Steve,

Doesn't determinism imply monism, the block universe, and denial of free will?

I consider determinism the belief in the possibility to calculate the future. Therefore I do not see myself on a deterministic road.

Yuri suggested to somehow unite Permanides and Heraklitos. I do not see any factual justification for that. Of course, mandatory idolizing in particular of set theory and of SR led to many desperate maneuvers by those who are a bit coward and maybe even ready to be a bit less honest. Yes, your innocence is my best friend.

Which essay do you consider relevant with respect to the issue I mentioned above? In other words, which are the most hurting ones?

Regards,

Eckard

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  • Post #26

Eckard,

You really take a sledgehammer to the whole rickety structure. I certainly don't have anywhere near the depth of knowledge you possess, so thank you for adding me to the list of those you consider worth reading, even if my essay wasn't what you may have liked to see.

Reading various of the entries in this contest, there are many more serious proposals to really question the conceptual foundations than I had expected, so it gives me some hope a real paradigm shift might be in the foreseeable future. Possibly after this contest is over, some organized effort can arise from those looking outside current boundaries. It is safe to say there is little momentum within the status quo that isn't fantastical speculation, so maybe the momentum will switch to the outside. As I've put it before, the future is a continuation of the past, as long as current structure can absorb new energy, when it can't grow further, then the future becomes a reaction to the past.

Best wishes and congratulations on a take no prisoners essay.

That list you asked for.

    Dear John,

    Your judgment Is seemingly the opposite from other reactions. I copy what Yuri Danoyon wrote to me:

    -- Dear Eckard, My correspondence with other Nobel laureate G.Hooft about Blumschein essay

    Yuri:"What is your attitude to essay Eckard Blumschein?

    http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/833 I think that it raises for discussion a very important issue for the revision of the foundations of modern physics"

    His answer:"I found this essay too long and too boring to read. My superficial search for anything touching upon the foundations of physics led to negative results." --

    Frank Wilczek preferred not to answer at all. Meanwhile I got aware that he had advocated for a preferred frame of reference.

    Thank you very much for providing the link to cosmologystatement.org So far I did not manage opening it. However, this might be my fault.

    Best,

    Eckard

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    • Post #28

    Eckard,

    Those who create, promote and work within the current model are certainly not going to give credence to those who question it. Ask yourself which side of the debate you would prefer to be on; Those advocating for an increasingly fantastical orthodoxy, or those questioning it?

    I've been wondering how those within the establishment would respond to this contest question. If Philip Gibbs and [lin:http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1379] Professor Abraham Loeb[/link] are representative, then they are projecting on from current speculation, not debating its foundations.

    If the foundation is weak, whatever you build on it is transitory.

    John,

    I looked at Gibbs and Loeb and agree with you. The important things first: You forgot the k of link, and I forgot to ask you for confirmation that the link to cosmologystatement.org still works.

    Philip Gibbs wrote to James Putnam on Aug. 11, 2012, 18:05 GMT: "I think more people would agree with you than me but that is because I am ahead of my time :)"! Maybe, he envisions viXra ahead. While I appreciate the possibility to publish anything, I did not yet find any good viXra paper.

    P. G. revealed to me why 't Hooft understood that my reasoning contradicts to "the holographic principle of Susskind and 't Hooft [6]. Understanding of this deep idea came in a number of steps each of which sought consistency through hypothetical thought experiments."

    My understanding is different: I see unitarity reversible because it belongs to the level of abstracted from reality notions. It is elusive if understood as an attribute of reality. Only abstracted probabilities can add up to one. Ontological causality also belongs to the level of abstract notions. I maintain what I wrote about causality and elapsed time.

    Best,

    Eckard

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    • Post #30

    Eckard, nice to meet you again

    There are Gerard's new articles

    http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4926

    http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3612

    Dear Yuri,

    Since John blamed me for a no prisoners essay, I would like to beg the more for your further support. I highly appreciate a lot of hints you gave me including Winterberg, to whom I referred to at [1], Popper on Parmenides, and the Pauli issue to be found in perhaps the first interesting to me viXra paper. Your new hints might be more appealing for those like Lawrence Crowell and Michael Goodband than for those who follow Popper's view like me.

    In my reply to Steven I stressed that I consider determinism related to models, not to the open in the sense of reasonably taken for potentially infinite reality. I reiterate what I wrote in my essay 1364: "While reality and causality are, of course, also assumptions, we need them as logical alternatives to unacceptable mere imagination and mysticism, respectively."

    By the way, didn't give Lawrence Crowell an intriguing straightforward answer to the question what might be wrong: unitarity, locality, and spacetime geometry?

    Best,

    Eckard

    1st submission, not yet submitted, while reviewing similar works for End Notes.

    Excellent review of Pre-Math and intuition. Disturbed by statement, "no consciousness for future time", but love "now time is zero".

    One (of many) approaches to this contest looks at E/f = h and Power = E/t. Dividing one gets, t/f, so IF t = 1/f it implies either t squared of 1/f squared. Square roots generate plus and minus, a past and future with no present?

    Comment? (may be used in my End Notes)

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      • Post #33

      Eckard,

      Tom and I have been arguing over causality, so I'll post my explanation of it:

      I'm not arguing against causality, but just trying to clarify it.

      Is one event in a sequence the cause of the next, or are they both surface descriptions of deeper process? Does it really make sense to say yesterday is the cause of today, or would it make more sense to say they are both the effect of the earth spinning relative to the light coming from the sun?

      If I was to hit a nail with a hammer, it makes sense to say my swinging the hammer is the cause of the nail being driven into the board. So what happened here? There was a direct transfer of energy from my arm, to the hammer, to the nail. My output of energy became input for the nail.

      So why doesn't yesterday cause today, but the rotation of the earth and light of the sun does? Energy. There is no direct transfer of energy from yesterday to today, but there is both the momentum energy of the rotation of the earth and radiant energy of the sun, which does go to create this event we call a day. So causation is a function of the transfer of energy, rather than to a direct sequence of events.

      Hello Eckard,

      I must tell you that in fact it is simple and complex.

      The free will is an essential. Like is essential the free critics. The catalyzations are after all the most important when the determinism is the torch of causes and effects. So the free will is the sister of the free critic. In fact , I beleive strongly that a real universal teacher must be always rational.In fact we cannot affirm a thing if we have not the proof. That said, it exists universal evidences which sometimes does not really need a proof. It is important to be deterministic. It is essential for a scientist at my humble opinion.

      If you simulate the future ,you can be determistic but it is difficult because you cannot compute all the parameters.

      About the essays, there are all kind of essays. I like, you know it, the determinism, so I hope that the most rational essays shall be recognized. I have my prefered but I don't say anything :)

      Best Regards

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      • Post #36

      Eckard,

      News from Gerard

      http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

        John,

        I dislike imprecise thoughts. In my understanding any measure of time like for instance the timespan yesterday does neither cause nor be an effect of anything.

        While primary or so called temporal causality is bound to reality, so called ontological causality refers to abstractions from real processes.

        Nonetheless I agree with you: A causal relation is obviously more than merely a temporal order between earlier and later. You are ascribing it always to a transfer of energy. Hm. I rather see processes integrating influences. Instead of a single cause, I see a plurality of influences. In case of a family tree it would not be justified ascribing a transfer of energy to the male or the female line of influences.

        Eckard

        Dear Yuri,

        Thank you for the hint to "Not even wrong". I found:

        "... no sign of any superpartners at all. Not only were they supposed to be not too much heavier than the Higgs, but many of them were supposed to be much produced much more copiously, and thus be much easier to see. By now the LHC experiments have shown that such expected particles are absent, unless they are made inaccessible by pushing their masses up to more than an order of magnitude higher than that of the Higgs, a value far beyond what had been advertised as reasonable.

        The implications of this attack on theorists by the reality principle are just beginning to sink in. The big yearly conference of superstring theorists was held this past week in Munich, with different speakers taking different approaches to dealing with the problem. One speaker advocated not doing anything until next year, hoping against hope that newer data would give better results. Others took the attitude that it had been clear for quite a while that superstring theory wasn't going to show signs of existence at the LHC, so best to just work on finding other uses for it. In the conference final "Outlook and Vision" talk, the illustrious speaker announced that all was well, and didn't mention the LHC results at all. The ostrich-like tactic of burying one's head in the sand seems to be on the agenda for now, but this will become increasingly difficult to maintain as time goes on and more and more conclusive negative experimental results arrive."

        Regards,

        Eckard

        Time is what power acts on to produce energy like length is what force acts on to produce a "mechanical" energy.

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        • Post #40

        Eckard,

        Yes, there are many causes to any event. The conversation thread, in which you commented, had been about determinism vs. probability:

        "We can't know what all past events will affect current ones, until the affected events actually happen. All the laws deciding what happens may be entirely deterministic, or they wouldn't be laws, but there is no way to know all input, ie, from prior events, before the event in question happens. For the simple reason that the lightcone of input isn't complete until the event happens. So in order to know all potential cause, prior to effect, you would need superluminal signaling, but if such a possibility existed, then it might also provide input into that event, thus needing even faster signaling, and the problem repeats.

        Therefore that which has not yet occurred is probabilistic, as all input cannot be known, while all factors have been factored in what has occurred, making it determined."

        Tom didn't agree, but that's to be expected.

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        • Post #41

        Hi Ted Erikson,

        Well, elapsed time is in reality always positive as is distance too. Ws = Nm.

        I just do not yet understand how your comment relates to my essay. In particular, I would never state "no consciousness for future time" or "now time is zero". To me, consciousness does not matter in objective physics.

        Eckard

        Hello Steve,

        What you means with determinism is perhaps causality and the possibility to reduce anything to the laws of nature if only something like Laplace's demon is available. You should ask yourself whether or not all possible influences can be taken into account. It depends from this pre-mathematical decision whether you are a theorist like for instance Tom Ray or someone with common sense like for instance me.

        Best regards,

        Eckard

        John,

        I see you quite right. What has not yet occurred is not yet fully decided. We only can attribute some probability to it. I wonder if Tom or someone else could refute your argument. I consider Tom's view at the heart of illusions that affect not just modern physics but already modern mathematics.

        Best,

        Eckard