Philosophy Now Forum

You've got some of the history right but the bits you got wrong you got badly wrong. Galileo was actually the true father of relativity but indeed it was Poincare who must be regarded as the true father of modern relativity theory. I have acknowledged this countless times in my writings, including several times in this thread, and that's because my philosophy is entirely founded on Poincarean relativity. It is quite untrue that he gave up on relativity but he died in 1912 before GR was published and whilst his own work was still ongoing. He completely and utterly rejected SR and did so until his dying day and it was precisely because the 4D manifold of space and time ignored gravity that he rejected it. He would have recoiled in horror at GR and branded it as an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig because Poincare never accepted the idea of representing time a spatial dimension from the outset. You are also quite wrong when you say that Poincare was a relative unknown outside the field of physics. He was a genius of rare stature and acknowledged as such throughout the world, a highly credentialled polymath in many fields, including philosophy, and to this day he is widely regarded as the one of the most intuitively gifted mathematicians in human history. He made Einstein look like a humble public servant. Poincare was not blind to the bloody obvious and he knew perfectly well that time was not a spatial dimension, although he recognised the convenience of modelling at such. Spatial dimensions are bi-directional and time is patently not, which meant that the equations of physics in spacetime are time invariant when the real world simply isn't. The arrow of time flows only from the past to the future via the nexus of the present and Poincare never lost sight of this blindly obvious FACT.

He was also perfectly well aware of the fact that such a dimension could not be modelled with Newton's classical mathematics and he spent the last few years of his life developing exactly the right system of mathematics which could model it. He died before he got the job finished but his work eventually evolved into the modern mathematics known as fractal geometry. It is this system of mathematics which is used to model every naturally occurring system in science except for physics because every naturally occurring system in science except for those in physics are quite obviously self-causal. What an amazing coincidence that every science except physics makes sense.

To add on to Poincare, it was Leonhard Euler who is the father of topology (look up the Konisberg bridges and graph theory), and it was Poincare who further extended topology in important ways.

PhilX

For an overview of Poincarean relativity look up the three-body problem. It is unresolvable in spacetime physics but it is quite mathematically difficult and thus beyond the scope of this discussion.

Philosophy Explorer wrote:To add on to Poincare, it was Leonhard Euler who is the father of topology (look up the Konisberg bridges and graph theory), and it was Poincare who further extended topology in important ways.

PhilX

An excellent point, Phil, and it's useful to have a mathematician to the party. Poincare knew perfectly well that a space was a mathematical object and not a bloody physical object at all and that time could only be modelled in a uni-directional topological space. I have defined the continuum of space and time as the ontological underpinning of the epistemic spacetime and I define this topological space as a fractal dimension. However I take pains to stress that this "dimension" is no more a "thing" than a spatial dimension is a "thing". It is merely a mathematical co-ordinate system used to define motion.

surreptitious57 wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote:
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

Maybe you need to tell that to OLeo? You've just denied light as a mean of detecting age.

A review:

So, given that there is no contrast class to Existence/Totality, since non-existence cannot be, much less be productive, we have it that Existence must be, with no choice, no option, as necessity, so we can stop worrying about how something can be already 'made' without it ever having been 'made', for we've found a Truth, and a truth is better than a proof because then one doesn't need the proof, at least not right away.

People will have to take care in how they refer to the impossible nothing/non-existence, as, for example, in claiming that there is Nothing outside something or little bits of Nothing inside something as spacers.

So, Totality/Existence has no beginning, and thus is ever, meaning, too, that it can have no end, being always. It is, rather than is not, and if this is more than just in the present tense we refer to it as eternal, its past eternal already complete, but not its future one, presumably, although surely its gone through just about everything possible time and time again, and will do, for ever. It’s always rerun season on Totality’s channel, unless eternity is not exhaustive, which I now think can be possible, yet there will be repeats, too, which may be due to finite resolution.

So, now we can go further, such as that it has no set direction to it, given there isn't anything 'before' it and thus no point for a design to be imparted to it. Plus, Totality is all there is and so there is no 'outside' either.

Given no set direction, it has to generate happenings in and of itself, by some process, but we are left to consider that either it has to operate in just one way due to necessity or that it can, for lack of any one specific direction, go in any and all directions, as doing everything, which, I know sounds nebulous, as something like a wide open possibility or potentiality.

Any thoughts so far? I like the part that it is generative, and of course this is because it is transformative, having only itself to work with, yet new arrangements are generated, and so that makes it generative.

PoeticUniverse wrote:So, given that there is no contrast class to Existence/Totality, since non-existence cannot be, much less be productive, we have it that Existence must be, with no choice, no option, as necessity, so we can stop worrying about how something can be already 'made' without it ever having been 'made', for we've found a Truth, and a truth is better than a proof because then one doesn't need the proof, at least not right away.

This goes to the point I made that any cosmological model at all has to start somewhere with a metaphysical statement which is no further reducible. There can be no doubt that such a statement is a statement of claim which cannot be proven, even in principle, but when there are only two opposing such statements of claim it becomes possible to draw conclusions from both of them and compare the two deducted sets of conclusions with the evidence. Thus in the case of the universe as a whole we are able to compare two opposing definitional claims in the certainty that no third option exists. I have stated earlier that Boolean logic must surely be the understructure of all other logics because in Boolean logic we deal with principles which are ultimately reducible to such a binary option. It was actually Leibniz who laid the groundwork for this form of reasoning but it was Boole who elaborated it into the formal mathematical structure of what was to evolve into information theory, the intellectual driver of the modern world.

The two opposing definitional claims about the nature of our universe are breathtakingly simple to understand, by barmaids, children and philosophers alike. Either it is everything that exists or it isn't and each of these claims leads to startlingly different conclusions about the nature of space and time, as I believe I have satisfactorily illustrated. "Everything" can have no beginning or else it can't be Everything and the existence of Everything implies the non-existence of Nothing, another simple Boolean translation which was comprehensively explored by the pre-Socratics and which PU refers to so elegantly. The pre-Socratics had no elaborate mathematical tools with which to model the world they lived in but they had a sophisticated understanding of mathematical philosophy which was not to re-appear in human thought until the Persians refined it some 16 centuries later. These refinements in pre-Socratic thought never translated into European thought, although the mathematical tools of the Persians found their way into Europe after the crusades. Persian philosophy could find no foothold in Europe because of the boot heel of divine authority imposed on human knowledge by the Roman church and its exclusively Platonist directives. This legacy of the Dark Ages was to pollute the metaphysical underpinnings of science for centuries to come and the final act of catharsis needed to expunge these flawed doctrines from physics has remained a story yet to be written. My philosophy is an attempt at such a story but I am under no illusions about the fact that there will be others who will write this story far better than a dilettante wordsmith with too much free time on his hands.

In the mathematical philosophy of the pre-Socratics reality was not infinitely divisible and this was illustrated by both Zeno of Elea and Democritus of Thrace. The philosophy of the quantum has been logically unshakeable ever since and yet Newton ignored it. In the mathematical philosophy of the pre-Socratics Nothing simply didn't exist and it was merely regarded as a mathematical placeholder, a conceptual convenience which offered a relativistic distinction between two Somethings. They understood with perfect clarity that empty space was purely a mathematical co-ordinate system with no ontological status whatsoever, an understanding further elaborated by the Persians and yet completely ignored by Newton. Heraclitus of Ephesus went on to show how the two Somethings for which space would serve as a mathematical placeholder were not "objects" but events, a procedure of thought he inherited from Anaximander of Miletus, but one which was once again totally ignored by Newton. I've already said it many times but I never tire of saying it. Newton mistook his map for his territory.

The pre-Socratic philosophers were highly astute observers of their world who operated in an intellectual zeitgeist untainted by the degeneracy which was to follow in some of the subsequent Greek schools, when philosophy became as much a question of public policy and political expediency as an exploration into the nature of existence. The consequences of this miss-step in the goals of the philosophical discourse were to be amplified many times over some centuries later when the Roman Empire ruled the world, because the Roman Empire was itself deposed by a coup d'etat engineered by the Roman church, an institution committed to the propagation of ignorance in service of the chilling doctrine of monotheism. 21st century science is still paying off the debt bequeathed to it by this catastrophic hiatus in the evolution of human knowledge and countless billions of human lives have been needlessly wasted as a consequence. We are reaping what we have sown.

My philosophy is not a new one, and never have I claimed it to be. It is a reprise of pre-Socratic and eastern philosophical thought synthesised with the vast compendium of human knowledge acquired since that era. Coincidentally the great eastern philosophies of the Indians and Chinese evolved almost contemporaneously with that of the pre-Socratics and when cultural and historical differences are taken into consideration these eastern philosophies arrived at much the same conclusions. Sadly these too were subsequently corrupted by those in pursuit of wealth and power and for a historian of the human journey it's not hard to see that such a corruption was inevitable. Knowledge is power is not just an empty slogan but a statement of universal truth in an informational universe. The modern world is now living Newton's legacy, and it may be facing a cost burden it finds itself unable to meet, and for this reason I suggest that the bloody obvious is a doctrine whose time has come. Again.

PoeticUniverse wrote: Given no set direction, it has to generate happenings in and of itself, by some process, but we are left to consider that either it has to operate in just one way due to necessity or that it can, for lack of any one specific direction, go in any and all directions, as doing everything, which, I know sounds nebulous, as something like a wide open possibility or potentiality.

This is a reasonable overview of non-linear dynamic systems theory, the theoretical underpinning of self-causal systems. Process philosophy deals with phenomena purely as temporal entities and thus we can say that at any given moment reality is confronted with an "infinite" index of possiblities, only one of which will be realised. I put the word infinite in inverted commas because in a finite and thus informationally closed system, such as the universe, this cannot be literally true. However when reality is quantised on the Planck scale then it is certainly metaphorically true. However if we adhere to rigid semantic discipline infinite really means ginormous.

It is via this mechanism of the index of possibilities that self-causal systems evolve increasingly more complex informational hierarchies within themselves, each of which constitutes its own causal domain and this is quite exquisitely modelled in the Mandelbrot set. Self-causal systems evolve from the simple to the complex solely because they are self-causal and for no other reason but non-linear dynamic systems theory is an entire branch of science of its own. It is a mature science with a rigorous methodology and it contains a number of sub-branches which deal with specific aspects of it in more detail. These sub-branches include complexity theory, game theory, control theory, information theory, chaos theory, evolutionary theory, dissipative structures theory, cybernetics, neural network theory, cellular automata, quadratic polynomials, topological spaces, Julia sets, non-linear algorithms and fractal geometry.

When you reckon you've got all of these thoroughly understood get back to me and I'll be happy to provide you with a further list.

Every science except physics uses more than one of these structured disciplines to model its theories because every science except physics is based no non-Newtonian heuristics. Physics completely ignores every single one of these disciplines and dismisses them as irrelevant to its own Newtonian agenda. This could hardly be regarded as a trivial oversight since the universe is quite self-evidently a self-causal system which is evolving from the simple to the complex, not a gigantic Newtonian clock unwinding towards its own doom.

If you want to know why physics makes no sense then there's your answer.

PoeticUniverse wrote:A review:

So, given that there is no contrast class to Existence/Totality, since non-existence cannot be, much less be productive, we have it that Existence must be, with no choice, no option, as necessity, so we can stop worrying about how something can be already 'made' without it ever having been 'made', for we've found a Truth, and a truth is better than a proof because then one doesn't need the proof, at least not right away.

People will have to take care in how they refer to the impossible nothing/non-existence, as, for example, in claiming that there is Nothing outside something or little bits of Nothing inside something as spacers.

So, Totality/Existence has no beginning, and thus is ever, meaning, too, that it can have no end, being always. It is, rather than is not, and if this is more than just in the present tense we refer to it as eternal, its past eternal already complete, but not its future one, presumably, although surely its gone through just about everything possible time and time again, and will do, for ever. It’s always rerun season on Totality’s channel, unless eternity is not exhaustive, which I now think can be possible, yet there will be repeats, too, which may be due to finite resolution.

So, now we can go further, such as that it has no set direction to it, given there isn't anything 'before' it and thus no point for a design to be imparted to it. Plus, Totality is all there is and so there is no 'outside' either.

Given no set direction, it has to generate happenings in and of itself, by some process, but we are left to consider that either it has to operate in just one way due to necessity or that it can, for lack of any one specific direction, go in any and all directions, as doing everything, which, I know sounds nebulous, as something like a wide open possibility or potentiality.

Any thoughts so far? I like the part that it is generative, and of course this is because it is transformative, having only itself to work with, yet new arrangements are generated, and so that makes it generative.

To the logic concerning physics, I think this conversation is only confusing interpretation here.

When I argue for a state of nothingness, this is prior to anything regarding 'time' since time is a construct of change that we experience. But we know 'states' with more clarity AND while it may not be 'intuitive' by some here, this is NOT the case with many, including myself. I'm guessing that how one experiences life may contribute to how they think on these things without actually disagreeing in real meaning.

I define "totality" as others have to differentiate between any local concept of 'time' as we are biased to experience. But it still includes this.

I too argue that in any given universe WITH time, that this is best perceived as infinite and why I support the Steady State model. The BB proponents historically DO interpret a 'beginning' even while some take better care to consider the singularity as an approach. And I've argued this clearly before elsewhere. What I DO have contention with is a misunderstanding of the meta-logic treating all reality as a state. Since time does not apply there unless one can provide a rationale that connects it as a state, discussing 'totality' as an ORIGIN, is a different kind of "beginning". We are forced to use language of such by our everyday experience and so this is getting falsely interpreted as meaning that our "universe" has a beginning.

What those of you miss is that only if you bias our particular "universe" as all there is, this is the real of science proper and the underlying logic of using the term, "totality" is intended to act as more universally inclusive with regards to philosophy. As such, "totality" is NOT what those like Leo here thinks as the "universe". But since he and others may only interpret our particular physical universe as all there is, you delimit the discussion to this only. And this is where it is faulty with regards to a complete philosophical inquiry. Without labeling the concept of an all which may (or may not) include other universes as "totality" is implying, you are begging those of us who define this concept to your limited perspective. Regardless of whether there is or is NOT more than this "universe", the concept of "totality" is more inclusive philosophically. This is why and how I argue from.

As an example in point, when I've discussed the BB problems elsewhere, I focused on things like how or why the presumption of spacial expansion didn't interpret this necessarily as an acceleration from the start. Only in 1999 did a paper come out that demonstrated that space was actually accelerating. The older scientists recognized this but instead of defaulting to recognizing this, they imposed a retro-theory of inflation to justify how what we see could only come about in 13+ Billion years. So I've argued mathematically how expansion necessarily implies acceleration AND showed that with regards to a 'singularity' how we can not be able to precisely interpret this as a real point of origin. Thus my argument was one of an infinite universe with respect to time included. This is a calculus argument and a point about how we are unable to ever interpret a "beginning" because we only approximate distances to most galaxies without sufficient precision needed to interpret this as such.

I also argued that given the limits of the speed of light, with respect to the assumption (which I happen to revert by interpretation) of 'time' itself as being altered, even in this interpretation, one has to recognize that this 'speed' also has to be interpreted as altering with respect to inflation if it was true. That is, if inflation OR acceleration of the universe is true, then the further out we look out, any interpretation of time also must be shifted. And so it only 'appears' that our universe is 13+ Billion years old. A time interval we perceive from distant phenomena for the speed of light to us is thus actually faster and faster as we look further away. We just cannot perceive this because we interpret the source light based on OUR present reference of time.

If need be, I could possibly illustrate or link to where I have illustrated this OR re-illustrate this using math and geometry here.

With regards to interpreting past scientists as being irrational, however, like Newton, Plato or others, I find ignorantly missing what they contributed and also dismisses the role of evolution of knowledge as dependent upon the given times. So I find it unnecessary to bother type-casting people based on these old philosophies as Newtonian or Platonists. These philosophers have initiated many concepts of which some are more valid than others. And I also find that most today lack the perspective of understanding what exactly they meant as most cannot seem to place themselves in their shoes.

In kind, I am disappointed with the abuses of some who inappropriately attack others in these forums based solely on a fear of criticism only for their theories in a rational way. And then I too get abused when one simply insults or uses such abusive tactics to try to diminish my own posited views without their own willingness to attend to the logic at hand.

In closing of this post, I am reinstating the position that math and logic are as real AND empirical....that models are intended to represent the reality short of actually being able to literally BE the realities we are discussing. We cannot argue for any 'objective' truth about objects external to ourselves without modeling. But the semantic meaning of these models to nature are what matters as they are very real.