Last week I found some really interesting sites.

The first one was Quora.

I found a blogpost that highlighted some good reasons to get involved there.

I clicked through and was indeed immediately hooked.

It is a question and answer site, where anyone can ask and answer all kinds of questions. But apart from that, you can follow people as well as topics and specific questions.

I thought it was a very good idea to get to know my way around there, because I really love searching for answers to questions I have.

But even more, I love it to hear different opinions and see discussions about certain subjects.

Knowledge Inside

I read somewhere that much of the knowledge is still not in a useable format on the web.

And when you think about it you would say that probably 90% of the information that people have is still in their heads, not on the internet. So we’re trying to get that information out of people’s heads, so it’s not on sources that are hard to access on the internet, and get it into a really useful format to make a valuable database.

So I signed up and learned a lot already. Not yet participating much, but I think I certainly might later on.

Bookmark and Highlight

On there, I also found another interesting site called Diigo. Nothing very special, but for me a great tool. It is a site to bookmark webpages, while at the same time you can highlight that what struck you most in that article.

Which is really great. I did not use it much yet, but it is something I did myself often with copy and paste the most interesting parts of an article.

But not in a very organised way, with the result I could never find anything back. And if I did find it back, I could not find the original source again.

With this site (which has a great browser extension) it is really very easy to bookmark an article and at the same time highlight the essence of why I found it interesting.

Fiction and Non-fiction

And finally, the third site that I found this week, was Goodreads. I think I found it earlier, but never took the time to look around the site. But now I did and signed up.

After that you could start by adding books to a shelf. Books you read already, books you are reading at the moment and books you want to read later.

So I started adding those books and found out some interesting facts while doing that. I am still going through the really huge collection on the site, thinking back about the books I once read and how I would rate them.

One of those facts is that I read only a few fictions. Most of the books I read are non-fiction. But most of those non-fiction books I did not read from start to finish. I just read what I found interesting, what caught my attention at that moment.

But I remembered that there was a period in my life that I did read non-fiction. I read all the books of Agatha Christie when I was young. Some of them even more than once. And I really loved them at that time.

Open but Critical Mind

But after that, there where very little fiction books (with a few exceptions). Most of what I was interested in, where books that had to answer the many questions I had. Which is why I only read them partly. Once I had the answer, I already had another question that lead me to another book.

And suddenly I realised that was the reason why I got so interested in Quora, as soon as I saw it. For me it has the potential of more than just ‘one has the question and one has the answer’.

I definitely see the potential of some sort of collective dialogue. Or debate. Or as I said in my post Debate or Dialogue, at best a combination of both.

The open mind and respect of a dialogue combined with the critical and opposing nature of a debate.

Related posts:

1. English Books in Dutch Libraries
2. Patterns of Meaning that Develop over Time
3. Designing my Website
4. The Importance of Individual Human Experience
5. Individual Language

Recently I was thinking about information.

How ‘real’ is our knowledge?

My thoughts on that went into many directions (as usual) but I kept coming back to something the writer David Foster Wallace said in an interview.

I came across this writer because several people mentioned him. The first time was a while ago, when someone advised one of his books to me. But because his books are not translated in Dutch, there is nothing to find in our library.

So I kind of forgot about it, until I read a quote from him on the blog ThoughtWrestling.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

I thought this quote was very interesting (as was the whole post) and I decided to find out something more about Wallace. So I came across that interview and was very intrigued by what he had to say.

Art and literature

There were many things that caught my attention, but I especially liked the part where he compares literature with other forms of art. Here he answers the question what he thinks literature can do, that other things can’t.

There is something musical about it, because it has to do with the patterns of meaning that develop over time. There is stuff for me about reading that isn’t like looking at a piece of art, because there I choose how long I look and what I look at.

But in a piece of music or in a movie that flow is directed for me. I got no choice but to follow. With books it is weird. If I read a paragraph I like a lot, I go back and read it over again.

So I am trapped in time but I have more mobility within that time.

So in a way, he says that processing information is by relating it to your own world. I have the same. If I read something, I extract that information that resonates the most with me.

Does that mean that especially that part of the information is more important then other parts of that information, is it more real?

Well, I don’t think so.

Every part of a story might be important to different people. And if I extract some part of it, because I think it is important, it only means that it makes sense to me. It makes sense to me, because on some level I noticed the same. At some point and at some time.

It might not have been a conscious awareness at the time. Maybe it was a dream, maybe it was something I read. But most likely it was something I experienced. And that personal experience made me come to a certain conclusion.

Often it is a conclusion that is not exactly worked out, it is some undefined thought or feeling that does not make much sense on its own. But the moment you recognise that in the outside world it starts to make sense.

And with all those moments of awareness, a certain pattern arises, a pattern of meaning. Like Wallace says, that develops over time. A development in our individual lives, but also in the lives of others, if we all manage to share our insights.

The individual, freedom and consciousness

Near the end of his life, Wallace said something,

..true freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience…

that very much relates to something said by David Bohm,

..the individual needs to have freedom to look at all the information and determine in his own way whether it is right or not…

and they both seem to suggest the importance of the individual in determining what is ‘real’.

But if that is how it works (and personally I think it does) that means that there is no independent reality. There is a reality, but the meaning differs from person to person. And the reality depends on a personal context. But if there is no awareness of your own consciousness, it means that you let your reality depend on the context of others.

Which comes back again to the importance of individual experience in the processing of information.

Related posts:

1. Recognizing Patterns from an Underlying Reality
2. Time and the Meaning of Life
3. Mechanism vs Meaning
4. Is our World Dualistic after all?
5. Collective Sharing of Individual Knowledge

This is the third time I am going to upload the same video on this blog.

The reason for that is that I think this video is extremely important. I think it gives a way out of a very old problem.

The problem of choice between Monism and Dualism.

It is a video of the physicist David Bohm. It is one of 5 videos that completes an interview with him from 1989 in the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen. The whole interview is also uploaded in the post Information Exchange.

In the post Making a Concept of the Whole I already uploaded this video (part 3) again because I think he says some very important things there. In that post I transcribed as good as possible the video, and in the post Make the Quantum World Understandable I already highlighted what struck me most in that video.

But everytime I watch it again (and I did so many times), and every time I think about it, I can only come to one conclusion.

Bohm thinks that the very essense of our world is dualistic.

In this post, I first define the difference between Monism and Dualism (Wikipedia) and give my understanding of Bohm’s view. Then I upload the video again and extract the parts where I think Bohm says our world is dualistic in its very core.

Monism

Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity, that the universe is really just one thing, despite its many appearances.

1. Materialism: only the physical is real, the mental or spiritual can be reduced to the physical.

2. Idealism: only the mind is real.

3. Neutral monism: both the mental and the physical can be reduced to some sort of third substance, or energy.

Dualism

The term dualism was originally used in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Some examples of what can be seen as dualistic.

- Good and Evil

- Male and Female

- Yin and Yang

- Mind and Body

Dualism according to Bohm

Now I do not think that Bohm says that the core of our world is a dualism between Good and Evil, or Male and Female, or Yin and Yang. Maybe he thinks those are dualistic, but it is not what he is talking about here.

What does play a role in his view is the duality between Mind and Body, although not directly. Like many others he thinks that the core of our world might be energy.

But he does not think there is just energy. He says there is something else that is essential, but is not the same.

One can not be reduced to the other. It is something that is really so very common in our day to day life, but does not play a role in measurements. But it has a fundamental effect.

And that other important core element is information.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here Bohm starts with explaining where his view differs from Niels Bohr, which is the mainstream.

But the one thing I did not agree with, was that this whole was completely, there was no way of making a concept of this whole, And that meant that you cold not make it intelligible, the mathematics could only refere to the probable results of experiments, but not discuss what was actually happening.

He says there are other fields like the electromagnetic field.

The quantum field is different, it has some similarities but it is different, because the effect of the quantum field depends only on the form and not on the intensity. The field drops off, but its effect does not. The effect only depends on the form, not on the intensity.

In the following part he gives an example which I had to listen to many times. It is something so common, but as he says also the very difference between day to day experiences and measurements in science where the effect of the information is left out the equation, while it is an essential part of that.

That is not so weird. In fact it is very common, but we generally don’t pay attention to it. If you take for example a radio wave. Its effect calls up. Now imagine a ship guided by radar on an automatic pilot. The guidance does not depend on the intensity of the wave. It depends only on the form, we may say, that carries information. The word information has two words, ‘in’ and ‘form’. To put form in. You only need a sensitive receiver. As long as it is received, it is essential the same program. What happens is, that the form of the radiowave puts form into the currence, forming the receiver. The energy comes from the reciever, not from the radiowave. The radiowave is not pushing the ship around mechanically. The ship is moving under its own energy and responding to the form. The radiowave is giving shape and form to its motion. It is all human experience. People do not push and pull each other around, except when they are violent. They depend on the sound of waves to communicate, people move around because of that. The point is, that this is the most common form of experience and the mechanic business of pushing and pulling is more limited, but our experience of the last few centuries, has us focussed on that as the main point. And saying, we can always explain the other things though that. But I am saying ‘maybe form is fundamental and the electron responds to this form’.

So by bringing in information, there would be a solution for many things that could not be well explained otherwise.

That explains not only the interference, it explains that the electron acts like a wave, it explains this non-local business, it explains the superconductivity as the electrons move by the common pool of information.

Here I think he is saying that the mind and consciousness are in the same range as information. Mind and consciousness react to information, they all have the same basic thing.

The basic quality of mind, is that it responds to form and not to substance. And therefore, the electron has a mindlike quality. Not conscious as we know. Consciousness might depend on much higher organisations of this mindlike quality.

Then the interviewer asks if that information (plus mind and consciousness) are the basic of our universe. So actually he asks if our world is monistic, as in only the mind is real. But Bohm says it is both.

Interviewer: So what you are saying is that the physical universe is really more about information than about substance.

Bohm: Well, I am saying it is both. But information contributes fundamentally to the quality of substance.

Mind and Energy

So Bohm says information (mind) is just as important as substance/intensity (matter/energy). And one can not be reduced to the other. That means our world is not monistic.

It is not materialistic because that would mean that only the physical is real and the mental can be reduced to the physical. It is not idealistic because that would mean that only the mind is real. And it is also not something like neutral monism which means that both the mental and the physical can be reduced to some sort of third substance.

So that can only mean that the world is dualistic. But not in the way that dualistic is often seen. At least not at the very basic level. It does not mean there is no such thing as the duality Good and Evil, Male and Female, Yin and Yang. But those maybe can be called ends of a spectrum or something like that.

I do think what Bohm is talking about here has something to do with the Mind and Body duality. But personally I think it would be better to speak of the duality between Mind and Energy here at this point. Or as Bohm calls it, between Information and Intensity/Substance. Where one can never be reduced to the other.

Related posts:

1. Make the Quantum World Understandable
2. Information Exchange
3. The Artist and the Scientist in Dialogue with the World
4. Thought is about Becoming, not Being
5. Patterns of Meaning that Develop over Time

In my previous post Making a Concept of the Whole, I uploaded a video of David Bohm where he talks about finding a way to make quantum physics intelligible.

After the transcription, I was going to add my understanding of what he said there, but got a lot of problems with uploading that post.

At this moment I can not change anything in that post, so I can not highlight what struck me most. Now I will do that here in this post.

• Similarity between quantum physics and society
• It must be possible to make a concept of the whole
• Effect in the quantum field depends on the form, not on the intensity
• Mechanical in quantum, versus information in society

Bohm says a few times in the interview that the difference with his interpretation of quantum physics and that of others is very subtle, but at the same time essential.

It is very clear that he has a lot of trouble explaining it and the main reason for that is in my opinion that it is so obvious and common, that we are hardly able to see it.

I will try to seperate as much as possible what he said and hope that it makes more clear what he actually says.


Similarity between quantum physics and society

Bohm is comparing the view of quantum physics with society and the interviewer asks him if that is not strange.

But he thinks there is very much similarity, problems in society can only be solved if they are seen as a whole. Not by a fragmentary approach.

And the same goes for what is happening in the quantum world. Like there has to be an emphasis on wholeness in observing a phenomenon.

It is not just an observer and a phenomenon that is being observed. There is an interaction going on, or as Bohm says (somewhere else) ‘observation is going on’. This is where his experiment with language, called the rheomode, comes in.


It must be possible to make a concept of the whole

Then the interviewer asks how his view differs from the mainstream view in quantum mechanics. Bohm says there is actually not that much difference, but his main point is that he thinks that there has to be a way to make the experiments intelligible.

According to others, the only way to explain it is by mathematics. And because mathematics is to abstract, it can only refer to the results of the experiments, but what happens can not be discussed.

Another thing he says (not this video, but the next) is that he thinks it is important to make it all accessible to more people, also in other fields. He thinks it is important to show the connection between different experiments.


Effect in the quantum field depends on the form, not the intensity

What he says here is really very important I think. He takes some time to explain it all, but it is indeed very subtle.

He says that any effect depends on the form, not on the intensity. When the interviewer says that he finds that weird, Bohm says that it is not so weird. He says that it is very common.

In fact it is so common, that we do not pay attention to it.

Then he gives the example of a ship guided by radar and on an automatic pilot. The guidance does not depend on the intensity of the wave. It depends on the form that carries information.

The word information has two words, ‘in’ and ‘form’. To put form in.

But you need a sensitive receiver. And then the form of the radiowave ‘forms’ the receiver. The energy does not come from the radiowave. The radiowave is not pushing the ship around mechanically.

The ship moves under its own energy, responding to the form.

So if I understand it correctly, this form where Bohm is reffering to many times, is not energy. There is energy, but apart from that, there is information.

But they are not the same.

This information has a certain form. And it does not add to the energy, but it does have an effect. It contributes fundamentally to the quality of substance.

So not everything is energy. Apart from matter/energy there is something else.

And that is information. Information that does not have an intensity but a form.


Mechanical in quantum versus information in society

This took for me the longest to understand and I am not sure if I do now. But if I understand it right, the main difference between the quantum world and the ordinary world, is the characteristic of information.

And according to Bohm, the electron has the same characteristic as information. It responds to form and not to substance. And so do our mind and consciousness.

Now Bohm says in our day to day world, that is just common sense. Most of what happens is because of the exchange of information. It is what our whole world is based upon.

But our experiments in the last few centuries, are focussed on the mechanic part. And wants to explain all things through that.


The importance of information

So I think what Bohm says here is very important. If I would have to pin down what it all comes down to, I would say that it is that information plays a crucial role, but although it is not actually seen seperate, it is different from energy.

Related posts:

1. If you Know All the Views, you will Know the Whole
2. Is our World Dualistic after all?
3. Making a Concept of the Whole
4. Information Exchange
5. The Artist and the Scientist in Dialogue with the World