Philosophy Now Forum

Hobbes' Choice wrote: But how likely is it that the total observable Universe is equal to the total universe?

In fact the total observable universe is almost but not quite the total universe but it's as much as we're ever going to be able to observe, even in principle. The fact that this is a true statement is easily demonstrated.

The furthest back in time that our most sophisticated telescopes can see is a region called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This region is sometimes called the cosmic egg and there are some truly beautiful pictures of it all over the internet. It's a picture which has been faked up using some pretty fancy software because the light from this far back in our past is so red-shifted that they had to cheat a bit to make the image but there's no reason to doubt that they've got it right and this is roughly what the entire universe would have looked like 380,000 years after the big bang. That is, of course, assuming that you're god looking at the universe from the outside looking in. From the inside looking out there's something seriously wrong with this picture because we're not in it and yet one of the little dots in the CMB image is our own Milky Way galaxy. How we can both be in the Milky Way galaxy making our observation as well as observing the Milky Way galaxy from outside it is a little mind-fuck which I'll let you figure out for yourself.

As I said, it will never be possible to see any further back in time than this because before this time the universe was a place of Stygian high-energy darkness with no light in it of any wavelength. The physics of all this is fiendishly complex, and luckily irrelevant to the story, but the point is that IF we could see through this region then we have to look only 380,000 years further back in time from the CMB to be able to observe the very Big Bang itself.
What do you reckon we'd see in this hypothetical scenario? Do you reckon we'd see the universe suddenly bursting into existence from a zero-volume point? If you answer yes to this question you get an F for logic and go to the bottom of the class because what you'll see is the exact opposite. The observer observes his world by looking BACKWARDS down the arrow of time. What you will in fact see is the universe vanishing back into a zero-volume point and it'll take a hell of a lot longer than 380,000 years to do it. The closer it approaches to the point the exponentially slower the proper time of the universe will be relative to our own because if there's one universal truth in the universe it's this one.

You don't fuck with gravity.

Scott Mayers wrote:1) You clearly don't count space as meaning anything. So my question from here is how you interpret expansion itself? If expansion to collapse means anything but space is not anything, why are you basing your theory on the very expansion of space you don't believe in?

This universe is the obverse of the spacetime universe. In spacetime space is assumed to be the property of the universe and time the property of the observer but in this model the opposite is the case. Time becomes the property of the universe and space the property of the observer. Proving this is childishly simple. However it becomes linguistically cumbersome to completely avoid using the metaphorical language of mathematical physics altogether, although you'll never hear me speak of an expanding universe. In my model the universe is merely aging like the rest of us and this explanation is perfectly sufficient to the evidence.

Scott Mayers wrote:2) If a fixed quantity of matter exists, why is this quantity special? That is, why is their X quantity of matter but not X + 1 or X - 1 etc.?

The people of Hiroshima discovered that no fixed quantity of matter exists and that matter is just energy which has been configured in a particular way.

Scott Mayers wrote:3) In your 'crunch', is there any space left?

With all due respect, Scott, this is a rather dumb question to put to a bloke offering a model of a spaceless universe.

Scott Mayers wrote:
4) A singularity is inferred from the expansion of space to which I'm not sure you accept. If you do, do you think that this implies that space has an edge? I ask because I'm not sure if you understand how the singularity was inferred. To the scientists, they perceived space as infinite except at the singularity. This is because for any arbitrary small amount of spacial expansion, it goes from no space to an infinite amount instantly. Do you accept this interpretation?

See above.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Scott Mayers wrote:1) You clearly don't count space as meaning anything. So my question from here is how you interpret expansion itself? If expansion to collapse means anything but space is not anything, why are you basing your theory on the very expansion of space you don't believe in?

This universe is the obverse of the spacetime universe. In spacetime space is assumed to be the property of the universe and time the property of the observer but in this model the opposite is the case. Time becomes the property of the universe and space the property of the observer. Proving this is childishly simple. However it becomes linguistically cumbersome to completely avoid using the metaphorical language of mathematical physics altogether, although you'll never hear me speak of an expanding universe. In my model the universe is merely aging like the rest of us and this explanation is perfectly sufficient to the evidence.

I haven't a clue what you are interpreting about spacetime here. Spacetime from what I understand it is the fact that expansion of space and time are one and the same. I don't know what you are meaning by interpreting nature via the observer and nature itself? Either you explain things by the observer completely or by the 'ideal' observer of nature itself. You cannot mix the two without grave confusion. A sentence, for instance, initiates with a subject (that indicates the 'observer') and explains what occurs through the predicate via some verb to the external objective world.

"Leo walks to the store."

"Leo" is the subject. "walks to the store" is the predicate. "walks" is the action with respect to the observer. and "to the store" is the object or goal of the action described by the perspective of the subject.

In other words, the sentence contains consistent factors from the perspective of the subject. You can begin with a subject that relates to nature but then the perspective of the sentence relates to that subject only. For instance,

"The universe has space that expands." To science, spacial expansion IS the addition of spacial content AND time because this implies change from one state (size) to another which Einstein simply equated.

I'm not sure how you interpret what 'time' is without anything to measure this change? "time" is a verb. Does walking exist without an entity that can walk? To Einstein, since both change and states are required just as every sentence requires at least one noun and one verb, both space and time act as a product of the same thing.

Scott Mayers wrote:2) If a fixed quantity of matter exists, why is this quantity special? That is, why is their X quantity of matter but not X + 1 or X - 1 etc.?

The people of Hiroshima discovered that no fixed quantity of matter exists and that matter is just energy which has been configured in a particular way.

I don't care what you prefer to think of matter as. I equate matter with energy too. But my question is if this is a fixed quantity as you assert, what does it mean to assert this without wondering why nature would fix this amount? Why is there not an infinite amount of matter/energy too, for instance?

Scott Mayers wrote:3) In your 'crunch', is there any space left?

With all due respect, Scott, this is a rather dumb question to put to a bloke offering a model of a spaceless universe.

If space does not exist, what does matter 'occupy'? If it isn't something that occupies nor has space to define distance, this reduces to something virtual like the very 'forms' you dislike of Plato. It is a software 'program' that lacks a machine to operate on. I'm completely confused by your explanation.

Scott Mayers wrote:
4) A singularity is inferred from the expansion of space to which I'm not sure you accept. If you do, do you think that this implies that space has an edge? I ask because I'm not sure if you understand how the singularity was inferred. To the scientists, they perceived space as infinite except at the singularity. This is because for any arbitrary small amount of spacial expansion, it goes from no space to an infinite amount instantly. Do you accept this interpretation?

See above.

Your 'above' doesn't answer this. The 13.8 billion years is inferred by premises beginning in asserting a given distance in space to the nearest star through parallax. Then the measured shift infers the velocity of it moving away at this initial distance. Then they interpret what is 'twice' the distance and notice that the speed of those stars are moving at twice the velocity. How you 'believe' the validity of a fixed past determined by assuming the reality of space yet not accept expansion is not understood by me here. ??

Scott Mayers wrote: Why is there not an infinite amount of matter/energy too, for instance?

This is the sort of question which simply makes no sense to me. Why doesn't a dog have six legs? Why is there something rather than nothing?
Because if our auntie had balls she'd be your uncle. Trying to derive meaning from a counter-factual event strikes me as the pinnacle of absurdity.

Scott Mayers wrote:But my question is if this is a fixed quantity as you assert, what does it mean to assert this without wondering why nature would fix this amount?

If you wish to mount an argument in refutation of the first law of thermodynamics you can count me out. I'm perfectly satisfied that the universe is everything that exists and if you wish to claim otherwise then the burden of proof lies with you. Good luck with that because it can't be done.

Scott Mayers wrote:If space does not exist, what does matter 'occupy'? If it isn't something that occupies nor has space to define distance, this reduces to something virtual like the very 'forms' you dislike of Plato. It is a software 'program' that lacks a machine to operate on. I'm completely confused by your explanation.

I'll not deny that a physical reality that has extension in time alone is no conceptual bargain but you soon get used to it. Nowadays I'm simply unable to think the world in any other way and when I recall how I used to think about space and time I wonder how my mind could ever have worked like that. Why does reality need a background to enact itself upon, other than for the convenience of the observer? If nobody's observing it who gives a fuck except Newton who was modelling the mind of god? Don't forget that in the absence of the observer in spacetime physics nothing at all even exists so my little conceptual hurdle should be a piece of cake. At least the moon still exists whether somebody is watching it or not, its just that the space between the observer and the moon doesn't exist unless somebody is observing it because the space is the property of the observer. The observer is spatialising time, just as Minkowski did with SR and I've made this point so often that I simply refuse to make it again. It's too fucking obvious to have to keep saying it. Don't forget that all the paradox problems in physics are about the problem of the observer and you won't find a physicist who'll say otherwise. Furthermore that space is not physical is by no means a novel proposition in philosophy and that the 3D space of our observed world is nothing more than a construct of our consciousness is a simple statement of the bloody obvious to a cognitive neuroscientist. None of this is as weird as you seem to think, Scott, but if you like your own story better then have it. For no extra charge you will have a cat which is simultaneously dead and alive whether you like it or not. The cat unequivocally goes with the spacetime story as does the chance that you could kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence. Do you regard these problems as a trivial inconvenience?

Scott Mayers wrote:I'm completely confused by your explanation.

I noticed. I'll bet you still haven't figured the Monty Hall puzzle out either. You have to carefully read what people are saying and then THINK about it.

Scott Mayers wrote:Your 'above' doesn't answer this. The 13.8 billion years is inferred by premises beginning in asserting a given distance in space to the nearest star through parallax. Then the measured shift infers the velocity of it moving away at this initial distance. Then they interpret what is 'twice' the distance and notice that the speed of those stars are moving at twice the velocity. How you 'believe' the validity of a fixed past determined by assuming the reality of space yet not accept expansion is not understood by me here. ??

You'll have to rephrase this question because I can't make nor tail of what you're asking of me.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Scott Mayers wrote: Why is there not an infinite amount of matter/energy too, for instance?

This is the sort of question which simply makes no sense to me. Why doesn't a dog have six legs? Why is there something rather than nothing?
Because if our auntie had balls she'd be your uncle. Trying to derive meaning from a counter-factual event strikes me as the pinnacle of absurdity.

If a fixed quantity existed and had no reason, then either there would be something 'special' about this number to nature. Perhaps some 'god' liked this amount, right? Now, you don't believe in other worlds like I do. For a multversed world, those who DO accept a fixed quantity, they justly infer multiple places (other worlds) to account for this. Otherwise, it suggests a type of 'favoritism' for that special quantity in only one universe. So this is a burden you have to answer or you still leave it open to a potential 'god' to exist who favors such a quantity.

Scott Mayers wrote:But my question is if this is a fixed quantity as you assert, what does it mean to assert this without wondering why nature would fix this amount?

If you wish to mount an argument in refutation of the first law of thermodynamics you can count me out. I'm perfectly satisfied that the universe is everything that exists and if you wish to claim otherwise then the burden of proof lies with you. Good luck with that because it can't be done.

How is the laws of thermodynamics here relevant at this stage? These apply only where there already IS matter and energy. You have to explain where this initial matter and energy came from and why if it is less than an infinite or some number greater than zero what magical quantity this could be without multiple places for each possibility to exist removing such privileged status?

Scott Mayers wrote:If space does not exist, what does matter 'occupy'? If it isn't something that occupies nor has space to define distance, this reduces to something virtual like the very 'forms' you dislike of Plato. It is a software 'program' that lacks a machine to operate on. I'm completely confused by your explanation.

I'll not deny that a physical reality that has extension in time alone is no conceptual bargain but you soon get used to it. Nowadays I'm simply unable to think the world in any other way and when I recall how I used to think about space and time I wonder how my mind could ever have worked like that. Why does reality need a background to enact itself upon, other than for the convenience of the observer? If nobody's observing it who gives a fuck except Newton who was modelling the mind of god? Don't forget that in the absence of the observer in spacetime physics nothing at all even exists so my little conceptual hurdle should be a piece of cake. At least the moon still exists whether somebody is watching it or not, its just that the space between the observer and the moon doesn't exist unless somebody is observing it because the space is the property of the observer. The observer is spatialising time, just as Minkowski did with SR and I've made this point so often that I simply refuse to make it again. It's too fucking obvious to have to keep saying it. Don't forget that all the paradox problems in physics are about the problem of the observer and you won't find a physicist who'll say otherwise. Furthermore that space is not physical is by no means a novel proposition in philosophy and that the 3D space of our observed world is nothing more than a construct of our consciousness is a simple statement of the bloody obvious to a cognitive neuroscientist. None of this is as weird as you seem to think, Scott, but if you like your own story better then have it. For no extra charge you will have a cat which is simultaneously dead and alive whether you like it or not. The cat unequivocally goes with the spacetime story as does the chance that you could kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence. Do you regard these problems as a trivial inconvenience?

Wow,...? I can't follow you on this, sorry.

Scott Mayers wrote:I'm completely confused by your explanation.

I noticed. I'll bet you still haven't figured the Monty Hall puzzle out either. You have to carefully read what people are saying and then THINK about it.

Maybe you need to take your own advise here?

Scott Mayers wrote:Your 'above' doesn't answer this. The 13.8 billion years is inferred by premises beginning in asserting a given distance in space to the nearest star through parallax. Then the measured shift infers the velocity of it moving away at this initial distance. Then they interpret what is 'twice' the distance and notice that the speed of those stars are moving at twice the velocity. How you 'believe' the validity of a fixed past determined by assuming the reality of space yet not accept expansion is not understood by me here. ??

You'll have to rephrase this question because I can't make nor tail of what you're asking of me.

You don't question that the universe is measured to be 13.8 Billion years yet this is impossible for you to accept rationally because the premises going into it default necessarily to interpreting space as being real, something you deny.

Scott Mayers wrote: If a fixed quantity existed and had no reason, then either there would be something 'special' about this number to nature. Perhaps some 'god' liked this amount, right? Now, you don't believe in other worlds like I do. For a multversed world, those who DO accept a fixed quantity, they justly infer multiple places (other worlds) to account for this. Otherwise, it suggests a type of 'favoritism' for that special quantity in only one universe. So this is a burden you have to answer or you still leave it open to a potential 'god' to exist who favors such a quantity.

This statement strikes me as so utterly absurd that I don't know how to respond to it.

Scott Mayers wrote: You have to explain where this initial matter and energy came from a

Why do I? You're simply refuting what I say by saying what I refute and I refute your creationist myth that the universe had a beginning. It is what it is because that's what it is and that's all there is to it. Don't you actually know what the word "eternal" means? It means where did it come from is a dumb question.

Scott Mayers wrote: Wow,...? I can't follow you on this, sorry.

I know you can't but I suspect you're not trying very hard because there's nothing hard about it. Are you up to the task of answering some tough questions about the problems with spacetime if I put them to you7? Apart from the cat and the grandfather problems how would you like to have a crack at explaining reverse causation, particle superposition, uncaused events, entanglement, the Sagnac effect, firewall paradox etc etc etc. I could keep going all day but I'm sure you get my drift. Your spacetime story makes no fucking sense.

Scott Mayers wrote: You don't question that the universe is measured to be 13.8 Billion years yet this is impossible for you to accept rationally because the premises going into it default necessarily to interpreting space as being real, something you deny.

This statement is simply false. The age of the universe has nothing whatsoever to do with the physicality of the Cartesian space. You're embarrassing yourself.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote: But how likely is it that the total observable Universe is equal to the total universe?

In fact the total observable universe is almost but not quite the total universe but it's as much as we're ever going to be able to observe, even in principle. The fact that this is a true statement is easily demonstrated. .

All a bit too convenient. The propostion of dark matter and the blank spaces of knowledge in the early universe is a hint that modern cosmology is still just guessing - but guessing badly.

"easily demonstrated" - by a circular argument.

Hobbes' Choice wrote: "easily demonstrated" - by a circular argument.

Why is the argument circular? Do you disagree that the CMB region shown in the "cosmic egg" image represents a region showing the universe as it was only 380,000 years into its existence? This would be a very difficult argument to sustain under any cosmology but I'd be interested to hear your reasoning.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote: "easily demonstrated" - by a circular argument.

Why is the argument circular? Do you disagree that the CMB region shown in the "cosmic egg" image represents a region showing the universe as it was only 380,000 years into its existence? This would be a very difficult argument to sustain under any cosmology but I'd be interested to hear your reasoning.

I doubt very much that a single pretty picture is not capable os sustaining a myriad of other explanations.
Not only is this stuff speculation, but speculation informed and imposed by the current metaphysical assumptions of modern science - probably as much misconceived as the geocentric hypothesis was.

Hobbes' Choice wrote: I doubt very much that a single pretty picture is not capable os sustaining a myriad of other explanations.
Not only is this stuff speculation, but speculation informed and imposed by the current metaphysical assumptions of modern science - probably as much misconceived as the geocentric hypothesis was.

As I said to you in an earlier post, you are late to the conversation and have missed most of it because your above point is the exact point I've been making. I have described the current cosmological hypothesis of the 4D manifold as a misrepresentation of the evidence so spectacular that it makes Ptolemy's minor slip-up look rather banal because I'm insisting that the spatio-temporal extension of the universe is an observer effect and that the real universe has a temporal extension only. However in the main I'm not questioning the evidence because evidence is simply raw data which makes no statement about the system it is defining. It is the narrative within which the evidence is interpreted which I question because in all cases it is the narrative which advances the procedures of human thought and thus advances the goals of science. As a scholar of intellectual history you of all people should regard this as an uncontroversial statement.

The science of physics has wasted the entire 20th century in chasing a phantom and your reference to Ptolemy is apposite. The spacetime paradigm is a mathematical extravaganza of mind-boggling intellectual virtuosity but it is not modelling the real universe. Not for a moment do I question the epistemic utility of the models thus created but I most emphatically question the proposition that they are explanatory models, a claim which incidentally most of the illuminati of physics would be most reluctant to make in any case. A true scientific theory must be both predictive and explanatory and the Minkowski continuum meets only the first of these criteria. My claim is that the reason why spacetime has no explanatory authority is because it is grounded on a false a priori metaphysical premise, namely the physicality of the Cartesian space, and I regard this case as satisfactorily made.

If you wish to explore my arguments further I warmly invite you to do so but I can assure you that I have spent decades in formulating them and have subjected them to the most piercing scrutiny imaginable on various online forums for many years. They simply cannot be lightly dismissed because the explanatory framework which derives from them is one of the most exquisite simplicity and one which eradicates EVERY SINGLE counter-intuitive absurdity and conceptual paradox from modern physics. Furthermore my philosophy doubles as a legitimate scientific hypothesis because it yields a testable prediction which would unambiguously falsify current theory.

I'm currently in discussion on these questions in several threads and I prefer not to repeat myself so if what I'm saying is of interest to you then I suggest you update yourself on the content of these threads. Some of my points are canvassed in the "determinism" thread because essentially my philosophy is an exploration of the nature of determinism. Others are covered in the "where is here?" thread because essentially my philosophy insists that our traditional assumptions about spatial locality are nothing more than constructs of our human consciousness and that these actually represent spatialisations of temporal intervals. Yet others are contained in the "unification of physics" thread because I am able to show that this paradigm shift in conceptualised thinking is the breakthrough that physics has spent a century in quest of in an effort to unify its mutually exclusive epistemic models.

You may also consider reading this.

https://austintorney.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-de-jong/

This is merely a synopsis of a far more substantive work which remains a work in progress. It will be receiving a complete rewrite in due course but this synopsis as it stands is still a reasonably adequate overview of the main thrust of my philosophy and accordingly I recommend it to your interest.

Science/philosophy, unlike Dogma, is never done, and so it goes on.

At its ultimate level, What IS is quantized/discrete, so there can be no more subdivisions or parts to it, thus it’s the finite basis which is unbreakable, and thus unmakable, which shows that What IS has to be ever, with no beginning.

The icing on this cake of something above is that Nothing cannot be, as well as that ‘Nothing’ didn’t happen, if one still wants ‘it’ to be possible, plus that ‘it’ would still ‘be’, and so there wouldn’t be anything now.

These monads, as Leo refers to them, then, must be non composite, and as such they are the only basis from which change/transformation occurs in the ‘now, there being no other source, and no other ‘time’, for What IS as ever has no ‘before’ or ‘outside’. Nor can the monads go away, and, so all that goes on must have root in the basis of their information processing, which grants the ‘it’ of what goes on from ‘bit’, which complexity continues to increase.

The monads are relational, with the ability to influence any other, and so no background is required, and this seems to be the most promising route for the Holy Grail of constructing a theory of quantum gravity.

Earlier quantum gravity attempts used a background and later ones tried to make the equations independent of a given background, but having no background is better, although the price or the glory is the giving up of space as fundamental, the primacy then going to time, with the base constituents doing the work as time goes along, rather than having a pre-built block of all past and future already made rather instantly, somehow, such as in the 5th dimension.

At our level, it is useful for our brains to spatialize the sequence of ‘nows’ so we can better navigate our way through them.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote: I doubt very much that a single pretty picture is not capable os sustaining a myriad of other explanations.
Not only is this stuff speculation, but speculation informed and imposed by the current metaphysical assumptions of modern science - probably as much misconceived as the geocentric hypothesis was.

As I said to you in an earlier post, you are late to the conversation and have missed most of it because your above point is the exact point I've been making. I have described the current cosmological hypothesis of the 4D manifold as a misrepresentation of the evidence so spectacular that it makes Ptolemy's minor slip-up look rather banal because I'm insisting that the spatio-temporal extension of the universe is an observer effect and that the real universe has a temporal extension only. However in the main I'm not questioning the evidence because evidence is simply raw data which makes no statement about the system it is defining. It is the narrative within which the evidence is interpreted which I question because in all cases it is the narrative which advances the procedures of human thought and thus advances the goals of science. As a scholar of intellectual history you of all people should regard this as an uncontroversial statement.

The science of physics has wasted the entire 20th century in chasing a phantom and your reference to Ptolemy is apposite. The spacetime paradigm is a mathematical extravaganza of mind-boggling intellectual virtuosity but it is not modelling the real universe. Not for a moment do I question the epistemic utility of the models thus created but I most emphatically question the proposition that they are explanatory models, a claim which incidentally most of the illuminati of physics would be most reluctant to make in any case. A true scientific theory must be both predictive and explanatory and the Minkowski continuum meets only the first of these criteria. My claim is that the reason why spacetime has no explanatory authority is because it is grounded on a false a priori metaphysical premise, namely the physicality of the Cartesian space, and I regard this case as satisfactorily made.

If you wish to explore my arguments further I warmly invite you to do so but I can assure you that I have spent decades in formulating them and have subjected them to the most piercing scrutiny imaginable on various online forums for many years. They simply cannot be lightly dismissed because the explanatory framework which derives from them is one of the most exquisite simplicity and one which eradicates EVERY SINGLE counter-intuitive absurdity and conceptual paradox from modern physics. Furthermore my philosophy doubles as a legitimate scientific hypothesis because it yields a testable prediction which would unambiguously falsify current theory.

I'm currently in discussion on these questions in several threads and I prefer not to repeat myself so if what I'm saying is of interest to you then I suggest you update yourself on the content of these threads. Some of my points are canvassed in the "determinism" thread because essentially my philosophy is an exploration of the nature of determinism. Others are covered in the "where is here?" thread because essentially my philosophy insists that our traditional assumptions about spatial locality are nothing more than constructs of our human consciousness and that these actually represent spatialisations of temporal intervals. Yet others are contained in the "unification of physics" thread because I am able to show that this paradigm shift in conceptualised thinking is the breakthrough that physics has spent a century in quest of in an effort to unify its mutually exclusive epistemic models.

You may also consider reading this.

https://austintorney.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-de-jong/

This is merely a synopsis of a far more substantive work which remains a work in progress. It will be receiving a complete rewrite in due course but this synopsis as it stands is still a reasonably adequate overview of the main thrust of my philosophy and accordingly I recommend it to your interest.

Well I suppose you have to believe in something.
I prefer not to.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:Well I suppose you have to believe in something.
I prefer not to.

Naturally your conceptual preferences are your own affair but I can assure you that my philosophy is not a treatise of belief. It is a legitimate work of scholarship which has occupied most of my life, a statement whose truth value you will obviously be incapable of evaluating if you don't take the trouble to read it. However I respect you as a diligent scholar, Hobbes, despite your unfortunate manner, and if you have an argument to put in refutation of any of the points I've made I'd be very interested in hearing it. This is the sole reason why I participate in forums such as this because it often forces me to think my way through concepts somewhat differently and therefore express them in a more precise form of language. If you simply wish to refute what I say by saying what I refute then it seems I may have overestimated your level of commitment to the philosophical discourse. However I trust that this will not be an impediment to civility in any future discussions we might have on other topics which are more in tune with your conceptual taste because generally I find your commentary both valuable and stimulating.

PoeticUniverse wrote:These monads, as Leo refers to them, then, must be non composite, and as such they are the only basis from which change/transformation occurs in the ‘now, there being no other source, and no other ‘time’, for What IS as ever has no ‘before’ or ‘outside’. Nor can the monads go away, and, so all that goes on must have root in the basis of their information processing, which grants the ‘it’ of what goes on from ‘bit’, which complexity continues to increase.

This is the central thrust of the process philosophy which I'm espousing. It is fundamentally an information theory where it is the informational "bits" themselves which are the fundamental units of reality and it is the fundamentally asymmetrical relationship between gravity and time at the Planck scale which causes these "bits" to self-organise into embedded hierarchies of informational complexity, as modelled fractally by Conway and Mandelbrot. This is an unstoppable process and this means that our universe will continue to evolve until it can evolve no further, but because the information content of the universe is finite this evolutionary trajectory must have an end and thus when I say "can evolve no further" I intend that this statement be taken literally. It is at this point in our far-distant future that the universe must undergo a phase shift somewhat analogous to flipping over on a Moebius strip and it is at this phase shift that the universe transitions from a minimum entropy entity to a maximum one, an event which physics models as the big crunch/ big bang interface. As you point out the informational "bits' themselves are eternal in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics.

PoeticUniverse wrote:The monads are relational, with the ability to influence any other, and so no background is required, and this seems to be the most promising route for the Holy Grail of constructing a theory of quantum gravity.

As you know I make no bones about it, PU, and I state my claim quite unequivocally that this is the NARRATIVE for quantum gravity. However I'm not a physicist and I don't propose to paddle in the pool of those who are and so the MODEL which will need to be derived from this narrative will be the work of others. This model will require totally different mathematical tools from those which physics currently uses because the universe I describe is self-causal and thus a non-Newtonian construct. Thus this paradigm shift is not only a metaphysical re-alignment of a thought procedure but also a meta-mathematical re-alignment of the way such a procedure can be modelled. I guess it's better late than never but this is exactly what Henri Poincare, a genuine philosopher and polymath as well as the true father of relativity, was working towards before he inconveniently carked it. I know perfectly well what these mathematical tools are because these are the tools of fractal geometry which are used to model every single naturally occurring system in science except for those in physics, which could hardly be a coincidence. Fractal geometry is not for the fainthearted and I claim no proficiency whatsoever in the manipulation of these tools even though I am well schooled in the mathematical philosophy which informs such use. Not so co-incidentally, not long before he died Albert Einstein revealed in an interview with John Kemeny that he was almost certain of the reason why he had never managed to unlock the secret which would unify the models of physics. He stated quite unambiguously that he suspected that all along he had been using the wrong mathematical tools and now it was all too late. He said this somewhat wistfully in a tone of "what might have been" and one can't help but wonder how physics might have evolved had Poincare lived a bit longer and had Einstein used him as his mathematical mentor rather than Hermann Minkowski. Such counterfactual questions are a gratuitous self indulgence in a "shit happens" universe but I have no doubt that our science historians of the future will examine them with a fine-toothed comb. I simply regard it as a tragedy because all this shit should have been sorted out before I was even born and then I would have to have found some other question on which to vent my existential angst. The chilling doctrine of logical positivism which ensnared the minds of the German physicists of this era was virulently contagious and soon spread itself throughout the entire world of physics while the philosophers were asleep at the wheel, a truth poignantly made plain by no less a metaphysical giantess than Doris Day herself. "Que sera sera".

PoeticUniverse wrote:At our level, it is useful for our brains to spatialize the sequence of ‘nows’ so we can better navigate our way through them.

That's rather the irony of the entire saga. None of this will make the slightest bit of difference to the way we live our lives and it'll be a very long time before it makes any difference to the epistemic models of physics. These models will remain viable as astonishingly accurate linear approximations to a non-linear reality and it's difficult to imagine a higher level of precision being needed in the foreseeable future. I doubt that the Standard Model can survive the revolution but the particle geeks have been heartily sick of the Standard Model for decades anyway and I reckon they'll welcome a refreshing change of direction. My own guess is that the science of the physics of the sub-atomic world will merge with the science of computation and that the information nerds are about to get their moment of glory in the scientific spotlight. Already great progress is being made in the field of evolutionary algorithms and neural network processing and once these protocols can be translated into a coherent fractal paradigm I predict rapid advances in physics will quickly follow, as well us remarkable new technologies which could we now barely imagine, not the least of which will be the long-yearned-for "quantum" computer. This will not be a faster-than-light computer, as some of the fraternity of today are pleased to call it, but it will be a light-speed computer and a light-speed computer is a very fast computer indeed. If you don't believe me you need merely take a look at the world around you and imagine how quickly it's changing at the subatomic scale. A light-speed computer is what our universe is.

Obvious Leo;

I think it should be pointed out that Doris Day stood on the shoulders of her mother.

One of the chief benefits of this venue for me as well is to learn better ways of stating the obvious.

What may be needed here is a little ordinal mathematics.

PoeticUniverse wrote:At its ultimate level, What IS is quantized/discrete,

The curse of epistemic physics has always been its damned infinities, a problem which greatly agitated the mind of John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler was a genius of lofty calibre who had a deeply intuitive grasp of what it was that physics was looking for. To Wheeler the word "infinity" was synonymous with the word "mistake" and the equations of all three models of physics were littered with infinities which could only be cancelled out by the judicious use of mathematical constants which had to be calculated from the observational data. Wheeler knew that this was cheating, as did Newton who started the practice with his gravitational constant, G, but he could see no way around this impasse. He could see that physics was creating its own tautologous network of self-confirming hypotheses, which would have sent a shudder of revulsion down the spine of Immanuel Kant. What Wheeler couldn't see was what Einstein eventually saw and that was that the infinities were a property of Newton's classical mathematical tools and not a property of reality.

His yearning for a physics aesthetic was even greater than mine because he understood the nature of the problem far better than I ever could. His longed-for "it from bit" universe of "sublime austerity" lay tantalisingly beyond his reach mainly because modern information theory was only in its infancy and this was not his area of expertise anyway. It was the area of expertise of yet another towering genius of the 20th century, Alan Turing, the man who laid down the mathematical groundwork for an entirely new science, the science of computation. Turing was neither physicist nor philosopher, and even if he had been he had far more pressing concerns in his life than resolving the problems of physics, such as saving his nation from annihilation at the hands of the Nazis and trying to avoid persecution at the hands of a society which presumed the right to tell us whom we might be free to love.

Turing's work was the final step on the path to uncovering the nature of reality which was first laid down by Gottfried Leibniz, the very same man who cringed in horror at Newton's cavalier assumption that a mathematical co-ordinate system was synonymous with a physical space. Leibniz was an eclectic thinker, and he may very well have been the thief that Newton accused him of being, and although the Leibnizian calculus was practically indistinguishable from the Newtonian version it is inescapably true that the thinking which underpinned it was not. Leibniz was heavily influenced by the work of Spinoza, another bloke he gratuitously stole ideas from, and he could intuitively see that the Spinozan world must be a quantised one. No doubt he hadn't forgotten the lessons of the pre-Socratics either which Newton had simply cast aside in his zeal to adhere to the Thomist doctrine of Aquinas. Leibniz simply accepted as an a priori truth that physical reality could not possibly be infinitely divisible and must in fact have a smallest possible "bit". It was from this that he developed his philosophy of monadology and to be honest I reckon much of this thought is valueless. However it went on to become something far more significant a century later when George Boole pinched parts of it in his formulation of the laws of thought and his construction of the Boolean algebra. In many senses it is Boole who should wear the mantle of the father of information theory and it is Boolean logic which should be seen as the understucture of all other logics. According to Boole's mathematical analysis of logic all true statements about reality must be ultimately reducible to simple yes/no, true/false, up/down, left/right kinds of statements. Boole's is a rather intricate branch of mathematical philosophy but it was eventually to lead to the idea of the binary logic gate and the spectacular advances in human technology which have since derived from it. As an intellectual achievement Boole's was a remarkable tour de force which has been properly acknowledged only by the true afficionados of this arcane but vital branch of knowledge. Wheeler knew something of the work of Boole but he had no idea how these ideas could be incorporated into physics. Physics cannot accommodate the notion of an informational paradigm because such paradigms can only model processes and a process is a purely temporal construct which can find no home in a model where time is represented as a spatial dimension.

It is the infinities of physics which have given birth to the mathematical constants of physics, particularly in the Standard Model where the particle geeks have simply adopted the enchanting practice of renormalisation in an effort to cancel them out with constants. Nobody denies that this is anything but a fudge and everybody agrees that a true model of the sub-atomic realm will be required to provide an explanation for these values rather better than "well, that's what they have to be in order to conform to the theory".

"it is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe".....Albert Einstein.

I am in no doubt that a computational model based on non-linear dynamic systems theory can deliver the goods for the particle physicists, even though I personally wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to go about it. I have some vague intuitions about knot theory which I rather fancy but this is probably a reflection of a bias of my own because this is an important theory currently being pursued on the cutting edge of cellular biology in understanding the processes of protein folding in cellular metabolism, but living systems are non-linear dynamic system of such staggering complexity that something much simpler might be more appropriate for a simple process like an atom. I mention this only in passing and as little more than a wild guess because such considerations are questions way above my pay grade.