Philosophy Now Forum

Obvious Leo wrote:

Scott Mayers wrote: Your theory is incomplete.

How the fuck would you know since you haven't even read it?

I have suggested an experiment and outlined the protocols for this experiment in such a way that it allows me to make a prediction in accordance with my model which differs from that of current theory. This is the gold standard in all of science, Scott, to design an experiment in such a way that two conflicting theories will yield two different outcomes when exposed to empirical testing. I claim that if my prediction is confirmed by experiment then the spacetime model is unambiguously falsified. Do you deny this or would you prefer not to say because you haven't even bothered to read it?

Could you provide another link to your blog again, Leo? I thought I saved it as a link but don't see it.

By "incomplete" I was referring to your approach using non-closed concepts. For instance, you assert "all that exists" is presumed by you but not "all that doesn't exist" as well. You accept "determinacy" but lack closure (completeness) without including "indeterminacy". In the last case, since you recognize time going forward, you ignore how the future acts as what is incomplete. My comment was more about the way you don't mutually exhaust all possibilities and so any closure you can expect must remain conditionally bound to your limited domain. To me, it is like accepting only natural numbers (1, 2, 3,...) ignoring the whole numbers (0 plus the natural numbers), Negative numbers, etc to cover all numbers in a theory about numbers.

Scott Mayers wrote:Could you provide another link to your blog again, Leo? I thought I saved it as a link but don't see it.

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

As a matter of routine courtesy you should refrain from further criticism of my thoughts until you have at least read this synopsis of them. It's not a complicated model but explaining it in fragments as responses to questions is bloody near impossible if you don't at least grasp this overview. I've already mentioned that my experiment contains a mathematical error which I hadn't noticed earlier, sums not being my long suit. Where I use the value 0.000033 seconds predicted by current theory in my experiment this should read 0.0000133 seconds. However this doesn't affect the overall definitiveness of the experiment because the grav/time prediction needs only be less than this value to disqualify the spacetime hypothesis.

Scott Mayers wrote: By "incomplete" I was referring to your approach using non-closed concepts. For instance, you assert "all that exists" is presumed by you but not "all that doesn't exist" as well.

This is where you lose me completely. I say that everything which exists exists and everything which doesn't exists doesn't exist. Are you accusing me of some sort of semantic legerdemain? I reckon the philosophy of the bloody obvious has been well named because I'm perfectly content for this statement to be taken absolutely literally. I also make quite clear in my synopsis which other statements should be taken absolutely literally, one of which is this one: SPACE DOES NOT EXIST.

Scott Mayers wrote:You accept "determinacy" but lack closure (completeness) without including "indeterminacy".

Once again you'll have to pardon me for being just a simple country lad but effects are either preceded by causes or they aren't. In the philosophy of the bloody obvious you can't have it both ways. This means that the unidirectional arrow of time becomes a physically real phenomenon and it is at this point where my model differs sharply from the spacetime assumption which unambiguously denies this. In spacetime physics time is invariant and does not pass but is rather frozen into a single Parmenidean block. This is where the curvature of space comes from because representing time as a spatial dimension will automatically warp the orthogonal co-ordinate frame into a hyperbola because time is an inversely logarithmic function of gravity. What needs to be understood is that this is a mathematical statement and not a physical one and the fact that there are still some very clever people around who seem to be unaware of this simply beggars belief. Einstein was in no doubt whatsoever about what Minkowski had done and stressed throughout his life that spacetime was to be seen as a mathematical metaphor only. It was the fucking idiots who followed in his footsteps who decided that the universe could only be understood in the language of mathematics and therefore the map would be synonymous with the territory.

Indeed I don't pull my punches in my writings on this subject because this basic error in simple formal logic should never have been allowed to occur in the first place. That it has since been incorporated into formal scientific dogma is an act of such monumental stupidity that sociologists and psychologists will find rich pickings in it to write about for centuries. The comedians will also find a fertile field of opportunity to take the piss out of the 20th century physicists and I hope they bloody well do it. In my opinion attempting to define the universe as something which is far too complicated for us poor dumb schmucks to understand is a crime against humanity. The fucking universe is exactly what it appears to be, a sequence of events.

Scott Mayers wrote:To me, it is like accepting only natural numbers (1, 2, 3,...) ignoring the whole numbers (0 plus the natural numbers), Negative numbers, etc to cover all numbers in a theory about numbers.

This is the truth of numbers, Scott. They are an abstract construct invented by a human mind to model a certain procedure of thought. Numbers can tell us nothing about the nature of reality. Numbers tell me that if have a bowl containing two apples on my table then I can take three apples out of this bowl and have a negative apple left. This will not provide me with my lunch.

I think you need an abstract to your theory up front, Leo.

I don't believe in catch phrases like, "bloody obvious" as you only beg it without appropriate clarity. I reached the point of you mentioning Boolean logic and find that you don't seem to be aware that George created the logic based on assuming closure as I do. He opted to define the whole, whether it include the domain of our universe, some god, or gods, or even anything lacking apparently not so bloody obvious things, like zero as a necessary element in reasoning about reality. Totality is what he named the whole without biasing reality merely to our local perspective of it. And he used a '1' akin to a something as well as '0' to reference a nothing. But both values AT LEAST are needed in even the expanded logic using multiple values. To be sincere to your reasoning, Leo, you'd have to only require a unitary value, '1', to represent existence. Also, if you prefer using all values except '0', such a logic is always incomplete.

Assume at least only one thing, you call existence, such that we represent it as a '1'. You cannot make any further distinction upon existence without recognizing that at least something must NOT exist too. Even time itself requires a means to distinguish change. In a computer, we use altering pulses that is somewhat as follows:

0101010101010101....

If we didn't depend on a meaning to real nothingness, then even this:

11111111111111....

would be indistinguishable to meaning than

000000000000000....

Now our particular universe biases us to perceive existence. But the above shows that to make sense of any requires accepting both. Yet at the same time, what precedes prior to the 'existing' state of a computer is one which began in its "off" state, even if it has no meaning until powered up. But from there on, the computer cannot 'think' without using the alterations of pulses (the clock) which alters as the first example above.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Scott Mayers wrote:To me, it is like accepting only natural numbers (1, 2, 3,...) ignoring the whole numbers (0 plus the natural numbers), Negative numbers, etc to cover all numbers in a theory about numbers.

This is the truth of numbers, Scott. They are an abstract construct invented by a human mind to model a certain procedure of thought. Numbers can tell us nothing about the nature of reality. Numbers tell me that if have a bowl containing two apples on my table then I can take three apples out of this bowl and have a negative apple left. This will not provide me with my lunch.

I urge you to actually try to create a REAL computer without the things that reference number as a real thing. Or are computers unreal?

Maybe it might help to note another kind of comparison using graphics applications like Adobe's Photoshop vs Illustrator. What do you think is the difference between vector and raster graphics? If you already know, 'raster' type graphics draws frames by some form of scanning the whole screen while vector's merely formulates things as 'objects that mathematically give a generic formula for things on the screen in 2 dimensions. Raster graphics treats the whole 2D frame using a linear 1D type of drawing.

Example, just using 1s and 0s, I'll draw a simple picture:

000000
011110
000010
000100
001000
001000

Can you see how the one's create the character, '7'?
A raster program treats the information as one stream. By laying it out from left to right, and top to bottom, this is
000000011110000010000100001000001000.

A vector-type program begins with the 'object' akin to how you perceive matter without concern of the spaces. Thus, it might speak only of 1s here and explain how it is generically drawn by a form:

Beginning with a given starting address (like 2 across and 1 down), find another address x units to the right and join them with 1s.
Go down x/4 units down and fill that line with 1s.
Find a point x/2 down and x/2 left; draw 1s joining this to the last point.
Lastly find a point x/4 units down and join this to the last point with 1s.

This formula describes any '7' based on a standard size, 'x', for the shape.

I used this explanation because both have uses to describe reality but the vector form acts independent to any space it is in. This is similar to how you perceive matter as real but not the spaces. Yet notice that the monitor still draws the whole frame using a raster that still demonstrates the reality of the page as a whole by turning the given vector into a raster as it is being viewed on a monitor.

Also notice that even directions within the vector description require understanding directions that exist as directions that must exist or would mean nothing. It also requires the background to be real.

Does this REAL analogue demonstrate how your thinking is like your preference to bias your description via the objects rather than the background. Yet both need the background ('0 or 1' variable spaces) and the '1s' representing the object. The '0s' may not have to be placed as it is by default there already. But they still represent and shape how the objects in them have meaning too.

Also, the same formulation can occur by reversing the 1s with the 0s so the default background would be 1s but the objects would be defined by 0s.

Scott Mayers wrote:I urge you to actually try to create a REAL computer without the things that reference number as a real thing. Or are computers unreal?

As I've mentioned a few times one of the things I'm having the most difficulty with in explaining my philosophy is getting people to take me literally when I intend to be taken absolutely literally. I make this part clear enough in my synopsis because I define the universe as a computer and I intend this statement to be taken ABSOLUTELY LITERALLY. My process universe is a reality MAKER and the fundamental unit of physical reality is neither more nor less than a binary logic gate and I mean this statement to be understood exactly as it stands. The non-linear computer that is our universe is quite specifically a Universal Turing Machine, the cyclical and eternal computer which programmes its own input and never repeats the same reality twice. This interpretation is perfectly compatible with all of the empirical data available to modern physics but it is NOT compatible with the narrative which modern physics is currently using to explain this data. I'm not talking about a new way of doing physics, Scott, I'm talking about a new way of thinking the world which isn't even new. My story is as old as Sanskrit and it is the same story which is told in every major philosophical school in human history. The physicists sacked the philosophers for the simple reason that Newton's story is the odd man out.

I'm not really qualified to offer much in the way of useful comment on your mathematical approach to this question. I'm very well schooled in mathematical philosophy but the actual tools of mathematics have always been a little too abstract for my bluntly pragmatic and prosaic approach to metaphysical questions. I always value deductive simplicity as a higher path to truth than inductive and symbolic consistency because the latter is necessarily contingent on an explanatory narrative which lies external to itself. In other words mathematics cannot model reality but only a particular story of reality. My own model is no different in this regard and I have made no attempt to write my story in the language of mathematics. I have no doubt that this will eventually be possible and I even know which mathematical tools will be needed for such modelling. A non-Newtonian universe will need to be modelled mathematically with the non-Newtonian tools of fractal geometry. I have plenty of ideas about the general principles which will need to be incorporated in such modelling but the details of such work is orders of magnitude above my pay grade.

Such work will be for the computer geeks who work with such tools as evolutionary algorithms and neural network programming and the theoretical underpinning for such work will be found in the science of biology and NOT in physics. Metaphysics is the study of the nature of Being and nobody does the nature of Being better than those who study the science of life. Being is a PROCESS.

Hello Lawrence Crocker (I'm also from Poughkeepsie), my old friend Leo, and all.

Ultimate laws could not be so, because there is no point at which to impart direction, specifics, rules, laws, and so forth to the something that has to exist ever, being that the basis cannot have a beginning, for it cannot have come from a "nonexistence"—as that can never have being.

Given that Totality, 'What IS', Everything, the basis or whatever one want to label it cannot be of any certain chosen direction, one might conjecture that it somehow is or has the potential for anything and everything, but, too, we have to wonder if it, having no preset design, is, that is, must be, the default case, meaning that no other form of it is possible, which might mean, for example, that it could only be a simple, continuous something, for then it has no parts to precede it.

So, if it's a default, then it's the only way it could be, but not a law ruled forth from anywhere else, and if it's a kind of everything-all-at-once kind of superposition something, then it's more nebulous something, labeled by such words as possibility, probability, potential.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about writing a book called 'Cause Determines Effect'.