The Meaning Code

Glen explains his perspective on the physics terminology that is vital to exploring what life is and what it isn't. Glen's view from physics interacts with Karen's view from art at such intersections as boundaries, constraints, limitations and anomaly.

Playlist for all 6 episodes follows notes.

Next episode, Glen will talk about Science with a capital S. If you want to prepare for the discussion, watch these two videos:

Cargo Cult Science with Richard Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg&feature=youtu.be

The Morality of Fundamental Physics https://www.cornell.edu/video/nima-arkani-hamed-morality-fundamental-physics

Other videos with helpful information:

Reversing entropy https://youtu.be/KR23aMjIHIY

Maxwell's Demon https://youtu.be/favrMbfi1Pw

John Wheeler paper he referenced: https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf Playlist for the whole 6 part series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZhxqfaqYU5yjy0-Tr8RlB4

John Vervaeke, Wolfgang Smith and Richard Smith begin with a discussion of relativism and what we can do about its negative aspects. Then begins a wide ranging discussion of the tripartite macrocosm and the tripartite microcosm and the overlap between John's work and Wolfgang's work.

Many book recommendations included in the timestamps. Fuller bios of Dr. John Vervaeke, Dr. Wolfgang Smith and Dr. Richard Smith in previous conversation: https://youtu.be/5G9gk49VhKM

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

03:35 JV Discussion of Cultural Relativism; the limits of cultural frameworks

05:30 JV Plato is well aware of he many aspects of any object, even the visual aspect A through line is that which binds the aspects together. The Platonic framework All organisms are varied - a universal process has produced the variation

08:30 WS Relativism is intimately connected with the Cartesian bifurcationism (my res cogitates is different than yours). In today’s world, we are trained to be disrespectful

11:20 JV Relativism exacerbated by Des Cartes. Lack of respect. Elevation of subjectivity to be half of ontology has been problematic Clark’s Explorations of Metaphysics. Kant never gave an argument for the possibility of understanding other human beings. Wittgenstein: There is ‘no private language’. If there were a private language, you couldn’t be corrected.

15:45 WS Respect is a sine qua non for all else. Today, we create skeptics, critics, always negative to the consensus. To find Truth, one needs to start with sane human attitudes.

21:15 JV Nietszche, Freud, Marx have given us the hermeneutics of suspicion. Palo, Merleau Ponti, J. J. Gibson are giving us a hermeneutics of disclosure. Beauty as disclosing reality. What is needed is this kind of dialogic format focused on the hermeneutics of beauty. An ability to follow the through line.

27:00 Many truths are only disclosed to us when we are willing to go through a transformative process. “Not just erudite, but wise.” Wolfgang Smith

30:15 WS You need to have a certain access to the truth before you get more truth. Contemporary teaches to doubt and question everything, so young people are deprived of truth.

33:00 JV That which is most real has intelligible coherence. And the opposite of that, held in tension to the first, is that the real is simultaneously what surprises, shocks, startles us. We need to live a stance as finite transcendents. Reality discloses itself in our finitude. Myths of heroism so we don’t despair of our finitude v. Myths of hubris so that we are constantly aware of our mortality.

38:11 WS The Platonic program - Platonists regarded the intermediary realm to be inherently mathematical (geometry) Sidereal/ planetary / terrestrial Seeing with the eye of the intellect

51:00 JV Difference between Platonism and Neo-Platonism (a continuity between Aristotle and Plato Tripartite in John’s understanding: Nous: The intelligible is that which is accessible only through the nous. Sensible: Corresponds to the corporeal Imaginal: Rituals link the intellect (the nous) and the sensible.

57:15 JV Realizing the through line - theory All the appearances have a throughline that points to something beyond.

1:00:30 JV This all has to translate into me becoming wiser

1:00:59 Geometry, the imaginal, the intermediary, the Pythagoreans, Proclus, theurgia, liturgy. Yogic transition of the imaginal and geometric traditions. Intermediary includes both the intellect and the imaginal

Sacred geometry Truth and Reality Reverence and Virtue

Thomas Taylor’s Commentary on the Timaeus

Eric Perl’s Theophany: the Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius

Thomas Cheetham’s All the World is an Icon

Karen and Glen in Episode 1 of the series which will explore the question, What is Life? Future episodes will cover Thomas Kuhn and paradigms, Complexity v. Simplicity, Landauer's Principle, and a general overview of the meaning of and interactions between Entropy, Energy and Information. Playlist for all episodes follows notes.

Nima Arkani Hamed video: https://youtu.be/5aAMJNVmdoY Hamed is an alpha dog in theoretical particle physics. It took courage for him to address the nature of morality and truth in relation to physics. He came to the conclusion that there is an objective Reality which is Truth with a capital T, and it is both knowable and accessible. In order to do physics, you have to believe that there is an objective reality. Hamed is on the periphery of the question of how we approach the perfect. You have to accept its pronouncement on you. You may work your whole life on a theory only to have someone else demolish it, and you will have discovered that your theory did not accord with Reality.

Paul Davies video: https://youtu.be/GCD1ZT4IgAY (27:00 or 28:00) Brian Miller video: https://youtu.be/YAXiHRPZz0s How does life begin? Paul Davies' assumption is that physics has nothing to say about the matter, because physics uses the language of matter and energy and forces, while biology uses the language of information, coding, instructions. To start working on a design problem, you need a set of design specifications. In this case, we need a non-biological definition of life. To do so we must explore the interface of Entropy, Information and Thermodynamics. All of the arguments against the theory that biology was the basis for first life are statistical. Given the improbabilities, there's just not enough time. Maxwell's demon might be a fruitful approach. Has anyone worked out a way to create a Maxwell's demon using a chemical process? Every compression algorithm needs an error checking mechanism and a key to read it. The error checking mechanism is effective only if you keep all the parts together. The Whole is greater than the Sum of the parts. In the same way, God's Word has a built in error checking device which will always keep you from error if you are familiar with the whole Word and don't dispose of some part of it or take some part of it out of context. Jordan Peterson doesn't take Scripture literally. He takes it seriously. Glen takes it very seriously. Everything has a boundary, an inside and an outside. Entropy is only observable from the outside. Physicists talk about the black box view which is the external view, how the user interacts with the system. The white box view is the internal view, the internal workings of the system contained on the inside and not connected to the outside.

PLAYLIST for the whole 6 part series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZhxqfaqYU5yjy0-Tr8RlB4

Brad and Karen dive deeper into the implications of "measuring up" and the balance between mercy and judgment.

For the full YouTube, see here: https://youtu.be/qkDWTKNMI2c

We discuss the aspect of comparison, relationships between binaries, Iain McGilchrist's work on the two brain hemispheres, the role of the observer, etc. Link to Part 1 follows the timestamps.

Timestamps

00:00:00 Intro

00:01:15 Navigating between two binaries, example: justice and mercy

00:02:50 Migraines that shut down the left hemisphere, comprehending and apprehending

00:08:30 Training horses, the blessing of anomaly, learning to listen with the right hemisphere

00:10:00 Left hemisphere gives us speech, so a truth, once spoken, becomes a lie. 00:11:20 Finding practical meaning in this little corner

00:12:37 Comparing wavelengths, frequencies is what we do, a kind of measurement, at multiple levels and over time.

00:14:30 The observer changing what is observed. The feedback loop.

00:16:30 Hiking in the Maui Rainforest is contact with reality.

00:20:30 Thoughts on the measurement problem and its practical implications 00:23:00 We are also being observed, always. We shape the arena, the arena shapes us.

00:31:00 The incarnation of Christ in us, the triad of Love (intention, communication and action)

00:40:30 Having a question and balancing that with living real life

00:50:28 Was Eve trying to become the Observer? Things have to measure up to my expectations. Unravels the web of Love.

00:59:20 Action as the missing piece

01:06:30 The perils of providing good content

01:14:15 We are comparing frequencies or wavelengths related to context in art 01:23:00 Agape and action

01:24:20 Loving

Measurement Problem, Part 1 The Ideal is a Judge: Gauge Blocks and the Requirement to Measure up. https://youtu.be/iT43zHL2Xp8

Jonathan Pageau joins for a conversation with Dr. Wolfgang Smith and Dr. Richard Smith about icons, symbolism and our connection to the Divine. Links to books and articles mentioned will follow the timestamps.

Timestamps

00:00 Opening chitchat

01:20 Intro

05:30 Wolfgang Smith’s Tripartite Cosmos icon

12:00 Jonathan’s question about the icon

20:15 Examples of 3 dimensional versions

28:50 Jonathan’s icons

42:40 Wolfgang responds to question about the aeviternal realm

45:20 Jean Borella quote as an opening to the question of the symbolism of the Cross

53:20 The connection to the Divine is what fill it with Reality, bringing up into Glory

1:05:30 Without an identity, you can’t measure anything. Identity is a gift.

1:15:30 The cup, the apple, identity and coherence over time an Wolfram’s Theory

1:19:30 Obstacle is the gift

1:27:50 The introduction of perspective in sacred art

1:31:20 Wolfgang is encouraged meeting Jonathan

Wolfgang's books (selected out of a long list)

The Vertical Ascent

The Quantum Enigma

Cosmos and Transcendence

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions

The new physics by Stephen Wolfram: https://wolframphysics.org

Perry Marshall, author of Evolution 2.0 and founder of the $10 million price for the origin of a spontaneously arising communication system joins Glen and Karen to discuss the fundamental nature of information, choice and the observer. Links to videos mentioned will follow timestamps.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:45 Origin of Life v. Origin of Species

05:14 Is something missing in the Intelligent Design argument?

07:35 Where does the idea come from in the first place? Information must become physical.

11:00 How many divine interventions are there supposed to be?

16:00 The limitations of the God of the Gaps argument. Information shows up. There has to be a mechanism, a chunk of hardware. This problem is not addressed by Intelligent Design

18:30 Does Code = Information? Many definitions of information. Shannon, for example.

22:00 Definition of code is symbolic information exchanged between a sender and a receiver, Between an encoder and a decoder, and it’s a digital communication system 27:25 Science v. Religion is a proxy battle for something deeper, perhaps what it means to be human.

33:30 Does Maxwell’s demon actually exist?

41:00 John Torday, A systems approach to physiologic evolution https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcp.25820

45:00 Information capacity is a capacity for choice. Freedom to select a one or a zero. 53:00 Maxwell’s demon lives on symbolic info, not bits and bytes. It’s what the 1’s and 0's represent symbolically. What is the sender looking at and the receiver sending onto? A bigger more holistic landscape than science can look at.

1:00:22 Free choice in quantum mechanics. The observer has free choice in what experiment to do.

1:05:45 Time acts on the rocks. The rocks do not act on time. We act on time

1:11:14 If you want to push choice down to the level of Quantum physics, you have to acknowledge that there are multiple pathways into the future which are all consistent with the past history of the universe, so you can’t have perfect determinism. Choice breaks that.

1:15:25 Following the question of the observer is a fruitful path. Glen’s suggestion: perhaps replace consciousness with agency. Consciousness is how WE experience agency, so it takes US out of the theoretical pathway. Reluctance to recast definitions into formal, mathematical statements hinders progress in the search for Origin of Life.

1:17:00 Stuart Kaufman and Set Theory

1:24:00 Heuristics leads to an outcome that is good enough. Inductive reasoning is a powerful skill set.

The Meaning Code videos related to The Physics of Life: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZhxqfaqYU5yjy0-Tr8RlB4

The Observer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZTm9ZRgC9OQINsbC1BxsPy

Perry Marshall and Stephen Meyer on Unbelievable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RHUEXn2upI&t=1s

Perry Marshall, Denis Noble and Lee Cronin on Unbelievable https://youtu.be/Njuso5A2jts

The Prize website: https://evo2.org

The book: Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design by Perry Marshall

Karen and Glen get together for an informal review of items that have recently caught their attention relative to Stephen Wolfram's Theory of Fundamental Physics. If anyone wants to do a comment with timestamps, I will be forever grateful. At the end, Glen mentions John Walton and his reading of the first few chapters of Genesis. We talked about how great it would be to see a conversation between Jordan Peterson and John Walton, and after I started uploading this video, I saw that the Youtube Channel called Deep Talks had uploaded a video today of clips from those two, so here's the link to that: Jordan Peterson v John Walton on Deep Talks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiSGdDc3bQY&t=2s The art video from Chris Petkau that we mentioned: https://youtu.be/pYgUwolDuPs And Glen once again mentioned Nima Arkani Hamed's Morality of Fundamental Physics video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiSGdDc3bQY&t=2s Here's Wolfram on Lex Fridman # 124. Interesting things happen starting at 1:33:30 and again at 3:16:00 going all the way to 3:40:00 or thereabouts..

In Part 3 of this discussion regarding the role of the observer, Glen weaves together ideas of robust computing (demon horde sort) and distributed intelligence. He makes the claim that it could be mathematically verified whether or not computation is fundamental, and that if it turns out to be so, then language is also fundamental, since computation and language are inextricably intertwined. We also learn that handedness (chirality) is hierarchical. links follow timestamps

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

0:15 Recapping the end of Part 2

2:00 Central Planning v. Distributed Intelligence 3:00 Responding to viewer’s comments

4:45 PBS Spacetime on the participatory universe 8:32 John Wheeler’s biggest question: Whose bit?

12:20 Implications of observers and the quantum mechanical universe

16:20 A vision of Wholeness

18:30 A challenge for mathematicians

20:35 If there is a point where entanglement does not affect the next layer up, that would solve the Wigner’s Friends paradox and would also illustrate that computation is fundamental.

24:00 Robodog as a way to explore learning systems and language in robotics

28:00 An exploration of group intelligence and the conversation as adaptable

31:30 Handedness is essential and implies Hierarchy

33:30 The language called Forth

38:20 Context Free Grammar, indexed grammars, natural language processing

41:35 The layers of Grammar

47:30 Field workers will probably never be replaced by robots, not a menial task, very complex

51:35 If computation is fundamental, we need a covenant between Truth and Language

53:40 Trust Networks and Cesar Hidalgo

57:50 Decisions at the level of the input output are more effective than centrally planned ones.

1:02:00 Questions about Darwin

1:07:20 It depends on what question you want answered

1:07:45 Questions about Space and Time, the reality of Possibilities and Options

1:11:15 Computational irreducibility is more intuitive if you talk about languages

Finite State Machines on Reason to Believe https://youtu.be/6FOJWxdTvms

“The "Meta" Hard Problem of Consciousness and Quantum Babbling with Levin, Friston, and Fields,” https://youtu.be/J6eJ44Jq_pw

"Cracking The Nutshell," https://www.youtube.com/c/CrackingTheNutshell

"Do Electrons Have Free Will? The Conway-Kochen Free Will Theorem - Closing the Free Will Loophole,' https://youtu.be/7ZqUEAACfyk PBS Space-Time,

“Does the Universe Create Itself?” https://youtu.be/I8p1yqnuk8Y?t=600

"Robust-first computing: Demon Horde Sort (short version)," https://youtu.be/lbgzXndaNKk

"Forth the Hackers Language," https://hackaday.com/2017/01/27/forth-the-hackers-language/

If you want to watch this episode on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/ZUOiF0tljiw

Sevilla King of A Quality Existence joins the Meaning Code to discuss recent appearances by Jonathan and Matthieu Pageau. We look at Mercy and Judgment, gathering in and cutting away. Judgment as a type of discernment, measurement, paring down, producing fittedness. Mercy as a gathering together, care, attention, choosing. Both together are Agape and Sacrifice, opportunity cost, bringing reality into existence. Matthieu Pageau with Tammy Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Om4NKrOCF4 Jonathan Pageau on Love and Attention at the Consciousness and Conscience Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGQVs4ewHFw&t=647s

For Youtube version: https://youtu.be/G8cAwts0ZZg

Margaret Allen tells her story of being raised in an aggressively atheist household and yet learning of the better way, and opens her heart about the process of writing her book. Lot of resources available on Margaret's website, https://margaretallen.org Be sure to look at the page of Declarations. A great encouragement! Gracious Living: Creating a Culture of Honor, Love and Compassion https://www.amazon.com/Gracious-Living-Creating-Culture-Compassion/dp/1952025087/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3THKU7MET6BVL&keywords=Margaret+Allen&qid=1661454384&sprefix=margaret+allen%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-2