Nobody said it was going to be easy. When I invented that “religion” I was a physicalist. That was relatively easy compared to what came after.
I try to do that also. The purpose of philosophical debate, for me, is to try to reach the core of the disagreement – to find out exactly where we part company and why. Honesty and clarity are essential to make this work, and courtesy is nearly always a better option than a lack of it.
In practical terms, I “trust science.” But I associate belief with the actions of a particular organism. Believers are organisms who primarily “live” their belief with their bodies. I may verbalize a “belief” that perceptions are internal stuff, but my body “says” otherwise. I leap out of the way of the truck that’s about to run me over.
I read “objective” as unbiased. We filter out relevant bias through the tradition of science. Metaphorically speaking, science is a communal subject, which is shrewder or less biased ( more objective ) than most of its participants. Even here we overlook that the judgement of whether another judgement is biased is the situated judgment of a particular organism, a particular believer.
We trust battle-tested theories with our lives. So we enact practical certainty. But I’ve never seen a convincing justification of the assumption of the uniformity of nature that didn’t take it for granted.
Ayer’s take on this is fascinating. Because there is no solution, there is no problem. It’s a pseudo-issue. It’s just the air that we breath, so move on.
But I also agree that a statement that cannot — even in principle — be embarrassed by experience…is a definition, not an empirical assertion. Your example indeed sounds like a definition. But I don’t think you want to be read as offering an analytic statement.
Even analytic statements are idealizations. Signs are objects in the world. Sure, there are fuzzy norms for their use, but the same signs vary in their significance for their various perceivers. We could even make a case for this in behavioristic terms. Animals react differently to same stimulus.
So whether a statement is analytic is a situated judgment. Hence the swamp of metaphysics. In practical life, we settle for juries who make 1-bit decisions that compress who knows how much ambiguity.
I respect that. I can even relate from personal experience. For my father, it was heart attacks, strokes, and dementia.
I sometimes think of Hausdorff. He and his wife took veronal when they couldn’t escape the nazis. That’s the kind of suicide I respect. Death is to be feared only to the degree that one is attached to future that one expects to bright. In itself, it is nothing. Of course many people worry about leaving others behind. We don’t want to cease to be able to look out for those we love.
This has some resonance for me. Of course I appropriate it in my own way. But I also don’t believe in the afterlife and associate freedom with responsibility.
I might read it more in the direction of Peirce. Inquiry is something like settling on a policy for meeting the future. I’m personally not a determinist. I think we at least suffer and enjoy the burden/opportunity of decision and responsibility.
Looking back, the problem of free will haunted me when I was a little Catholic boy. I was trying to make sense of God sending most people to Hell. It was the beginning of my loss of faith, though I was too young for my grievances to be sophisticated. I just felt the not-right-ness of it. It wasn’t only the cruelty. It was also the cognitive dissonance, perhaps the tension between tacitly understanding people as machines in the causal nexus and this other thing, a “freedom” that could buy you eternal torture.
Now I see that I took a deterministic metaphysics for granted as identical with science.
I never believed Christianity. I was forced to attend church as a child but this just made me loathe it even more, and I point blank refused on Christmas day when I was 12. I have known Christians who struggled exactly like you describe though.
Later in my life I concluded that Jesus must have been historically real, and as an individual his life transformed Western civilisation more than anybody else in history. I am fascinated by the early history of Christianity.
A lot of people assume that, and while science is effectively joined at the hip to determinism, I don’t believe that is strictly necessary. I think a post-physicalist, praeternatural version of science is possible. I think Nagel has already laid some of the groundwork, even though his intention is a new kind of naturalism. The problem is he thinks it must be governed by empirically-testable laws rather than untestable metaphysical constraint-based rules.
I trust that you know the physics side better than I do. I primarily looked into the philosophical side. Fuchs seems to have been inspired by some of my own favorite thinkers. As far as I remember, it’s accident or coincidence that I used “ontocubism” as a label for my position.
I would love to talk to Fuchs to confirm this, but I understand him as an ontological perspectivist. We don’t need a world-from-no-point-of-view. “Consciousness” is not inside-stuff but just the “presence” or “being” of an “aspect” of reality. We don’t need perfect synchronization. We only need to allow for enough “harmony” to account for us mostly understanding one another. We enact a strong sense of reliably shared perceptual objects. So any discordance is seriously constrained.
But really I’m willing to just take our sharing objects for granted as the tacit basis for rational conversation in the first place.
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This ontoperspectivism doesn’t gel with a “truth from no point of view.” Instead science becomes warranted relatively battle-tested belief. It’s a tradition that informs enacted belief that is also situated in a particular social organism. The theory does not understand itself to mirror a “true reality.” Signs are not understood to be primarily representational. So we get a kind of radicalized instrumentalism, which is genial enough to grant how seriously we trust the more battle-tested models.
Yes, it has long been my view that axioms, assumptions, and all other guesses (educated or not 
) should be made much clearer. We usually seek to conceal them, and hope no-one will notice that our reasoning is built on sand… 
More and more I see philosophy — in the mode of positivism and phenomenology — as basically specializing in just that.
Metaphysics speculates. Phenomenology excavates.
The most powerful assumptions, those that hobble us the most, are the ones we enact but cannot verbalize.
“A picture held them captive.” But “picture” is somewhat misleading here, unless we are talking the “metaphors we live by” discussed by Lakoff.
Burroughs had what he called his “routines.” To paraphrase Heidegger in this key: for the most part we are bots. Sentient, sure, but largely enacting our inheritance uncritically, parroting what Everybody Knows like an LLM. We don’t know that we don’t know what we mean.
I mean all of us. The philosopher is a bot who gets lucky and excavates this or that particular routine, becoming a little freer but never free of performing still other inherited routines that enable as they hobble, that illuminate as they darken.
Geoff, I believe I’ve located the fundamental weakness of your theory. This is the reification of the wavefunction, which is actually just a mathematical model. That is a case of misplaced concreteness, and you centre you entire theory around wavefunction and its supposed collapse. Here is evidence of that, quoted from your posts.
I’m sure you recognize that the wavefunction is a mathematical representation of probability density. Simply put, it represents the probability of detecting a particle within specific space and time parameters. Because of this, it does not represent anything real or substantial. It exists as a mathematical tool, no different in principle to if someone determined that there’s a 92.36% probability that I will show up for work tomorrow morning. There’s nothing real represented, just a statistical probability which is a tool in prediction.
But if you look at how the wavefunction is constructed you’ll see that it represents a wave pattern of energy transfer. Now the issue is that it is constructed on the principles of energy moving in a wave form, but there is no known substance (aether) for that wave energy. Therefore the representation is not of waves, but a wavefunction. Because the substance of the waves is not apprehended, the waves themselves cannot be adequately understood, and therefore the way that the waves interact with what we know as solid massive substance (physical objects) also cannot be understood.
I’ve noticed that you reject Einsteinian relativity theory, so why not also reject the relationship between electromagnetic waves and massive substances which this theory produces. You claim the need for a real paradigm shift, but the wavefunction is as much a part of the Einsteinian paradigm as is general relativity. So if we reject Einsteinian relativity altogether, then we can reject the relationship between electromagnetic waves and particles, which is based on it, as an untruth supported only by that rejected theory.
I think we might salvage something though from relativity, and that is the principle of the relativity of simultaneity. I believe there is some truth to this principle, which has been upheld by empirical observation. But if the Einsteinian constant, light, is rejected, then the relativity of simultaneity must be reworked.
The relativity of simultaneity is what enables the concept of a thick present, which I call the breadth of the present. If we allow that difference types of matter, different types of particles, experience “the present” at differing times, then there is an overlap of future and past at the present, depending on the type of substance. The hierarchy, or order could be based on mass rather than the Einsteinian method of velocity. The reason for using mass is that mass is what demonstrates continuity at the present, inertia, so this provides mor empirically true constant.
If we start with the fundamental (presentist) premise, that all activity occurs at the present, then the breadth of the present allows that some types of substances are active before others, as time passes. I believe that this allows us to avoid retro-causation. If for example, the activity of the more massive particle is prior to that of the less massive, then a group of less massive particles acting together in unison, thereby increasing their mass, could influence the activity of the more massive particle in a way which would appear like retro-causation.
The principal issue is what happens at the present, and how this determines the past. I find that your presentation of this is somewhat lacking in its correspondence with what is observed empirically. You propose MWI, along with a past which is not static, as Phase 2, but I find these ideas to be problematic. And I see that the reasons why you take this route is that you prioritize wavefunction collapse, as what happens at the present, along with conscious choice. But we do not need to be restricted by wavefunction collapse if we acknowledge that wavefunction is simply not an adequate representation.
Then the problems presented by wavefunction collapse are simply a reflection of this inadequacy. The reason why the wavefunction must be conceived as collapsing is simply because it is an inadequate representation of the continuity of the present. This continuity is based in the Einsteinian constant, the speed of light, but it needs to be turned around to represent what is empirically observed as the continuity of the present, the inertia of mass.
I read the page but comment on this:
Praeternaturalism is belief in a causal order in which there are no events that require a suspension or breach of the laws of nature, but there can be exceptionally improbable events that aren’t reducible to those laws, and aren’t random either. Praeternatural phenomena could have been entirely the result of natural causality, but aren’t.
I’m personally fascinated by the elusive concept of “random.” There’s a beautiful approach in AIT, which basically understands it as incompressibility.
Another approach is that we call “random” what we can’t explain, predict, or control. It escapes our nets.
For me the same laws that constrained events are also constrained by them.
I see human consciousness as the prejudicial or expectant disclosure of the world. Part of this “prejudice” is that which part of the world appears depends on the location of my sense organs. But prejudice is conspicuously expectant through the phenomenon of surprise.
This prejudice is malleable. Surprise modifies the expectation that enables surprise. The “law” that fails us too many times is cast aside. Theoretically and explicitly, sure, but I mean at the level of feeling and the movement of limbs.
Synchronicity manifests as combinations of events that are both exceptionally improbable and meaningful in some way, particularly but not always associated with personal psychological or spiritual development. Jung’s best known example occurred during a therapy session with a rational and highly educated woman who had been resisting dealing with her emotions. She was telling him about a dream in which she had been given a piece of jewellery in the form of an Egyptian golden scarab beetle – a symbol of rebirth and transformation. Jung heard a tapping on the closed window behind him and saw a flying insect knocking against the window from outside. He opened the window and caught the creature, which turned out to be a beetle virtually identical to the golden scarab, rarely found at that latitude, especially trying to get into dark rooms during the day. The improbability of such an event occurring at precisely that time allowed the woman to stop intellectualising matters and from that moment she began to make progress.
I’ve studied Jung closely, but I was never quite sure what to make of this part of his work. I don’t reject it out of hand, but I find “acausal connective principle” hard to parse. Probably he means more than our holistic sense-making, something like a quasi-cause.
Let me share this for context. One way to see science is as a theory that builds tools that work independently of their user’s expectations. So the placebo effect is filtered out. The phrase “placebo effect” might come off as dismissive, but I’m open to how much our confidence can contribute toward a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But “positivistic science” filters all of this out. I see it in the methodology that reduces a rich perceptual situation to a numeral. The reduction of quality and expectation is already right here. The one who measures is ideally generic and unbiased. The measuring human enacts the role of a device that maps a flood of analog historically charged richness to a numeral.
Perhaps this method contributes to what I’d call the mathematical platonism that tacitly dominates much of metaphysics.
I thought philosophy did both of those things, and probably more too. 
I get fed up of divisionist disassemblies of philosophy, when (to me) it is no more or less than serious and considered thought, regradless of what such thoughts are aimed at.
But I suppose if there are enthusaists for the various -ologies, it’s fine for them to delve as they see fit. For me, metaphysics remains a firm favourite; it’s much more fun!!! 
So I hear you but to me there’s an accidental tinge of monological prejudice here.
What I mean is that we are individuals who don’t agree on what counts — for us as individuals – as “serious and considered thought.”
I naturally consider my “dialogical positivism” to be “serious and considered.” But I even expect that some other philosophers will be deaf to me from the beginning. I will activate this or that prejudicial projection of the enemy, the fool, the infidel, etc.
I think the word “metaphysics” has as many voices as their are ears. For some it’s just a word for what they see as outside of their concern as philosophers.
I love novels, plays, good TV shows. In some ways “literature” is a freer concept than philosophy, because there’s not the expectation of earnestness. The author can hide behind a thousand disharmonious masks. But it would be rude on this forum to perform a persona that is intentionally ironic. I mention this because I think some of the more profound issues are better treated with irony and ambiguity. You might say that this is why I can comfortable afford the constraints of a poetic positivism, that I am happy here with excavation.
That isn’t a weakness, because this is a radically open question. Whether or not the wavefunction is ontologically real or not, and what “real” actually means, depends on which metaphysical interpretation of QM we are talking about. Some of them treat it as a mathematical tool, and others treat it as more real than that, but each does it in a different way. The “Measurement Problem” is the fact that 100 years after the problem first appeared, we are no closer to a consensus about the solution than we were at the beginning. I am a hard wavefunction realist.
Einstein’s theories predate quantum mechanics by 10 and 20 years respectively. And Einstein could not accept the implications of QM, and never really got over this.
But I am not rejecting relativity. On the contrary, 2PC actually deepens its relevance, because it actually explains why Phase 2 is relativistic. In 2PC, classical reality literally only exists from the perspective of an embodied observer – it is literally relativistic in a way that even space-time is not. Space-time is a continuous entity which imagines what it would be like to be embodied at any particular location and velocity. Phase 2 is a collection of individual subjective viewpoints, and classical reality is “crystalised” out of Phase 1 in a manner which is necessarily relativistic.
I think we might salvage something though from relativity, and that is the principle of the relativity of simultaneity. I believe there is some truth to this principle, which has been upheld by empirical observation. But if the Einsteinian constant, light, is rejected, then the relativity of simultaneity must be reworked.
The relativity of simultaneity is what enables the concept of a thick present, which I call the breadth of the present.
There is an interesting question here which isn’t directly addressed in anything I have published about 2PC. As things stand the only conscious observers are no further away from anybody else than the Moon, which means the time it takes light to travel between the most distant pair of observers is less than the duration of the “specious present” (your “thick present”). That means there is a single “now”, and a single “storm of microcollapses”. All conscious organisms are involved in the same selection process, described by the CRC equations. But what if there is a colony on Mars? Now, for the first time in the history our cosmos, there would be two separate storms, each one of them selecting a different part of reality into Phase 2 existence.
That sounds like panpsychism, which is obviously incompatible with the position I am defending.
I am having trouble following this. What do you mean by “activity”?
I can understand why anybody would find my position on time “problematic”. It is deeply counter-intuitive. But it would help if you could be a bit clearer about exactly why you find it problematic or lacking.
It helps that we can agree that the present is what really matters here, but if you accept that, why does it seem so troubling that the past can decay, and that some parts of the past are still in a timeless superposition because no conscious being has yet interacted with them?
Again I am having some trouble following this, but it might be worth continuing the discussion to see if we can make any progress. As things stand we have fundamentally diverging views as to the ontological status of the wavefunction. It is worth recognising that this disagreement is nothing unusual – it is very much a live debate in quantum foundations. For example, anyone who believes MWI is a wavefunction realist (even more so than I am).
He himself wasn’t sure what it means. This is partly why I define it as a different sort of causality. At least it is clear what that means.
For the first 33 years of my life, I never suspected for a moment that synchronicity could be real. By the time I was 34 it had become impossible to deny it, because the act of denying it just made the effect harder to deny. Please note that I am not expecting anybody to believe this based on my word (which is enshrined in Principle 6 of the NED):
We cannot expect people to believe things (any things) based solely on other people’s subjective lived experiences. There will always be skeptics about any alleged praeternatural phenomena and their right to skepticism must be respected.
Let me share this for context. One way to see science is as a theory that builds tools that work independently of their user’s expectations. So the placebo effect is filtered out. The phrase “placebo effect” might come off as dismissive, but I’m open to how much our confidence can contribute toward a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In 2PC, the placebo effect is a real effect, governed by the rules of Extended Competition Resolved Collapse. What we believe can happen constrains what actually happens.
Maybe…
I agree with all of this. My point is only that I don’t feel philosophy needs sub-dividing. For me, serious and considered thought works because it embraces all of philosophy, undivided.
Of course we cannot and will not agree on what deserves such consideration, but that’s fine. It was my intention to be all-inclusive. I know what counts for me, as you do of what counts for you. That’s more than enough, I think?
I don’t know Geoff, I think the subjective/objective dichotomy doesn’t work. Look at how the degree of certitude varies between one person and another, even in relation to things considered to be objective. For example, some people are highly certain of Einsteinian relativity, others are not so certain.
So, I really hope that your wife can “know” that you love her, or else she’ll live her life in an insecure relationship. This is regardless of whether you are more certain of your love for her, than she is.
To make something which is a radically open question, a foundational premise in your metaphysical system, is a weakness. Your whole system is centered around wavefunction collapse, but what exactly a wavefunction is, and whether collapse is even a coherent concept is a “radically open question”. So to base your system on this, rather than the traditional practise of basing metaphysics in self-evident truths, I believe is a weakness.
The specious present is completely different from the thick present, the latter implies a second dimension of time. Suppose we have a line which represents time in the conventional way. At the end of that line is the present, with an arrow signifying that the present is continuously advancing. The “specious present” indicates that the present is a small line segment where the arrow is, rather than a point. The thick present adds a second dimension, giving that line breadth. So, as the arrow of time moves ahead, the past does not extend backward in a one dimensional line, it also widens in a perpendicular direction. This serves to replace the need for MW.
The present is the time when things change, “activity” occurs. In the context of QM, the wave function must continuously change as time passes, at the present, and also the present is the time when a particle is actualized. The two are incompatible “activities” at the present, so the actualization of the particle is the need for collapse.
No, it’s not panpsychism, just a slightly misleading use of “experience”. Consider what I said, that all activity happens at the present. Now replace “experience the present” with “are actualized at the present”. That’s what I meant. So in relation to the one dimensional line, some types of particles (the more massive by my proposal) are active prior to the others (the less massive), that’s why “weight” has multipole meanings.
This is what the second dimension of time provides for. The “now” marks the time that a particle is active, or actualized. But relative to the one dimensional line, some particles are actualized (have a present) prior to others. So a second dimension of time is required to allow for this breadth of the present. Relative to that traditional line of time, it appears as a specious present, but relative to the various particles themselves, it is a real point in time which marks their actualization as now, but not at the same time, therefore a second dimension of time.
I mentioned two things in particular which are problematic, retro-causation, and your need to rely on MWI. If you want, I can revisit some of your posts and analyze how phase 2 relates to phase 1, in what you call transition, to determine exactly where I think the principle flaw is, but I think it is primarily your emphasis on wavefunction collapse. As I said, I think that the need for collapse is due to the fact that “wavefunction” is an inadequate representation. So “collapse” is just a symptom of a faulty model.
Okay, this is another problem, the need for a conscious being to interact, for there to be a “present”. What occurred before there was conscious beings on earth, was time not passing then?
But again, this problem is just produced from you accepting the reality of collapse, which is a symptom of the faulty representation, wavefunction. A proper representation of real waves, in real substance (aether) would not require collapse, it would just require interaction. But if we don’t understand the substance we cannot model the true wave action, nor its interactions. So instead of interaction we have to assume “collapse” of the model (it fails to be representative at this point), and that is evidence of the flaws in the model.
You seem to fall back on MWI in Phase 2. Are you saying that you do not believe in it?
I hope you don’t mind if I focus on what seems to be the most important things you’re saying.
That is left-hemisphere thinking. To understand 2PC, you need to engage the right hemisphere. It requires a gestalt shift, and if you cannot get past the opening premise then the shift can’t happen.
There are at least 12 major interpretations of QM, and many more variations on those themes. In nearly all of these cases, the interpretation has been proposed purely as a solution to the Measurement Problem, with little or no attempt to integrate with anything else (such as the hard problem of consciousness or the crisis in cosmology). On their own, none of them can assemble a consensus, because there are too many of them, and because none of them are empirically testable.
2PC is different. It begins with a new interpretation (which is a combination of two existing ones), but instead of just leaving things there, it goes on to explain why this metaphysical proposal leads to an integrated solution to over 30 different problems in science and philosophy. Not 30 different solutions to 30 problems, but one solution to 30 problems.
This is exactly how major paradigm shifts are supposed to work. Not piecemeal progress or fragmentary truths, but a whole new way of looking at things which reframes the old problems so suddenly everything makes much more sense. Heliocentrism was like this. So was evolution. This isn’t a weakness.
Okay, this is another problem, the need for a conscious being to interact, for there to be a “present”. What occurred before there was conscious beings on earth, was time not passing then?
This question suggests you have not yet understood the basic framework I am proposing (and I don’t mean that in a negative way, it is just a fact). What we think of as “before” the first conscious being (LUCAS, 555mya), isn’t really “before”. Mainstream science tells us that the cosmos existed for 13bn years before then, and it is assumed without question that this history was classical-relativistic. It is assumed that it unfolded temporally forwards, under the dynamic influence of the laws of General Relativity. In 2PC, that is not true. Phase 1 of 2PC (which includes the entire pre-LUCAS history) only ever existed ontologically as Phase 1. It existed only as Phase 1 information describing one possible timeline through an MWI-like block of possible histories. Nothing ever experienced it, and no time passed. The entire 13bn year history was selected as a block. So from the perspective of LUCAS, the whole of cosmic history was a giant synchronicity with the sole purpose of leading to its own evolution (“psychegenesis”). Of course, LUCAS couldn’t understand any of that, because it was the size of a grain of rice, but you know what I am saying.
This mechanism explains both abiogenesis and the evolution of consciousness. It also predicts that the Phase 1 history of the Earth should contain a series of unbelievably improbable events – this would be the signature of psychegenesis. And this is exactly what we do see.
The Psychetelic Principle | Two-Phase Cosmology
Why did psychegenesis happen on Earth, rather than somewhere else? The Psychetelic Principle tells us that we should expect the Earth to be special, but it doesn’t tell us exactly what is special about Earth. It makes an empirical prediction: if the model is correct, then there should have been multiple exceptionally improbable events in Earth’s phase 1 history. These, if they exist, would be signatures of psychegenesis. There are many examples, the most extreme of which are these four:
1. Eukaryogenesis: The Singular Emergence of Complex Cellular Life
Eukaryogenesis is the origin of the eukaryotic cell via the endosymbiotic incorporation of an alpha-proteobacterium (the precursor to mitochondria) into an archaeal host, and it appears to have happened only once in Earth’s entire 4-billion-year history. Without it, complex multicellularity (and thus animals, cognition, and consciousness) would not have emerged. The energetic advantage conferred by mitochondria enabled the explosion of genomic and structural complexity. No similar event is known to have occurred elsewhere in the microbial biosphere, despite vast diversity and timescales. If eukaryogenesis is a statistical outlier with a probability on the order of 1 in 10⁹ or worse, it becomes a cardinal signpost of the unique psychegenetic branch.1
2. Theia Impact: Formation of the Earth–Moon System
The early collision between Earth and the hypothesised planet Theia yielded two improbable outcomes at once: a large stabilising moon and a metal-rich Earth. The angular momentum and energy transfer needed to both eject enough debris to form the Moon and leave the Earth intact was extremely finely tuned. This event likely stabilised Earth’s axial tilt (permitting climate stability), generated long-term tidal dynamics (affecting early life cycles), and drove the internal differentiation which fuels the magnetic field and active tectonics. It’s estimated to be a rare outcome among rocky planets – perhaps 1 in 10⁷ – and essential for the continuity of biological evolution.2
3. Grand Tack: A Rare Planetary Migration Pattern
Early in solar system formation, Jupiter is thought to have migrated inward toward the Sun and then reversed course (“tacked”) due to resonance with Saturn. This migration swept away much of the early inner solar debris, reducing the intensity of late bombardment and allowing small rocky planets like Earth to survive. Crucially, it also delivered volatiles (including water) to the inner system. This highly specific orbital choreography is rarely reproduced in planetary formation simulations. Most exoplanetary systems dominated by gas giants do not preserve stable, water-bearing inner worlds. The odds against such a migration path are estimated to be very high. Some simulations suggest well under 1 in 10⁶. 3
4. LUCA’s Biochemical Configuration
The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) did not merely represent the first replicator, but a highly specific and robust configuration of metabolism, information storage, and error correction. It was already using a universal genetic code, RNA–protein translation, lipid membranes, and a suite of complex enzymes. LUCA’s molecular architecture was a kind of “narrow gate” through which life could pass toward evolvability. Given the astronomical space of chemically plausible alternatives, LUCA’s setup may reflect a deeply contingent and rare outcome.4
Conclusion: Compound Cosmic Improbability as Psychegenetic Marker
Each of these four events is, in itself, vanishingly unlikely. But more importantly, they are compounded. The joint probability of a single planet experiencing all four – along the same evolutionary trajectory – does indeed render the Earth’s phase 1 history cosmically unique. Under 2PC these improbabilities indicate the statistical imprint of consciousness retro-selecting a pathway through possibility space – making a phase transition from indefinite potentiality to a single, chosen actuality.
1 Lane, N., & Martin, W. F. (2010). The energetics of genome complexity. Nature, 467(7318), 929–934. The energetics of genome complexity | Nature
2 Canup, R. M. (2004). Simulations of a late lunar-forming impact. Icarus, 168(2), 433–456.
Laskar, J., Joutel, F., & Robutel, P. (1993). Stabilization of the Earth’s obliquity by the Moon. Nature, 361(6413), 615–617 and Elser, S., et al. (2011). How common are Earth–Moon planetary systems? Icarus, 214(2), 357–365, and Stevenson, D. J. (2003). Planetary magnetic fields. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 208(1–2), 1–11.3 Raymond, S. N., Izidoro, A., & Morbidelli, A. (2018). Solar System formation in the context of extrasolar planets. ArXiv:1812.01033, and Walsh, K. J., et al. (2011). A low mass for Mars from Jupiter’s early gas-driven migration. Nature, 475(7355), 206–209.
4 Woese, C. R. (1998). The universal ancestor. PNAS, 95(12), 6854–6859.
Martin, W., & Russell, M. J. (2003). On the origins of cells. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 358(1429), 59–85, and Lane, N., & Martin, W. (2010). The energetics of genome complexity. Nature, 467(7318), 929–934, and Szostak, J. W. (2012). Attempts to define life do not help to understand the origin of life. J. Biomol. Struct. Dyn., 29(4), 599–600.
Aren’t they totally difference case? Noumena objects such as God, immortality are postulated by reason for religion and morality to exist.
QM does what science does. They observe particles and atoms, but they they behave in uncertain and unexpected way, and they cannot explain using the law of physics.
Noumena has the solutions as long as you use the right methodology for perception i.e. postulation via reasoning and faith.
QM has no solution. Their answer is uncertainty.
“Noumena” just means “things as they are in themselves” as a opposed to “phenomena”, which means “things as they appear to us”. So we know what phenomena is (it is a 3-D material world where time passes - a classical reality), but noumena, at least according to Kant, are unknowable. So that could indeed include God, but it doesn’t have to. It is whatever it is, which we supposedly cannot know.
You just said it yourself. Science observes particles and atoms – classical objects which have a singular position and a singular set of properties. “Normal” objects (regardless of scale).
This is why QM has caused so much trouble: we cannot observe a quantum superposition. QM is literally a description of the world when it is not being observed. It is precisely because we cannot observe a superposition that we have 12+ competing interpretations of QM. No observation we can make can decide between them, because all of them are consistent with the empirical evidence (at least on the surface). Those interpretations are metaphysical because they cannot be empirically distinguished. However, only one interpretation can be correct. The “Measurement Problem” will only be solved when a consensus can be assembled as to what that correct answer is, which suggests that nothing currently (officially) on the table is correct.
I am proposing that the reason for this is that what appear to be the two most diametrically opposed interpretations (MWI and von Neumann’s “consciousness is collapse”) fit together to make a new interpretation. This is a completely new way of solving the problem, because it simultaneously makes the most of the strengths of MWI and CCC, and gets rid of their biggest weaknesses. But it radically changes how we must interpret the empirical evidence with respect to cosmology. It means our current model of the early cosmos is completely and utterly wrong, because it get rid of “cosmic inflation”. So this is a new explanation for the origin of the Hubble Tension (which is caused by a model-dependent extrapolation, where the model is now shown to be wrong).
I always judge premises for truth or falsity before proceeding. Most often, the soundness of what follows is dependent on the truth of the premises. You can call this left-hemisphere thinking if you like, but if right-hemisphere thinking requires that I plunge into wild ungrounded speculations, with what appears to be absurd conclusions, then there is a high probability that I would be wasting my time in that endeavour. I think well disciplined thought requires a unified balance of right and left side, not one side dominating the other.
I really think that you are not proposing a whole new way of looking at things. You are starting within the same old paradigm, wavefunction, with the appearance of collapse, and you are claiming to have found a new solution, as an alternative to the 12 or so others, within this tired old paradigm. A true paradigm shift would be to start with what I proposed, to recognize that wavefunction is a faulty representation, which due to its faults produces the unacceptable conclusion of “collapse”, and reject that wavefunction paradigm altogether.
This is exactly what I mean by “absurd conclusions”. The idea that time did not pass before conscious beings existed is contrary to all the geological and biological evidence which we find right here on earth, without the need for reference to general relativity theory. Notice the way that geomorphology models the evolving rock structures of the earth even prior to living beings. There is clear evidence that time was passing before there was conscious beings on earth.