Measuring Existence

[Obvious Leo]

Energy is information.

[JSS]

Do you know the mechanism that allows energy to affect?

My background is philosophy. I wouldn't claim to know anything other than that 2+2=4, all bachelors are unmarried men and as Descartes pointed out, there are phenomena.

What is energy?

Basically the amount of damage something will do if it hits you, according to Newton, or how bonkers it will go if it unravels, as per Einstein. In essence how tightly wound up big bang stuff is. How big a lump it is and how fast it's moving.

In other words, energy is that stuff that affects you (or who/whatever).
And "how it works" is that it causes affect. Physics gives no explanation.
Philosophically, "cause", "affect", "energy", and the physical universe are all the same thing.
But don't tell the physicists. They want to be the ones to figure it out.

That's what I've been trying to tell you.

I haven't disagreed with you (about that).
The question is, how are we going to work out those nuance differences?

Energy is information.

...such as THAT.

[uwot]

..."how it works" is that it causes affect. Physics gives no explanation.

"it causes affect" is no explanation either. How does it do that?

Philosophically, "cause", "affect", "energy", and the physical universe are all the same thing.

That's stretching it in my philosophical book. What I'm saying is that there (probably) is a physical universe. It is apparently made of big bang stuff, and it is the variation in density, the distortions and motion in that stuff that mediates cause/affect and is energy.

But don't tell the physicists. They want to be the ones to figure it out.

Well, in the sense of energy (cause, affect) being interchangeable with matter, Einstein already has. In fact he went even further:

We may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an aether.1

Aether is not a word that is used a lot by physicists Robert Laughlin, a physicist who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize, explains:

It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum…The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.2

I had to confess to Leo that, fundamentally, I am an aether theorist, but as Laughlin points out, there is a stigma attached to that. There are a lot of total fruitloops out there who call themselves aether theorists. Could be I'm a fruitloop too, but at least I have a couple of Nobel Prize winners who agree with me.
1. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk ... ether.html
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

[JSS]

..."how it works" is that it causes affect. Physics gives no explanation.

"it causes affect" is no explanation either. How does it do that?

When two affects enter the same point in space, they add their affects. What else is there to say? How do they add? They add the same way anything adds, they both affect the same spot at the same time, thus they "add". And that adding causes delays which eventually become, "emerge as", the mass and inertia.

Could be I'm a fruitloop too, but at least I have a couple of Nobel Prize winners who agree with me.

That "aether stuff" is Affectance.


... bet that one surprised you, huh.

[uwot]

When two affects enter the same point in space, they add their affects. What else is there to say?

Well, you could say how they affect.

How do they add? They add the same way anything adds, they both affect the same spot at the same time, thus they "add".

Do you mean like waves?

And that adding causes delays which eventually become, "emerge as", the mass and inertia.

By magic?

Could be I'm a fruitloop too, but at least I have a couple of Nobel Prize winners who agree with me.

That "aether stuff" is Affectance.


... bet that one surprised you, huh.

Not really. Like I said, there's a lot of fruitloops that call themselves aether theorists. Welcome to the club.

[JSS]

When two affects enter the same point in space, they add their affects. What else is there to say?

Well, you could say how they affect.

They merely change the existing affect that was already there (add to it or subtract from it). That is ALL that the entire universe is made of .. "affects upon affects". That is what that aether like, "BB stuff" is. It is only made of the changing of the ability to change.

That is what I have been talking about when it comes to how you are misconceiving the make of the universe. There is no solid "things" involved at all. That "stuff" is merely the changing of the ability to change. It's funky weird, but it is an avoidable reality.

How do they add? They add the same way anything adds, they both affect the same spot at the same time, thus they "add".

Do you mean like waves?

Waves, pulses, spikes... yeah .. but ultra-minuscule, far, far less than we could ever directly measure, "infinitesimal chaotic waves".

And that adding causes delays which eventually become, "emerge as", the mass and inertia.

By magic?

No, by necessity.
Two things adding cannot change from their former value to the new value in zero time. If they could, that would be a discontinuity and that point would have to have two values at the same moment = violation of identity. The new value must be approached. And that takes time. Actually that IS "time".

And that is also what sets the speed of light. An affect wave must increase each point in space to a new value before it can affect the next point and the next and next. The delay in setting each infinitesimal point is what prevents any affect from being able to propagate instantaneously (which would cause the universe to not exist). Light, or affectance, raises each point at an infinite rate. But to propagate, it has to do that an infinity of times merely to get from point A to point B. So when you have something taking only one infinitesimal of time but having to do that an infinite number of times, you have infinity * infinitesimal = finite. That is why light propagates at a finite speed.

And then that speed is what causes everything else to be the size that it is. From those sizes, we measure that light is propagating at such-n-such meters per second.

Like I said, there's a lot of fruitloops that call themselves aether theorists. Welcome to the club.

Well, I don't really accept "aether", because it was improperly defined as something that isn't there. What they were thinking of as "aether" is not what is out there. Affectance is "aether-like" but I can prove that "affectance" is real.

[uwot]

That is ALL that the entire universe is made of .. "affects upon affects". That is what that aether like, "BB stuff" is. It is only made of the changing of the ability to change.

Well, call me crazy, but I think that stuff is actually stuff.

[JSS]

That is ALL that the entire universe is made of .. "affects upon affects". That is what that aether like, "BB stuff" is. It is only made of the changing of the ability to change.

Well, call me crazy, but I think that stuff is actually stuff.

I didn't say that it wasn't. I am talking about what all "stuff" is made of.

[uwot]

I am talking about what all "stuff" is made of.

It's over JSS. God knows I tried to make it work, I know you did too, but sometimes you just have to let go and accept that it wasn't meant to be. I don't think there's any point attributing blame, you think stuff is made of something, I think stuff is just stuff. We can try to change each other, but we both know that will just lead to recrimination and bitterness. It's better that we end it this way.
Or we can carry on arguing, but there's no point trying to pretend that our differences are nuanced. You're a rationalist, I'm an empiricist. You think you know. I know I think.
Either's good by me.

[Obvious Leo]

In other words, energy is that stuff that affects you (or who/whatever).

At the fundamental scale of reality energy is all there is, as Einstein demonstrated with E=mcc. All matter must therefore be defined as EMERGENT and the properties of emergent entities are specified by the observer of them. Ship of Theseus.

And "how it works" is that it causes affect. Physics gives no explanation.

Physics was never designed to offer explanations because physics can only model effects, not causes.

Philosophically, "cause", "affect", "energy", and the physical universe are all the same thing.

YES.

But don't tell the physicists. They want to be the ones to figure it out.

They'll never figure it out in a million years with their bullshit spacetime narrative. They need to go back to metaphysical first principles and understand what's fundamentally real and what's only emergently real.

Obvious Leo wrote:
That's what I've been trying to tell you.


I haven't disagreed with you (about that).
The question is, how are we going to work out those nuance differences?


Obvious Leo wrote:
Energy is information.


...such as THAT. Image

There is much to like about your affectance idea but it can never be a mechanical model without a smallest possible physical "bit". The philosophy of the quantum is unshakable on both physical and metaphysical grounds and your subatomic particles CANNOT POSSIBLY be quantum entities unless the universe is predicated on a transcendent cause, a la Plato.

That's stretching it in my philosophical book. What I'm saying is that there (probably) is a physical universe. It is apparently made of big bang stuff, and it is the variation in density, the distortions and motion in that stuff that mediates cause/affect and is energy.

YES. The physical universe which we observe is nothing more than an energy/information density map which is changing at the speed of light. However what brings this universe to life is the fact that this speed is the most inconstant speed in the universe, being variable all the way down to the Planck scale because of gravity.

Well, in the sense of energy (cause, affect) being interchangeable with matter, Einstein already has. In fact he went even further:

Einstein wrote:
We may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an aether.1

Unfortunately Einstein is famous for saying so many different things that he often appears to contradict himself. However if you read him closely you'll see that the aether he refers to is quite explicitly defined as a "geometric aether" and NOT a physical aether capable of performing physical work. The distinction is not a trivial one because it was for this reason that Einstein quite unambiguously stated that spacetime should never be regarded as physically real but only as a mathematical representation of the physically real.

Could be I'm a fruitloop

"Conceptually challenged", would be a kinder turn of phrase, uwot, but you show promising indications that the bloody obvious might lie within your grasp.

When two affects enter the same point in space, they add their affects.

Try it without the space and it'll make sense.

JSS wrote:
When two affects enter the same point in space, they add their affects. What else is there to say?


Well, you could say how they affect.

In a fractal time dimension informational quanta act as a simple binary logic gate. Conway's model is the easiest way to understand this visually because you can see how particles can emerge from such a process at the Planck scale.

They merely change the existing affect that was already there (add to it or subtract from it). That is ALL that the entire universe is made of .. "affects upon affects". That is what that aether like, "BB stuff" is. It is only made of the changing of the ability to change.

This is amazingly close to what I'm saying when I speak of reality as a computation and the speed of light as the processing speed of this computation. The important bit to grasp is that this is a computer without a programme because the emergent informational hierarchies are self-generating. The Mandelbrot set models this exquisitely.

That "stuff" is merely the changing of the ability to change. It's funky weird,

Heraclitus will be beaming with self-satisfaction but he would argue against the idea that there's anything weird about. If you like weird nothing beats the dead and alive cat.

Well, call me crazy, but I think that stuff is actually stuff.

You're not crazy at all, mate, but stuff is only stuff because that's how we've mutually agreed to define its emergent properties. There simply is no right way or wrong way to do this, just the way which works best until we find a way which works better. A hundred years from now all of the various particles, waves, fields and forces currently being used in physics will have become quaint historical curiosities. They are nothing more than convenient heuristics with their own built-in use-by date because there's no such thing as "laws of physics", merely the temporary "laws" of physicists. The only law needed to generate a self-causal reality is the meta-law of cause and effect.

[Obvious Leo]

uwot. Regrettably you are wrong on both physical and metaphysical grounds. A quark is only a quark because that's the way the geeks have mutually agreed to codify a particular class of observations in their interrogation of the subatomic world. The "quarkness" of the quark is defined by the emergent properties of the quark and these emergent properties can only be defined within a pre-determined narrative which must first be specified by the observer of these properties. Kant 101.

“(...) Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognising it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object”.

Immanuel Kant. (from the Jasche Lectures on Logic.)

Although Kant observed the honourable German tradition of ensuring that his philosophy was unreadable his meaning in this arresting statement is perfectly clear. "Stuff" has only an epistemic utility but it has no ontological currency. "Stuff" is NOT the ding an sich.

[JSS]

The philosophy of the quantum is unshakable on both physical and metaphysical grounds and your subatomic particles CANNOT POSSIBLY be quantum entities unless the universe is predicated on a transcendent cause, a la Plato.

I would stall you in that debate.

You cannot validly support any quantum theory of existence.

And Affectance Ontology requires no "transcendent beings".

[Obvious Leo]

You cannot validly support any quantum theory of existence.

I can and I have. Furthermore Planck's revelations from his research into black body radiation are too overwhelmingly persuasive to ignore. I note that you've made no attempt to refute the conclusion drawn from this work and that your affectance model consequently has no mechanism. If physical reality is infinitely divisible then you have no physical entity which you could define as "that which is affected", which means you offer no metaphysical improvement on current action at a distance theory.

Note that in a broader sense of the term my own model could also be defined as an affectance model but since I can quantise time, gravity, information and the speed of light equivalently in a no-further-divisible "bit" my model is a mechanical one.

[JSS]

You cannot validly support any quantum theory of existence.

I can and I have. Furthermore Planck's revelations from his research into black body radiation are too overwhelmingly persuasive to ignore.

You haven't with me. And he is not the slightest bit persuasive to me.

I note that you've made no attempt to refute the conclusion drawn from this work

Actually I blew him out of the water with merely one thought:

And speaking of constants, how in the hell do you suppose that anyone could take a few measurements of limited accuracy and then predict and proclaim a constant in the range of 10^-35 (or -31, whatever it is this year) ??

A measurement might be as accurate as 10^-7 at an extreme case. And every calculation done upon that, reduces the accuracy even lower. And yet today you have all of these people accepting the absurd nonsense that Plank calculated a constant based upon measurement down to 10^-35 .. WHAT???

It is nonsense.

and that your affectance model consequently has no mechanism.

It creates/forms it's own "mechanism" (for what you are calling a "mechanism"). You just haven't asked how it does that. It is pretty simple actually and I already explained basically why it works.

If physical reality is infinitely divisible then you have no physical entity which you could define as "that which is affected", which means you offer no metaphysical improvement on current action at a distance theory.

I don't know where you came up with that idea. A wave of affect crosses another wave of affect. Why is there any need for indivisible bits?

Note that in a broader sense of the term my own model could also be defined as an affectance model but since I can quantise time, gravity, information and the speed of light equivalently in a no-further-divisible "bit" my model is a mechanical one.

You can't validly quantize time, even if you could quantize gravity (although you can't do that either).

The real problem is that no matter how absolutely conclusive any argument that I present to you might be, you are not going to change your view. You can, of course, say that at me too, but that doesn't change the problem.

What would it really take for you or uwot to change your mind about anything on this forum?
I seriously doubt that it can be done.

[uwot]

At the fundamental scale of reality energy is all there is, as Einstein demonstrated with E=mcc.

Energy is not 'stuff', it does not exist in its own right, stick a zero where the m is and E=0.

All matter must therefore be defined as EMERGENT and the properties of emergent entities are specified by the observer of them. Ship of Theseus.

Like I said, it is my hypothesis that matter and energy are distortions in big bang stuff; they emerge from it, if you like.

They'll never figure it out in a million years with their bullshit spacetime narrative. They need to go back to metaphysical first principles and understand what's fundamentally real and what's only emergently real.

Those that believe that spacetime dimensions are 'real' will struggle, I suspect, but despite the mindbogglingly implausible string theory, not all physicists believe they are. There simply is no cabal, much less a priesthood.

Unfortunately Einstein is famous for saying so many different things that he often appears to contradict himself. However if you read him closely you'll see that the aether he refers to is quite explicitly defined as a "geometric aether" and NOT a physical aether capable of performing physical work.

Which of Einstein's words should I read closely where he specifically refers to a "geometric aether"?

The distinction is not a trivial one because it was for this reason that Einstein quite unambiguously stated that spacetime should never be regarded as physically real but only as a mathematical representation of the physically real.

So you keep saying, still a citation would be handy so I can see for myself.

If you like weird nothing beats the dead and alive cat.

More physicists believe the many worlds interpretation than Copenhagen, if a poll of 90 gathered for a conference in Cambridge is to be believed. If they are right, there is universe in which the cat is dead and another in which it is alive. In theory there are so many universes that in several of them the cat is actually a tortoise. "Significantly, 50 ticked the box labelled 'none of the above or undecided'." (Manjit Kumar, 'Quantum'. Icon Books, 2009, p358) As I said, there is no priesthood.

You're not crazy at all, mate,

Aw. Not even a little bit?

but stuff is only stuff because that's how we've mutually agreed to define its emergent properties.

Leo, me old mucker, that is pretty well exactly what I'm not saying. By big bang stuff I mean the stuff that properties emerge from.

The only law needed to generate a self-causal reality is the meta-law of cause and effect.

Effect on what?