On The Road Not Taken by Akinbo Ojo

Dear Akinbo,

Good to be home! I like your classic approach.

You ask: "in a very fundamental discussion, what information will be "occupying the ontological basement""?

I say it is in any system of events the OBSERVER proper as signifying the "virtual exchange" of standard model or "space-time" of general relativity. Thus to realize Wheeler's participatory universe we must assume that the universal computer or algorithm proper is ANY DE FACTO OBSERVER as the "configuration space" of all matter/bits and what is better known in QM as the matter wave (wave function).

My "observer" is in other words the thing we call individually "mind" or biologically "life" and physically "energy" (or generally a "conservation law").

Thank you for your engaging essay.

Regards,

Chidi

Dear Akinbo,

I hope the comment I wrote here, and lost during changing the server, will be restored. If not, I will try to make another one.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Dear Akinbo,

Thanks very much for reading and commenting on my essay. Sorry it took so long to reply, but I've finally managed to read your essay. I thought your analysis of monads was very interesting, and I really liked the way you handled your discussion of historical philosophical views on the topic. I think it's really important that anyone who stands on the shoulders of these giants should know what they were actually thinking and how they arrived at their ideas, since textbooks often either misrepresent things, or just leave out the original reasoning entirely.

Regarding your question about existence/non-existence as a binary choice, I think our views are very different on that point, although I can appreciate what you're going for. It's just that I do think a continual passage of time is fundamental, and prior to any particular thing existing. I can think of a three-dimensional set of monads existing, like the "one-dimensional" set you've drawn at different stages in the two figures in your essay, but I can't think of those two instants if the monads don't exist. And in order for objective time to pass uniformly throughout the Universe, which is what I've argued for in my essay despite relative proper duration, etc., I don't think random discrete particle creation and annihilation in the Universe could be the cause of this uniform absolute duration.

That's why I think 'it from bit' has to fail, despite the possibility that bits (monads) are the fundamental building blocks of everything in the Universe. But I'm no stick in the mud, and as I said I can appreciate your position, and I enjoyed your essay. You have my vote!

Best of luck in the contest,

Daryl

Akinbo,

While I still disagree, I wish I'd given you more than the seven I did, on presentation alone.

You will have to go back and read my essay to get the context, but I do see the "energy" as necessarily foundational to the "information," since information changes while energy is conserved. To me, the "bit" amounts to the "peak" of a wave. It rises to the level of signal, above the ambient noise. As for why it doesn't make sense to me to specify monads as being temporally defined, you would have to go back and read my Questioning the Foundations entry, where I make the argument that the problem with our understanding of time is that we treat the sequential experience, from past to future, that physics reduces to a measure of duration, as foundational, yet it is an effect of the process of change that turns potential into actual, ie, future becoming past. Tomorrow becoming yesterday, rather than the vector from yesterday to tomorrow. This makes action foundational to events. The idea of past and future, whether of you and I, or of a monad, is conjectural, not physical.

Time then emerges from this activity, just like temperature. Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. The "arrow of time" emerges from the fact that since energy is conserved, in order to create new information, old has to be erased.

It is very revealing that you use the device of a court proceeding to argue your point. It is the purpose of a court to make determinations of the evidence, in order to reconcile divergent views. The fact remains though, that there are divergent views because perspective is inherently subjective. Consider the Relativistic argument against simultaneity, that different points of view can even have different timelines of the same events. This is illustrative of a point I tried making in my entry, that such distinctions are necessary to having perspective in the first place. That if you combine all the colors, you just get one shade and that is the conceptual basis, or absolute state. It is necessary to have distinct colors in order to create complexity. This goes to the nature of theology, in that there is no "God's eye view." An ideal is not an absolute. The absolute is the universal state from which we rise, not an ideal form from which we fell. The proper representation for the spiritual absolute would be a new born babe, not a bearded old man. It is only as this essence fractures into parts and they interact that complexities, numbers, geometry, etc. arise.

Now we do need to frequently coalesce, judge, determine, will, etc. a choice out of all the potential options, but that never fully resolves the issue, because that essence naturally grows back in the open spaces of what is neglected. Like grass pushes through the cracks in the sidewalks of our decisions. What is hard and set and fast, grows old quickly when it cannot adapt, yet in order to adapt, it must change to met the new, so if the future is a continuation of the past, the old must evolve, or it creates reaction. Evolution or revolution.

I'm starting to go off into politics, so I'll leave it at that...

Regards,

John

Akinbo,

Extension being space, I fully agree. it is the stage on which all else acts.

Regards,

John

Dear Akinbo,

Judge: What of extended points?

Jacek: Your honor, I agree that all is geometry. It is not easy to abandon the idea of a universe made of matter and embrace the vision of a reality made of a pure (conformally flat, isotropic, elastic, homeomorphic and self-organized) spacetime. We shall be looking for that one, universal, distance scale invariant metric (eventually reducing to Einstein GR metric within Solar System distance scale) and having ability to generate predictions. The first prediction of that geometrization concept is the spin experiment outcome. Depending on the outcome we shall look for a proper metric or give up.

Judge: The hearing is suspended until the spin experiment is carried out!

-------

You are absolutely right that we seem to have been led along the wrong road. I do not mean that I agree with you in 100%. E.g. I would exchange your extended points for wavepackets (spacetime deformations) as fundamental objects of geometry. This is not the same in details but they are also extended objects. That is a way to reduce physics to geometry.

I like your approach and I think that philosophy is very important to understand the reality (for teaching purposes) but in my opinion it is not enough to prove anything (for judgment) in the field of physics. My experiment is not described in the essay (my fault as I had a lot of place). It is the best to read full description here: http://vixra.org/abs/1304.0027

We differ in some issues but I think your essay deserves the high rating!

Best regards,

Akinbo,

As Yogi Berra put it, "When you reach a fork in the road, take it." The point, line, etc are just model systems from a physicist's perspective. One uses them in a way that is appropriate to the problem at hand. What mathematics means in of itself and its bearing on physics is a subject that many people have pondered and written about. This extends to ideas about mathematical realism, which is a variant of Platonism, and Brower's constructivism that considers mathematics as largely just a mental model set.

There is a monad aspect to things. I think elementary particles are just projections of a single eigenstate into different configuration variables. This means there is only one electron in the universe, and the vast number of them around us are just holographic projects of that single particle state.

Cheers LC

Akinbo

You asked me, again to look at your essay.

Overall, I do not understand what you are trying to convey, and your assumptions about the generic physical circumstance are incorrect.

There is no 'it' as such, other than in the sense that ultimately physical existence/reality must comprise of something (or various types of something). A reality, ie what exists at any given time, is a discrete definitive physically existent state of whatever comprises it.

Space is implied by existence (ie of something), we do not measure space, but the difference, spatially, between somethings. This might sound like 'splitting hairs', but the important point is that one can only establish the space between/relative spatial position of whatever is existent at the same time, and that is a specific physically existent state. Not a thing. There are more than 3 dimensions, this is, rather like things, just a high level conceptualisation of what actually occurs. The concept of dimension is associated with any possible direction, either way, of the spatial footprint of whatever physical state being considered. So, however many directions the smallest thing can travel from a spatial point, halved, is the number of possible dimensions. This would represent a line as you define it.

The point is this. When considering distance, spatial position, etc, what we are doing is imposing, conceptually, a spatial grid on any given reality. Although it is probably impossible for us to do, in order to properly correspond with what physically occurs, that grid would need a 'mesh' size equivalent to the smallest existent substance. The grid is located with respect to something. But if we do not understand how reality occurs, then application of this gets confused, eg we are relating things that do not exist at the same time, or we are referring to things that physically do not exist as we conceive them, etc. X=vt can be misunderstood. The concept is that space is being expressed in terms of the duration it would take something to travel a distance. But it cannot actually do this, because whilst doing so, the reality has altered.

To put this all another way around, there is no duration, no motion, no change of any degree whatsoever in a reality. Any difference constitutes another reality, ie a different physically existent state. There cannot be two different states of whatever comprises existence occurring at the same time. Duration, motion, a degree of change of any type is a reflection of the difference between one reality and its successor. In other words, it is a sequence.

Paul

Dear Akinbo,

You wrote an intriguing and compelling essay about monads. In the quest for understanding the universe, we are all beginners, and it is great that from time to time curious minds follow roads not taken.

Best regards,

Cristi

Akinbo

I am not bothered who else said this. It is a fact, that is how, generically, the physical existence we know must occur.

Now, you raise the right question, but it is not a challenge, it is very easy to explain. Well, generically anyway (as per my essay). How this actually manifests in our existence is very difficult to establish, and that is what physics is supposed to be doing.

Based on the physical input we (and all sentient organisms) receive, we know that that form of existence has two fundamental characteristics;

-what occurs (ie exists), does so independently of the mechanisms which detect it

-it involves difference, ie comparison of these inputs reveals that there is difference, and therefore alteration.

Hence the apparent conundrum (or illusion as you say). On the one hand for existence to occur there must be something definitive. But on the other hand, we experience change thereof. The resolution of this lies in a proper understanding of sequence, and the abandonment of the incorrect ontological concept of 'it changes'. A difference is a difference, not the same with a change, which is physical nonsense.

So the existence we can know is existential sequence. Whatever comprises it can only exist in that sequence in one discrete, definitive, physically existent state at a time, the predecessor must cease to exist so that the successor can exist, and so on. That last phrase is critical, and physically correct, but is the opposite from how we fundamentally conceive of reality, with 'things' and 'changes'. Whilst it is obviously important to understand what comprises reality, substantively, and causes difference, the concept of physically existent state is crucial. Things do not exist, a physically existent state does.

To put this simply. Take any thing around you. There is a cup of coffee here. Now, that appears to be an existent thing. But we know that if we wait long enough, we will see alteration. We know that if we put this under an electron microscope, we will see alteration. And we know if we could subject it to a more detailed examination, we would see more alteration. In other words, the question becomes, when is that cup of coffee a cup of coffee. And the answer is never, or once, depending on how one wants to phrase what is actually happening.

From one point in time to the next it is not the same. What is happening here is that we are conceptualising physical existence (reality) from a higher level than that at which it occurs, physically, via certain superficial physical attributes, which are not actually existent. And we deem this 'thing' to remain in existence whilst those attributes pertain. Indeed, we then rationalise alteration by conceiving that it has changed, which, physically, is nonsense, because if there has been alteration then something else exists.

In sum, there is no 'cup of coffee'. It is, physically, a sequence of occurrences, one at a time, which bear a superficial resemblance. These occurrences being the physically existent state of whatever is involved. Each of those states being a reality. That is, there is no degree of alteration within a reality. That alteration is what differentiates one reality from another in the sequence, ie one physically existent state from another.

Paul

Akinbo,

You missed my response and question (below June 8th post) above ref Dark Matter and the erroneous assumption it can't be baryonic. Saw you on the cusp, and the good news is that I hadn't addressed your points. Situation now remedied. I trust you'll double check too.

Thanks, and very best wishes for the final cut.

Peter

Akinbo - an interesting essay, but a little too philosophical for my tastes. However, I did appreciate your extended discussion of monads, which I think certainly shows some unique insight.

Good look in the contest.

Kind regards, Paul