Process Studies Supplement

Process Studies Supplement Issue 24 (2017)

Process Physics, Time, and Consciousness: Nature as an Internally Meaningful, HabitEstablishing Process Jeroen B. J. Van Dijk Jeroen van Dijk is an independent scholar educated as a Mechanical Engineer at the Hogeschool Eindhoven in The Netherlands. His main research interests are foundational problems in contemporary mainstream physics and the connection between Reg Cahill's process physics and process-oriented theories of how consciousness works. Email: [email protected]

Abstract: Ever since Einstein s arrival at the forefront of science, mainstream physicists have tended to think of nature as a giant 4-dimensional spacetime continuum in which all of eternity exists all at once in one timeless block universe. Accordingly, much to the dismay of more process-minded researchers, the experience ofan ongoing present moment is typically branded as illusory. Mainstream physics is having a hard time, however, providing a well-founded defense of this alleged illusoriness of time. This is because physics, as an empirical science, is itself utterly dependent on experience to begin with. Moreover, if nature were indeed purely physical-as contemporary mainstream physics wants us to believe-it is quite difficult to see how it could ever be able to give rise to something so explicitly non-physical like conscious experience. On top of this, the argument of times illusoriness becomes even more doubtful in view of the extraordinary level of sophistication that would be required for our conscious experience to achieve such an utterly convincing, but-physically speaking-pointless illusion. It is because ofproblems like these that process thought has persistently objected to the "eternalism" of mainstream physics. Recently physicist Lee Smolin has brought up some other major arguments against this timeless picture in his controversial 2013 book Time Reborn. Although he passionately argues that physics should take an entirely different direction, he admits that he has no readily available roadmap to success. Fortunately, however, over the last 15 years or so, a neoWhiteheadian, biocentric way of doing foundational physics, namely Reg Cahill s process physics, has made its appearance. According to process physics, nature is a routine-driven or habit-based process, rather than a changeless world whose observable phenomena are governed by eternally

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PROCESS STUDIES SUPPLEMENT 24 (2017)

fzxed and highly deterministic physical laws. Although, in the currently prevailing view, the universe is seen as a law-abiding natural world whose entire history-past, present, and future-must have been "called forth by law" in one go at the big bang, process physics suggests that the universe has come into actuality from an initially undifferentiated, orderless background of dispositional activity patterns which was driven by a habit-establishing, iterative update routine. In the process physics model, all such habit-establishing activity patterns are "mutually ieformative" as they are actively making a meaningful difference to (i.e., in-forming) each other. This mutual informativeness among activity patterns will thus actively give shape to ongoing structure formation within nature as a whole, thereby renewing it through stochastic (hence, novelty-infusing) update iterations. In this way, the process of nature starts to evolve from its initial featurelessness to then branch out to higher and higher levels of complexity, thus eventually even leading to neural network-like structure formation on the universes supragalactic level of organization. 1 Because of this noise-driven branching behavior, the natural universe can be thought of as habit-bound with a potential for creative novelty and open-ended evolution. Furthermore, three-dimensionality, gravitational and relativistic effects, nonlocality, and near-classical behavior are spontaneously emergent within the process physics model. Also, the models constantly renewing activity patterns bring along an inherent present moment effect, thereby reintroducing time in terms of the system s ongoing change as it goes through its cyclic iterations. As a final point, subjectivity-in the form of mutual ieformativeness-is a naturally evolving, innate feature, not a coincidental, later-arriving side-effect.

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1.1 Getting to know process physics in terms of time, life, and consciousness 2. Time 2.1 From the process of nature to the geometrical timeline 2.1.1 Aristotle's teleological physics 2.1.2 Galileo's non-teleological physics 2.1.3 The deficiencies of the geometrical timeline 2.2 From the geometrical timeline to time-based equations 2.3 From time-based equations to physical laws 2.3.1 The flawed notion of physical laws 2.4 From geometrization to the timeless block universe 2.5 Arguments against the block universe interpretation 2.5.1 The real world out there is objectively real and mind-independent (or not?)

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2.5.2 Events in nature reside in a geometrical continuum (or not?) 2.5.3 Relativity of simultaneity means that our experience of time is illusory (or not?)

3. Doing physics in a box 3.1 The Newtonian paradigm 3.1.l The exophysical aspect of the Newtonian paradigm 3.1.2 The decompositional aspect of the Newtonian paradigm 3.1.3 From quantum wholeness to the subject-object split and nondecompositional decomposition. 3.2 Measurement and information theory 3.2.l Looking at measurement in a purely quantitative, informationtheoretical way 3.2.2 The modeling relation: relating empirical data to data-reproducing algorithms 3.2.3 From information acquisition to info-computationalism 3.2.4 Information, quantum, and psycho-physical parallelism 3.2.5 From psycho-physical parallelism to measurement as a semiosic process 3.3 From doing physics in a box to doing physics without a box 4. Life and consciousness 4.1 The evolution of the eye 4.2 From info-computationally inspired neo-Darwinism to "lived-through subjectivity" as a relevant factor in evolution 4.2.l From the info-computational view to information as mutualistic processuality 4.2.2 From the non-equilibrium universe to the beginning of life as an autocatalytic cycle 4.2.3 From environmental stimuli to early subjective experience 4.2.4 From early photosensitivity to value-laden perception-action cycles 4.3 Perceptual categorization, consciousness, and mutual informativeness 4.3.l Integration, differentiation, and the mind-brain's mutual informativeness 4.3.2 Self-organization and the noisy brain 4.3.3 Self-organized criticality and action-potentiation networks 5. Process physics: A biocentric way of doing physics without a box 5.1 Requirements for doing physics without a box 5.2 Process physics as a possible candidate for doing physics without a box 5.3 Process physics: going into the details 5.3.1 Foundationless foundations, noisiness, mutual informativeness, and lawlessness


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5.3.2 Process physics and its roots in quantum field theory 5.3.3 Process physics and its stochastic, iterative update routine 5.3.4 From pre-geometry to the emergence of three-dimensionality 5.3.5 Process physics, intrinsic subjectivity, and an inherent present moment effect 6. Overview and Conclusions

Appendix A: Addendum to §2.5.2: Events in nature can be pinpointed geometrically (or not?) Works Cited List of Figures

2-1: Bronze ball rolling down an inclined plane (with s-t diagram) 2-2: The earth-moon system in a temporal universe and in a block universe 2-3: Minkowski space-time diagram 3-1: Simplified universe of discourse in the exophysical-decompositional paradigm 3-2: Rothstein's analogy (between communication and measurement systems) 3-3: Steps towards Robert Rosen's modeling relation 3-4: Universe of discourse with von Neumann's object-subject boundary 3-5: From background semiosic cycle of preparation, observation, and formalization to foreground data and algorithm 4-1: Conscious observer as an embedded endo-process within the greater embedding omni-process which is the participatory universe 4-2: Subsequent stages in the evolution of the eye 4-3: Stationary and swarming cortical activity patterns in non-REM sleep and wakefulness 4-4: Varying degrees ofneuroanatomical complexity in a young, mature, and deteriorating brain 5-1: Schematic representation of interconnecting nodes 5-2: Artistic visualization of the stochastic iteration routine 5-3: Tree-graphs oflarge-valued nodes Bii and their connection distances Dx 5-4: Emergent 3D-embeddability with "islands" of strong connectivity 5-5: [Dk-k]-diagram 5-6: Fractal (self-similar) dynamical 3-space 5-7: Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion model 5-8: Fractal pattern formation leading to branching networks 5-9: Seamlessly integrated observer-world system with multiple levels of self-similar, neuromorphic organization 5-10: Structuration of the universe at the level of supragalactic clusters

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1. Introduction This article is intended as a follow-up to Lee Smolin's Time Reborn (2013). In his controversial, yet well-received, book Smolin tried to argue against contemporary mainstream physics' firm belief in the unreality of time. Following in many of his footsteps at first, we will eventually try to continue where he left off: with the suggestion that nature evolves according to a principle of precedence and that our physics should therefore be routine-driven, instead of based on eternally valid static laws. So, starting with the basics, we will first follow the historical path from: (1) the debate between Parmenides and Heraclitus regarding whether reality should be thought of as existing statically or as dynamically becoming; (2) Plato's idea of nature as an imperfect reflection of the eternal, perfect realm of ideal forms; (3) the geocentric teleological physics ofAristotle, who thought of time as an abstracted measure of motion; (4) the heliocentric non-teleological physics of Galileo, who turned time into a quantifiable one-dimensional coordinate line; and (5) the mechanistic physics of the Newtonian-Laplacean clockwork universe, with its concepts of absolute space as a 3-dimensional geometrical volume that exists independently of its contents (i.e., the physical constituents of the "clockwork universe") and absolute time as an externally running chain of intervals that pass by at the same rate for everyone and everything in the entire universe. Then, at the end of this list, we will find what is today almost unanimously considered to be one of the great highpoints in the history of physics and, thus, the absolute climax in the history of thinking about time, namely, (6) Einstein's relativistic physics, which, due to Minkowski's block universe interpretation, led to the now well-established belief that nature is actually a giant 4-dimensional spacetime continuum in which all of eternity exists together at once as a huge static and timeless expanse. That is, following the line of reasoning in the block universe interpretation, which argued that the relativity of simultaneity2 necessarily involved the unreality of time passing by, many physicists became convinced that our experience of time had to be illusory. Supported by the wave of public enthusiasm that followed Arthur Eddington's confirmation of Einstein's prediction of the bending of star light around the sun ( 1919), this belief in the unreality of time grew in popularity until it reached the status of a logical necessity-a rock-solid truth.

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It is, however, very hard for mainstream physics to provide a truly watertight defense of this illusoriness of time. This is first because physics, as an empirical science, is itself utterly dependent on experience-since it is instrument- as well as sensory-based. Second, if our experience of time were indeed illusory, it is still exceptionally difficult to see how and why it should ever have evolved at all. After all, in the context of the prebiotic universe-which is, according to current mainstream belief, an entirely inanimate and purely physical world-the emergence of such an extraordinarily sophisticated and convincing illusion like our conscious experience of time would be utterly pointless and inexplicable. It would thus be entirely impossible to explain in a logically acceptable way how our conscious illusion of an ever-changing present moment could ever relate to such a becomingless whole as the timeless block universe (Capek 521). Or, to put it more graphically, it would become impossible to explain why we are not living in the reign of George III (Ibid.; McTaggart 160)-or any other past or future ruler, for that matter. Last, but not least, then, although the block universe interpretation may indeed seem well-structured and crystal-clear at first sight, on closer scrutiny its arguments in favor of the unreality of time are not at all as firm and sound as one might hope for. 3 It is because of reasons like these that process thought has always been opposed to the portrayal of nature as a purely physical and timeless realm. In hindsight, we can now say that its minority opinion has forced process thought into a long-lasting uphill battle. The empirically gathered evidence of mainstream physics had proven so useful and convincing, and its mathematics seemed so aesthetically pleasing, that any criticism did not stand a chance if it were based on philosophical grounds alone. Just recently, however, leading physicist Lee Smolin managed to breathe some new life into the debate that, so it was commonly thought, had already been won by mainstream physics long ago. In his critically acclaimed book Time Reborn, he persuasively argues against the existence of eternally valid laws of nature. That is, he claims that it is a mistake to think that such local "laws" could "govern" the behavior of the universe at its largest scale:

My argument starts with a simple observation: The success of scientific theories from Newton to the present day is based on their use of a particular framework of explanation invented by Newton. This framework views nature as consisting of nothing but particles with timeless properties whose motions and interactions are

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determined by timeless laws. The properties of the particles, such as their masses and electric charges, never change, and neither do the laws that act on them. This framework is ideally suited to describe small parts of the universe, but it falls apart when we attempt to apply it to the universe as a whole. All the major theories of physics are about parts of the universe .... When we describe a part of the universe we leave ourselves and our measuring tools outside the system. We leave out our role in selecting or preparing the system we study. We leave out the references that serve to establish where the system is. Most crucially for our concern with the nature of time, we leave out the clocks by which we measure change in the system. [But, w ]hen we do cosmology, we confront a novel circumstance: It is impossible to get outside the system we're studying when that system is the entire universe. (Smolin, Time, xxiii) What Smolin objects to particularly is any attempt to extrapolate our conventional way of doing "physics in a box" to the universe at large-an objection, by the way, that he shares with fellow physicist Joe Rosen (7275). Indeed, it has been a historically hugely successful method (1) to isolate a small subsystem from the rest of the universe; then (2) to try to extract empirical data from it; and then, finally, (3) to put together a "lawful" physical equation on the basis of these data so that the behavior of this isolated subsystem can be represented and computed with great precision. Accordingly, the thus achieved Newtonian framework is very much "info-computational" in that it depends heavily on the informationtheoretical scheme of data being encoded into data-reproducing algorithms and then decoded again into data that is post- as well as predictive of the target system's past and future behavior. Along these lines, modern cosmology and astrophysics have come to think of our natural universe as a giant information-processing system as well. The universe is thought to have evolved from the big bang to its present state as the laws of nature governed its entire historical lineage from its earliest initial conditions. The initial conditions serve as informational input to the laws that perform the computation from one state to the next, and so on. This info-computationalism did not remain limited to the physical sciences, though. With the advent of genetics, it came to be a major factor in biology as well, thus giving rise to the idea that organisms could be thought of in terms of the machine metaphor as information-processing biomechanisms whose behavior as well as their fit with their environment were basically already pre-programmed in the genetically inherited

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instructions of their DNA. On top of this, much of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science is computational in the sense that it supports the computational theory of mind in which the brain is thought of as an enormously complex biological computer in which what we like to call "the mind" is ultimately no more than neural computation-the signal exchange between information-processing communication modules as known from classical information theory. However, this information-inclined approach totally overlooks the fact that nature, in its deepest essence, is not a pre-coded place. That is, "nature as left unframed by our nature-dissecting gaze" is unlabeled in terms of the categories, concepts, code and symbolic alphabets that we usually like to attach to it (see Edelman and Tononi 104; Kauffman, "Foreword: Evolution," 11). This, then, is one reason that nature as a whole can never be modeled exhaustively by using such pre-defined symbol systems. Another reason, which has already been noted above by Smolin, is that this info-computational way of doing physics in a box necessarily requires that we leave ourselves, our preparatory actions, and also our entire measurement instrumentarium outside the system to be observed, something that cannot be done when trying to attend to the universe in full . In fact, this info-computationally primed way of doing physics in a box-or what we will later on also refer to as "exophysical-decompositional physics"4-inevitably leads to much more of such impracticalities, all kinds of paradoxes, and the dubious belief that the natural universe is entirely timeless. Not to be forgotten, it will also bring along unanswerable questions, such as "why these laws?" and "why did the universe start out with the initial conditions from which it has evolved into its current state?" (see Smolin, Time, 97-98). To find a way out of these problems, Smolin suggests that we should drop the idea of eternally valid "laws of nature" and exchange it for something else. That is, following in the footsteps of process philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), he argues that nature is not being governed by predetermined laws, but develops habitually. Inspired by this idea, Smolin becomes convinced that, in order for physics to get rid of its problems with time and its unanswerable questions, it should take an entirely different direction, although he admits that he has no readily available road map to success. Fortunately, however, some 15 years ago or so, a neo-Whiteheadian, neuro-biologically inspired, biocentric way of doing physics without a

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box, namely Reg Cahill's 5 process physics, arrived on the scene and ever since it has managed to grow into a serious habit-centered alternative for contemporary mainstream physics. As such, process physics aims to model the universe from an initially orderless and uniform pre-geometric prespace by setting up a stochastic, self-referential modeling of nature. In process physics, all self-referential and initially noisy activity patterns are "mutually in-formative" in the sense that they are actively making a meaningful difference to each other (i.e., "in-forming" or "actively giving shape to each other"). Through this internal, habit-establishing "co-informativeness," process physics is able to avoid the info-computational approach of externally imposed "pre-coded" symbol systems that seem to cause so much trouble in mainstream physics. Also, due to this system-wide mutual in-formativeness, the initially undifferentiated activity patterns can act as "start-up seeds" that become engaged in self-renewing update iterations (see section 5.3 .3 for further details). In this way, the system starts to evolve from its initial featurelessness to then "branch out" to higher and higher levels of complexity-all this according to roughly the same basic principles as a naturally evolving neural network. Because of this self-organizing branching behavior, the process system can be thought of as habit-bound with a potential for creative novelty and open-ended evolution. Furthermore, nonlocality, threedimensionality, gravitational and relativistic effects, and (semi-)classical behavior are spontaneously emergent within the system. Also, the system's constantly renewing activity patterns bring along an inherent present moment effect, thereby reintroducing time as the system's "becomingness." As a final point, subjectivity-in the form of "mutual informativeness" (which is also used in Gerald Edelman's and Giulio Tononi's extended theory of neuronal group selection to explain how higher-order consciousness can emerge)-is a naturally evolving, innate feature, not a coincidental, laterarriving side-effect.

1.1 Getting to know process physics in terms of time, life, and consciousness In order to properly introduce process physics, first, a proper outline of our contemporary mainstream physics and its problems must be given. Therefore, in Chapter 2, titled "Time," we will discuss the most important technicalities having to do with how mainstream physics deals with time. To be more specific, we will first take a look at the role of time in Aristotle's

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teleological physics. After that, the more recent history of time as a geometrical dimension will be sketched, starting with Galileo's onedimensional timeline, and then going from Newton's absolute space and time to Einstein's 4-dimensional spacetime, which motivated Minkowski to develop his interpretation of nature as an entirely static and timeless block universe. Then, Chapter 3, on "doing physics in a box," aims to give a comprehensive analysis of the basic workings of our contemporary mainstream physics, together with an outline of some of its intrinsically problematic features. Although a good number of mainstream physics' problems will be addressed, in the context of the present study the most important of these are the denial of the reality of time and the claim that consciousness must ultimately be illusory-two problems that process philosophy has been dealing with for a long time. If, indeed, consciousness is not illusory, as process philosophy, phenomenology, and the system sciences like to argue, then it would be crucial to sort out how it arose in living organisms, and how it enables these organisms to get to know the natural world in which they live. This and more will be discussed in Chapter 4, titled "Life and Consciousness," where the main topics of interest will be the emergence of life through autocatalysis and the coming into actuality of higher-order consciousness. Since subjectivity is here seen as the process of sense-making as an organism goes through its cyclic perception-action loops, 6 one of the main conclusions is that consciousness is not confined to some elusive center of subjectivity buried deep within the brain, but extends well into the organism's environment. That is, a sense of self and world gets to be sculpted by the process of sense-making as it runs its course within the seamlessly interconnected "organism-world system." Both the emergence of life and that of consciousness are particularly relevant to how process physics hangs together, because both of them can be explained as self-organizing processes that come into actuality from a primordial background of initially undifferentiated processuality. This has a striking resemblance with how process physics works. That is, process physics is a biocentric way of doing physics without a box, which introduces a non-formal, self-organizing modeling of nature. As such, it gives an account of nature in which the "earliest beginnings" are considered to be inherently protobiotic, ecological and organismic, rather than entirely abiotic, physical and mechanistic. In line with all this, the process physics

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model is not based on law-like physical equations, as in mainstream physics, but on a stochastic iteration routine that reflects the Peircean principle of precedence (Peirce 277). By modeling nature with the help of "recursive routine" rather than "timeless laws," process physics manages to set up a dynamic network of dispositional relations through which higher-order relational patterns can emerge from an initially uniform and undifferentiated background (see Cahill, et al., "Process Physics: Modelling," 192-193). In so doing, the process physics model will gradually start to exhibit many features also found in our own universe: non-locality; emergent three-dimensionality; emergent relativistic and gravitational effects; emergent semi-classical behavior; creative novelty; habit formation; mutual informativeness;7 an intrinsic present moment effect with open-ended evolution, and more.

2. Time Although time has played a major role in physics ever since the early 1600s when Galileo started to specify it in terms of chronologically arranged intervals along a geometrical, unidirectional line, there is still no common agreement on what it actually is (see Davies, About Time, 279-283 ; Davies, "That Mysterious," 6-8; Smolin, Time, 240-242). Despite the impressive theoretical and technological progress over the last four hundred years, physicists and philosophers alike continue to be troubled by the elusiveness of time and our incomplete understanding of it. So, for sake of clarity, let us first try to reconstruct how the concept of time was historically introduced into physics, and see how it developed over the years.

1.1 From the process of nature to the geometrical timeline Presocratic process philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (circa 535-475 BCE) is famous for having coined the slogan "all is flux, and nothing stays the same." Using this as a first principle, he put forward an account of nature in which change and processuality were the central themes. As a means to come to grips with the many chaotic and unpredictable aspects of nature, he claimed that the world was actually a giant coherent process in which there were hidden connections between its contrasting opposites. According to Heraclitus, these opposites were thus tacitly related to one another in a balancing way so as to compensate for each other's extremities. He thought all change in one direction was ultimately evened out by a

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matching change in the countervailing direction, thus leading to a worldview of nature as a dynamic equilibrium-united as one, yet capable of heterogeneous change and diversity (see Kirk 178). However, one of his contemporaries, Parmenides of Elea (circa 515-450 BCE), argued that only being and non-being were crucial, since, to him, it was a logical necessity that what exists, must always have existed. In order to show the inevitability of his logic, he asked the following question: If what exists should ever have come into existence, or go out of it, how should this ever occur at all? After all, if it were to come into being, it should not even have existed in the first place. Subsequently, Parmenides reasoned, because emergence out of nothing would be absurd, all change should be considered an utter illusion: There is only Being and Non-Being and no intermediate or transitional form can be conceived of without inner contradiction. For if that into which something changes did not originally exist, where could it possibly have come from? [The only other option is that it was already] there from the beginning, in which case there is no change at all since everything has remained as it always was .... In short, it is unthinkable that between Being and Non-Being there exists a category of Becoming. If we believe that we observe change all the time in our daily lives, then our observation is at fault and we must conclude that our senses fail to provide us with reliable information about the real world. (Cohen 9-10) Plato (circa 425-347 BCE), then, when he developed his most famous philosophical ideas, actually stayed quite close to Parmenides. In his thinking about the essence of reality, he distinguished between the imperfect world that is observable with the senses and the perfect world of "Ideal Forms." In the Timaeus, Plato gave an account of the natural world as being imperfectly modeled after those impeccable Ideal Forms, as poor reflections of them (see Cohen 10). Far beyond the observable phenomena of the natural world, he thought there had to be immutable and eternal "Ideal Forms" whose properties could be spelled out by number theory and geometry-the mathematical discipline dedicated to the specification of abstract shapes and lengths. In short, Plato held that nature's phenomena got their shapes from abstract geometric figures (such as circles, points, angles, and lines) whose ideal forms they could never actually achieve, but only approximate (10-11 ). Later on, Aristotle (circa 384-322 BCE) exploited geometry in a way that made it fit nicely within his teleological physics (see section 2.1.1).

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In order for this to work, he argued that the regularity in the motion of stars and planets, which could be witnessed every night when looking up to the nocturnal sky, was a sign of the explicitly geometrical nature of steadily rotating celestial spheres. So, although Aristotle dismissed Plato's realm of ideal forms, he still recognized geometry as one of the most essential sciences. Particularly, he believed the sphere to be the most perfect of all geometrical shapes. After all, to the naked eye, the heavenly bodies clearly seemed to move around the Earth in an explicitly circular manner. The combination of these two was then more than enough "proof' for Aristotle to crown the celestial sphere as the pristine, perfect, geometryabiding part of nature. Through their eternal sameness and perfectly circular regularity, the celestial spheres far outstripped the everyday imperfection of our earthly domain where all things die and decay without having the permanence of the heavens. It was in this sense that geometry had a central place in Aristotle's cosmology and that its influence was passed on for centuries on end in support of the Aristotelian cosmology and teleological physics ( see section 2.1.1 ). Aristotle's body of thought eventually turned out to dominate much of the almost two millennia that followed. With his detailed and careful study of the behavior of falling objects, however, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) basically established the blueprint for what-through the later work of Newton and Einstein, among others-has now become our modem mainstream physics. In Galileo's days, as it had been in the ancient Greek era, geometry was still the preeminent piece of equipment in the scientific tool box. Therefore, the accounts of motion that were formulated by Galileo's contemporaries would typically be based on geometry, if not directly then at least indirectly. Accordingly, all things having to do with motion first had to be looked at through the filter of geometry, for instance, by comparing traveled distances of thrown projectiles or the depth of impact pits left behind by falling objects.

2.1.1 Aristotle's teleological physics For a long time, however, the most influential account of motion had indeed been that of Aristotle, who, in his time, had introduced a way of doing physics that was very much end-directed and purpose-laden, and thus in fine agreement with his teleological philosophy:

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Aristotle's vision for physics ... depended on [the] division of suband superlunar cosmic domains. Five basic elements existed in Aristotle's cosmos: earth, water, fire, air and aether. Each element had a 'natural' motion associated with it. Earth and water 'naturally' sought movement toward the Earth's center. Air and fire naturally rose toward the celestial domain. The aether was a divine substance constituting the heavenly spheres. These 'natural' inclinations seemed self-evident to Aristotle and did not require separate tests. Only many centuries later would a new breed of scientists such as Galileo (in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) demand that a hypothesis such as natural motion be validated through experiments. (Frank 4 7) Along these lines, Aristotle's explanation for what seemed to be the two most obvious forms of motion-"free fall" and what may be called "continued travel"-were very much end-directed. In the Aristotelian framework, free fall would be explained by appeal to the striving of earthly matters to move towards their natural endpoint, namely the heart of the universe, which was, according to the then prevailing wisdom, the center of the earth. Continued travel, on the other hand, was in Aristotle's view the result of so-called antiperistasis. This is the phenomenon through which the motion of a projectile like a spear or arrow is continued as compressed air coming from the front of the projectile fills in the empty gap that it leaves behind, thus pushing the projectile forwards with a constant thrust. Both forms of motion were later given a new, improved interpretation by Galileo, but for now, we will keep our focus on Aristotle's view of nature a little bit longer: In line with the teleological principle that earthly matters and water are naturally driven toward Earth, he thought that the speed of something falling down would actually depend on the amount of earth-seeking elements it contained, or, in other words, on its weight. He had been led to think so by the observation that heavier objects, when being dropped in the water, sink to the bottom in an observably faster way than lighter ones do. From this he concluded (wrongly, as it turned out) that the rate of falling had to be proportional to the weight of the object and inversely proportional to the viscosity of the medium. Put simply, heavy objects had to fall faster than lighter objects. And although we now think of this belief as being quite naive and impulsive, it still managed to persist for a staggeringly long period of time-almost two millennia. Nonetheless, over all those years, Aristotle's accounts of the two

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forms of motion-free fall and continued travel-still had to endure some fair amount of skepticism. That is, some critical minds found that there was something wrong with Aristotle's teleology. After all, the problem with those purpose-based accounts of motion is that they merely re-describe what is found to be the case. For instance, the explanation that "things fall towards the ground because they strive towards Earth" basically amounts to a tautology-saying the same thing twice in different words. Unfortunately, this tautological reasoning did not only occur in Aristotle's explanation of free fall. That is, since it was based on the teleological principle of horror vacui, 8 Aristotle's antiperistatic explanation of continued travel was found to suffer from the same weakness. As soon as one tries to explain that air will fill up any gap left behind by an arrow because "nature abhors a vacuum," it will immediately become apparent that this line of reasoning is just as trivial and pointless as the above tautological explanation behind free fall. At the time when Galileo first started to think about motion, one of the two components in Aristotle's account of motion-the phenomenon of antiperistasis-had already been replaced by the idea of "impetus" or "impressed force": After leaving the arm of the thrower, the projectile would be moved by an impetus given to it by the thrower and would continue to be moved as long as the impetus remained stronger than the resistance, and would be of infinite duration were it not diminished and corrupted by a contrary force resisting it or by something inclining it to a contrary motion. (Buridan as translated in Zupko 107) Notwithstanding this revision by Buridan, and some others that preceded him, the general framework in the pre-Galilean era was still very much Aristotelian. Despite the earlier-mentioned criticism with regard to the tautology of purpose-based teleological arguments, Aristotle's account of free fall, based on the belief that heavy weights naturally outpace all lighter ones when falling to earth, was still very much the established view. The falseness of this belief, however, managed to remain unnoticed for almost two thousand years, because no rigorous testing was being performed and also because Aristotle and his followers unintentionally threw up a smoke screen that basically prevented them from taking a better look. Specifically, Aristotle's "rule," saying that heavy weights would always hit the ground sooner than lighter ones, caused his physics to become specifically geared towards comparative proportions. That is, in

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line with the naive belief in faster-falling heavy objects, Aristotle's rule was converted into a neat quantitative expression, relating weight and speed to each other in a proportional way:

W/W2=V/V2, with

W=weight

and

V=speed

(2.1-1)

The technicalities that came with this expression arguably kept Aristotle and his followers busy enough to overlook the fact that it was actually quite wrong. Initially, these ratios were only used in an after-the-fact manner. But, with time, it became apparent that falling objects started from a resting position and had to pick up their pace upon release, instead of immediately dropping down at full speed. This is when it was decided that the speed of the objects would have to depend on the distance covered. Accordingly, it was concluded that falling objects would increase their speed the deeper they fell. 9 What is particularly noteworthy in this case is that the buildup of speed was not being linked with the lapse of time, but with the distance covered. To be able to understand the motives behind the linkage of speed with covered distance rather than with time elapsed, we will first have to look into Aristotle's thoughts of how movement and time were related with each other: [B]ecause movement is continuous so is time; for (excluding differences of velocity) the time occupied is conceived as proportionate to the distance moved over. Now, the primary significance of before-and-aftemess is the local one of "in front of' and "behind." There it is applied to order of position. But since there is a before-and-after in magnitude, there must also be a before-andafter in movement in analogy with them. But there is also a before-

and-afler in time, in virtue of the dependence of time upon motion. Movement, then, is the objective seat of before-and-afterness both in movement and in time; but conceptually the before-and-aflerness is distinguishable from movement. Now, when we determine a movement by defining its first and last limit, we also recognize a lapse of time; for it is when we are aware of the measuring of motion by a prior and posterior limit that we may say time has passed. And our determination consists in distinguishing between the initial limit and the final one, and seeing that what lies between them is distinct from both; for when we distinguish between the extremes and what is between them, and the mind pronounces the "nows" to be two-an initial and a final one-it is then that we say that a certain time has passed; for that which is determined either way by a "now" seems to

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be what we mean by time .... Accordingly, when we perceive a "now" in isolation ... then no time seems to have elapsed, for neither has there been any corresponding motion. But when we perceive a distinct before and after, then we speak of time; for this is just what time is, the calculable measure or dimension of motion with respect to before-and-aftemess. Time, then, is not movement, but that by which movement can be numerically estimated. (Aristotle, Physics, 219a-21 %-emphasis added) In Aristotle's view one may speak of "time" when attending to the duration aspect of motion, whereas one is dealing with "movement" when the displacement aspect is at stake. Accordingly, change in place-i.e., movement, or locomotion-can be expressed by displacement as well as duration. However, as can be understood from the italicized segment in the quote above, Aristotle thought that time could become apparent only by virtue of the occurrence of movement. Nonetheless, time has a special relevance in Aristotle's framework in that anything that changes, can only change in time. But because it is impossible to point to time in the way that one would point to an actual thing, time was considered a derived, abstract notion. As such, time was thought to be dependent on movement, rather than being fundamental to it. So, all in all, the belief in (1) faster-falling heavier objects, and (2) the abstractness and motion-dependence of time, together with (3) the unavailability of precise measuring instruments, and (4) the associated lack of rigorous testing procedures, caused the Peripatetic school of Aristotle to commit the error of linking the increase of speed with covered distance and not with elapsed time.

2.1.2 Galileo's non-teleological physics Thanks to a lot of hard work, dedication, and an especially inquisitive mind, Galileo was able to find an entirely non-teleological alternative to Aristotle's physics that both solved the problem of the tautological arguments and rectified the incorrect linkage between increasing speed and traveled distance. Instead of looking only at the change and differences in weights, motions and speeds of objects, he started to look specifically at the rate at which change occurred. That is, he found out that motion could be catalogued more easily by recording not only the covered distance and descended height of falling bodies, but also the rate at which these quantities would change.

18


Just to be able to do so, Galileo devised many ingenious experiments in which he tried to link change in spatial coordinates to a standard measure of duration. In this way, the total amount of change in position could not only be expressed in terms of standard spatial intervals, but it could also be measured in a chronological manner by counting up the amount of standard units of duration between the initial and the final position. For instance, by monitoring the changing water level in the reservoir of a water clock that was running at the same time as he would release some heavy mass at the top of an inclined plane, Galileo could chart the duration of the object's descent in terms of the water level markings (this would include split times as well as the total amount of time). In tum, the covered distances at pre-marked split times could be registered by looking at the distance markings that were carved along the ramp's downward slope. As it turns out, though, it is quite difficult to get a reliable and consistent reading in subsequent runs of such an experiment. This is because the water level is changing rather slowly in comparison to the falling body' s changing height. Therefore, later on, a more elaborate inclined plane experiment was introduced. While it is not entirely certain if this experiment-in the exact form as described below-was actually performed by Galileo, it at least combines two of his earlier innovations that had a great impact on the practice of physical experimentation: (1) the downhill ramp, with its inclined plane for rolling down bronze balls; and (2) the free-swinging pendulum, which could be used as a relatively precise indicator for the rate of time. In this enhanced inclined plane experiment, a bronze ball was made to roll down the ramp, which had a pendulum hanging from the backside of the platform from which the balls were released. Because of the added pendulum, the ramp could effectively also double as a makeshift metronome. That is, although the ramp's main function was to serve as a straight-lined "speed track" for the bronze ball, its second job was to subdivide the total time of descent into equally long intervals. This feature was achieved by placing a series of moveable warning bells on strategic positions along the slope of the ramp (see Fig. 2-1 ). The precise spots where these bells should be placed could be found through synchronization with the swings of the pendulum that was hanging beneath the platform located on top of the slope. In this way, after having been released from the upper platform of the ramp, the passing bronze ball would set off the bells one after the other in an even, steady rhythm.

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Table 1: Distance and time va lues in Ga lileo's inclined plane experiment Measurements leading to Galileo ' s time-squared law offal!. See tl1e end of Section 2.2 for how the valu e of the propmtionality constant k relates to cu1Tent metric measures (also cf. McDougal 20). tiine l x

distance .r

t 2 = .< I k

t2

"ith equal intenals !it :

as 1neasured in 'point.s'

calculated with k = 33

t_,. squared

'1 = 1

33

1.00

11 = 1

'1= 2

130

3.94

21 = 4

t, = 3

298

9.03

31 = 9

t, = 4

526

15.94

41 = 16

ts= 5

824

24.97

5 2 = 25

t6 = 6

1192

36. 12

61 = 36

t7 = 7

1620

49.09

71 = 49

'• = 8

2 104

63.76

s' = 64

~ l = l x- l x_J

limct -

0 0

500

1000 traveled

distance

1500

2000

-

§

•• • •

h - - - 1~ Fig. 2-1: Bronze ball rolling down an inclined plane (with s-t diagram)

20


By introducing a "normalized" measure of time (in which, for instance, the equalized time stretches between the ramp ' s warning bells were taken as countable standard units) Galileo could list this measure next to the distance and/or height covered by the moving body. In so doing, he could then put together a chronologically ordered record as in table 1 (see also Smolin, Time, 31-36). As it turned out, the notion of a timeline could then be derived by using the analogy between (a) a measuring tape stretching straight from the moving body's starting position to its end point, and (b) the time interval between initial and final readings on a water clock (or even smaller intervals, such as those between the pendulum-calibrated warning bells attached to the slope of the ramp). In other words, as had happened before with the notion of space, 11 time was thus abstracted from the process of nature as a linear phenomenon. On the whole, there seems to be no other experiment that illustrates better how distance and duration can be made to pair up-no better demonstration of how time can be characterized as a geometrical phenomenon. That is, it demonstrates most clearly how the initially unlabeled process of nature is actually converted into (a) movable physical bodies, (b) a spatial coordinate system, and (c) a linear time axis. By submitting the world to his nature-dissecting gaze and then filtering away all that was irrelevant to him, Galileo basically put nature through the wringer to thus end up with a fully geometrized "stage setting" in which the act of doing physics could be performed. It became finally possible to put the mathematically predictable maneuvers of physical objects on display within a timeline-equipped spatial coordinate system-thus implicitly suggesting that nature truly worked in a geometrical way. But on close enough scrutiny, the abstract geometrical timeline could only be given a meaningful role through the artificial isolation of a "physical object" from its local neighborhood, and all of Galileo's other acts of abstraction that led to his first basic version of doing "physics in a box"-as Lee Smolin calls it. It is only through all these acts of abstraction that what we like to call "motion" can be "soaked loose" from the process of nature as if it were the change of an object' s position "through" space and time. Despite first appearances, object, neighborhood, measuring instrument, observer, etc., are eventually not separate entities, but rather inseparably connected process-structures deeply ingrained within the greater embedding whole of the universe at large.

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It is because of these acts of simplifying abstraction from the process of nature that our current way of doing physics in a box could be made possible at all. And it is only in this abstracted, mathematized world that nature's processuality can be translated into a moveable dot running along a chain of equally long time stretches.12 This very method of doing physics in a box, however, has persuaded many ofus to indeed think of time as a geometrical exponent of reality that is needed to get from one event to the next. However, this belief is a typical example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. To put it even more strongly, it is already dubious to even speak of "time" as having an autonomous existence. Even Einstein himself was not shy to bring this to the fore: "Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live" (Einstein as quoted in Forsee 81). Remarkably, in opposition to the timeless and nonprocessual Parmenidean block universe that Minkowski proposed on the basis of Einstein's special theory of relativity, this same point is used in process philosophy to endorse an explicitly processual interpretation of nature: [T]ime is not in itself a fundamental reality. It is an abstraction from the process .... What really exists is a succession of events. They are by their very nature related to one another as past and future or as contemporary. These relationships are temporal. But there is not something to be called time apart from these actual relations. (Cobb 161)

In other words, time should not be reified. Galileo's geometrical timeline model should not be interpreted as something that has an actual existence alongside nature's events (Griffin, "Bohm and Whitehead," 127). Moreover: [A]ll the features of time ... are rooted in the intrinsic reality of events, in the process by which they become concrete, or determinate, for it is here that the event includes the past events into itself and it is this inclusion that makes time irreversible. Accordingly, any approach that commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by equating the extrinsic side of the events with their complete reality will necessarily miss the roots of time in those events. (Griffin, "Introduction," 13) Hence, looking at all this in the most sober way we can, at the end of the day we will have to admit that geometrical timelines result from the subjective choice to abstract from the process of nature. Our long-standing Western tradition of "doing physics in a box" 13 actually depends a great deal on such idealizing abstraction.

22


It cannot be denied that what has grown to become our present-day physics has known many tremendous successes over the years. On balance, the vast majority of those successes have come with impressive concrete consequences. After all, many previously unexplained aspects of nature are now considered familiar and well-understood phenomena as their behavior can be traced and predicted mathematically to a near-perfect degree of precision. However, even perfect empirical agreement between some target system of interest and its mathematical model does not mean that the mathematical model is an exact representational twin version of the system in question. In fact, our nature-dissecting physics can only deal with observables, not beables. 14 Mainstream contemporary physics primarily has to do with the mathematization of phenomena and typically likes to evaluate nature in terms of instrument-based empirical data-backed up by sense data, if needed. Appropriately, then, physical equations should not be considered to refer directly to nature-in-itself; for all practical purposes, their designated source of information is to be found in the responses of observation systems. Unlike an airplane in low-altitude flight, we cannot dive below the "radar" of our own phenomenal awareness to check if the so-called "real-world-out-there" exists exactly as we experience it. From early life onwards, we have gradually learned to cut up our otherwise undivided natural world into various subsystems (particularly target, subject, and symbol systems, as well as their respective constituent parts). Despite our thus developed nature-dissecting mindset, this will never bring us conclusive proof if these systems do indeed exist just as we infer them to be (Van Dijk, "The Process"). Therefore, we should realize very well that physics-from what it was in Galileo's hands to what it has become in the present day-has until now been no more than a collection of instrumentbased, mathematically expressed phenomenologies made possible by some well-considered acts of abstraction (see also Sections 3.1.2 to 3.2). Following the same argument, we should also recognize that the concepts of space and time, as used in contemporary mainstream physics, are ultimately phenomenologies: instrument-enabled, geometrically expressed metaphors or figures of speech for how nature appears to us, conscious nature-dissecting observers. Although they help break down the process of nature into geometrical dimensions and their contents, space and time should not be thought to exist as such. In the words of Alfred

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North Whitehead: "This passage of events in time and space is merely the exhibition of the relations of extension which events bear to each other, combined with the directional factor in time which expresses that ultimate becomingness which is the creative advance of nature" (Whitehead, PNK, 63). Moreover: "We habitually muddle together this creative advance, which we experience and know as the perpetual transition of nature into novelty, with the single-time series which we naturally employ for measurement" (Whitehead, CN, 178). Here, the word "naturally" should perhaps better be replaced by "routinely." After all, by following Galileo's first example of presenting such a single-time series in a table (as in Table 1, above), we are entirely taking for granted all the idealizations and simplifications that in fact enabled him to present time as a unidirectional geometrical line. In other words, we are thus accepting the authority of tradition without really questioning Galileo's hidden presumptions. Within certain contexts of use it may perhaps be quite convenient to interpret space and time in terms of geometrical dimensions, but these interpretations should not be taken so literally as to impose them onto the process which is nature. We should not mistake our abstractions for reality, so we should always remain critical towards claims that the physical real world should sit within space and time, or exist as a 4-dimensional spacetime continuum. At the end of the day, space and time, although all too often interpreted as actually existing, geometrically specifiable dimensions, are in fact artifacts of the human intellect that follow directly from the naturedissecting mindset on which our still well-established tradition of doing "physics in a box" is based. This does not mean, however, that space and time are mere illusions, but rather that what we have come to think of as "space-time" is actually an intrinsic aspect of the process of nature and can thus not be usefully reflected upon without taking nature's processuality into account.

2.1.3 The deficiencies of the geometrical timeline So, however useful Galileo's geometrical timeline has proven to be over the years, it's quite another thing to suppose that this abstract construct should have a concrete counterpart within nature-in-itself. Although the geometrical timeline does quite well when it comes to chronologically ordering the sampled values of observables 15 by associating them to a serialized chain of time slots, it seems to perform quite poorly otherwise.

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After all, while nature is all about change, process, action, evolution, etc., the timeline by itself is as static as can be (Cahill, "Process Physics: SelfReferential," 2). Furthermore, the geometrical timeline does not allow for a present moment effect. The timeline doesn't have a unique and indisputable Now which will automatically come to the fore during use. This lack of a dedicated present moment is in fact a shortcoming that even Einstein had become quite concerned about in his later years. As Rudolf Carnap reported: Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics .... Einstein thought that scientific descriptions [whether they be formulated in physical or in psychological terms] cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; and there is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science. (Carnap 37-38) To us, conscious human beings, things happen in a particular order. That is, things seem to change as they pass from the present into the future, thus leaving their past "behind" them. Accordingly, when left to its own devices, nature typically likes to follow the path of irreversibility. Water does not spontaneously flow upwards against the slope of a mountain; milk will not unmix itself from the coffee in which it is poured; and, as we will all learn in life, we do not grow younger as we age. In classical thermodynamics-although gas particles in bulk tend towards disorderliness, thus leading to a preferred direction of time-the microscopic laws describing the collisions of individual particles are time-symmetric, indifferent to any distinction between a back or forward direction of time. Accordingly, at least until the advent of quantum mechanics, all the then known "laws of nature" were time-reversible, and to this day most of them still are: The reversibility of basic physical processes comes from the time symmetry of the laws that underlie them. This time-reversal symmetry is usually denoted by the letter "T." You can think ofT as an (imaginary) operation that reverses the direction oftime-i.e., interchanges past and future. Time-symmetric laws have the property that when the direction of time is inverted the equations that describe them remain unchanged: they are invariant under T. A good example is provided by Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism, which are

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certainly T-invariant [or in other words: symmetric under timereversal]. (Davies, About Time, 209) When seen from the perspective of timeline-equipped laws of nature themselves, it seems to make no difference at all if we start tracing the timeline from left to right, or just the other way around. There is nothing in the mathematics of our laws that forbids them to be "unrolled" counterclockwise. So it turns out that physicists, when putting these laws to the test, must first choose which direction to follow. Because the physical equations themselves do not stipulate a specific direction, they actually require external subjective choice in order for the timeline methodology to work according to plan. In fact, geometrical timelines are basically analogous to tear-off calendars, whose pages can be removed from the front to the back, but also vice versa, randomly, or in any other possible order. And-as is so well-accepted that it is mostly forgotten-tear-off calendars, as well as geometrical timelines, require social convention to know in which direction they should be read, and external manipulation to get from one time slot to the next. 16 In other words, physicists availing themselves of such an artificial timeline necessarily have to apply an additional metarule which states that an external time pointer should be run alongside the line to indicate which point on it is effectively acting as the present moment. That is, just like the tear-off calendar needs some outside help (another's "helping hand") to remove the page of each day gone by, the timeline needs an external present moment indicator to get from one time slot to the next. It should be stressed that this present moment indicator (a) is entirely separate from the timeline itself, and (b) acts in total independence from any mathematical equation to which this timeline may be linked. As will be explained in more detail below, however, this external present moment indicator plays an enormously important role in the ongoing "mathematization of nature."

2.2 From geometrical timeline to time-based equations Galileo's revolutionary idea to relate the changing position of a moving body to the rate of his own heartbeat as he felt it beating in his pulse, or to other measures of time, 17 basically amounts to relating the change of one thing to the change of another. Or, to be more precise, it amounts to

26


encoding the nonlinear, nonuniform change in one aspect of nature (i.e., relocation in space) in terms of the more simple and steady change of another (i.e., "relocation" in time). It should be noted, though, that comparison to another clock is basically the only way to determine at which rate the first clock's time indicator is changing position. Therefore, to avoid an infinite regress of calibrating clocks, the most practical solution is simply to accept the first one's rate of change as smooth and uniform over its entire range. 18 In each of his different experiments, Galileo had to assume that-more so than the beats of his own heart-the time indicator markings 19 would always pass by at a perfectly even rate, so that they could be used as a standard measure of time. By supposing that these markings would indeed pass by in uniform fashion, it became possible to introduce an operational definition of time. 20 Such an operational definition simply takes a conveniently chosen number of the same recurrent events ( e.g., the swinging of a pendulum, or the passing by of indicator markings) as the standard unit of time. In this way, since the number of counts is the only thing required to specify the magnitude of a time interval, there is no need to know any more if time is something that physically exists in the so-called "real world out there." That is, as long as the assumption of this uniform rate leads to empirically adequate results, there is no need to know how time actually works, but only that it works-in the above mentioned operational sense, that is. The adoption of this operational definition of time allowed Galileo to achieve a major breakthrough that ushered in a new era in the natural sciences. By closely studying the time tables he had put together from his experiments on falling and descending objects (see Table 1) he could systematically compare the object's change in position (especially the vertical component) to the amount of time that had elapsed during its descent: Having placed this board [i.e., the downward track for the bronze ball] in a sloping position, by lifting one end some one or two cubits above the other, we rolled the ball, as I was just saying, along the channel, noting, in a manner presently to be described, the time required to make the descent. We . . .now rolled the ball only onequarter the length of the channel; and having measured the time of its descent, we found it precisely one-half of the former. Next we tried other distances, comparing the time for the whole length with that for the half, or with that for two-thirds, or three-fourths, or indeed for any fraction; in such experiments, repeated a full hundred times, we always found that the spaces traversed were to each other as the

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squares of the times, and this was true for all inclinations of the plane, i.e., of the channel, along which we rolled the ball. (Galileo, Dialogues, 178-179) In so doing, Galileo found that the traveled distance was directly proportional to time squared: S 0C

t2

This expression contains two variables, s for distance, and t for time, and says that with each elapsed time interval, the traveled distance increases quadratically. This relation may indeed seem quite obvious, since rolling down the ramp's entire length will take the bronze ball twice the time that is needed for the first quarter distance. But in order to really make sure that his hypothesis would stand the test of time, it seems that, further on into the experiment, Galileo decided to replace the not so precise water clock with the more reliable methodology of metronome-like transit sounds made by strategically placed frets (i.e., "speed bumps") or alarm bells. Because this method, due to "double calibration,"21 ensures a high level of accuracy in making equally long time intervals, it becomes possible to introduce a standardized unit of time. And although this method left their actual size unspecified-or simply one (i.e., 1.00) by default-it led to all time intervals having the same duration with a very small margin of error: The phrase "measure time" makes us think at once of some standard unit such as the astronomical second. Galileo could not measure time with that kind of accuracy. His mathematical physics was based entirely on ratios, not on standard units as such. In order to compare ratios of times it is necessary only to divide time equally; it is not necessary to name the units, let alone measure them in seconds. The conductor of an orchestra, moving his baton, divides time evenly with great precision over long periods without thinking of seconds or any other standard unit. He maintains a certain even beat according to an internal rhythm, and he can divide that beat in half again with an accuracy rivaling that of any mechanical instrument. (Drake 98) It was because of this increased measurement accuracy that the proportionality constant k, relating distance and time to each other, could be determined with ample accuracy:

s=kt2, with k=33 (see Table 1; Section 2.1.2)

28


The precise value of k depends effectively on the relation between the locally valid gravitational acceleration (or to be more precise, the locally valid gravitational acceleration minus some possible deceleration due to friction and other speed-diminishing factors) and the applied measuring unit for distance (which, in the metric SI-system, is the meter). However, it was initially based on the traveled length during the first interval t0 - t 1 as expressed in terms of Galileo's standard unit-the "point." And since Galileo normalized the time interval t0 - t 1 to unity, his assumption that the velocity of a freely falling object would increase uniformly led to another value for gravitational acceleration than we use today. In the case of the measurement run for the inclined plane experiment recorded in Table 1, the value of k equaled 33 . This was, indeed, the number of distance markings that could be counted between the top of the ramp and the position of the first warning bell. With the standard measure for length-named "points"-amounting to approximately 29/30 ::::: 0.967 mm, the traveled distances can be calculated from s = kt2 . Accordingly, at time t1, the traveled distances 1 would reach a value of s = (29/30) ·33· 12 = 31.9 mm (cf., Table 1; Section 2.1.2). As a matter of fact, all other distances could be calculated in similar fashion, for any single moment within the available time range. Although Galileo had to fight an uphill battle in order to defend all these ideas, today we realize that this ground-breaking spin-off of his initial proportionality relation soc t2 actually embodied the first version of what has now become the "gold standard": the time-based physical equation. 2.3 From time-based equations to physical laws Elaborating on Galileo' s work, Isaac Newton then added force and mass into the mix, which enabled him, among others, to formulate his three laws of motion-out of which the most famous second one, is another physical equation: F = ma. Together with yet another physical equation, known as the law of universal gravitation, F9

= G m~';

2,

with the gravitational constant G = 6.67 · l Q- 11 [N · m2/kg 2] ,

Newton was able to lay down a basic framework for describing the motion of all of nature's physical objects within the earthly as well as the heavenly domain. The equations dealing with the gravitation of ordinary objects

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on earth could be unified with Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Because of the enormous empirical success and the giant leap of understanding that this unification brought about, Newton's work could give rise to the mechanistic "clockwork universe" worldview. This worldview even motivated Pierre-Simon Laplace to claim that it should in principle be possible to calculate, from a given set of interim conditions, the entire history and future of nature as a whole: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future . An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. (Laplace 4) Laplace's strict and absolute determinism is now typically regarded as outdated. 22 This is mostly due to ongoing developments in physics. With the advent of thermodynamics (with its novel concepts of ergodicity, entropy, and statistical ensembles), and quantum mechanics (which, in most interpretations, is taken to be inherently random and indeterministic), this rather resolute form was no longer tenable. However, although this strict Laplacian determinism had to be abandoned, most other aspects of the mechanistic worldview managed to survive. In fact, the general framework behind the mechanistic worldview not only came out alive and well, but it even went on to permeate the whole of science. As a result, our contemporary mainstream physics became very much framed in terms of what may be called the CartesianNewtonian paradigm. In the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, nature is typically interpreted as follows: (1) as an entirely physical "real world out there" ready to be exploited and manipulated by us, conscious human beings who like to think of it (2) as a giant collection of atomistic, elementary constituents whose behavior is governed by fixed, eternal laws of nature. The first feature refers to the apparent necessity in physics to keep an external perspective on the system to be observed. That is, although our physical sciences are utterly experience-based, as they rely on empirical observation, the observer's experience itself always belongs to the

30


instrumentarium of investigation, and never to its target. As such, our nature-interpreting subjectivity resides on the other, non-physical side of the epistemic cut (see Von Neumann 352; Pattee): ... any attempt to include the conscious observer into the theoretical account, will cause the theory's extra-systemic "view from nowhere" [see Nagel] to be handed over to a newly introduced meta-observer. At least from the theory's perspective, the initial observer must then be treated as any other physical system [see Von Neumann 352]. In this way, physical theory seems to be condemned to a "Cartesianesque" split [see Primas 610-612] that leads to the undesirable bifurcation of nature [see Whitehead, CN, 27-30]. Hence [our current physical sciences can be labelled as] "exophysical" [see Atmanspacher and Dalenoort] which refers to an external "view from nowhere" onto a world that is held to be interpretable entirely in physical terms. (Van Dijk, "The Process") Furthermore, the second feature of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm-its corpuscular physicalism (see Barandiaran and Ruiz-Mirazo 297)-can be credited first to Galileo, who paved the way for modem physics by being the first to systematically single out material bodies as individual systems to study their behavior during free fall. Second, it can indeed be credited to Newton, who built upon Galileo's geometry-inspired groundwork to arrive at his laws of motion and universal gravitation. The superior explanatory power of Newton's laws-which made it possible to understand such diverse phenomena as planetary motion, the working of the tides, and the movement of material objects on Earth with the help of just one theoretical framework-was so impressive that his work really set the stage for all that followed: ... the success of scientific theories from Newton to the present day is based on their use of a particular framework of explanation invented by Newton. This framework views nature as consisting of nothing but particles with timeless properties whose motions and interactions are determined by timeless laws. The properties of the particles, such as their masses and electric charges, never change, and neither do the laws that act on them. (Smolin, Time, xxiii) Although its initial mechanistic interpretation had to be abandoned with the advent of Einstein's relativity theories and quantum mechanics, this law-centred methodology was still quite painlessly passed on to our contemporary mainstream physics. The general procedure of predicting the future state of any system by identifying its initial conditions and then

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letting them be processed by "the laws that be" is still the way to go (see Smolin, Time, 50). And even though the strict Laplacian determinism turned out to be untenable,23 the general Newtonian mode of operation is still alive and well. Nowadays, rigorous determinism is not a realistic expectation anymore, but empirical agreement has taken its place. That is, when a physical equation achieves empirical agreement with the system it is held to portray, it is typically thought to closely follow the target system's behavior. Accordingly, the physical equation is customarily considered to represent the system at hand-if not in a direct chronological sense, then at least statistically (Van Dijk, "The Process").

2.3.1 The flawed notion ofphysical laws When we call our physical equations "laws," this means that, all else being equal, it applies to many, many cases (see Smolin, Time, 99). 24 In other words, in a practically equal situation, the physical equation at hand will apply without exception, again and again. And although the CartesianNewtonian paradigm thus facilitates the view that there could be a complete collection of fundamental laws of nature, there is more than enough reason to disagree with this (see Cartwright 45-55; Giere 77-90). First of all, none of our past or even present physical theories has universal validity. This can be easily exemplified by investigating situations in which Newton's universally valid "laws" of motion are to be combined with his "law" of universal gravitation (Giere 90). No two interacting bodies, anywhere in the universe, will be found to exactly behave according to these "laws": The only possibility of Newton's Laws being precisely exemplified by our two bodies would be either if they were alone in the universe with no other bodies whose gravitational force would affect their motions, or if they existed in a perfectly uniform gravitational field. The former possibility is ruled out by the obvious existence of numerous other bodies in the universe; the latter by inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter in the universe. (Giere 90) Moreover, all conditions would have to be thoroughly idealized (perfectly spherical, chargeless bodies within a frictionless environment, and so on). Even Richard Feynman stated that Newton's law of universal gravitation is "the greatest generalization achieved by the human mind" (Feynman 14) for it is simply not true that the force between any two bodies is given by the law of gravitation. That is, no charged objects will

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exactly behave according to Newton's "law" of universal gravitation, since Coulomb's "law" applies as well (Feynman 13-14; Cartwright 57). Moreover, the effect of both "laws" typically differs depending on the scale of magnitude and other relevant system and environmental conditions. In view of all this, Cartwright goes on to argue that our celebrated "laws of nature" are, in fact, no more than generalized theories 25 : Many phenomena which have perfectly good scientific explanations are not covered by any laws. No true laws, that is. They are at best covered by ceteris paribus generalizations-generalizations that hold only under special conditions, usually ideal conditions. (Cartwright 45) These special, idealized conditions fail to present the whole picture. That is, since our physical equations always refer to some carefully singledout system of interest, the entire rest of the universe is being ignored as if it doesn't exist. 26 This neglect of the outer-system world is an absolute necessity for a physical equation (e.g., F = ma) to be valid in many other cases. Accordingly, the idea of physical equations having the status of a "true law" can only be maintained thanks to theoretical neglect: Newton's second law [for instance] describes how a particle's motion is influenced by the forces it experiences .. .. Each particle in the universe attracts every other gravitationally. There are also forces between every pair of charged particles. That's a whole lotta forces to contend with. To check whether Newton's second law holds exactly, you would have to add up more than I 080 forces to predict the motion of only one of the particles in the universe. In practice, of course, we do nothing of the kind. We take into account just one or a few forces from nearby bodies and ignore all the rest. (Smolin, Time, 100-10 I) Hence, at the end of the day, we should realize that our physical equations can only be "universally valid" when they are generalizations. But when we have to admit that our equations are merely approximating generalizations, they can never be thought of as being fundamental, or as having a perfect or near-perfect fit with nature. So, despite the popular view that some of our physical equations are so widely valid that they could deservedly be labeled as laws, such labeling is in fact misplaced. After all, on closer scrutiny, these so-called laws are neither true, nor universal (see Cartwright 13 and 45; Giere 86). Despite all this, the idea that nature can ultimately be grasped fully by a single physical equation, or a small set of physical laws, is still very

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much alive. It is almost as if the huge empirical success of these timebased equations makes us forget that a great amount of abstraction, idealization, simplification, approximation, and neglect is involved. When ignoring all these manipulations we can easily become convinced that our simple equations for our local isolated systems can be extrapolated to the entire universe. And that's in fact exactly what happened after Galileo.

2.4 From geometrization to the timeless block universe By expressing nature's processuality with the help of a geometrical timeline, Galileo basically set the stage for modem science. Together with the three already known spatial dimensions, the temporal dimension thus made it possible to register all conceivable motion of physical bodies by specifying, for each fixed interval on the timeline, their position in terms of three spatial coordinates (x, y, z). The mechanistic Newtonian physics that was then built upon Galileo's innovation managed to refine and expand the still rudimentary geometrization of nature to a great extent. In fact, although Galileo had only a promising vision of mathematics being the language in which the great book of nature was written, Newton actually seemed to have pulled off the as-good-as-complete mathematization of nature-from falling apples on earth to the faraway heavenly bodies in outer space. According to Laplace's strictly deterministic interpretation of the Newtonian framework, the mathematically spelled out mechanical laws of nature governed the entire future unfolding of the universe. It was thought that the universe as a whole could be described deterministically by simply taking its initial conditions 27 and then making Newton's laws work out the inevitable consequences. This idea of such an algorithmically laid down universe was indeed very much inspired by Galileo's pioneering work. As a matter of fact, the renowned clockwork universe picture was conceivable only through Galileo's conception of the geometrical time line and the subsequent development of the timeline-compliant physical equations. Without this "geometrization of nature's processuality," the mathematical expression of quantum mechanics and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity would not even have been possible. But with the implementation of timeline-compliant physical equations, all major physical theories that followed in the wake of Galileo's theory of falling bodies were effectively left timeless in the sense that: (1) their


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formulae have to make do without any dedicated and unique present moment; (2) the entire past, present, and future are, according to Laplace, already contained in the chosen initial conditions and the static, unchanging physical laws acting thereon. On top of that, (3) in quantum mechanics, all possible quantum states are held to exist simultaneously in what some interpret to be a static kind of superposition-until observation leads to the actualization of one particular possibility; and (4) Einstein's relativity theories, with the newly introduced ideas of the 4-dimensional spacetime continuum and the relativity of simultaneity, made it clear that observers moving at different speeds would each experience a different order of occurrence for any arbitrary sequence of events relative to which they are movmg. The entire combination of (a) Galileo's geometrization of time, (b) the lack of a unique present moment in the physical equations that ensued therefrom, (c) the lack of a preferred direction of time in these equations (see Davies, "Whitrow"), (d) Einstein' s discovery of the relativity of simultaneity, (e) the postulation of the Einsteinian-Minkowskian 4dimensional spacetime manifold, and (f) the introduction of superposition in quantum mechanics (see Barbour 229-231 and 247; Smolin, Time, 80) motivated mainstream physics to drop time altogether. All this led physicists to argue that in reality there is no passage of time, but that all moments of all of eternity exist as a giant universal timescape in which all moments and configurations of nature are spread out as one eternally existing whole-comparable to the spacetime picture as presented in Fig. 2-2, but then for the entire universe. 28 a) past - - - ---+ present- - - - ---+ fu ture

!

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all moments existing together as one (en bloc) - --+

Fig. 2-2: The Earth-Moon system in a temporal universe and in a block universe. The temporal view (Fig. 2-2a) and the block universe view (Fig. 2-2b) of the Earth-Moon system. In the temporal view, the earth and moon move through space in time, while in the block universe view, all instances of the earth and moon exist together at once in a giant timeless space-time continuum. In the block universe view, all experience of the earth and moon moving from one moment to the next is thus held to be illusory. For ease of illustration, the images show only two spatial dimensions as well as modified, unrealistic sizes and distances. Images inspired by illustrations from (Davies, "That Mysterious," 9) and extensively edited from a Wikimedia Commons image of the lunar phases (original image: © Orion 8 CC BY-SA 3.0). In the words of theoretical physicist Julian Barbour: The most direct and naive interpretation [of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation] is that it is a stationary [time-independent] Schrodinger equation for one fixed value (zero) of the energy of the universe .... The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is telling us, in its most direct interpretation, that the universe in its entirety is like some huge molecule in a stationary state and that the different possible configurations of this "monster molecule" are the instants of time. Quantum cosmology becomes the ultimate extension of the theory of atomic structure, and simultaneously subsumes time. We can go on to ask what this tells us about time. The implications are as profound as they can be. Time does not exist. There is just the furniture of the world that we call instants oftime. (Barbour 247) Of course, this line of reasoning draws heavily on ideas from quantum theory. However, in the confrontation between believers and disbelievers in the passage of time, the relativity of simultaneity was what ultimately settled the score, thus making relativity the prime incentive for physicists like Barbour to try to make quantum physics comply with timelessness

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as well. But even before this quantum theory-based proposal of timelessness, Minkowski' s block universe interpretation of Einstein's special theory of relativity was, in conjunction with Eddington's famous solar eclipse experiments,29 already persuasive enough to make some researchers join the camp of the time-refuters. The remarkable agreement between prediction and experiment, as well as the straightforwardness of Minkowski' s geometrical interpretation, eventually seem to be the main reasons for physicists to have become so convinced of the timelessness of nature. The fact that the basics of Einstein's special relativity could be so graphically explained by his captivating thought experiments 30 probably contributed to its appeal as well: Besides the existence of a universal speed limit that all observers agree on, special relativity depends on one other hypothesis. This is the principle of relativity itself. It holds that speed, other than the speed of light, is a purely relative quantity-there is no way to tell which observer is moving and which is at rest. Suppose two observers approach each other, each moving at a constant speed. According to the principle ofrelativity, each can plausibly declare herself at rest and attribute the approach entirely to the motion of the other. So, there's no right answer to questions that observers disagree about, such as whether two events distant from each other happen simultaneously. Thus, there can be nothing objectively real about simultaneity, nothing real about "now." The relativity of simultaneity was a big blow to the notion that time is real. (Smolin, Time, 57-58) Accordingly, we may summarize the argumentation for the unreality of time as follows : 1. Initial assumption: The universe is an entirely physical world with an objectively real existence; 2. The relativity of simultaneity: Observers moving at different speeds will-under certain circumstances (!)-not agree if two nonidentical, well-separated physical events happen simultaneously or not; 3. Because of this lack of agreement, it must be concluded that there is no objectively real now; 4. Hence, there is nothing to divide the past from the future (see Capek 507); 5. Consequently, any passage of time would be a sheer impossibility;

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6. Therefore, the entire history of the universe-containing not only all of its past and present moments, but also all moments yet to come-must be considered to exist all together at once, in one massive 4-dimensional block of frozen spacetime (see Fig. 2-2).

It was basically this line of reasoning-inspired significantly by the easyto-misinterpret geometry of Minkowksi' s spacetime construct-that made the case for the timeless block universe, thereby basically marginalizing any possible process-oriented interpretation of nature. 31 Fortunately, though, the publication of Lee Smolin's Time Reborn has drawn renewed attention to the fact that we are in dire need of a more process-friendly, habit-driven physics. In Smolin's view, this new physics should then be operating according to a principle of precedence, rather than proclaiming the reign of timeless law (Smolin, Time, 14 7). Moreover, in such a physics, the block universe interpretation would become obsolete and be replaced by an interpretation in which the cosmos is seen as a giant dynamic network of habit-establishing activity patterns. On that account, space and time should not be conceived of in terms of an abstract geometrical coordinate system. Instead, it would be better to think of them as being a process-seamlessly interwoven with the process of nature as a whole. Similar to the quantum vacuum-a wellaccepted concept from quantum field theory-space is not to be seen as an absolutely empty void, but rather as a fiercely boiling ocean of activity (see Davies, Space and Time, 136; Boi 69)-indeed, a process. Although, by lack of any further explanation, this may perhaps still sound rather speculative and premature, in Chapter 5 (on process physics) this will be discussed in much greater detail. 2.5 Arguments against the block universe interpretation Despite the enormous appeal of Einstein's relativity theories, their huge impact on further developments within theoretical as well as experimental physics, and the many practical benefits they have given us over the years, there is still more than enough reason to handle them with a good deal of caution. Especially the block universe interpretation-in which nature is viewed as utterly timeless while our experience of time is branded as a stubborn, obstinate illusion-should certainly deserve some critical evaluation, to say the least. Although numerous weaknesses can be collected from historical as well as more recent sources, let us first

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focus on some essential ones from a process-oriented point of view ( see Capek). When being pressed to provide a well-founded and indisputable defense for the illusoriness of our experience of time, physicists are actually having quite a hard time trying to do so. This is first and foremost because physics, being so firmly rooted in experiment, is itself utterly dependent on empirical experience. Secondly, if nature were indeed purely physical-as most contemporary mainstream physicists would have it-it is then quite difficult to see how it could ever give rise to something so explicitly non-physical like conscious experience. On top of this, the argument of time's illusoriness becomes even more doubtful in view of the extra-ordinary level of sophistication that would be required for our conscious experience to achieve such an extremely convincing, but-physically speaking-pointless illusion. In other words, it would simply be next to miraculous for such an illusion to ever have evolved at all. And if that would not be enough, in a completely timeless world, the utterly processual and time-related concept of (neuro )biological evolution would just make no sense. Even though these points together would seem to make a very strong case against the eternalism of Einstein and Minkowski, most mainstream physicists do not appear to be very alarmed by them. Apparently, the prevalent attitude among physicists is that the findings in physics-arguably the most prominent member of our sciences-must certainly be more fundamental than those of the other, lower-grade sciences, like chemistry, biology, and especially neuroscience. Another way to look at this, however, is to place the process of empirical experience before any possible results ensuing therefrom. Researchers on this side of the scale are far less likely to think of neuroscience, psychology, consciousness studies, and the like, as being inferior to the physical sciences. No wonder, then, that the two camps will find themselves talking past each other over and over again (!). Therefore, process-inspired arguments alone are probably not enough to end this unfruitful status quo. More than anything else, it needs to be demonstrated technically, in the language of physics, that the current timeless view of the block universe interpretation needs a thorough revision. Previously, with David Bohm, Basil Hiley, Ilya Prigogine, Henry Stapp, and Lee Smolin, to name but a few, there have been a number of attempts from within the physical sciences to move towards a more process-oriented alternative to the static, timeless view. 32 So far, however, their "process-

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friendly" work has not been able to bring about any major reputationshattering crisis in mainstream physics. Nonetheless, these efforts should definitely be taken seriously-if only to provide us with new angles and ideas on how to tackle the many unresolved matters in physics and science as a whole. However helpful the work of the above mentioned researchers may be in getting a more process-oriented perspective on the physical sciences, for now let us focus on some specific objections against the initial assumptions, the idealizing abstractions, and also the eventual interpretation of these abstractions as used in Minkowski's timeless block universe framework. The line of reasoning from initial assumptions to the interpretation of nature as a 4-dimensional block universe can be roughly summarized as follows : The basic initial assumptions: 33

1. Reality is objectively real and mind-independent. That is, reality exists independently from our mental experience and observation of it. As such, it is an entirely physical "real world out there" whose contents range widely from Planck-scale fluctuations to subatomic particles, billiard balls, and pyramids, and from small-, medium- andlarge-sized planets to solar systems, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and beyond.34 2. Events in nature can be localized spatiotemporally by specifying their coordinates along the dimensions of geometrical space and geometrical time. 35 The crux of Einstein's thought experiment:

3. There is relativity of simultaneity. That is, observers moving relative to each other at different enough speeds will disagree whether two well-separated, distant events occurred simultaneously or not. For the moving observer, after all, the expected meetups with the two oncoming light pulses may have a different order in comparison to that of the other, motionless observer. The line of reasoning leading to Minkowski's block universe picture:

4. With the objective existence of the real world as a background assumption, it is inferred from the relativity of simultaneity that there cannot be an objectively real now;

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5. In the absence of an objectively real now, there can be nothing to divide the past from the future (see 3V and V ----> P, with P being an inert product that does not participate in any further chemical reactions. For sake of simplicity it is assumed that there is an abundant supply of reagents, so that the reactions only occur in this one direction and not in the opposite one. Since V acts as a reactive chemical as well as a reaction product it can be seen as a catalyst for its own reaction. Hence, V takes part in an autocatalytic cycle. The simulation of the reaction and diffusion processes is based on the partial differential equations au= Du'i1 2 u - uv 2

at

+ F(l -

u) and av = Dv'i1 2 V - UV 2

at

-

(F

+ k)V,

with u and v as the location- and time-dependent concentrations. The first part of the first formula Du 'i7 2 u is the diffusion term with parameter Du= 2.00 · 10-5; the second part -uv2 is the reaction rate,

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and the third part F(l-u) is the replenishment term (with feed rate F = 0.0600) which is needed to replenish the chemical species U because it gets used up in the reaction. For the second partial differential equation, the parameters are: Dv = 1.00 · I0- 5, feed rate F = 0.0600 and diminishment term k = 0.0620. The simulation was originally performed by the XMorphia simulation software (authored by Roy Williams at Caltech) with partial differential equations (as discussed in Pearson). However, samples (a) to (t) are taken from a renewed simulation run by Robert Munafo (see http://mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/index.html for details). As the network continues to go through its update iterations, even higherorder structures can arise from this initially low-level process. The model's network of higher-order process-structures will thus start to exhibit all kinds of characteristics that can also be found to occur in nature. Among the signature features of the process physics model we can find, for instance, nonlocality, emergent quantum behavior, emergence of a quasiclassical world, gravitational and relativistic effects, inertia, universal expansion, black holes and event horizons, and also a present moment effect inherent to the system itself (see Cahill, "Process Physics: From Information Theory," 11-12).

5.3.5 Process physics, intrinsic subjectivity, and an inherent present moment effect Whereas mainstream physics, with its dependence on the geometrical timeline, does not allow for a unique and exclusive now (see Section 2.1.3), the process physics model has an inherent present moment effect to it: The introduction of process and the stochasticity of self-referential noise not only provides the spontaneous and creative generation of spatial structure, it also captures what may be termed the "present moment effect," and thus the essence of empirical or experiential time. Successive iterations .. . generate a history ...which might be recorded and replayed precisely, and in this there is a clear "arrow of time" because, unlike a recording (which can be played forward or backward arbitrarily to find and examine specific instances), one cannot simply run the system in reverse to recover an earlier state since the mapping is unidirectional-the presence of the noise term precludes an inverse mapping. However, while the history may be broadly inferred from the presence of persistent relational forms so

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that there is a sense of a natural partial memory, the "present moment" is entirely contingent both on the specific detail of that history and on the SRN [i.e., Self-Referential Noise] so that the future awaits creation. (Klinger, "On the Foundations," 170) Although the iterations of the update routine are not literally synonymous with the phenomenon of time, they facilitate the ongoing renewal of the system's connectivity patterns and thus are constitutive of what Whitehead (PR, 128, 222) calls "the creative advance into novelty." Each fulfilled round of iterations can be thought to bring on a new present moment. (Admittedly, this is of course a simplifying idealization. After all, in reality we cannot actually identify any such completion of stochastic iteration cycles. However, when looking at nature in any way we can, again and again we find that nonequilibrium cyclic processuality is a consistently recurring phenomenon.) Moreover, the being engaged in those cyclic update iterations makes a meaningful difference to the network's islands of elevated connectivity. That is, by slightly modulating the connectivity landscape with each tum, the update iterations affect connection strength, spread, durability, and reactivity of the network's ongoing patterns of relationship: Numerical studies show that the outcome from the iterations is that the gebits [i.e., the 3D-embeddable branching structures with elevated connectivity strength] are seen to interconnect by forming new links between reactive monads [i.e., reactive start-up nodes] and to do so much more often than they self-link as a consequence of links between reactive monads in the same gebit. We also see monads not currently belonging to gebits being linked to reactive monads in existing gebits. Furthermore the new links, in the main, join monads located at the periphery of the gebits, i.e., these are the most reactive monads of the gebits .... [T]he new links preserve the 3-dimensional environment of the inner gebits, with the outer reactive monads participating in new links. Clearly once gebits are sufficiently linked by B- 1 they cease to be reactive and slowly die via the iterative map. Hence there is an on-going changing population of reactive gebits that arise from the noise, cross-link, and finally decay. Previous generations of active but now decaying cross-linked gebits are thus embedded in the structure formed by the newly emerging reactive gebits. (Cahill and Klinger, "Self-Referential Noise and the Synthesis") In fact, the relation between strength, node distances, and reactivity is such that it gives rise to an internal, dispositional preference of how to

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connect. That is, these locally evolving, emergent characteristics affect the islands of connectivity in a way that makes them hook up with "kindred" ones ( see Fig. 5-8b). Analogous to what happens in reentrant neural networks (see Sections 4.3 and 4.3.1), the iterative noise in the process physics model gives rise to a kind of plasticity in which simultaneously active structures link up with each other. Accordingly, it can be derived from the numerical analyses that "connectivity structures that are reactive together, hook up together," this in surprising agreement with the wellknown motto from neurodevelopment: "[neural] cells that fire together, wire together" (Lowel and Singer; Edelman and Tononi 83). In many complex adaptive systems, such activity-driven mutualism is known to give rise to self-similar fractal network structures in which the same patterns of relationship occur at all levels of organization. In a few words: fractal self-similarity means that the whole and its parts are similarly shaped. As already hinted at in the last part of Section 4.3.3, a fractal network structure is one that achieves the maximum correlation among the constituent network elements. In fact, in a fractal network system, successful branching structures persist as they do not stop to participate in structure-enriching network cycles, while poorly interassociated and less interactive subnetworks will sooner or later fade away as connectivity with the rest of the system drops below a sustainable level:

If the inputs to a system cause the same pattern of activity to occur repeatedly, the set of active elements constituting that pattern will become increasingly strongly interassociated. That is, each element will tend to tum on every other element and (with negative weights) to turn off the elements that do not form part of the pattern. To put it another way, the pattern as a whole will become "auto-associated." (Allport 44) And as fractal structure formation facilitates a high level of autoassociation, the network's constituent elements become so intimately connected with the network as a whole that we may even be so bold as to state that they can "sense" the global state of the system through their access to deeply correlated local information (Hesse and Gross 10). Moreover, in the long run these strongly interassociating systems turn out to develop an optimal ratio between (1) efficiency (i.e., the capability to follow "the path of least resistance") and (2) diversity or flexibility (i.e., the capability to adapt, or take another, alternative pathway in the face of changing local-global conditions). The near-critical balance between these

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two features (see Ulanowicz, The Third, 112) then leads to structure formation as found, for instance, in the optimally complex neural network of Fig. 4-4a-b. Indeed, similar fractal pattern formation can be found in systems as diverse as neural networks (Fig. 5-8a), tree root networks (Fig. 5-8b), river deltas (Fig. 5-8c ), blood vascular networks (Fig. 5-8d), ant foraging trails, and many more natural systems, even at the level of galactic superclusters (see Fig. 5-10 below). In summary, all the pattern formation in these systems thrives on dispositional activity. Whenever branching structures, under the influence of internal, external, local, and global contingencies and constraints, get to become each other's "adjacent possible" (Kauffman, "Foreword: The Open," xiii; "Foreword: Evolution," 15), they will likely hook up and, depending on the level of mutual sustainment, get involved into a more durable relationship or not. Simply because the probability to hook up will increase when branching structures are (1) simultaneously active, (2) equally strong, (3) equally durable, and (4) equally reactive, it would certainly not be too much off-target to say that these branching structures develop in an anticipatory, or at least a proto-anticipatory way. As all branching structures are "biased" in the sense that they tend to connect with resembling parts, this can also be thought of as a primitive form of subjectivity. The network as a whole, then, will exhibit what Robert Ulanowicz has called "ascendency" (The Ascendent; The Third 112)-the tendency to develop towards ever-higher, and increasingly intense complexity.

Fig. 5-8: Fractal pattern formation leading to branching

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networks. (a) Four fluorescently stained neurons from a bird's brain (finch). One small interneuron and three projection neurons in RA, the robust nucleus of the arcopallium; a brain area involved in the control of fine muscle movements required for the production of learned song (photo authored by Mark Miller (2011), postdoctoral fellow at UCSF School of Medicine); (b) Excavated root network of Balsam Poplar with the arrow indicating a "root graft" (a shared connection) between two individual trees. Root grafts are exquisite examples of "kindred" dispositional branching structures that hook up with each other, thus contributing to optimal mutualistic connectivity within the network. Location: Quebec, Canada (Adonsou, et al.); (c) Satellite picture of the fractal-shaped branching structures of the Selenga River delta on the southeast shore of Lake Baikal in Russia (source: U.S. Geological Survey); (d) Computer model of fractal blood vessel network in human lungs (edited from Haber, et al.). In fact, in the process physics model, the occurrence of dispositionality, and the emergence of primitive anticipatoriness, proto-subjectivity, and ascendency ( see Ulanowicz, The Ascendant) is achieved by the systemrenewing effect of the noise-driven iterative update routine. Accordingly, each round of iterations "in-forms" the entire connectivity network about its own newly acquired internal connectivity. Through the complex interplay of (1) the memory-like precedence term, (2) the Whiteheadian prehension of local-global data by the cross-linking binder term, and (3) the creativityinfusing noise term, the initially undifferentiated connectivity network will give rise to a present moment effect unparalleled by any timelinebased model. Aside from their geometrical timeline, those models have to rely on an external time pointer to get from one moment to the next. The present moment effect in the process physics model, however, is inherent to the connectivity network in which it arises. So much so that the network and the present moment cannot be told apart in any satisfactory way. Accordingly, the present moment effect should be understood as forming one inseparable whole with the connectivity network. Network and present moment are best thought of as one integrated process-a dispositional habit-driven present, or an anticipatory remembered present (see Edelman, The Remembered; see also Fig. 5-9). The most striking thing, here, is that we have already used the same

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term when we were discussing the coming-into-actuality of an organism's conscious now (see Section 4.3.1, note 93; see Sections 4.2.3 - 4.3.2 for more specific details). When taking a step back to contemplate this peculiarity, however, we may notice that the same basic repertoire-namely (1) memory, (2) linkage-establishing reentrant signaling, and (3) neural noise-is at work in the thalamocortical region of the mind-brain. This repertoire, in tum, is kept on the go as the organism's perception-action loop continues to go through its cycles. As long as this repertoire remains intact, it can give rise to the conscious organism's emergent sense of self and world through which not only the experience of an immediately apparent reality becomes possible, but also the thinking up of all kinds of scenarios of events that might or might not happen in the future . Moreover, an organism with higher-order consciousness-or, in other words, a well-developed anticipatory remembered present-would also be able to imagine events that could perhaps have happened in the past if circumstances would have been different. The organism's thoughts and actions would not necessarily be targeted solely on the "conscious now," but could also be aimed at imagined possible past or future realities.

Fig. 5-9: Seamlessly integrated observer-world system with multiple levels of self-similar, neuromorphic organization. Simplified illustration depicting (a) a within-nature observer who is

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(b) seamlessly embedded within the same natural world he, from early life into adulthood, gets to make sense of through (c) the workings of his mind-brain and the perception-action cycles, and other non-equilibrium cycles that enable him to go through life (these cycles are not depicted here; see Fig. 4-1 as a replacement). Subsequently, (d) this brain-equipped observer, by going through his perception-action cycles, gets to sculpt a conscious view of the greater embedding world, which at the supragalactic level, is also organized in a "neural network-like" way. Finally, then, (e) process physics shows that, at the "deepest" level of organization, the process of nature branches out into an all-encompassing, optimally interconnected complex network of "neuromorphic" activity patterns. This is characteristic of a self-organizing, criticality-seeking, complex fractal network process. All this suggests that this selforganizing network process gives rise to habit formation, internal meaningfulness through universal mutual informativeness, and all experiential aspects that mainstream physics systematically overlooks. (Credits: Edited neuron image and supragalactic network image inserted from Mark Miller and from Volker Springe!, et al., respectively. Edited image of "neuromorphic" fractal quantumfoamlike connectivity network inserted from (Cahill, et al.). Although it would of course be going too far to state that nature at its deepest level already possesses a highly evolved memory-based anticipatoriness, all the above forces us to admit that a primordial form of it could well be present from early beginnings onward. After all, analogous to the dispositional behavior of branching structures in the process physics model, a conscious organism's anticipatory remembered present arises through dispositional memory repertoires within perceptionaction cycles that thus enable the repetition of psychophysical acts, such as thought, imagination, and value-modulated musculoskeletal control (Edelman and Tononi 57-61). Given all this, we are now hopefully ready to conclude that proto-subjectivity, time (i.e., nature's "becomingness" as "the going through its iterative cycles"), universal interconnectedness, something akin to Whitehead's "subjective aim" (see "dispositional preference," teleology, or what Terrence Deacon [264-287] calls "teleodynamics"), and mutual informativeness are intimately related aspects of the in itself indivisible process of nature.

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Fig. 5-10: Structuration of the universe at the level of supragalactic clusters. (Source of image: Springe!, et al.; © Nature

Publishing Group 2005) These zoom images are generated by the Millennium Simulation. Each individual window shows the simulation-generated structure in a slice of thickness lSh- 1 Mpc (the order of magnitude for each window can be derived from the distance indication in the lower right and left hand corners). The sequence of windows gives consecutive enlargements, with a factor four magnification for each step. The simulation aims to model structure formation in the universe in a way that agrees with the results obtained by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS). To achieve this, it is assumed that the early universe exhibited only weak density fluctuations and was otherwise homogeneous. Starting from such initial conditions, these fluctuations are then thought to be amplified by gravity. Dark matter and energy are invoked to enable the applicable gravitational equations to achieve neuromorphic structuration compliant with the above-mentioned reference surveys. In process physics, the fractal, neuromorphic structure formation

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results directly from the iterative update routine and no dark matter or dark energy hypothesis needs to be invoked.

6. Overview and conclusions Throughout this paper, we have seen that our conventional way of doing physics in a box got us into trouble over and over again. The common source of all these troubles seems to be the general methodology behind doing physics in a box, or, in other words, the Newtonian paradigm. For sake of clarity, let us retrace the steps through which the very method that was invented specifically to improve our physical understanding of nature (which, arguably, it did), could ever so paradoxically end up being such an inhibitor of any deeper understanding as well. To begin with, the Newtonian paradigm holds that the natural world consists of nothing more than entirely physical contents. These contents are thought to behave, to a greater or lesser extent, in a regular manner that can be expressed in the form of lawful physical equations. Moreover, it is one of the core beliefs in the Newtonian paradigm that nature as a whole can eventually be captured by just a handful of these lawful physical equations so that, eventually, the entire universe can be said to be "governed" by only a small set of them. In a nutshell, this is roughly what the Newtonian paradigm amounts to. However, the Newtonian paradigm comes with quite a number of tacit assumptions that we typically like to forget about once we are in the midst of putting it into practice. A prime example among these tacit assumptions is the "Galilean cut," which is the idea that quantifiable aspects of nature (such as location, size, shape, and weight) belong to the "objective real world out there," whereas qualitative aspects (such as color, touch, and smell) belong to the subjective inner-life of the observer. A related, but not entirely synonymous, idea is that a simple dividing line can be drawn between the system-to-be-observed and its observational system, including, in particular, the conscious observer behind the switches and knobs of the measurement equipment. Another major point on the list of tacit assumptions, then, is the idea that the environmental influence on a well-isolated system can be safely neglected. Although all these ideas are crucial elements in the Newtonian paradigm-elements without which our present way of doing physics in a box would not be possible-they cannot be upheld whenever our locally successful "laws of nature" are extrapolated to nature as a whole. Such

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an extrapolation would lead to the following patchwork of arguments: 1. By trying to apply our local physical equations to the universe at large we are in fact committing the cosmological fallacy (Smolin, Time, 97; also see J. Rosen 72). 2. Once having done so, we basically act as if we can position ourselves outside of nature, along with our measuring rods, calibrated clocks, and other scientific instruments, just to take on an exophysical "view from nowhere" (see Nagel; Van Dijk, "The Process"). But it is of course impossible to observe the universe from the outside and any attempt to stubbornly stick with this exophysical methodology will lead to conclusions that are impossible to check, such as that the universe should appear static and frozen solid when looked at from the outside (see Smolin, Time, 80). 132 3. The application of the Galilean cut-which is (1) intimately related to the above mentioned exophysical view and (2) an absolute necessity to make the formulation of physical equations possible at all-automatically leads to the undesirable "bifurcation of nature." That is, it splits up our natural world into lifeless nature and nature alive (Whitehead MT, 173-232; Desmet, "On the Difference," 87), or, in other words, into an inanimate part that is describable in terms of physics and mathematics, and another animate part that is not. Unfortunately, however, this leaves unexplained all kinds of things that we typically like to associate with life, such as meaning, subjectivity, value, creativity, novelty, and so on. As a result, we are now left with an exophysical-decompositional physics that, in the words of Terrence Deacon, leaves it absurd that we exist. 4. This same exophysical-decompositional physics, by making it so natural and obvious to think of nature in terms of empirical data and their data-reproducing algorithms, all too easily persuades us to confuse those empirical data and their physical equations 133 with the natural world to which they are referring. Given the utter staticness of those data records, one may be tempted to conclude that the referents to which these records are held to pertain 134 are themselves equally static, and thus "frozen in time" (Smolin, Time, 33). However, this would amount to mistaking empirical data for what are held to be their referents. We would actually be committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead, PR, 7, 18), which is undesirable since it ultimately leads to all kinds of confusing results, such as the

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denial of time and experience in Minkowski's block universe interpretation of Einstein's special theory of relativity. For the purpose of arriving at a proper, to-the-point conclusion, we do not need to go too deep into all technical details of relativistic physics and its timeless block universe interpretation. Instead, we can suffice by zooming in on where the main assumptions of the block universe interpretation go wrong. To recap, these main assumptions are: (I) nature is an objectively existing, mind-independent real world out there; (2) natural events reside in a geometrical continuum; (3) relativity of simultaneity means that there is no passage of time and that any experience of time passing by is thus illusory. Remarkably, though, all three assumptions are in fact symptoms of what may be called the physicist's fallacy. This fallacy, which may count Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and many others among its victims, leads one to suppose that what is being identified as an object in one's experience must naturally have its origin in an external, mind-independent world of entirely physical objects. This basically amounts to the idea that our experience occurs somewhere in an exophysical center of subjectivity and that it only has to import and interpret the information gathered from a pre-coded "real world out there." However, nature is by itself unlabeled and unframed by our filter of observation. As such, it does not contain any categories, concepts, or pre-coded information from which our mindbrains can construct nature-representing mental content. Instead, as is shown in Sections 4.2.3-4.3.1, organisms get to sculpt their "conscious sense of self and world" through perceptual categorization-the ability of conscious organisms to partition nature into categories, although nature by itself does not contain any such categories at all (Edelman and Tononi 104). That is, sense of self and world emerge as two aspects of one and the same stream of experience as conscious organisms live through their multimodal perception-action cycles 135 as well as the associated nutrient-waste cycles, 0 2-C02 cycles, and the like. An organism's experiential world is carved out as a somatically meaningful "self-centered world of significance" through a process of sense-making that takes place within the integrated whole of the seamlessly interconnected organism-world system-not within some exophysical center of subjectivity or Cartesian theater.

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This not only debunks the first main assumption of the block universe interpretation-namely, that nature is an objectively existing, mindindependent "real world out there"-but also the second and the third. After all, assumption (2) can only be made to work when natural events and living observers are being reduced to point-events and pointobservers-something that is shown to be a misleading abstraction in Section 2.5.2. Moreover, since it turns out that relativity of simultaneity does not hold in each and every case (see Section 2.5.3), the third assumption, that our experience of time passing by is merely an illusion, should no longer be considered an established finding either. To drive home the point that the block universe interpretation is mistaken, though, it will for now be enough to focus primarily on the flaw in the first main assumption and keep the flaws in the other assumptions on standby. As for the first assumption, it should be quite obvious that the long-cherished ideal of a mind-independent "real world out there" is flatly contradicted by the above-mentioned finding that observing organism and observed world are ultimately one. In fact, this finding is utterly incompatible with our entire current enterprise of doing "physics in a box" (or "exophysicaldecompositional physics," as it can be referred to as well). 136 Due to this incompatibility, and some other reasons as well, it seems we need to (1) temporarily put aside our exophysical-decompositional way of doing physics in a box and save it exclusively for practical purposes, 137 and (2) look out for a nanexophysical-nandecompositional way of doing physics without a box to thus be able to get a modelling method in which mutual informativeness is an integral part of the system, so that we no longer need to bump into the problem of information having to be pre-coded before it can ever be imported "from the outside" 138 (see also Kauffman, "Foreword: Evolution," 9-22) as would be required for an observer whose exophysical center of subjectivity is processing the sense data originating from the allegedly mind-independent "real world out there." This problem of pre-coded information can be avoided when information is in fact an initially unlabeled process of mutual informativeness through which the model system is dynamically being given shape from within, i.e., a process through which all activity patterns can make a difference to all other activity patterns within the system, and vice versa. Without such mutual informativeness, the above-mentioned process of perceptual categorization would not even be possible. It is through the mutual informativeness among and within neuronal groups in the thalamocortical

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region of the mind-brain that conscious organisms get to carve out their conscious "Umwelt" (i.e., their "self-centered world of significance"; see Von Uexkiill and Von Uexkiill; Koutroufinis) from a less salient background of noisy, lower-order activity patterns. In a remarkably similar way, the mutually informative process of "autocatalysis" is thought to have facilitated the advent of life by enabling the emergence of initially primitive biotic networks from a nondescript background of low-grade, slow-going chemical reaction cycles (see Kauffman, At Home, 47-69). In both cases, a higher-order world of habitestablishing foreground patterns is "bootstrapped into actuality" 139 through the mutually informative cyclic activity within the system itself. According to Reg Cahill's process physics, this mutual informativeness is not only an essential characteristic of biological systems, but also of nature as a whole. In the process physics model, it is the mutual informativeness among inner-system activity patterns that gives rise to a complex world of criticality-seeking, habit-establishing foreground patterns. Similarly to what happens in the emergence of life and consciousness through autocatalysis and perceptual categorization, respectively, these foreground patterns get to "bootstrap" themselves into actuality from an initially undifferentiated background process of noise-driven, mutually informative activity patterns. Because of this mutual informativeness, which enables it to avoid all the problems associated with pre-coded information, process physics should be considered a prime candidate for a nonexophysical-nondecompositional way of doing physics. Process physics, by virtue of its "co-informativeness-based" 140 way of doing physics without a box, introduces a non-mechanistic, nondeterministic modeling of nature based on a self-organizing and noisedriven iterative update routine. As such, process physics can be said to work according to a Peircean principle of precedence (Peirce 277), so that it has no need for lawful physical equations and can thus avoid the many problems and fallacies that are associated with our conventional way of doing physics in a box. By means of its "habit-establishing, stochastic recursiveness," the process physics model can give rise to constantly renewing activity patterns. In contrast to mainstream physics, in which any sense of processuality has been so worryingly absent, the thus achieved "becomingness" can be associated with what we, in everyday life, experience as time. Instead of ending up with an utterly timeless and non-processual world, such as the

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block universe which mainstream physics claims that we live in, the process physics model, by going through its habit-establishing iterations, gradually gives rise to an entirely processual network of self-organizing activity patterns that exhibit lots of familiar behaviors that can also be found to occur in nature itself. In so doing, the process physics model will slowly but surely start to show more and more features that are also so characteristic of our own natural universe: non-locality; emergent threedimensionality; inertia; emergent relativistic and gravitational effects; emergent quasi-deterministic classical behavior; creative novelty; inherent time-like processuality with open-ended evolution; and more. Finally, perhaps the most directly appealing aspect of process physics may well be its full compliance with our best theories on life and consciousness.

Appendix A: Addendum to §2.5.2 "Events in nature can be pinpointed geometrically ( or not?)" Mathematically formulated physical equations do not represent naturein-itself In physics, the actual target systems are samples of raw empirical data that will acquire their eventual processed form only through the intimate interplay between what we in earlier times liked to label as subjective and objective aspects of nature. 141 Accordingly, physical equations are to be thought of as intersubjective phenomenologies pertaining to how the results of measurement interaction are presented in terms of theory-laden data; they do not pertain to nature itself. In other words, physical equations do not directly represent nature itself and there is no objective, one-on-one representational relation between any within-nature events and physical equations. At the end of the day, physical equations are instrument- and sensation-based phenomenologies of nature, rather than fully corresponding representations; they are approximations of regularities found in observational data whose coarsegrainedness depends on which measuring instruments, which measuring methods, and which background theories are being employed (see Section 3.2.2 for more details). For this reason, we should definitely reexamine the presupposition of relativity theory that events and observers in nature can be pinpointed geometrically. Instead of treating mathematics as the language of nature-as Galileo did when he introduced the geometrical timeline, thereby basically giving rise to modem physics-it makes much more sense to consider

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mathematics (and thus geometry) a later-arriving human artifact. Indeed, as Lee Smolin suggested in Time Reborn (33, 245), we should think of mathematics as a tool by means of which we can analyze, predict, and postdict the data extracted from observationally-intellectually singled-out natural systems. To understand how this could be, we should again focus on how we sculpt our conscious view of the natural world we live in (see Sections 4.2.3 to 4.3.1). For this, we should realize that we, as seamlessly embedded conscious organisms, learn to make sense of nature by associating "world states" with value-laden "body states." In other words, by living through their own body states, conscious organisms will gradually learn to value nature in terms of how it dynamically affects their internal milieu. 142 It is along these lines that the organism develops value-laden sensorimotor and somatosensory action repertoires through which both musculoskeletal and cognitive acts can be repeated while matching, repertoire-specific body states are called to the fore. The thus evolved psychophysical action repertoires are "dispositional" in the sense that they constantly reroute their firing patterns under the influence of novel stimuli. 143 Accordingly, the organism can develop adaptive behavior even within rapidly changing living environments (all this has been explained in greater detail in Sections 4.2.2 to 4.2.4). Hence, what in early, pre-natal life is still a blooming, buzzing confusion (see James, "Percept," 50) is thus given bodily meaning and gradually becomes categorized into an inner- and outer-organism world. 144 The thus developed experiential world does not represent the so-called "real world out there," but arises within a joint effort of world and organism 145 as ongoing perception-action loops are engaged in bringing somatically meaningful, non-representational percepts into actuality. It is only in this non-representational way that the richness of our percepts, Gestalts, conscious categorizations, and higher-order concepts has been able to emerge. What is more, a case can be made that all mathematical concepts have actually originated in this manner. This may indeed be quite hard to swallow for some-especially for those who, in the spirit of Galileo, like to think of mathematics as the pre-given language of nature. But despite the sobering effect of this non-representational approach, it also has a lot going for it. First of all, it offers an evolutionary account of mathematical thinking. Secondly, it opens up avenues for philosophers and scientists alike to think of nature as being routine-based

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(i.e., habit-forming) instead of law-governed (i.e., obeying math-based physical equations). In this way, thirdly, the question "Why these laws?" can be dropped and replaced by the question of how habit-forming activity patterns can arise, persist, and evolve in nature. Analogous to non-representational conscious experience, then, mathematics should ultimately be seen not as representing nature, but as a tool that works with great precision within certain well-defined contexts of use. On this account, geometry, too, is finally no more than an idealizing tool with great pragmatic use. But its numerical specifications of lengths, surfaces, and volumes should be seen as figures of speech rather than as realistic representations of concrete reality-let alone as concrete realities by themselves.

ENDNOTES

1. On a large-scale, supragalactic level, 21st century mainstream simulations of the universe typically take on the form of a neural network-like cosmic web. Notably, the Virgo Consortium's "Millennium simulation" (see Fig. 5.10) and the NASA- and NSF-funded "Bolshoi simulation" are some prominent examples of such simulations. 2. Different observers moving at different speeds may not experience the same well-separated events in the same order so that it cannot be confirmed if these events are actually simultaneous or not. 3. While relativity of simultaneity seems to lead logically and inescapably towards the negation of the passage of time, it is by no means an absolute fact (Capek, 508). That is, the relativity of simultaneity will only occur under certain specific circumstances, namely it requires: (1) well-separated events that (2) must have come into actuality before they can ever (3) be detected by observers that are moving relative to one another with a significant enough difference in velocity. 4. The term "exophysical" refers to an external, non-participating observer looking out onto an allegedly entirely physical world. Moreover, "decompositional" refers to the nature-dissecting acts of decomposition that have to be performed before physics as we know it can be done in the first place (see van Dijk, "The Process"). 5. Professor of physics at Flinders University in Adelaide (Australia), and winner of the 2010 Gold Medal of the Telesio-Galilei Academy of Science.

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6. "Perception-action loops" is actually short for "sensation-valuation-motor activation-world manipulation" loops. 7. Please note that, in cognitive neuroscience, mutual informativeness is also characteristic of the process of subjectivity (see Edelman and Tononi 126-130). 8. The term horror vacui, typically paraphrased in English as "nature abhors a vacuum," is often attributed to Aristotle, and refers here to antiperistasis, the alleged phenomenon through which a vacuum behind a projectile in flight is filled up by air coming from the front tip of the projectile. 9. Please note that the average speed still had to obey Aristotle's so-called "law of motion": V c< FIR, (with V= speed, F= motive force, and R= resistance of medium), which expressed Aristotle's belief that the rate of falling was proportional to weight and inversely proportional to the density of the medium. So, it was commonly agreed upon that air resistance and viscosity of water would indeed slow down falling objects, thus to a certain extent affecting the rate at which the falling speed would build up. 10. The data shown here can be found in Galileo's original working papers on folio 107v [with "folio" meaning sheet, and v standing for "verso," which is Italian for "back side" as opposed to r, which stands for "recto" (i.e., front side)] . The working papers are being kept in Florence, in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (the Central National Library). The 160 surviving sheets of the working papers are now bound as Volume 72 of the Galileo manuscripts-also known as "Codex 72" or "Manoscritto Galileiano 72." 11. Euclid's magnum opus on geometry had already been published in Ancient Greece around 300 BCE (see Byrne). 12. The equally long time stretches could be the intervals between (I) the ramp's warning bells, (2) the water level markings of the water clocks, (3) the sand level markings on an hour glass, (4) the completed swing periods of a pendulum, or ( 5) any other indication of time units that can be used in an experiment. 13. Doing physics in a box: this term, coined by Lee Smolin in his 2013 book Time Reborn, refers to the long-established practice of isolating some aspect of nature (or system of interest) from its surroundings and then trying to empirically identify and mathematically capture the regularities in its behavior. 14. The term "beables," coined by John Bell (Speakable, 174), refers to those existents purported to make up the unobservable realm "beneath" our observation-based phenomenal world.

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15. E.g., physical parameters such as height, distance, water level, or the angular position of a clock's hand (i.e., the "time pointer"). 16. Furthermore, there has to be agreement on the rate of sampling ( e.g., a calendar or timeline with a page, or segment, for each day, week, month, year, or other measure of time). Next to that, one also has to decide which aspects of nature to associate with the geometrical timeline, etc. (see Cahill, "Process Physics: Self-Referential," 3; Van Dijk, "The Process"). 17. One of his first spontaneous experiments was to time the swing periods of a chandelier by using his pulse. In his later experiments, Galileo would also exploit several other means of measuring time, such as the rising level of a water clock, or, indeed, the increasing amount of synchronously ringing downhill bells. 18. See McTaggart's A and B series. 19. Depending on which experiment was being performed, the time indicator markings in question were: (a) the water level markings, or (b) the warning bell positions. 20. Conventional definitions typically refer to something more fundamental in order to specify the definiendum. However, this way of putting together definitions will typically lead to infinite regress or circular reasoning. For instance, the short and simple definition of time as "that which is measured by a clock" depends on the definition of a clock as "a measuring instrument for time" - a dependence relation which clearly involves circularity. The only way to avoid this infinite regress and circularity is simply to terminate the search for any more fundamental underpinnings, and, instead, to adopt an operational definition that works for all practical purposes. According to Hans Albert's Miinchhausen Trilemma (in which these three elements of infinite regress, circular reasoning, and termination of the justification procedure form an inescapable triadic unity), every such definition necessarily has to remain non-exhaustive (see Albert 11-15). 21. The "double calibration" consists of: (1) synchronizing the frets or alarm bells with the back-and-forth dangles of a free-swinging pendulum; (2) synchronizing the frets or alarm bells to each other by hearing, that is, by listening if their consecutive sounds, triggered by the descent of a downward rolling ball, form an even sequence. 22. To begin with, it can be questioned if the postulation of such a superintellect

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is scientifically acceptable at all. After all, its existence can neither be confirmed nor falsified. Furthermore, it is also quite hard to see how it should ever be possible to gather, in one go, all of nature's information - involving all positions, velocities, and forces of all particles in the universe. 23 . Over the years, determinism has now taken on a somewhat less rigorous guise: reductionism. And although reductionism, in tum, comes in many different flavors, its general idea is that all of nature can be brought back to its most elementary physical foundations, which should then be expressible in terms of a concise set of physical equations. The physical equation has managed to boost its status from convenient, approximating tool (man-made artifact / abstraction / simplifying idealization) to an all-encompassing, literal representation of nature. 24. Newton's Second Law of Motion (F=ma), for instance, was thought to pertain not just to one specific physical body. Instead, Newton deemed it universally valid for all masses in the universe. 25 . This includes quantum mechanics (Cartwright 163-216) and, according to Giere, also relativity theory (Giere 250n13). 26. Please note that a noise factor may be built into many physical equations so that external influences can be taken into account. However, this makeshift procedure is not used for "laws" since so-called laws of nature are thought to give deterministic outcomes in many cases. 27. Since the term "initial conditions" is typically used for some specific, carefully selected entry out of a larger set of temporally arranged alternatives, the term "interim conditions" is probably more accurate. 28. Remarkably, contemporary mainstream physics seems to opportunistically "smuggle" time back in by stating that the block universe entails a "causal structure" of some kind. In this vast network of cause-effect chains all events in the history of nature are thought to exist together at once - albeit with their own particular spatiotemporal coordinates (see Smolin, Time , 58-59). Since causal relations have a fixed order of events, with causes before effects, every causal chain, or "worldline," can be said to imply the unidirectionality of time. This impression of time is typically blamed on an asymmetry inherent to the spatiotemporal states of the world (or slices of the block universe) as they exist side by side within a causal order, rather than an asymmetry of time as such (see Davies, "That Mysterious," 9). Arguably, however, this line of reasoning is flawed, since it labels as nonexistent what has already been abstracted away beforehand (i.e., the process of nature loses its processuality

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as it is reduced to static slices that are frozen solid within an asymmetrical causal order). 29. Please note that Eddington's experiment pertained to predictions based on Einstein's general theory of relativity, not special relativity. However, because general relativity can be considered an elaboration of special relativity, it could still contribute to the adoption of the idea of timelessness within the scientific community. 30. These experiments were (1) the "clock-hit-by-light experiment," pertaining to what would happen if one were to chase after a light beam reflected off the face of a running clock, and (2) the "train-and-platform experiment," involving two lightning bolts striking simultaneously for one observer and at different times for the other. 31. Next to the philosophical branch of process thought, we may think, for instance, of David Bohm's, Milic Capek's, and Ilya Prigogine's processual worldviews (see Griffin, Physics). 32. For a larger list of process-minded physicists, see Eastman and Keeton. 33. Please note that this summation does not include Einstein's assumptions, because we are here dealing with the assumptions that gave rise to the block universe interpretation as based on Einstein's special theory of relativity, not STR itself. See also Bros. 34. In Einstein's time it was unknown if the universe actually extended beyond our own galaxy. 35. It was not until Minkowski's later introduction of the 4-dimensional spacetime construct (1908) that space and time were first interpreted as being an inseparable whole. Therefore, Einstein's initial assumption was that the whereabouts and "whenabouts" of events in nature could be specified in terms of three space coordinates and one time coordinate (x, y, z, t). 36. This argument can be countered as follows: since consciousness enables us to imagine and "somatically appreciate" - i.e., give body-related meaning to something-to-be-perceived in terms of the conscious organism's body states (see Damasio 133-167; Edelman and Tononi 82-110) - the different future scenarios with which we may have to cope, consciousness "steers" our current behavior in anticipation of what is expected to come. In a similar way, after all, Pavlov's dog learned to associate the ringing of a bell with the appearance of food which triggered the secretion of saliva, so that the dog would be better

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prepared to digest the food. Accordingly, from early life onwards, conscious organisms gradually learn to value what they are undergoing by how their body states are affected by it. Consciousness becomes a lived "anticipatory remembered present" (see Van Dijk, "The Process-Informativeness") - i.e., a bound-in-one culmination of direct perception and value-laden memories as experienced from within - which definitely has causal consequences for physical reality. When held in the spotlight of the third-person perspective of physical science, however, it remains notoriously elusive. 37. Next to big bang nucleosynthesis (which is the main source of hydrogen [H] and helium [He] in the universe), there is also stellar nucleosynthesis and supernova nucleosynthesis (synthesizing H and He into the more heavy elements of the periodic table). 38. See, for instance, Kauffman, "Foreword: Evolution," 9-22. 39. As quoted in (Popkin 65). 40. Please note that "abstraction" is not the act of reducing concrete, realworld objects, events, relations, and/or phenomena to their most pure and ideal Platonic forms . Rather, abstraction is the dissection and reduction of the process of nature to symbols, geometric elements, algorithms, etc., that are meaningless by themselves. They can only achieve concrete significance when situated within a socioculturally evolved, meaning-providing context of use. Like this, in order to make any sense at all, they need to be considered within a semiotic process where they can form a unified threesome with an observer-individuated referent (i.e., target system or aspect of interest) and with an impact on the sign-interpreting observer; see Section 3.2.5. 41. For Newton, space and time were absolutes that did not depend upon any physical goings-on. Rather, they made up the backdrop within which the contents of nature could be accommodated. Absolute space was seen to be unchanging and immovable. Time, on the other hand, was thought to be absolute and universal in the sense that (a) it was supposed to be valid for all of nature simultaneously, and (b) it was held to run its course irrespective of any events being present to unfold "within" this absolute time. 42. Post-geometric physics: Any field in physics where geometrical dimensions are used to construct - via an act of preparatory stage-building - a "prefab arena" in which the events of interest should run their course. 43. The 4-dimensional spacetime continuum of relativity theory does not account for nonlocality. Therefore, at the least, it can be characterized as an

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idealizing simplification. 44. Initially, in special relativity, Einstein did not take into account gravitation. Only with the later development of his general theory of relativity, gravitation (and thus mass) were presented as a natural consequence of the curvature of the geometrical spacetime continuum. As an addendum to Einstein's first (special) theory of relativity, Minkowski's geometrical spacetime construct only had to deal with geometry, point events, point observers, and any (less than or equal to light-speed) causal connection between them (see Papatheodorou and Hiley). 45. This can be derived from Minkowski's formula for the constancy of the world interval/= s 2 - c2 (t2 - t 1 ) = constant (with c = 3· 105 km/sec= 3· 10 10 cm/sec; and with spatial intervals = -J (x 2 - x1 ) 2 + (y 2 - y 1 ) 2 + (z 2 - z 1 ) 2 . Like this, sis expressed in terms of the spatial and temporal coordinates Xi, y 1, Zi, ti, x 2 , y 2 , z2, and t 2 which are geometrically associated with the events E 1 and E 2 • Please note that all these geometrical coordinates are specified from the perspective of the observer whose reference frame is being applied. 46. In Newtonian physics, time is by convention considered to pass by at an even rate, while space is held to be spread out in equally long stretches as well. In Newtonian absolute space, therefore, the spatial distance between two stationary point positions s 1 and s 2 will thus be the same for all observers involved-moving or not. As a result, an object moving at uniform speed between these locations will cover the given distance t..s= (s 2 - s 1) within the same time interval At= (t2 - t 1)-no matter which coordinate system is being used. In Minkowskian space-time, however, spatial distance and temporal duration are treated as equivalent. As a result, the invariance to be agreed upon is that of intervals of spacetime as an integrated whole. Such intervals are called "world intervals" and are denoted by capital / (Minkowski). 47. See also Weinert 184 for the link between causality (causal chain) and the before-after asymmetry. 48. Since measurement coordination is needed for any standard clock or yardstick-i.e., the assignment of (1) a fixed standard rate by which ideal clocks should be expected to run, or (2) a fixed standard length for the span of an ideal measuring rod-measurement practice first requires a reliable theoretical account in which this standard measure is to be grounded. But, in tum, this theoretical account can only tum to measurement practice in order to get the data on which to base its theoretical inferences of how to arrive at a reliable context-independent standard measure. In other words, measurement coordination is needed to guarantee that all ideal clocks will operate at a

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universally identical, standard rate when moving at any speed anywhere in the cosmos. 49. As mentioned earlier, there have also been some experiments that did not agree with the relativity theories. Examples are the experiments that led to the "bore hole anomaly," the "earth fly-by anomaly," and, of course, the "dark matter and dark energy anomalies." Instead of leading to doubt about the theories, however, these experiments are typically thought to be indications that the data are, in one way or the other, incomplete (see McCarthy 358). 50. However, only in hindsight-i.e., only after the synchronization of clocks by two spatially separated, moving or non-moving observers-can two "innercone events" be identified as lying on the same "simultaneity plane" within that light cone (see Fig. 2-3). This strongly suggests that the synchronization events (i.e., light emission, reflection, and reabsorption) must actually have occurred before that, and that they do not pre-exist in the future light cone. 51. It is already a misleading idealization to treat position, time, events, observers, clocks, measuring rods, and the like as if they were truly representative of a "real world out there" and as if they can be successfully held in one's thoughts separately from the process of nature itself. 52. As many generations of physicists before us have done, we could decide to just stick to the well-beaten path of geometry-based approaches, which have been so carefully laid down by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Minkowski. /fwe would indeed choose to do so, we would eventually have to commit ourselves to abstracting the process of nature into geometry-based spatial and temporal dimensions, point events, point observers, causal light cones, and so forth . When thinking of mathematics and geometry as tools (Smolin, Time, 34), rather than regarding them as parts of an eternal, perfect, and exact language of nature, however, these geometry-based abstractions are more likely to tum out as idealizing figures of speech, not as representations of concrete reality. 53. Kepler's laws of planetary motion only pertained to planets orbiting around the sun and did not apply to the moon. Also, they provided no explanation for the motion of the planets, but only succeeded in (approximately) describing their orbits. Newton's universal law of gravitation, together with his three laws of motion, not only provided an explanation for planetary motion, but could also be applied to the moon and the lunar satellites of other planets. 54. All this is typically expected to occur in an empirically adequate way,

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that is, with chronological, one-on-one empirical agreement between measurement data and data-reproducing algorithms, or, otherwise, by way of statistical goodness offit-as is the case in quantum mechanics. 55. This quote is Fritjof Capra's rendition of a personal conversation with psychologist R. D. Laing at a 1980 conference on "Psycho-Therapy of the Future," held in the Monasterio de Piedra Hotel near Zaragoza, Spain. 56. Please note that the system environment and observation facilities are themselves thought to be made up from their own individual system constituents as well. For instance, the observation-enabling support systems, among which there are: (1) the sensory system, (2) accessories, and (3) research facilities, may respectively be divided into: (1) the eyes, optic nerves, visual cortices, etc.; (2) engineering tools and research equipment, such as wrenches, cloud chambers, and photo-detectors; (3) lab buildings, cleanrooms, scientific libraries, and so on. In turn, all this is embedded in a greater embedding environment and set within a historically evolved context of sociocultural and scientific use (see Van Dijk, "An Introduction," 77; also "The Process"). On the whole, however, all aforementioned systems are typically taken for granted, neglected or left out of scope. Depending on the focus of the investigation, as well as the personal preference and philosophical persuasion of the chief investigator, any of the supporting subsystems on the subject side may be handed over to the target side. A measuring instrument may itself become part of the system-to-be-observed and the subject side will have to trust "the naked eye" to gather its empirical data. 57. This present moment indicator, or time pointer, moves externally from the timeline at a uniform rate, or else it cannot provide the otherwise completely static timeline with any "dynamicity" or a distinction between past and future (see Cahill, Klinger, and Kitto). 58. Please note that, in line with Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 , this content is typically thought of in a material-energetic sense. In the timeless interpretation of quantum physics, it is thought that the stationary wave function can specify all possible configurations of all the universe's materialenergetic content that is compliant with the universe's actual initial conditions: "In quantum mechanics, [the wave function] is all that does change. Forget any idea about the particles themselves moving. The space Q of possible configurations, or structures, is given once and for all: it is a timeless configuration space ... .[T]he probability density [of this configuration space Q] has a frozen value - it is independent of time (though its value generally changes over Q). Such a state is called a stationary state ... .All true change in quantum mechanics comes from interference between stationary states

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with different energies. In a system described by a stationary state, no change takes place .... The suggestion is that the universe as a whole is described by a single, stationary, indeed static state" (Barbour 229-231 ). 59. Admittedly, this is of course a crude caricature, but a telling one nonetheless. After all, just as the shell is a crucial part of the egg that will be lost in the process of separation, there are also various aspects of nature that will be lost in the above process of decomposition. First of all, everything that is related to the subject side-measurement instruments, including clocks and measuring rods, as well as the conscious observer and all unquantifiable subjective aspects of observation-is separated from what is held to be the entirely physical "real world out there." Also, space, time, and mass-energy are indeed first artificially decomposed from the undivided whole which is nature in the raw, before it is attempted to glue them together again. But because the initially unbroken "whole is more than the sum of its parts," any act of a priori decomposition will cause something essential in nature to be lost. By the way, the well-known phrase "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" can easily be misunderstood, because in its deepest essence nature does not contain any real "parts." That is, every "part" of nature is only a "part" in the sense that it is subjectively singled out and linguistically labeled as such. 60. The framework of physical equations for each of those theories is subject to all sorts of different interpretations. It is of course widely known that there is a large number of different interpretations of quantum mechanics, among which we can find the Copenhagen interpretation, the Bohmian hiddenvariable interpretation, Everett's many-worlds interpretation, Einstein's neorealist interpretation, Von Neumann's extension of the Copenhagen interpretation, and Heisenberg's potentia-actuality interpretation (see Herbert 16-29). Furthermore, next to the block universe interpretation of the theory of special relativity, there is also a dynamic block universe interpretation, as well as a Lorentzian and neo-Lorentzian interpretation, to name a few. Even for the quite straightforward classical Newtonian mechanics there are at least four empirically equivalent interpretations: ( 1) the action-at-a-distance interpretation; (2) the gravitational field interpretation; (3) the curved space interpretation; and (4) the analytical-mechanistic interpretation (see Jones). 61. In full, these acronyms are read as: "Large Hadron Collider" at the "European Organization [formerly: Council] for Nuclear Research" and the "Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory." Both research projects have undergone several technical updates to increase their sensitivity and measurement range. 62. That is, the imperceptible counterparts of"physical observables."

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63. These rudimentary activity patterns can thus be imagined to be emergent from an initially undifferentiated vastness ( e.g., via something not unlike a phase transition). Hence, from very early on, nature can already be thought of in a mutually informative (hence, epistemic) as well as in an ontic sense. 64. DNA, for instance, has not been pre-available in the biosphere, but had to evolve within it. In the prebiotic universe, it becomes even harder to find something analogous to a symbol-based alphabet. In fact, the introduction of an alphabet of symbols can be seen as part of pre-theoretical interpretation. 65. Necessarily, measurement outcomes will always have meaning-providing interpretation associated with them due to the measurement and background theories that give rise to the conversion of raw data into well-refined empirical data (Kuhn, The Structure, 123). 66. Although target side and subject side can arguably be decomposed into an arbitrary number of constituents, this cannot be done for the measurement interaction between those opposing sides. This is due to what may be called "the problem of the missing meta-observer" which is inherent to the use of an epistemic cut between target and subject system. However, when allowing such a new meta-observer to examine the finer details of measurement interaction, the same problem will occur all over again, albeit this time between the newly introduced meta-observer and the initial measurement interaction that became the new target of investigation (see Von Neumann 352; Pattee; Van Dijk, "The Process"). 67. Depending on which metaphysical system is being used, these theoretically assumed ur-differences may indeed be referred to as noumena, be-ables (i.e., the counterparts of observables), actualities, existents, and so on. In each case, however, it should be noted that the use of the plural noun form already involves a tacit elementary act of decomposition which dissects the one undivided whole of nature into a multiplicity of constituent entities. 68. Please note that classical information theory allows various kinds of members-"elementary items of information," such as symbols, signs, tokens, bits, byte-sized bit strings, syllables, or words-to be used interchangeably. 69. As apparent from the example of weighing scales, which had already been around in ancient Greece, the basic method of proportional comparison was already available long before Galileo. He was the first, however, to systematically apply it to time and distance combined.

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70. Nowadays, this usually depends on the maximum frequency of measurement. In Galileo's case, however, it depended on the shortest period that could practically be achieved for the standard interval of time. 71. Here, "post-dictive" is used as the counterpart of "predictive." In this way, it refers to the encoding of past empirical data into a potentially congruent data-reproducing algorithm (i.e., a candidate physical equation). 72. It must be noted that both measurement encoding and predictive decoding will always require ample interpretation on the part of the experimentalist. As first mentioned by Thomas Kuhn (The Structure 123), all measurement interpretation occurs on the basis of the actually applied theory (including all relevant background theories). 73. After all, this would only call forth the same problem all over again (i.e., which production rules to use for putting together the data-smoothening encoding and decoding encryptions) and thus lead to confusing circularity and/or infinite regress. 74. This infinite regress of meta-observers is analogous to the homunculus problem in cognitive science (see Edelman and Tononi 94, 127). 75. Wave function collapse: the coming into actuality of one specific measurement outcome although the system-to-be-measured is thought to exist in a superposition of equally probable quantum states prior to the conscious measuring act. In absence of conscious observation the quantum states are believed to exist all-together-at-once, this in analogy to the different time slices in Minkowski 's block universe that are thought to exist all-togetherat-once as well, thus leading to (1) the timeless view of the universe, and (2) the arguable claim that our experience of time is completely imaginary. This is why adherents of the block universe interpretation and relativity-inspired interpretations of quantum physics like to dismiss consciousness as irrelevant and illusory (see Smolin, Time, 59-64 and 80). The idea of consciousness playing a decisive role in the collapse of the wave function has a controversial history and has long been considered rather troublesome and unwanted by many physicists. Hence, nowadays, mainstream physics has put its trust in the quantum decoherence explanation in which wave function collapse can be interpreted as being brought about by the hard-to-pin-down environmental part of the quantum system under investigation-more or less along the lines of Paul Dirac's idea of 'Nature making a choice' instead of consciousness. The mathematical methodology behind the decoherence interpretation, however, is definitely not without foundational problems either: "Under normal circumstances ... one must regard the density matrix [i.e., the mathematical

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tool that forms the main pillar underneath the decoherence approach] as some kind of approximation to the whole quantum truth .... It would seem to be a strange view of physical reality to regard it to be 'really' described by a density matrix. The density-matrix description may be thus regarded as a pragmatic convenience: Something FAPP [an acronym by John Bell that means for all practical purposes, or, in other words, a figure of speech], rather than providing a 'true' picture of fundamental physical reality" (Penrose, 803). And although the last word on this topic has probably not yet been said, for now, we will round off the discussion with the argument from process physics-namely, that the process of quantum measurement involves aspects of decoherence as well as consciousness (see Cahill, "Process Physics: SelfReferential," 7-9 and 24; Cahill, "Process Physics: From Information," 33). 76. Von Neumann used the term "abstract ego" as a name for the "immaterial intellectual inner life," the "conscious mind," or the "center of subjectivity." 77. According to semiotics, semantic as well as pragmatic information can thus be added to in-themselves meaningless data-signifying syntactical symbols. For reasons of simplicity, the possible difference between sign ( a.k.a. sign function or sign hood) and sign vehicle ( a.k.a. token or signifier) is ignored here. Instead, the terms meaning and sign are used to denote the use of a certain token within a triadic sign relation. See Noth 79 for more details on the possible differences between sign and sign vehicle. 78. The preparation process may pertain to different activities in different theoretical contexts. In quantum physics, it primarily denotes the process through which a "quantum particle" is "soaked loose" from its embedding environment so that it can be submitted to observation further on down the line (see De Muynck 74-75, 83, 90-91, 94), and in classical physics it refers merely to the process through which some interesting "physical" aspect of nature is "individuated" into a target system. 79. See Mara Beller's 2003 article "Inevitability, Inseparability and Gedanken Measurement" for some more background information on how Bohr arrived at this interpretation. 80. Post-mathematical reinterpretation may also lead to an attempt to put together an alternative, but equivalent, formulation of the initial physical equations. 81. By value systems I mean neuromodulatory, hormone-secreting systems that signal diffusely across the brain during biologically meaningful events, thereby fine-tuning nervous pathways that are simultaneously active (Edelman

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and Tononi 46-47). Because of value systems, the organism can become capable of strengthening successful activity patterns and weakening those that are of little to no use for survival. 82. Acquired, experientially fine-tuned action repertoires involve the establishment of action-triggering dispositional memory pathways that enable the organism to repeat an act when being confronted with similar exteroceptive and interoceptive stimuli (Edelman and Tononi 105). As such, they codetermine how an organism gets to live through its perception-action cycles. 83. Due to the close resemblance between the eyes of humans and octopi, the various evolutionary stages that are hypothesized to have preceded the current stage of the octopus eye are often thought to make up a good model for the evolutionary development the human eye may have undergone. 84. A photodiode will typically alternate between two pre-set states that enable it to send out a binary signal, thus communicating the detection or non-detection of light. These states can be considered part and parcel of the physical architecture of the photodiode. 85. See "causative" stimulus and "effectuated" nervous signaling; body and mind; the physical world and the mental world; Descartes' res extensa and res cogitans, etc. 86. Proteins are biomolecules that are absolutely vital to living organisms as they participate in a vast repertoire of biological activities, such as DNA replication, cell metabolism, biochemical signaling, and molecular transportation (as in the blood's O2-binding protein hemoglobin). 87. Epigenetics is the study of how each organism's life events can affect the expression of their genes as some genes are left free to act while others are deactivated by methylization (see Phillips). 88. Although it is typically suggested that the interior of these black boxes can be fully accounted for in a later meta-analysis, this follow-up analysis will then inevitably bring along the same problem all over again. In this way, just as in physics (see Section 3.3), only a pseudo-explanation is given, or another sub-plot, of how the processing of inputs into outputs should occur. 89. Whenever signal-distorting noise can be kept at a low enough level, Shannon's information and communication theory holds that messages can be received without any data corruption.

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90. See also John Pickering's papers on the relation between David Bohm's active information and J.J. Gibson's view and on mutualism as an alternative for conventional cognitivism for some added context. 91. This is analogous to the absence of a sharp and absolute borderline between target and subject side in physics (see Section 3.1.2). 92. From the perspective of the orthodox physicalist paradigm, life (as well as the related phenomenon of conscious experience) seems to be utterly otherworldly. That is, by prematurely characterizing the early universe as an entirely physical, mechanistic, and abiotic realm, the emergence of life automatically becomes a sudden and radical departure from the mechanistic status quo. As a result, reductionistic explanations have remained at a loss ever since-requiring all kinds of counter-productive measures, such as writing off conscious experience and the passage of time as illusory, just in order to preserve the mechanistic, reductionistic worldview. Unfortunately, though, such measures create more problems than they solve and leave more things unexplained than they clarify. With that in mind, perhaps it is about time to start questioning the mechanistic, reductionistic worldview, rather than conscious experience and the passage of time. 93. When an autocatalytic network evolves a semi-permeable membrane, it is typically referred to as an autopoietic system-a system capable of maintaining and reproducing itself (see Maturana and Varela). 94. Of course, all non-equilibrium processuality will involve not only the entire autocatalytic cycle, but also all of the (direct and indirect) in- and outgoing flows of energy, material, and information. 95. An autocatalytic network and its environment have a co-dependent symbiotic relationship, albeit an asymmetrical one, in that the impact of an individual autocatalytic system on its environment is usually smaller than that of the environment on one of its local autocatalytic networks. This is simply because any autocatalytic network that exhausts its environment will rob itself of its future resources, thereby sealing its own fate. It is far more likely for an environment to grind down one of its in-house autocatalytic networks than it is for some autocatalytic network to deplete its own environment. For instance, parasitic organisms typically co-evolve with their target species, so that they do not completely run down their hosts or, at least, so that they will not kill any individual hosts before having had the chance to let their offspring spread across the community. Admittedly, before the arrival of lipid bilayer membranes, it would have been more likely for autocatalytic networks to deplete their environment. However, once an open autocatalytic

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system manages to evolve such a semi-permeable membrane, it will become more protected against the risk of being dissipated into its immediate environment. Also, it will become more likely for the autocatalytic network to develop adaptive repertoires that will enable it to withstand harsh environmental conditions for shorter or longer time spans. 96. The organizational integrity involves more than just self-preservation. That is, this integrity not only refers to the capacity of an organism or ecosystem to maintain its organization, it also pertains to the capacity (1) to develop towards a higher level of complexity when conditions are favorable to do so; and (2) to withdraw into an earlier state when energy inflow is depleting or when resources are scarce (but still with the potential to return to the lost higher-order level of organization). Such growth towards increasing levels of complexity, which is characteristic of rich, healthy ecosystems is called "ascendency" (Ulanowicz). 97. For instance, under the influence of the day-night cycle, the organism may develop early circadian rhythms that affect its inner biochemistry. 98. This idea of categories pertains to the organism's capacity to "classify" its environment in terms of what it does ( and thus means) to the organism and what it triggers the organism to do in response. As in Pavlovian conditioning (where, after repetitive trials, an initially seemingly neutral stimulus, such as the sound of a ringing bell, gradually gets an entirely novel and explicit meaning as it becomes associated with the arrival of food) , categorization enables an organism to "get to know" its environment in terms of its own "somatic status" (physiology, biochemistry, homeostasis, etc.) and adaptive motor responses. As the organism develops a habit to repeat adaptive categorical responses, it basically "sculpts" its ability to discriminate salient foreground percepts from a less relevant background for adaptive purposes (see Edelman and Tononi 48). 99. These features are the result of hominids adaptively living through their perception-action cycles, nutrient-waste cycles, 0 2-C0 2-cycles, etc., during the course of evolution.

100. Anyone wanting to distinguish between sensation (as mere "uninterpreted" sensory stimulation and signal transduction) and perception (as the process of valuative-emotive interpretation of sensory signals, stereotypically to be performed by the brain) would probably prefer to use the term "sensationaction cycle" instead of "perception-action cycle"-especially when the investigative focus is on primitive cellular life. On the other hand, whenever one prefers to avoid such a possibly premature distinction between sensation

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and perception, perception could also be thought of as exhibiting various levels of sophistication-from the primitive, rudimentary level to the highly complex. We can, after all, not rule out beforehand that there may be an internal process of sense-making even in primitive organisms. Because of the prominent role of value constraints, even in early life, we cannot exclude this possibility too soon. Indeed, early "interpretative" valuation cycles may at first sight not yet be functional as such, or be instead so rudimentary as to be negligible. However, even in its prebiotic stage, the universe is-metaphorically speaking-filled to the brim with nonequilibrium cycles. Whenever any "individual" non-equilibrium cycle gets to be absorbed into another one, or when an existing cycle evolves an inner sub-cycle such that the smaller, nested cycle becomes relevant in maintaining the whole of the greater, overarching one, then, to the best of our knowledge, we can consider the nested sub-cycle to be of organizational value to the whole. What is more, they can in fact be considered mutually meaningful, and so can all other non-equilibrium activity patterns in the universe. Therefore, even such low-level valuative activity can be considered relevant enough-at least potentially-to take their early form of proto-sensitivity seriously ( see Section 4.2.4 for further details). 101. Fitness, organizational integrity, metabolic rate, the morphology and functionality of habitually grooved biochemical pathways, etc., can all be considered possible aspects of the future course of development of lightsensitive cycles. 102. Originally coined by Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin as Aufforderungscharaktere, the concept of "valences" later inspired J. J. (James) Gibson to develop his theory of affordances (The Ecological, 119-135). See also John Pickering's paper ("Active") on the relation between Gibson's view and David Bohm's active information. This will become particularly relevant later on, in Sections 4.3 to 4.3.3. 103. That is, different patterns of exteroceptive stimuli that are held to pertain to the "state" of the outer-organism world, but also of proprioceptive signals pertaining to the organism's musculoskeletal positions and movements within that world. 104. That is, the totality of interoceptive patterns relating to the entire homeostatic and physiological condition of the organism's body. 105. This "conscious now," which Edelman has coined as a "remembered present," can be thought of as an ongoing conscious scene of self and world (see also Edelman and Tononi 102-112). In higher-order organisms-capable of symbolic thought, language, and hence the construction of imaginary

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"storylines" about possible futures-this remembered present can even be called an "anticipatory remembered present." 106. In fact, this narrows down the range of possible neural patterns to a relatively small set, thus leading to invariability. 107. For example, influx versus dissipation; system constraints versus system dynamics; excitatory versus inhibitory forces; synaptic growth versus decay. 108. As mentioned earlier, such a threshold can thus form a local pocket of potential (a.k.a. potential well). 109. It must be emphasized that, although SOC-systems are typically thought of in terms of some kind of constituent elements (e.g., sand grains, neurons, carriers of disease, solar flares, etc.), these elements are basically singled out by our subjective nature-dissecting gaze. They should therefore not be considered truly atomistic elements of the system in question. Instead they would better be seen as relatively autonomous process-structures (Jantsch 21-24) that may perhaps be treated as individual constituents, but are ultimately seamlessly embedded endo-processes within the greater embedding process that our nature-dissecting gaze has labeled "the SOC-system." These SOCsystems are not composed of some finite set of static unchanging components, but of endo-processes that should be understood as relatively stable manifestations of nature's processuality (e.g., a sand grain may appear to be atomistic, but has a deeper processuality within it). So, despite our learned habit of depicting processes in terms of interacting objects-which, historically, has proven to be of great didactic use-this mode of operation eventually results in practically useful object-oriented figure of speech that, despite appearances, has definitely no absolute truth to it. 110. This in full agreement with the meaning of "mutual information" in Sections 4.2.1, 4.3 and 4.3.1. 111 . Nature is not made up of quasi-isolated, equilibrium-seeking systems such as those that are portrayed by classical thermodynamics. Dissipative systems that behave according to non-equilibrium thermodynamics (NET) are the rule, rather than the exception, and on many levels of organization these systems show signs of self-organized criticality (Bak, How, 5; Jensen 2). 112. By implementing an alternative for exophysical representationalism (ER) and psycho-physical parallelism (PPP), we can avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as well as what I like to call the physicist's fallacy (namely: "To suppose that the objects of thought, as found in introspection,

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must have their origin in independently existing external objects residing in the entirely physical 'real world out there', instead of being sculpted into actuality through a process of sense-making that takes place within the integral and inseparable whole which is the undivided organism-world system"). Last but not least, getting rid of PPP and ER may help not to take so literally the would-be fundamental concepts of "state," "system," "apparatus," "measurement" that were criticized by Bell. Instead, it would become clear that these concepts are ultimately just figures of speech-convenient within a certain context of use, but meaningless without it. 113. The most serious candidate for this "law without law" criterion seems to be what Charles Sanders Peirce called a "tendency to take habits" (277). 114. Here Wheeler did not include an explanation of what "the boundary of a boundary is zero" should mean. He probably meant to say that it is a fundamental assumption in physics that various conservation laws hold in every physical system that is properly isolated from its environment (see Von Kitzinger 177). 115 . This last remark-about physics having to be, in a sense, foundationfree-can be linked with the second and fifth requirement on the list. That is, if we are to avoid any logical paradoxes, impossibilities, infinite regresses, etc., we should stay away from using any hypothetical set of elementary building blocks as a foundation . Instead, what Wheeler calls "existence" should keep itself "up and going" through recursive loops capable of "bootstrapping" themselves into actuality from an otherwise undifferentiated background (see Chew; Cahill and Klinger, "Pregeometric"; Cahill, Klinger and Kitto; Cahill and Klinger, "Bootstrap"). 116. As a possible solution for the foundation problem, it seems desirable to rethink Geoffrey Chew's bootstrapping procedure, which was later used by early string theory pioneers, such as Veneziano to formulate string theory-see also Cushing for a historical overview. It should be noted, however, that this updated version should not be one in which the same foundational problem is being invoked all over again by introducing strings, elementary particles, or other a priori entities that have to be bootstrapped into existence. 117. Among these referents may be found the earlier-mentioned electrons, photons, and electromagnetic fields, but also all so-called elementary particles of the standard model of particle physics. To the best of our current knowledge, there does not seem to be any explanation for the physical equations that we use to specify the behavior of these entities.

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118. An intrinsic present moment effect causes the external present moment indicator to become redundant (see Section 2.1.3 for more details on the external present moment indicator). 119. Trying to model nature with the help of such supposedly fundamental physical constituents necessarily has to rely on pre-theoretical interpretation. And in the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm the first task to be performed during pre-theoretical interpretation is to draw the Galilean cut which slices away any subjective aspects of the phenomena under investigation. However, as has been emphasized throughout this paper, it is a mistake to think that this would successfully divide nature into, on the one hand, "entirely physical constituents" and, on the other hand, our "entirely subjective experiences" of those constituents. This would amount to the undesirable bifurcation of nature, which, once having been put into effect, cannot be undone. That is, "nature in the raw" cannot be cut into bits and pieces and still be kept intact, i.e., in conformity with "naked fact." 120. Please note that the word "deepest" implies a layered hierarchy of lowerand higher-order levels of organization. However, this use of language should be considered metaphorical rather than true to nature; in reality, it makes more sense to think of nature in a holarchic way-with each part being a seamlessly integrated member of the whole in which it participates, and, in tum, with each whole itself being interpretable as such a seamlessly integrated part as well (see Koestler). All this is characteristic of self-similar fractal organization. 121 . As already mentioned in Section 3 .1 .2, there are many different ways to refer to the initially unlabeled natural world. A wide variety of names can be used, all of which have their own context of use and are the result of a specific set of beliefs on how nature works. Although these terms-the Kantian "noumenal world" or "nature-in-itself," John Archibald Wheeler's "pregeometric quantum foam" or "pre-space," David Bohm and Basil Hiley's "holomovement" and "implicate order," Bernard D'Espagnat's "veiled reality," the ancient Greek "apeiron," John Stewart Bell's world of pre-observational "beables," or other words, like "vacuum," "void," or the Buddhist "plenary void"-can all be used to refer to this primordial stage of nature, no one of them can be crowned as the ultimate candidate. 122. As far as I know, Joe Rosen is not related to theoretical biologist and biophysicist Robert Rosen. 123. Earlier on, Joe Rosen defines science as our attempt to understand the reproducible and predicable aspects of nature as objectively as possible (30).

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By the authority of this definition, he excludes from science all phenomena that are not reproducible and/or predictable. In his view, science is not meant to deal with such phenomena. Although this seems to give us quite a clear and well-defined description of what science is, it does not point out that the reproducibility and predictability of empirical data often can be established only by allowing margins of error. In other words, because of these margins of error, neglect of noisy deviations, application of statistical meta-rules, etc., we may just as well conclude that absolute reproducibility and predictability is in fact never possible; it is always reproducibility and predictability under certain pre-theoretical restrictions. 124. Although physical equations are, when combined with their posttheoretical interpretations, often thought to provide an explanation of how nature works, they do not really do so. Just as there can be no neutral algorithm for the choice of physical equations-i.e., for deciding which physical equation best describes a given set of empirical data (Kuhn, The Structure, in the Postscript written in 1969)-there can also be no finite and fairly balanced procedure for finding the best interpretation of equation-based theories like quantum theory or Einstein's relativity theories. Therefore, an interpretation merely confirms the context of use within which a given physical equation reached its mature form (see Van Dijk, "The Process"). This, then, is the reason that no conclusive final answer can be found as to which interpretation should be the best one. 125. Think, for instance, of a temporary wooden support on which to rest the building bricks when constructing an archway. Although its semicircular shape indicates where the bricks should be placed, once the arch is completed the support is no longer needed and can be conveniently removed. 126. The noise-driven update routine has an effect that is quite similar to that of neuromodulation (which enables brain plasticity in the initially unconditioned, newly developing fetal brain). Analogous to self-referential noise in the process physics model, neural noise and reentry play an indispensable role in neuromodulation, neuroplasticity, the optimization of motor control, and the like (see Sections 4.3 and 4.3.1 ). In the case of the process physics model, however, there is no explicit, pre-developed substructure like a prewired brain. 127. In fact, in rice and sand pile systems such a tuning parameter can "gather under its umbrella" the effects of various phenomena: (1) stickiness between grains; (2) the average mass of grains; (3) the precise magnitude of the gravitational constant (which may vary with the latitude at which the experiment is performed); (4) the average downward velocity of the grains being dropped; (5) possible wind sheer. .. and so on. Accordingly, such a tuning parameter

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may influence the self-organizing dynamics of the sand or rice pile system in question. Particularly, it will set the angle (or, better put, the small range of near-critical angles) at which avalanches will be able to tumble down the slope. The occurrence of self-organized criticality itself, however, will remain unaffected. By the same token, all such details can be likewise covered by one generic parameter a in the process physics model. In both cases, the precise features of all contributing micro-factors and subnetwork activities do not matter too much, just as long as self-organized criticality will be achieved. And just as avalanches can occur at a wide range of different angles in rice and sand pile models, many different values of the tuning parameter a may be used in the process physics model without them affecting the ongoing self-organized coming-into-actuality of "foreground cells" of activity patterns (i.e., connection nodes) from a background of activity patterns with lowerorder connectivity. 128. The here depicted images are white noise frequency spectra (see Bourke) which are used for educational and aesthetic reasons only. 129. When talking about "islands of connectivity," the terms "branching structures ' " "connectivity nodes ' " "(sub)actualities ' " "events '" etc ., can all be used interchangeably. For sake of clarity, the terms "monads" or "pseudoobjects" are used to refer to the start-up level of the connectivity network (or a subnetwork). At this start-up level, internal connectivity is typically thought of as non-explicit, because, due to universality (i.e., scale-free phenomena), any higher-order structure can be used interchangeably as the low-level startup activity of yet another, higher level of organization. In any case, all these terms are ultimately just educational figures of speech. That is, nature in itself is ultimately unlabeled, which means that what happens in nature can never be fully synonymized with our linguistic tags. The connectivity patterns themselves, however, become meaningful to each other, despite their unsuitedness to be named or, in other words, despite their unsuitedness to be externally given meaning in any unambiguous way. 130. Events, a.k.a., "actualities," "nodes," or Whiteheadian actual occasions. Using less short and snappy language, they can also be described as "localglobal (i.e., holarchic) centers of connectivity." 131 . "Diaphoric" means "difference-making." 132. "The requirement that the clock that measures time in quantum mechanics must be outside the system has stark consequences when we attempt to apply quantum theory to the universe as a whole. By definition, nothing can be outside the universe, not even a clock. So how does the quantum state of the

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universe change with respect to a clock outside the universe? Since there is no such clock, the only answer can be that it does not change with respect to an outside clock. As a result, the quantum state of the universe, when viewed from a mythical standpoint outside the universe, appears frozen in time" (Smolin, Time, 80). 133. Next to the possible confusion of empirical data and data-reproducing algorithms with their referents, all their further math- and geometry-based abstractions (such as point-observers) can be similarly mixed up with what they are supposed to refer to. In this case, for instance, abstract point-observers are easily confused with their intended referents-live conscious observers that are seamlessly embedded within the greater embedding process of nature as a whole. 134. These referents could be anything that, according to the physicalist paradigm of mainstream physics, can be thought to exist in the real world out there, for instance, "states," "events," "objects," the "snapshot takes" of what is thought to be an object in motion, and so on. 135 . Such perception-action cycles can also be called "sensation-valuationmotor activation-world manipulation" cycles. These can be likened with "Gestalt cycles," although there are still a number of differences between the two concepts. 136. Our current way of doing physics in a box can be characterized as exophysical-decompositional, or, to be more elaborate, as taking an external perspective onto a world that is held to be decomposable into entirely physical constituents (Van Dijk, "The Process"). A core characteristic of exophysicaldecompositional physics is that it implicitly suggests that its mathematical labels are synonymous with nature itself. This, then, typically leads to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead PR, 7, 18) and therewith associated umealistic conclusions, such as nature being geometrical and timeless. 137. I.e., practical purposes like the design and manufacture of computer chips; the sending out of space-craft on missions into space; the deployment of a properly working GPS-system, and so on. 138. Please note that the intake of pre-coded information by an exophysical observer implies the presupposition of what one is trying to explain. That is, it means that the alphabet of expression with the help of which this observer is trying to describe nature, is already given beforehand (see Kauffman, "Foreword: Evolution," 11 ). This is like trying to describe the spectrum of sunlight in terms of primary colors only. Obviously, one will then be left

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incapable to include ultraviolet, infrared, etc., into the picture. In other words, pre-coded or pre-stated information necessarily leads to incomplete representations since our tools of observation and alphabets of expression can only denote so much-they always have upper and lower limits beyond which they cannot go. 139. This "bootstrapping" refers to the Baron von Miinchhausen, who allegedly used his own bootstraps to pull himself out of the deadly swamp. A bootstrap, then, is the handgrip at the backside of a boot that can be used to pull it up. For "bootstrapping" in the context of the emergence of autocatalysis and higher-order consciousness, see Kauffman, The Origins, 373; and Edelman and Tononi 173, 205, respectively. 140. The term "co-informativeness" is here used as a synonym for mutual informativeness. Another synonym is "process-informativeness" or "processinformation" (see Corbeil; Van Dijk, "An Introduction" and "The Process"). 141. Because there is always an element of subjectivity when it comes to scientific observation, it seems to be more appropriate to use the concept of intersubjectivity, instead of the absolute notions of objectivity and subjectivity. In physical measurement, the format of the experimentally acquired empirical data will always be affected by the subjective choice of (a) which aspect of nature should be put under scrutiny, and (b) which data-refining encoding to apply. At most we can attain some high degree of intersubjective agreement-i.e., getting the same results when probing nature in a certain way-but purely objective outcomes are out of the question (J. Rosen 4-20). 142. The organism's internal milieu involves, among others, the state of its sensory apparatus and life organs, its homeostasis (as well as derived feelings and emotions), the kinesthetics and position of limbs and joints, muscle tension, and so forth. 143. During use neural connections and muscle tissue are constantly engaged in a process of strengthening and weakening through brain plasticity, neuromuscular memory path formation, etc. (see Edelman and Tononi 46, 79-95). 144. See Von Uexkiill's "Umwelt" or "self-centered world of significance" (see Von Uexkiill and Von Uexkiill; Koutroufinis). 145. Please note that world and organism should not be seen as truly separate. The concept of "world" includes all within-nature organisms, while, in tum, each organism is fully embedded within the natural world in which it lives.

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