Why all this unproven universe?

The most difficult part in writing is that articles, books, come up with a good title. Such that it sounded intriguing, and the content of the article described, but did not give up completely. And also to make it ambiguous - for complete beauty and elegance. After going over a few and becoming discouraged, I decided: it would come as it was written, but for now let it be:

On quantum physics, the brain, Gödel’s theorem and jury trials.

Actually, the reason to write this article was a performance in the St. Petersburg club "Key". The format of the presentation was 30 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions. This was called the “Gutenberg smoking room” and implied the mention of a book, which served as the impetus for the subsequent story. I chose Roger Penrose's “The New Mind of the King: On Computers, Thinking, and the Laws of Physics.” The book is wonderful, rich in clever thoughts and interesting expositions of difficult things. Moreover, there is a life motive in this book, there is the main question that crosses between all its lines: why is everything like this? That is not a question: what are the laws of the universe? And not a question: how is thinking arranged? And the questions are: why are the laws of the universe just such, why does thinking exist, and why does mathematics, the product of thinking, describe the real world so well.

Then, when I read Penrose, these questions seemed to me eternal and insoluble. For many years, all reasoning on the topic of “why” was perceived by me skeptically for a simple reason - all theories were not falsified. That is, they did not allow the possibility of any logical, calculated or experimental verification. For example, where is it easy to say “for all the will of God”, add to this “God is an incomprehensible essence” and close the question forever.

The first hope for at least some answer snapped when it was possible to find a rigorous mathematical explanation of beauty (in a nutshell, it’s impossible to explain who followed my articles will understand). Since it is impossible not to agree that the universe is built with a fair amount of grace (this applies not only to planets, stars and galaxies, but also to the physical laws themselves), the opportunity to explain beauty already meant that one can now answer one of the “why”: “ why is all this beautiful? ” It was a little bit, but it allowed to ask the right questions further.

A significant breakthrough occurred when it turned out that in the model of the brain I came to, you can find analogies (not blurry, but very specific) with all the basic physical principles, including all quantum mechanics. And not because the model was built with an eye on these principles, but because they all surfaced as absolutely inevitable.

This is where the answer came about, which turned out to be exceptionally plausible to me, and most importantly, the answer that allows a certain check.

Actually, the following video is a summary of the answer to the main question (here is the new name).

Main question:



If you had the strength to listen to this 30-minute speech, then you noticed that it is based on a certain model of the brain and on the mechanisms of thinking, behavior and emotions resulting from it. It’s not so easy to understand this, half an hour will be clearly not enough. But if there is still time and desire, then below are two speeches in which the basic essence is explained “on the fingers”.

About the work of the brain at the neural level:



About behavior, thinking, emotions, love and beauty:



If you mastered these two parts as well, then you probably understood that in these speeches it was gently and unobtrusively made clear that the riddle of thinking was solved, that it was already possible to unravel how the neural networks of the brain work, how information is stored and processed, how the cortex is trained and its self-organization. So, neither more nor less. But such statements must be seriously proved, there must be supporting facts, working programs, the results of computer simulations, expert opinions and the like. What about the evidence? I will write about it in the next part. And this part, perhaps, still I will name:

Why all this unproven universe?