

Indeed, to this day, most people, even including most professionals, and in these very same fields, do not, as yet, even doubt their crucial underlying premises, and have stuck, consistently, to them, ever since their major revelation by the ancient Greeks. For, they were, and still are, neessary-simplifications of Reality, and still retaining a true-if-limited measure of Objective Content within them.

They are often true-for-now, and hence wholly dependable in the short term. Indeed, in some cases they even appeared to be true-for-ever, such as in Number, for example! But in reality it depends on what you are counting - for, if your 1 + 1 is a Man and a Woman, it could, in time, equal 3, or 4 or even more. Then, as the parents die, it can decline, maybe even to 0! Yet, who would give up Number as a truly valuable concept, because of this clear time-dependence: it still has true value in many relatively unchanging scenarios.

Indeed, the key-misleading-assumption involved, when applied generally, has a name: it is termed Plurality. Put simply, Plurality asserts the permanence of certain things, ideas or beliefs, and their independence of other simultaneously-present entities or happenings. It was intuitively arrived at by the Greeks, in their first major revelation - that of Mathematics, originally concerned with perfect shapes in Euclidian Geometry, but soon extended to the whole discipline involving all Pure Forms.

And, let us be crystal clear, with Mathematics, within its well-defined bases, Plurality is, indeed, always valid! Its very power depends upon its definition of perfect shapes, or more generally, Perfect Forms, for this enabled the whole discipline to be built into a relatively consistent and developable system.

But, this was only at all possible by limiting study to Pure Forms alone, which, as a consequence, also made it necessarily conform to Plurality too. But, consequently, Mathematics does NOT apply to Reality, as such, but only to this reflection of its Pure Forms and nothing else - basically, it is true only of a parallel and restricted World, which we term Ideality.

Roger Penrose and some Ideality

Now, the problems with my chosen disciplines arose, when situations unavoidably involved Qualitative Changes. For, Mathematics, as originally defined, excluded this possibility entirely, but also for the very same reason could still be developed into a remarkably informing descriptive discipline, when restricted to things conforming to Plurality - that is to only quantitative changes, usually only within what are termed Stabilities.

But, my consequent turn to Physics (from my first love, Mathematics) didn't help, for the benefits of Mathematics in staying with Plurality, had also been exported illegitimately, first, to Formal Logic, and thereafter to the Sciences too.

Though Physics, for example, was temporarily rescued by a form of Positivism which allowed the co-existence of various contradictory stances which could be switched-between with the long-standing pragmatic excuse of, "If it works, it is right!" So, an amalgam of stances were simultaneously-allowed, including Materialism (from Reality), Idealism (from Mathematics), Pragmatism (from his Hunter/Gatherer past), Plurality (from Formal Reasoning), and even Holism (from attempts, in spite of all the above, to physically-explain real phenomena).

The major crisis, was finally unavoidably precipitated, in the 20th century, by the increasingly-emerging failure of the above amalgam, which led to the dropping of Physical Explanation totally, and the whole-hearted embracing of Mathematics as the "sole-saviour", particularly in Sub-Atomic Physics, but also with a devastating carry-over into Cosmology too.

Now, this particular essay was precipitated by a video on the internet by Professor Roger Penrose upon the assumed-cause - the Big Bang, and inevitable final-demise, of our Universe! Penrose started by mentioning his resolute faith in Mathematics, and, in particular, of Einstein's Relativity Equation, and though he didn't question the Equation, he felt that certain prior assumptions, upon which it was erected, might well be erroneous.

Interestingly, he located the difficulties within the Singularities seemingly occurring at either end of that existence - the Big Bang beginning, and the Zero ending, indicated within the equation by its effective blowing-up at those singularities.

His problems were with the (indisputable-for-him) Second Law of Thermodynamics, which indicated that the trajectory of that whole History was -

from a High-Energy, Random-movement, Minimum Entropy Start

onto a Low-Energy, Random-movement, Maximum Entropy End

It didn't make sense in Penrose's conception for it seemingly went from Chaos to Chaos via Structured Foms and even Life? But, his doubts weren't because of Penrose's "rich and wide" experience of Reality: for he, on the contrary, only "dwells" exclusively in a pluralist world determined-and-describable only by Mathematics!

Indeed, if you expected any Explanatory Physics, from his then-emerging Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, you will be sadly disappointed.

Both in the Universe's Origin (as in a Big Bang)

and in the Universe's Demise (as in a Terminal End)

they are described as being in an identical Conformal featureless "Flatness".

You have to remember his total dedication to pluralist Mathematics: in "explaining" anything, he actually says, "The equations deliver all these outcomes"! No references are made to any actual Substances and their properties. Absolutely everything comes from the Abstract Equations alone, and, ultimately, all his descriptions will be shown as the consequences of Formal Equations - they, we are told, determine-everything!

Yet, such means not only do not, but also cannot, deliver Qualitative Change, so all adherents to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, with their Maths-only stance, can never ever explain such changes: they can only, in the old pragmatic way, switch between equations because - "If it works, it is right!" That is NOT Science. It is Idealism as embodied in purely Formal Equations. It can only ever be descriptive, but never explanatory, so it actually terminates Science to be replaced by a dry and dead formalism.

Now, with justice, the response to all of this might well be to demand that this critic must deliver the alternative to this Dead End, and that is certainly a legitimate position to take. Yet, the routes taken in the whole of Mankind's various intellectual disciplines, over millennia, have unavoidably brought us to this significant current Impasse. The contradictions have been built into the Amalgam of such Premises, which were all retained, in order, pragmatically, to be able to achieve the many required particular outcomes, in a variety of areas.

And, that Amalgam must now be dismantled, via a route admitting of, and dealing comprehensively with, Qualitative Change.

But, in spite of several heroic attempts to do this, particularly since the Dialectics of Friedrich Hegel, some 200 years ago, this has not been achieved, primarily, because such an undertaking has never been systematically-and-comprehensively applied to Science, and, crucially, to Physics.

And, the usual restriction is, invariably, to only ever do Studies of Stability, either natural or arranged-for, which is now required to be extended beyond the point where formalist equations FAIL - where each-and-every essential Stability dissociates, and where the Real World processes, which alonedeliver the Qualitative Changes, termed Emergences,or even Revolutions,must now be the New Focus.

This is not new, descriptively, of course - for in Biology, Evolution is both totally accepted and well described. And, Geology has revealed the 4 billion-year-long History of the Earth, and even the time of the Origin of Life, and the Tempo of its consequent stages of subsequent development - its Evolution!

But, what are rarely, if ever, investigated, are the relatively short Interludes of Emergent Change, which are totally unavailable by current scientific methods, which ONLY EVER investigate Stability! It has been shown that an interlude of Qualitative Change is a cataclysmic transformation, requiring, initially, repeated Crises within the current Stability, which turns out to be a self-maintaining balance of multiple-opposing-factors, and which finally totally collapses - seemingly heading for a Nadir of Dissociation - that is, in fact, a complete dissolution of the prior System-Stability involved.

Yet, consequently, this then allows the still-existing individual processes, from the prior Stability, along with co-existing others, to find new "partners", in both conducive-cooperating and opposing relationships, which ultimately achieve a wholly new self-maintaining balance, in a new Stability, at a new and different level!

We currently recognise the Stabilities, upon either side of such a Transforming Interlude, but know nothing of the process which brought-about The Change. We use the passing of Threshold values, in certain Key Parameters, to signal when to switch getween the alternatives, but we can never explainthe conyent of that transition!

Now, such an absolutely necessary inclusion of these changes into Science is not just a dream! It is already underway, with a major Holistic attack upon the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, and its many consequences. The ill-famed Double Slit Experiments have been fully explained, purely physically. And the quantization of Electron orbits in Atoms has also succumbed to the new approach. Of course, the very heart of this endeavour has been to produce a coherent, consistent and comprehensive Holist, Materialist Philosophic Stance. And, the demotion of Mathematics from its current primary position to that of a flawed but useful Handmaiden in both Science and Technology has been necessary.

How can Science become Holist rather than Pluralist?

This undertaking, almost exclusively by a single individual (the writer of this paper), has amounted to over 1,000 papers, published at a rate of approximately 9 per month over the last 9 years, but based upon a lifetime's involvement, at a professional level, in all the disciplines addressed.

Postscript: The obvious question that may be considered important, about this philosopher/scientist, must be, "to what tradition or milieu does this researcher belong?" He has been a aspiring Dialectical Materialist since early adulthood, but only began to make significant philosophical contributions in the last 20 years.