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A novel approach to the world based first only on individual experience of what is going on in what seems to be an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’.
In 2017 the AI program AlphaZero pulverized the then best chess program, using an approach very similar to the above, namely it learned from chess rules only, not from any previously aquired knowledge about the game. It not only won, but played often differently in unseen ways.
Similarly, findings about the world in this book often coincide with current wisdom, but they also lead to novel concepts in unseen ways, including some that even resemble ancient views. Like a new concept based on immediate perception of space and time that bears puzzling similarities with antique ideas about 4+1 elements (“fire, air, water, earth” and “ether”), or a concept of unconscious collective ‘beings’ that resembles ancient ideas about deities—all in well-defined and thus eventually scientifically testable ways.
Written by a Swiss physicist (*1966, Ph.D.).
In late 2017, Google’s DeepMind AlphaZero AI program beat the then strongest chess program Stockfish easily, at a time when humans did not have any chance any more anyways. But the way AlphaZero won was what was really astonishing. Unlike chess programs before it, it had not learned from previous games played by humans (or machines), it had learned strictly only from the chess rules.
This book has quite a similar approach to reality and the world, only so far not with AI, but with good old human reasoning. The starting point here is a completely fresh look at the world, one that does not assume anything about the world to be known, as if just having opened one’s eyes (and all other senses) to the world for the first time ever and trying to make sense of all that is going on in what seems to be an ‘outside‘ and an ‘inside’.
AlphaZero made moves nobody expected, sometimes even sacrificing the strongest piece on the board, the queen, which humans almost never do. Similarly, even though the findings here usually closely mirror previous findings of humans about life and the world that have been aquired across millenia, sometimes they differ, as follows…
Since the approach here is strictly scientific in the sense that it all starts with observation and tries to be as logically consistent as ever possible, it is never in contradiction with any verifiable facts that science can regularily predict.
But the approach also naturally leads to concepts that are not directly part of contemporary science. For example, one of the first concepts that appears is that there would be something that comes in 4+1 ‘parts’ and has astonishing similarities with ancient ideas about 4+1 elements (“fire, air, water, earth” and “ether”), or also the similar concept of eight trigrams of the Chinese I Ching, only in both cases in a more modern and well-defined way. And also emerging quickly is a more modern view of something that was often called and perceived as gods and godesses in the past, or similar concepts like a collective unconscious or a world soul, only here explained more scientifically as unconscious collective connections and effects.
It is important to note that the two things I just mentioned, concepts that resemble ancient elements and deities, seem to follow quite naturally and quite quickly from that fresh look at the world, about as astonishingly as some of AlphaZero’s moves. Of course, so far (in the first quarter of the 21st century), it has just been me doing this, so my approach might be biased or overlook other possibilities, but it clearly shows that there is more to be found with that approach. So, if you are looking for something novel to do, this might be a really good opportunity !
I am a physicist (*1966 in Zürich, Switzerland) and am doing this as a hobby…
* So far this is just an idea for a book, to appear maybe in the second half of the 2020s, but so far everything here is completely nonbinding…