Chapter 143: Affordances, the Equation of Everything and Consciousness

by Darryl Penney

Abstract: affordances are the impact of the environment on the consciousness of the measurer and it requires the equation of everything, which is ‘similar’ to the creation equation of the universe, to understand the transition. This process does not involve quantum mechanics, which currently is considered a likely contender, as will be seen when fundamental physics is derived bottom-up and offers a new view.

Keywords: affordances; conservation of energy; fractal universe; creation equation; social engineering

Preface

We seem to be seeing a biological truth at the moment that the old physics, mathematics, philosophy etc. are resisting change and their progeny need to create new species in the form of quantum biology, ecological psychology etc. and especially the creation of social engineering that is the ‘mirror image’ of the technology that we take for granted in a modern world. Quantum biology, ecological psychology etc. seem to be forging ahead with questions that science can not answer and a new scenario is needed, because religion was the first, and ‘science was the second great attempt to explain the world’ (The Goldilocks Enigma, Paul Davies, p 16) and we need a new vision to replace survival of the fittest and provide a goal for society. Science used energy and top-down organisation to give us technology and an unsustainable population growth, and now is the time for ecology and biology to use bottom-up organisation as social engineering to provide the goal that relativity demands, to replace survival of the fittest with new controls for society, if it is to continue indefinitely.

We are entering a new world of the generalist, as opposed to the specialist and recognising this might offer some insights that might be of value because the generalist and the specialist think differently, as shown by the creation equation, that, I believe, produces consciousness and is completely different to quantum mechanics. Also, the old disciplines are not doing the new disciplines any favours because quantum mechanics is ‘used, but not understood’, and fundamental physics ‘shut down’ a hundred years ago when Newtonian physics could not handle ‘modern physics’. The section, Form of the Universe, below, derives quantum mechanics and modern physics from first principles [bottom-up] and shows how Einstein’s and Newton’s ‘inspire guesses’ resulted in Newtonian physics and the present ‘hoge-poge’.

‘Today’s problems cannot be solved with today’s mind’

Albert Einstein and many great thinkers …

(Fair Food, edited by Nick Rose, p 250)

requires a new way of thinking and the long established disciplines are, I believe, incapable of change, and we should look to their offspring to trial new advances in new niches. In particular, consciousness is an enigma and is principally a product of the creation equation and introducing a new way of thinking might possibly create a new species [Homo sapiens sapiens] that is part of social engineering that appears as something that physics overlooked. Does a better mind create a new species? Arguably the Cambrian was the explosion of life-forms due to improved sight and its effect on the mind-brain increasing potential abilities that produced teeth, armour, speed and planning and the situation is similar here that a new way of thinking [bottom-up] that might produce the organisation that society requires to become a symbiote on the environment and not the parasite that it is currently.

This is not idle speculation, but an addition to science in two ways, that relativity requires a goal [which society does not have] to replace survival of the fittest as an over-arching goal [concept], and secondly, the means of attaining that goal [context] because social engineering emerges that uses the creation equation [concept] and the equation of everything [context] to show that another form of energy [affordances] can be used to attain the goal that changes the way that we think, in a similar way to the Cambrian explosion.

The Problem

Quoting from Life at the Edge: the Coming of Age of Quantum Biology, Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden, p 17, ‘this presents a puzzle: for the earth’s magnetic field to be detected by an animal it must somehow influence a chemical reaction somewhere in the animal’s body – this is, after all, how all living creatures, ourselves included, sense any external signal. But the amount of energy supplied by the interaction of the earth’s magnetic field with the molecules within living cells is less than a billionth of the energy needed to break or make a chemical bond. How, then, can that magnetic field be perceptible to the robin?’ (p 17)

Quantum tunnelling has been suggested as a means of lowering the barriers to chemical reactions, but there is a more subtle way and that is the general one of ‘how are affordances transmitted to the consciousness’ and it does not involve quantum mechanics but uses the simplicity of the relativity that underlies the creation of the universe. The book discusses many other cases where quantum mechanics is involved in chemical processes, and that may well be the case, especially as the reasons behind quantum mechanics are not well understood, and yet they are simple because quantum tunnelling is the effect, I believe, behind Born’s rule and ‘shimmer’, whilst the rule is empirical [derived from measurement], it can be derived from the gravity equation, below. Indeed, it is common knowledge that practitioners should use quantum mechanics, but not try to understand it! This has come about because science is top-down organisationally, which is similar to the ‘armchair musing’ of the ancient Greeks, and we know the problems that that caused. I am going to attempt to answer the above question, not by using quantum mechanics, but an even more basic means that explains the title, Affordances, the Equation of Everything and Consciousness.

Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Mechanics does not exist except as an arbitrary division of physics, and where physics is macroscopic, we use Newtonian physics, based on the laws of motion, that have nothing to do with the physical, but is convenient to use. Quantum mechanics is simply the physics of the small based on the creation equation of the fractal that we call the universe [that is derived by the equation of everything] and must be derived bottom-up. This leads to a new way of thinking [“New Think’, concept] that uses general mathematical physics as a context that combines the top-down of Newtonian physics [for convenience] with the bottom-up of quantum mechanics, the relativity that includes everything, the restrictions imposed on the universe [such as that the universe must expand], the everyday logic [based on the physical] and the truths that arise from evolution, such as the above [that the established continue, the progeny seek new niches].

This is derived in the section, Form of the Universe, below, that is necessary here as part of the derivation, further, the creation equation could be considered the same as the equation of everything, but one must be careful because the former is a concept and the latter is a context and they are definitely not the same, but are orthogonal and independent. This is similar to a very real problem that a specialist knows a lot about a small field [concept], whereas a generalist knows a little about a lot of subjects [context] and as knowledge grows, both are needed. This duality is as valid as the wave-particle duality that underpins the photon.

This paper contains the derivation of quantum mechanics, but does not use it, because it is there to establish the playing-field, so that it is believable that the universe is a fractal based on the word equation energy plus organisation equals zero and two sets of dimensions. Physics appears to have great difficulty with dimensions because ‘in physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally [my emphasis] defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it.’ (Wikipedia, Dimensions) Notice that I am using two sets [types] of dimensions, whereas the trend in physics is to use numerous dimensions to try to describe everything. If I were to define my idea of dimensions, they would be something like ‘the orthogonalities that define the form of an organisation’.

Affordances

‘Affordances are what the environment “offers the animal …. either for good or ill,” according to Gibson”. (This Idea Is Brilliant, edited by John Brockman, Daniel C. Dennett, p 147) ‘The huge gap in Gibson’s perspective was his refusal even to entertain the question of how this “direct pickup” of information was accomplished by the brain.’ (p 148) This “direct pickup” is not quantum mechanical, I believe, but comes through the creation equation.

Assuming that the law of conservation of energy is the bed-rock of physics [energy cannot be created nor destroyed], so, energy must be ‘something’ and considering that our universe was created out of nothing [the simplest surmise], there must be a relativity to energy that I could call organisation, and thus, energy plus organisation equals zero and describes a fractal. Fractals are very common and have the property that they are similar at all levels and they are apparent in individuals, groups, businesses, organisations and, countries. Adam Smith saw it when he said that what is good for the person is good for the economy.

‘Affordances are what the environment “offers the animal”’, so, what does physics offer? ‘It was clear in the 1970s that some very basic features of the universe remained completely unexplained – indeed, they were positively mysterious. First and the most obvious, was the problem of what actually caused the big bang. A related question was why the big bang was just that big . . . . Then there was the puzzle of why the large-scale geometry of the universe is flat, and the related mystery of why the total mass-energy of the universe is indistinguishable from zero.’ (The Goldilocks Enigma, Paul Davies, p 61) I think that this approach answers the fundamental problems of physics.

Consciousness and Measurement

Consciousness is both a concept and a context, and contexts are interconnected [entangled] with everything and the subject is too complicated to address properly here, but one aspect is important and needs explanation, and that is measurement. The form of the universe is built out of orthogonalities that only exist by being independent [somewhat like the Cartesian axes] and cannot measure one another except by a third party, such as a mind-brain, that is a parasite, but is part of the organisation of the universe. The mind-brain [consciousness] uses the creation equation to create a mathematics of concept-context that measures two concepts [let’s say energy and organisation] and assigns a ‘tag’ [affordance] on the context to each according to the value to the organism and a decision is made on the relative value of the affordance. I call this the mathematics of concept-context and it describes thinking [context], consciousness and the structure of the mind-brain [concept].

It seems logical that when the environment is measured, with respect to the organism’s requirement, the organisation of the environment is increased to include the measurer, and that requires that a compensating amount of energy to be given to the measurer’s mind-brain. So, energy appears in the mind-brain of the observer and constitutes the energy of the measurement and we call it emotion and it happens whenever we view organisation in music, art, religion, parades etc. Newtonian physics is based on energy, but emotion is an energy that physics neglects, presumably because it is difficult to account for, thus, the answer to the problem of the robin and the magnetic lines of force it that the robin is measuring the emotion produced by aligning with the magnetic field.

Whether this is the correct explanation, I do not know, but it entangles well with that which we already use as a theory and simplifies our understanding, and as an example, the most well known equation is probably E=mc2. There are stories that Einstein imagined riding on a photon, so, the creation equation becomes E/m=i2, on the photon, where ‘i’ is the square root of ‘-1’, E is the energy and m is the organisational form of that energy. Outside of the photon, the third absolute says that the speed of a photon must be ‘c’ to the measurer, so the measurement is ‘c squared’, and, E=mc2. Clearly, Einstein’s derivation becomes obvious from the creation equation because mass is the organisation of energy, but what is not so obvious is that the universe measures our measuring [relativity], and knows everything so as to give a unique organisational solution. Consider the relativity in deriving the gravity equation, below.

Having reached this point, another important issue is how the brain thinks, again using the creation equation, because a simple sugar [glucose] is burnt to supply energy and at the same time organisation [thinking] is created and the mind-brain, weighing 2% of body-weight consumes 20% of the body’s energy consumption, in the form of glucose. and thought is determined by a different equation a+b=0, where a, b and ‘+’ are whatever we want them to be because we are parasites and can do what we please. Notice that I am using concepts to describe the functioning of the mind-brain, and if quantum mechanics is involved, as it may be, it is a context and independent of the discussion.

Proof of the Pudding

Quantum tunnelling reduces the energy barriers to reactions, but the affordances do not afford any energy barrier and the organisation that the mind seeks, appears as energy in the consciousness, after all, that is why the mind-brain evolved, and it evolved because it could, and it did because that is a truth generated by countless generations of offspring of the existing moribund parents and by considering the universe as a fractal, everything becomes simple because the simple [word] equation creates similarity [fractal].

Consider literature with its concepts and contexts, consider language that we use all the time and these are the creation equation. Consider music that we listen to throughout the day. It is the taking of an infinite set of vibrations of a string, creating an absolute of half or double, that we call an octave, adding thirds, fifths etc. to give it body and a restriction of middle C to allow extra musicians to tune their instruments and play in unison. Of course, in history it was not done this way, but by trial of what sounded good, which is the emotion [energy] of the organisation of the notes within the consciousness.

Laughter is enigmatic, but when the jokester ‘leads us up the garden path’ organisationally, as is his intention, the simplification of the organisation at the end of the joke produces energy that the body has to get rid of and how does the body do that, by the enigma that we call laughter? Tapping one’s foot to music, dancing or listening to classical music, attending a Church service with hymns, costumes, parades etc., all produce emotion as they are designed to do. We have all wondered how a judge judges art? The more experienced art lover views a piece of art and the organisation within the piece is measured [affordance] relative to the experience of the judge and creates an emotional ‘tag’ that is his ‘value’ of the piece in the judging. This relativity to the software of the mind-brain [experience] is why “New Think” changes the way that we think.

This leads to the mathematics of concept-context that is apparent from the concepts [energy and organisation] and the ‘plus’ in the creation equation. Energy and organisation are orthogonal – independent, but entangled at the origin, and can only be measured by the mind-brain by establishing an affordance with each [via a ‘plus’] and the level of the ‘tag’ makes the decision on which is better. This is the affordance behind the market-place [economics] and democracy [governance] and we use them every day including listening and playing music, reading, talking, seeing the sights, religion etc.

Conclusion: we use the creation equation [concept] everyday in our daily life as a context [equation of everything] without realising what we are doing and that is what happens in a fractal because everything is similar, due to the simple generating equation. Have I answered the problem above? I don’t know because I am not a specialist, but I have done what a specialist cannot do, which is to provide a context for the specialist to operate within, so, let’s see what happens.

Prediction (as a relative [context] to the conclusion): physics, as it currently stands [law of conservation of energy that energy cannot be created or destroyed] hides the organisation [social engineering] needed to control and guide civilisation and religion [context], ethics [concept], governance etc. and ethics plus religion is vital social engineering to provide society with values. Notice that if organisation is ignored [ held constant], the creation equation reverts to the current law of conservation of energy, also, social engineering is orthogonal to technology and of equal size and importance. As an example, Christianity was a breathtakingly bold social engineering experiment that changed the savagery of the times into ‘love your neighbour, but it needs tweaking for a modern world.

Are there only a few cells that record emotion, or is it spread throughout the organism, and that is the point of the problem cited at the beginning of this paper? Simplicity suggests the latter because the organism is an organisational solution to survival, even though that thought is foreign to a ‘real’ mechanistic universe, but then, logic [as opposed to entanglement] proves that Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ exists everywhere. Just as, with a good joke, a ‘belly-laugh’ is too large for a few cells, I consider that the organisation [of the robin] as a whole feels the magnetic lines of force, and that answers the problem cited at the beginning of this paper.

Form of the Universe

In traditional mathematics, a fractal can be created from a simple mathematical expression, but energy plus organisation equals zero is a word equation and energy and organisation are concepts and ‘plus’ is the context [not just plus] with the restriction that energy and organisation be kept apart. The mind-brain uses the mathematics of concept-context [from the creation equation] in it’s operation because the organisation [concept] is measured [affordances are stream of sensations] by the mind-brain to produce energy which is an emotional ‘tag’ in the mind-brain [such as the amygdala]. Note that energy and organisation are created by the process of measurement because the organisation is increased, due to the impact of the measurer’s measurement on the environment and this increase in energy appears in the measurer’s mind-brain as emotion and differs from the usual interpretation of the law of conservation of energy that says that ‘energy cannot be created nor destroyed’, and this has two ramifications, firstly, that a law in physics is decided by peer acceptance, not derivation as I am using and secondly, that if organisation is ignored, the statement that energy plus organisation equals zero becomes energy is a constant, which is what the law is effectively saying, so, energy and organisation can be created or destroyed, but both must change by the same amount.

‘Affordances are what the environment “offers the animal …. either for good or ill,” according to Gibson”. (This Idea Is Brilliant, edited by John Brockman, Daniel C. Dennett, p 147) ‘The huge gap in Gibson’s perspective was his refusal even to entertain the question of how this “direct pickup” of information was accomplished by the brain.’ (p 148) This was answered above, but another important issue is how the brain thinks, again using the creation equation, because a simple sugar [glucose] is burnt to supply energy and at the same time organisation [thinking] is created and the mind-brain, weighing 2% of body-weight consumes 20% of the body’s energy consumption, in the form of glucose. and thought is determined by a different equation a+b=0, where a, b and + are whatever we want them to be because we are parasites and can do what we please. However, doing what we please means that technology is putting the world at risk and we need to apply social engineering to control it, see below.

Thus, relativity is the functioning of the universe and a lack of relativity is the form of the universe and a lack of relativity is easily created [and our understanding of the universe] by the ratios of the dimensions [energy (E), organisation (O), time (t) and length (l)] created by expansion . The five absolutes are firstly, the sum of energy and organisation is always zero [from the creation equation (1+(-1))=0], secondly, energy and organisation [dark energy] are necessarily created to balance the necessary expansion [for the creation equation to exist] of the universe [E/t+O/t, all volume], thirdly, the constant speed of light [with respect to any measurer] is l/t (all E and O) and fourthly, gravity [so called quantum gravity] is E/l+O/l (all t). The law of gravitation is:

E(mass1)/l times (for relativity) E(mass2)/l plus O(mass1)/l times (for relativity) O(mass2)/l

Notice that the ‘inverse square law’ is inappropriate [one mass, charge etc. can not exist] and is actually derived from the absolutes and relativity and the ‘+’ in the creation equation stands for all relationships [physical, logical, restrictive, use etc.] between two entities. Further, ‘as with the Schrodinger equation itself, we still have no fundamental way of deriving Born’s rule.’ (Beyond Weird, Phillip Ball, p 41) This is not surprising because Born’s rule requires the same derivation as the law of gravitation. ‘If the amplitude of an electron wavefunction at x is 1 (in some units), and at y it is 2, then repeated experiments to determine the electron’s position will find it at y four times (2×2) more often than at x…. How did Born know this? He didn’t. Again, he “guessed”’. (p 41). In every oscillation between a wave and particle [wave-particle duality], the particle has to reappear somewhere, and it appears with a probability dependant on the square of the amplitude of the wave because, as quantum gravity [absolute (4)] varies inversely as the separation, relativity requires the inverse square law [or the square law, in this case] and there is obviously relativity between the wave and particle.

‘Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle…. This restriction on precise knowledge does not apply to all pairs of quantum properties. It applies only to some, which are said to be “conjugate variables”. Position and momentum are conjugate variables, and so are energy and time (although the uncertainty relationship between them is subtly different from that between position and momentum) … I have never found an intuitive explanation of what makes two variables conjugate’. (p 150) The universe is created from an orthogonality [independent, but entangled at the origin] of energy [momentum] and organisation [position] and trying to measure an orthogonality [measuring each exactly is the same as between the two] is logically impossible because it is a restriction on the creation equation [independence]. Energy and time, along with organisation, volume and length are dimensions and must be orthogonal so that ratios can uniquely define absolutes.

Fifthly, the role of Occam’s razor and the principle of least action is crucial to the understanding of the functioning of the universe and the latter asks ‘why does light travel in a straight line?’. Newton’s laws of motion say that a photon must travel in a straight line otherwise the laws do not work and so misses out on vital information and is, again, ‘up in the air’. I believe that the answer is that there has to be a unique answer and the only unique answer in every case is the minimum and the organisation that belongs to the minimum energy is the most efficient organisation. I can say this with conviction because if either energy or organisation were not at a minimum, there would be two solutions at the same time and this would cause chaos in the functioning of the universe. This last sentence questions whether our universe is “real”, although derived from nothing is a bit of a difficulty, but then, what or where do we expect it to come from and suggests that it is an organisational solution based on possibilities created by measurement [such as Pythagoras’ theorem]?

If there is a creation equation, as I propose, the universe must be a fractal and everything in it must conform to certain simple rules. Adam Smith was the first to realise this in Economics, where an ‘invisible hand’ works so that what is good for the individual, is good for the economy. Clearly everything shows this form of the universe in its use and as an example, let’s look at Euler’s equation, which is claimed by Mathematics as the enigmatic relationship between the fundamental mathematical quantities pi, e, i, 1 and 0, though what 1 has to do with the others appears a little strange. However, as a description of the physical universe, it makes more sense because it determines the form of the universe [(e to the power i times pi +1) = 0 can be written (e to the power i times pi + e to the power 0) = 0, which is an expression of orthogonality and describes an expanding [e, simple interest expansion] sphere [pi] from 0 symmetrical [i] through the centre]. This ‘subsuming’ is the expected result in a fractal and Euler’s equation appears enigmatic because of the appearance of ‘i’ [the square root of ‘-1’], but it’s appearance becomes obvious due to relativity. Consider the quotation “wavefunctions generally contain ‘imaginary’ numbers – one involving the square root of -1, which is not something that has a physical meaning” (p 53). I am drawing attention to it because it shows the current confused thinking of physics, in that ‘i’ is an operator from quantum gravity [E/l+O/l for all t] because relativity is shown by ‘1’ and ‘-1’ from the inverse square law and that must be generated by ‘i’ and that is why “wavefunctions generally contain ‘imaginary’ numbers” because ‘i’ [and every number] is not only a number [concept], but also an organisation [context] and quantum gravity is the ‘spread’ from the atom [quarks] to gravity [in galaxies]. In other words, ‘i’ is imaginary because relativity always exists.

So, Newtonian physics is a creation of the mind and has nothing to do with the physical until general mathematical physics is used and then it can be seen that additional information is created from measuring organisation. For example Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity shows that there is a simple relationship between mass, length and time, but this is incomplete because the above says that energy, organisation, length and time are simply related through the ratios that destroy relativity. Einstein was looking at the relativistic changes, and clearly, organisation must be included, whereas the above looks at the things that don’t change [invariants of the universe]. Notice that we have just extended Einstein’s ‘special theory of relativity’ and that information is necessarily constrained to the speed of light, something that was a conjecture. Newton’s laws of motion, Einstein’s theory and Maxwell’s equations all hide organisation and that obscures the picture, for example, magnetism is an organisation that registers the relativity between a charged particle and the measurer as can be seen by its odd behaviour [sign depends on direction, magnitude on speed]. It is also important to realise that the dimensions are independent, but entangled organisationally.

Measuring organisation such as beauty, music, religion, buildings and parades etc. creates energy that we release as laughter, in extreme cases [good joke], dance energy [foot-tapping] or just feeling emotional energy of appreciation [Mona Lisa painting possibly due to the golden triangle ratios]. Thus, social engineering is necessarily orthogonal to material engineering and is the key to controlling our civilisation and preventing a (so far) inevitable break-down. The difficulty with the question of energy shows that Newtonian physics is convenient for us in our world, but does not consider the physical host that we live within [as parasites], and it behoves all good parasites to understand and consider the health of their host, for to kill their host is to die as well. This is a truth that we should seriously consider acting upon because “new Think” is based on truths.

“New Think” [concept] is a new complete way of thinking that uses the simplicity and ease of use of top-down traditional Newtonian physics with the bottom-up of the creation equation, relativity and the restrictions and a general mathematical physics [context] that creates a description of everything. This is not the law of everything that requires peer review, it is literally everything and raises our thinking to a new level because a complete physics generates a social engineering [orthogonal to technology] that, in a fractal, offers improvements in personal, group and country involvement.

References: no references were used, everything was derived from first principles.