And also no for another reason which is central to the philosophical discourse which is that ultimately Simplicity is Truth. That which is unnecessary cannot be and the process universe is at all times sufficient to itself.PoeticUniverse wrote: 23. Can there be something extra or super, a so called ‘intangible’ that still can interact with the tangible?
The monadology of Leibniz was always a rather confusing amalgam of ideas which were never truly properly formulated but they contained the seeds of a revolution in the procedures of human thought which evolved over the subsequent two centuries into what is nowadays known as information theory. Perhaps the scholar who was most influential in the advancement of Leibniz's ideas was George Boole, a 19th century philosopher/mathematician who published two seminal works which were to underpin what was later to become the science of computation. "The Laws of thought" and "The Mathematical analysis of Logic" were in my opinion the most significant advances in mathematical philosophy since the Persians and were the basis of Charles Babbage's first linear computer. Over the succeeding century these ideas rapidly evolved and in the first half of the 20th century they culminated in the work of some truly remarkable minds, such as those of Claude Shannon and Alan Turing. These guys were not philosophers but mathematicians, but ideas have a way of finding their own place in time and these revolutionary ideas of defining reality as a dynamic entity which is continuously being MADE had already been strongly canvassed in the philosophies of both Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. In their Newtonian zeal the physicists simply ignored all these developing ideas and thundered on into the darkness building their sandcastles in the air on the back of Newton's flawed metaphysical assumptions. Nobody took the trouble to reprise the pages of science history and question these assumptions even though Leibniz had utterly repudiated them some two centuries earlier, a repudiation confirmed by Ernst Mach and empirically proven by Michelson and Morley. We can but wonder why.
At the same time a genius of truly lofty calibre and the true father of relativity, Henri Poincare, was also being steadfastly ignored as he howled in dismay at the cavalier way in which the simplest of simple ideas had been translated into a mathematical abomination by a dunderhead called Hermann Minkowski who didn't know his epistemological arse from his ontological elbow.
Relativity is NOT some complex idea which can only be understood by supergeeks who speak through machines with their eyelashes. Relativity is the simplest of all possible logical propositions which was first enunciated as a formal scientific doctrine by Galileo. There is no state of absolute rest anywhere in our universe. Every physical entity in our universe is moving relative to every other physical entity in our universe and that is absolutely all there is to it. Once Newton had figured out that the trajectory of such motions was determined by gravity the job was done and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle sat starkly before him. We cannot determine both the location and the momentum of an object simultaneously for the simple reason that it can't HAVE both simultaneously and this blindly obvious truth applies as much to a jumbo jet as it applies to a sub-atomic particle. Galilean relativity was simply a correct definition of determinism which Newton was incapable of understanding in his blind religious zealotry. Newton simply assumed that determinism and pre-determinism were synonymous constructs because he assumed that the universe was the creation of an omnipotent being.
Poincare was a true Natural Philosopher of the old school, thoroughly familiar with all the sciences as well as the metaphysical constructs which underpinned them. He was a genuine polymath who had the relativity of space and time firmly in his conceptual grasp while Einstein was still a baby. However what he didn't have were the mathematical tools to formulate his ideas into a formal mathematical model. He knew perfectly well that Newton's classical tools would be inadequate to the task and he spent years of his life laying the groundwork for a new system of non-linear mathematics which eventually evolved into what is now known as fractal geometry. Since the time of Heraclitus it had been assumed that no science could ever be founded on the assumption of a living and dynamic reality so Poincare's task was a formidable one but he knew bloody well what his task was. Newtonian physics was not only metaphysically flawed but meta-mathematically incapable of modelling the real dynamic universe. However because he was a Frenchman at a time when the French were regarded with grave suspicion by the German mathematical establishment his howls of protest went unheeded and this was a great tragedy for the future of physics because the German mathematical establishment got it fucking WRONG. They chased a rabbit into a cul-de-sac and they've languished there ever since.
You don't need to be a computer whiz-kid to understand how the universe works but it helps if you've got a rudimentary grasp of the basic principles of computation. Firstly it must be stated that the cosmic computer is totally unlike the Newtonian contraption we have on our desktops because the universe is a computer without a programme. The technical name for such a self-programming computer is that it is one which runs an EVOLUTIONARY algorithm, which in the common parlance simply means that the universe makes it up as it goes along. A remarkable feature of such a self-programming computer is that the longer it runs the more complex the informational sub-structures which evolve within it and this process is exquisitely modelled by John Conway in his Game of Life and by Benoit Mandelbrot in the Mandelbrot set. This model of a self-programming computer can therefore account for the existence of life and mind in our universe, something which the true illuminati of physics have always been convinced that an ontologically viable cosmology must inevitably achieve.
Like all computers the cosmos has a smallest possible informational "bit", which in honour of Leibniz I have called the monad. Similarly like all computers the cosmic computer has a processing speed which is simply equated with the speed of light and thus we must think of the speed of light as the speed at which reality is being MADE. The monad is a time interval which can be loosely equated with the Planck interval in spacetime physics because it is the briefest possible interval of time in which we can meaningfully say that something has actually happened. That such a quantised time interval must exist dates back to Zeno and the pre-Socratics but it is a refutation of Newton who assumed that time must be infinitely divisible. This is a metaphysical absurdity because the notion of a time interval in which nothing has occurred is a logical non-sequitur, since time and change are simply two different expressions of the same thing. The monad is quantised equivalently with gravity, with which it bears a precise mathematical relationship which is inversely logarithmic in its nature, as demonstrated by Einstein in GR, and this inversely logarithmic relationship obtains all the way down to the Planck scale. This is quantum gravity because it is this fundamental asymmetry between time and gravity at the Planck scale which is the causal mechanism which brings forth our entire universe in all its complexity and glory. This is the ding an sich of reality at its most fundamental scale and it is this relationship which accounts for all the various epistemic objects which physics invents to model the world, such as particles, waves, fields and forces. These mathematical objects are NOT properties of the universe but merely properties of the human minds which have the capacity to model the self-organising patterns which spontaneously emerge from the evolutionary process of the non-linear computation. The way I like to put this is that reality is not made according to the "laws of physics" but rather that the "laws of physics" are made according to reality, with the significant qualification that these so-called "laws" are no such thing. They are a procedure of thought totally in the ownership of the observer.
To complete the picture we need only understand the monad as a binary logic gate. The monad has only two physical properties, these being its information/energy content and the duration of its existence in this state, as determined by gravity. We simply think of the monad as BECOMING its own next monad with either a higher or lower information content and that whether this information content goes up or down is determined by every other monad in the continuously emerging gravity/time continuum. Once again this is simple relativity because we already know that the behaviour of every single entity in the universe causally affects the behaviour of every other and that the speed of this information transfer is defined as the speed of light. However Einstein was a charming man with a robust sense of humour who certainly didn't mind a good belly laugh at his own expense and I reckon he'd have a good chuckle about this ding an sich model. In the real reality the speed of light is the most inconstant speed in the universe whereas in his holographic representation of its past it appears to be a constant. That's because nothing moves in a reality which no longer exists.
This is the self-causal universe. QED.
