Here are some of the scientific problems solved according to the theory on this site. (The solutions are detailed elsewhere.)
Physical objects are understood to be subsets of the world's total set of atoms. A subset in mathematics or logic is supposed to have a rule defining it. But for most of the physical objects of science, this rule is lacking. A chair, for instance, does not have a scientific rule specifying it. Its set of atoms is more-or-less arbitrary from science's impersonal point of view. Yet the chair is a well-defined object to us. It is a definite thing-in-itself and occupies an important place in the world. Somehow, science needs to see the chair from our point of view.
Attempts to solve this problem generally end in circularity. One reason for this is that we define an object according to the laws of physics but forget that the laws of physics have been deduced from the observation of objects.
In practice, scientists rely on human observation to define objects, supplementing observation with an assumption that there is some 'natural' partitioning of the world's atoms. Objects somehow 'define themselves'.
But 'natural' is a matter of human opinion. The idea of an object having a 'self' is also suspect. But worse, observation requires an observer, man. So an object defined by observation is dependent on man. This cannot be permitted if man is an object himself. The scientific problem is to know how atoms organise themselves into objects in the absence of human beings.
The answer described on this site is that the world's objects are specified by a rule of logic. This rule transfers objects into the real world. Thus objects do not exist until logically they are required to. The rule of logic that does this transferring is belief. Objects are believed to exist.
The laws of physics in current science are 'givens' - accidents of the big bang 14 billion years ago. There is no logical reason why they are the way they are. Although some of the laws have intriguing correlations with mathematical operations such as symmetry, they still seem to be accidents of the extraordinarily special initial conditions of the universe. Roger Penrose suggests that these initial conditions were special to one part in 10-to-the-power-of-10123 - a huge number. [Ref. 26] (He also thinks that the distinction between laws and initial conditions will eventually be removed. 'Instead, there will be just some marvellously consistent comprehensive scheme.') [Ref. 26, p 456]
Many scientists will agree with Penrose. The presence of fundamental 'givens' in science - the laws of physics, the free constants of the universe, the initial conditions - is unsatisfactory for an explanation of the world.
In the theory here, the laws of physics are explained as derivations from the world's objects, which are our creation. We look at the world's objects and derive laws and initial conditions compatible with them. So there is now a reason for the very-particular state of affairs that existed at the start of the world: that state of affairs was necessary given the objects that we see now to exist. Thus we create the state of affairs that existed at the start of the world. We do that, firstly, by believing a world of objects to exist; secondly, by summarising the characteristics of the objects in terms of laws and initial conditions. The initial conditions of the world need to be very particular to support the very particular world we believe to exist.
If we were to create a different set of objects to populate the world, the altered behaviour of the objects would oblige us to have a different set of laws and initial conditions describing the world; i.e., we would have a different world. We can get a different set of objects to populate the world by unconsciously believing a new set of things to exist (and by not believing the old set of things to exist). As I described, the creation of a new world in this way is necessarily an unconscious process, and we can only find out about it by employing the indirect methods of science. Our scientific effort represents us trying to find out what we believe.
Einstein's theory of relativity describes the deterministic universe as a 4-D space-time object, but it does not say why the object has the particular shape that it has. (This is a different view of the problem just mentioned.) There are an infinite number of possible shapes for our real world. We feel that something should select the shape that we actually see.
The answer here is that the shape of the universe is dictated by a logic external to the universe - the logic of belief. As I just said, if the world were believed to be different, it would in fact be different. But now we recognise that the shape of an object - any object - must be specified from outside it. Dictation from the outside, since it is logically prior to the object dictated, can be a very plausible reason for an object to have the characteristics that it has. In the case of the world, the dictation is by belief operating from the platform of logic.
The 4-D deterministic universe is unable to account for the feeling of movement that each of us experiences in connection with the universe's objects. We see a 3-D object in one part of space-time, then in another, and we say that the object has 'moved' from one location to the other. But in reality (in the 4-D picture) the object always was in both locations. The idea of movement is lacking, even though movement is an obvious feature of our world.
We can now see movement as a projection from outside the universe. We scan the 4-D object along the time dimension so that instead of seeing it all at once, we see successive 3-D slices of it. We interpret this succession as objective movement. Of course, this solution to the problem relies on an external viewpoint. The movement that we see in an object gets there because we put it there from the outside. Traditionally, the world does not have an outside and this explanation cannot be used.
Man's free will undoubtedly is an irrational aspect of the world. As I outlined at length earlier (and will not repeat here), the existence of this irrationality requires something irrational to have existed before man's evolution started. Since man started evolving at the big bang, the irrationality we are looking for must have existed before the big bang occurred. Scientists have not been able to identify what the irrationality is. They have made some irrational handwaving in the direction of randomness but have not reached a satisfactory answer.
The answer here is that the irrationality lies in logic. Logic existed before the big bang, and was perhaps the only thing that really did exist then. (The laws of physics didn't. They were created, or 'discovered', 14 billion years later when we got round to summarising the behaviour of the objects that we saw to exist.) The irrationality lies in the particular aspect of logic we call belief, which is irrational because it is 'unconscious'. (I will not repeat the arguments.) As to whether belief should belong to logic or not, we can settle that by removing it and seeing if logic still works. It is generally believed that logic becomes pointless without an element of subjectivity. When we are forced to include an element of subjectivity, belief is the element of choice.
Logic is not just rules manipulating objects, it is also objects to be manipulated. But the objects cannot be determined rationally, i.e., by the laws of physics, when the laws themselves are determined from objects. Thus the origin of objects needs to be irrational, and that is exactly the characteristic of belief.
The theory of evolution relies on an artificial distinction between (i) environmental effects that cause variation, and (ii) environmental effects that cause selection. As an example, a chromium atom in the environment might be seen as inducing a mutation in a DNA molecule or it might be seen as part of the environment selecting for the survival of an already-mutated DNA molecule. Which is it to be? A proper theory of science would not rely on humans to make such determinations in hindsight. Assignments of reality like that are particularly to be avoided in a theory that purports to explain the development of humans from prior-existing reality.
The problem of dividing the environment into parts that cause variation and parts that carry out selection does not arise in the theory presented here. Evolution is now a matter of (external) selection only. It doesn't involve variation. In a sense, everything already exists, so there is no fundamental requirement for variation to make anything. All that's required is selection. The sense by which everything already exists is in the existence of an infinite number of possible worlds, all equally real but with zero reality (i.e., they are all 'possible' worlds). We select one of these worlds by seeing it to exist. Selecting promotes it from virtual to real so that it becomes the world we see around us. (Some scientists fail to recognise that there is a difference between equality of reality, which can be 100%, and degree of reality, which can be zero. Two worlds can be 100% identical in their reality but have zero reality.)
The computer simulations carried out by evolution theorists demonstrate that evolution can occur under deterministic circumstances. That is a problem because it removes randomness from the evolutionary process. It should not be possible to do this when the theory of evolution relies so heavily on randomness.
In these computer simulations, simulated life arises from initial conditions followed by cause-and-effect development of those conditions. The arrival of this simulated life leads to the awkward conclusion that real life and other features of the biological world around us (i.e., we are now talking about reality rather than computer simulations of reality) were determined in the initial conditions on Earth. They might have been determined even earlier, in the big bang. This is intolerable to scientists. There is no mechanism, other than God, that might have set the initial conditions in such a way that they would inevitably evolve man. Some try to retrieve the theory of evolution by maintaining that our world is not deterministic, but it does not solve the problem. (It does not even seem to be true, if physicists are to be believed.) Even if our world is not deterministic, we still want to know why evolution can occur in worlds that are.
The theory presented here solves the problem by presenting a suitable mechanism to set the initial conditions. In fanciful terms, the mechanism involves us travelling back in time to adjust the initial conditions to get the reality we want. The time travel is nothing more than an overall requirement for the world to be logical. When we believe the universe to contain this and that object, we unwittingly cause the initial conditions of the universe to be such as to evolve into those objects.
Although they try not to, scientists make significant use of subjective words in their work: large, microscopic, suitable, well-defined, and so on. This causes two problems. First, the subjectivity of these words fits uncomfortably within a science that is supposed to be objective. Second, the meaning of the words is chosen in hindsight. When the scientists have singled out a plausible theory (an hypothesis), they adjust the subjective meaning of the words they have been using to make the hypothesis true. This is a procedure not too different from adjusting the boundaries of a laboratory experiment with an end-result in mind - a definite no-no in science. (The example I gave earlier was of Darwin choosing the meanings of 'slight' and 'numerous' to support his theory of evolution.)
The theory presented here solves the first problem by having the meanings of words based on a shared belief as to what the words mean. This is acceptable once belief has been accommodated in logic, and in science generally.
The retrospective assignment of meaning is not a problem when belief is timeless. Belief is as much outside time as the rest of logic, and can adjust the parameters of the past with impunity. We set reality by such adjustment. It is only if past reality were set independently of us that we would get into trouble attempting to alter it.
We want to know what constitutes a measurement and what sets the time at which the measurement occurs.
The answer is that a measurement occurs when it is believed to occur. It is an occasion when we force the world to tell us what we believe about it. We have an unconscious belief about the world and we want to objectify it, perhaps so that we can communicate the belief to someone else. So we conduct a measurement. A random outcome for the measurement would indicate that our beliefs do not exercise any constraints on the process, all possible results equally fitting into the logic of the world. If we constrained the particle in some way - perhaps by believing it would be found in our laboratory rather than in someone else's - the measurement result would no longer be totally random. To fit into the logic of the world it would have to appear somewhere in our laboratory. In the limit, our beliefs might constrain the outcome of the measurement to be one particular value almost with certainty. This occurs with macroscopic objects. A macroscopic event is almost bound to happen, because it would be unbelievable if it didn't.
All objective measurements are made from a platform external to the objective world. In the theory here, this external platform is logic and it includes belief. 'Measurement' is not confined to the physicist's laboratory. It is any situation where the world is observed to be in an objective state. We might make such a measurement simply by looking around. The objectivisation of the view that I see when I look around is my local real world. Of course, my local reality might not accord totally with the reality seen by someone else. If the logic of the world relies on our two observations, it will be the (vector) sum of our two beliefs that will represent the scene to the world i.e., to science.
The division of a scientist's laboratory into 'bit-being-measured' and 'bit-doing-the-measurement' is also explained by the theory here. The scientist makes the distinction when setting up the experiment, when they are deciding on a target-object and a measuring-object. Those two objects really do exist, but they only exist because they were forced to by the scientist. It is easy to see the scientist's creative action at work here. In other situations, the creation might be the silent effect of simply believing things to exist i.e., the result of observing things. The peculiarity of quantum measurements is that they bring this creative action into view, something that is normally hidden in daily life.
Free will is currently unexplained in conventional science - totally so. In the theory here, free will is our ability to set the shape of the deterministic universe by what we believe the shape to be. As described, the shape is set from outside the world. It allows the world of objective reality to be fully deterministic.
Since belief is not objective, the initiation of a free will act must be unconscious, and this is backed up by Libet's experimental evidence. Although a free will act is unconscious, the perpetrator or any onlookers might immediately objectivise the act and see either conscious intention (if they are the perpetrator) or determinism (if they are onlookers). Such rationalisation will occur after the event, albeit only a matter of milliseconds in some cases.
It is not sensible to inquire into the physical cause of a free will act. Just as a quantum particle obtains a value out of nowhere when it is measured, so does the state of the world when a free will act is enacted. It is why we call free will 'free'.
The Many Worlds interpretation holds that all worlds out of the great ensemble of possible worlds are equally real, raising the question of why we experience only one real world. The explanation here is simple: one world is selected by logic. The key idea is that the selection is made from a vantage point external to all of the worlds, the vantage point of logic. Many worlds might be described by the mathematics, but only one is believed.
The complicated machinery inside biological organisms conventionally is assumed to have arisen via random variation. (Selection plays a part, but it is variation that is supposed to have caused the required parts to come together.) In many cases, a random origin for such exquisitely designed machinery is not plausible. We can contrive to override our scepticism if we try hard enough, but we shouldn't have to do that. (We could equally contrive to override our scepticism about the existence of a deity...)
In the theory presented here, the complex machinery arises through being believed to exist; we create the machinery by our beliefs. In doing this, we cause many interlocking components to be created instantly. There is no need for random variation in this scheme. Evolution is a matter of selection only. It is a matter of what we observe to exist, this being an unconscious selection from all possible things that might be observed to exist. When we create an organism by observing it, we need not require that it be composed of intricate machinery. But if later on we require the organism to have some sort of complicated internal organisation, we will find that organisation to exist when we look for it. We will create it to support the reality that we have already decided shall exist.
A thing of much complexity occupying the minds of many mathematical physicists is the so-called 'theory of everything'. The theory is intended to be an explanation of why the laws of physics are as they are, why the fundamental constants have the particular values that they have, and in general why the world is the way it is and not something different.
Let us assume that (in the future) this theory has been discovered and is a certain symmetry in 28 dimensions. Some questions would immediately come to mind. What does the answer mean to the layman? How does knowing that answer make any difference to the world? Why 28 dimensions and not 34? (Replying that only in 28 dimensions do we get the symmetry, or that the theory needs 28 dimensions to be logically consistent, would not be a sufficient answer.)
One of the questions we might ask is why the theory needs to be so complex. There are many ways for something to be complex, but only a few ways - and perhaps only one - for something to be simple. Surely a theory of everything, if it is to be unique, has to be simple? The theory in 28 dimensions is so complex that we need something additional to complete it - some 'connection' to ordinary reality. This additional feature would be a plausible reason for the theory to be the way it is and not something different. Without such a connection, the theory would be incomplete.
There are other questions that could be asked in this vein, and together they suggest an unsatisfactory aspect to the quest for a Theory of Everything. I believe the problem lies in the complexity. We should not be looking for a complex theory, but a simple one. The answer, whatever it is, needs to be understandable by the layman, because if it must be interpreted by high priests, we will need to believe the high priests. That would mean belief being part of the theory.
We would also wonder how the priests' belief in the truth of the theory fits in with the theory's actual truth. Truth is supposed to be independent of us, not caring whether or not we believe in it, and remaining the truth even if we don't believe it to be the truth. In which case, surely it is a coincidence that the true theory happens to be one that the scientists also believe in? Surely it is just as likely for a true theory to be one that isn't believed as to one that is? Considerations like this show that a bald statement of a supposedly true theory is not sufficient.
The theory would also need to have consequences for the layman. If it had none, it would seem pointless. Unfortunately, the evidence to date is suggesting the theory of everything will indeed be a non sequitur.
These problems are solved if the sought-for ToE is the one presented on this site. The theory here is simple and unique and understandable by the layman. It has significant consequences (particularly in economics), and answers a good many questions in science and philosophy. There is one small quibble with this theory, however: it cannot be said to be true. But is that a problem? So long as the theory is true, does it matter that we cannot say it is?
There is a simple explanation of why scientists searching for a theory of everything get trapped down a path of complexity. The scientists insist that an object, if it is to be considered a real 'thing in itself', shall be the full explanation of itself. This stipulation represents the slippery slope to infinite complexity.
In looking at an object, we see it to be a certain thing and it enters the logic of our world according to what we believe it to be. Let us say that the object in question is a quark, a point object without structure. If we now insist that the quark 'explain itself', so that it enters the world of a supposedly independent reality in exactly the same way that it enters 'our' world, then we force it to have structure. That's because we see it differently from how it currently sees itself - currently meaning according to the characteristics we've given it to date. So we force the quark to expand its knowledge of itself. We do that by giving it structure. It is a process that never reaches an end.
The problem is that we know more about an object than the object knows about itself, because we know the object's context. It doesn't help if we break the object down into parts. The parts will still be objects. We will know more about them than they do of themselves. The only way that an object's self knowledge can equal ours is if the object is not an object to us. It needs to be an object purely to itself. When an object's selfhood is defined by some self other than its own, that very fact will be part of what the object is. It will need to be accounted for in the object itself (if we want a self-existing reality) but that is impossible. The defining action by definition lies outside the thing defined...
We should call a halt to this infinite chain of manufactured causes. The correct cause is us. Let us admit that our subjectivity is indispensable to science and must somehow be incorporated in science in a fundamental way.
Scientists treat Ockham's razor as an informal axiom of science, giving it the role of justifying the existence of an external reality. ("The simplest explanation of the persistence of things is that they really do exist.") But the axiom is informal. It is a human preference, something we believe should prevail in a proper world. Scientists are uncomfortable at having reality depend on us in this way.
The theory here gives Ockham's razor a footing in logic. Put simply, we believe in simplicity. Since things believed are the stuff of science, we obtain a scientific accommodation of Ockham's razor.
The other axioms of science are accommodated the same way. They form a set of starting principles that we believe to be appropriate. If we were not allowed to call upon belief in this way, we would have no scientific basis for selecting our axioms. They would be arbitrary, or justified in hindsight.
Godel showed that the truth of certain mathematical statements can be seen to be true but cannot be proved. This suggests an outside aspect to reality, a vantage point outside science that can see truth which the inside cannot see. Conventionally, science does not admit the existence of an outside aspect. The domain of science is supposed to be the whole world i.e., everything that really exists. Godel's results are a problem because they imply that the definition of science defines an outside to the definition.
But that is something we should expect. If the universe of everything that exists is U, it is easy to conceive of ~U ('not U'), being everything else. 'Everything else' might not contain anything, but is itself conceived to exist. It is a kind of 'container' that happens to be empty. It is part of the logical conception of U.
An outside aspect to reality is explicitly recognised in the theory presented here. It is logic. Godel's theorems reflect the fact that logic, in the form of belief, can demonstrate true things about the world that the world cannot.
Various aspects of the world (such as the physical constants) seem fine-tuned to allow the existence of human beings (or observers generally). The conventional explanation is that we would not exist to ponder this fact if things were otherwise. But that is not an explanation. It is selection bias, a matter of selecting past facts to suit ourselves. If we are permitted to indulge in selection bias in repect of the Anthropic Principle, we should be allowed to do the same in everyday science.
In the theory here, the specific characteristics of the world as it emerged from the big bang - including all the laws of physics and the values of the physical constants - are derived from the characteristics of the objects that we see to exist in the world. Based on the objects that we create by our observation, the laws, physical constants, and initial conditions of the universe must be as they are.
In their realist view of the world, scientists have yet to find a satisfactory reason for time to go one way rather than the opposite way. Some have tried to associate the arrow of time with probability or the second law of thermodynamics. However, probability implies randomness and non-determinism, whereas the arrow-of-time problem is one of determinism. (It's the deterministic equations of physics that demonstrate the problem.)
I gave the answer earlier: the direction of time derives from the direction of logic. I will not repeat the arguments. Instead, I will give a different view concerning a peculiar asymmetrical bias that we humans seem to have. We project this bias onto 'reality' and end up with time having a strong bias in one direction.
Many people imagine reality continuing when they die. They agree that when they die, they themselves will no longer exist or be able to perceive or know anything, but in spite of this intellectual position, they picture themselves as continuing to play a part in reality. The part they play is that of a dead person who somehow sees reality continuing on without them. Many of us probably entertain this notion. We do it because we think it would be unreasonable for the world to stop just because we stop.
So we imagine the world continuing on when we die. We imagine somebody outside the universe seeing reality continuing to do what reality does. Unfortunately, the same people who rely on this outside picture of the universe are also likely to say that the universe doesn't have an outside...
The most straightforward way to sort this out is to assume that the person is mistaken when they say that they believe they will go out of existence when they die. Instead, they unconsciously believe that in some logical sense they will continue to exist. And if they do continue to exist, they will in principle be able to see the universe continuing on. Indeed, they have invented a real universe for that purpose. They want to exist forever. What better way to achieve this than to have a continuing universe dependent on them?
Now let us consider where time's arrow comes from. The correct picture of the world (at least for a person who says there is nothing outside the universe) is to equate death with nothingness. The world does not continue on without them. Instead it falls into unimaginable nothingness.
There is a certain symmetry about such a viewpoint. Before the person was born there was unimaginable nothingness from that person's point of view, and at death it is the same. This is a good symmetry: nothingness before they exist, nothingness when they no longer exist.
It is this symmetry that gets broken by 'reality'. At their birth, the person emerges from the nothingness that preceded their existence but at death they don't go back into the nothingness. Once existing, they postulate a real world to keep them going forever. This broken symmetry between birth and death is what gets objectivised into a direction for time. (It is similar to the explanation of Penrose's Weyl Curvature Hypothesis which I gave earlier.)
That completes my list of solutions to the problems of science (although there are many others that are easily addressed).
The new theory also resolves various issues in philosophy, and I will briefly mention two of them here. Take the ancient problem of evil, the question of why a good God would create evil in the world. The answer is this: the physical world and its evil are necessary given our beliefs. God has no choice but to accept the physical world as it is, his omnipotence or lack of it not coming into the equation (because logic sits above such things). In ordinary human terms, the evil in the world is our fault. If we want a world with evil (i.e., if we insist on defining our world in terms of evil) - well, here it is. If we wanted a world without evil - well, we could have that instead.
The question of whether life exists on other planets is another easily answered philosophical puzzle. Physical reality is created by a process of logic and results in a deterministic world. It is meaningless to suggest that life 'probably' exists on other planets, because probability does not have a say in a deterministic world. The proper position for scientists is to accept that life on other planets does not exist.
But what do the people living on those planets think about it? This is a common objection, but invalid. We could equally ask what God or meringue-utans think about their supposed non-existence.
Where does this theory leave the theory of biological evolution? Many will say that the conventional theory of evolution must still be correct because the fossil record proves it. Or they might point to evolution happening in our own day. Those and other facts point to the fundamental correctness of evolutionary theory.
I don't dispute the fossil record, nor modern-day evolution in the laboratory, nor other 'facts' of evolution. As I said, my concern is with evolutionary theory's logic. I covered the problems earlier and will not repeat them here. Here, I give a short answer to the question of whether evolution is real or not. The answer is: Yes. It is as real as the Coriolis force or the force of gravity.
In this way, we see that evolution has a kind of reality, but not a reality that is independent of us. It is our creation, like the forces of physics. We create the conventional forces of physics for our convenience and do the same with the 'force' of evolution. Whether the conventional forces of physics are independently real or not is not an important question, but in the case of evolution there is a lot at stake. If evolution is not real but is our creation, then we couldn't have been created by it.
I expect many scientists will be uncomfortable with the ideas presented on this site. The theory I have been outlining says that the world is built on belief rather than on knowledge, and that belief is not an object we can have knowledge of or make conform to our will. Rationalists will tend to be offended by such ideas. They want a world that is knowable and capable of being controlled. The future becomes fearful if they can only 'believe' the world and not force it to their will. But I urge rationalists to rethink their position. Their invention of a 'reality' to put their faith in is a kind of superstition like that embraced by many religious people. Surely it is better to put faith in faith itself. Rationalists should trust that whatever process brought them into existence - undoubtedly a 'good' process from their point of view - will also be 'good' for them in the future. Only if they concoct an unreliable 'reality' to replace this benevolent process will they have cause to worry.
Next page - Page 9 (References and notes)
Back to beginning of Page 1 ('A solution to the problem of free will')