Philosophy Now Forum

attofishpi wrote:Its an interesting quirk that the faster you go, the less events occur to 'you' relative to those remaining stationary. However, each time you check your watch over the years, and look in the mirror, you are still aging at the same rate. Then again..what is 'stationary'?

In this crazy universe, 'stationary' is a completely meaningless term. Everything is moving, but as the twins paradox demonstrates (or appears to, Leo) some things are moving more than others. As for the quirk, if you haven't yet looked, here's why:
http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/2014 ... ou-go.html

You're missing the main game here, uwot. You're not watching out for the ding an sich. There is is the thing as it is and there is the thing as it appears to be, and these are not to be conflated. We already know since Romer that the speed of light is finite so the thing as it appears to be is not the real universe at all. For fuck's sake, man, you know more than enough physics to get this and you've got more than enough flexibility of mind to grasp the implications of it. Physics is not modelling reality but the observer's interpretation of it. This is something which any philosophy undergraduate would be expected to understand.

Obvious Leo wrote:Physics is not modelling reality but the observer's interpretation of it.

Well, if you follow Van Fraasen, which up to a point, I do, then all physics can hope to achieve are theories that are empirically adequate. I have made the point several times that physics explains the phenomena; it doesn't have to be 'true', it just has to work. Is there a difference between 'observer's interpretation' and phenomenon?

uwot wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:Physics is not modelling reality but the observer's interpretation of it.

Well, if you follow Van Fraasen, which up to a point, I do, then all physics can hope to achieve are theories that are empirically adequate. I have made the point several times that physics explains the phenomena; it doesn't have to be 'true', it just has to work. Is there a difference between 'observer's interpretation' and phenomenon?

No. There is no difference between observer's interpretation and phenomena. This is how Kant defined our phenomenal reality and since Manny was the last word in the philosophy of knowledge I'm not intellectually big enough to tell him he's full of shit. Are you?? Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Wheeler knew what Kant was banging on about but I've got my doubts about a few of the media sluts who have proclaimed themselves qualified to tell the story to the ordinary punters of today. Too many of these logical positivist troglodytes have fallen in love with their equations and forgotten what these equations are supposed to be mapping. Am I pissed off about this? You better believe it, pal.

Obvious Leo wrote:Am I pissed off about this? You better believe it, pal.

Fair enough. Anyway: what does "moving in the time dimension only" mean?

uwot wrote:Fair enough. Anyway: what does "moving in the time dimension only" mean?

Not much, from an ontological point of view. In this model time is a fractal dimension rather than a Cartesian one but the definition of a dimension remains the same as it was as originally framed by Leibniz. It is a purely relational concept which refers only to the dynamic behaviour of the energy quanta which encode for the physical world. I tend to think of the gravity/time continuum as a a wave which is continuously coming into existence and the Planck quanta as informational points on this continuously emerging wave. However each of these points exists only in its own referential frame so Poincare would describe such a universe as n-dimensional where n is an arbitrarily large finite number. John Conway models such a continuous process quite exquisitely in a Euclidean plane in his Game of Life and this model can give us a rough idea of how subatomic particles are encoded for in a fractal dimension. However to get a full cosmological picture Conway's representation must be enfolded mathematically into the Mandelbrot set with its embedded hierarchy of informational sub-structures. John von Neumann was the pioneer of this way of modelling self-causal systems although much of the subsequent work was carried out by Claude Shannon, Stuart Kauffman, Norbert Weiner and Ilya Prigogine. However self-causality is the next big thing in information theory where evolutionary algorithms are being widely deployed in such notions as neural network programming. Such networks do not merely process information but actually generate new information in an embedded hierarchy of informational structures rather like the nested matryoshka dolls where each doll exhibits a range of physical properties which are more complex than the sum of its parts. The Planck quanta encode for the subatomic particles which encode for atoms which encode for molecules which encode for chemistry which encodes for life and mind etc. This process is entirely self-causal, and thus non-Newtonian, so what I'm essentially doing is extending the Darwinian procedure of thought into foundational physics.

Non-linear dynamic systems theory is a vast field of knowledge so naturally all I'm offering here is the most cursory overview of it. However it makes perfect sense to regard the cosmos as a gigantic dissipative structure which cannot dissipate because of the first law of thermodynamics. It's total entropy can only decrease while the entropy of its sub-structures can only increase.

"All things come from one another and vanish into one another according to Necessity and in conformity with the order of time"....Anaximander....On Nature.

Obvious Leo wrote:It is a purely relational concept which refers only to the dynamic behaviour of the energy quanta which encode for the physical world.

For me, the interesting questions are what is the universe made of and how does it work? That's why I did philosophy and not physics. So what I want to know is what are energy quanta made of and how do they 'encode'?

Obvious Leo wrote:I tend to think of the gravity/time continuum as a wave which is continuously coming into existence and the Planck quanta as informational points on this continuously emerging wave.

I've already made the point (somewhere) that the Planck scale is epistemological rather than ontological. It happens to be the smallest scale we could theoretically measure, as you say 20 orders of magnitude below what we can currently achieve, but to say that is the smallest actual scale is, as you put it, to confuse the map for the territory.
Anyway, this takes us back to that other thread, before our derailment got rerailed.

uwot wrote:I think the difference between us is that you are content to believe that "Gravity just IS", whereas I suspect there is a mechanism that is responsible for it.

Obvious Leo wrote:How long is long enough to try and come up with such a mechanism? For 400 years some of the smartest minds in human history have been focused on this question for no result whatsoever. Give it up, mate, and hoist the white flag of defeat. Gravity/time is the ding an sich.

Surrender? It's not really my style.

uwot wrote:For me, the interesting questions are what is the universe made of and how does it work? That's why I did philosophy and not physics. So what I want to know is what are energy quanta made of and how do they 'encode'?

My process model is exclusively an information theory since I literally model the universe as a non-linear computation. Therefore I regard information and energy as entirely synonymous constructs. They encode for emergent structures in the way Conway models his informational units in his Game of Life. I assume you're familiar with it.

uwot wrote:I've already made the point (somewhere) that the Planck scale is epistemological rather than ontological

Yes you've already made this point but I vehemently disagree with it. The philosophy of the quantum is one of the most ancient and unshakable principles in applied metaphysics. Physical reality cannot be infinitely divisible and Max Planck proved it in his work on black body radiation. Likewise time cannot be infinitely divisible since the speed of light is finite. There simply MUST be a minimum possible unit of time in which we can meaningfully say that something has actually happened and the notion of a unit of time too brief for something to actually occur in it is a metaphysical absurdity. I'm sure we can at least agree that such a no-further-divisible time unit is gravity-dependent but whether we say that gravity determines the duration of this interval or whether the duration of this interval determines gravity is entirely arbitrary since they effectively define each other.

uwot wrote:Surrender? It's not really my style.

I'm not done yet, mate. Don't forget my claim that the gravity/time continuum hypothesis yields a testable prediction which would unambiguously falsify the spacetime model.

Obvious Leo wrote:My process model is exclusively an information theory since I literally model the universe as a non-linear computation. Therefore I regard information and energy as entirely synonymous constructs.

Fine. But what is it and how does it work? If you can show me that your model isn't undetermined, or that the "gravity/time continuum hypothesis yields a testable prediction", then I'll do my bit to get my head round the stuff I'm interested in, according to your model.

Obvious Leo wrote:Physical reality cannot be infinitely divisible and Max Planck proved it in his work on black body radiation. Likewise time cannot be infinitely divisible since the speed of light is finite. There simply MUST be a minimum possible unit of time in which we can meaningfully say that something has actually happened and the notion of a unit of time too brief for something to actually occur in it is a metaphysical absurdity..

Well, if time is a measure of change, then it goes without saying. However, if you partition reality into packets, even really tiny ones, you necessarily introduce spooky action at a distance, albeit a teeny-weeny distance, and causality breaks down; the universe works effectively by magic. Fine and dandy to a mathematician, they don't need to know what causes gravity, or 'strings' to keep vibrating for 13.78 billion years, what causes mass, blah, blah, blah, but to yer philosopher, that's the stuff that counts.

Obvious Leo wrote:I'm sure we can at least agree that such a no-further-divisible time unit is gravity-dependent...

Easy tiger, I'm not there yet.

Obvious Leo wrote:My process model is exclusively an information theory since I literally model the universe as a non-linear computation.

Certainly it appears that phenomena don't always operate linearly, but why? When proportionality of input and output is skewed, what's going on?

Obvious Leo wrote:Therefore I regard information and energy as entirely synonymous constructs. They encode for emergent structures in the way Conway models his informational units in his Game of Life. I assume you're familiar with it.

Energy is the material and information the design of the material. What of high energy, low order states like atomic bomb blasts as compared with low energy but highly ordered operations of computers? Leo, surely there's some fundamental difference - that energy and information cannot be boiled down to one or the other or be treated as synonymous, but they have more of a complementary relationship, like light and shadow.

uwot wrote:

attofishpi wrote:Its an interesting quirk that the faster you go, the less events occur to 'you' relative to those remaining stationary. However, each time you check your watch over the years, and look in the mirror, you are still aging at the same rate. Then again..what is 'stationary'?

In this crazy universe, 'stationary' is a completely meaningless term. Everything is moving, but as the twins paradox demonstrates (or appears to, Leo) some things are moving more than others. As for the quirk, if you haven't yet looked, here's why:
http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/2014 ... ou-go.html

Thanks uwot, i have checked out your site in the past. The chap that made the video in my OP also explained it using CGI in a different vid - was easier to understand than your static cartoon..!

uwot wrote:I think the difference between us is that you are content to believe that "Gravity just IS", whereas I suspect there is a mechanism that is responsible for it.

Isn't it called the Higgs 'Field'?

Greta wrote: Certainly it appears that phenomena don't always operate linearly, but why? When proportionality of input and output is skewed, what's going on?

I'm not sure what you meant by 'operate linearly' but if it means non-sequentially I think nonlinear does not mean this in this instance but stand to be corrected in both instances.

attofishpi wrote:Thanks uwot, i have checked out your site in the past. The chap that made the video in my OP also explained it using CGI in a different vid - was easier to understand than your static cartoon..!

Ah well. Do you have a link?

attofishpi wrote: Isn't it called the Higgs 'Field'?

As I understand it, Highs is responsible for a small portion of inertial mass. I think your video bloke has a go at explaining it, but another Aussie, Derek Leinweber does a pretty good job.