PHYSICALITY

To live some amount of abstraction must be accepted.  Arguendo, DNA is natural abstraction, is the language of nature.  What is the causal connection, if any, between nature’s language (DNA) and the languages emanating from human brains?  Some connection must be alleged since no other species are permitted by their DNA to speak, read or write.  But there is more.  As language DNA is as minimally abstract as possible while human brains invent fully abstract languages containing no physicality, substance or contact with anything tangible or concrete.  Homo Sapiens DNA not only permits language in the human brain, it permits languageness, i.e., anything which acts as a language whether it has any connection to physical reality or not.  The ability to say literally anything is seemingly a natural ability encoded into the human brain.  This is the reason Guth can write “roughly speaking, anything [physical] can happen in a vacuum [because vacuum is a “physical system” which obeys quantum uncertainties], although the probability for a digital watch to materialize is absurdly small.”  Guth is a serious scientist, he would not write this unless he had some basis in fact, even if ultimately the fact is proved to not exist.  This statement is as extreme as it gets with physicality at least minimally involved.  Guth can be given the benefit of the doubt even if no one has ever seen a digital watch materialize, some version of mathematics is on Guth’s side even if he can not for real compute how small is the probability.  A step beyond this tenuously physical statement is a category of statements which by their own admission have zero ties to physicality.  Notably, Guth did not say Santa Claus would materialize, or an amoeba would materialize, or an analog turntable playing the Ninth Symphony would materialize.  He could not go as far as to aver a digital watch connected to a telephone network, ready to use, would materialize.  By definition physicality can not penetrate the quantum of action, a more precise physicality is an impossibility.  Any computation of probability must incorporate the physical limits imposed by the quantum of action, if it does not then arguably the probability estimate is beyond physics, is metaphysical, is an abstraction devoid of any substance, meaning it is an abstraction “by itself.”  This type of action is automatic for the human brain, it is normal and presents no problems.  Language puts no limits on the human brain’s ability to say anything making this ability exhibit 1 in demonstrating the human brain is causally disconnected from physicality.  Santa Claus lives at the North Pole (why not the South Pole?), has thousands of elves working for him and on a single night Santa Claus climbs down literally millions of chimneys to deliver gifts to deserving children whose letters he has “checked twice.”  This story has made it to the national news networks where serious commentators attempted to compute the actual miles Santa Claus must travel in about a 6-8 hour period.  Any tenuous tie to physicality granted to Dr. Guth’s brain farts vanishes with this story.  There is a class or category of events which can never happen, for which the probability is zero, but, of course, not inside the human brain where literally anything can “happen.”  In the vernacular used here, this class of events is devoid of any materiality or substance yet the human brain can fully understand, comprehend them as if they were reality.  The Santa Claus story is not unintelligible, to the contrary, any child can understand it.  Where exactly is this understanding?  Even if it is tied to some physicality in the brain this physicality must be shown to be the cause of the understanding.  Thus, while the physical brain may deliver the story to understanding it can not be shown the physical brain acts as a gatekeeper to keep out of the brain the class of deliverables the probability of which existing as physicalities is zero.  Clearly, no argument can be made to prove the understanding itself is a gatekeeper.  The human brain is DNA programmed to naturally understand any language based story no matter how “absurdly small” its probability.  To live some amount of abstraction must be accepted, the human brain could not exist otherwise, and the brain is built in such a way as to have the ability to, in essence, “go all the way,” to take a partially abstract event and distil it to a level of 100% purity, removing from it all physicality all the while never losing any understanding or comprehension of what it is doing.  Somewhere in the brain this is “happening” and it is a ubiquitous skill all brains perform automatically, even given a modest vocabulary.  The ability to take a set of facts and make a pure, 100% abstract allegory out of them seems to be hard wired into every human brain.  A possibility exists:  the part of DNA enabling this skill may itself have evolved beyond any physicality, may be 100% abstract and is thus inexorably and automatically delivering to humans a 100% abstract mentality wholly separated from physicality, leaving it 100% up to the freedom of choice to utilize it or not.