Status Updates From The Singular Universe and t...

My speculative proposal is that the correlate of qualia are those events without precedence. It is commonplace to observe that habitual actions are unconscious in people. Maybe the same thing is true in nature. Maybe brains are systems where a lot of novel events take place. " This is also similar to an idea of mine, regarding that emergence of consciousness is one and same as emergence of a unique being/perspective

In this chapter he is arguing for the reality of qualia, experienced by conscious individuals here and now, and Galen Strawsons related view of panpsychism is evoked as consistent with the temporal naturalism perspective, but not consistent with the timeless naturalism and platonic, mathematical realist perspectives.

"We have direct experience of the world in the present moment. Just as the fact that we experience is an undeniable feature of the natural world, it is also an undeniable feature of the natural world that qualia are experienced in moments which are experienced one at a time. This gives a privileged status to each moment of time, associated with each experience: this is the moment that is being experienced now."..

"In Chapter 1, I introduced the metaphysical folly as the tendency for unreflective naturalists to believe in an imagined nature constructed in their imaginations as being more real than the world we perceive with our senses. " (pp 480) This is akin to my notion of this tendency for hypostatisation of our models of reality, and the problems this creates in confounding and blocking our true appreciation of reality.

The branching model is his preferred approach as this leads to the possibilities of cosmological natural selection

The last couple of chapters develop the understanding of mathematics required alongside the temporal naturalism, which will be one of providing static models based on past regularities, rather than being the ideal form to which reality aspires. Three cosmological options are pluralist, linear cyclic models and branching cyclic models. The first is inflation, multiverse and least likely for Smolin. ..

As he says in the text: "To give up the relativity of simultaneity is a major step, but we have very good reason to consider it, if we are to escape the cosmological dilemma and fallacy and move toward a cosmological theory that could give sufficient reason for choices of laws and initial conditions." (pp 420)

This section makes quite a claim that relativity of simultaneity may be only a locally correct phenomena, rather than universal, in order to be made consistent with shape space and his notion of a global, and real time of here and now, i.e. his temporal naturalism.

Smolin's alternate suggestion is that we avoid multiverse ideas and anthropic reasoning principles to stay true to a temporal naturalistic understanding of the universe as unique, meaning that there is a preceding universe or state to our current universe, from which we can form a sufficient reason account for its emergence, perhaps through his concept of cosmological natural selection.

In preceding chapter a good critique of the current cosmological model, its drawbacks, weaknesses and limitations. The popular notion of a big bang, conceals many conceptual difficulties. The lack of radiation emitted, leading to Penrose suggestion of Weyl Conjecture, the horizon problem, the fine tuning problem, the infinity of EFE solutions and lack of determinism, among some others.

This could also explain the lack of appearance of quantum style effects on the every day scale, but could also explain some exceptions when a unique relational being or phenomena emerges into the more mundane everyday level, and throws some surprises out there..

..on the intermediate scale of reality, Newtonian and statistical approaches can prevail, with things taking on forms that are much of a muchness, due to coarse graining, but on the smallest scales of protons/electrons and the largest scale of universe as a whole, Leibniz principles predominate of unique entities defined by relational tangles and webs, possessing some intrinsic qualities also.

A lot of much more interesting ideas in these first sections by Lee Smolin, and must less repetition. The perspective of temporal naturalism is laid out in detail, and its motivation relative to things such as shape dynamics, relational general relativity, and the failure of the Newtonian paradigm. Leibniz Principle of II and SR are appealed to...

Also the important fact that causality presumes an arrow and direction to time, which is lacking in symmetrical, mathematical accounts/models of space-time. The issue over and over seems to be something many have pointed out, including myself, which is that a failure to acknowledge ones ontological and metaphysical premises leads one quickly down a road to confounding ones models of reality with reality itself.

Jokes aside, the basic concept of the book, and the three main propositions regarding, 1) the singular nature of the universe, 2) the inclusive reality of time, and 3) the selective realism of mathematics, raise a powerful objection to some of the errors in much cosmological science, such as the science fiction of the multiverse, and the problems of singularities where the laws of nature break down completely.

There is some irony so far in this book, that already at this early stage, the position that the universe is singular, and does not repeat should itself be explained in such a repetitive way. Roberto Unger seems to find about 20-30 different ways in the first chapter alone to make the same basic point, if only the book would read as singular as they are claiming the universe to be!