`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

The Questions That Call to be Answered


I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage


Index


  1. Are they legitimate questions?

  2. Why is there anything?

  3. Where do the Laws Come From?

  4. What is Fundamental?

  5. How do we know that there is a World out there?

  6. How do we know what is real or illusion?

  7. What kind of Truth?

  8. Does the Answer help explain other problems?

  9. Waves or Particles?

  10. Do we have Free Will?

  11. God and Free Will?

  12. Moral Responsibility?

  13. Is there a self?

  14. What difference does it make?

  15. What happens next?

  16. What is love, actually?

  17. What choices are to be made when it comes to sex and marriage?

  18. What is all the weird stuff about?

  19. Astrology - How?

  20. Astrology - Fate or Destiny?

Even when we don't yet realise that there actually is a question, all pieces of information provide some kind of answer. So any book, in providing information, even if it is just the unspoken 'what happens next' in a novel, is answering questions. So what are the questions, the big questions, the hard questions, which I aim to answer in this book/website?


This is bearing in mind that there are many other questions, but that either I just don't think of them, or consider them not worth considering.


Are they legitimate questions?


Philosophers often like to think that they have the inside track when it comes to questions, after all, they have collectively been asking and answering questions for thousands of years.


But philosophers will sometimes tell you that your question is not proper. I once saw 'How do electrons vote?' being cited as an improper question, and it clearly is a category error because electrons do not vote, obviously.


Yet, while admitting that there frequently are poorly phrased questions, nonsense such as 'Why are beeblings thrinkle?' - which is almost entirely meaningless, except to express a confused attitude on the part of the questioner, I would argue that all questions are valid to some extent, even though they may demonstrate a significant lack of knowledge on the part of those asking the questions.


'How do electrons vote?' may be trivial, and used purely for illustration of obvious nonsense, but even so, we could take it seriously and conclude that electrons must vote with their hosts, the citizens of which they are a part, and then we'd see that most electrons do not take part in voting at all.


Equally, any poor question can be taken as a lead in to a discussion that, if nothing else, may lead to the education of those taking part.


Why is there anything?


A lot of the big names in philosophy have asked this one, and many lesser anonymous philosophers have claimed it is an invalid question. But it remains, and will doubtless endure as a question until satisfactorily answered.


Since Rene Descartes we have had some kind of consensus that something exists, and that whatever it is that exists, our thinking self, the 'I' in 'I think', and in 'I am', is existing in some manner; 'me' must exist because 'I' think. That is, one's thinking is the most certain thing about us.


There has been some dissent from this, Martin Heidegger thought that being was more fundamental than thinking, but I don't believe Descartes was claiming that thinking was causal to being, rather that without knowing what his being was composed of, at least he could still have access to his own thinking and be certain from it that he existed.


Even if we were to think the 'Why is there anything?' question a poor one, because of some argument about causes, or their lack, we could still interpret this 'why?' as a 'what?' - a 'what is there?' This is the question philosophy attempts to answer with ontology, the study of what there is. We might even regard it as a 'What am I?' kind of question. A sort of blue pill or red pill.


Throughout the history of philosophy there have been idealist and materialist views of existence, and with them empiricist and rationalist explanations of why either view is correct. Yet, even with the rapid progress of science, we have found no certainty about what underlies everything we experience. Plato thought it was non-material ideals, while Aristotle favoured real things existing first.


Rene Descartes couldn't extrapolate from his thinking self, so ended up with two kinds of things - the stuff of thought, and the stuff of extended material things, and so Dualism was conceived, along with unanswered questions about how these different stuffs could interact. Hence, subsequently, Dualism has become somewhat disreputable.


Science has given us some explanations, such as the Big Bang, General Relativity, and Quantum Field Theory, but science says nothing about why these things are as they are, nor what the basic building blocks might be. What we do get from science is an understanding that everything that we think we perceive is really mostly empty space. As for what space, time and mass are, we barely have a few clues, let alone any knowledge of where they came from.


The question remains, 'Why is there anything at all?' It is closely tied to 'What is there?'


My opinion is that, despite some objections from others, it is a very good question, and in that I join Gottfried Leibniz, Martin Heidegger and many, many others.


(External Website) Answers to questions about Existence


Where do the Laws Come From?


As well as questioning why, or how, Existence came to be, we could also ask why are the Laws of Nature what they are - how do the laws come about? Is how they are the only way they can be?


(External Website) Answers to questions about Emergence


What is Fundamental?


There are different notions of what fundamental means, but the project of science [physics] is highly reductionist, and that means forever looking for the smallest parts that can explain the reality we see around us. In that quest we have gone from discovering the atoms that were theorized by the Ancient Greeks, to the particle zoo of protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. all the way to quarks and the gluons that hold them together. Yet, we can't say that we have got to the end of that road, because we can't actually explain gravity as a quantum phenomenon, but we do know that we inhabit a quantum universe.


Even were we to fully explain gravity, it would not necessarily mean that we had achieved the final objective in explaining reality, so we might ask how would we know when we have got there? The answer is all to do with the question 'what is fundamental?'


(External Website) Answers to questions about Time, Space and Gravity


How do we know that there is a World out there?


Ideas obviously didn't stop with Rene Descartes, though. There has been a steady stream of big names in philosophy, now increased to a flood by the modern world's greater availability of education. Each of these thinkers has added a little to the pot, but truthfully, despite knowing a great deal about the biology of the brain, and which areas are associated with which functions, we are no closer to solving David Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness .


It is not enough to claim that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Of course it is, but that tells us nothing about what is going on, despite some progress since 1875, we don't even have a full theory of emergence, only descriptions of some things that emergence does, so the word is little better than meaningless; an incantation of some magical thinking.


Epistemology is the study of how we know anything, but that is not the knowing that I am referring to. I mean how is it that any one thing, any of us for instance, can be conscious of another thing; something in the outside world, or even some internal thing we possess, such as a thought.


Of course, there are those who will just resort to the claim that thoughts are naturally conscious, but that tells us nothing either, and is in any case unsubstantiated. What we need are complete and proper explanations of how exactly one arrangement of something can produce such a convincing facsimile of some other entirely different thing, i.e. how it is that the brain allows us to be conscious of anything, particularly the things of the world around us.


So for me this question is crucial, how can we be conscious of anything at all?


(External Website) Answers to questions about Consciousness


How do we know what is real or illusion?


Many people have written at one time or another that some phenomena, time itself for instance, are illusions. Immanuel Kant took the view that time was an 'a priori' reality, which more or less says we just have to accept it as a 'brute fact', as Bertrand Russell would have claimed.


However, I would point out that an illusion is like a conjuror's trick, or a mirage, that an illusion is actually a lie, a false impression or mistake. Hence, if we have a proper theory of everything, nothing that is true can actually be an illusion.


This turns the question into 'What is true?', another very good question, but one that is taken as a premise for my theory, as described previously. Therefore, what we have to decide is what category of truth do we rely on.


What kind of Truth?


For the questions we have in mind here, the applicable category is that of coherence. Coincident truth may work for some aspects, but much of what is inferred in Virtualism is not verifiable by testing, so we are forced into relying on telling a coherent story that fits with what is known. I'd hope to achieve that, but also, I'd suggest that there are means by which to test and verify the whole thing, and for that I believe that Astrology, despite its disreputable position in modern culture, has the potential to be properly understood and to provide evidential proof of the wider truths of Existence; truths that go far beyond those of pure Physicalism.


Does the Answer help explain other problems?


For all that Science has given us great tools with which to get to grips with the world about us, and with which to understand the physical aspects of the Universe, there is a huge problem at the heart of physics, and that is to do with the incompatibility between on the one hand General Relativity, Albert Einstein's great theory of mass and energy forming space [spacetime], and on the other hand, the Quantum Theories [Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Electro Dynamics, and Quantum Chromo Dynamics] that are equally great, but which describe the behaviour of small particles. [There is also the latest advance; Quantum Field Theory, but I am not a fan.]


Because the story of Emergence and Virtual Existence [as I tell it] is so all-encompassing, it should, if it is any good, shed some light on the quandary that exists between General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory.


Waves or Particles?


The strangeness, as it seems, of Quantum Field Theory, is bound up with the question about light and other quantum events [changes]: Are the things that make up light actually particles or waves? Newton thought that light was made of particles, corpuscles, as he called them, but the experiments of Thomas Young, at the start of the Nineteenth Century, showed clear wavelike behaviour. Then Quantum Mechanics seemed to show clearly that light was composed of discrete quantities, much as Newton had claimed, but also that these behaved according to probabilities. The question remains with us, although current fashion describes reality as waves in fields that permeate space, but why this is so and what the fields are, still eludes us. I claim that Virtualism solves this conundrum, and that it does so by denying both wave and particle, and field! Saying that these emerge after the event, and for the observer. The light is truthfully just a subtraction and an addition - a rotation out and then in, of a square number.


Do we have Free Will?


This is a question that really does not interest me very much, because I am of the opinion that it is self-evident that we do have free will, within the constraints of our personal circumstances.


However, it is a question that people are frequently very concerned about, or so it seems, so it would be churlish not to provide an explanation of how we do have free will. After all, people maybe have a right to know whether they themselves are entirely a slave to fortune, or misfortune, or whether they have some say in the course of their life.


There are two ways of interpreting this question [at least]; the first being a matter of is the Universe deterministic ? Is everything just clockwork? Running down to the heat death of everything; the second is a looser form of determinism, along the lines of does some superpower coerce our experince? Is there a God, or God-like entity, who controls our lives.


Benjamin Libet performed a famous experiment that showed that brain activity proceeded the reported moment of awareness of decision making, leading some scientists to conclude that free will had been abolished. The experiment showed muscle readiness some 550ms prior to physical movement relating to choice, while reported awareness of choice was only averaging 206ms prior to action.


A quote from Wikipedia


A more general criticism from a dualist-interactionist perspective has been raised by Alexander Batthyany who points out that Libet asked his subjects to merely 'let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act'. According to Batthyany, neither reductionist nor non-reductionist agency theories claim that urges which appear on their own are suitable examples of (allegedly) consciously caused events because one cannot passively wait for an urge to occur while at the same time being the one who is consciously bringing it about. - Wikipedia


But we possibly should take account of the quantum/classical dilemma in physics, and wonder if maybe the internal sensation of consciousness of thought requires the brain to act as observer and amplify that thought, thereby making it an after the event moment that consequentially takes on classical properties, whereas the actual decision making may be more akin to a quantum process that precedes the apparent moment of choice. If we were to posit a superposition of choices, to flex, or not to flex, being the question, the problem becomes one of downward causation, one where the conscious self chooses to flex, and for whatever reason, the muscle readiness occurs sooner, by 300ms, than does the ability to notice the choice and check the clock. Without a suitable explanatory model of consciousness we cannot answer that.


Another way to frame this question might be to ask: How is it that the thing we regard to be our self, exercises causation on our self and our environment, and is there any scope for alternatives within the constraints that we live under? This including internal constraints.


Such a question becomes one of downward causation, from my perspective anyway. It asks how is it that the self that emerges from the sum of our own parts has the capability to choose between alternatives in more than a merely reactive manner, if indeed it does? Of course, that rephrasing contains many assumptions about the nature of the self, and these too may be questioned. Some would want to ask: Is there a pre-existing self, or are we simply existential with self arising from being? Therefore, the question really becomes: What is the nature of the self?


(External Website) Answers to questions about Free Will


God and Free Will


There are those who say that there is a sentient being that exists, that we call God, and that this being is perfect, so good and infallible, so this God knows the future before it has happened, therefore the future is fixed, therefore we have no free will. Others say that this God stands outside of time, and so if we consider the question of prophecy, we might ask who else tells the prophet? If such ever exist.


My answer is that the past is known, the present is real, the future consists of fixtures that may, or may not, be postponed, possibly indefinitely. As was famously said about future certainties - 'death and taxes'.


If there were to be a God, omniscient as claimed, which I doubt, the 'omni' would not have to include the future, because the future does not exist in any sense at all. There is a 100% certainty that there will be some kind of future, until things stop changing, but for any Now, there is only now. An omniscient God cannot know what is not, only what is possible.


The virtual truths about all that is, are simply factual, but some are brighter than others, being better connected. Everything that exists is connected, so everything is in a sense known by the virtual truth, but the future does not exist, so is not known. The timing of moments, such as days, are known in the sense that they are predictable, but unknown in the sense that they are not yet connected by truth.


Astrology predicts where planets will be in the future, but goes on to describe what that 'weather' pattern looks like. Whether we choose to take a metaphorical umbrella, or stand in the shade of another is entirely up to us. The weather is a bit of a constraint on our free will, rain stops play for tennis and cricket, but not football and rugby.


Moral Responsibility


The brain, in as far as it is hard-wired, becomes a constraint on free will, as do emotional responses. Tiredness plays a big role, as does habit and addiction. The thing is that these are a part of self, but they are not mind. Mind is not yet consciousness, as we are capable, so we are told, of having unconscious behaviour. So this calls for a question: Is the unconscious a part of the realm of our moral responsibility? This is not dissimilar from the issue of drink driving.


Really this boils down to a question of which parts of our being take responsibility for our actions. Our conscious thoughts, the part that Rene Descartes was referring to, the part that can be known with most certainty, the part that can most be considered to be 'I', that part carries responsibility for our actions, assuming that free will does indeed exist.


When I was a student with Victor Lewis-Smith, he was arrested for climbing the scaffolding on York Minster [drink may have been involved], whereupon allegedly he called out 'It's a fair cop, guv! I'll come quietly, but Society is to blame!'. Society, here, being the root cause of the hard-wiring of habit that [as he joked] led to miscreant behaviour.


The point is, within the theory of Iconism, that somewhere among the checks and balances of the mind are metaphorical black holes of thought that filter out certain forms of mind, or a metaphorical lack of fuel for the rocket to launch the thought, preventing those icons ever coming to the heart of our being and attaining consciousness. What the nature of the obstacles to certain thoughts are, and whether these obstacles to free will are of the brain or of the mind must be open to debate, at least until the nature of consciousness is better understood. The question remains, then becoming: What are the limits of our responsibility?


Indeed, are there even any objective moral facts, i.e. universal morals; moral truths applicable to everyone? Such morals - maybe 'Thou shalt not ... kill, or whatever else - these, if universal, apply to everyone, but frankly, it is hard to impossible, to see where exactly such truths would originate, unless one is to believe in Father Christmas giving them to us 'if we've been good.'


Is there a self?


It may seem foolish, on the face of it, but there are serious enquirers into the nature of consciousness who will and do ask 'Is there really a conscious self?' The argument goes something like; the brain is active, and has no place, nor need, for consciousness as an extra thing, and anyway an additional consciousness would imply dualism - and that is impossible. I may be misrepresenting the argument, giving you a strawman, but the bottom line is that there is no 'self' to be conscious.


Now, I clearly believe that to be a mistaken point of view, but there are many who do not, and if we are just the passing byproduct of some neural activity, then maybe those people are correct. However, I say that Iconism explains how the phenomenon emerges, and so why we do exist as a conscious self, and further; why we continue after death, as a conscious spirit.


What difference does it make?


Why should we care about what there is, how it got that way, and how we fit into that puzzle?


Quite apart from the ostrich-like response of willful ignorance, I'd suggest that we all have at least two good reasons for wanting to know the answers to all of these questions.


Firstly, we know with a greater certainty than our liability for taxes, that eventually we will shuffle off this mortal coil, turn up our toes, and go to meet our maker. In short, we will all be as dead as a parrot, one day, so we all have some concern as to what might happen next. This is excepting those whose zen-like fixation in the present entirely overrides any concern for their own future, although, to be frank, I don't think many of us are like that. However brave we feel when we are young and strong, however immortal [and we do], as time passes, things happen that give us sleepless nights, and the nearer the end the more courage can leak away as we face that 'invincible defeat' [Leonard Cohen], so answers to these questions will make a comforting friend when the going gets tough. If nothing else, simple curiosity should be enough to stir sufficient interest in what's to come; to want some answers.


Secondly, before that final curtain-call, we have to decide how to live our lives. We need to make decisions in the Here and Now, so how are we to decide? Should we be as callous as a Vladimir Putin? Should we be as caring as a Mother Theresa? The only way to decide is through some understanding of the context of any question, and every question has Existence standing alongside it as the proverbial 'elephant in the room'.



Given our existential interest in what happens next, we really need to ask ourselves what, in the context of Existence, can we deduce is actually possible, from the many myths and witness statements that there have been about dying.


What is love, actually?


The Beatles sang 'All you need is love', but what is love? M.Scott Peck, in The Road Less Travelled, says that it is wanting the best for the beloved, but while loving someone may well include that, it tells us little about the existence of love, or its counterpart, hate.


Given that we are asking questions of Existence, and possibly hoping for some guidance from the answers, it seems a natural follow-on investigation to inquire whether Jean-Paul Sartre was correct in his explanation of the nature and phenomenology of love stemming from 'the Look', that which places us as object instead of subject, thereby giving us the perspective of being loved; experiencing our self as if through the eyes of the lover.


Contrasting with JP's version, we might say that it is all very well to concentrate on the phenomenology of encountering others, whether with look or touch, words or other actions, and that there is a thin line between love and hate [for The Pretenders, anyway], maybe that they are two sides of the same coin, but we can also ask ourselves; is there more to love? Is love something that is in any sense real, or is it rather an abstract of experience, more akin to a form of consciousness that is just as durable, as eternal even, as the stuff of memory, by which I mean is love an abstract truth that has as much ability to guide or constrain our will as does our ability to recall conscious experience in the form of memory? Clearly, I am giving away my position here, and will lean toward the concept of love as a virtual truth, one that comes from a similar, although significantly different, type of relationship as that which I hope to show forms consciousness.


By understanding the actual nature of love, to the fullest possible degree, we as potential lovers ought to be better informed on how to proceed in matters of the heart. A similar argument must apply to understanding any aspect of life, whether that be politics, competition, education, art, psychology, or just about anything else that affects us as human beings, and which consequentially we may be called upon to make decisions about. I may be biased in prioritizing love, but for such a little word it is maybe the most misunderstood, although that is also debatable. Even so, I do think that it makes a suitable question for inquiry.


Love does actually have a converse, hate is almost an exact opposite of love. We see love as good and hate as bad, usually, but is it always ok to love and not ok to hate? What else utilises the same mechanism as used by love and hate?


(External Website) Answers to questions about Love


What choices are to be made when it comes to sex and marriage?


Although not strictly necessary, these days, partnering up has been a popular way of life since forever. But there always remains the question of who is, or 'are' even, suitable. Often we fall in love, and that decides it, but for very many of those relationships at least one of the people involved should have run a mile. So how do we decide whether to 'cut and run', or to stick it out for the long haul?


What is all the weird stuff about?


Religion, parapsychology, all the things that skeptics call woo; might these too be inquired about? Largely they are left to individuals to decide as matters of belief, which is to say that we tend to treat them as matters of opinion, and leave it at that.


Without wishing to upset anyone, I would claim that we can draw much better conclusions about questions such as; does God exist ? Is ESP a true phenomenon ? etc. By having a coherent and complete theory that explains all the things that we can know about, then we can have a much firmer basis on which to draw significantly better conclusions about the things that are otherwise impossible to be sure of.


A firm basis, i.e. one that explains all of Existence, must necessarily provide parameters that define what is possible within that Existence, and therefore whether the woo phenomena may be actual, or not. So I think it reasonable to extend the questions to include 'What is all the weird stuff about?'


Astrology - How?


Of all the weird things in life, I reckon that Astrology incurs the most opposition from the sceptically inclined. Why so ? Because Astrology borders on the mathematical, scientific, and philosophical, while retaining a lot of arcane, mysterious practices. Hence there is plenty of scope for argument over the rights and wrongs of the matter. It is a wide topic, but above all, the materialists demand an explanatory mechanism, arguing that the midwife has a greater gravitational effect upon the baby, than does any distant planet. Despite the fact that the Sun and Earth combined conspire to keep both baby and midwife on an epicyclic eliptical path through space [not that gravity has anything to do with Astrology, except to keep the planets on course], it remains for a proper explanation to be provided - if the doubting Thomases are to be brought on board.


Astrology - Fate or Destiny?


If Astrology is a true thing, then what sort of a thing is it ? Does it compel our lives entirely, does it just influence them gently? In short, does it operate as unavoidable fate, or alternatively as a destiny that asks to be fulfilled, but which is by no means certain?


(External Website) Answers to questions about Astrology


In Summary


So there you have it, a brief rundown of all the Big Questions about life and what it is for. Doubtless, I will have omitted some questions that could have been asked, but I also think that I can't ask every question. Also, given that I reckon this to be a pretty good theory about Existence, I naturally believe that any other questions, such as may occur to you, will gain some kind of automatic answer from Virtualism, without my having to catalogue every last one.



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