SHAPE Blog

New Special Issue on Nothing

2012-01-27T13:56:00.000Z

A whole series of magazine articles by prestigious authors and Special Issues by office hacks, as well as many different TV spectaculars and series have found it necessary to expand upon their increasingly important concept of... well... nothing.

In seeking an Origin for the Universe (without a God of course), they have settled upon "Nothing" as their necessary source. But, as you might have expected, it is a very special kind of Nothing!

First of all it is man-made. Or, to clarify, we both call it "Nothing" and have defined what we think Nothing actually is.

And, secondly, as you might have guessed, there isn't a single, unambiguous definiton. Indeed, the indubitable origin of the concept of Nothing is definitely mathematical, and associated with the mathematicians new concept of "zero" (as a number without any magnitude). It is a formal "nothing", like zero, but made up of +1 and -1, or equal amounts of positive and negative charges, or even completely balanced forces which give the appearance of zero activity, and, of course, many others of similar ilk.

Indeed my favourite has to be the Physical Singularity, where something supposedly vanishes by successive contractions, until it shrinks into the tiniest dot, and then down to absolutely Nothing. And, lo and behold, in reverse... we can have the whole of the present universe emanating from an identical dimensionless dot. Magic, isn't it?

This is not an unimportant philosophical speculation: it is indeed the current consensus position of the vast majority of today's physicists and cosmologists. And it is a direct consequence of two important principles, which were both progressive and extremely useful for many centuries. These were the Formalism of Mathematics and the Plurality of analyses of things into seperable parts.

Now, though gigantic pragmatic and technological strides were made using these principles, which it has to be admitted, transformed our world - they finally, and inevitably, began to lead us astray. When our tools no longer work, we should cast them aside and replace them with something better. For such has always been the way of Science!

It is never as easy as it sounds. Those who benefitted greatly from their past use of such priniciples, and indeed, made them the cornerstones of all their contributions and theories, would always and ever defend them to the last as their own prestige was surely based upon them. And, in their defence of these now reactionary principles, these supporters will favour the most remarkable retreats, rather than admit that they were wrong.

In 1927 a totally reactionary conception of Physics won the day against "old fashioned" Einstein and his supporters at the Solvay Conference, with what became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory - a pragmatist/idealist retreat of major proportions, that cast out "fuzzy" reality as the final arbiter, and replaced it with "driving essences", which were affirmed to be
equations.

The story of this debacle and how it must be defeated, has to be addressed, and Shape Journal is finally ready to begin this vital task. This Special Issue, under the title of "Nothing" is to start the process, to address this current preoccupation, for it has certainly redirected science into an impassable idealistic mire.

Read it here

Tory Science: The Study of Failure as Success

2012-01-25T20:11:00.002Z

Horseshoe Crabs: celebrating an anachronism

I awaited the new BBC television programme on Evolution (Survivors: Nature's Indestructible Creatures) with great interest. The oft-repeated trailers for the show emphasized the recurrence of major cataclysms within that process, which had, on every occasion, wiped out most of the current lifeforms on Earth, yet had always left a few very resilient survivors, and everything that still exists today must have evolved from these remnants. The very fact that catastrophes had played a part was, I thought, extremely significant in what they had precipitated, and the fact that the presenter (Prof. Richard Fortey) was from one of the very best museums in London, led me to expect a great deal of valuable extra information that would be available to add more substance to my recently published Theory of Emergence.

But, to my surprise, the globe-trotting expert did not allocate any evolutionary credit whatsoever to the Emergent Events triggered by those destructive cataclysms, but instead concentrated upon the unchanging "living fossils" that, with great difficulty, he was able to physically present as still living relatively unchanged to this very day.

At the end of a boring hour, looking at Horseshoe Crabs, Lampreys, Lancelets and Stromatolites, we got the bad news that this was to be a whole series of programmes. Good Grief!

So, instead of studying the crucial processes by which evolution had regularly rescued Life from wholesale mass destruction, our expert lauded the niche-surviving relics that hadn't had any revolutionary processes acting upon them for as many as 500 million years. What on earth was Fortey trying to prove?

Clearly, none of the freaks he presented to us were the reason for survival and development in general, or the vital accelerated adaptive changes involved - indeed, he was doing the exact opposite! His chosen "heroes" had survived by being extremely undemanding and resilient, and certainly not by being capable of rapid change in order to adapt and survive. Fortey even described with approval how a certain animal could go for an entire year without any food and still survive. How magnificent? I think not! Most organisms have survived by a mixture of maximal plastic variability and abundant reproduction coupled with certain individual deaths, not by living forever unchanged.

His examples were of where evolution failed to do its job and create new forms suited to radically changed environments, when faced with the most disadvantageous circumstances.

Now, such errors are perhaps understandable, but also unforgiveable! For though the incrementalist, quantitative changes idea of development does still dominate science, that doesn't change the fact that such a standpoint is wholly wrong. The engine of general survival was always adaptive radiation - those interludes following major disasters in which, from a single species, a whole range of different species arise in a relatively short space of time. The pinheads changes that we can see do not become changes in qualities: the incrementalist thesis is a myth.

All developments, not only in Life, but also in all circumstances, display two dominant modes. The first, and of longest duration, is undoubtedly Stability, when an integrated system has become established, not only by its advantageous virtues, but also by its integrated defensive processes. Once established such systems can persist for very long periods, in which the only significant changes are not towards increased order, but to its opposite, via imperceptible and inevitable decay - The Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't actually rule, but its dissociations do mount up until the system becomes totally undermined, and a wholesale collapse ensues.

Now this is self-contained denouement, not that precipitated by externally caused catastrophe. But, either way, the immediate following period, which is the important part of the alternative mode, is always a short Event of major qualitative changes, which we term an Emergence.

For those who doubt that these Events actually occur, may I proffer a few important examples?

These are - The Origin of Life on Earth, the Advent of Consciousness and the Appearance of Directed Thinking. Complete overturns of what came before.

There can be no doubt, this alternation of long periods of incipient decline within a maintained Stability, and short, explosive interludes of revolutionary ferment and changes, is the pattern of all development. Now, if this is true, what must be the crucial area of study in order to explain innovation - true creative evolution? It can only be the detailed study of Emergences themselves.

But what does Professor Fortey do instead? He studies the failed remnants that have proved impervious to the creative processes of Evolution. He is lauding Conservativism. How can you talk about Evolution and not talk about progress and change?

By being a Tory?

Review of Survivors here

Genius

2011-12-18T17:26:00.000Z

A regularly used epithet?

Every now and then some individual is celebrated as being a real "genius".

Whether he is merely skilfully juggling a football, singing with great beauty, painting a few walls, memorising vast numbers of names and ideas or coming up with a revolutionary new theory, they all get this extreme title, yet I would be hard-pressed to agree to such an appellation to any apart, possibly, from the last example.

For though most of us spend our lives using what others have given us (in one way or another), the occasional individual does come along who transcends prior conceptions and assumptions, and sees, for the first time, a further dimension of Reality.

To append some built-in, already-existing quality to that individual (He's a genius!) misses the real point entirely. Something has happened in that person's thinking, which completely overturns the usual, generally held ideas, and moves into a wholly new scenario, in which many things begin to make sense, more profoundly than ever before.

If such an overturn happened in Society, it would be called a Revolution, and when a similar thing happened on this planet, among systems of non-living chemical processes within related entities, there was a major transformation, which we have termed the Origin of Life on Earth.

As it turns out, such events have been happening rarely but regularly, and definitely essentially, throughout the history of the Universe. They are termed Emergences!

And they are never just "developments" as we usually conceive of them, but in fact cataclysmic overturns to a current, long-term Stability, and involve a subsequent ascent to a wholly new Level of Stability, with vastly more entities, properties and processes than were possible before that transforming occurrence.

Indeed, when positioned within the normal flow of History, these Emergences are short, dramatic episodes between relatively unchanging and long-lasting Stabilities. And, literally all of our knowledge and understanding is based almost entirely, and very selectively, upon these long epochs of Stability. So we are therefore so lacking in being able to deal with certain areas of Qualitative Change, that the Emergences, when they come, are never predicted as Events, and can also never be described in any predicted detail, even when they are in actual process. What contents they will produce are always totally unpredictable before the event. They are entirely unknowable.

They are always bolts-from-the-blue, and, even more perplexingly, they are invariably the final result of an enormous catastrophic collapse in the prior Stability, which, if anything, seems to promise only destruction and chaos.

Indeed, via studies (retrospectively) of periods in the history of human societies when Revolutions did, in fact, occur, we could only ever discern the prior drives towards collapse - never any possible positive and constructive moves at all. And dreamers, who desired such events to rid their societies of repressive regimes, always assumed that such events would free things up once and for all.

But serious study of Emergences has shown that they only arrive and remain at a new higher stable Level, by being as strongly conservative as the previous regime - to ensure the continuing survival of the new Level.

So clearly, knowing so little about these events, and also inevitably packing their study with stability-based and extracted "laws" and myths (not to mention dreams), means that when it is the revolution in the thoughts of a "genius", we are hopelessly ill-equipped to say anything meaningful or helpful about what happened in that person's head. Yet as active social revolutionaries know, you cannot just observe a revolution occurring, all by itself, and wait for the "good times to roll". You have to have objectives to be achieved during the creative inner phase of the Revolution itself, for even if the New Level is achieved, major changes thereafter will certainly be impossible. Such can only happen in the mêlée of the event itself.

Now, such lessons can help when we are considering all kinds of other forms of Emergences including, of course, within Thinking. The question must be, "What must be done to facilitate such an Event (if anything)?"

The feature of Emergences which always acts against any such objectives, is the evident opacity of any yet-to-occur overturns of this nature. We cannot predict its detailed creations!

In a world totally without any Life, of any sort whatsoever, living things could never be even conceived of: they appeared on Earth as a kind of miracle, so devastating that a single initial organism rapidly spread to a prodigious extent across the Globe. And also "no one" attempting to predict the nature of such entirely new entities, would ever have got anything even remotely right, even if some sort of alien observer could have been present, and guessing what would happen next!

An Emergence is a very special kind of calamity, best illustrated by the metaphor of "The Phoenix arising from the Flames of Destruction". For that certainly fits most known Emergences.

But how does this relate to Genius?

Another common metaphor is that, "There is a fine dividing line between genius and madness!" Such clichés are, of course, beguiling suggestions, but one-liners never deliver anything more than the merest glimpse of what is happening: the truism.

But recent research can deliver something, for where Emergences are studied it becomes clear that NO Stability is eternal. Each and every one always contains the seeds of its own demise within it, and when they finally cause the ultimate cataclysm of dissociation, that dismantles that stability, they will return the situation back(?) to some state with no real order, and that means no prohibitory or self-maintaining constraints will remain, they will all have been swept away.

And it is only in such seemingly ultimate turmoil that the productive capacity of Reality towards Order asserts itself. For without the abundant constraints of an established and stable order these can develop conducive and productive relationships and actual multi-process systems begin to appear. Clearly and importantly, such forms of Order will emerge, and they can never be a repeat of the similar process, which established the prior stability. For the very occurrence of that epoch will have changed things, and its produced detritus, after dissolution, will remain despite the calamity, and will enable wholly new forms, impossible in the prior Emergence. Thus as they say, "You can never swim in the same river twice!", it is always a different river, and so it is with the potentials in the Chaos produced by the cataclysm of dissociation that initiates all Emergences.

When it comes to the emergence of genius, the break through will have been precipitated by a breakdown of all bankers, which assured that prior stability. The individual will be cast into such Chaos, and will inevitably see new things and certainly new possibilities.

But, as the Theory of Emergences has shown, there is no obvious or easy ascent! The creation Phase in an Emergence always involves, in fact, a violent zigzag between the creation of new Order, and its immediate dissociation. Such an inevitable absolute cancellation is not what always happens, however, because gains can be made, but only by the marrying of system orientated constraints, which oppose both dissociation and rival constructions too.

A permanent achievement of a new and persisting stability is never guaranteed though. Unless a viable and self maintaining system with adequate constraints is created, the final stability will not emerge, and the situation will either remain in the pair of chaotic alternating construction and dissolution processes, or retrench back to a previous stability.

Madness in genius is the seemingly permanent limbo of this incessant zigzag.

Of course, when it comes to ideas in the Human Brain, we are effectively in a wholly new realm, that no longer obeys its wired-in patterns of behaviour elicited by triggers in sense perceptions, but instead "simulates" internally the consequences of possible phenomena and their built-in processes. Indeed, this aspect of particularly human thought requires learning, and definitely the ability to think critically; such processes actively seek breakthroughs - Emergences in Thought!

The initial work on Emergences was by Hegel and addressed this very same area.

So, though we can use the discovered trajectory of "An Emergence" to help us consider such happenings, we are, once again, looking at Form, rather than Content.

To consider a supernova, the Origin of Life and Human Consciousness as exactly the same kind of event, is obviously rubbish. So, what we do is notice their similar trajectories of change, and sequences of phases, even though what is happening in concrete details will be vastly different. And, in an important sense, what happens within the Human Brain is happening in a "different Universe" of possibilities to all prior concrete instances of these Events.

For, instead of them being overtly physical systems (such as those underlying these processes inside the brain as strictly chemical and electrical activities), we are instead considering things at an entirely different Level of the organisation of matter. We will NEVER reduce such things to those physical/chemical processes, just as we will never reduce Life to purely non-living chemical processes. To attempt to understand it that way misses the whole nature of Emergences.

For these mighty versions create wholly new Levels, which, though they include and use multiple processes from prior Levels, are maintained and controlled at the new Level by entirely new meta-processes totally impossible at any prior level alone.

In conclusion, we cannot "arrange for" genius, just as we cannot engineer a revolution. We are more likely to do the opposite of what is required, for such occurrences look like their absolute opposite in their unavoidable primary dissolutionary phase.

And incorrect uses of the term certainly don't help.

Stephen Fry is not a genius: neither is David Beckam.

Hegel, on the other hand, certainly was.

The Single Photon

2011-12-02T17:51:00.001Z

Here are a series of papers addressing the Single Photon Double Slit Experiment:

Introduction
Explanation Part 1
Explanation Part 2

Explanation Part 3

Issue 22 of SHAPE

2011-12-02T17:07:00.001Z

Read it here

The Red Herring of Observation

2011-11-09T20:49:00.000Z

I have received much criticism from the YouTube brigade on my Double Slit animation, for not fully addressing the role of the observer / quantum erasers et al. This was never my intention with the work, which was addressing how electrons could build up an interference pattern in the Double Slit, without the need for resorting to probability distribution, which I see as a mathematical "trick" to get the right answer. I hope the following papers will help to clarify my position on this aspect of Quantum Physics.

The Double Slit Experiment and the Role of the Observer I

The Double Slit Experiment and the Role of the Observer II

The Problem of the Observer

Issue 21 of SHAPE

2011-11-09T17:56:00.000Z

Read here

First part of a two-part issue on the Shell-Shaped Universe
(see video in previous post)
Part 2 will be published in Issue 22 of the Shape Journal next month.

“Chasing the Do-able” may well accelerate growth in Science, but the consequences will invariably, as in all such undertakings, cause the growth to be both etiolated and aberrant by such a process, with a major canker at its very heart, almost unavoidably included from the start. And Cosmology is certainly no different! Vast strides have been made, but have they all been in the right direction? The answer has to be a resounding,”No!”

How can such conceptions as Physical Singularities and Parallel Universes be anything other than frigs imported from that seductive World of Pure Form alone, which we term Ideality? And the nature of that “door” to such developments can, at the time of opening and entry seem to be not only harmless, but also positively encouraging. For in that wide-open view, all things seem eminently do-able.

The turning points were, of course, Einstein’s contribution on Relativity and the general acceptance of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory as bases for an entirely new turn in Physics and Cosmology.

No longer was Explanation the “number one” priority! Mathematics and the worship of Equations seemed eminently preferable. But also, many consequent assumptions were unavoidably taken as the foundations for this New World, and not least was the belief that light could propagate across entirely Empty Space without any transmitting medium whatsoever, and to “solve” the resulting problems, the Particulate Nature of Light (via moving Photons), became a cornerstone of the new system.

The following, alternative set of ideas, in contrast, turns its back upon such premises, and instead requires a particular form of medium for light propagation, and therefore makes transmission across totally Empty Space impossible. By such changes, the whole Universe is transformed!

Now, to immediately proceed along such a route cannot be done. For, though some sort of self-consistent body of ideas can be constructed, there are other, much more profound and significant philosophical standpoints and consequent methodologies to be addressed too. We must start by not looking forwards to the New Ideas, but by looking back to the Big Bang itself, and seeing it in a wholly new way.

Issue 22 will continue investigating these ideas and look deeper into their ramifications. We also have a new video up on our youtube channel, boldly titled, The Shape of the Universe!

The Shell-Shaped Universe

2011-10-28T14:27:00.002+01:00

What Shape is the Universe?

A new issue will follow this video in coming days, explaining further how the theory of Empty Photons could have dramatic ramifications on how we see the Universe. Could the known Universe exist in a thin shell? Could every galaxy be an illusion? Watch this space to find out more...

New Special Issue on Form & Probability

2011-09-08T15:42:00.001+01:00

Read it here

This Special was a commendable task!

It was intended to reveal the nature of statistical and probabilistic Law as a special type wedded indissolubly to experimental evidence, and the revelation of this was to be a plank in the final and complete criticism of the Copenhagen approach to Science, as put forward by Bohr and Heisenberg. And it is a contribution to that objective! But, it certainly isn’t, as yet, part of a comprehensive argument.

It got deflected into absolutely necessary component issues, and diligently followed various lines, that were revealed as having to be solved to have any hope of completing the full task. In such crucial reversals of methods a whole range of component issues have to be addressed prior to a final integration: The terminally ill but not yet dead semi-copse has to be seen to its final demise, before we bury it for ever!

I am sure that this offering will energise others, as it has this writer, for the task is essential, and the rewards will be prodigious. Sub-Atomic Physics was wrecked upon the rocks of real Qualitative Change and the emergence of Levels within the development of Reality. And such problems (in all areas of Science) will only be properly addressed when the problems raised in this area of Physics are finally solved for good!

Issue 20 of SHAPE

2011-08-14T16:24:00.001+01:00

Read it here

This issue of SHAPE Journal contains a closely related series of papers, in which the trajectory of significant qualitative change in an Emergence is tackled,diagrammatically. Of course, the elements of such considerations are still concepts, processes and transformations, but the spatial idioms of diagrams delivers that extra “dimension” of simultaneous portrayal, which does, indeed, allow quite involved transitions to be laid out, considered and significantly improved.

A words-only argument can be as much about winning as revealing, and it is clear to this author that without these kinds of diagrams, we would not only find solving such problems considerably more difficult, but we would also be bereft of the best initial means of communicating the ideas involved too.

The trajectory of Creative Change in an Emergence, such as that of the Origin of Life on Earth, involves contradictions, phase changes, and major transformations – even of the probabilities of events, and it is these features that must be understood. These papers do not complete the job, but they were fundamental in the creation and publication of this author’s Theory of Emergences in 2010.

New Special Issue on Empty Photons

2011-07-22T16:17:00.000+01:00

Read it here

What is Intelligence?

2011-07-22T11:42:00.000+01:00

In the article Claws for Thought in New Scientist (2819), Emma Young ranges about various studies in the animal world to find evidence that convinces her that “animals lie on a kind of spectrum, from a primitive kind of awareness, to the rich and complex stream of thoughts in the human mind”. And in doing this reveals that she (and those she refers to in her piece) have a pluralist approach to such questions.

By this I mean that every animal is measured against Intelligence (–the human kind) to see if they have it, or part of it, and this seems to reveal a continuous range with Human Intelligence at the top, and lower animals with this same commodity, having ascended, step by step, some way at least towards this ultimately possible state. You might ask why such is deemed to be pluralist (in the philosophical sense and not either the religious or political senses). Well, Plurality sees everything in terms of Wholes and their constituent Parts, and hence any investigative process attempting to reveal the nature of things is basically analytic, applied first to an observable Whole, and subsequently to each of its Parts, to thereafter make possible an explanation of the original Whole.

From the outset, perhaps centuries ago, the property of intelligence was allocated only to Human Beings, and other “mechanisms”, such as hard-wired instincts were awarded to all those below the qualifying limit.

But, such a standpoint has long been severely undermined, but the alternative of a spectrum cannot be any better, for it implies quantity rather than quality – amount rather than wholly new processes, and even, perhaps, that it is sufficient quantity of what is involved that can jack things up to each and every Level in this range of the given facility.

Yet, the study of Development in general shows that such is never the case. Significant Qualitative Change only happens in short-period interludes termed Emergences, which are NOT mere stages in a particular quantitative spectrum of changes, but actually totally transforming revolutions. And these transformations are never incremental. Indeed, they involve seemingly terminal crises initiated by wholesale avalanches of dissolution, which only when that process has dismantled the situation almost to the state of complete chaos, does it turn round and then create the wholly New.

And when this is used as a template for development, and hence in Evolution too, the work must be to first identify these crises, and explain why they occurred, as well as the following creative phase which brings in wholly new qualities and establishes a New Level of Reality. With such a development scenario the changes are neither gradual or incremental, but revolutionary, and each major advance involves a significant step-change in possibilities, so ideally each of these new Levels should have its own unique name: they are not all the same but differing in quantity: no spectrum of these Levels can be constructed.

Therefore, Intelligence in Humanity is not a general quality with different amounts at each Level of development.

To assume the latter merely becomes the apportioning of amount to each phase without any investigation of how the Event of Transformation occurred. Instead, it is assumed to have merely increased by some pedestrian process which when passing an important threshold (merely of quantity) enabled the “new facilities”.

No! I’m afraid this is not how these things occur!

And to do as the researchers into the Origin of Life on Earth do, and merely study the prior conditions for the actual causes of the development will (as it continues to do in that important area) always and inevitably fail. Even the searching for the causes of a Revolution in prior circumstances will also be inadequate.

What has to be addressed is the relationships between Stability and Emergence, - so that the studying of prior circumstances can only deliver reasons for the initial crisis and cataclysm, and not for its resolution within the creative Phase of the Emergence.

For such a study must expose the real dynamic or trajectory of changes within an Emergence, and also deliver why the New is ever possible. My point is that the kind of research related in this article, with its implied current methodology is doomed to never reveal what is actually happening, and why, but indeed it is merely logging what appears and when.

Issue 19 of SHAPE

2011-06-17T15:16:00.000+01:00

Read it here

In this issue of SHAPE Journal we carry on with the next installment of The Demise of Formalism. A significant part of this part of the paper addresses the essential change of standpoint that is necessary when tackling Emergent Change, from the usual formal and pluralist approach to a dramatically different holisitic one!

Also in this edition we are trying out a very different structure to a standard issue of the Journal. Not, I must hasten to add, in the Design or in the Content of SHAPE, but both in the quantity that we publish in a single issue, and in the intrinsic relationships between the set of papers included.

In the past we have divided all of the longer papers into a series of installments, which were then spread over a series of issues episodically - and we usually only had three unrelated topics in each issue. The success of the Special Issues of SHAPE has demonstrated to us that that choice was mistaken, and complaints have made it clear that more coherence and continuity would be acheived by publishing related sets of papers within a given issue.

So, for a few issues at least (and maybe for much longer) we will be changing our policy. First, the issues will be larger in size. The articles will be longer than the original 1000 word limit, there will be more of them, and they will tend to be all upon a related or even on an identical topic.

In this issue, therefore, will be seven separate contributions, thus raising the content well above the usual limit, though in this first tryout we have chosen fairly short papers with more diagrams. Most of these were written at different times starting 4 years ago, and it is interesting that the very act of composing this latest version has catapulted the editor into another bout of writing on the same topic. Clearly, it is hoped that this format will reveal something of the actual development of the ideas involved, and may even elicit more contributory responses from our readers.

This current set is on Positive Feedback scenarios, which turned out to be an absolutely crucial concept on the creation of the Theory of Emergences and in radically transforming in the research into the Origin of Life on Earth.

Shadowlands

2011-06-15T18:41:00.007+01:00

Why was there such a thing as Shadow Theatre?
It is, in a way, a kind of minimalist means of telling a story, but it also involves the most striking symbols of the types of people, places and events that are involved. And I characterise them as symbols with good reason: images or representations would be simply not appropriate. For they are immediately recognisable, and can “perform” in standard recognisable ways all sorts of “characteristic” actions, which would be difficult to present in a real theatre with actors and props (though in Far Eastern theatrical traditions, and ancient Greek Theatre, they did also attempt to do it with masks and/or dramatic costumes).

The suspension of disbelief was considered paramount; so the inadequacy of direct portrayal by perhaps less-than-convincing human representations, and the use of symbols seemed to greatly aid this requirement. Also, the ambiguity involved in using shadows allowed the imaginations of the audience to “fill-in” what was not there, and also allowed the effects, possible with shadows, could also be put to “magical” uses. The rhythm of the actions and the possibility of transformations by merely changing the angle of presentation of the puppets (or even the distance from the screen to deliver indefinite, ghostlike” images, could elicit in the audience a magical imperative of a story-line, almost impossible by other means at that time. It was, indeed, a very telling means of delivering a known and striking legend or myth.

Four different shadow views of the same object
demonstrating the illusory effects of shadow distortions

Now, this brief introduction may surprise its readers, when they discover that this essay is actually about Mathematics!

The writer is both a mathematician and a scientist, and has for many years sought a characterisation of what is involved in these two seemingly closely related areas, but which turn out to be very differently grounded. They turn out to be not the most comfortable bedfellows by any measure of means.

By far the most difficult to pin down was always Mathematics. It is, at the same time, considered both as the most abstract representation of Reality, while also its inner imperative – its actual driving force! And these are certainly inherently contradictory characterisations.

How can Form – the substance of all Mathematics, be both abstract and also the cause of all concrete phenomena? The only answer is that it cannot be both!

Yet, some seemingly sublime things can be unearthed by Mathematics alone, so what is actually going on? What is Mathematics really? What does it deliver? Can it really be the essence of Reality?

These are important questions, and are, even by the giants in those fields of endeavour and explanation, very poorly understood. Indeed, the whole History of Science (and even of Philosophy) has displayed a constant oscillation between disembodied Form and Concrete Content as the basis of Everything – indeed between Idealism and Materialism! And sometimes, the imposition of what are clearly idealised Forms upon aspects of Reality has proved amazingly fruitful, and even in the most surprising applications, for solving real, everyday problems.

Nothing could be more idealised than Euclidian Geometry with its dimensionless dots, and lines of zero thickness, not to mention its perfect circles and infinite perfectly flat planes. And yet it proved to be packed full of resonances with certain aspects of Reality and was so formally coherent that sound proofs could be constructed within this Ideal World alone! It empowered Man to solve real problems in his concretely existing World, by tackling them in a totally idealised World! No wonder these early mathematicians endowed their subject with transcendental properties to deliver the actual essences of Reality.

But, of course, it simply wasn’t true! It did not deliver a single CAUSE!

It delivered what came to be called Pure Form (unadulterated by the noise and dirt of the Real World) And knowing and understanding Form of itself could be extremely useful, even when applied in a much more complex real World. Indeed, it proved (much later in History) to be possible to manipulate Reality to clearly expose such Ideal Forms, which “proved” once and for all that these essences simply must be there! How could you reveal something that was merely a figment of your imagination? NO, you were extracting something that Reality actually contained!

The careful construction of appropriate Domains of Reality, with the control and even the suppression of many factors could indeed transform a situation, so that the most important relations were exposed clearly, and could be both extracted and presented mathematically as Equations.

Man did seem to be exposing the hidden essences of Reality, and they were indeed Forms! The World appeared to be constructed out of multiple contributing Forms, which Mankind was getting increasingly better at extracting, manipulating and even using! But, the question still hung there unanswered, “Could purely abstract relations actually cause concrete phenomena, or were the concrete phenomena generating Universal Forms?”

After many attempts to correctly characterise Mathematics, which had to explain how what seemed to be intrinsic Form, it was clear that these could not only be recognised and extracted, but then could be manipulated in isolation from its place in the concrete World, to some really useful purpose. There was something clearly objective even in abstract Mathematics! What could it be?

Perhaps the Shadow Theatre could throw some light upon these questions!

I suddenly realised that doing Mathematics was like shining a powerful light to reveal only the Shape of things by the shadows that they could cast! The analogy was more than a clever, but superficial, construct. It included the possibility that different things could cast very similar shadows, and were also capable of misinterpretation! Shadows require not only a source of light, but also a receiving surface, where the shadows could be cast. And the nature of the latter could certainly both select single Forms from many, or even distorts them markedly. Yet measurements of such shadows would still contain some Objective Content: they would have been caused by real concrete set ups. Even though the receiving surface could be at an angle, or curved, or even uneven, they would never be valueless, they would still contain real features of the original, though mediated by the overall circumstances of their projection upon the receiving surface. Even the nature of the casting light would have its effect but would never be arbitrary. Imagine the difference between the shadows projected by a point source of light upon a flat surface compared with a spherical surface surrounding both the light of the object to be studied.

Giorgio de Chirico's architectures of shadow

Yet the very limitations of Form delivered by such means, was simplified, without totally losing any objectivity. Even in a distorted shadow, there will still be Objective Content from the really existing concrete source. And the mixture of simplification and Objective Content could be very informative, especially if the simplification could be appropriately controlled and adjusted to expose a chosen feature.

Finally, the constancy of capture – shadows on a screen, would certainly impose a consistency on the things studied – a crackable universality. So, if all this is legitimate we have Mathematics as the Shadowland of Reality – a filter and a dramatisation that does facilitate the possibility of a beginning to its understanding.

Yet it also removes forever the idea that Form exposes the driving essences of Reality. That clearly is a myth!

New Special Issue on the Origin of Life

2011-06-01T18:12:00.000+01:00

SHAPE Special Issue 5

An Assault on The Origin of Life
The Ground and Proposal for a new Miller's Experiment

This Special does not deliver a final solution to the Origin of Life on Earth, but it does both ask and answer many of the crucial questions without which such a task would be impossible.

It defines a new and necessary standpoint for a scientific attempt on this question, which has from the outset been forced to abandon the current, universally accepted ground for all scientific work. It has had to turn its back upon Plurality (the Whole and its Parts), Universal Reductionism, Formal Logic and the wholly idealistic belief in Reality being the product of eternal formal laws, and replace all of these with a steadfastly holisitic view, which turns out to be the only way to address revolutionary Qualitative Changes as are clearly involved in this stupendous Event.

It turns away from the Sciences of Stability and towards the Science of Qualitative Change, and to do this, extracts from a wide range of similar Emergence Events, what must be involved to create the Wholly New. But, to make such a switch is, without doubt, highly dangerous, because unlike the consensus standpoint in the Stability Sciences there is NO well-defined and soundly established standpoint and tested methodology. Nowhere can a holisitic scientific standpoint be looked up and implemented. It has had to be devised! And because of this, it will necessarily be incomplete.

Nevertheless, the gains that came from even a few sound holistic priciples, and a great deal of research, have made the outlines of such an approach conceivable and indeed applicable too.

The crucial and necessary task was to rescue Miller's wonderful experiment from its unavoidable cul-de-sac, in which, though it was able to demonstrate that amino acids could be naturally produced from an emulation of the Earth's primaeval atmosphere and shallow tropical seas, it could not reveal how this had happened. To intervene in such a complex natural process to check what was going on would have broken the isolation necessary to make it entirely self-moving. But, by employing the new standpoint and using the latest available techniques, those weaknesses have been solved, and a major part of this Special Issue is in a long paper defining the New Miller's Experiment.

Other questions, answered incorrectly by many at present, who are more influenced by the need to acquire funding or join the consensus, than in finding the truth, had to be properly established as part of this approach. The questions "Where?", "What?", "How?", "When?", and "Why?" were addressed, and many important discoveries found, which turned out to be vital in tackling this, the most important of all current scientific questions.

A type of Truly Natural Selection, before Life had arrived, had to be established, and shown to be instrumental in a rapid, directed rush-to-order in this Event. And most important of all was the realisation of unavoidable osciallation between long-term stability, and episodic revolutionary Emergence Events, which constitute the actual rhythm of Development in Reality. This was finally released in 2010 as The Theory of Emergences, and published in a previous Special on this Journal. Finally, the various build-up-to and analyse-down-to routes to the Origin of Life were shown to be profoundly mistaken, and the essential nature of both DNA and the Cell as being the point at which Life actually appeared, debunked to allow the addressing of the real questions.

I have now contributed six years to tackling these questions, and I hope that this initial Special (there will also be several others) will help others to also tread the new exciting path of Qualitative Holistic Science that is being erected now!

Read the Issue on Shape

First Life - Review

2011-05-11T20:06:00.000+01:00

In David Attenborough’s new series on BBC TV, he considers the trajectory of Life from just after its Origin onwards. He, so far at least, doesn’t get involved with the so-called pre-requisites for Life, nor the most difficult of all questions – the actual Process of Origin, but he does address the almost incomprehensible tempo of development in Early Life.

He initially starts by standing in Charnwood Forest (near Leicester in England) where he points out a very early fossil, discovered by a pupil from his own school (at which I taught for a while). Indeed, it is perhaps the most famous – Charnia (named after where it was found). But the age of such very early fossils was only somewhat less than 600 million years old (from the Pre Cambrian geological era), and he goes on to reveal the discovery of fossils as old as over 3 billion years that have since been revealed. Yet the crucial question about this early phase in the evolution of Life has to be “Why did it take so long (around 3 billion years) to get from these early, but indisputable glimmerings of Life to Charnia?”

Sadly, though, just as you’re getting interested, he goes on to repeat the current NASA-led prejudice, which insists that the location of the very First Life on Earth was at the Black Smoker emissions in the depths of the major oceans. [A position considered absolutely necessary by NASA for it to continue to get its required prodigious funding. Their argument being “If life could begin on Earth in seemingly impossible places, it might also be found in similarly impossible places in Space, so give us the funding we required to find it!]

Though he doesn’t say it, Attenborough infers that the reason for the deadly-slow early tempo of Life, was the prodigious isolation of the Black Smokers in the depths of the oceans from the required highly conducive areas for the rest of its development. It may have started there, but to develop further it had to get away to better conditions.

But, we aren’t funded by the US government (as is NASA), and we don’t have to take up such a position.

Let us assume the much more likely location for the Origin of Life on Earth – NOT in those dark, pools amid a totally hostile and vastly extended context, but in highly conducive, rich and varying circumstance bathed in the light and heat of the sun, and with world-wide surface currents and quickly moving atmosphere to transport all sorts of different components into an ever changing mix. I’m sorry, but I am amazed at the current consensus on this important question! Don’t these non-experts know that the consensus is always wrong, and is generally created and propagated by those with a vested interest, and the resources to publicise it?

Now, the same vast delay would still have to be explained, but not so easily using the pigeon-holes provided by NASA, and then shelved!

Why would the first Life not immediately diversify?

To really address such a question, we would have to tackle it from the exact opposite end!

Why did Life later on diversify and multiply at ever more accelerated rates? And why did certain forms remain almost unchanged for hundreds of millions of years? And exactly how did the clearly necessary conditions for both these cases actually occur? The question turns out to be a philosophically basic one about Stability and Change. The generally accepted prejudice about such things is that once the impossibility of something has been breached, and the impossible has actually appeared, it will accelerate away in multiple directions. It will accelerate away, but NOT in multiple directions.

It will proliferate in a SINGLE direction!

Nothing persists, no matter how often it appears, unless it is part of a system, which prevents other changes. The New has to become part of a system, which actively maintains itself by acting against all further (and threateningly rival) developments, even if they could be “better”! The norm is that Stability is always very highly conservative, and once established will inhibit, devour or destroy any further, similar forms of change to itself. Indeed, qualitative change is rare, and can only succeed if the currently prevailing stability becomes totally compromised, and a cataclysmic dissociation dismantles ALL its defensive maintaining and inhibitory processes.

You need a calamity to precipitate “real change”

NOTE: Now, before we go any further, we should consider the situation of First Life!
It would NOT be part of any system, when it first occurred, and it would certainly fail! Indeed, many different potentially first Life entities would appear and disappear even in highly conducive circumstances. But, there would be significant changes. A few mutually conducive processes – both living and non living could come together and co-operate as a mini-system, and as such would begin to proliferate at the expense of other less conducive or even mutually contending! Only when a set of processes persisted could we signal the actual beginning of Life.
But it would NOT generate a variety of different forms. On the contrary, its success would depend in its inhibition of such occurrences. The First would proliferate as a SINGLR form, to a vast extent, and everywhere prohibiting further alternative “successes”.
Indeed, as with the much later Stromatolites the norm would always be this vast single-form proliferation. In the case of these Stromatolites, it was worldwide and sufficient to actually change the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, with a vast increase in free Oxygen, in spite of its high reactiveness.

Now returning to our point about the necessity of calamity to cause significant qualitative change. This is embodied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Rust never sleeps!), which makes deterioration the most ubiquitous tendency in Reality. Now, even that powerful tendency can be kept at bay, for long periods, but never finally defeated!

Now, the usual optimistic idea of development is that small, incremental improvements can accumulate until a progressive revolution is precipitated, which leads to significant qualitative change.

But that is a hope-filled Myth! The only guaranteed cumulative processes are those towards dissolution, and even without any externally-caused calamity, a given stability will, in the end, fall apart, and an avalanche of dissolutory change will carry the situation towards a total loss of any kind of Form – indeed, towards Random Chaos! But, such a calamity turns out to be the ONLY possible situation in which significant wholly-new changes can begin to occur. And this is because the defensive and attacking processes of the prior stability have been removed!

NOW, anything can happen!

And it does!

All sorts of conducive processes, which reinforce one another will now be selected as against contending ones, and without the policing processes of the prior stability, and will proliferate.

Though the more successful they are, the more the dissolutory processes will again grow to dismantle them. It looks as though all will fail! But, though the overall situation does indeed seesaw between progressive construction and dissolution, a very remarkable alliance is possible. Certain dissolutory processes can turn out to be advantageous to a developing proto-system, for they could benefit from the system for their own required resources. They can emerge as the policemen of the proto-system, and the seesaw changes are nevertheless generally upwards.

At a certain point the proto-system can become established and persist! A new continuing stability or Level has occurred full of wholly new things. But surprisingly its continued existence is, in the last analysis, down to its own defending dissolutory processes aimed specifically at all which are NOT of that system. The revolution only succeeds by being opposed to further change It stops all further qualitative change! Things grind to a halt in innovative terms. Indeed, such systems can proliferate quantitatively, and “take over the World”, but do not allow further or general significant qualitative change.

These revolutionary Events are, of course, Emergences, and the new regimes, which they establish are termed Emergent Levels. Life is just such a Level. The conundrum of why Life doesn’t keep reappearing from non-living situations is thus explained. It is prevented by already existing Life.

Class and Consciousness

2011-05-11T19:21:00.000+01:00

I have contributed an article on class to my son's blog, The Red Eye Portal.
Click here if you are interested in reading it.

The Red Eye Portal

2011-04-30T22:30:00.000+01:00

The Red Eye Portal

New blog from Shape Journal contributor Mick Schofield. News, Views and Reviews from the Left of Field.

Review: Horizon - Before the Big Bang

2011-04-29T16:12:00.002+01:00

At last it seemed that the crucial unanswered questions were finally being addressed.

“What had happened before the Big Bang? What had actually caused it to occur?”

But, I should have known better! What causes can you ever find when you have long ago dispensed with such things, for mathematical forms of its essential equations?

Read Review

New Special Issue on the Big Bang - The Origin

2011-04-29T15:54:00.001+01:00

Read it here

Issue 18 of Shape

2011-04-29T15:50:00.001+01:00

Read it here

Shape Down

2011-04-29T12:30:00.000+01:00

Sorry everybody, it would appear we're having some problems with our website host for the journal.
We're still trying to find out exactly why the site is down, and will endeavor to have it up and running again as soon as we can.

Understanding Intelligence?

2011-04-02T15:46:00.001+01:00

If I was going there, I wouldn't have started from here!

Photograph by Mick Schofield

The expression "You can't see the Wood for the Trees!" is ever resonant in the ways that we usually consider the World. I never realised it before, but it relates to our profound belief (our assumption) that Plurality is the way of the World; that the essence of all phenomena is contained within their "constituent Parts", and the converse of this - that properties of the Whole can be totally reproduced by means of the mere provision and juxtaposition of all these Parts.

Indeed, the major criticism of Plurality is that it exactly equates the Parts revealed, isolated and extracted by artificial erection of Domains, with its "brother" relation, as it exists, in the coherent real World Whole.

But, of course, that is NOT the case! It is merely a "useful" simplification used by scientists.

No matter how much we learn about the specimen forms of trees, grown in splendid and perfectly arranged isolation, such knowledge can never reveal, from that alone, the full full qualities of the Wood or Forest.

Yet, this assumption is ubiquitous (hence the saying above to counter it), and once you realise it, clear cases of it appear absolutely everywhere, and then stick out like sore thumbs, where previously they were "invisible". In a recent New Scientist (2784) there is an article entitled The 12 Pillars of Wisdom which is introduced in the very first sentence with:

"Can we ever understand intelligence? Only by building it up from its component parts"

The point is proven, is it not?

Now I could belabour the point throughout the whole length of that contribution, but I won't. The key point necessary has been made! Clearly the writer believes he is going to bring together as many aspects of "intelligence" extracted by various pluralist means, in order to deliver the nature of intelligence. But that is impossible. Many new things may be there, and the article will be worth reading for those things alone, but they will not, and indeed cannot deliver the secret of intelligence!

That would certainly involve a very different approach grounded soundly upon some understanding of the episodes of revolutionary qualitative change known as Emergences. For only when we begin to grasp how all such changes emerge, NOT as the consequence of the mere juxtaposition and summation of only small incremental changes, but as the reality-changing result of dramatic revolution.

New Search Feature

2011-04-01T14:58:00.003+01:00

The Life Factory

2011-03-05T15:50:00.005Z

(Natural Selection before Life?)

Perhaps surprisingly, scientists have finally returned to Miller’s famous experiment concerning the Origin of Life on Earth, but with the purpose of going beyond the limited achievements of that effort so many years ago (1952). In an article in New Scientist (2797) by Katherine Sanderson the ideas of Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow were presented, which put forward a new slant on that experiment. Along with the rest of the NASA-led sheep, he is persuaded that Life did NOT originate in such circumstances as were the basis for Miller’s Experiment, but in much more surprising places, such as the “black smokers” at the bottom of the oceans, or even at one of the many other unlikely places (that could even be found elsewhere in the Solar System, and even more distantly in the Universe, and hence justify the funding that NASA needs “to investigate”)

Now Cronin’s other new point is that there must have been a whole series of developments in the chemistry involved (in our case organic chemistry, but not necessarily there in other parts of the Universe) prior to Life. And in this he is certainly correct!

Of course, the actual mechanism for selection and development, or even “evolution” in these non-living things could not be Darwin’s Natural Selection, for the processes involved in that are predicated upon Life already being in existence, and upon competition between living organisms.
So some very different form of selection and consequent development must have occurred based upon an entirely different mechanism, to take the “organic broth”, to a position in which all the necessary processes, which would later be included into Life itself were made available.
NOTE: BUT both he, and almost all others investigating this field, assumes that Life was the direct result of the presence of such processes, which almost automatically shifted over into this New Form. But this is NOT the only conception of what actually happened. Indeed the main alternative has Life emerging out of a precipitated catastrophe of dissolution of a prior stability.

So taking his conception of pre-Life selection AND his idea of a direct precipitation of Life, he believes that he has a way of investigating such pre-Life developments. AND, significantly, that they could happen anywhere, and NOT just on Earth. [It begins to sound even more conducive to NASA’s conceptions, does it not?]

Cronin et al do indeed recognise an unavoidable pre-Life development period, in which, long before we could call it Life, there were processes “competing” for the same resources, and thus producing a strong selective effect on a sufficiently initially diverse mix of processes to lead to the dominance of certain sequences of systems of processes. Indeed, though his method is to establish such processes as generally available by experiment with his Polyoxometalates, the idea has already been developed theoretically by this author (J. Schofield) in Organic Chemistry in his paper Truly Natural Selection (2009), and published the following year in SHAPE Journal on the Internet. But Cronin’s experiment expects what he calls autonomous developments to occur right there in his apparatus, and considers that the only extras required to take things to significant levels, will be the external adjustments to various available parameters, and this is, I’m afraid, doomed to failure.

This is because he assumes a continuous, incremental series of steps travelling uninterruptedly through to Life itself, and that is never how such things actually develop. Such revolutionary New Levels never appear surreptitiously and automatically, but ONLY via what are generally termed Revolutions, or more technically as Emergences.

Now such Events do indeed happen throughout the history of Reality, and they always the absolute opposite of continuous and incremental changes into the New. On the contrary, they are invariably initiated by a wholesale collapse of the till-then established Stability, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics types of dissociative processes grow at an increasing rate, until they pass a crucial threshold and precipitate a cataclysmic avalanche of dissociations. This catastrophe seems to be sending things careering back towards an inevitable oblivion.
But it doesn’t do that!

Research into such Events has shown that ONLY via such an almost total dismantling of the prior stability can the available processes begin to rapidly form new systems unhindered by the strong forces of stability, which actually allowed the prior Level’s continuing stability. Only when those conservative processes are finally gone, could the actual possibilities of unhindered competition begin to form systems, which could ultimately be resolved into a single dominant system being finally established as the new Level. Life was no automatic transformation, but a successful Revolution, made possible by a prior, and almost total, collapse, of the preceding stability. Only when the old Level is dead could constructive (opposite to the Second Law) developments actually succeed.

Without any idea of the trajectories within an Emergence, NO experiment could ever be conceived of (never mind constructed) to facilitate these necessary Events. Cronin will produce only a confirmation that selection is possible, but the whole dynamic essential for a revolutionary overturn will NOT be present, and as with Miller’s magnificent attempt, it will not lead to real gains on the Origin of Life ON EARTH!

NOTE: This author’s (J. Schofield) design for a new Miller’s Experiment is already available via the SHAPE Journal’s Blog on the Internet.

I, Algorithm

2011-03-05T15:34:00.005Z

(or Artificial Intelligence with Probabilities)

This article in New Scientist (2797) by Anil Ananthaswamy describes how the old (and now dead) Artificial Intelligence based on Formal Logic and Neural Networks has been re-vamped by the inclusion of Noise and Probabilities. It is, I’m afraid, not a new and great step forward, but an old “solution” to the unanswerable problem, “How do you improve upon a purely formal and pluralistic, and hence totally unchanging, artificial system, which is intended to deliver some sort of machine- based intelligence?”

So, instead of strict determinism only, you merely need to add a bit of random chance, and then deal in the probabilities of various alternative outcomes.To put this new system into the language of the participants, these new systems of Artificial Intelligence “add uncertainty to Formal Logic – in order to reason in a noisy and chaotic World”. It is a proposed “new” application of the same standpoint as was used in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory almost a century before. But the real world is NOT basically deterministic PLUS “noise”! It is holistic! And to attempt to analyse it pluralistically is doomed to failure. So the trick, as usual, is to continue with that old methodology, but to heighten the “flavour” with the added “spice” of Random Noise and the coherence of Statistical Methods – using averages and probabilities on top of a still wholly deterministic basis.

Now, to echo the revolution that occurred in Sub Atomic Physics may appear to be an important development, and in the same way may allow better predictions in this sphere as it did in Physics, but in BOTH areas it certainly does NOT deliver the Truth! In this particular instance it seems to apply very well in the area of infectious diseases, but we have to be clear why it works there, but also, and most importantly, why it isn’t the general solution that it is claimed to be.

It works when many factors are acting simultaneously, and with roughly equal weights. In such circumstances many alternative diagnoses are available, and hence various distinct results are possible. The important question is, “What is the correct diagnosis in a given particular case?”

Now Neural Networks had delivered a system that could be modified to more closely match real weightings of various alternative situations, but they were crude to say the least: absolutely NO indication of why and how these changes were effected were revealed. It was merely data without a cause!
Now this new version of AI returns to such ideas, but adds the 1764 ideas of Bayes embodied in the Theorem which carries his name:- which is,

if the conditional probability of Q implies the conditional probability of P
then
the conditional probability of P implies the conditional probability of Q - [Bayes Theorem]

And this was for the first time a basis for being used with Causes and Effects, not only in the usual direction but backwards too (that is diagnostically).

The constructed systems were so-called Bayesian Networks, where the variables were initially purely random, that is of equal weight, BUT thereafter dependant on every other involved variable. Tweak the value of one and you alter the probability distribution of all of the others. Now, this, on the face of it, appears to be very close to Holism, but has a clearly fictitious starting point, where all are equally probable. The “saving grace” was then that if you knew some of the variables you could infer the probabilities of the other contributions. Now, when you think about it, it doesn’t seem likely. Starting from a wholly fictitious starting point, why should the inclusion of some reliable data move ALL of the probabilities in the right direction? Clearly such systems and associated methods would have to be very close to Iterative Numerical Methods, and hence dependant on a convergent starting point for a useful outcome. And, as with such numerical methods, these too needed to be refined and improved until they began to become much more reliable than prior methods.

Even so, it is clear that such methods are full of dangers. How do you know whether you are considering all the necessary factors? Gradually researchers began to produce models in certain areas which were much more reliable. The key was to build them so that new data could be regularly included, which modified the included probability distributions.

But, as it did not deal with answering the question, “Why?”, but only the question, “How?”, it was still dependant on the old methodology, even if it was overlaid with Bayesian add-ons.

Indeed, to facilitate such programs, new languages began to be developed specially designed to help construct such self-modifying models.
To give some idea of their powers AND limitations, it is worth listing the principles on which they were based.

1.Equal likeliness of all contributing factors must be the starting point
2.Algorithms must be very general
3.New data must be straightforwardly included to update the probabilities.

Now, this is clearly the ONLY way that the usual pluralistic conceptions and analyses can be used in a holistic World. The basis is still Formal Logic, but real measured data can modify an initial model in which everything affects everything else, but as to how they do it, there are NO revelations. The ever-new data merely adjusts less and less arbitrary figures, and, by this alone, the model improves. The model learns nothing concrete about relations, but improves as a predictor, based on regularly updated data.

Nevertheless. There could be no guarantees. It is a pragmatic method of improvement and NOT a scientific one.

Also experience has shown that the gathering of new data can be altogether too narrow, and the seriousness with which it is collected much too slight for the methods to always be depended upon. Behind the robot diagnostic program, a very experienced “doctor” would certainly come in handy!
There is also the problem of ”current ideas” guiding the actions of the data collectors, and hence “tending” to confirm those current ideas. You cannot discover a new cause, if you are not measuring for it, can you? The method is NOT a genuine holistic one!

And the most important omission has to be that Time and Trajectory are not part of the schemas. Miller’s famous Experiment was indeed holistic, and produced amino acids from a modelled holistic system, but it too lacked Time and Trajectory information. This author’s (Jim Schofield) redesign of Miller’s Experiment has the same core set up as in the original, but surrounded by a time-triggered set of diagnostic sub-experiments, regularly sampling what was present at crucial positions throughout the set up and throughout the whole time that it was running. The results would then have to be laid out on a series of related timelines, showing WHAT was present and WHEN. The relationships over time and place would then be available and sequences and even cycles of processes could be revealed and interpreted.

The half-cock nature of the latest version of model based on Neural Networks but involving Bayesian principles, though it will produce ever better simulation-type computer programs, is still immovably grounded on pluralist principles, and so will be limited in its applications, and most important of all, will REDUCE the amount of real analysis and explanation to the Lowest Common Denominator of “the computer says that…..”

Dominance Breeds Stability, but Rust Never Sleeps

2011-02-25T13:52:00.004Z

The Dynamic of Real Development

Perhaps there has been some confusion in this author’s papers on both Plurality and Emergence, in that though they refer to both these conceptions, they do not fully explain them.

For example, they do not fully explain why Dominances actually occur, and thereafter how they then not only play the major role in the locality they dominate, but also they even begin to transform the context which produced them. Finally, though the process of analysis may have been fairly clearly explained, it has never been made clear just how that process is, to a major extent, determined by the quite evident dominances, to the detriment of currently insignificant factors, which will certainly not remain so as development proceeds.

Read More

Issue 17 of Shape

2011-02-25T13:46:00.005Z

Read it here

A new theory of the Double Slit

2011-02-23T20:02:00.000Z

New Special Issue on The Double Slit

2011-02-08T15:13:00.006Z

The Theory of the Double Slit

Read it here

This new Theory is supported by an animation - Watch it here

From a Peak in Darien

2011-01-11T14:00:00.005Z

The paper Holistic Equations is now quite old.

It was originally written in September 2008, in the latter stages of a long trek, in which I was attempting to see a way forward towards a viable alternative to Pluralistic Science. Much has been achieved in relevant areas since that time, but none have been directly added to that contribution. Though this may seem surprising, I have good reasons for not changing that significant paper, for even its mistakes are revealing. It really should not be touched!
Now, my reasons for these remarkable conclusions are, of course, to do with pedagogy.
I have arrived at some crucial conclusions regarding how you must deliver Theory to those who have no idea of the necessary trajectory of development that must be followed to reveal the New.

Indeed, I now believe that the publication of a final, all-bells-and-whistles paper is almost always a Bad Thing! It does not encourage people to make their own contributions. Indeed, it invariably inhibits them from such undertakings. For such are usually, and sometimes purposely, intimidating, implying the arrogant sub-text that “If you don’t understand this, you are thick!”
So, on the contrary, the best educational papers are certainly not the final ones, but those which marked a realisation of where to go without yet having any experience of actually doing such a thing. As Hegel insisted, “Once you realise that a boundary exists, you have already passed it!”
Such turning points are packed full of real Science – mostly in the inevitable and necessary dead-ends, but also, and crucially, the occasional View as from a Peak in Darien, wherein a wholly new Ocean of Reality is glimpsed for the very first time.

For when the thinker finally stumbles upon such a View, a thousand possibilities are immediately evident within his head. He may currently have found himself up a sizeable Gum Tree, but he is still Full of Delight! He has certainly glimpsed the Promised Land can immediately guess at many of its features.

So, here is that paper from 2 years ago, which elicited a positive Adaptive Radiation of new lines of Thought, for it is when I, after 25 years of asking the same question and never getting any answers, I finally stumbled upon the answer for myself. The seemingly simple question was, “What are Iterative Equations really about?”, and its inevitable riders, “Why do we get different, and more real, behaviours from such equations, than are ever available from the usual pluralist forms, which currently dominate Science?” It took me a long time to realise that the users of such forms just didn’t know the answer, and perhaps even more surprisingly, didn’t want to know it! They worked! That was enough!

But they were profoundly mistaken!
In a trajectory that is only now coming to fruition this scientist and philosopher is only now finally treading the route he observed two years ago.
To deprive people of that experience is unthinkable, not only to communicate what I have gone through, but to experience real Science and not the drivel that is currently peddled everywhere, which certainly does resonate with, “If you don’t understand this, then you are thick!” What utter rubbish! Show me a serious worker, who has had innumerable failures along with his few successes, and I will show you a real scientist.

Holistic Equations was a signpost to NOW!
Its very errors, mistakes and wrong paths were its best qualities. Without them you will never understand!

Read Holisitc Equations

Issue 16 of Shape

2011-01-10T17:27:00.003Z

Read it here

The Cosmology Specials

2010-11-27T16:10:00.005Z

Cosmology Special 1
Can We See The Edge - is now available on the Journal

Download PDF here

The Earth Simulator

2010-11-17T15:09:00.006Z

How Plurality Misleads

Here we go again!

In the introductory paragraph the article The Earth Simulator in the recent New Scientist (2784), Philip Ball first mentions the bankers as the cause of the recent Bank Crash, and subsequent world-wide recession, but within the same sentence switches to the real culprit - “the complexities of a system…which allows this…to morph into ..an unavoidable.. systems collapse”.

Now this “necessary admission of the truth” then goes on to suggest the only way that we could avoid such a reoccurrence in the future, albeit in another area, but with similar consequences. That new way, it seems, says we must harness the number crunching power of modern computing with our emerging understanding of the Physics of Complex Systems, to enable us to rebuild our theories of Economics from the bottom up.

But, that crisis wasn’t caused by ignorance, but by knowledge and dishonesty. The perpetrators didn’t “lose their shirts” by themselves backing very dodgy long shots! On the contrary, they made damn sure they would walk away early with pockets stuffed with money, while others would be left to foot the bill, and ultimately (as is crystal clear now with the new Tory government) the ordinary people would have to pay in lost jobs, lost services and poorer education.

And therefore the “solution” proffered here must be seen for what it is - another tired and wilfully dishonest means of tidying away the real truth, and blaming it on mere natural and unchangeable Complexity.

For the suggestion about bringing in Complexity Theory will do nothing except make it easier for the same type of thieves to succeed again, without being sussed until it is too late, and they are already cruising out the subsequent crisis in the South Seas.

There is a system to blame however, but it is nothing natural.

It is the Capitalist System, and its crises are due, as always, to the unavoidable declining rate of profit. Where are they to get the funding from to finance the necessary innovation, and the expected returns on investment? Surely, only by telling lies!

The experts have to “use” that system to persuade, those who invest money on other people’s behalf (like pension funds for example) to “back this new certainty”, and while building the coffers of the Funds they work for, can do very nicely for themselves while they are at it.

Now, this is not a political paper. But it is, nevertheless, essential to demolish the seemingly authorative advice given by these “well-informed” people. We have to sweep away the papering over and be clear on what really happened.

But, in addition, we must also be informed of the total lack of substance in the promises made here about Science enabling us to avoid such “mistakes” in the future.

Now, I do not know who Philip Ball is, and why he should be in a position to be able to supply the solution to this problem. But, I doubt that he is as well qualified, and experienced as myself to pronounce on the methods that he is proposing.

I ended up as a Director of Information Technology in a College of London University, after previous posts in Hong Kong and Glasgow, where I was an expert in the application of computers to all kinds of serious research - from computerising complex kit such as Gas Liquid Chromatographs, and sophisticated Engineering rigs, and in difficult Physiological investigation via new taxonomies in Zoology, and even in the Teaching of Dance using Multimedia Resources (for which I and my colleague won a BIVA award).

For a time I was involved in helping researchers into… guess what? Chaos and Complexity Theory, and have recently published a Theory of Emergences after many years of personal research.

It is therefore not by chance that only one week before the issue of this particular New Scientist containing this article was published I was moved to severely criticise the whole standpoint revealed in the above position, and to tackle it from their own supposed ground. This resulted in the paper The Myth of Simulation: Pluralistic “holism” and the Real thing.

This paper is included here today!

Issue 15 of Shape

2010-11-17T14:58:00.003Z

Read it here

Review: Bennett’s Theory of Evolution

2010-10-18T15:32:00.003+01:00

Turn here for Chaos!

The resplendent graphics along with the tables and graphs of Keith Bennett’s article in New Scientist (2782) promise a major revision of Darwin’s Natural Selection, and as that had been written as The Origin of Species 150 years ago, and as much has been discovered since then, you would certainly expect that many major additions and improvements, not to mention substantial revisions would have been discovered by now.

But Darwin’s Theory is hard to dismiss, not least because it is that rare yet essential factor in Science – a truly holistic theory. Instead of a straight forward encapsulation of carefully measured data into a deterministic equation, we have a set of ideas which explained how evolution happened – one you might call a real scientific theory as distinct from a merely abstracted relation. So, as someone involved in closely associated researches (The Theory of Emergence), I looked forward to more evidence to add to a raft of recent quality contributions (in the magazine), which certainly are pointing the way to important updates in Darwin’s Theory.

Yet, though this is a relatively short article, the first two thirds is concerned with his own and others current investigations (mostly on the fairly recent geological past in the glaciations and interglacials of the late Quaternary). His problem was that these dramatic and large-scale changes in the environment did not have the effects on Evolution, which Natural Selection would seem to infer. Yet, though these findings were certainly interesting, and correctly demand more than pure Natural Selection as the active processes involved, his extractions are, perhaps surprisingly, rewarded with the by now usual formal answers to all things inexplicable – Chaos!

Evidence of the impossibility of predicting (a key word in that view of Science) the future in Evolution, about which he is certainly correct, makes him proffer Non Linear Chaos as the engine for real, qualitative Change. He doesn’t deny the natural selection pressures on the phenotypes of individual organisms and hence on the genetic make up of those who will dominate the gene pool. But, he clearly promotes unpredictable changes as his primary factors in Evolution.

Now many would perhaps reply to such a position by saying that Random Mutations with totally unpredictable outcomes may be of themselves sufficient to deliver the same unpredictability. But, the irresistible momentum of current ideas on Chaos and Fractals at the present time seduces Bennett into making formal (mathematical) features as being those of central importance.
Now, the making of such choices are not unimportant. First, it does not remove Evolution from our usual ideas of determinism, it just makes the “disembodied drivers” non linear.

I’m afraid that is an easy get out!
Quoting the profound contributions of Stephen Jay Gould in Interrupted Evolution will not add credibility to Bennett’s thesis. Gould and others have stated that Evolution definitely occurs in rapid bursts, and not merely via the accumulation of small incremental changes until some threshold is passed, and a wholly new species is born.
Putting that down to Chaos is certainly not a progressive improvement, but a retrenchment compared with where Gould was heading.

It is, of course, the return to the ancient and ubiquitous, idealist strand in Science, which always wants to reveal “laws” – disembodied, formal relations, which “drive” Reality. The cosy home of Chaos and Fractals involves no new thinking at all! It is merely the latest answer to the ever-increasing evidence that a solely deterministic world is a simplifying myth. For, in this kind of mathematics, we have the marriage of formal deterministic equations (the absolutely essential ingredient in this kind of Science)) and unpredictability, which is increasingly evident in many aspects of Reality.

But Form is NOT Content!
It is only how we describe the patterns of things.
It is certainly NOT how we either understand or explain things.
I’m afraid this sound and indeed vital evidence is misunderstood, and matched to formal patterns in lieu of proper scientific explanations.

No, for all this evidence can indeed be accommodated, if we concede incremental change accumulation on a minor scale, but not leading to major redirections and true qualitative change. Indeed, what precipitates the latter is not progressive accumulation at all, but what Gould correctly saw as its very opposite. Major changes occur in relative rapid episodes termed Emergences, which are initially catastrophes for the prevailing status quo. They are the actual result of accumulation, but NOT of changes towards some “next stage”. They are the ever-present deleterious contributions, which have been recognised for very many years as the basis for the ubiquitous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which start by undermining the current stability, until they finally precipitate its wholesale dismantling. The New is NOT, as such, present within the content of the Old, “growing and ready to flower given a last push”. It is, on the contrary, wholly absent from any situation prior to an Emergence. The actual creation of the New can only occur in the aftermath of an avalanche of destructive change (like a Phoenix arising from the Flames), for such a cataclysm removes the processes, which ensured the stability of the prior Level.

All the evidence Bennett quotes is wholly consistent with such a trajectory of real qualitative change, To mix up micro (non revolutionary) changes with the real engine of Evolution is indeed a mistake, and to join the increasing chorus of applause for Chaos solves absolutely nothing.

Issue 14 of Shape

2010-10-18T15:18:00.005+01:00

Read it here

Introduction

In the mid 1980s I wrote an article entitled The Demise of Formalism. It was about Mathematics and the work of contributors like Gödel and Turing, who had proved that Hilbert’s conception of the nature of Mathematics was incorrect, and it was neither complete nor coherent, or even entirely consistent, as he had asserted.
But that was then!

The content at that time only addressed the discipline of Mathematics and nothing beyond that. After a further 25 years since then many new ideas have been developed, which take the area involved well beyond Mathematics alone, and well into Philosophy in general. The most obvious extensions were, as you might imagine, in the ideas involved in Formal Logic, and, of course, then into all disciplines which use Formal Logic as their “banker technique”.
Even further it had become more and more clear that the techniques involved had very limited areas of application, and in particular excluded all disciplines which involved significant Qualitative Change, and most especially in those interludes in development which were covered by the revolutionary Events termed Emergences. To be able to tackle THE most essential areas of Reality just had to involve these crucial Events, for otherwise they would only be addressing entities and relations embedded in totally stable periods.

Science would then be limited to the study of what was possible within Stability. Ideas such as the Origin of Life on Earth as well as its subsequent Evolution would be left out of the areas for study, and it soon became clear that the development of Planet Earth itself, not to mention the Cosmos, were also evolving systems and had to have their Emergences too.

Now these Events are remarkable interludes involved concentrated avalanches of Change, and each one, on completion produces its own entirely New Level, containing entirely new entities, properties, relations and indeed processes. To make matters worse, it had also become clear that the methods universally used in the Sciences up to now were totally inadequate to such cataclysms of Change within Emergences. Indeed, the nature of any Emergence could NOT be derived from knowledge of prior conditions, no matter how full they were.
Nothing could be predicted from before the crucial Event that would pertain after the Event!

Now though these features seemed to make this an impossible area to study, such Emergences had been identified as such in the past, and the touchstone and template for such Revolutions had to be the First Appearance of Life on Earth. In addition, once recognised and described, these Events seemed to be cropping up everywhere, from interludes within the development of the Cosmos, to the emergence of Human Consciousness in Man.

By October 2007, the research of this author had reached the stage where another, much wider Demise of Formalism was necessary, and this is it! But what is included here was by no means the last word in this area, which by October 2009 had resulted in the publication (in SHAPE on-line Journal) of The Theory of Emergences.
This paper can be seen as the immediate precursor to that Theory, and as such, several important differences will be evident between the two. (565 words)

Jim Schofield September 2010

P.S. As this is a long paper, it will be published in instalments over a series of Issues of SHAPE.

New article on Philosophical Diagrams

2010-09-23T13:10:00.003+01:00

SYNOPSIS

1.These are Philosophical Diagrams, developed by this author to aid in the communication of complex ideas, and because of this he is ideally placed to explain them.

2.They are not mere illustrations of ideas in an alternative form, but were designed as essential tools as part of a polemic against the current philosophical consensus in his area of study – Science.

3.Because they deal with Philosophy, it has been necessary to deliver, both in words and diagrams, means, which show relationships, and whereas the overwhelming tendency in this area has been to do this solely by means of Equations, a wider and better means was required.

4.The process commenced with attempts to deliver the Processes and Productions of Abstraction, and here the whole trajectory of that effort is delivered.

5.Crucially, such diagrams would have to deal with both the USE of abstractions, and their crucial role in EXPLANATION.

6.This had to be a new kind of diagram, and as this paper shows, went through a whole series of forms until an adequate solution was found. It had to include both Processes (usually as “arrowed lines”) and Products (presented as labelled circular areas)

7.The main aim of these diagrams was to identify the different processes & productions associated with Science, on the one hand, and Mathematics, on the other. It was clear from the outset that these were very different and definitely separate.

8.The basis of everything illustrated has to be Reality, as the source & confirmation of all the associated abstractions. From this starting point all conceptions had to flow and be validated by frequent returns to this primary source.

9.Categories such as Objective Relations, Models and Equations had to be related, as did processes such as The Scientific Method for confirmation, extension or rejection of the Models.

10.A clear split between Explanatory Models and purely Formal Models was evident, and the process had begun. But the first effort was clearly not good enough because it delivered only what was already known.

11.The next stage attempted to deal with repeated use of the abstraction processes, and how these allowed more general (on the one hand) and more universal (on the other) extractions from evidence in Reality. Interestingly, the term Coherence was shown to be different in Explanation from its role in universal Equations.

12.Further diagrams separated out the Scientific Method and the crucial process, which I have termed Mathematical Speculation, which centres most developments on Equations as source rather than Reality.

13.Finally, I present the culmination of these studies with a diagram in which the ground of everything – the background of the diagram, is Reality. And MAN is positioned at the centre as the source of all processes. Between that thinking initiator and Reality is a ring containing all Productions (abstractions), and between Man and these Productions via Reality are the actual Processes.

14.The success of these diagrams was not a formal solution to a problem of representation, but HOW the diagram can be used in tracing what people are doing with their thinking and arguments.

Read more

Issue 13 of Shape

2010-09-22T18:17:00.003+01:00

Read it here

Review: The End of Incremental Evolution?

2010-08-16T23:44:00.006+01:00

Accidental Origins (New Scientist 2751)

Yet another article has appeared but this time adding a rather different gloss to the usual consensus interpretation of Natural Selection, but instead of the usual cashing in on a world celebrated anniversary, this one does add something of real value.

In Accidental Origins published in a recent issue of New Scientist (2751), reporter Bob Holmes introduces us to Mark Pagel, who along with his colleagues, has uncovered a fatal flaw in the assumption of large numbers ofvery small, incremental steps which alone are supposed to deliver the crucial process of species change via Natural Selection. Though many others have questioned this tenet of Natural Selection, Pagel is different because he uses the same standpoint and methodology as his opponents to demolish their position. He uses a mathematical analysis of data derived from available evolutionary sequences to show that they could not have happened in the assumed way. But importantly, the significance of his results also, in fact, reaches well beyond Natural Selection to a whole range of “theories” based on the same sort of assumptions throughout present day Science, and so his contribution is significant for Science in general.

He reveals a significant hole in this form of explanation by showing that the concrete results do NOT have the actual “shape” that would be unavoidable from large numbers of small steps. Indeed, he goes on to demonstrate that the nearest idea that matches the analysis, is that species change is caused by a single accidental event rather than the assumed gradualist drift.

But, taking a step away from the individual problem Pagel addresses, we must more generally separate out quantitative derivation of formulae and its ability to accurately predict, from the usually following explanatory theory. Most scientists today feel that the initial stage is actually the “real nitty-gritty”, and the explanatory phase is merely some sort of rationalisation. Once a means of prediction is in their hands, the scientific process is presumed to be “complete”, and all sorts of questionable rationalisations are considered sufficient for the final “window-dressing”, explanatory phase. Returning to Pagel’s work, it is clear he has totally undermined this overall approach, at the same time as his contributions to Evolution, ALL other similar rationalisations in many other important areas of modern science must also be seen as subject to the same criticisms. The premise of vast interludes of time, and innumerable increments to totally alone produce ALL possible states can be demolished by such research as that delivered by Pagel. The flawed methodology is not a no-brainer, which everyone is bound to accept.

Indeed, many other scientists, including myself, have long disputed such forms of “explanation”, but our position has not been accepted as most cases were always completely beyond either experimental demolition or confirmation. Pagel’s method changes this seemingly permanent impasse, and such assumptions can be tested with certainty. Consider all the accepted methods, particularly in computer simulations, where, based upon “placeholder” theories, of the kind demolished here, involve similar thresholds, beyond which it is assumed that a new situation has been established (by incremental changes?), and new formulae can be employed. Such methods are now clearly revealed as cases with sufficient evidence for reliable data, yet having NO real Theory, and which therefore require invented, incremental-type placeholders which cannot be validated in the usual ways.

Mark Pagel (University of Reading) attempted to “quantify” species change by considering the effects of both random, incremental events and the time-gaps between adjacent species in an evident evolutionary sequence, BUT he came up with the result that the usual assumptions were inconsistent with the investigated data, and in considering a whole range of alternatives, the one that stood out as vastly more in tune with the data, was that only the emergence of a new species by a Single Accidental Event would do.

Now, as a scientist who cringes at the usual purely mathematical foundations for “theories” in much of modern science, I was primed to disagree with Pagel. But I was mistaken. He was using the science of Pure Form (Mathematics) as it should be used – to assess the formal implications of a methodology. His conclusions are formally unassailable!

But nevertheless, for my kind of Science, his revelations are only the beginning of absolutely necessary consequent scientific investigations.

NOTE: The criticised basic assumptions seem to be:-

1. That totally random and undirected accidents occur over vast periods of time, from which Natural Selection picks out only the most advantageous for continued survival.

2. And, that such increments can then gradually build up until a threshold is reached, beyondwhich a wholly new species (NOT a mere race or breed) is created.

The expression, “You cannot see the Wood for the Trees!” comes immediately to mind. A single isolated tree in an open space is a very different thing to one existing in established and continuing Woodland. The latter is part of a system working at a different level from the single tree. Component individual trees are different by being surrounded by other trees. In established Woodland, the growth patterns are very different, and the Wood affords a measure of protection too, while the involved ecological system is much richer there, so that all sorts of symbiotic and parasitic and even inter-species advantages can establish themselves. The question has to be asked, “Could the system of the Wood be determined solely by knowing about the properties of an individual, solitary tree?”And, of course, the same must also be true for other species of organisms. We cannot reduce their development and crucial change to incremental and undirected accident over vast periods of time.

Pagel’s work demolishes the usual placeholders, but the actual causal features of species-change are still requiring answers, which will NOT be solely formal, but will tackle exactly how such changes can occur; what is the biological content of species change? What significant qualitative events can deliver such innovation?

Now, to address this question, we must start by admitting that step-by-step selection does indeed take place, and can transform a species into a different Form – but that does NOT mean a switch to a different species: a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are still both just Dogs! The mechanism explains breeds but NOT speciation!

Something else must happen to result in what we correctly term a New Species: something which is NOT gradual and incremental, but immediate, qualitative & significant!

Now Pagel et al draw the conclusion that a single accidental event must be the cause, but that merely precipitates even bigger questions. What sort of single change could produce a new species at a single stroke? It must, surely, be impossible when seen as a single accidental mutation! We must replace both Pagel’s and the usual interpretation of such an “event” with something of an entirely different order.The Change must be brought about by a short but “revolutionary” Event, and such, of course, do indeed exist, and we have come to call them Emergences.

These cannot ONLY involve a single piece of genetic damage, which, by pure chance, causes sufficient changes to produce a wholly new and viable species. It must be some sort of general “system” change in which, in a relatively short period of time, via both avalanches of dissociation and swift erections of “the new”, produce, over a series of contained, see-sawing crises, a new synthesis, which is both viable and persists!

Now, such Events are not unknown! The greatest example of such occurrences must include the very first Star, then, much later, the Origin of Life itself, not to mention subsequent significant revolutions, such as those involving the birth of Consciousness, and that of Thinking too. Finally, such processes must even apply to Social Revolutions.

But such are not usually seriously addressed in academic circles. They are considered to be too much driven by ideological assumptions and indeed are often entirely discounted. But their reality is unanswerable by such purely prejudicial reasons for dismissal. The absolutely Key example of such a kind of revolutionary Event must be the Origin of Life on Earth from purely inanimate matter. And no-one could possibly put that down to a single accidental event, could they?

To respond to Pagel et al’s criticisms can only be addressed by a serious, scientific study of Emergences – the crucial, and indeed only, single events of qualitative change. Now, though these have NOT been pursued scientifically to any great degree to date, they have been available throughout history via fragmentary observations, artistic creations and persisting myths.

Around 2,500 years ago, two opposing, world-view conceptions were outlined almost simultaneously. These were Plurality and Holism.The former, concerned with seeing everything in terms of Wholes and their constituent Parts, was established in Ancient Greece, while the latter was formulated as a world view and guide to living for human beings by the Buddha – as “everything affects everything else” and “all is change” Nothing persists!” Thereafter, throughout the intervening period right up to the present day, many holistic gems were uncovered and delivered in sayings, stories, and many works of art, but it was not until Hegel (around 1800) that an attempt was made to formulise the study of Qualitative Change via his attempt to construct a “logic” of Change with his book The Science of Logic.

His main disciples, the Young Hegelians dramatically switched sides, not only abandoning Idealism for Materialism, but also by concentrating to a great extent on Social Change as their main purpose. Marx and his followers could not be stomached by the conservative occupiers of High Academia, and any serious research into Emergences and Qualitative Change was effectively deemed insupportable.

But, the wheel has turned full circle since that time, and Science is now constantly coming up against the contradictions inevitable from maintaining an entirely pluralist standpoint in a clearly holistic World. [The most significant and ever continuing crisis debilitating Modern Sub Atomic Physics is perhaps the clearest example, but many other cases with the same causes abound in many diverse areas of study].

Even from the very heart of Academia, scientists such as Murray Gell-Man have proposed the task of addressing Emergences, and the famed Santa Fe Institute was established with that as its main purpose. But, even the giants involved there could not negate what they and their predecessors had constructed over the last century, and their unbreakable marriage to Plurality has made any real progress impossible, and the purpose of the Institute has now shrunk into investigating yet another branch of Mathematics ONLY! Such philosophically unsound bases, and purely maths-led “theorising” is incapable of addressing this crucial area, and the contributions from Santa Fe have been decidedly poor.

AS scientific method and explanation is increasingly replaced by pure Form equations, applicable only in pluralist-demanded Domains, these researchers find themselves incapable of transcending the contradictions they encounter on all sides, such that they are now major “tenets” for their position and are “worn as badges of honour and superiority over the rest of uncomprehending humanity. So, like Pagel, they find flaws, but can only replace them with other flaws, dictated by their increasingly redundant methodologies and world views.

The errors, though, frequently switch to the opposite end of the spectrum and the “containing Wood” may well be recognised, but only as a summation of isolated trees producing overall and average collective features with matching probabilities. Instead of real understanding and explanation, almost arbitrary quantifiable features are monitored for a dependable, recurring Value (at Transition), so that when it is surpassed, new laws are brought into play to replace those possible before the threshold. Clearly the passing of the value at the threshold does NOT cause the change over, but is merely yet another symptom of the process which really does bring about the changes. AND these are not a simple switch but a kind of system revolution, involving significant dissociations and re-associations – more of an Emergence indeed, than a single accidental event.

No real answers will be produced without a major renovation of the by-now ubiquitous pluralist and maths-led methodology, and the general acceptance of such apposition is clearly proved by the very language of almost all scientists. They talk of natural laws determining the nature and evolution of Reality, which is clearly an abandonment of Materialism. How can a disembodied formalism produce and then drive Reality? That is naked Idealism! Laws are produced BY Reality, which changes and evolves, so that new laws appear at each new emerging Level. The revolution of the Origin of Life on Earth generated via concrete Reality, a whole new world of laws – subsequently gathered together by Mankind as Biology! Were there any eternal biological laws “before Life”? Of course there wasn’t!

Now, this short paper is not mere kite-flying. The author – a physicist/mathematician, philosopher and teacher of 50 years experience, has been writing on these very matters for over 10 years and has, in the last 12months, described his conception of the Inner Trajectory of an Emergence, as the first step to a world-wide investigation into scientific method and the necessary formulation of an holistic alternative. Such a purpose has already produced a reformulation of Miller’s brilliant and holistic experiment into the Origin of Life. And this would itself begin to define a whole new approach to such questions, and lay the foundations for a Holistic Science.

Reviews

2010-08-16T22:00:00.003+01:00

Today we post our first review on the Shape Blog. I have been feverishly and regularly writing such responses to published materials for some time (mostly of articles in New Scientist Magazine), but what with the short time between consecutive issues of that publication (it's a weekly) and my own experience in writing to such tight schedules that have been the unavoidable case, that in spite of the quality being finally acceptable for publication, the "currency" has slipped much too much. By the time they were finished they were invariably too late to inform possible readers of the original stimuli for these responses.

But clearly until I can produce these reviews in good time and while the source is still "fresh", the increasing pile of offerings has remained in my out tray (but never left it).

It is clear that this apparent waste cannot be allowed to continue, so we are now going to publish most of our reviews even if they are a bit late to be current with the latest issue of New Scientist. And, on thinking about it, they will still be relevant to the issues which have dominated Science News and Comment for very extended periods. In fact some crucial arguments have been going on for many years.

Certainly, this first review will not be rendered passe by unavoidable delays. Pagel's contribution (revealed in yet another New Scientist article and addressed in our first review) has turned out to be an extremely significant contribution to criticising many of our basic assumptions with regards to Evolution. In fact at least four successive papers have already been produced by this author and Pagel's work is definitely undermining many sacred cows in this important area of study.

The paper I have decided to publish here as Review No. 1 is entitled The End of Incrementalist Evolution and it hopefully will get our readers thinking and perhaps get the relevant materials for themselves.

NB: The Special Issue of the Shape Journal on Emergences in Evolution is now at an advanced stage of preparation, and is likely to be the next one published. And in this proposed publication the relevance of Pagel's important contribution will be revealed in full along with a whole series of other related contributions from current publications.

Issue 12 of Shape

2010-08-11T20:14:00.007+01:00

Read it here

I will be posting some diagrams on Fuzzy Logic and Dichotomous trees in the next few days, for those interested in the paper on gleaning Coherence from Incomplete Sequences.

Akhenaten Design

2010-08-11T19:11:00.002+01:00

The Holism Debate

2010-07-26T20:50:00.007+01:00

Four philosophers Tom, Dick, Harry & Bill are in their cups, but instead of going out and painting the town red, they gather closer together in the quietest corner of the pub, and argue about their shared conundrum – What is Holism?

How do they deal coherently with such a self-modifying Reality?

These four contributions are in the order in which they were delivered, each correcting or extending its predecessor, or drawing in evidence or metaphors from their own experiences of Reality. What do YOU think of their conclusions?

1. TOM: The Ascent of Predictive Processes

Our highly commendable efforts to understand Reality nevertheless bear the stamp of our own current stage of development. To jump straight to a full and coherent conception of Everything was, and still is, totally impossible, and, in addition, each stage in the process will be unavoidably limited by our own current capabilities, knowledge and understanding. Indeed, whatever we extract will never be incremental steps in a direct upwards ascent.

All gains will be conditional, simplified, and even rationalised, in our attempt to reveal what we see as the essential driving elements our “conceived of” clearly meaningful World.

And this conditional process is always more of a large-swing zigzag than a ladder, and our greatest difficulties are often involved in shedding our most dearly-held assumptions and principles, which have indubitably been the foundations of our previous gains, rather than the inherent problems of the actual nature of Reality itself.

Nevertheless, progress is definitely made – NOT by descrete morsels of Absolute Truth, but on the contrary, by a series of constructs (didactic models), which contain objective content.

Now the meaning of this described process of development becomes crucial!

Objective Content is NOT the Truth, but it embodies aspects or views of parts of the Truth, in given circumstances, and it is useable! That made each of these, and still does, a considerable gain. But it doesn’t, of itself and necessarily, take us directly forwards towards a fuller understanding. And this is because its main purpose is often and primarily for Prediction.

To be in a position to accurately predict what will happen next, endows the successful predictor with considerable power. With such dependable predictions, plans can be made and instituted. Mankind can begin to control aspects of his World to his evident benefit!

But accurate prediction is not necessarily predicated on real understanding, but on the extraction of dependable Form or Patterns.

For, if such patterns could be reliably revealed, the future could be predicted by a simple forwards extension of the pattern.

The trouble was, and still is, that the World is not wholly or even separable deterministic – always following rigidly pre-ordained patterns to completely predictable outcomes.

Occasionally, such conditions can exist, but they are rarely dependable, and a good dollop of hope, ritual and “added magic” was always considered an essential ingredient in any attempts to predict such outcomes.

Yet such rituals and “added substances” could (though rarely) actually help, and well-defined processes, with “important” substances present were established and retained in that using group’s culture. It was still hocus-pocus, but it could, and sometimes did, contain a sliver of Objective Content, and, the process could be more successful than most such “magic”

The outcome of such methods was that Mankind began to identify necessary substances and even began to add features such as Fire or Water, and occasionally a well-defined, controlled and maintained process would actually begin to deliver the predicted results quite reliably.

The crucial feature in such processes was that a Part of Reality was isolated and maintained as such, and subjected to controlled processes within those steadfastly maintained conditions.

Mankind achieved a measure of predictive success by imposing Plurality upon a given situation.

What is meant here by Plurality is the conception that each and every Whole is composed of separable constituent Parts, and although this was only rarely true in unfettered Reality, it could be made to be the case in limited and controllable localities. Yet the requirements for such impositions upon sections of Reality were initially prodigious in the light of Man’s own current powers and knowledge.

To even start, such methods required a great deal of reliable knowledge, which itself was difficult to come by.

A chicken-and-Egg situation meant that early real gains were dead slow!

But, Mankind did, by partial truth upon partial truth, begin to gather more and more objective content, which in turn empowered him to successfully control situations to he required degree.

Ultimately, there was an ever widening area of situations in which he could impose a strict Plurality upon them, and hence, by holding most things constant and varying only a handful of factors were indeed in a position to both extract and predict!

This was successively refined into what came to be called scientific methodology, and fostered the great developments in the production of required implements, tools and weapons which became Technology.

But it was deterministic and mechanistic in the main, and was therefore NOT applicable in the bulk of questions which Mankind had to constantly address.

It became an aberrant (though very useful) growth in a particular direction, and engendered a general attitude to all endeavours, which was, all too often, entirely inappropriate!

But you can direct your own paths of development.

They may be inadequate, but if they do contain that vital objective content, then you must pursue them, though the more general outcomes will only be “as predicted” in very limited, mechanistic areas, and everywhere else they could produce, and often were, dire results.

2. DICK: How a Holistic World Suggested Plurality

Now in the previous contribution (The Ascent of Prediction), the development of Technology has been outlined, but such an approach to Reality is by no means the only one, or even the most important one, and the reason is that it is wholly predicated upon Plurality, and the World is simply NOT pluralistic.

Yet as with all such characterisations by Mankind, BOTH of our versions of the two categories Plurality and Holism are clearly mistaken oversimplifications, and in spite of their many strengths and successes, can, and in the end always do, mislead us to a remarkable extent.

For example Holism, in its crudest form, insists that absolutely everything affects everything else. All is subject to constant change – absolutely nothing is constant!

Now, if that were “all that there is to it” concerning Reality, we would not get very far it attempting to understand it.

Nothing would be extractable as separable and independent entities or relations, and every attempt at prediction based on some isolated segment of Reality would inevitably fail.

So, such a basic holistic approach inevitably disables our chances of getting to grips with Reality, and ever actually controlling it to direct it to required ends.

It that simplified form Holism becomes a merely passive philosophy, which observes Reality-as-is as it remorselessly pursues its own paths of interaction and change. We cannot intervene! We merely notice its cycles which are regularly repeated, and the trajectories of Life and Death, but we can only sit and contemplate. [Some wags actually say that such a position accurately defines all Philosophy, but that isn’t true!]

And, of course, that version of Holism doesn’t pertain anywhere: it is our own simplification of what does exist in unfettered Reality, but it is a fiction.

That basic view delivers such a complex, multiply-interacting mix, that the result is close to chaos, and totally random and unpredictable in particulars.

Evidently, such a definition is not only useless; it is significantly false as well.

For, in the midst of chaos, we do indeed have Order. Things may well be in constant change, but most such changes are NOT immediately significant, and the entire multiple and contrasting processes are not necessarily either equal in weight or entirely contending. For, if they were we would indeed have ONLY a totally random and chaotic World.

No forms would be evident, and everything would be the same everywhere.

Now, that is clearly NOT the case.

And the ground for the many subscribers to Plurality was that many, many things did indeed persist as the same Form for sometimes considerable periods. Indeed, the belief that all species were permanently constant and unchanging, and had been so ever since God had created them was almost universally believed. And even individual living things, once they had matured into adulthood, tended to remain in that state for long periods of time.

Without any doubt, our real, holistic World could, and did, beget episodes of Stability, wherein certain things persisted as constant – at least for a time.

Now, in all this there is an inherent contradiction!

Either there are NO purposive processes maintaining constant things, or there are ONLY such processes!

Stability implies the presence of such processes and seems to confirm Plurality, whereas constant change and quite evident dissolution and indeed Death, implies contending processes as in a holistic World.

The pluralists among us concentrate upon the essential laws, which “produce” everything in Reality and never themselves change.

While the holists concentrate upon an “infinite” number of contending processes, making nothing eternal and all involved in a constant process of change.

As inferred earlier, BOTH these are incorrect!

But just denouncing the contending alternatives has to be insufficient! We must characterise Reality as it actually is, and that must include both periods of Stability, and periods of dissolution and significant change. And, once again, these are not merely present together,

Indeed, they are interludes in an overall process of change.

There are dissolutory factors constantly attacking any stability, while there are also other factors which tend to erect stable situations, and the remarkable thing is that they “alternate” in dominance, and neither permanently dominate the world.

To make matters even more difficult for Mankind’s purpose of understanding these things, the situations do not just alternate like a permanent oscillation. Indeed, the overall process is one of discernable development – indeed, of Evolution.

Reality is NOT a fixed entity. It is regularly producing the entirely NEW, and creating new and higher stabilities, which themselves never permanently persist. But neither do they merely dissociate into “lesser” noise and chaos (as, it must be pointed out, it is inferred in the Second Law of Thermodynamics - a pluralist belief!), but resolves each cataclysm of dissociation into a new and higher stability.

For Mankind to cope with Reality-as-is, he must make the study of Emergent Change his most important task, for without it, he too will ricochet from one illusion to the next without really understanding what is happening.

3. HARRY: An Evolutionary Conception of Reality

Now, from the two contributions so far, it must be clear that, as usual, it is our conceptions of the inherent Nature of Reality which most often leads us astray. In addition, we have a very mistaken idea of what Truth is, and this has similar deleterious effects.

Reality is neither wholly determined by eternal laws, nor is it constantly deteriorating into ever more total chaos.

On the contrary, it regularly produces Stable Situations, which persist, but which also, in time, will just as inevitably destroy. Reality has a definite propensity for stability, but only produces stable situations which are inevitably undermined and superceded. And that process of Major Qualitative Change has dissolution at its very heart.

The myth of the Phoenix arising from the flames has a real basis in developing Reality!

The Possibility Space of Reality is regularly extended, yet none of these extensions are final and perfect. They can, and always will be, overturned by degeneration and replaced by the wholly new.

Those who support such a conception of Reality consider that the main study must be the trajectory of such changes, including the erection of the new stabilities, their undermining and dissolution, and the subsequent creation of an entirely new Level of stability ON TOP.

Now, this area is complicated not only by the richness of each new Level, but by the (perhaps) surprising continuance of the older Levels too.

The New Levels only replace the Old locally, and indeed, depend upon selected subsets of the older processes internally. So though locally the process is one of dissolution, replacement and selection, that is not the case outwith the aegis of the new Level – i.e. over the rest of Reality.

The various Levels co-exist, but are mutually affected to some degree!

Perhaps my favourite analogy of such a Universe-wide process is delivered by the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter.

The visible (top) of that atmosphere appears to be split into bands (by latitude). There are clear divisions and different movements, speeds, and even directions of cloud movements.

Yet at persisting points, great, stable “storms” occur, and indeed persist for centuries. Clearly the Form of the Great Red Spot is not unlike a hurricane on Earth in the spiralling rotation of the gases involved. But whereas the earthbound storms are always very temporary, the Spot on Jupiter appears semi-permanent – stable?

Around it the other layers continue their dominant movements, but with the regular generation of “eddies” as in an earth-bound stream. Similar things appear within the boundaries of the many layers, and particularly around the boundary of the Great Red Spot.

Clearly, there are important resonances between the general idea of Qualitative Change with Stabilities, and the phenomena on Jupiter.

4. BILL: The Jovian Exemplar

Now, though extremely valuable, it is clear that the inclusion of the image of the atmosphere of Jupiter in the last contribution needs a further explanation, if it is to really deepen our idea of a holistic Universe and its inevitable trajectory of interludes of Stability and Change.

Look closely at this photograph of a section of the atmosphere of Jupiter.

To really grasp the significance, you would ideally have to see it as a long, time-lapse sequence of images over quite long individual intervals of time. For such a sequence, speeded-up to reveal the vast and complex movements involved would greatly amplify what is contained in this breath-taking exemplar of Constant Change.

For though some features persist (indeed the Great Red Spot has been around for hundreds of years), everything else displays a veritable cauldron of constant and unpredictable motions.

The various lateral bands move at quite different speeds and even in opposite directions, and we are constantly presented with stable processes, limited in extent, and everywhere we have active curlicued boundaries between them.

Sub spots peel off the boundary of the Great Red Spot, and persist for a while, and elaborate and turbulent eddies are created everywhere,

Now, we can be, and usually are, transfixed by these phenomena, and imagine that, like the atmosphere of Earth, we could with sufficient data, construct a simulation of the overall process with multiple laws (each (of course) accompanied by its failure thresholds – where it must be replaced by another more appropriate one. And because of recent mathematical researches into “Chaos”, we would undoubtedly bring in that determinism too. Indeed, the very fact that a deterministic equation could produce such seemingly unpredictable stuff would convince us that our earth-bound methods would indeed cope even there, and we would again MISS what Jupiter really has to teach us. For though over our life-length imposed periods, we see Jupiter as in turmoil, but basically the “same”, there can be NO DOUBT that over vast periods of time it has changed to a colossal extent, AND passed through many different “temporary” stable states.

So the suggested movie of the Jovian atmosphere is only an analogy or exemplar for Change in all things, it does not deliver a complete metaphor. The crucial lesson must be about Stability and its overthrow even in limited systems such as this.

In what appears as a prime situation for total chaos, we also have stability and BOTH occur within an overall and continuing process. The activities at the boundaries are vitally important because, though within a stable structure like the Great Red Spot, we have persisting Patterns and Cycles, at the margins we have almost infinite variety AND access to substances from other stable structures elsewhere.

[I am also moved to suggest the paintings of Mark Rothko as delivering similar activities at the boundaries of his wonderful “areas”, though he is concerned with US (Mankind) directly, and not the Universe in general]

It is in those boundary regions where any transport and juxtaposition of materials occurs and guarantees maximum possibilities. Within the major stabilities the opposite is surely true.

So, look again, and imagine the described movies.

You are looking at really existing Holism!

You have Stability within chaos and constant changes. Does not the confidence of our programmed simulations seem more than a little blinkered?

First Special Issue of the Shape Journal

2010-07-20T15:53:00.010+01:00

The Theory of Emergence by Jim Schofield

Read it here

Interesting article on viruses in the human genome

2010-07-20T15:47:00.006+01:00

Wonders never cease, a decent article in New Scientist!

Coherence from Incomplete Sequences: Introduction

2010-07-03T15:59:00.002+01:00

This short paper will appear in Issue 12 of Shape Journal. It is only part of the topic of "informed speculation", which is a vital component of all scientific hypotheses, and of theorising in relatively new areas of study. It is not usually at all pluralistic, but takes reality as it is, and constructs reasonable and well informed explanations where they are sorely needed. The reason for the limited nature of the coming paper is that the more obvious elements involved are already well-covered by many previous papers.

The crucial feature of the relationship of Relative and Absolute Truth, is always treated early on in criticising any demand for Absolute Proof, beloved of all mathematicians, which is only very rarely possible in concrete Reality, so that a "lesser" demand for objective content is the proper aim of all Science. But, we must use Logic where it can be useful. Not in the Absolute Truth sense, but in the elimination of the impossible, and very unlikely scenarios to reveal the most reliable extractions and conclusions.

The paper addresses a couple of ways in which partial evidence can, none-the-less be sufficient, and how ever-available loops of correlation can home us in ever closer to the truth we seek.

Issue 12 will be published in 3 weeks time...

Issue 11 of Shape

2010-07-03T15:54:00.002+01:00

Read it here

The Theory of Emergence - Coming Soon!

2010-06-15T17:22:00.007+01:00

What is an Emergence? It is a special interlude of major qualitative change, in which a new level of reality is both generated and maintained. Such a Level is not a mere re-organisation, but involves wholly new entities, properties, relations and even Laws which did not exist previously. The template for such an Emergence has to be the Origin of Life on Earth. Only after the creation of the first living things did they inhabit a new Level of Reality, with its own laws. We call this collection of laws Biology, and institute a whole new science with its own scientists. But this, though without doubt the most important Emergence was certainly not the only one. Every science has had its own birth via an Emergence, and indeed from the Big Bang onwards all significant qualitative changes were created within Emergences, as have been all since that event.

As so many of my philosophical ideas revolve around this theory of Emergence, we have decided to publish a special issue of the Shape Journal, dedicated to its explanation and exploration. Watch this space...

Building A Consensus

2010-06-15T15:54:00.005+01:00

Nice diagram from New Scientist, but I think it communicates more than the original authors intended. It demonstrates how the consensus in a particular research area is established and maintained. I'm currently writing a paper on this subject, and will post it as soon as it is ready...

Paths to Chaos or Paths to Glory: Introduction

2010-05-25T16:55:00.005+01:00

What is the natural trajectory of change in Reality? Do we, in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, consider it to be a constant downhill descent into oblivion, or is it "built-in" that it should naturally evolve into ever-more potential-filled and richer forms? Now, for highly constrained subsets of reality, the answer is clear. They will indeed, if left to themselves, deteriorate into chaos. But what of unfettered reality as a whole, with no imposed constraints and added purposes, what will be the natural outcome there? The evidence is all around us. It will evolve!

But why does this remarkable second case happen? What is the engine of such developments, and what determines the trajectory of that process?

In order to address these questions this paper attempts to address reality as it is, without Mankind! But to do so, we must bury our usual methodology, which sees every discovery in terms of how we can exploit it for our own ends. We must instead become observers and interpreters, and never users. We must develop what we are clearly already aware of, but rarely pursue - disinterested Science.

The evidence for the evolution of Reality is undoubtedly legion, but as to what factors drive this development, we do not know. The tempo of such changes when measured with our 'clocks' seems to be zero - that reality is entirely stationary and unchanging.

Now a single tiny and isolated particle of Matter in a completely empty space cannot display, or even have, any properties at all. We have to realise that such things can only appear in aggregates. It is only when many such fragments come together that we not only get bigger pieces, but also qualities begin to be evident: the fragments relate to one another. And these qualities will be different at every stage of the enlarging aggregate. They will not only change in magnitude, but also in properties. Initially, then the property of Gravity - the mutual attraction of particles of Matter for each other, must be the initial drive. But notice, we could extrapolate all the way from the very first tiny aggregations seamlessly to a single all-consuming Black Hole into which the whole Universe could be unremittingly drawn, to vanish completely back up its own Physical Singularity! That is the simplest extrapolation of Gravity. But, of course, we know better. Vast aggregations collapse Matter into ever closer forms, until in the largest aggregations they burst into stars. Millennia of studying the Heavens have revealed a whole series of different forms of stars which clearly form a sequence of phases, and even include cataclysms such as Supernovae.

Clearly, apart from the observable evidence in the sky, there is a more complex and detailed trajectory involving many other modes or phases. And what is crucial about these phases is that they change the game. These natural developments transform their own producing ground every single time! So how do such a variety of very different and indeed new forms get driven into existence merely by Gravity?

Now, one aspect of the forms involved is also crucial. There seems to be an alternation between long periods of relatively slow-moving stability, and very short interludes of radical change. Such a trajectory implies that other forces are also being generated, and grow to such a point that they always undermine, and then overthrow, the current stability, only to, at a later time, surrender to their own, different, stability-enforcing system, thus moving into a new period of stability.

If we had a mechanist, purely bottom-up Universe, such things could never happen! This evidence seems to suggest that Reality is NOT pluralistic (the bottom-up approach), but is, on the contrary, entirely holistic, involving causalities in all directions. This means that the possibilities are increased, because the ground is always changed by its own products. As soon as a product (such as free Oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere) is produced in sufficient quantities, it changes future possibilities into features that were impossible previously.

Elements of such a view are already occurring in our thinking about the world, but they are swamped by the stamp of our own purposes for USE!

This series will continue in Issue 11 of the Shape Journal. Watch this space.

Issue 10 of Shape

2010-05-25T16:38:00.003+01:00

Read it here

Order Out of Chaos Introduction

2010-05-05T18:38:00.008+01:00

This forthcoming series of papers (Issue 10) under the general title of Order Out of Chaos? were commenced in 2008, and bear the stamp of when they were written. They do not represent the developed, current position of the author, but nevertheless, it was decided that they must be included in the journal as a necessary preparation for the continuous stream of rapidly developing contributions that have been produced ever since. Also, it is very clear to me that this is perhaps the most important area in modern science, and will not be delivered by a single theorist, and I'm keen to see other contributions in this area.

Firstly, the erroneous claims of the mathematicians of Chaos that their new area will ultimately contain the explanations for crucial Emergences such as that of the Origin of Life on Earth, must be debunked. Formal Mathematics cannot explain anything: it merely describes, never explains, and hence can never address such an important question. Secondly, these studies must actually investigate what really happens within such events as Emergences - NOT as mathematical forms only, but as Real Science. Since when did we credit our tools with creating the masterpieces by themselves!

The question, which has motivated this author for over 15 years, is considered to be by far the most important one in Science, which is now regularly coming up against the consequences of its own basic assumptions, tenets and even "beliefs". The chaos that is today's sub-Atomic Physics, is finally heading for its ultimate demise at its own hand. The "final proofs" of its current theories expected from the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider, will not be forthcoming. Indeed, by far the most likely outcome from this mammoth experiment will be an evident failure in this regard, causing a general flight from maintaining any trust in these odd believers in Parallel Universes, Physical Singularities, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, time flowing backwards, and even colliding Branes producing our Universe out of precisely Nothing. They will finally, and justifiably, be laughed out of Court.

It was decided, therefore, to include these older papers as an introduction to the studies into Emergence by this author. For though this is an important area, it is very little supported within current research, outside of the denizens of the Santa Fe Institute, who think that Mathematical Chaos will alone provide all the answers necessary. There appear to be very few who agree with this author. Nevertheless, the line of research that will appear ONLY in the Shape Journal, has recently arrived at a new Theory of Emergences, which for the first time goes into the various phases of such an event. At the same time, such vital research cannot be a one-man show, and even hostile criticism will help refine these new ideas. Of course, even better would be the contributions of other like-minded experts, who are not merely mathematical physicists, but true explanatory scientists, who also realise that the study of Emergences is the crucial area in the absolutely imperative re-establishment of Real Science as the only sound path towards Truth.

Don't miss Issue 10 of the Shape Journal to read the first instalment of this paper.

Chinese Stamps for Sale

2010-05-05T17:47:00.005+01:00

Not sure if any of my regular readers will be interested, but thought I'd mention it anyway!
I'm currently trying to sell my large collection of Chinese Stamps

Visit www.chinese-stamps.com to find out more

Issue 9 of Shape

2010-04-23T15:59:00.001+01:00

Read it here

The Heroic Failure of Mark Rothko

2010-04-15T15:44:00.003+01:00

"...No figurative content is either discerned, or was intended, and though most people “see” windows and doors to somewhere (?) or even nowhere, the real content seems to reside in amazing texture and meaningful “detail”. The substance of the works seems to reside in the almost furry or “blurred” edges of his deceptively simple areas, which seem to articulate directly and sensitively into adjacent “new space”, which is itself packed full of its own colour-based activity.

We seem to be directly discerning real and complex feelings by abstract visual means alone..."

A Three Dimensional Problem

2010-03-29T14:22:00.007+01:00

Introducing the Soma Strand

These images are from a paper forthcoming to the Shape journal, as part of the "A Structure of Diagrams" series. Here diagrams and models were used to solve a complex three dimensional problem based on tessellation.

This case was to do with a self designed form which I had named the Soma Strand (after Piet Hein’s “Soma delicious Soma”).

Long before the tessellation problem outlined above, I had to design the original form. This, in itself, took a great deal of time and model making, but what finally emerged was an infinite strand, with a re-entrant form, and congruent, singly re-entrant hexagonal faces (with 90o and 270o angles only). It soon became clear (after making a bundle of these strands, that they definitely tessellated to fill three dimensional space completely.

Careful model-making had established this exciting property, but, it must be said that cardboard, glue and bits of wooden dowling (without which the strands were impossible to construct) are not the ideal materials to facilitate detailed studies in the area of volume filling stacking, particularly of such difficult (and indeed infinite) strands. Attempts at solving the problem using 3D graphics packages were soon abandoned, as these so-called tools, may deal with three dimensions, but are generally NOT designed for meaningful and revealing visualisations essential to the designer and creator of new things. You just couldn’t see what you were doing, and the figures soon became unintelligible. In addition to the complexity, that package had not helped me to adjust units effectively and lock them into the required precise positionings. Attempts at colouring to get some order out of the chaos only led to an obscuring of one part of the figure by another. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but those facilities were simply not available.

As a last resort, I went all the way back to an ancient (and primitive) 2D drawing package that I had used for many years (De Luxe Paint 2).

Issue 8 of Shape

2010-03-14T15:49:00.002Z

Read it here

Domains & Quilts

2010-03-03T16:32:00.003Z

An early investigation of Man's Abstraction of Reality. See my final definitive Abstraction Diagram

The Superstructure and the Base

2010-03-03T16:10:00.003Z

This philosophical area is a profoundly difficult, yet at the same time, an extremely crucial one.
It cannot be dealt with by a single paper, or even a series of them. It is about our fundamental assumptions concerning the World about us and our understanding of it. It inevitably therefore will display the unavoidable errors that will occur when one part of Reality (Mankind) attempts to explain either that all-embracing World, their own automatic origin, or finally their current place within that World. Clearly, no straight (or Royal) road to Knowledge can be viewable, or even available from within the continuing process itself. Indeed, Man has to promote himself outside of the process in the position of a God, in his attempts to address it. There is no way that the bulk of his attempts will be anything other than fictions and rationalisations. And from the exact same ground, any condemnations of Mankind’s errors in this area will involve a similarly arrogant super-promotion.
Such a trajectory was, and still is, unavoidable, and every gain made in this gigantic task will, of course, be partial and propped up with many formal inventions. How could it be otherwise?

But, that does not mean that Mankind should, “Give up now, you’ll never do it!”
On the contrary, it is the most important purpose ever generated by this evolving World.
So, any paper commencing the task of looking at our assumptions and methods will have to start somewhere, and wherever we choose will immediately and inevitable reveal contradictions. But, that is still the only way we can remedy our misconceptions and improve our attempts. What else can we do?

This author commenced writing about such questions some 14 years ago, under the title, Levels, and it is clear that the currently existing Universe is NOT a single monolithic structure. Not only is it spatially divided, but it has also generated a whole series of Levels of Existence, each with its own entities, properties, relations and even laws.
Life is just such a Level, as is Consciousness, and the real task will have to be addressing these innovatory changes of Level, as well as explaining the more mundane relations within particular Levels.

Nevertheless, we must make a start, and perhaps the best issue, which cannot but expose the essentials of such a World, must be that of The Superstructure and The Base. The main criticism of Marxism by its conservative opponents was that they could not even explain their own existence, never mind that of the rest of Reality.
So we will start there!

In this current period SHAPE is involved in publishing a series of papers addressing these and related issues. They include:-

The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Formalising the Heavens
Truly Natural Selection
The Superstructure and the Base
Order Out of Chaos
Paths to Chaos or Paths to Glory?

These papers were either purposely selected, or specially written, for this period in the establishment of SHAPE as a new kind of Journal.
It will NOT be re-hashing old ideas, but on the contrary making original contributions on all the questions that it addresses. It will, therefore, seek to represent the cutting edge of research, and though most of the early contributions will be from the pen of Jim Schofield, the whole idea is to generate a whole school of contributors keen to tackle these crucial questions.
Instead of playing the role of a conduit for the publishing of all and any papers on these issues, it is intended to deliver coherent, comprehensive and new contributions to a 21st century view of the World!

Mankind's Bubble of Abstraction

2010-02-24T20:45:00.006Z

Enlarge Diagram

The Processes And Productions of Abstraction

The version of the diagram that is shown here did not finally reach the state you see until about four years ago, but it has ever since allowed me to pursue all other studies from an objective standpoint.
It is, of course, by no means the last word on this area, but it has most certainly been for me the first and dependable one.
To trace the increasingly important sub-processes involved in Mankind’s abstractions, we must start at Process I (observing Reality) to Production 1 (observations), as on the diagram, and then continuing anticlockwise around the circle...

Continue Reading

Diagram by Jim Schofield
Graphic Design Mick Schofield

(Belated) Issue 7 of Shape

2010-02-10T16:03:00.003Z

Read it here

Issue 6 of Shape

2009-12-15T19:15:00.004Z

Read it here

Eureka! It's Populist Science

2009-12-09T16:36:00.005Z

"...On reading the current issue [Eureka Magazine, The Times, Nov 5 2009] from cover to cover, I was surprised to find that really nothing new was presented there at all. It reminded me of New Scientist, but whereas that journal is aimed at “scientists” (supposedly), this one is certainly aimed at the “interested layman” in mind instead. And one of the characteristics of such disseminations is that they are totally subservient to the “experts”.

No longer do we have hostile antagonisms by arts-types and other non-believers, but in the new attitude of embracing Science in all its current glory, all the participants merely swell the ranks of the consensus merchants, who “wonder” at the might and power of Big Science as propagated by its producers. This removes that absolutely vital criticism which Science has always needed to continue to progress, and which is now, more than ever absolutely essential, as its ageing philosophy and consequent methodology becomes increasingly inadequate to cope with the major unanswered questions that are daily arriving at the top of every agenda..."

Read the rest of this article

The Fruits of Asymmetry

2009-12-09T16:04:00.003Z

Coxeter - 'n' dimensional tilings - assuming maximum symmetry

A Penrose Tiling - concerned with near symmetry cases

Tessellation utilising re-entrant polygons
(in this case using a singly re-entrant asymmetric hexagon - or "L tile")

"...What was evident to me was that the essential component in these formal investigations was Symmetry! While my colleagues in Physics were totally wedded to complete maximal Symmetry (and indeed Super Symmetry), I was finding that instead of the limited numbers of tilings and crystal forms that were available to them, I was finding (in 2D at least) a seeming infinite complexity of Forms. With maximally symmetric units, these all funnelled down into a minimal set, but with re-entrant forms (the first deviation from maximal symmetry), and various regular asymmetries, the possibilities were vastly increased.

Indeed, from monolithic tilings (using a single basic unit in a single way) there occurred a wide range of hierarchical forms, which could be different or mathematically similar at each succeeding level."

To read the rest of this paper, click here

Diagrams on the Science of Music

2009-12-09T14:05:00.003Z

One of my many music theory diagrams - this one showing the family of C tunings on the guitar. More images and possibly some papers to come...

Colour cycling reveals form in tessellations

2009-11-22T16:34:00.004Z

Click to enlarge

I have been researching Tessellation since the 1960s, and will be publishing much of my work in this area on Shape Addendum, watch that space for more...

Issue 5 of Shape

2009-11-22T15:43:00.004Z

Read it here

Forms & Causes - What's the Difference?

2009-11-04T15:07:00.006Z

In identifying things in Reality, we first notice their Forms!

Forms are frequently recurring patterns, which appear in all phenomena, and seemed to be the crucial indicators of the nature of these happenings and their involved entities. All our earliest characterisations of things were unavoidably on the basis of their Form, and things with closely similar Forms would initiallyalways be inevitably grouped together as “closely related”. But, this didn’t usually hold up, as many members of such “groups” later turned out to be hardly related at all: they merely had the same Form. So Forms are not particular and fundamental, but universal: the same forms appear in many different, andcertainly not causally-related, situations. So, though common patterns do recur, and hence need explaining, they are quite different to the more physical causes: they can be common to many unrelated, and differently-caused things.

Now, in addressing why this is, and how Form is characterised by it, we have first to address the other, indeed the primary, consideration, which is what actually physically causes the identified phenomenon!

It is clear that quite different causes, in widely separated areas can display the very same Form, but that this is almost never because they all have exactly the same actual cause. Yet, this being true, why are the Forms themselves so recurrent? They must reflect similar patterns, weights and conjunctions of contributions. (Notice that the conjunctions themselves are not directly involved. It is the MIX that determines Form. Forms must be the natural shapes ofrecurring types of mixes, even if the physical causes of the involved contributions are unrelated. This feature of Form can make it extremely valuable in predicting what is likely to happen next. But, we must also notice that to “follow the Form” in this way does NOT mean that we understand the producing causes, but only the shape, or pattern, of what follows.

These questions are very important because, when asking those who address them what they think, alarge fraction of them insist that the Form is primary, indeed they tend to consider each Form as a kind of immaterial Essence, the makes things the way that they are. Consequences are considered to be driven by Form! Now, this is important because the physical causes can be missed in the worship of assumed Essential Form, and actual causes are not then directly sought for: they become unnecessary if the essential driving forces in Reality are just the Forms. Why do we need more?

Mankind has developed a powerful set of techniques for dealing with Form, and perhaps the most significant stage in its progress has been their distillation into Formulae – into general equations which are abstract mathematical representations of measurables within given Forms.

My Mind to Me A Kingdom Is

2009-11-04T14:53:00.007Z

The myth of the philistine scientist is not about experience, it is about prejudice. And the sentiments of Sir Edward Dyer express Mankind and not merely the artistic subset...

In Praise of a Contented Mind

My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
That world affords or grows by kind.
Though much I want which most men have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

No princely pomp, no wealthy store,
No force to win the victory,
No wily wit to salve a sore,
No shape to feed each gazing eye;
To none of these I yield as thrall.
For why my mind doth serve for all.

I see how plenty suffers oft,
How hasty climbers soon do fall;
I see that those that are aloft
Mishap doth threaten most of all;
They get with toil, they keep with fear.
Such cares my mind could never bear.

Content I live, this is my stay;
I seek no more than may suffice;
I press to bear no haughty sway;
Look what I lack my mind supplies;
Lo, thus I triumph like a king,
Content with that my mind doth bring.

Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have, and seek no more.
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store.
They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I leave; they pine, I live.

I laugh not at another’s loss;
I grudge not at another’s gain;
No worldly waves my mind can toss;
My state at one doth still remain.
I fear no foe, nor fawning friend;
I loathe not life, nor dread my end.

Some weigh their pleasure by their lust,
Their wisdom by their rage of will,
Their treasure is their only trust;
And cloaked craft their store of skill.
But all the pleasure that I find
Is to maintain a quiet mind.

My wealth is health and perfect ease;
My conscience clear my chief defense;
I neither seek by bribes to please,
Nor by deceit to breed offense.
Thus do I live, thus will I die.
Would all did so as well as I!

The Cradle of Life - New Scientist is at the vents again...

2009-10-27T14:54:00.006Z

The Cradle of Life?
(Comments on the recent New Scientist article)

1. “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”, but you also need the Funding!

An article entitled The Cradle of Life in New Scientist (2730) is an interesting contribution to this discussion, but in a rather surprising way. Throughout the piece the author, Nick Lane, of University College, London brings forward the works of Peter Mitchell, along with those of Mike Russell, of NASA, to explain the Origin of Life! But, he repeatedly uses the verb “to evolve”, which is a surprising choice for the transition from inanimate Matter to Living Things, and you might think that these contributors are finally moving towards an Emergentist position.But, that turns out NOT to be the case! The use of “evolve” is well within the generally agreed use because the contributions detailed in the article do not actually address the Origin of Life. The title The Cradle of Life gives it away, because what is presented here are the earliest developments inLife after its Origin. Surely, a site for the actual Origin would be called something like the “Crucible of Life”. A Cradle is aprotective environment for a Life already born!

Now, I have been arguing for many years against that School of explanation on the Origin of Life, which looks solely to pre-existing processes within the preceding non-Life Level, and I argue against their whole approach and “revealed causes”, because they do NOT explain the actual Origin at all. Even the contributions of Miller and Oparin were NOT the causes of the Origin but merely pre-requisites for when the real and appropriate causes did finally appear.

Here we encounter a similar approach, but this time working downwards from within the Life Level, and burrowing as deep as possible towards the actual Event of Life’s Emergence. But, in both these approaches there is a basic assumption which prevents them ever unearthing the actual causes.They assume the usual banker of Reductionism - that continuous links which connect each and every phenomenon with its causes, are appropriate right through this revolutionary transition also...

The Time Has Come To Bury The Dead

2009-10-27T14:41:00.003Z

Friends, colleagues, scientists, listen to me!
The scene all around us is littered with the dead and dying and the war is finally won.In order to proceed we must, clear this present carnage, and in an orderly and respectful way,bury the dead, and proceed to construct a New Order.But first, we must identify each and every lifeless corpse, certify their demise, and with dignityconsign them ALL to the ready earth.There are those, still standing, who would deeply mourn the passing of these heroes, and theyare honourable men, but I must be true to myself and boldly declare that I do not truly mourntheir passing. Nonetheless, I am here without hindrance from their still powerful supporters, tojustify the evident slaughter, so it is clear that they are all honourable men.So, let us begin. Let us start with the leader of all these men, both dead and still alive, theindomitable Rock against Change; the veritable Cause of the recent war.Yet, we must be charitable, as his friends are now clearly charitable in allowing me to speak toyou now - for they are truly honourable men.Here lies Plurality, for that was his true name, who in spite of his many grievous wounds (someinflicted over 2,500 years ago by the mighty Zeno), did stand and fight until now, when he hasfinally and irretrievably halted by death. Let us intern him, and all his colleagues with duehonour, by clearly crediting him with what he gave us, that you all, I am sure, could recount,and cover him up FOREVER!

Plurality stated clearly, and it was agreed by all to be the certain truth, that every Whole is made up ofseparate Parts, and indeed this profound premise DID open the door to a simplification of the World in orderto study it. Now, Pluralism has at least one hidden partner. If we are to isolate the Part from the Whole andignore all connections, links and even causes EXTERNAL to the Part, we are similarly easily pressed into also ignoring all trivial and clearly negligible relations, which STILL pertain after isolation. Indeed, howcould we determine from where cometh any tiny variations still evident, after we have established our Partdefiningconditions? We can’t do it!So we say that maybe the isolation is not absolutely perfect, and therefore, following our principle of deepstudy of ONLY the dominant relations of the Part, we exclude what else we can, and also ignore what wedon’t seem able to eliminate entirely. Whether these tiny variations are small still-existing links with the restof the Whole, or trivial-but-contained relationships WITHIN the Part, we dump them any way.So, this partner of Pluralism can be called Simplification – the dumping of the inconsequential!

Read More

Issue 4 of Shape

2009-10-27T14:30:00.004Z

Read it here on SHAPE

Recursive Tessalations

2009-09-16T15:34:00.007+01:00

Some of my "Hierarchical Tessalations" - more to come including colour cycling animations that reveal form and a paper or two on what it's all about...

Dreaming of Jupiter

2009-09-10T15:24:00.006+01:00

The Dream

Last night I had a dream...

I must have been thinking a great deal about the problem of holisitic, emergent change before I dozed off, because my dream 'solved' the problem in a very beautiful, purely filmic way.

No concepts were involved, no intellectualism - only a sequence of images in glorious technicolour. Entities, as areas of colour, were being changed into other entities, easily distinguished by their clearly evident changes in characterisitic hue. Things were constantly appearing and disappearing, but NOT according to any single mathematical rule. The happenings evidently depended on what entities were present, what they seemed to absorb, and what they produced. The ever-changing context seemed to be crucial in what the sequences of changes were. The most important feature seemed to be the creation of localities, which tended to have some sort of persistence. These appeared to be dependent upon certain preponderances of a particular type of entity. And within these localities the changes occurring were either small or involved sequences or cycles of processes and entities.

But, most interestingly, it was around the edges of the localities that the quickest tempo of changes occured. The best picture of what was happening was that it seemed like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Just as there, the spot itself seemed permanent, but involved cycles within it, whereas around the edge, things were happening much more dramatcially, and could either be sucked into the Spot or emanate from it. Other peripheral activities seemed to sail by with minimal interaction. Sometimes various appearances in the border region seem to accelerate away and from a different new locality.

This dream was purely visual, but of breathtaking beauty. It reminded me of watching a rough sea on rocks. It implied incessant, constant cause, but infinite possibilities. The dream though was much more cogent and simplified. It was like an abstract symphony of form and colour.

On waking, my mind was filled with thoughts that imagined all sorts of significant events that had occured and precipitated an interlude of changes, before something else took hold and drove the patterns onwards. It was clear to me that the periferies of the relatively stable localities were special. Within the main localities, too much was constrained, while outside of every locality nothing seemed to be present for long. Colour succeeded colour in rapid succession. At the boundaries there certainly seemed to be a reliable provision of resources from within the locality, while elsewhere on this periphery the locality's edge was itself being fed by the absorption of passing entities. But while peripheral forms were being supplied from within the localities, they were also in immediate contact with the external churning void. When it came to a budding off, it was clear that the dependence on the parent locality was no longer necessary, and each offspring gathered around itself very similar peripheral streamings as were present around the main locality. The "Great Red Spot" was producing new entities which could then exist anywhere within the chaotic soup in the same way as the parent did.

Now, I am well aware that this was only a dream, but where do we start addressing the intractable problem of Emergent Changes?

Issue 3 of Shape

2009-09-10T15:18:00.003+01:00

Read the latest issue here

Empty Photons?

2009-08-26T14:09:00.006+01:00

A Basis for the Speed of Light

My recent musings on the actual contents of 'Empty' Space, have led to a position in which I now postualte that it is packed "full" of what I term "empty photons". Now, of course, such a conception poses a series of questions. For example, what happens to a photon of zero energy content? Can it continue to exist? Also, what might such photons actually do? If they had movement, it would seem that they should continue to move. And what happens when such photons collide?

I have NO idea of the answers to any of these questions, so that in the following muse, I will have to make the best assumptions that I can muster. If you thought neutrinos were a conundrum, how about zero-energy photons?

Now, my idea of empty photons seems to fill in the answers to a few of my recent self-addressed questions on the Speed of Light. If Space is full of photons with very, very low (if not zero) energy content, and these are the carriers of all E-M radiation, then the situation can be likened to an enourmous box, packed full with snooker balls. Any disturbance on one of these balls will be immediately transmitted to all immediately adjacent balls, then these, in turn, will deliver the distrubance onwards by the same method. The Speed of Light with this model is then NOT the speed at which a photon travels in totally empty space, but, on the contrary, the speed at which transfers take place photon-to-photon. The photons stay where they are but pass on the E-M disturbance. Also, the Speed of Light does not present the usual conundrum of somehow being independant of the speed of the producing source. Obviously, with this model, the speed of any source is irrelevant. Indeed, this Speed becomes a property of light's transmission medium - the packed photons which constitute Space itself.

The Michaelson-Morely experiments do not present an inexplicable contradiction, but, on the contrary, give excellent evidence for my case here. Any disturbance is immediately transmitted to Space itself, which, when composed solely of its empty photos, has a FIXED speed of transfer, which equals C - the Speed of Light. Notice that whenever the disturbance has to travel through Matter it is slowed down, and related to its frequency or colour, whereas all light in Space of whatever frequency is propogated at the exact same velocity = C. Notice also, that our model of packed photons makes for good simplification of wave propogation in Space too. The disturbance being communicated equally in all directions, with a leading edge (or Wave Front). Important features such as interference are also straight forward products of this model, as particular photons would receive disturbance from two seperate sources and would either sum or cancel just as required.

Remember, of course, the disturbance is an E-M one - it involves NO consequential movement of the photons. Their movements are quite seperate, and exactly what they will be, requires some more thought. Certainly, the packing of these photons is not obvious. Maybe they are as tightly packed as our snooker balls-in-a-box. They don't need to move to communicate E-M disturbances. Indeed, they could be in incessant movement with inumerable mutual collisions, for these would not affect their role in propagation (as is the case with sound waves through a gas). What is clear is that if collisions of photons did take place, and caused changes of direction, there could be a completely "random" spread between the resultant directions by now, and this would perhaps facilitate the propagations by effectively making the movements cancel out and be irrelevant. I can conceive of the photons not moving very far at all, but subject to so many collisions, as to be seen as to be vibrating.

Certainly the theory of empty photons is in its infancy, but I will publish another more in depth paper on the subject via the Shape Journal very soon. Watch this "Empty" Space.

Issue 2 of Shape

2009-08-14T16:25:00.003+01:00

Issue 2 of the Shape Journal is now available here.

Fractals Are Boring!

2009-08-14T16:19:00.003+01:00

Cartoon by David Shrigley

See Fractal Unreality for more...

Adaptive Radiation Diagrams

2009-08-07T15:44:00.004+01:00

The Search for Holistic Science

2009-08-07T13:54:00.006+01:00

Perhaps the most important current work of this author is concerned with that crucial Emergence which brought about the Origin of Life on Earth. It is NOT a physical, a chemical or even a biological investigation, but a philosophical one! The revelation of the crucial trajectory of Qualitative Change via such a revolutionary Event, such as an Emergence, must be at least the initial goal And one of the latest pieces of work in this field is perhaps epitomised by the Synopsis of paper IV in a series of papers on the philosophical and methodological implications of Miller’s Experiment. The papers themselves obviously give the full story, but when I had to concentrate the content of this particular piece into a Synopsis, I realised that it captured the work in the fewest possible words, while delivering its purpose in the way that I would have liked. It is included here to introduce the reader to this work, which not only addresses the issues in defining an Holistic Science, but begins to suggest the way forward via a re-running of Miller’s Experiment in a new Holistic way which would reveal the inner processes of that epoch-making contribution.

THE SYNOPSIS OF THE PROPOSAL FOR A NEW MILLER’S EXPERIMENT PAPER IV.

Miller's experiment was holistic! It used pluralisitic means, but for a different purpose: it was to keep the initial primaeval mix unadulterated. It's controlled mini-world was a Model of the primaeval world before Life.
But what had actually happened in the apparatus was, and still is, unknown, and could thereafter ONLY be used as an argument for the natural Origin of Life, but not exactly how it occured. It was not, and could not be, followed up.
This, and many other experiments (such as those by Oparin), couldn't be carried further because of current experimental method and its generated assumptions about Reality. The crucial missing element was an awareness of the role of Emergent events.
Indeed, even after Emergences were recognised as having occurred, their content was wholly unknown, and experiments such as those by Miller & Oparin were misinterpreted as being part of those events, whereas they were really only necessary precursors happening prior to the precipitation of the revolution itself.
A random-chance conjunction of all these precursors became the standard assumption as to how Emergences did what they did, but that model was certainly quite mistaken. For it involved a wholly positive, tide-of-progress process and Emergences were certainly NO such events.
They were, initially at least, cataclysms of destruction, wherein the past stabilities were first gradually and then acceleratingly, dismantled into a kind of chaos. The usual model, on the other hand, assumed that a trillion-to-one chance would definitely happen if Reality had 1 trillion chances, but that retrospective definition cannot be applied to creation.
An Emergence had to radically alter probabilities. And it did just that! The initial phase conformed with the famed Second Law of Thermodynamics, and resulted in something very like chaos. But in so doing it provided the conditions for a new start, and impossible odds were first shortened to probable and then to inevitable.
In fact the significant precursors for an Emergence were mostly those pressing towards a dissolution of the status quo, and such a disaster would always be the initial outcome. But as all positive feedback avalanches also contain the necessities for their own termination, so it was with Emergences.
The second phase of a completed Emergence would always be one in which the detritus of the old regime, plus the unfulfilled possibilities such as are demonstrated in Miller's Experiment would come together in new ways in the creation of a wholly new regime.
It must be the content of the processes of an Emergence which will provide the ground for the creation of a vital new approach to Science. The whole trajectory from incipient breakdown, through total dissolutions, and then upwards to a new regime, with new possibilities, must be tackled and solved.
The first ideas currently suggested are of a series of avalanches of Change, removing the old maintaining processes, which subsequently allowed new mutually conducive, and hence mutually supporting processes to emerge as part of a wholly new order.
The crisis at the end of the Cretaceous was such an Emergence, and the gains of Cosmology in the 20th century were also replete with other Physical Emergences in the Evolution of the Universe.
But these are, as yet, NOT co-ordinated into a new hollisitc Scientific Method which addresses unfettered Reality directly!
Even the mass of pluralist scientists have implicitly taken on the hollistic World in their attempts at Simulations. But they do not have a methodology, and instead impose a 'Threshold & Switch' method of dealing with qualitative Change. It will not do in dealing with creation...

This is of a paper written in July 2009, which was proposed would be published in the SHAPE Journal sometime in 2011, but it certainly cannot wait its turn in that very long queue, so it is flagged HERE and NOW, by this synopsis, and made available in full to all those interested in this vital and revolutionary area of research. The work involved is surely too broad and important to be undertaken by a single individual, and it is hoped that this publication will elicit a response form those who agree with the quest, and even from those who would like to participate.

You can download the PDF of paper IV here

Fractal Unreality?

2009-07-27T13:11:00.006+01:00

In yet another missive from Mark Buchanan, entitled Fractal Reality (appearing in New Scientist No. 2701), he continues his clearly self-assigned task of papering over everything in Quantum Theory that is evidently unreal and false. He does this with yet another carefully brought together layer of the usual mathematical formalism, but without showing any of the mathematics, and instead talking about them as if the involved formal entities actually exist in concrete Reality. In doing this he has the decided advantage of merely reporting the work of others, who more directly but “specifically” do the same thing. By his method, he can pick-and-mix between alternatives to produce a fabric of what seem to be competing notions, but which are in fact from a very closely related, and generally agreeing, group of mathematical scientists, working in an area that they can only deal with by totally abandoning Explanation. Buchanan’s approach gives the impression that the real choices are between the “contending” members within this consensus, and certainly NOT for, or against, Quantum Theory. In a relatively short article (2,800 words) he covers, as usual, a great deal of ground, and his reportage approach means he does not have to explain or justify each and every one of his identified alternative strands (how could he in 2,800 words). And he pays his readers the “compliment” of implying they “know all that stuff anyway”.

So, with a mass of fragmentary offerings, plus a liberal addition of attractive images and “information panels” (for those who have forgotten such things), he offers up a heady mix. I have written before about his approach epitomised by his regular articles in New Scientist, so I must leave my critique of his method here, and instead attempt to plumb the depths of the mathematical speculation on which he is reporting.

Buchanan admits from the outset that Quantum Theory is hard to take, and once again relates the old arguments between Einstein and Bohr on the counter-intuitive, contradictory, and indeed often idealist elements of the Theory. The hoary old “issues” get resurrected to obscure the real and unaddressed problems, with the emphatic statement that “the Theory’s extraordinary success in explaining the behaviour of….quantum events” justifies its acceptance”. Of course he cannot mean explain, for he is talking of equations: so he must be using that word to give more weight to the more correct word predict, which is what Quantum Theory does. And they are not the same thing at all! The whole history of Science is littered with such mathematical predictors, which in spite of their predictive success, were in fact misleading and implied quite incorrect explanations. , Of course, even such things could not be totally arbitrary inventions, or they would not predict so well. But, the major error of this sort of Science is revealed, and shows that pattern matching is insufficient. It works only for essentially blinkered, pragmatic Science, but delivers NO integrating or understandable, overall view.

So, why is this correct prediction possible? The answer is in their Forms! They may not explain but they DO indeed fit! They do have appropriate Shape, and it is this Form, and Form alone, which allows quantitative prediction.

BUT, there are , of course, many Forms, in appropriately constrained conditions, which are extractable from Reality, but the interesting thing about them is that they are universal: they also fit multiple unrelated areas for each and every individual Form. All the scientists have to do, once they have determined “appropriate Form”, is carry out a detailed “fitting operation”, using sufficient data from experiment to accurately evaluate all constants associated with their chosen general Form, to make it fit tightly in all the right places. The fact that it can then fit experiments with such accurate predictions should surprise no one. After all, an equation is a succinct embodiment of a whole set of measurements from Reality, without which NO prediction would be possible. The whole task of the “discoverer” is to recognise pattern – that is Form, and to know how to condense multiple readings into such a minimised abstract “shape”.

Now returning to Einstein versus Bohr, they were BOTH unrepentant mathematical physicists: BOTH sought these well-fitting Forms via the methods I have briefly described, but they differed in philosophy somewhat. Whereas Einstein expected that the Forms would ultimately be explained in terms of a Real World, and thus complete the full task of Science, Bohr was a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatic mathematician, who actually rejected such an expected explanation in that particular realm of study as completely impossible – forever! He had absolutely NO patience with those who continued to try to “uncover” such explanations. He did not care one whit that his equations (and how they were used) involved totally inexplicable elements (indeed contradictory elements). He trumpeted, “Do they work?”, and answered his own question with a resounding “Yes!” But he was wrong to leave it there!

Science is not purely about prediction in tightly defined circumstances – we have another name for that! We call it Technology. Science, on the other hand, requires explanations! Why? – because it is understanding which takes Science forward. Bohr’s pragmatic agenda brings it to a dead stop as a developing means of understanding Reality. Each and every equation was, for him, the end of the process of “scientific endeavour”. Thereafter, for Bohr no science was necessarily involved.

What was involved, in this approach, were two consequent lines of “research” The first was wholly formal – purely mathematical! The equations themselves were “researched”, and reresearched ad nauseam . The clincher to reveal exactly what this type of “research” is, appeared in a previous issue of New Scientist, when a correspondent claimed to have discovered a Worm Hole big enough for a whole spaceship to pass through. Questions such as “Where is it? Tell me the location?”, of course went unanswered, because he hadn’t done any scientific research, neither had he discovered anything. He had, in the comfort of his office and sitting at his desk, and, of course, with sufficient sharp pencils and sheaves of paper, he had done some mathematics. He had constructed a version of the appropriate equations that “fitted” his claimed scenario. It wasn’t even of the legitimate type of “fitting” that I described earlier, for he had NO new data from even from either experiment or observation at all. What he did was dream up data and see what effect it had on the “properties” of the agreed mathematical forms. He was importing pure speculation into the purest mathematics.

The second possible route for so-called research is even more amazing. As old fashioned Explanation had been permanently dumped, its use was prohibited, and this left our mathematical scientists somewhat illequipped. But if the equations could be “mined” to reveal formal elements, which could be taken together into some kind of “new entities”, this might well be legitimate and even “clarifying”.

The source was no longer Reality for any new entities. They were instead to be found in the equations.

This was surely a remarkable development! For along with a Ground of entities carried over from “old fashioned science”, a new amalgam was unashamedly constructed involving these new “legitimately mined” entities from within the trustworthy and perfect mathematics alone.

Why do I condemn such methods? It is because they leave the supreme arbiter of Reality behind. And I am also not impressed when later experiments are said to “reveal” these inventions as “confirmed”. What else would they do? Data from Reality was the raw material for the original equations, and these were then re-interpreted into “entities” involving certain aspects of the equations. It would therefore be a total shock if new data contradicted the merely “re-packaged”original data, would it not? Interpreting confirmation of the old data from the new as confirmations of their speculative interpretations is merely circular reasoning. They are merely confirming the consistency of their old and new data (with fancy labels added). Not much like real Science is it?

And even they implicitly know that this is true! They cannot claim as their own the kind of achievements regularly made by “old-fashioned” Science, when they have banned it! They now deal in mathematics and speculation. Where is there something that can be physically and concretely confirmed? They don’t have any physical and concrete elements in what they do.

Their methodology involved them embarking upon a new unscientific form of imaginative speculation, which is actually a part of Mathematics alone. It constructs multiple and very weird things from the maths forms by themselves. Where do you think Parallel Universes, String Theory, Branes and 11 (or is it 12), dimensions come from? Do they all come directly and ascribable from Reality? You know the answer! Physics has clearly been in the most horrendous crisis for almost a century, and, continuing to use its now universally accepted maths-led approach, means that it cannot escape from its inevitable doom...

__________________________________________________

This is just the first of five short papers I have written in response to the article in New Scientist. There are no immediate plans to publish these on the SHAPE Journal website, but I've included links to the PDFs for anybody that is interested...

Fractal Unreality Paper I

Fractal Unreality Paper II

Fractal Unreality Paper III

Fractal Unreality Paper IV

Fractal Unreality Paper V

Another diagram about science...

2009-07-22T13:20:00.004+01:00

Click image to enlarge
Mathematics deals with Ideality. Science SHOULD deal with reality...

Flow diagram of Discovery & Invention

2009-07-21T16:33:00.000+01:00

We plan to use this blog to post some of the many diagrams I have created over the years. Some of these will be published in the Shape Journal - we will link to it if there is an associated paper. Some of them are just little ideas to get you thinking!

For many years I have been struggling with the Philosophy of Science, and my efforts have not been helped by the fact that I do not sit with the consensus in this crucial area. Indeed, I am considered something of a maverick, in that I have long opposed the generally accepted philosophical position in my own subject - Physics. I have found, that to marshal my arguments effectively, I have had to go beyond the exclusive use of words. In revealing my position on the Philosophy of Science I have felt it essential to reveal relationships via diagrams...

The above quote is from A Structure of Diagrams, a series of papers to be published on the Shape website.
The first of which can be found here

SHAPE Journal Issue 1 now available

2009-06-26T14:36:00.000+01:00

Issue 1 of my new journal SHAPE (Science, Holism, Abstraction, Philosophy, Emergence) is now available for free from E-Journal.org.uk here

The issue includes six articles (all papers from larger series that will be published over future issues) covering a wide variety of subjects including The Debacle of the Large Hadron Collider - why it won't work! Explanation via Chaos - a paper on the bank crash - why politics can't be explained by Chaos theory. A Structure of Diagrams, Are You A Real Marxist, The Gradual Emergence of Life, Before The Big Bang - quite a set for Issue 1 I think you'll agree! The website also features bonus series in the archive - The Nature of Form, The Nature of Reality, Emergence & Reductionism and The Philosophy of Mathematics each featuring a set of two or more papers.
All papers are available as PDF downloads so you can print them off easily and read them at your leisure.

We are also looking for submissions by other authors and scientists for the journal. If you are interested in participating or have any comments on any of the topics, leave them here or visit our contact page

Happy reading!

Editorial from Issue 1:

Welcome to the SHAPE Journal.
In this double Launch Issue we will begin with six sequences of papers on a wide variety of topics. We unashamedly concentrate on Philosophy as the essential and universal approach to human understanding of the world, but, as you will soon see, reject totally its usual academic and remarkably opaque form. Philosophy is too important to be sidelined into esoteric territory for a privileged intelligentsia. It is essential for everybody, yet never so addressed!

Therefore, all our Strands (categories), though all part of our conception of Philosophy, will range across a very wide spectrum of disciplines that would usually be placed elsewhere. This initial selection will give an idea of what we will be discussing. Perhaps the most important papers, which commence here, are not what you would expect to find in an academic Journal, but the separation into clearly distinct disciplines is without doubt at the very heart of what is wrong with them. They are usually hermetically sealed compartments, which admit of NO all embracing approach. Well, that essential World View standpoint is precisely what we mean this Journal to be all about.

The paper Explanation via Chaos is a thorough-going criticism of a BBC TV programme (High Anxieties) which attempted to explain the World Bank crisis of Autumn 2008 as a result of unavoidable mathematical Chaos, and hence "nobody's fault". The second major article The Debacle of the Large Hadron Collider was, once again, in response to a "popularising" TV programme on this amazing billion dollar venture, and tackles the by now century-long crisis of these physicists locked into the cul de sac of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Four other papers cover topics as far apart as Marxism, the techniques of Realisation via Diagrams, what came before the Big Bang and finally the myth of the gradual Emergence of Life on Earth. Quite a set, I think you will agree!

This first double issue will hope to establish our remit, and subsequent issues will continue with already commenced sequences of papers, and also introduce new concerns in each and every new publication. We sincerely invite comments and contributions, but please note that the initiators will not accept everything that is offered. This does not mean we will reject articles which oppose previous contributions to the Journal. Open debate is essential in this vital area. Please join in and make Philosophy the real search for Truth that it was always meant to be! This is the Shape of things to come...

Jim Schofield
JUNE 2009

E Journal begins...

2009-03-14T19:37:00.000Z

Once my new website "E Journal" is up and running, I'll post up here the latest news, papers and articles etc. I will also add anything that I think may be of interes to E Journal's readers...