Questions we'll never solve

[Obvious Leo]

Things that don't yet exist will have originated from what has and does exist. I guess I just don't like saying that everything that will exist exists in a potential way because almost everything exists in a potential way and there is a virtual "infinity" of things that will never exist. I'm sure this is largely just semantics. Everything that will exist exists in a potential way and much more besides. Reality is composed of the "now" and includes an unknowable future that will be determined in the future.

And there you have it, the ding an sich, the universe as it is. We can pleasure ourselves until doomsday speculating about what MIGHT happen in the future, and a few of our guesses may even land by chance on an aspect of the truth, but the simple fact remains that there will be only ONE future for our universe and this future will remain unknowable. It will remain forever unknowable because the universe is continually re-making itself at the speed of light. Far from having a plan the cosmos just makes it up as it goes along and all we can do is figure it out as best we can.

The philosophy of the bloody obvious in a nutshell, you might say.

Cladking. You may be unaware of the fact that despite the self-evident nature of such statements they are utterly incompatible with the models of modern physics, so when you come across any of the vast suite of statements made by physicists which seem to make no sense to you then you'll know the reason why. You needn't be concerned that you must be some kind of idiot for not being able to understand what they're banging on about because they can't understand a word of it either, and to be fair to them most of them have the decency to admit this in their own published writings.

The simple fact is that these models of physics make no fucking sense because the physicists are thinking about the world wrong and that's all there is to it. Their particular flavour of group-think has drawn them into a conceptual cul-de-sac and they don't know how to get out of it.

[Scott Mayers]

Point one is nothing more than a definition. In practice what we take to be the Universe is everything that appears to exist.

Quite so. The Universe is everything that exists is simply a statement of definition but it's worth pointing out that it's the opposite statement of definition from that which Newton proceeded and only one of us can be right. However if we accept that the first law is a statement of metaphysical first principle then there follow a number of significant follow up statements which we can deduce from it.

1. If the universe is everything that exists then nothing exists external to it and thus it had no beginning. Ex nihilo, nihil fit. The universe has always existed and is thus eternal.

This is already what is understood via universals. You can either define the 'whole' as absolute and then define all that exists AND doesn't exists as contained in it, OR you limit this 'whole' to all that is with what is outside of it constantly redefining what is this 'whole' in a dynamic way. This is what I and others have called, "totality", and doesn't bias all that is included in it to presume only our unique contingent reality. Your "ex nihilo, nihil fit' is thus indistinguishable.

2. The verb "exists" in this statement is a verb in the present tense, which means we can simply rephrase our definitional statement as "The universe is that which is existing". This defines the universe as an event rather than as a place and the notion of the event implies both a past and future tense to the verb "to exist". The universe is a PROCESS. Thus we deduce that the universe has always existed and will always continue to exist but the notion of its "state of existence" is only meaningful in the nexus between these two verb tenses, the moment Now. Therefore this is a simple statement of presentism.

While any universe contains time as a dimension, your ignorance to the static components within it that actually describe this have no means to construct a rationale foundationally. One who 'walks' must exist before being capable to describe what 'walking' means. So placing the verb prior to the subject, is no different than the Biblical, "In the beginning was the Word,..." This is NOT to insult you but to point out the origins of how many thought with good reason that something was commanded to come forth through a type of force that commands. You claim NOT to accept law(s) yet this screams of this still. And while you think some 'static' existence should not exist prior, your form of argument only restates that some unspoken non-thing barks verbs, which is no different.

3. Newton's assumption of a law-derived universe is inapplicable in an eternal process model because no explanation for the origin of such laws is possible, so this model defines the universe as SELF-CAUSAL. This Spinozan notion of immanent cause means simply that the past MAKES the present and the present MAKES the future, a self-evident statement of the nature of determinism which conflicts with Newton's understanding of the concept. Newton adhered to the Platonist principle of transcendent cause, a principle which contradicts the definitional proposition.

Newton wasn't the 'owner' of this nor was the last one. Laws are the generalizations of real things as the forms of Plato to which you denounce. If you feign these, then stop begging it but pretending to hide this in obscurity instead.

4. This model of reality demands an acceptance of the notion that the arrow of time is likewise an ontologicallky valid concept and that time, change and causality are simply three different ways of saying the same thing, namely that the universe is simply that which is continually re-making itself. I've occasionally used the word "continuously" in this context but I'll have to stop doing so because the philosophy of the quantum, as illustrated by Zeno, requires that this process cannot be continuous but must proceed in discrete and quantised steps. It is from this that I derive my concept of the universe as a computer, the "it from bit" entity of Wheeler's dream, and the speed of light as the processing speed of this computer.

You don't even understand the appropriate meaning of a quantum. It is an abstract generalization of discrete limits, like asymptotes or limits in Calculus, another matter you don't accept.

5. This processing speed is the most inconstant speed in the universe, because it is variable all the way down to the Planck scale because of gravity, and it for this reason that the eternal universe is the only coherent narrative for quantum gravity.

Define "quantum gravity". This statement isn't very informative and contradictory. What is "processing speed" as you here seem to be denying the fixed speed of light and trade it for some "inconstant speed" instead. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The process of information transfer between any two consecutive points is 'c'. What is your "inconstant" speed a reference to?

[cladking]

One who 'walks' must exist before being capable to describe what 'walking' means. So placing the verb prior to the subject, is no different than the Biblical, "In the beginning was the Word,..." This is NOT to insult you but to point out the origins of how many thought with good reason that something was commanded to come forth through a type of force that commands. You claim NOT to accept law(s) yet this screams of this still. And while you think some 'static' existence should not exist prior, your form of argument only restates that some unspoken non-thing barks verbs, which is no different.

Perspective.

In the (human) beginning was the word. It was a metaphysical word and as such contained great knowledge and power. John I is simply a confused retelling of this from an outside perspective. The universe as known by man was created in his image. It didn't exist until it was named (defined) by man and understood as theory (called a specific "god"). When the metaphysical word fell at the 'tower of babel", confusion was born. Only the invention of experimental science has made it possible to someday unravel the confusion.

Man doesn't need to exist before an elephant can "walk". The sun appears in the east each morning without a human to define (or confuse) the terms. WYSIWYG. Reality exists as it appears but we now lack the means to manipulate the observation directly. "The word" was the means by which reality was discovered, understood, communicated, and manipulated.

[Scott Mayers]

[Post deleted by iMod]

What's your problem Leo? You've been doing just this with me without apparent cause elsewhere. If I piss you off, embrace it and try to use this in a constructive way rather than rage. I've already read enough of you and have even given you a hundred times more effort than you've given me in the least as you don't even try to read what I've said elsewhere unless I'm appearing only to please you. I understand your interpretation and even met your approval as I clarified how I have before. But this understanding isn't all that I'm about. I only am at least proving to you that I understand prior to showing what I think is wrong with it. But then you don't welcome the criticism regardless and resort to anguished outbursts of direct ad hominem attacks.

I agree with Scott. Obvious Leo, please tone your expressions of irritation down. That kind of unphilosophical language is not welcome here.
iMod

[Scott Mayers]

One who 'walks' must exist before being capable to describe what 'walking' means. So placing the verb prior to the subject, is no different than the Biblical, "In the beginning was the Word,..." This is NOT to insult you but to point out the origins of how many thought with good reason that something was commanded to come forth through a type of force that commands. You claim NOT to accept law(s) yet this screams of this still. And while you think some 'static' existence should not exist prior, your form of argument only restates that some unspoken non-thing barks verbs, which is no different.

Perspective.

In the (human) beginning was the word. It was a metaphysical word and as such contained great knowledge and power. John I is simply a confused retelling of this from an outside perspective. The universe as known by man was created in his image. It didn't exist until it was named (defined) by man and understood as theory (called a specific "god"). When the metaphysical word fell at the 'tower of babel", confusion was born. Only the invention of experimental science has made it possible to someday unravel the confusion.

Man doesn't need to exist before an elephant can "walk". The sun appears in the east each morning without a human to define (or confuse) the terms. WYSIWYG. Reality exists as it appears but we now lack the means to manipulate the observation directly. "The word" was the means by which reality was discovered, understood, communicated, and manipulated.

I said any "walker" which includes anything we describe as having the capacity to 'walk'. It is not the symbolic words I'm referring to but the semantic meaning of them.

And the "word" biblically was of one an even earlier interpretation of how people thought of the origin of nature to be strictly of a dynamic 'force'. My point is that just as any sentence consists of a subject and a predicate, nature requires both in order to 'complete' the sentence ('sentence' derived from meaning that which makes 'sense' as a closed or finite concept.) The rays of the sun by some was interpreted as this force (as Ra). Yet others believed that only the object itself as its finite shape, meant anything (the Aten = 'a thing'). To better make sense of it is to assume the state that causes the effect but that both are equally needed to form a greater closure.

In language, we assume a subject can be a 'noun' but this 'noun' is equally replaced by whole sentences. Predicates by themselves do not mean anything and are considered incomplete without a subject (unless the context of one is implied). If someone commands, "Go now!", this has the implied subject, the person whom this person speaking is referring to: "(You) go now."

Verbs can be closed too but then become 'gerands'. So even presuming an infinity of things can only be understood by enclosing it under a universally fixed finite concept. Things like 'time' or 'infinity' lack meaning without closure or completeness, even if simply modeled as such.

[Obvious Leo]

Physics gives us structure, as equations, because that’s all it can do, but it’s the non-structured part that we’re after, and so philosophy/logic is our best chance for that. Using our mental/experiential doesn’t tell us of the non-mental/non-experiential either, but only mental messages at large which could result from any kind of implementation/messenger, and while they give us the notion of a basic ordering of events, they also paint phenomena on the noumena, granting a useful map, but just a map nevertheless.

How Kant's simple truths have been so blatantly ignored by physics is a question for the science historians of the future to answer but to me what you say here is nothing more than a simple statement of the bloody obvious, PU. A Platonist cannot see this but our mental/ experiential world is the only world we've got with which to comprehend our realities. How we set about this task is not something which is imposed on us from outwith our own minds because our minds are artefacts solely of our own creation. This is what the great Persians meant when they said that knowledge can be learned but knowledge can never be taught. In the evolution of the mind we are exposed to a gazillion selection factors but it is WE who are the selectORS of these factors and it is we who must compile these factors into a coherent map of reality. There is an impenetrable divide between us and the real world we're mapping but this doesn't mean that an objectively real world doesn't exist. It merely means that Plato's eternal Forms are a crock of shit and that the Noumenon is formless. It is we that give form and structure to the self-causal universe and it is we who have evolved the minds to create models of the self-organising patterns we observe. To a cognitive neuroscientist this proposition is a slam dunk. Neuroscience is a science in its infancy but already much is known about some of the various neural mechanisms which are involved in this mapping process, including how we spatialise our perceptions within a 3D co-ordinate system. I can't for the life of me see how physics can so blatantly ignore such simple facts and then stubbornly try and defend the ontological status of models which are purely epistemic in their nature. No philosopher in history has spoken on behalf of the physicality of a mathematical co-ordinate system and yet we are expected to accept this as an a priori truth, despite the fact that doing so inescapably leads to models of the universe which make no fucking sense.

This is doing my head in, PU, and I'm losing the calm state of equilibrium which an examined mind instinctively seeks. What the hell is the world coming to?

[cladking]

A Platonist cannot see this but our mental/ experiential world is the only world we've got with which to comprehend our realities. How we set about this task is not something which is imposed on us from outwith our own minds because our minds are artefacts solely of our own creation. This is what the great Persians meant when they said that knowledge can be learned but knowledge can never be taught. In the evolution of the mind we are exposed to a gazillion selection factors but it is WE who are the selectORS of these factors and it is we who must compile these factors into a coherent map of reality. There is an impenetrable divide between us and the real world we're mapping but this doesn't mean that an objectively real world doesn't exist.

This is doing my head in, PU, and I'm losing the calm state of equilibrium which an examined mind instinctively seeks. What the hell is the world coming to?

The impenetrable divide between ourselves and reality is language. We take a perspective from outside reality and from a distance to what we observe then we shouldn't be surprised that we need words and language to express what we see. We shouldn't be surprised that we can't be taught but must learn. It is the first corrolary and the cause of this simple truism (we can't be taught) that is the source of the frustration. Since we can't communicate our observations due to the lack of a logical framework (other than mathematics) and the perspective of language we are all doomed to this frustration.

We each select those things in which we believe and it's usually based principally on what we want to believe. This is a very poor selection basis so most individuals have myriad beliefs that are not conducive to learning or understanding. It's ironic that the level of discourse here seems very good and the effectiveness of communication is excellent. A lot of the concepts we're all trying to communicate are somewhat complex and the means by which we arrived at them extremely diverse.

That the real world exists is bloody obvious but in order to see this people must be willing to accept the staggering complexity that makes the concept of "infinity" seem insignificant. We must be willing to "think inside the box" of reality. It is very difficult or impossible for many scientists to think in terms that don't involve their models and the logic which organizes them.

Truth to tell I think you're doing pretty well here and somewhat better than I've ever managed on these subjects. Your expectations are quite high. Mine were lowered by a long series of experiences that highlight the same problems. I once thought I had written a beautiful 61 step proof that anything divided by zero was infinity. I couldn't find anyone among my teachers to even give it a second look. No one even cared. Eventually I discovered I had assumed the conclusion on about the 45th step. This is essentially the way "everyone" operates; they assume the conclusion and then spend the rest of their lives becoming the assumption. My teachers were living embodiments of the belief that if a number divided by zero was infinity it wouldn't be proven by a boy. They had jobs to do and beliefs to believe and no time for students.

My point is that we are not doomed to this because it is an artefact of language. To mitigate the problem it need merely be recognized. We need merely accept a few simple defintions and for everyone other than scientists the very first one needs to be "reality".

[surreptitious57]

There is an impenetrable divide between us and the real world we are mapping but this does not mean that an objectively real world does not exist

Well we ourselves are part of the real [ or observed ] world. And the divide is in our inability to completely understand it despite our best effort
The multiplicity of factors that allowed us to evolve and develop our cognitive ability were not pre ordained. From a probability perspective the odds on our being here are incredibly infinitesimal because of the Fine Tuning Argument of physics. And if we cannot understand all there is it is not to be wondered why as our existence was not a given in the first place. We act as if it is our absolute right to know everything when it is not

[Obvious Leo]

From a probability perspective the odds on our being here are incredibly infinitesimal because of the Fine Tuning Argument of physics.

The Goldilocks argument proceeds from the assumption that the events of the universe are mandated according to a suite of laws and this assumption proceeds from the assumption that the universe had a beginning. If we proceed from the alternative assumption, i.e. that the universe is eternal, then no such suite of laws is either necessary or possible. An eternal universe is self-causal and a self-causal universe is beholden to only the meta-law of causality, the mechanism for which is simply the intrinsic asymmetry between gravity and time at the Planck scale. This is a point I have made several times in this thread as well as in several others, as well as in my blog.

This notion of a meta-law, from which all of our man-made epistemic laws derive, is by no means a figment of my own creation. Already it is well known that the so-called "laws of physics" are not laws at all but merely useful approximations. They are highly accurate approximations, but approximations nevertheless, which means that the mathematical constants, which have been inserted by hand from observation into these "laws" in order to make these approximations accurate, must indeed be approximations themselves. This is the stance taken by most theorists in the field of foundational physics. The consensus is that a true cosmological model to underpin and unify the current models will explain the origin of these "laws" and "constants", but the main point I'm making in my philosophy is that these "laws" and "constants" are a property of the way the observer is modelling the universe rather than a property of the universe itself.

This is a position which any Kantian philosopher would take, and one which most of the modern generation of theorists would embrace, but it is a position which cannot be accommodated within the Platonist spacetime paradigm which currently informs all of physics. The notion of a law-mandated reality is intrinsic to the paradigm because of the eternalism implied by the Minkowski "block" modelling.

[Hobbes' Choice]

No. The evidence which supports the BB is overwhelming under either the created universe or the eternal universe paradigms. However the way in which this evidence is interpreted is vastly different. For instance, instead of expanding our universe is merely aging, just like the rest of us. .

May I take it that the observance of red shift is nothing more than light getting old?
How come only light that is far away is old and local light is young?

[surreptitious57]

How come only light that is far away is old and local light is young

This question is nonsensical because although a photon travels through time it does not actually experience time
So the notions of young and old do not apply. Also if an observer was at the other end of a point of light that you
regarded as old they would regard it as young. This is nonsensical too. So for these two reasons you can not apply
subjective concepts of time to light since from the frame of reference of a photon such concepts just do not exist

[Obvious Leo]

No. The evidence which supports the BB is overwhelming under either the created universe or the eternal universe paradigms. However the way in which this evidence is interpreted is vastly different. For instance, instead of expanding our universe is merely aging, just like the rest of us. .

May I take it that the observance of red shift is nothing more than light getting old?
How come only light that is far away is old and local light is young?

The red-shifting of the light is indeed a property of cosmological objects moving away from us, just as physics claims, but they are moving away from us in time and not in space. This is easily explained. Not all galaxies are moving away from each other but let's take the case of two widely separated ones which are currently observed to be doing so. We already know from GR that time passes more quickly between galaxies than it does within them because the galaxies are gravitationally bound. My model equates the speed of light with the speed at which time passes so when time passes more quickly between two objects than it does within them the observer will observe this as red-shifted light. This applies just as much to local light as it does to distant light but the red-shifting is so minute that science has no instruments to detect it. For instance the light from a comet hurtling towards us will be blue-shifted whereas one that is moving away will be red-shifted. In fact even the light which reaches us from our own moon must be ever-so-slightly red-shifted because time passes more quickly between the earth and the moon than it does on either body. This explains why the earth appears to be moving away from the moon at a rate of 4cm per year, something it has been doing for the last 4 billion years. If you wish to think of this as the space between the earth and the moon expanding you are free to do so but then you must also think of the space between the comet and the earth as either expanding or contracting depending on whether it's moving towards us or away from us. You must also think of the space between yourself and a car driving away from you as expanding but personally I reckon this is a cockamamie way of thinking the world.

The vexing notion of the "expanding" space is possibly one of the most difficult concepts in physics for a layman to grasp because physics speaks in the language of mathematics and the expanding space is simply a mathematical metaphor for the inconstant speed at which time passes and thus the speed at which light moves. The same can be said of the "curved" space held to be responsible for the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. In fact gravitational lensing is no more complicated a phenomenon than is simple light refraction, the well known bent-stick-in-the-water illusion that we all recall from our high school days. This observer effect is simply a consequence of the fact that the speed of light in the medium of water is slower than the speed of light in the medium of the air above it. Although a "gravitational field" cannot be sensibly described as a medium the effect on the observer is exactly the same as if it were. When a beam light from a distant galaxy is seen to be bent by its passage through an intervening galaxy this is simply because, relative to the observer, the light has slowed down.

Much of this confusion is due a misunderstanding about the so-called "constant" speed of light. The speed of light is not a constant and no physicist would make such a ludicrous claim. What physics actually states is that the speed of light is OBSERVED TO BE A CONSTANT in the referential frame of the observer. The speed of light on the earth is the same as the speed of light in a black hole but this is as measured on the locally placed clock which is doing the measuring. The clock in the black hole is ticking many orders of magnitude more slowly than is the clock on the earth so, as you can see, the speed of light and the speed at which time passes are simply two different ways of expressing the same thing. Trust me, physics is nowhere near as complicated as many would have us believe and if the geeks stopped attributing physicality to its mathematical co-ordinate system then all this is stuff that a child could understand.

[Obvious Leo]

How come only light that is far away is old and local light is young

This question is nonsensical because although a photon travels through time it does not actually experience time
So the notions of young and old do not apply. Also if an observer was at the other end of a point of light that you
regarded as old they would regard it as young. This is nonsensical too. So for these two reasons you can not apply
subjective concepts of time to light since from the frame of reference of a photon such concepts just do not exist

The question is not nonsensical but your response to it reflects your confusion about what the spacetime paradigm is actually claiming. According to the Minkowski block model and the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction translation, in the referential frame of a photon time dilates to infinity and space contracts to zero, which means that in the referential frame of a photon the universe does not exist. If you're looking for nonsense then you won't do much better than that, or so one might think. However,the nonsense thrown up by spacetime is a gift which keeps on giving and here's one which should have them rolling in the aisles hooting in derision. If you could build a spaceship fast enough to travel just the tiniest fraction slower than the speed of light then you'd be able to traverse the entire universe within a single human lifetime and then come back to find that our own Milky Way galaxy had died of old age. This is the sort of bullshit that you've got to be willing to buy when you assume that your map is synonymous with your territory.

[Obvious Leo]

Newton ignored the fact that the speed of light was finite, even though this fact was known to him, and thus he modelled gravity in terms of instantaneous action-at-a-distance. He knew that this was cheating but he figured that somebody would come along later and sort this problem out. Einstein had a crack at it, and there's no question that his refinement was an improvement on Newton's effort, because he certainly took the finite speed of light into his considerations. However Albert knew bloody well that he hadn't solved Newton's problem at all, and he never once claimed to have done so, because all he'd done was replace Newton's instantaneous action-at-a-distance with his own speed-of-light action at a distance. The action-at-a-distance assumptions of gravitational motion remained unaffected and they continue to remain unaffected in the spacetime paradigm of the present day. That's what all the fuss is about.

Unfortunately what Einstein was never able to grasp is that his second relativity model, GR, was a disproof of his first, SR. This is the elephant in the room of physics, the unification model hidden in plain sight. SR is nowadays commonly understood as a special case of GR in the so-called "flat space", which is a space where gravity is absent. However GR shows that no such place actually exists in the real and physical universe, a fact which even Newton was aware of. Thus if we decide to stick with Einstein's metaphor of the curved space then we are forced to the conclusion that space is curved all the way down to the Planck scale. To suggest that a curved space can become miraculously flat at some arbitrary "gravitational field strength" is a logic claim which no physicist would dare to make, and indeed none of them do. However what this means is that SR is not a model of a physically real world but the model of a mathematical abstraction, a world without gravity. This has profound consequences for QM because QM is modelled exclusively in the flat space of SR and NOT in the curved space of GR. Thus the Standard Model is a gravity-less model. That's what all the fuss is about. If QM is modelled on a mathematical abstraction then the SM must likewise be a model of a mathematical abstraction and not a model of a physically real world. QM and GR are incompatible by their very definition.

I have reluctantly used the spatial metaphors of the spacetime model to illustrate the nature of the problem but the real problem is that these metaphors are purely mathematical metaphors and that the so-called "curved space" of GR is simply an expression of the inversely logarithmic nature of the relationship which obtains between gravity and the speed of passing time. When viewed in this light we have a far more coherent narrative within which to explain our observations. We can say that the world of the observer is a world of space and time and that it is this world which our mathematical models are modelling. However underpinning this world is the real world and the real world is a world of gravity and time, where reality is continually coming into existence at the speed of light.

This interpretation of exactly the same evidence is so simple, elegant, and beautiful that it simply cannot be false. However I understand and respect the conditions which science imposes as a routine demand on any theory which is to be accepted as a legitimate scientific hypothesis. Such a theory must yield a testable prediction which differs from that offered by the theory which it seeks to replace, as well as an explanation as to why this prediction should differ. It must then be possible to test this prediction in an unambiguous and repeatable experiment which allows the experimenter to compare his result against the two competing predictions of this result. This is what the philosophy of the bloody obvious can deliver.

[surreptitious57]

Newton ignored the fact that the speed of light was finite even though this fact was known to him and thus he modelled gravity in terms of instantaneous action at a distance. He knew this was cheating but he figured that somebody would come along later and sort this problem

In his day it was a given that time was eternal and absolute although it was regarded too as a separate dimension in its own right rather than as a component of spacetime in which space and time were inextricably linked. The idea of time being separate was a powerful one since it remained unchallenged for over two centuries. But it was not Einstein that originally worked on relativity but Poincare. Someone whose name is not known at all outside of physics, He abandoned it because he apparently could not comprehend the metaphysical implications of something so simple yet ground breaking. Einstein though did not become world famous as soon as he had discovered both Special and General Relativity. Because he had to wait for four more years till 1919 when G R correctly predicted the irregular orbit of Mercury. Now it was said at the time that there were just three people in the world who understood it. They would have been Einstein and his old physics teacher Minkowski and the astronomer Eddington who photographed the orbit of Mercury. Einstein had to wait another there years until 1922 before getting the Nobel Prize which was actually for the photoelectric effect not S R or G R that he is most famously known for. And he was actually up for nomination the year before but none of his discoveries were considered worthy by the Nobel Committee unbelievable as that may now sound. And S R and G R were rejected since the Nobel Committee did not understand them so complex were they. Einstein also famously ended up working as a tax clerk after failing to secure tenured position in a university. It was there that he formulated S R one of the four ground breaking papers he published during that amazing year of 1905