On The Road Not Taken by Akinbo Ojo

Akinbo,

You have, I believe, asked the same tough question on both our blogs so I am answering on both blogs. The question is about "the not-two aspect of reality". You note that Parmenides said "of necessity one thing exists, viz., the existent and nothing else."

If this is true then several questions arise: how to conceive of or represent this fact. And whether this is merely a conception or whether one can be aware of this fact in direct fashion.

I choose, as a physicist, to identify the "one thing" as the primordial gravity field, and attempt to show how our current universe, including us, can and did evolve from this one thing. To do so I necessarily include in the nature of the field the aspect of awareness, based partly on the self-interaction of the field that is necessary for the one thing to evolve (since nothing else existed!) and partly on a conclusion that I have reached that awareness, as I experience it, cannot be created from material building blocks, but must be inherent in the Participatory Universe that Wheeler intuited.

But this then implies, as Amos has noted, that we can, being evolved parts of the one thing, be directly aware of the one thing. Yet if this is the case, why is not everyone aware of this, and further, what does it mean to be aware of it?

In my essay I discuss how the existence of a threshold allows the creation of "two-state" systems, idealized as logic gates and the interconnection of these gates can produce numbers and such numbers can be generated by energy input to the 'counter'. I then discuss how we can, algorithmically, treat these numbers to derive 'feature vectors' which are the essential ingredients of physics. This process can be internalized in our brains to represent the world as "things", or what Zen calls "the Ten Thousand things".

Now whether awareness arises from the biological fact of putting the right building blocks in the right order, or from its inherent existence as a primordial field, in either case human beings identify as 'separate individuals', generally denoted by the term 'ego'.

If all we are is 'meat machines' then that's probably as far as we can go. But if awareness is the core property of the universe, then one might expect that it's possible to have some direct indication of this. Unfortunately, the nature of ego is to divide the universe into 'me' and 'not-me', an inherent two-fold reality.

Is it possible to transcend this? Many reports claim that is.

Abraham Maslow's studies, related in "The Peak Experience" claim that many people naturally have episodes wherein they experience the 'one-ness' of the universe, also termed 'being one-with the universe'.

William James in "Varieties of Religious Experience" came to the same conclusion.

Jill Bolte Taylor's "My Stroke of Insight" describes the state as she (a neuro-anatomist) experienced it while having a stroke.

Innumerable reports of LSD and psilocybin experience indicate the same thing.

All cultures have a mystical tradition based on experiences of this sort.

In my opinion every one of us was born with this general awareness, before our brains learned to distinguish 'me' from 'it' based on sensory input.

I also believe it is essentially a 'topological' awareness, based on *connectivity*, wherein the metric overlay of 'distance' is (almost) completely suppressed.

What is absolutely certain is that it can neither be adequately described in words (or math) nor can it be reached by talking, reading, or "thinking" about it. It is apparently reached through a biological state, either naturally, as Maslow and James report, or chemically induced, or stroke induced. Those who have never experienced it (or have forgotten the experience) tend to believe it's hogwash (or possibly codswallop). However it would appear that millions have experienced it, and the general consensus is that it's 1.) real, 2.) extremely positive, and 3.) has 'religious' overtones.

According to Zen and the Tao, it cannot be reached with words, but for a taste of the experience, I find D T Suzuki's translation of "Inscribed on the Believing Mind" to be exquisite.

I hope this adequately addresses the 'not-two' question.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

PS. This may seem to border on 'mystical', but I personally find it far less mystical than the belief that "math lives in some Platonic realm". It is based on direct experience, not abstract concept.

Akinbo,

Hi. Yours was a very good essay! As you mentioned in your posting on my essay, several of us are thinking along the same lines: using a bottom-up approach to model reality based on discrete units (monads, existent states, etc.). In addition to Franklin Hu, Kjetil Hustveit had a similar essay.

If I understood it correctly, one of the things I don't think I'll agree on is that monads/existent states can't have a border. In my thinking, the border is not some separate structure because as someone above pointed out, this would be smaller than the monad, which would then lead to the conclusion that the monad isn't the smallest particle size. Instead, I think the monad/existent state and its border are really one and the same thing. I think this is necessitated by there being no interior contents within the monad (since it's the smallest existent unit size). In fact, I'd vote that the reason anything (monads, books, clouds, etc.) exists at all is because it is a grouping defining what is contained within. This grouping or defining relationship is equivalent to a border that gives substance and existence to the thing. Without a grouping saying what is contained within, the thing wouldn't exist.

This next part is usually where I usually lose people, so you might want to stop here. But, I think that at the smallest, most fundamental level, the only thing that can act as its own grouping or border is the complete lack-of-all, or what we used to refer to as "non-existence" or "nothing". "Non-existence" (lack of space, time, volume, energy, matter, mathematical and abstract constructs, minds, etc.) would be a situation that acts as its own grouping/defining relationship/border. By its very nature, it says the entirety of all that is present or not present is contained in this lack of all. That is, if we could think of this supposed lack-of-all a little differently, we would see that it's actually an existent state, a monad. Said another way, our distinction between "nothing" and "something" is not correct. They're just two different words for describing the same underlying thing. Monad/smallest-existent-state would be another word for this underlying thing.

Anyways, I think your essay was excellent, and I just wish more (or any) physicists and philosophers would start using the type of bottom-up reasoning that you use.

Roger

P.S. Sometimes, I think that studying biology helps in this type of thinking because we have to think in terms of things (cells, molecules) and physical mechanisms as opposed to physicists who think in terms of abstract/mental images.

Akinbo,

Thanks for the reply. That Leibniz sounds like he was a pretty smart guy! I'll write more over at your other comment. See you there!

Hi Akinbo,

Though energy is quantified, that does not mean that the Planck constant is a minimum energy, and hence the Planck length the smallest possible length in the universe.

The short reasoning* is that since in blackbody radiation there are more energy levels per unit energy interval at higher energies, temperatures, so we need more and more decimals to distinguish successive energy levels, the energy gap between subsequence levels can become arbitrarily small: though energy is quantified, there is no minimum limit to the size of the quantum, so the Planck length and Planck time etc. have no special significance.

The Planck constant h is like the number 1 in mathematics, encompassing all values between 0.5 and 1.5, so if we can measure the Planck constant in more decimals, at higher energies, then we can write that number as 1.0, which encompasses all numbers between 0.95 and 1.05.

So if in our equations we set h = 1, then every time we improve the accuracy of the Planck constant, then we increase the magnifying power of our microscope with a factor 10.

Though there is no smallest distance, to what extent spacetime itself is detailed depends on the energy density somewhere: the higher, the more detailed the spacetime area is.

*For the long reasoning, see my 2010 FQXI essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/838

Another point is that if we do live in a self-creating universe where particles and particle properties are as much the cause as the effect of their interactions, then two particles only would be identical if they would be at the exact same point in spacetime, if their environments would be identical.

So instead of saying that interactions between particles become weaker because distance 'dilutes' the property of one particle as observed by the other, we can as well say that the properties of particles become qualitatively more different as they are farther apart, as if from the point of view of a nail, say, a magnet turns more and more into a cork as it is more distant.

This means that your monads not only have no minimum size, they can also differ qualitatively, the difference changing gradually, a difference which is observer dependent.

Regards, Anton

Doctor Ojo,

Thank you for furnishing the website link to Plato's rendition of Parmenides. I think the only improvement I may have added to our understanding of what unique is, is my tautological emphasis on once. It is not the fact that a fingerprint is unique once to each person who has lived, it is unique once to each person who will ever come into existence in the future. This will apply even if cloning becomes real. Aliens may exist, but if they do, they cannot have fingerprints or DNA in their cells.

Dear Akinbo

An interesting presentation.

You can add comments to a prosecution lawyer in the following, or not:

It does not come from bits and the bits also did not born from it.

It is itself - it was born from the process activity of nature - because if there is no source of information dissemination, the information will not have to take over, and the bit is always available everywhere,so bit is not something that was born from it, the bit only absorb and transmission the impact from the source dispersal of information.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1802

Dear Akinbo Ojo,

I would like to suggest that you look at Heckman's essay. It occurred to me that identification of his "agents" with your "monads" leads to some interesting perspectives.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Akinbo,

I like the closing statement that all is geometry and Bit and It seem to be just as fundamental. Also they style and format of your essay is nicely put together.

Perhaps my essay isn't too far removed from your own line of thinking to be worth a read?

Best wishes,

Antony

Dear Akinbo,

Thanks for commenting on my essay and introducing me to yours and about Leibniz's monads. I am flattered by its resonance and intrigued by the differences and their potential ways of reconciliation.

Take the idea of "lifetime" of monads in your essay which you also probed in the comment. From the perspective of monads, I would not treat lifetime of monads to be defined or derived from time if time has no further derivative. When monad appears from nowhere to somewhere, how does one define on long it has taken it to do so since there is no way to tell how long it has been in nowhere. Unless reference is made to something else which has the quality of time and that something else couldn't be a monad because it will spiral into infinite chaos and confusion if so. But from the perspective of non-monad, the monad will appear to have a lifetime between annihilation and creation and vice-versa. However the non-monad will have no way to identify which monad has been annihilated and created again, because the monad would have to leave traces or parts behind for the non-monad to identify, where no monad will do, since there are no parts to monad. Therefore monad cannot exist within the non-monad 'time-based' system and this is where we differ subtly it seems.

Regards,

Hon Jia

Dear Akinbo,

Your work is really attractive. I am fully agree that thickness and actual sizes of objects must be no ignored in realistic descriptions. In the classical physics this demand is considered. However the matter is different in QM representation. Here you are right fully. On this question open please the reference from my article ,,Rethinking the Formal methodology ...,, and email my from there. I think we can talk seriously!

Sincerely,

George

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1804

Akinbo,

As the subject of Zeno's dichotomy belongs more to your thread than to mine, I post my reply to your post at my thread on yours -be it in a more concise form. OK?

According to relativity theory the length the walker observes his path to have depends on the pace he walks at: the faster he moves, the more contracted the path looks to him, to shrink to zero length if he could walk at the speed of light. So it are the relativistic effects of his motion, however tiny at walking pace, which allow the traveler, despite the mathematic impossibility, to reach his destination. Zeno's concept of space is that of classical mechanics which assumes that it is the same (cosmic) time everywhere, that we live in a mathematical space were all points are identical but for their coordinates. In the actual spacetime we live in, the observed pace of clocks and length of yardsticks differs slightly at different distances, so you might say that the different points of his path live in slightly different universes, so the traveler at the end of his walk isn't the exact same person as the one who departed at the other end.

Anton

Hello Hon Jia,

Thanks for your comments. I cannot tell you I have all the answers but I do not see any other road that can lead us to truth and reality. The further details will be filled in by dialectic and reductio ad absurdum type arguments.

For example, nothing, not even a monad can exist in nowhere. A monad is a something and a somewhere. Nowhere means no place. If you check the Newton and Leibniz quotes, 'somewhere' and 'something' are essentially comprised of the same "atoms of nature". So, the question of how long it has been in nowhere should not arise. I think the appropriate phrase is arising ex-nihilo.

Only things that exist can have a lifetime and if existent things have a variable lifetime, by default duration and time must arise.

The appearance of a monad and its annihilation according to Leibniz will occur in an INSTANT. The current theoretical thinking of this shortest duration is the Planck time.

Non-monad do not exist so it cant have a perspective and cannot have a need to identify any event.

Monad is the fundamental unit of geometry so space is a composite of monads, just like you and me. Leibniz tells us that, "...monads are the true atoms of Nature--the elements out of which everything is made". And Newton concurs, "...And my account throws a satisfactory light on the difference between ... a body and a region of space. The raw materials of each are the same in their properties and nature,..." (see my reference). As you rightly point out, monad cannot leave traces. It has no parts, unlike composite things. It appears and disappears all at once.

Time remains a difficult concept for me to grasp. But time can ONLY be contemplated within and by what exists. And ALL that exist, both body and space is a composite of monads. Again, monads are not eternally existing things and are not all created or annihilated together. Somewhere in this, the perception of time must come in.

More homework needs to be done on 'Time'. Many thanks for your comments.

Regards,

Akinbo

Akinbo,

Thanks for reading my paper. You are of course correct that the geometric point is a mathematical fiction, as are infinity and other mathematical concepts. Math is an abstract representational system. Math is not physics, although the two have been conflated by our observer-based measurement models (Relativity and QM). The facts clearly demand the hypothesis that space is a substance, so the task of a theoretical physics is to understand that substance and its role in all phenomena. We now know much, much more about the physical world and the evolution of complexity than did the Greeks, Newton, Leibniz or Einstein. Space must have some smallest parts, but I think that they bear little resemblance to Leibniz's monads, which is why I did not use that term. We cannot proceed as did philosophers of old with abstract speculations about the elements of space. We need to instead look at the known phenomena and see what they tell us about space.

I have shown that gravity is most simply explained if Newton's "absolute" space is instead a fluid flowing into matter--its acceleration causing all matter to accelerate with it. We measure its velocity by the slowing of our atomic clocks. See the theory here. This theory solves Newton's action-reaction dilemma-space acts upon matter to resist its acceleration because matter is acting upon space, consuming it as a sink consumes a fluid. You speculate that the spatial elements disappear in front of and are created behind a moving object, that is possible, but because gravity appears to involve the consumption of space by matter and a resulting sink flow, I think it's more likely that when matter moves through space, space flows into and around it. Someday experiments may help differentiate between these two theories. You may be interested in my further speculations about space, its parts and its motions in this essay.

As you are a physician, you may also be interested in my thoughts on the corruption of medicine by pharmaceutical corporations, and the resulting ignorance of natural scientific medicine, including endocrinology. See my practice webpages.

Henry

Hi Akinbo,

I very much liked your essay. I never heard of these Monads before, they are very similar to my UB's (Universal Bits).

I believe that for a coherent world to develop, these monads need to follow a simple rule. I have described this simple rule in my essay. By following that simple rule, a coherent world with time and space emerges.

If you have the time, please take a look at my essay. I would love to have your comments. If you like the ideas in it, you can read the full story here:3D Universe Theory

Cheers,

Patrick

Hi Akinbo,

I left a comment on my website.

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1773

Regards

Helmut

Dear Dr. Ojo

Congratulatins for writing a lucid, engaging, enjoyable and thought-provoking essay, and one (unlike many others here) relevant to the It-Bit contest question.

Your learned guided tour along the Monad Road was of special interest to me because in my 2005 Beautiful Universe Theory also found here I have proposed a Universe composed of a single building block - I call it a node, but you may as well call it a physical monad. While I have not speculated on the 'size' of this node it differs from yours because it does not disappear/appear to describe motion as in your figure. Rather, a pattern of node orientations and energy changes, while the nodes themselves do not move or disappear. Please see Figure 26 in the above mentioned paper to illustrate this rather complicated convoluted motion!

Again thank you for an excellent read - I will also read Newton's paper that you referenced that I did not know about.

With very best wishes, Your Honor.

Vladimir

Akinbo,

If given the time and the wits to evaluate over 120 more entries, I have a month to try. My seemingly whimsical title, "It's good to be the king," is serious about our subject.

Jim