Gravity and the Nature of Information by Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Edwin,

I had penned a long reply to your stuff, which disappeared into a puff of nothing, which I assert violates the law of conservation of energy. So would like an instantaneous return of my thoughts... O well. So here I begin again. But I am first writing offline so that I can control things better.

You wrote on my blog...:

Einstein said,"There is no space absent of field." In other words, the gravitational field fills space completely. Although you may or may not think of this field as a 'substance', it is considered to have energy (Maxwell taught us fields have energy) and hence mass (Einstein taught us energy has mass equivalence) and a number of writers of books on gravitation consider it a substance (as do I). Your question implies that you think of space as 'empty' ,but it is entirely possible that the primordial gravity field gave rise to space. Your second question, about what qualities would make it the source of all else is the topic of my essay

You are correct in that I used to imagine space to be "empty", but when I read Berkeley, I adopted his view, which critiqued Newton's notion of a God-created world-machine, which in turn caused our perceptions of itself.

With Berkeley's view I now see space, not as a container in which "things" reside, but as a mental and perceptual x, y, z, t coordinate system by which we keep track of where and when we are, for ourselves in the world and to coordinate with other perceivers. B saw the world-machine as an unhelpful intruder because it could never itself be observed (except by the perceptions themselves, which begs the question of its existence), so that we could never empirically know it to be there, nor be able to compare it with our perceptions to make sure we were perceiving correctly. Knowledge of the machine would be entirely metaphysical, not empirical. So it would have to be a logical conclusion, not an empirical one. So he cut out the "middleman" and went directly to God as the cause and the coordinator of the cosmos for us inhabitants. Occam's razor with a vengeance. God is by nature a metaphysical entity, not physical, and this requires the cosmological argument (or something similar) to justify belief in Him.

So I am very interested in your attempt to understand gravity as the source of all things. I have always understood gravity to be an attraction between objects with mass. But I could easily imagine a space entirely empty. So I am not sure what to think of Einstein's notion above. I suspect that he was the victim, as many others, of the collapse of real causality (a personal God), and so had to find substitutes within the cosmos itself.

In any event, B's view, if true, changes the whole discussion on the meaning of space at all, and the sense in which physical matter can be the cause of anything. We no longer have things of a Newtonian sort bumping around, we rather have perceptions which are related to each other by laws of behavior - what I called "bundles of behavior" in my essay.

In either case, there has to be an adequate "objective unifier of apperception" to tie together the disparate events, experiments, etc., that we want to think are part of the "same" world, and under the "same" laws. How gravity might be a better candidate than God for doing that I wait to see.Dear Edwin,

I had penned a long reply to your stuff, which disappeared into a puff of nothing, which I assert violates the law of conservation of energy. So would like an instantaneous return of my thoughts... O well. So here I begin again. But I am writing offline so that I can control things better.

You wrote on my blog...:

Einstein said,"There is no space absent of field." In other words, the gravitational field fills space completely. Although you may or may not think of this field as a 'substance', it is considered to have energy (Maxwell taught us fields have energy) and hence mass (Einstein taught us energy has mass equivalence) and a number of writers of books on gravitation consider it a substance (as do I). Your question implies that you think of space as 'empty' ,but it is entirely possible that the primordial gravity field gave rise to space. Your second question, about what qualities would make it the source of all else is the topic of my essay

You are correct in that I used to imagine space to be "empty", but when I read Berkeley, I adopted his view, which critiqued Newton's notion of a God-created world-machine, which in turn caused our perceptions of itself.

With Berkeley's view I now see space, not as a container in which "things" reside, but as a mental and perceptual x, y, z, t coordinate system by which we keep track of where and when we are, for ourselves in the world and to coordinate with other perceivers. B saw the world-machine as an unhelpful intruder because it could never itself be observed (except by the perceptions themselves, which begs the question of its existence), so that we could never empirically know it to be there, nor be able to compare it with our perceptions to make sure we were perceiving correctly. Knowledge of the machine would be entirely metaphysical, not empirical. So it would have to be a logical conclusion, not an empirical one. So he cut out the "middleman" and went directly to God as the cause and the coordinator of the cosmos for us inhabitants. Occam's razor with a vengeance. God is by nature a metaphysical entity, not physical, and this requires the cosmological argument (or something similar) to justify belief in Him.

So I am very interested in your attempt to understand gravity as the source of all things. I have always understood gravity to be an attraction between objects with mass. But I could easily imagine a space entirely empty. So I am not sure what to think of Einstein's notion above. I suspect that he was the victim, as many others, of the collapse of real causality (a personal God), and so had to find substitutes within the cosmos itself.

In any event, B's view, if true, changes the whole discussion on the meaning of space at all, and the sense in which physical matter can be the cause of anything. We no longer have things of a Newtonian sort bumping around, we rather have perceptions which are related to each other by laws of behavior - what I called "bundles of behavior" in my essay.

In either case, there has to be an adequate "objective unifier of apperception" to tie together the disparate events, experiments, etc., that we want to think are part of the "same" world, and under the "same" laws. How gravity might be a better candidate than God for doing that I wait to see.

Dear Edwin,

I had penned a long reply to your stuff, which disappeared into a puff of nothing, which I assert violates the law of conservation of energy. So would like an instantaneous return of my thoughts... O well. So here I begin again. But I am writing offline so that I can control things better.

You wrote on my blog...:

Einstein said,"There is no space absent of field." In other words, the gravitational field fills space completely. Although you may or may not think of this field as a 'substance', it is considered to have energy (Maxwell taught us fields have energy) and hence mass (Einstein taught us energy has mass equivalence) and a number of writers of books on gravitation consider it a substance (as do I). Your question implies that you think of space as 'empty' ,but it is entirely possible that the primordial gravity field gave rise to space. Your second question, about what qualities would make it the source of all else is the topic of my essay

You are correct in that I used to imagine space to be at least potentially "empty", but when I read Berkeley, I adopted his view, which critiqued Newton's notion of a God-created world-machine, which in turn caused our perceptions of itself.

With Berkeley's view I now see space, not as a container in which "things" reside, but as a mental and perceptual x, y, z, t coordinate system by which we keep track of where and when we are, for ourselves in the world and to coordinate with other perceivers. B saw the world-machine as an unhelpful intruder because it could never itself be observed (except through the perceptions themselves, which begs the question of its existence), so that we could never empirically know it to be there, nor be able to compare it with our perceptions to make sure we were perceiving correctly. Knowledge of the machine would be entirely metaphysical, not empirical. It would have to be a logical conclusion, not an empirical one. So he cut out the "middleman" and went directly to God as the cause and the coordinator of the cosmos for us inhabitants. Occam's razor with a vengeance. God is by nature a metaphysical entity, not physical, and this requires the cosmological argument (or something similar) to justify belief in Him (the subject of my doctoral thesis).

So I am very interested in your attempt to understand gravity as the source of all things. I have always understood gravity to be an attraction between objects with mass. But I could easily imagine a space entirely empty of objects. So I am not sure what to think of Einstein's notion above. I suspect that he was the victim, as many others, of the collapse of real causality (a personal God), and so had to find substitutes within the cosmos itself.

In any event, B's view, if true, changes the whole discussion on the meaning of space at all, and the sense in which physical matter can be the cause of anything. We no longer have things of a Newtonian sort bumping around, we rather have perceptions which are related to each other by laws of behavior - what I called "bundles of behavior" in my essay.

In either case, there has to be an adequate "objective unifier of apperception" to tie together the disparate events, experiments, etc., that we want to think are part of the "same" world, and under the "same" laws. How gravity might be a better candidate than God for doing that I wait to see.

(You were right, we need more space than nine pages to present our case....)

Hi, Edwin,

I should have added that the above was written after I read your paper. It will take another reading to digest adequately, but will do so and respond again.

Blessings, Earle

Dear Dr. Klingman,

Thanks for the comparison of our outlooks you left on my page. All very good points that I would like to consider at greater length later. The good and bad thing about the contest is that it does impel one to rate as many essays as possible, rather than to explore any in depth.

All the Best,

John.

Dear Edwin, what an accomplished man, what a renaissance man! What a beautiful essay and what a pleasure to read it. You started with the Suzhou Qingming Scroll that shows the celebration of ordinary lives during the worship of ancestors festival in Suzhou market. You mockingly ask the quetion of this contest: "the ambiguity of life. I hear the man on the left saying "Information is real, matter is imaginary", while the one on the right proclaims, "Matter is real, information is imagined".

Which is correct?.... This contest could have been titled: "Map from territory, or territory from map?"

Smolin says of purely math-based ideas: "sooner or later we'll find ourselves just making stuff up."

Modern physics, tied maximally to math, minimally to reality, contains a lot of 'made up stuff'.'

You indicted the professional physicists of bias and they have failed to realize or acknowledge their bias or ignorance. You presented your case: "QED's worst gives 4% accuracy and QCD's best about 1%--both ten times worse than the theory of epicycles--yet dogma such as virtual particles, QCD color, Bell non- locality or other premises are never to be questioned."

Then brilliantly, you proposed your powerful but simple alternative. You wrote: "...we can assume that only one real field existed initially. If so, it could evolve only through

self-interaction. If we call this field φ and the change or evolution operator ∇ , then this English statement about evolution has a math equivalent10 (expressed in Geometric Algebra notation):

∇φ =φφ. . Powerful stuff! Great achievement! I like it very much.

However this conclusion below, I beg to differ with respect. You wrote: "The model is thus a structure or form in hardware (computer or brain) and the addition of measurement data 'in-forms', or develops improved in-ternal form-al structure. This is the meaning of in-form-ation. It derives from the physical hardware that incorporates the map or model, and is inherently and unquestionably "bit from it". Without the physical, there simply is no information. To argue otherwise one must show how a world with no physical reality can be brought into existence from information. Wheeler's remark "how to combine bits in fantastically large numbers to obtain what we call existence" was just unsupported fantasy." In contrast, in my essay Child of Qbit in time, I postulate that bit = it that it can come from bit or bit from it. Because as you pointed out, it is one field that interacts with itself. Thus bit interacts with itself as bit or it. As Shakespeare told us, our thinkings make things right or wrong or bit or it. KQID describes our reality that all things are one Qbit(00,1,-1). This Qbit is the singularity Qbit Multiverse that projects its computations in Einstein complex coordinates(like Pythagoras triangles) with A = pc and S = mc^2 satisfies Einstein vector space in time |E) = A iS, where S and A are real, and i is imaginary number satisfies i^2 = -1, S = mc2 and A = pc that satisfies (mc2)2(pc)2= 1 onto the 2D screen (our Multiverse event horizon) Lm which is Minkowski's Null Geodesics that in turn project those Einstein coordinates in our real world that we really feel as alive and conscious. Yes we agree there is only one field, in KQID is our Ancestor FAPAMA Qbit.

I agree with what you said: "I hypothesize that awareness came into existence but once. A consciousness field does not arise when a number of Lego blocks are first assembled in correct order-- and re-arise with every organism that is born! It's been a Participatory Universe from the beginning." Here, we use different terms naturally, I say this is that Qbit and this Qbit manifest itself into myriads things in a field as described in KQID equation υτ(iLx,y,z, Lm) in the form of conscious and aware entity as described in this equation ψI( CTE) where I is information as the bits- wave function of consciousness(C), time(T) and energy(E). Of course then, as you deduced: "Thus the field is aware of both position and motion aspects of reality -- Space and Time!" And of course that

"Bits and information imply consciousness; knowledge and meaning of information require awareness!" We have similar idea but using different terms and symbols. What a wonderful essay beyond words to describe. I rated it the best score. Please comment on my essay and rate it accordingly. Thanks for this gift, Leo KoGuan

Dear Edwin. Hello, and apologies if this does not apply to you. I have read and rated your essay and about 50 others. If you have not read, or did not rate my essay The Cloud of Unknowing please consider doing so. With best wishes.

Vladimir

Edwin,

I very much appreciate your thought provoking essay. You gave me much to think about!

You can represent the dualism of the C-field using a 2D complex space (Eddington's phase dimension). Widening the phase angle indicates an increase in the conditional entropy of the observer (corresponding to the expansion of spacetime). Narrowing the phase angle indicates an increase in entanglement entropy (gravity). (See my essay "A Complex Conjugate Bit and It".)

In Eddington's hypersphere model universe, the toroidal topology of a spin 1/2 particle and the universe is the same. As with the dualism of the C-field, one can envisage winding states reciprocally generating meridial mass flow. The radius R of the winding states stretches towards the maximum limit (the Cosmic Event Horizon) as quantized meridial mass states diminish to a continuum (de Sitter spacetime). Conversely, as R deceases, the spacing between the winding states grows smaller until they form a continuum at the quantum critical point, where entanglement entropy is maximum.

A hypersphere can turn inside out and fold back into itself, like a Clifford torus. The lines of latitude and longitude are interchanged, and with them, the corresponding mass flows. A 720 degree spherical rotation of a spin 1/2 particle has analogs in homotopy group inversion on a hypersphere. If we consider passing "inside" a 1/2 particle, the winding and the meridial states flip at the crossover. Maximum entropy winding states in de Sitter space become minimum entropy meridial flow in AdS diminishing to a continuum. In effect, we now have the same physics (in reverse) at i/R as we did at R.

Best wishes,

Richard Shand

Hi Edwin,

I kept wondering why I have not been seeing any posts regarding interesting essays, under the "Recent Forum Posts". It just dawned on me that only posts about blogs, not essays, appear there now. Bummer!

I recently encountered this essay, from a local college, that I think you might find interesting, in the context of your essay:

Fields and Particles and Being

The essay, by Dylan Casey, begins on p. 57 of the PDF file.

The essay is published in "The St. John's Review". St. John's is a rather unique, small liberal arts college, whose entire curriculum is devoted to reading and discussing "Great Books". Consequently, the faculty members, called tutors, are well versed in the history of philosophical and scientific thought. Dylan Casey is a physicist, turned tutor. His essay concerns how notions about the nature of "particles" and "fields" evolved over the centuries and into modern Field Theory. Because of his position, at the college, he is rather more cognizant of the distinction between actual physics and metaphysical speculation, than most modern physicists.

The essay begins by noting the problem of "Action at a Distance", encountered in Particle Interactions. It then notes that Faraday "coined the term field", to avoid this problem; particles don't interact, at a distance, with other particles, they only interact with the field they are immersed in. Subsequently, Maxwell and Einstein delved into the origins of such fields and hit upon the notion that particles might disturb the field near them, and these disturbances propagate, at finite speed, towards other particles, and thereby alter the field near them, thereby altering their response to their local field.

This brings me to your intriguing "master equation". As you know, I'm not particularly fond of pulling mathematical rabbits out of physical hats. But I like the idea of starting solely with a single, self-interacting field. But why assume that the *entire* field is interacting with itself? Perhaps, given any finite speed for the propagation of disturbances, and a large physical universe, only localized interactions are possible, like schools of fish, and flocks of birds. The evolution of the interaction occurs as a result of the constantly changing subset of the field, that is actually influencing any given particle, at any given moment.

I could say more regarding my take on gravity as geometry, consciousness, the Holographic Principle and the like, but, at least for now, I'd mainly like to hear your thoughts regarding global vs. local self-interaction.

Let me give you a little more idea of where I am coming from. You are familiar with some of my concerns regarding the usage of Fourier Transforms in Field Theory. Let me be explicit about it, in the present context. Spatial Fourier Transforms integrate over all space. Temporal ones integrate over all time. But, they cannot integrate over a disturbance that has not yet arrived, unless one reintroduces instantaneous action, not just at a spatial distance, but temporal, future ones, as well. Hence they cannot be a correct model for any local interaction. This is why communications engineers introduced concepts like "instantaneous frequency" as opposed to "Fourier Frequency", to extract information from only localized fields.; localized in both space and time.

Rob McEachern

I forgot to mention something important. It occurred to me, while reading Casey's essay; while the introduction of fields may provide a solution to the action at a distance problem, another, more fundamental problem remains. How do particles sense/measure the field? None of our hard-won technology can do it. And we keep building *bigger* instruments, like telescopes and particle colliders to increase the sensitivity to the things they do sense. So, when you drastically decrease the instrument size, down to a single electron, with no internal structure, how can that little bit of unsophisticated technology accurately sense the field around it, so that it can response accordingly? Even when you consider particles to be merely some aspect of the field, such as a resonance or vortex within the field, if the field evolves, why don't the nature of the particles evolve along with it? Why is an electron always an electron? Do electrons in different parts of the universe, subject to different localized fields, behave differently than those in the field near us?

Rob McEachern

Hi Edwin Eugene Klingman,

Nice work, It gets my highest mark and I also admire Alfred Korzybski.

Don Limuti

Hi, Edwin,

Thanks you. That does clarify a lot. I am in the midst of a move to another city, so spare time is scarce, but will reread your essay and respond again. I am very glad to have gotten into this discussion on FQXi, brings me up to date on a lot of issues. The depth of the mess into which philosophy of physics has fallen is startling, but I should have been forewarned by my own original doctoral thesis as to the problems ahead given what philosophers of science were saying in the 1960's.

Our views might indeed be compatible. I will have to think through your thoughts above with another reread of your essay.

Blessings, Earle