Video Outline
00:18 – Introductory Statement:
“…as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”*
– Albert Einstein, 1922
*First published 1921 by Julius Springer (Berlin) https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol7-trans/225
A quote remembered for what it says about the limits of human knowledge, but less remembered for what it says about the peculiar powers of a conscious mind, to perceive perfect certainty, such as mathematical proofs, despite living in an imperfect universe.
00:55 – Introducing myself, Andrew Malcolm, and my host, Dr. Vijayakumar Varadarajan and Ajeenkya D Y Patil University; and providing an overview of the workshop
02:43 – Reading the Music Festival Example:
If you wanted to fill in the details surrounding a memory of an event, like viewing a show at a music festival, what would you do? You could revisit the site of the festival, ask friends you went with to share stories, or see the same show again somewhere else, meet the performers, and ask about their perspectives. But what if you wanted to fill in the details surrounding the memory of a thinking-event, like a fantasy of yourself on the stage instead of the performers? You could repeat the fantasy again, this time with more awareness of what was happening in your mind during the visualization, but how would you know for sure that any of the qualities of the repeated fantasy match those of the first iteration? How would you know for certain you visualized the same sights, the same sounds, or experienced the same affiliated feelings, or even started and ended the fantasy the same way, with the same duration in between? For the memory from real life, you have people, things and events in the external universe that confirm for you the continuity between where the show took place, how long the show lasted, and who or what was involved, but nothing can confirm this kind of continuity for you in terms of your thinking-events. In fact, this experiment leads to an unanswerable question: how do you really know that you had any of the thoughts that you remember having?
04:07 – I state that remembered-thinking-events are defined by uncertainty, and introduce the exercise of comparing the real and fantasy music festival event-memories.
05:02 – Examining the memory of the real life event:
Memories of real events have a beginning and end, they have boundaries, but the boundaries are fuzzy.
The mind recognizes repeated events in the universe, but it also understands that events aren’t repeated perfectly, that repeatability in the external universe is only sort-of there.
We make deductions and inferences about the connections between events in the universe, but we know that are deductions and inferences are vulnerable to criticism from other people, and future evidence that may disprove our deductions.
08:52 – “This interlude presents Section 2 from my essay (“The Pressure of Light: how consciousness creates permanence in an infinite universe”*), which examines the nature of external-events-remembered.
*https://pressureoflight.ca/the-pressure-of-light/
12:29 – Examining the fantasy music festival event-memory:
I may believe that the visualization caused a feeling of excitement, but can’t prove this happened
I can repeat the fantasy over and over, and presume that I’ve done so in precisely the same way without the risk of disproof
I can perceive the boundaries surrounding the thinking event as perfect
15:35 – Summary of examination of each type of memory
The differences are important because our brains would have evolved according to the knowledge-generating nature of each memory-type
17:30 – Seeing a remembered thought, and two thoughts ago, and three thoughts ago, as analogous to nodes of communication in Claude Shannon’s “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”*. A similar increase in uncertainty makes it easier to perceive perfect iterations further and further back, so that infinite iterations are in fact easy to perceive.
*https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.503815/mode/2up
19:55 – “This interlude presents Section 3 from my essay (“The Pressure of Light: how consciousness creates permanence in an infinite universe”*), which examines the nature of internal-events-remembered.
*https://pressureoflight.ca/the-pressure-of-light/
26:10 – Concluding with my thoughts on the introductory quote: “…as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”*
– Albert Einstein, 1922
*First published 1921 by Julius Springer (Berlin) https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol7-trans/225
I propose that the nature of remembered-thinking explains how we are able to perceive systems that are perfect, such as what’s contained in mathematics, despite living in a universe not described by mathematics with perfect certainty.
Call for Contributing-and-Lead-Authors (submissions and nominations):
So that my core assertions may be taken from non-academic realms to the realms of academia, I’ve created this call for a lead-author and contributing-authors for a scientific paper that is described by the following hypothetical abstract (please consider submitting yourself as an author, or nominating someone else, by commenting or letting me know in any available way):
Title: How Causation Roots in Remembered-Thinking (an abstract created as an example for a call for contributing-authors: submissions and nominations)
The following hypothesis was made in the 2022 presentation, “Thinking, Remembering-Thinking, Thinking about a Memory of Thinking, and how that Messes with Time”, to Ajeenkya D Y Patil University:
Perfectly repeatable and connectable remembered-thoughts establish the means for perceiving causal relationships, more so than any remembered-external-event, and therefore causation most likely roots in remembered-thinking.
The hypothesis breaks down as follows: perfect repeatability and connectability is established through a comparison of remembered-thinking-events and remembered-external-events with the following outcomes: memories of external events have fuzzy boundaries, imperfect repetitions, and are connected through inferred relationships that are vulnerable to disproof by other event-participants and future evidence; remembered-thinking-events have perfect boundaries, perfect repeatability, and are invulnerable to disproof. Because unresolvable-uncertainty about remembered thoughts is what allows for perfect boundaries and repeatability, and because uncertainty increases for two-thoughts-ago, three-thoughts-ago, and so on, infinite repetitions are easy to conceive, and neurological evolution is likely to respond to this mental capability. Furthermore, since the roots of causation are in a mentally created past, this point gives strength to the hypothesis that causation does not exist in the external universe at all.
The presentation was made by Andrew Malcolm, who was presenting the core assertions made in his 2022 non-academic, epistemological essay, “The Pressure of Light: how consciousness creates permanence in a universe of infinite-heterogeneity”. Unlike in the essay, the presentation put the hypothesis in the context of David Hume’s system for understanding consciousness, and his own assertions about causal relationships. The outcome was a strengthening of Malcolm’s hypothesis about remembered-thinking.
The outcome breaks downs as follows: David Hume deduces that causal relationships are not observable in the external universe, and only inferrable in the conscious space. He also asserts that causal relationships are only inferrable after objects-of-cause and objects-of-effect are witnessed in contiguity in space and time, and remembered, over multiple iterations. If remembered thinking allows for far greater ease in observing perfect iterations than the external universe, and if Hume is correct, then it’s likely causation roots in remembered-thinking.
For this paper, a number of academics from the fields of neurology, physics, psychology and philosophy were invited to consider Malcolm’s hypothesis in the context of a theoretical framework they were familiar with, and which concerned either causation or consciousness, or both, much as Malcolm did with Hume. The results present a tally of which considerations strengthened the hypothesis and which weakened it. The discussion considers the value of the hypothesis, and the possibilities for verification and falsification through experimentation.