It is only by restricting consideration to finite time sequence patterns that eventism is able to define the quantum of energy. Our system of temporal succession is extensive and monotonous enough to run experiments in finite time intervals. This has yielded some understanding of physical action that covers the spectrum from the high frequency activity of quark cycles to the low frequency activity of planetary orbit patterns. Thus the experimental method is anchored in the here-and-now, with the runtime of any experiment being finite. Theoretical speculation extends to the cosmic time scale in Archimedian fashion, speculating on ever further reaches of temporal extent. Scientific theory overreaches if it passes the threshold of what can be verified in the here-and-now. That verifiability is the empirical mandate laid upon scientific speculations. Finite eventism is also built up, conceptually, in the Archimedean mode of extension: anchored at the here-and-now, extending backward to the past, forward to the future, and by combinations of forward and backward, to our contemporaries "out in space." "Extension" here is not spatial or geometric; it is only concatenated steps of time sequence, these steps being quanta. The stepping action of time advances: from our causal history; to the here-and-now; and on to whatever causal future might lie ahead of us. This notion of pure temporal concatenation satisfies relativity and quantum theory at the outset. The theory cannot pass judgment on the very reasonable question of whether or not there are one or more beginning moments to our system of temporal succession (moments without predecessors,) and likewise for the question of final moments (moments without successors.) These questions are beyond the reach of experiment or confirmation, as far as I can understand. If I am correct, our questions about the beginning or end of time cannot be decided by the scientific method. Confined therefore, to non-experimental hunches, we might eventually converge to some opinion on these matters based upon meta-physics and analogies, once we settle upon a trustworthy, coherent solution to theoretical physics.

Here are links to my other key papers online:

 

Putting the Homunculi to Work
   Remember when brain science discovered homunculi on the surface of the cortex?  These humanoid shapes appeared in our textbooks in school.  If you recall, there is one homunculus for tactile sensation and another for motor control.  The topology of the human body is preserved in these shapes, but geometric distortions of the "little man" give him the appearance of a malformed fetus.  The homunculi seem to be largely forgotten, but they are important to the mind-body problem.  This paper will explain why.
   First I will explain why their importance has been discounted.  The homunculi appeal immediately to students, because they are findings of brain science that everyone can relate to.  The shape of the body is replicated in miniature, with distortions, on the surface of the cortex.  You can stimulate the motor homunculus with a probe and get the corresponding part of the body to twitch into action, like operating a puppet.  You can stimulate the sensory homunculus to shortcut the more remote stimulus that is normally needed on the surface of the body to achieve the same sensation.  Thus the homunculi are like "voodoo dolls," except that there are known pathways connecting these "voodoo dolls" with the muscles and sense receptors spread throughout the human body.  The notion of a "little man" in the "cockpit of the brain" who is running the show, like a "mind" controlling a body, is considered highly misleading by both brain scientists and philosophers.  Therefore a concerted effort is maintained to prevent any interpretation of this sort.  The important thing has been to keep students from jumping to the wrong conclusions about the homunculi until they are well-versed in the physicalistic concept of brain function and bodily behavior.  At that point, they will be well immunized against the idea that there is any mental agent at work in the brain.  The focus, then, has been on combating a wrong interpretation, rather than making any positive use of the discovery of the homunculi.
   Now I shall put the homunculi to use.  In the physicalistic conception of the brain, there is no phenomenology of sensory experience involved.  The defining concept is the Newtonian one of matter or energy distributed in a spatially extended region bounded by the cranium.  On the other hand, the phenomenology of sensory experience is a rich field of study in itself, isolated from the physicalistic concepts of brain science.  This is the "hard part" of the mind-body problem.  The two "speak to one another across the divide" when a psycho-physical experiment is conducted.  Here the subject reports sensory experience while the scientist probes the subject's brain.  A well-known correlation is then confirmed, such that phenomena of mental experience occur concomitantly with scientific probing on the cortex.  This is how the homunculi were discovered and mapped out.  It is best at this point to adopt Descartes' dualism, as a provisional tactic, in order to conceive the two distinct types of data involved in the psycho-physical correlations.  One type of data is qualitative, including colors or pains for example, while the other is purely structural and quantitative.  I shall use Russell's term, "mental event," for the state of mind of the subject who is reporting the experience of qualitative sensory data.
   The significance of the homunculi is obscured if we confine attention to tactile sensation.  The eye is part of the body too, and patterns on the retina are likewise reproduced on the "visual projection area" of the cortex.  This reproduction of structure is usefully conceived as another homunculus.  Auditory experience has its own homunculus on the cortex also.  A mental event typically involves all these homunculi at once.  Let us focus on visual experience and its physicalistic correlate, the patch of cortex called the "primary visual projection area."  In phenomenal vision, we have a spatially extended field of colored patches.  In the corresponding brain science, we have no color of any sort, and we have space-time instead of pure spatial extension.  These distinctions are useful in keeping track of what belongs to the mental events of the subject, and what belongs to the physical structure of the brain.
   A colorful visual field is part of a human mental event.  Its inherent structure, including geometrical features, is a "given" to the subject of that experience.  We can judge with remarkable precision the size and shape of colored patches given in our visual experience.  A well verified example is the extraordinary precision by which we can judge a rectangle to have height-width proportions of the "golden mean."  This is pure phenomenology.  The ancients could judge with the same accuracy.  It owes nothing to science.  It is a type of measurement that involves no physicalistic conceptions or assumptions.
   The visual projection area is defined with a physicalistic metric.  This metric is based in physics, which has consolidated its unit to the "space-time interval."  Here, space and time are measured in the same units.  The space-like unit is obtained from the unit of time by using scale factor "c," the speed of light.  The cortical surface, considered as a region of space-time, is a set of contemporary events with space-like separation that form a bounded region of 2-dimensional surface.  This "homunculus" on the occipital lobe is what correlates to the colorful visual field that we experience.  This is where we find a congruence between the phenomenological and the physical, a congruence between mind and brain.  It is a congruence between two very different types of structure, and it relates the unit of measure in physics to the size of colored patches that we can judge by immediate acquaintance.  Thus it is useful to understand this congruence for an epistemological account of physical measure, which requires sentient mental events in the laboratory, and sensory data that is phenomenally given to them.
   Let us suppose the visual projection area of the cortex to be roughly circular and one inch in diameter.  That area of cortex is congruent to the whole of the visual field as given in the experience of the sentient observer.  Half an inch then corresponds to half the span of the whole visual field.  Such strict linearity may not actually obtain, but departures from linearity are just as easy to map out in the course of psychophysical studies as the rough linearity itself.  I expect linearity is best in the central focal region.  Thus we relate experienced size in the visual field to size-in-inches on the corresponding patch of cortical surface.  The physical unit of one inch is about a tenth of a nanosecond in light travel time, so our basic unit of physical measurement, the second, is related to phenomenal size judgment of the experienced visual field.
   Let's go back to the more recognizable homunculus-- the tactile homunculus for the sense receptors spread out on the skin.  I recall an oversize thumb and hand on this homunculus, correlating with a relative abundance of touch receptors on our hands.  Thus we have large distortions that produce the fetus-like appearance of that homunculus.  Nevertheless, the distortions are finite and the overall topology is recognizable as a "little man."  Judgments as to the portion of the body spanned by two simultaneously felt locations on the body-as-felt will correlate in a continuous manner with the correlated span on the cortical homunculus.  Thus we have another sensory mode with its own inherent metrical features, and another homuncular region with which to correlate it.  Ordinarily, we use the tactile mode in conjunction with the visual mode to improve our intrinsic judgments of size and shape.
   Now let us face the fact that the sort of congruence we have been talking about is rather special.  It is not the congruence of one physical body to another, as when two lovers are "spooning" in bed.  And it is not the sort of congruence that two phenomenal triangles might have to one another in the visual field.  It is a congruence between phenomenal entities and physical entities, which belong, respectively, to two distinct and incommensurable domains.  How then do we make this congruence intelligible?  The key is to grasp that the physical metric of "space-time interval" is purely theoretical.  It is just as theoretical as Special Relativity itself.  It is not perceivable at all.  The other metric we described-- the phenomenal metrics-- are of the perceivable sort.  When we link the two disparate types of measure together, we are linking an unperceivable metric to a perceivable one.  We cannot expand the domain of the perceivable by this trick of linking the theoretical to the phenomenal.  The link that we are forming must itself be as weak as the unperceivable domain it is blindly "reaching out to."  That is, the sort of congruence that we can establish is itself a theoretical postulate.  In being "postulational," it is just like theoretical physics itself.  But the new postulate does not belong to the theory of physics.  It is a postulate of psychophysics, which connects physics to the qualitative domain of sentient experience.
   In Russell's account of mental events and the brain, a mental event has physical location by being sandwiched between its immediate causes and its immediate effects.  That is, for Russell, all location is causal location.  If the immediate causes and effects of a mental event are themselves brain events, then by virtue of that fact alone, the mental event is "in the brain."  This meaning of space-time location is purely theoretical, and the brain as a structure of brain events is part of this theoretical construction, so the brain is not something one can perceive.  The visual field, as part of a mental event, has the "visual homunculus" on the occipital lobe as its set of immediate causal predecessors.  The phenomenal body-- the body-as-felt-- is another part of the mental event, and it has the tactile homunculus as the set of its immediate causal predecessors.  These cortical regions serve to "sandwich" the mental event to a determinate location.  Because a single mental event typically includes all sensory modes in unison, its location must be spread across the cortex to "touch" all the various sensory homunculi at once.  The causal efficacy of mental intentions to act and move the body must "touch" the motor homunculus.  This "touching" is just causal contiguity, meaning that nothing intervenes between the mental event and its immediate causal predecessors and successors.  This is a Russellian account of the sort of congruence-to-the-homunculi that this paper is about.
   Notice how different all this is compared to what Russell calls "naive realism."  In that view, colors, for example, are congruent with physical objects outside the human head, "painted" directly onto the physical objects.  This is still a widespread notion, and a difficult one to shake.  Ordinary language reinforces this habit of the imagination, even though it is incompatible with physics and the causal account of the sensory organs and brain.  All in all, one cannot understand Russell and Whitehead's elimination of spatial relations from physics-- "eventism"-- until one grasps the purely phenomenal nature of the various kinds of spaces that we can perceive, and the purely un-phenomenal nature of space-time, which is constructed by systematic conjecture.
   Notice also the confusion that prevails in contemporary discussions of "the measurement problem" of quantum theory.  The theoretical physicists are stupid about the mind-body problem.  They have no understanding of the divide between phenomenology and physical theory.  They assume that physics, at some level or other, is about observable entities, and they are searching for this level with no intention of resorting to mental events in the brain to provide such observables.  It is a case of unacknowledged naive realism.

Recent Emails (Carey Carlson, June 2006)

(This discusses how charge quanta, drawn as horizontals, are distributed in the 4-D time lattice, and it also identifies the vertically drawn quanta as quanta of "forward momentum."  Some interesting formulas are given that pertain to the 4-D lattice.  First of all, I try to convey why this simple theory of everything for physics must be true-- why the economical derivation of Bohr's formula cannot be an accident.)

 

Thank you, Louis!  You are really picking up the ball and carrying it, and "teaching me back."

   That JPEG looks just fine.  You've got the scaling just right.  And I like your use of the phrase "into phase."  This theory is pure time, so "into phase" is a good example of the type of terminology that will survive intact in physics, while much else will wither away.

   What I learned about Balmer and Bohr came out of Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia.  Balmer came first, fitting a formula to the 4 prominent lines then known for spectral absorption/emission by hydrogen.  Wavelengths in angstoms were known for those 4 lines, and Balmer noticed the "spacing pattern" of those 4 values, and formulated those proportionalities in small whole numbers.  Afterwards, with more wavelength data available for other atoms besides hydrogen, it became apparent that each atom had its own "fingerprint" of spectral emission wavelengths, just as hydrogen does.  Rydberg was involved somehow, I forget.  In any case, Balmer's formula for hydrogen was neatly expanded by use of a second integer index, so that the "Balmer series" for hydrogen was just the simplest case, and by incrementing the second index by one, and then letting the original index count, the known series of lines for helium was matched.  Likewise, the series for lithium, beryllium, and so on-- the prominent series found experimentally by spectroscopy measurement for each atom in the periodic table was matched by the "double-index" formula, and this more powerful formula got named for Bohr.  The neat part of the formula, the part with simple ratios of small whole numbers squared, left an "ugly part," which is a constant of proportionality that is multiplied by the value of the "nice part" of the formula to give the right values in angstroms that match the wavelengths in that unit of measure.  Bohr named this multiplying constant, or scale factor, "the Rydberg constant."  It is basically "the radius of an electron" in angstroms, or as Bohr conceived it, the radius of his smallest inner orbit.  It is the measure in angstroms of the "unit of scale" of electronic structure of the atomic clouds (in my own very general terms.)

   Because the angstrom is an arbitrary unit, based on meters and seconds-- both arbitrary units-- I see the Rydberg constant as an arbitrary value also: the compensating scale factor used to match up to the arbitrary angstrom wavelength units.  But the "nice part" of Bohr's formula is not arbitrary.  Its "niceness" in small whole numbers reflects the simple discrete composition of the electron clouds that produce the spectral data.  We have our "cue" therefore as to what our non-arbitrary unit of spacetime ought to be:  we should make the Rydberg constant equal to 1.  The consequence would be to make the main spectral line series of all the atoms come out with their measure in terms of small whole numbers, which CANNOT BE AN ACCIDENT.  (I emphasize that.)

   Bohr built his theory around his "Bohr's formula."  His theory was semi-classical, with orbits for pointlike charges called "electrons" with momentum, spin, and all the rest.  Working all those primitive concepts into a "quantized version," he gave a breakdown of his "Rydberg constant" into factors that involves c, h, e, and m (along with 2 x pi-squared, for "dimensionality purposes.")  That's speed of light, Planck's constant, charge of electron, mass of electron.  But these latter all go to 1 individually on my theory, so the Rydberg constant does also.

   No, I don't know of a web resource for spectral data, but as you say, that would be a crucial resource, and I would think it's available.

   Now, on to fine structure.  This is where you are really stimulating me and teaching me, with what you've said about it.  I have a question for you.  If the real number 137.036 (or its inverse) has come about by taking into account the "fine splitting" of the "coarse lines" that fit Bohr's formula perfectly, does that mean that, previously in time, when the spectroscopy data was not as precise, there was a role for the integer 137 involved in the "coarse lines"?  Or not?  I would be most interested to know that, so I could think better about what you suggest: that the "arrow theory" might be capable of explaining the "fine splitting" that "muddies" the Bohr formula encapsulation of spectral lines.

   I've sent my Topological Derivation PDF to quite a few physicists, and usually got no reply.  But I did get one from a Mr. Ketterle who shared the Nobel prize a few years ago for confirming a low-temperature form of "condensed matter."  He granted that my derivation provides a simple alternative to Bohr's model, but he was dubious about the prospects for further elaboration.  I tried to keep him on the line with a short reply, tying my theory to Rafael Sorkin's "causal sets" (which is the very same theory in its formal basis) and Sorkin's use of the theory to calculate the Gravitational Constant and Hawking radiation from Black Holes.  And I attached my "Adequacy" paper.  But I never heard back from him again.  Anyway, people are naturally blind, it seems, to the possibilities of further elaboration of "the arrow theory," let's call it.  But remember, all the diagrams in the JPEG you just sent me are "stripped down" to the minimum number of arrows that will form a 4-D lattice.  The "charge quanta" are left out of all these electron clouds, because I haven't figured out which ones to draw in.  Then there are all the "vertical arrow possibilities," which I've only drawn in for the helium cycle (drawing all of them in that case) to arrive at the diagram which has 137 arrows.  But the Topological PDF employs no charge quanta and no "verticals."  Likewise, your latest JPEG has no charge quanta and no verticals.  And there are many other arrow possibilities omitted besides the ones from those two categories.  So yes, there are many promising ways to explore further elaboration of the arrow theory.  I think I need to understand first how the integer 137 was originally considered important to the constitution of the atom, and whether the shift from integer value to real value (137.036) goes along with the shift from coarse, Bohr-formula lines to the higher precision observations of "split lines."  That might steer me toward an explanation of that shift via the as yet unexplored elaboration of arrow diagrams beyond the basic frameworks of arrows that produce 4-D lattice patterns.

   Great work, Louis.  Talk to you soon!  -- Carey

 

Hi Louis,

   Are you still there?  I haven't heard from you for a while.  I'm buoyed lately by the thought that the account of the fine structure constant as given in my TOE booklet is indeed the genuine article.  As you pointed me to good summaries on the internet concerning the fundamental constants and the fine structure constant in particular, I find the comments about the "permutivity" of empty space to be highly encourgaing.  I had previously encountered this notion in my reading about Robert Moon's geometric models of the atom, but I could make nothing of it at the time.  Also, Feynman's QED had talked about the FSC (fine structure constant) as the "coupling constant" in the exchange of photons by electrons.  I can't say precisely how it all works out, but it suddenly seems apparent to me that the manner in which 137 arrows form the diagram on pages 24-25 is at the confluence of all 3 major employments of the FSC (the spectral lines, impedance/conductance of empty space, and coupling constant for electrons.)  The last two may be redundant for all I know, so weak is my technical grasp.  But here's what led me to my latest encouragement:

   I copied you on something I'd written up about the missing charge quanta in all my diagrams, and how such "neutered-of-charge" diagrams actually depict formations of neutrino cycles which constitute the fabric of space-time itself.  It is a fabric occupied by two prominent types of quanta: 1) the charge quanta (horizontal arrows;) and 2) the "vertical" quanta (perhaps "quanta of momentum" will turn out to be an appropriate physical name for the "verticals.")  The laws of electromagnetism describe the shifting distribution, over time, of charge in space.  The "shifting over time" is redundant when speaking in terms of "space-time," so the laws of QED describe the distribution of charge in spacetime.  This description is readily formulated, as a general conception in my theory, as the distribution of horizontal arrows in the 4-D neutrino lattice.  The laws of electromagnetism are, in my theory, the patterns of horizontal arrows that occupy the neutrino lattice.  (The lattice "framework" has its own patterns of regularities and irregularities, so it's not a "homogenous backdrop" differentiated solely by the uneven occupancy of charge quanta.)  I expressed this earlier as "The lattice is a playground for patterns of charge quanta."  Now when I think, just intuitively, about "impedance to the flow of charge," I think of arrow pathways in my lattice.  The lattice has its own propagating pattern tendencies, providing nodes for passing photons which are "carrying the EM force."  Photons, lattice quanta, charge quanta, and "quanta of momenta" are all just quanta-- all just "arrows" in differing arrangements.  Basically, "how charge moves" has to do with the structure of the lattice and its "occupancy rate."  A "helium cycle," as on page 24, can host 59 verticals max, as on page 25.  We can also define "holes in the lattice" without difficulty, and such a hole constitutes "empty space."  Looking at pages 24 and 25 then, as 137 contingent possibilities, ranging from zero arrows at a minimum to 137 arrows maximum, we imagine that a free radiant photon can encounter anything from empty space to a region full of momenta (plus whatever charge quanta the region can hold.)  Vague though it all is, it is no great stretch for me to believe that the progress of radiant photons is impeded by the "fullness" of the 4-D lattice it encounters, and that calculations of that fullness might be based on the small basic region of the lattice shown on page 24.

   I know it's vague, and I wouldn't divulge these thoughts to most people, but since you have a pretty good feel for what I'm all about, I thought I'd try it out on you.  Consider the prevailing way of talking: "Empty space has its own permittivity value."  Does anyone else detect a touch of the bizarre in that?

   Hope to hear from you soon.  -- Carey

 

Hi Mike,

   Thanks for the answers, but next time show your work.

   No, I'm half joking about that.  I'm thinking a bit, but preoccupied now about my upcoming trip to Salzburg.  I thought of something that's not in the booklet, that I might not have mentioned to you yet.  The "electron cycle" of 10 arrows, from the TOE booklet, is actually a "neutrino cycle."  It is the "little neutral one."  Its neutrality is due to the bi-lateral symmetry about its major axis.  For this "structure of 6 individuals," up to 5 more arrows could connect various nodes until this 6-node structure is "full."  Three of these are the "verticals," and the other two are the "horizontals."  (These classifications arise purely from the time ordering alone, and correlate to handy geometric features because of various drawing conventions that I freely chose.)  The three verticals, then, can go into the neutral cycle to yield a different diagram.  One of these is the major axis itself, right up the middle-- a nice opportunity for a quantum.  That preserves the bi-lateral symmetry of the little neutral one.  But without asserting some law for it, a neutrino cycle can include a major axis or exclude it.  It still holds together as a cycle, with first point and last point, and there will still be a definable bi-lateral symmetry to the neutrino cycle whether an arrow connects first-to-last or not.  I treat any arrow like that-- its presence versus its absence in a given connected set of nodes defines two distinct diagrams.  Each arrow is optional when surveying all the possiblities allowed by chronology protection for an ordering of N individuals (N=6 in the case of the neutrino/electron family under discussion.)  But I'm not always content to rummage through all possibilities starting at N=1, 2, 3, etcetera.  I start venturing some "preferences" in formation of diagrams, which amount to proposed "laws," assuming I like what I find.  I formed an early preference for the "closed diagram," or closed structure, defined by having exactly one earliest moment and one latest.  I also got a preference for symmetry, and the two combine in the symmetrical closed structure, of which the 10-arrow neutrino cycle is my favorite.  It can "take" 3 verticals, one being the major axis quantum itself; the other two could appear together, reinforcing the bi-lateral symmetry.  Finally we come to the two horizontal quantum possibilities.  These are relatively interesting.  Either or both, if present, will BREAK the bi-lateral symmetry.  Know anything about quantum states for charge?  I don't, is why I ask.  These horizontals are the "charge quanta," the basis for electromagnetic charge.  Without either of these quanta, we've got a neutered electron cycle.  And that is precisely what constitutes a neutrino.  A skein of neutrino cycles is actually spacetime itself.  The skein can have holes in it-- missing cycles.  The cycles are real.  There can be whole cycles missing from the interior of a region, defining a hole of nothing.  The skein of neutrino cycles has a lot of options for the charge quanta it can hold.  The distribution of actual charge quanta make highly regular patterns, manifesting the laws of electromagnetism.  One highly regular pattern formation is the electron cloud pattern of an isolated hydrogen atom, persisting in time by chained repetition of its characteristic time sequence.  The proton is also a closed time cycle, composed of subcycles called "quarks."  I don't have the schematic of the proton or its quarks yet, but a certain amount of electronic behavior can be determined without that knowledge.  The distribution pattern(s) of charge quanta in the standard hydrogen cloud, over one or more of its cycles, is no doubt such as to afford some counter-symmetry by turning the inherent asymmetry of single charge quanta against one another to exact some compensation in the way of overall symmetry.  Stability of a particle or physical pattern is, to me, the clue that such a pattern is a chained repetition of highly symmetrical closed cycles.  "Collision" consists of one or more isolated patterns reaching the end of their isolation.  This is perturbation, and relative simplicity is suddenly turned to relative complexity.  I have only "waded among simplicities," which is why I've barely reached any "perturbative behavior" in my diagrams.  I'm not equipped to dive into the complexities myself, but I would encourage those who are, by pointing out that time patterns provide a domain as fertile as arithmetic-- each is based on a successor relation.

   The Topological Derivation indicates a progression of electron cloud patterns that are entirely denuded of any charge quanta.  It is interesting that the Derivation can achieve what it does in ignorance of the charge quanta.  But without any charge quanta, we have only "neutrino clouds."  I have also, by necessity, ignored the nuclei.  A nucleus will have counter-symmetry relation(s) to its characteristic counterpart electron cloud, achieving a pleasing neutrality (bi-lateral symmetry) in combination.  That combination consists in synchrony of their distinct characteristic cycles, sharing nodes at regular intervals.  Together they form one integrated time sequence cycle in a chained repetition, just like a fundamental particle.

   The reason I'm going into all this for you is that you seemed truly interested in my "electron cycle," so I thought, if you're thinking about it, you should know what I think about the "charge quanta" as described above.

 

(one more page to follow…)

 

   More generally, my clouds have a major axis and a fleet of arrows parallel to the major axis, which constitutes the “axis of proper time” inherent in the closed cycle.  It is the most numerous set of parallels the cycle affords.  I think of this subset of quanta—the “verticals”—as the “momentum component” of the cycle.  See pp 24-25 of the TOE booklet for a diagram of the helium cycle with all its verticals included.

   Let “cloud index N” be “1” for the free electron, “2” for the hydrogen cloud, “3” for the helium cloud, etc.  Louis Gidney came up with this formula for the total number of “lattice arrows” per cloud index N:

 

lattice-arrows = (8 x N x N) + 2N

 

Thus for N=3 we get 78, the number of lattice arrows in the helium cloud cycle as shown on page 24 of the TOE booklet.

 

I came up with this formula for max number of “verticals” per cloud index N:

 

Let “S” be the sum of the first N squares.

max verticals = (4 x S) + (N x N) – 2N

 

For N=1, a single hex cycle, we get 4 x (1) + 1 – 2 = 3, which is correct.  For N=2, we get 4 x (1+4) + 4 – 4 = 20, which is correct for the hydrogen cloud cycle.  For N=3, helium, we get 4 x (1+4+9) + (3 x 3) - (2 x 3) = 59, which agrees with the number of arrows on page 25 of the TOE booklet.

 

With two good formulas now, we can add the number of lattice arrows and the number of verticals for a given N.  Thus for helium, lattice arrows plus verticals = 78 + 59 = 137.

   It's fun to have the sum of squares in the formula.  I don't know how to express the sum of squares up to N-squared as an arithmetical function of N, or whether it is even possible, but working at it, I did come up with this: as N becomes large, the whole formula for number-of-verticals approaches (4/3) x N-cubed.  We already know that the number of hex cycles for any cloud is N-squared, so the ratio of verticals to hex cycles approaches (4/3)N as N grows large.  Number of hex cycles defines the "volume of a cloud."  So the total number of "verticals," or "on-axis quanta," per unit volume, approaches (4/3)N.  Could be useful.

=====================================

   Well, that gives you a pretty good idea of how I interpret my diagrams as reconstructions of various traditional physical concepts.  In case it's of any use to you.  I think it helps me, at least, just to put it into words once in a while.  -- Carey

 

Human Sentience at 10 Hertz

Carey R. Carlson

 

(This is past email correspondence, circa 2005, to my friend Mark, regarding the causal setting of human sentient events, as quantum events amidst others composing the human brain.  The importance of repetitive chains of structured cycles, evident in my Theory of Everything for physics, is applied to a speculative account of “the human cycle” as a component of the quantum make-up of the human brain.)

 

Hi Mark!

   I get the feeling, first of all, that you have grasped a good bit of my whole deal-- that is, both my books.  There is a "philosophy of mathematics" involved, which comes down to "relations."  And these Relations (I'll capitalize to indicate "relation" as a "technical term," narrowed from its looser common usage) are ontological entities, not just logical conventions.  Relations-versus-Relata is the "first distinction" that must be drawn in order for thought to proceed in a coherent manner.  Without it, nothing intelligible can really be said, only "speaking in an unknown tongue."  But with it, per Russell, you get a consistent language for expressing all things mathematical, as well as a general purpose system of notation for consistent description of the actual world.  Using "word as label," each notational element can have a referent, and the notation of physics can have its referents in the real world.  In my TOE, there are two species of referent, one relation and the other relatum, and these compose primitive (or "atomic") facts, such as "a1 succeeds a2."  And all the primitive facts are indistinguishable in the physics, except for unique labeling of the  individuals referenced in the primitive statements.  "Labeling," in physics as opposed to phenomenology, involves no perceivable referent, so we come to understand that all labeling is accomplished purely by the conception of relative location in a pattern-- patterns being the only things that one can profitably make hypotheses about.  This is so because only patterns (structures) can be simple-vs-complex, and the latter is the only criterion of comparison for judging a given explanation to be better than a random alternative.

   Because the theory seems to work, I believe ever more strongly that scientific knowledge arrives at various time sequence patterns and nothing else.  Learning the structure is one thing, and distinct from that is the matter of comprehending the two structurally primitive elements which compose, by repetition, the entire structure.  Science has no expertise in this second matter. Thus it is appropriate that a scientific theory show you mathematical notation and nothing else.  Its findings are that constricted.  It is left to the sentient being to make whatever sense he can of the primitives, to conceive the paradigm "primitive fact" that is responsible, through its many instances, for the entire physical world.  All that anyone has available to draw upon, in forming such a conception, is his own sentient state of mind.

   So far so good.  I keep rehashing a summary in order to become more clear myself.  It's past time I confessed the following: that I talk, even to myself, as though I know more than I do, in hopes I'll expound "over my head" and glean something by hearing myself say it.  The "intelligence" of language itself may be responsible for the benefit that I imagine.  But that's just a device.  You said I might understand more clearly than you about the "derivation" of the visual field from its causal ancestors.  And I might not.  Let's assume not.  That's closer to the truth, I suspect.  Take what I say in the spirit of mutual inquiry.  I was trying to get at an answer to your question.  I've reread my answer and what's there ain't bad (I think) but it only "chips away" at the matter from certain perspectives I take.  At this point, we may do just as well to work on the phrasing of the question, as to work on formulating an answer:  "How is the spatial structure of the phenomenal visual field inherited (if it is) from those many quantum events at the surface of the visual cortex that normally influence the moment-to-moment details of the spatially-structured phenomenal field-of-view?"

   I was careless in saying "there is absolutely nothing in my theory of physics with which to identify something that is irreducibly spatial."  In reference to the "identity theory" that we share, I believe that what I said is true, in that the sensory visual field incorporates instantaneous spatial relations, while space-time does not.  But space-time does include plenty of sets whose members are all mutually contemporary.  Let's call such sets "acausal sets."  And since "spatial contiguity" is definable, there are spatially contiguous acausal sets.  These latter sets can form spatial lines and surfaces.  A spatial line that I see in my visual field is normally taken to be a "perception" of an acausal spacelike line in space-time.  That works well for us in practical situations, due to the great stability of "spatial forms" (very repetitive structure of time sequence) prevailing in our environment.  If the acausal spacelike line were instantaneous, we might consider identifying the perceptible line, which is instantaneous, with the spacelike line of events in space-time.  But since that is not the case, the phenomenal line must be conceived along the lines of a "word" or "label," with the spacelike line being its intended referent.  The percept-line has linearity of structure, in terms of its own native ordering relations, and so does the spacelike line, in terms of its ordering relation: before-and-after.  The two types of relations, spatial for percept-line and temporal for spacetime line, are unlike one another.  Only bare Relational Structure makes the percept anything more than a dumb nametag for that acausal line which is thought to be beyond the human head and "in the line of sight," in accord with the causal theory of perception. The representation succeeds in certain ways that can be explained without implying any mutual instantaneity of the events composing the space-time line.

   So, let's be clear in terms of whole (or complex), structure (bare Relational structure), relation(s), and individuals (relata).  I have the visual line, the "percept-line," as a structural feature of a basically planar visual field, this field being a whole with colored patches as individuals, these latter ordered among themselves by 2D spatial arrangement.  In this analysis, the visual line is not strictly an individual, but a sub-structure of the visual field made out of dots let's say.  Other issues here for me, but "insulated" from the overall soundness of the scheme, I would say.  That is, I'm thinking that shape, or shapes, are phenomenologically primitive, and given a few basic shapes, their overlap relations compose further shapes, tiny dots, and so on.  Maybe this IS germaine to our main problem.  What meaning does "shape" have within the pure topology of time sequence?  Is the formula for a circle in 2-D Cartesian coordinates, “x2 + y2 = r2,” round?  No, the formula is not round or circular.  It's all about the arithmetic of numbers, isn't it?  There's nothing round or circular in that, is there?  Likewise for pure time sequence, I would say.  In a strong sense, whatever "shape" there may be to a physical object is “shape” that we have bestowed upon it by use of our imagination.  That's what comes of penetrating, phenomenologically, to the core meaning of "shape."  The common-sense use of the word, by which the physical table is "round," is actually a metaphorical usage.  Numbers tell the whole story of the physical table, integers in fact.  Our sentience includes a visual field, and this is the only home to "shape."  (Ignoring tactile sense, etc.)  This visual field, and its shapes, become causal signifiers in our embedded interaction with the rest of the world.  "Shape" becomes a "medium of exchange" for us in our thought and language in dealing with physical objects and physical theory, so "shape" has worked its way in and seems an integral part of the world in its physicality.  But it's not.  Geometric shape, in its essence, is only to be found within the individual moment, or monad, of the causal scheme.  Of what use is this though?  It could just be picky and trivial.  But now we could say that shape, as well as color, are contributions to the universe from the purely phenomenal realm.  Neither can be attributed to the structural patterns of time sequence.  They are elements "locked within" the privacy of individuals, that sort of privacy which is secure from the blind probings of the scientific method.

  Now, the problem we're working on is:

 

How does the phenomenal line arise in experience in such a way as to represent a space-like line on the surface of the visual cortex?  (Because then, in turn, the phenomenal line could just as easily represent a space-like line on the retinal surface, and just as easily a space-like line at the external focal plane of the eye, all due to repetition of structure along the route of the causal theory of perception.  The usual intended “referent” of the phenomenal line in everyday experience is the space-like line out beyond the head at an external focal plane of the eye.  But we’re more interested in the space-like line of events at the surface of the visual cortex, because we already have a decent grasp of the general scientific account of physical-to-physical causal chains getting to projection areas at the surface of the brain.  Here, I take the “brainwaves” as a narrowed class of events in which to find our own phenomenological sentient moments.  In alpha rhythm, a ten-per-second frequency is dominant, and so there must be abundant quanta of the tonic frequency, quanta of 10/sec individual energy.  Apart from some kind of “synchronous fusion” of many quanta into one (like coherent light of a laser) I don’t see how to identify the human I-now with anything but a node in a complex “human cycle,” itself of period 10/sec, provisionally identified as a time sequence cycle, closed and repetitious.  The node is not a quantum.  The node is a relatum and the quantum a pairing relation.  At the time I wrote the mind-body book, I presumed to identify the sentient moment as a quantum of energy, which was a confusion.  At least, I’ve changed my mind.  Quanta only “count up right” when they are identified with the arrows (the pairings, the Relation), not if they are identified with the nodes (the individuals, the Relata.)  I wasn’t clear about that when I wrote the book.  I thought of the arrows and their junctions as being somewhat interchangeable.  That’s risky.  Next, I find a choice between identifying the I-Now as an individual moment or alternatively, as a transition—an arrow.  The individuals are so “bare” in the physical theory that one starts to ignore them, in favor of the relations which provide all the structure.  Currently, I like the idea of “the human cycle,” which is a closed time sequence in chained repetition, like an electron or a helium atom, a discriminable periodicity of quantum structure in the brain, part of the electronic interactions there, with an overall period of 1/10 second, with component quanta of the cycle having perhaps an order of magnitude shorter duration (higher energy.)  The “major axis quantum” of this diagram (time cycle) is its least energetic quantum.  I’m prone to identify this one as the “dominant human inheritance,” to borrow from Whitehead.  Thus an arrow indicates an instance of inheritance, from one individual to another, and “the human moment” is identified with the key node of a cycle (the first/last node in the recurring pattern over time.)  That is, the human moment is, logically, an individual rather than an instance of Relation.  The basic “re-creation” of “the same person” from moment to moment (from tenth of a second to tenth of a second) is thereby identified as a direct “me-to-me inheritance” identified with the major axis quantum, which directly connects key node to next key node in the human cycle.  That’s neat.  Probably way too neat, as I’m speculating way out on a limb at this point.  But for now, as this ad hoc Word doc (which outgrew Notepad) is all out of order due to random day-by-day insertion sessions, let’s go with that hypothetical template of “the human cycle.”  One nice thing about it, it hews as close as possible (without abondoning discreteness of time) to the self-evident continuity/persistence/endurance of the human stream of consciousness.  That is, it does as much justice as is possible under the assumption of discrete time succession, to the introspective smoothness of experience in time.  The serial chain of human moments connected by links of direct reproductive inheritance constitutes the intrinsic human sentient experience over time.  The breakdown into node-vs-quantum, or moment-vs-transition, and the subsequent interpretation of the required logical categories, Relation/Relatum, to be paired with human real-world constituents—phenomenal and phenomenological (and perhaps unknown and conjectural besides, but believed-in nevertheless)—this breakdown seems much more hazy and difficult to pin down.  We might just think of the alternating chain of human moment, direct inheritance, human moment, etc, as “two phases of an alternation” and leave it at that.  The identity theory, quantum theory, and relational logic, taken together, call for some such “phasic” constitution to experience, though we don’t corroborate this in our direct phenomenology.  We don’t, do we?  Time seems to flow perfectly smooth, right?

 

Straight lines of events beyond the human head bring about straight lines of events at the surface of the cortex according to the causal theory of perception, and the whole route is "strung out" in time sequence.  If I don't "cheat" in my reasoning, and if I rely on the "closed structure" (which is my first instinct) to provide a stable repetitive template of roughly 10-per-second sequence at which human sentient moments assume a structurally key ordinal position, namely, at the first/last locations of an iterated closed pattern, then my usual "round of existence" is captured in one cycle, and all my normal inheritance is to be found in that one cycle.  A direct arrow from "bottom-to-top" (a "major axis" arrow) is always a possibility for a closed diagram (and one which nature seems to take full advantage of.)  In the case of a "human cycle," this direct arrow would represent direct inheritance from one human moment to its successor human moment.  Here we may have an important factor, or component, in the stability of human experience from moment to moment.  Once we have "shape" and "visual field" in one human moment, that "global" feature of visual experience may be directly inherited next-to-next by a "run" of human moments, leaving other fluctuations in the full cycles to elicit the more detailed local variations in the visual field over time.  Whitehead talked about direct inheritance of one human occasion by the next, and I was drifting away from that, but now that I see a place for direct inheritance as the major time axis in the closed cycle, I'm inclined to rely on it more.  The major axis step of succession is the lowest frequency quantum, and the lowest energy quantum, among all the quanta in the cycle to which it belongs.  This suggests, if we identify a direct link of human-to-human inheritance with the major axis quantum of some yet-to-be-worked-out closed cycle of succession pattern, that a whole human sentient moment, (containing a whole visual field as a sub-part, but constituting only one individual at the first/last location in a closed time sequence of the physical world) is in large part reiterated without change thanks to the direct inheritance link, the major axis quantum of the human cycle.  This attributes quite a lot to the least energetic quantum, but perhaps the right way to look at it is that the mere preservation of existing order, through straight re-enactment, IS the least energetic sort of thing that nature does.  If this is roughly correct, then it might be the case that the characteristic of "spatial extent" that is essential to the very constitution of the geometry that makes the visual field a "field," --that this "spatialness" is only present in the "human nodes" of the human cycle, those rather "structurally special" first/last nodes.  Otherwise, one must suppose that other individuals, the ones occupying “less special positions” in the human cycle, carry their own inner spatial fields, either equivalent to, or more reduced and rudimentary than, the type of visual field we're familiar with in our own phenomenology.  This is something like the thought that our big, busy visual field is somehow a composite of many reduced visual fields, and that these latter are to be attributed to various of the many non-human individuals which populate the human cycle and make their routine contributions to the inheritance of the human node.  Maybe this is partly true.  At its extreme, I envision a situation in which certain occasions in the human cycle are so rudimentary that each enjoys a flat field of one color apiece.  They combine their inheritances, perhaps in a modular fashion, such as to produce a slightly more complex occasion with a discriminate 2-tone field, and with further convergence, we get a build-up to the human occasion, with a field discriminable into thousands of locations and colors, thanks to the systematic, building contributions of many occasions occupying the human cycle.  I think this extreme version is simplistic and unlikely.  The phenomenology of "spatial extent" is never really reduced in this account-- it's just multiplied liberally to all the occasions involved in the causal role of the human visual field.  That fails, ultimately, to "explain" the arising of "spatial extent" in the phenomenology of ANY occasion.  I reiterate my preference for the hypothesis that the spatial visual field is an ingredient of the human nodes at the first/last positions of the human cycle, and likely NOT an ingredient of the other nodes of that cycle.  In this case, we focus on the arising of spatiality at the peculiarly human nodes of the conjectured human cycle of brain event sequence.  Once the visual field is "jump-started" somehow, it tends to hold stable by direct inheritance via major axis on the one hand, and on the other, by fortuitous correspondence of its intrinsic order to the surface activity of contemporary events of the visual cortex.  Their space-like arrangement that forms a topological "surface" suits them to be joint immediate causal predecessors to a human mental event.  No two individuals in space-time are "simultaneous," but there IS one clear use for the term "simultaneous" within "physics" that is not empty of instantiation perhaps, and that is this:  Multiple quantal transitions that converge upon the same individual can be said to be "simultaneous" at their common arrival node.  (And likewise, multiple transitions that fork from an individual can be thought of as "simultaneous" at their common departure node.)  This just spreads the use of "simultaneous" from an individual, which is simultaneous only with itself (a useless relation,) to the "poles" of the transitions that join at that individual.  Thus, each individual at the node of a 4-dimensional lattice could be said to be part of a "fact" involving eight simultaneous "poles."  We thus stretch the scope of "simultaneous" to include an individual's immediate "causal setting," as for instance, the individual as junction of 8 poles-- 4 of one "sense" (arrivals) and 4 of the other (departures.)  This gets us into no trouble, I think, such as the trouble you get into by trying to define a set of individuals that are simultaneous with each other.  On the other hand, it's just semantics.  But it does perhaps yield some utility for the word "simultaneous" in the domain of causal structure.  "Simultaneity" fails to relate any individuals of causal structure, finding no application that way.  But insofar as an individual is, say, a complex of eight poles, itself a "4-to-4 relation," we might profitably conceive that complex as having eight simultaneous constituents which are physically distinguished (that is, specified in terms of causal structure.)

   As on the cover diagram of the TOE book, an interior junction of the minimal 4-dimensional time lattice joins 4 incoming quanta to 4 outgoing quanta, and if we conceive this as pairwise joinings, we get 16 couplings of quanta, with each "centered" on the individual node.  The individual itself could perhaps be conceived as a "transform" or "function" of four inputs and four outputs.  This, I suspect, is the discrete basis for what becomes a tensor, or 4-D vector, in General Relativity, where calculus is employed.

   The other use of "simultaneous," and the more important one, is the one of direct phenomenal judgment concerning distinct sensory items in one "I-now" of experience, a relation locked up in the privacy of an individual, not showing up in the conceptual scheme of causal structure, unless some set of quanta impinging jointly and directly upon an individual in the causal structure are correlated with the sensory items that manifest as "simultaneous" to the subjectivity of the individual at the convergence.  This must be the case to some degree, which returns me to the thought that we can infer the inner complexity of an individual occasion by the number of arrows it joins according to its setting in physical theory.

  

   If a million quanta impinge simultaneously (our new use of the word) on a human sentient moment, (routinely as part of phenomenal visual experience, let us suppose for the sake of argument) then this does not commit us to a uniform space-time of a million dimensions.  It does mean that a million arrows periodically arrive at a crucial causal node, but that could be a fairly rare formation at electronic energy levels, requiring an organizational cluster as rare as a brain.  Within the brain, 4-dimensionality still reigns supreme, with surfaces formed that present huge numbers of contemporaries simultaneously (recently defined use of the word) presented to a less frequent occurrence, the human node of the human cycle.  I'm generous about variation possibilities regarding how many arrows might join at this or that individual in general.  I think of 4-dimensionality as simply preponderant, given the simplicity of its build-up, and the apparent love of nature for the electron cycle, which must provide some kind of bonanza to its constituent occasions, a bonus to the individuals of that ubiquitous inheritance pattern.

   Now I'm inclined on the one hand to admit fairly high numbers in speculating about the human cycle and the number of "afferent arrows" arriving at the human node, and "efferent arrows" originating from the human node.  My early diagrams suggest that symmetry might prevail such that the actions of the external world upon a human sensorial moment are equal in number to the "reactions" of that moment, its "quantal acts" toward the future, the quantal “endowments” yielded to its successors.

   On the other hand (in contrast to liberally high numbers), I feel a need to cut the numbers down to a minimum.  Just as high-res digital images take up the lion's share of disk space compared to most non-image files, the wondrous detail of the visual field threatens to make the human "causal confluence number" skyrocket to a million or more.  But one way of cutting the number down to something reasonable is analagous to "delta encoding," in which only the differences of frame-to-frame are recorded once an initial frame of a digititized movie is fully recorded.  The movie can then be reconstructed by initializing with the fully recorded first frame, add difference to get next frame, add next diff to get next frame, etc.  Here’s what I’m thinking:  When you first open your eyes upon waking, you soon “snap to” the external environment with your vision.  Just before waking up, there might have been a visual field also, but swirly and dreamy or dark and drab, with no relation to the world outside, no normal perception going on (not that dreaming and imaging are abnormal.)  In this case, the dreamy visual field probably adapts to a new assignment heralded by the fresh intrusion of light patterns streaming through the opening eyes.  Even though the adaptation might only take a second or less, that is a number of cycles in which to “rebuild the image” from a previously dreamy scene to another which is “locked onto” the standard environmental cues that one habitually attends to in the normal mode of visual perception.  Once the groggy waking state is revved up to incorporate a sharp detailed visual field with orderly correlation to retinal patterns of activity excited by incoming focussed light patterns, direct inheritance may be conceived to account for the preservation of that detailed scene (insofar as there is no variation from human moment to human moment) requiring no more arrows than the one major axis quantum of the human cycle.  That arrow may “carry” the whole sensorium unchanged, inclusive of all the sensory modalities, not just the visual field.  Now it is the variations from “carbon copy reiteration” that must be accounted for, to “keep up with” changes in the shifting “scenery” of the external world.  Other arrows in the human cycle, other than the major quantum, and other, perhaps, than the “minimal lattice” constituting a sustainable human cycle, can now account for changes from moment to moment, or “deltas,” within an overall field structure, such as the visual field we are considering.

     What I’m driving at, is how much change do we really perceive, in terms of discrete information, from one moment to another a tenth of a second later?  Take a crystal-sharp highly detailed visual field as a worst case.  I’m not sure it’s a very high amount of information at all.  Attention “lands” on this or that detail or global feature, and much of the available changes going on in the periphery are out of focus, vaguely apprehended, and in large part unnoticed and conglomerated.  Patterns are recognized to the oversight of their ingredients.   I remember reading something once to the effect that we can recognize numbers-of-things, through immediate recognition, from 1 up to 7.  After that it takes grouping and counting and pattern arrangements to “perceive” the cardinality of a given phenomenal multiplicity.  The same number, 7, apparently serves as a limit across sensory modalities too.  I wonder if a fairly small integer, like 7, might be the most changes a human can register from one moment to the next.

 

1) As you know, I have long been a pansentientist; that part is easy. Though

I can’t say what part of my sentient experience is shared by non-human

events. I’m not sure what part of your own sentient experience you would say

is shared by all other events; that wasn’t clear to me.

 

1. In a word, "feeling."  But then, that's just a synonym for "sentience," as I see it, so I don't know if I'm addressing your question.  From the TOE book, I see physics as a way of conceiving the world exclusively in terms of before-and-after.  That's very "bare."  According to that view, the "individuals" of physical theory are likewise "bare."  They are merely whatever can come before or after one another.  But our experience is not similarly "bare," but rather variegated, even within an individual moment, by qualitative properties such as pains, colors and thoughts, which are nothing else than what they seem.  They are grouped in a determinate way in each individual occasion of experience.  The UNITY of such an occasion is a unity of feeling or sentience, and that unity itself must be counted as something that human occasions have in common with all events, human or non-human.  That way, the ultimate individuals of physical theory may be termed "sentient occasions," without regard to whether they are human or not.  Only their unity with respect to before-and-after is required for the physicalistic conception.  The qualities themselves are inaccessible to the scientific method, but they differentiate experience, making experience something else than utter monotony, which would be virtual nothingness.  The range of variety within one person's experience is tremendous, and we imagine that range to be augmented somewhat when we conceive of other people having their own somewhat unique experiences.  And augmented further when we conceive of the experience of bats and other strange creatures.  I have no secret way of knowing how this variety might manifest beyond those common extensions (other animals), but I don't see that as a problem.  Does that help?

 

2) And I fully agree that naïve realism is the root of all fallacious

physical descriptions. Physical space is not like our visual field space.

But it is not clear how the visual field space is derived from the quanta

events, or how it is an aspect of the quantal brain events. I think you

might have a clear idea about this, but I haven’t understood it yet. Does it

somehow derive from the 1/10 of a second smearing of the past with the

present?

 

2. That "smearing" you refer to must belong, according to my premises, to the rudimentary situation depicted in the "causal X" diagram, if you recall that section near the end of the book.  That is, at the level of time order analysis, there is no smearing-- all facts are stepwise and discrete.  One moment of my experience stands in direct relation to a set of immediate predecessor moments which provide whatever causal inheritance there might be to my moment as "central occasion."  That occasion also stands in direct relation to its immediate successors, its only outlets by which it will provide any inheritance to other occasions.  To the extent that my experience is "serial," rather than situated at an intersection of multiple "personalities," one of my predecessors is very like my current moment, and also one of my successors, characterizing me over time as a serial coherent stream of experience.  While my visual field, and its inherent geometry, holds fairly stable over time, it's natural to think of it as a complex quality inherited from occasion to occasion in my series.  In that case, the visual field as a whole is part of what is "passed" via arrow in the diagrams, and these arrows are the units of causation for physics.  Thus, causation is defined in terms of inheritance from other actual occasions, and what is inherited is Platonic essences, qualitative complexes, or phenomenological data, whatever you prefer to call them.  On this view, causation in the brain is ultimately defined then in terms of Platonic complexes, such as the momentary visual field of a human subject.  With ordinary perception, my visual field relates me to past and present in tight-knit fashion according to physics.  My visual field is then "playing a role" that involves other occasions in a well-defined theory.  On the other hand, my visual field, at suitable moments, can take me on a hallucinatory ride, in which other less well-defined psychological theories might speculate as to the "route of inheritance" responsible for my wild visual experiences.  This is a rather different "role" that my visual field can play in my experience.  I don't "reduce away" the visual field to the various "roles" it might play.  That would be similar, I think, to the way I DO "reduce away" the individuals of physics to their "role" in a theory of sequence patterns.  The latter is to isolate the purely scientific knowledge obtainable by the scientific method.  Phenomenology is an altogether different method, and gives us direct acquaintance of what the visual field is in itself, regardless of the disparate roles it might play in perception and hallucination.  I'm determined to conceive the world in terms of "good old" whole-and-part, more so than ever after what I feel to be encouraging success.  And in this, I am in no mood to admit circularity into analysis.  Thus, if I start with our whole physical universe and work down to the parts, I come down, as the TOE book attempts to explain, to the temporal successor relation and the individuals which it orders.  Each individual, now reduced to momentariness by the initial before-and-after reduction, retains a potential complexity that must reside "all in a moment."  This complexity includes such things as an entire visual field.  Further analysis of the visual field into its color and geometry is pure phenomenology.  The phenomena themselves, in "my Platonic conception" you might say, are at "rock bottom" in the whole analysis, the ultimate parts.  They are possibilities from the realm of all possibilities, brought into actuality in the formation of an individual.  That act of formation settles particular steps of time sequence, about which science can gain information, but as the basic unit of occurrence, the act of formation is immune to structural description and immune therefore to scientific knowledge.  Neither do we, through introspection, know much or anything about the "act of formation."  But we live it.

   Now to address your question more directly, in regard to key phrases "visual field space," "derived from" or "aspect of" "quantal brain events."  Any quantum event, whether a brain event or not, has phenomenal ingredients, providing that event with its individual definiteness, the positive ground, in principle, for an intrinsic conception (by us) of the event.  Physics in itself has no access to such a conception.  To physics, all quantum events are intrinsically alike-- not because it knows them to be alike, but because it doesn't know anything about anything that could make them intrinsically different-- it doesn't "know about" or have any language at all for ANY phenomena.  Its only language is structure, and the only relation responsible for this structure is before-and-after.  I must take issue with either of your phrases, "derived from" and "aspect of," because I feel that whole-and-part are sufficient to describe the relation of the visual field space to a quantum brain event that is a human mental event that "has" the visual field space.  The relation is one of whole-and-part: the visual field space is part of the quantum event.  Itches and odors compresent with the visual field space are further parts of the same quantum event.  Thus, a human sentient occasion is a quantum event which, though simple upon physical analysis (via time order), is still quite complex in being reduced to a single moment, with distinct sensory modalities included, and within the visual modality, some irreducibly spatial order apparent.  (And there is absolutely nothing in my theory of physics with which to identify something that is irreducibly spatial-- the visual field is therefore a pure phenomenon.)  Insofar as "a part" is an "aspect" of "a whole" to which it belongs, I'm OK with: "The visual field space is an aspect of a quantum event."  But whole-and-part analysis (into relations, relata, structure, and fact) is my basic mode of understanding, while "aspect" seems more vague to me.  It seems to stray unnecessarily from my chosen mode of thought, so I don't trust it much.  I think of whole-and-part as most basic and most clear.

   Now what about "derived from"?  I get the feeling that "causation" is involved in that phrase, am I right?  And I do believe that my visual field, as one of the more stable features of my experience, is very much inherited from my past, with stability sustained largely by successive inheritance of this phenomenal display from previous "moments of me."  If you think of that helium diagram with 137 arrows, suppose that my human moment is a first or last individual in that diagram, and that my stream of consciousness consists of the periodic individuals that occupy the first/last position in that diagram, as the diagram repeats itself in chained repetition.  Suppose now that the diagram is much more complex, representing some periodic sequencing of brain quanta, though it remains a closed diagram, with a first/last position for my own sentient occasions to occupy.  Now my mind is "in" my brain, where it belongs according to theory.  Suppose a thousand arrows impinged on the last event in the diagram.  That would be a thousand causal factors impinging on one of my sentient occasions.  Now I think we're much closer to reality than if we insisted that each human occasion impinge directly on the next.  The latter better satisfies our intuition that a human mind consists of "an unbroken serial thread of human occasions."  But I favor that less and less.  (Inserted note: I now favor it more and more, finding that the major axis quantum of a closed cycle, in the case of a “human cycle,” is an ideal candidate for what Whitehead calls “the dominant line of inheritance” of the human thread of experience.)  For one thing, even in that case, the basic discontinuities at the basis of my theory-- the discrete steps-- do not satisfy our intuitions of smooth or "smeared" experience.  I must "swallow" that departure from intuition in order to keep what seems more certain to me.  In that case, I can swallow a bit more with less trouble.  What's driving me is the thought that my visual field space (to take a splendid example) is causally correlated to other occasions in such a way that localized variations in it have separable causal factors in a cortical region of space-time, accounting for the role of my visual field in the causal theory of visual perception.  My visual field alone, in that case, would seem to require (all by itself, ignoring hearing and touch, etc.) a thousand, or a million, immediate causal predecessor events.  That's no problem, if human mental events can be situated at key points in the periodic structure of a sufficiently complex sequence, and the brain might be just the place to host such a complex pattern.  If this is right, then the visual field space is still a part of each quantal moment of "me," but my moments, and thus their parts, exist only at select periodic nodes of a repeating complex pattern of brain sequence.  In this conception, although the visual field space has causal factors influencing its occurrence, the time-sequence type of knowledge obtained through physics cannot of itself be conceived to cause any phenomena, simple or complex.  The phenomena themselves are pre-requisite to the individuals and to their time relations.  There is no time order in the first place, and no causality, without phenomena to start with-- phenomenal possibilities to excite individuals into existence.  This is "Platonism" as I understand that term, in which the primordial parts of the actual world are culled from the realm of pure possibility, a realm that is not properly "physical," and for which there is no explanation whatsoever.  But such Platonic entities are precisely what we witness directly in sentient experience.  They claim our recognition, I believe, in spite of what may be an irksome absence of any explanation for them.  In teleological terms, they make experience possible, which certainly constitutes a fine purpose for them, in the manner that human beings seek a purpose for things.

   Good thing I composed offline.  Hope it's not a snow job to you.  Hey, guess what I'm reading lately?  The Casteneda books over again!  Another thing, like pan-sentience and ping pong, that you and I have shared to good advantage.  Let me know if I made any sense.  -- Carey

  

Departures From Whitehead, -- Carey Carlson, June 29, 2006

    After giving credit to Whitehead and Russell for solving the mind-body problem, I stumbled upon the "Theory of Everything."  The theory pertains strictly to patterns of time sequence.  Before-and-after is the sole ordering relation by which patterns are defined.  The field of the relation is a class of generic individuals called "events" or "moments."   The nature of these "bare individuals" is not ascertainable by the scientific method, apart from the implication that individuals are momentary-- that is, temporally indivisible.  By merely occurring before and after one another, they form intersecting sequence patterns of rationated frequencies that constitute quantified energy.  In regard to the mathematical expression of the theory, "events" are represented as "logical individuals," the kind you would use to build up "extensional set theory."  The actual universe then, as designated in the formal theory, is just a set of events ordered by earlier and later.  That is a simple ontology, and easy to deal with mathematically.  A wealth of mathematical pattern is afforded by the domain of time ordered sequence; the structural possibilities can be explored inductively, starting with the simplest, as one can explore arithmetic by getting familiar with the lowest numbers.  This path leads quickly to reformulations of the most basic concepts in physics, which are thereby reduced to the single primitive concept of discrete time order.  When spacetime and all that it contains are reconstrued as pure time patterns, the overall conception, a world "spun from time alone," hardly seems "physical" any longer.  But time has always been a sturdy parameter in physics.  It proves in the end to be the sole parameter, sufficient to all the needs of physics.
   Although the scientific method yields nothing but structural knowledge of time sequence patterns, it is not difficult for us to know more than this.  We know that human mental events provide the ultimate testimony for whatever empirical confirmation is adduced for the theoretical scheme.  Human mental events fit nicely into the theory as momentary individuals.  The theory locates them in time, in the laboratory, in the observers, in their brains, at its surface, at a frequency of about ten per second.  In addition to mental events of the observers, the region of the laboratory is a complex time sequence of other unknown events. We can infer that the other events are also sentient occasions of experience.  We have no  other notion of individuated momentary actuality except for the subjective I-now of mental experience.  Nor do we have need for any further notion, in order to flesh out a realistic interpretation of "physical world" that instantiates the formal theory.  Thus the individuals of physics are momentary occasions of subjective experience, and the physical world is the temporal succession of such individuals.  With that, the basic interpretation of the formal theory is complete.
   Metaphysics is the broadest domain of human knowledge, subsuming all the more specialized domains such as physical science.  Because physics is such an important domain, the sudden emergence of its theoretical resolution will spur a major reshuffling of metaphysical views.  At issue here are Whitehead's views.  Neither Whitehead nor anyone else had ever conceived that physical energy consists of mere rationated time sequence frequencies.  Thus, every physicist and philosopher of science who assumed that "mass-energy" refers to something important and quantifiable has supplemented their account of physics with something over and above time itself.  Whitehead is no different.  Thus he variously attempts to invoke "the emotional intensity entertained in life" as a candidate for "physical energy," and he inserts a primitive quantity of "momentum" into his account of General Relativity.  It is now evident, in light of the Theory of Everything, that these moves were wrong-headed.
   Whitehead's analysis of the becoming of an individual event into phases of "concrescence" has no counterpart in the new physical theory.  The theory finds its success in the mere time sequence patterns of the individuals that "become."  The creation, or becoming, of each new moment in the accretion of time remains a complete mystery, although it is not a particularly troubling one, as was the mind-body problem.  A complete theory of "becoming" would constitute a determinism that is lacking in the Theory of Everything.  Whitehead claims that there is "complete freedom" at the level of an individual's becoming; this is more consistent with the new theory of time than any purported analysis of "becoming" into a stereotyped set of phases.  Better to stop at "complete freedom."  What happens in the moment stays in the moment.
   The "connectedness of everything" is now spelled out in terms of next-to-next temporal contiguity relations, such that each discrete contiguity-pairing of individuals constitutes a quantum of action.  Apart from such contiguity-pairings, connectedness is indirect via concatenated pairings.  This overrides a scheme such as Leibniz's, in which each individual mirrors every other in the universe.  This infinite regress appeals to an instinct for thoroughgoing connectivity, but I wouldn't attribute this doctrine to Whitehead himself, though many Whiteheadians seem disposed to it.
   Related to the previous point is Whitehead's insistent talk about "internal relations."  The Theory of Everything finds no use for the partition of relations into internal versus external.  At least for physics, plain old whole-and-part analysis into relations and relata is fully vindicated as a sufficient "logic."  There has been a fear that conventional relational analysis into parts and sub-parts will prove disappointing once logical individuals are reached, no matter what sort of individuals are arrived at.  To avoid such disappointment, Whitehead was tempted to further "relationalize" any entity that would otherwise be a logically simple individual, leading to another sort of regress such that analysis generates relations within relations without limit, never arriving at irresolvable relata.  But there is no longer any reason to fear the outcome of straightforward whole-and-part analysis.
   The "method of extensive abstraction" treats "regions" as primitive and constructs points and lines from the overlap of regions, inverting the usual whole-and-part conception.  In the phenomenology of our visual spatial experience, the method of extensive abstraction is a brilliant way of handling the fact that regions are given in experience, while points and lines of infinitesimal extent are not.  It is proper in phenomenology to treat what is given as fundamental.  But Whitehead carries the method into physics, which would be equally valuable if regions of physical space were phenomenologically given.  But physical space is not phenomenologically given.  More to the point, there is no physical space.  There is only a temporal succession that exhibits a 4-way branching pattern, accounting for all four of our physical dimensions.  Russell was clear on this point, whereas Whitehead was less so.  However, in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead constructs spacelike order from simple before-and-after time order.  This alternative to the method of extensive abstraction is the simplest and clearest route to success in physical theory.
   The "space-time continuum" is another errant hypothesis, one that bedeviled both Whitehead and Russell.  Just as "God made the integers," the physical world is made of discrete, countable temporal transitions.  "Man made all the rest."  Belief in a continuous differentiable manifold is probably encouraged by the smooth character of experienced visual space along with the widespread assumption that something of physical space is given to us in our visual experience.  Riemann gave some attention to "discrete manifolds," noting that these can provide an inherent metric.  If anyone had picked up on that clue, the disastrous allegiance to continuous manifolds might have been avoided.  The differential calculus has mankind in its thrall, because the techniques for handling infinities are so impressive and gratifying in their own right.  Thus we currently have General Relativity in terms of a continuous manifold, and Quantum Mechanics in terms of continuous probability waves.  When it comes to framing a logical theory, physicists have been eager to invoke infinities, thinking such extravagance to be justified by the subsequent applicability of the differential calculus.  But calculus is useful in dealing with the supply-and-demand curves of economic theory without anyone drawing the conclusion that supply-and-demand behavior is composed of infinitesimal transactions.  The same should be understood of physics.
   Sensory data merits no reference in the Theory of Everything, which is homogeneous in its bare mathematical notation.  This is a mark of the purely conjectural nature of scientific hypothesis.  The absence of sensory data from physics has been with us since Newton.  This is not a flaw awaiting correction.  Rather, it affirms the proper distinction between knowledge by acquaintance (knowledge of sensory qualities) and knowledge by hypothesis (knowledge distilled by the scientific method.)  Whitehead clung to the belief that the physical world is to some degree directly perceivable.  This cannot be maintained.
   In spite of the foregoing litany of criticisms, it remains true that the Theory of Everything is basically "Whiteheadian."  Eventism was correct.  Every event is a psychic occasion.  Societies consist of event sequences.  There is a limiting velocity because spacelike separation is entirely due to temporal propagation.  Waves and particles alike resolve to discrete time sequences.  Physical laws emerge as time patterns in conjunction with the physical entities that obey those laws.  The latter entities also emerge as time patterns, which means they are laws in themselves.  All this "emergence" is nothing but a flowering pattern of temporal succession, which is mathematically unlimited, like fractals.  Employing nothing but the unit quantum, time builds its patterns, from the quark to the nuclei, from the neutrino to spacetime, from the electron to its clouds, from the atoms to the molecules to the DNA to the eccentric life forms of biological evolution.  Time produces the whole complex business by chained concatenation of its quantum steps.  I think that Whitehead would be quite pleased with this outcome.

 

  The centenary of Einstein's big year, 1905, is about over, and I'm in position to point out where he went wrong with Special Relativity.  This makes for a rather backhanded tribute to the man, recalling the paper that Godel presented to Einstein as a birthday present, demonstrating solutions to General Relativity that violate the "ever-forward" progression of time.  Stephen Hawking has recently proposed a "patch" to General Relativity called "chronology protection."  This patch is a premise to the effect that time simply does not go backward, the express purpose of which  is to "weed out" any solutions to General Relativity that involve cyclic time.

   Hawking's "chronology protection" is considered "ad hoc" by some, including Palle Yourgrau, who wrote the recent book "A World Without Time."  However, I've shown that physics can be constructed by using chronology protection as the lone premise.  This implies that the cornerstone of all scientific knowledge is "chronology protection," the one principle that is immune to being characterized as "ad hoc."  Rather than being an ad hoc "patch" to some more trusted theory, chronology protection becomes the golden standard against which all other hypotheses, including the equations of General Relativity, are more or less ad hoc.  Yourgrau has done us a great service in describing a "world without time," because it represents the mode of current scientific thinking, and because it is oriented a perfect 180 degrees away from the truth.  The truth is a turnabout, such that time alone accounts for all things physical.  The proof is in the mathematics, where a pair-wise time-ordering relation, the "temporal successor" relation, suffices for the construction of all of physics.  Hence, the correct view may be titled "A World of Pure Time."

   So how did Einstein go wrong at the point of Special Relativity?  He went wrong where Russell and Whitehead refused to follow.  Instead of "swallowing whole" the limiting velocity of light, as an unanalyzable fact, they surmised that our notions of "space" and "time" conceal a redundancy.  A strict constant ratio governing spatial intervals and time intervals (we measure space in light-years) suggests either that space and time have a common component, or that one is composed of the other.  It turns out that physical space is the redudant notion, and "4-dimensional time" is the clarifying phrase that can help undo the harm of "space-time."

   Before I log off, I'll mention that "energy" and "time" have a similar redundancy, and in this case, it is Planck's constant that testifies to a strict constant ratio.  "Time" appears here as "frequency," and "energy" turns out to be the redundant notion.  It's altogether inferior to explain these things in words, when the mathematical treatment set forth in my TOE booklet is perfectly concise and utterly simple.  There we have a domain of pure time, with the universe characterized as a set of time-ordered moments, conveyed formally as a set of ordered pairs.  In that domain of pure time sequence, we can define "frequency" and "wavelength" such that each is the inverse of the other, obviating the need for either particles or waves in the theory.

   My theory is so simple that I came to it without knowing much physics at all.  How can this be?  Why didn't the physicists find it?  There's a very good reason for that.  They trust the notion of space above all else, even above time.  The notion of space stems from spatial features of  phenomenological experience, such as a person's visual experience.  It is lifted from the phenomenal realm and applied unhesitatingly to the theory of what lies beyond experience-- the unseen world of physics.  It's a difficult subject to blog effectively.  Fortunately, I've explained it rather carefully in my study of Russell and Whitehead: "The Mind-Body Problem and Its Solution."  -- Carey