Not at all - I like what you have done. Thanks for the reply.
Wishing you all the best in the contest.
You certainly deserve to be a finalist!
Antony
Not at all - I like what you have done. Thanks for the reply.
Wishing you all the best in the contest.
You certainly deserve to be a finalist!
Antony
Thank you Sreenath
Finally someone is getting it! I think you will like my book when it is completed--The Armchair Universe--(nearly there) and released in a year or so. I am really hoping to attract other people to help me work on the higher dimensional solutions.
Stephen,
I just glanced at your essay and was floored by the similarity of our approach to the topic at hand. From my understanding of your postulate of GPE we are talking about the same thing, perhaps from a different perspective, yet governed by one fundamental foundation of absolute precision.
Please review my essay to make sure we are on the same wavelength. I believe the findings obtained from the recently concluded 12 year experiment will be of interest to you. Meanwhile, I will be re-reading your fascinating essay...
Best wishes,
Manuel
Stephen,
Thank you for your essay.
I wish the topic of this round of essays was a word like "'time" or a simple sentence. I am seeing two broad categories of essays: essays about knowing and essays about the structure of space at its must fundamental level and of course, combinations of the two these two themes. This essay is about knowing. I hope I have this right:
There is a perfect structure to the universe which we have an imperfect knowledge. There is a simplest unit that can contain all the properties that can be known.
All of these simplest units are connected to form our universe.
The issue I have is with time. In this model, all of time is going with the same lockstep. A single constant universal time would not fit relativity. We, of course, could be experiencing time (as well as everything else) in the wrong way. The larger issue I have is no pathway is given for us see this underlying structure of the universe. It might be correct, but how can we use it?
Jeff
Hello Stephen,
I am not yet fully satisfied but we can engage in more dialectic after reading my essay. Meanwhile...
As the contest in Wheeler's honor draws to a close, leaving for the moment considerations of rating and prize money, and knowing we cannot all agree on whether 'it' comes from 'bit' or otherwise or even what 'it' and 'bit' mean, and as we may not be able to read all essays, though we should try, I pose the following 4 simple questions and will rate you accordingly before July 31 when I will be revisiting your blog.
"If you wake up one morning and dip your hand in your pocket and 'detect' a million dollars, then on your way back from work, you dip your hand again and find that there is nothing there...
1) Have you 'elicited' an information in the latter case?
2) If you did not 'participate' by putting your 'detector' hand in your pocket, can you 'elicit' information?
3) If the information is provided by the presence of the crisp notes ('its') you found in your pocket, can the absence of the notes, being an 'immaterial source' convey information?
Finally, leaving for the moment what the terms mean and whether or not they can be discretely expressed in the way spin information is discretely expressed, e.g. by electrons
4) Can the existence/non-existence of an 'it' be a binary choice, representable by 0 and 1?"
Answers can be in binary form for brevity, i.e. YES = 1, NO = 0, e.g. 0-1-0-1.
Best regards,
Hello Jeff
Thanks for your input. I am working, and will get back to you tonight.
Stephen
Hello Akinbo
Thanks for you input. I am working and will get back to you tonight.
Stephen
Hello Akinbo
You said:
"If you wake up one morning and dip your hand in your pocket and 'detect' a million dollars, then on your way back from work, you dip your hand again and find that there is nothing there...
1) Have you 'elicited' an information in the latter case?"
The Endpoint Rationalist holds no special distinction between something and nothing unless and until either comes into focus through endpoint rationalist means. That is, nothing has the same ontological status as something. It is as informative that I could not pay for my lunch, as it is that I could pay for my lunch (even if it was going to be a million dollar lunch!).
2) If you did not 'participate' by putting your 'detector' hand in your pocket, can you 'elicit' information?
The Endpoint Rationalist does not need to detect the universe to know its structure, plainly, as covered in my thesis. Indeed, the money in my pocket is not even money to the Endpoint Rationalist until a proper model has been developed. Such anthropocentric ideas! One is trying to talk about ultimate foundations, surely, and money is just so passe.
3) If the information is provided by the presence of the crisp notes ('its') you found in your pocket, can the absence of the notes, being an 'immaterial source' convey information?
None of these things is an immaterial source. The GPE is the immaterial source, and it is the foundation of everything. One can't really go about supposing things about notes ('Crisp'! Really! So human-centered!)
Finally, leaving for the moment what the terms mean and whether or not they can be discretely expressed in the way spin information is discretely expressed, e.g. by electrons
4) Can the existence/non-existence of an 'it' be a binary choice, representable by 0 and 1?"
I don't understand this question. Doesn't existence (1) and non-existence (0) imply a binary choice? What what difference does that make beyond mere description. What everyone wants to know is, what brings this into existence.
Answers can be in binary form for brevity, i.e. YES = 1, NO = 0, e.g. 0-1-0-1.
Where do these 0's and 1's come from? Contemporary mathematics degenerated to a null element at the first step of construction within my essay.
Stephen Anastasi
Hello Stephen,
Yorguments are brilliant but I cannot agree that the simplest possible Omnet will not have the Asset (attribute) of position. And what has a definite position must at the very least be minimally extended. And if minimally extended, geometry cannot be escaped space being implied in 'extended'.
The geometric point having no Asset whatsoever, not even extension cannot be an Omnet and cannot exist.
As I said on my blog, that "a problem for geometry" is a masterpiece that I will be revisiting again and again. I envisage that without actually measuring it, it can prove the existence of a minimal length limit like the Planck length. This will have implications for the classical level contrary to the thinking that only slight changes, and this at quantum level can result. For example, you must know that Zeno's paradoxes of motion are resolved on the basis that no such limit exists. If now that limit exists, what next for motion. This is where 'digital motion' may come to the rescue, where dx will be the infinitesimal in the calculus of Newton and Leibniz and be equivalent to the Planck length.
Please I only agree with the first 8 paragraphs of Leibniz monadology that seems to be where his monad and that of the Pythagoreans coincide. The monads I describe are like minimally simple omnets, the only asset being position. There is no perception like Leibniz's monads, but they have a lifetime, which is random and can also be induced so that we have uncertainty and determinism co-habiting in our world.
Now, the if the fundamental IT is that monad or omnet, the fundamental "minimally simple event" is their annihilation and emergence from nothing. All other assets, e.g. mass, charge, etc and all other events are built from these building blocks. I dont know whether the you consider the ability to annihlate to nothing or emerge from nothing an Asset.
This is getting long. I will stop here.
Best regards,
Akinbo
*Rating your essay highly!
Hello Stephen
I think the Universe working as a bistable multivibrator 01010101......
Regards
Yuri
Stephen,
What I wanted to ask is "how can we use your principles to give us something we can test and use?"
What you said might be correct, but can it be confirmed?
Jeff
Hello Jeff
You set me an interesting question! Several interesting branches arise. Firstly, say experiment does not align with the implications of higher dimensional interpretations of the Harmony Set. Then the experiment is suspect! Why? Because we know that the Harmony Set is necessarily a proper model. This may seem to reverse the order of acceptance of a theory, but the evidence from our physical world has a lesser epistemological status that that of the rationalist world. That said, one does not expect that there would be any irreconcilable differences.
Secondly, to time. I have shown that a timelike metronome exists for our universe. That does not mean it is the time we measure, which I think is an effect brought by change of structures relative to each other within the physical universe. This 'physics time' is a vestige of the structure of the fabric of our spacetime background, which would at minimum be closely aligned to expectations of Special Relativity, as best I can read at this early stage.
Our challenge is clear: develop a physical model of the universe in a suitable topology based on the Harmony Set. If such a model shows that the world must be a certain way, then it rests with the investigator to come to understand how the world connects with the model, not necessarily the other way around.
In the end, there must be an interpretation of the Harmony Set that is an exact model of our world.
Best wishes
Stephen Anastasi.
Hi Yuri
Your point being? Justified by? Justification of that justification?
I want, indeed we all want, a causal rather than descriptive theory. That is what I have supplied.
Hello again Akinbo
Thanks for this post, which I missed among the others. Some comments:
This essay was a story about (or, more strictly, an account of) the origin of the world, meaning all that is. It was also a story about the origin of the physical universe, why and how it comes to be at all and, in so far as one essay could contain it, why and how it comes to be as it is. It is not a story about the first three minutes. It is not a story about the first seven days. To talk about these latter things we must first find a basis for time, space, physics, mathematics and perhaps religion. These latter things quickly reveal themselves to us once proper foundations have been laid.
Only then can we touch on the initial evolution of structure at the beginning of time, existence of physical structures like galaxies, stars and planets, people and minds.
In other words my essay aims to illuminate First Cause, a supposedly impossible task. First Cause means the first cause of everything; the thing that brought everything else into existence, including ideas of position and spacetime. Why we expect there to be First Cause is because, while there is a world, there might have been no world, or it might have been different to how it is. As such, the world as we find it is what is known as a contingent being. All contingent beings ultimately depend on a necessarily existing thing, meaning a thing that cannot not-be, a necessary being, for its existence or the form of its existence. This being may or may not have been a 'being' as we think of beings, or it might me a condition of the world, some inescapable law or fact of the universe. It was shown to be an inescapable principle of equivalence.
For our work to be more than just supposition, I had to answer the question:
Is there any knowledge in the world that is so certain that no reasonable person can doubt it? (Russell 1978)
because certainty is the prime requirement if we are to claim that a condition is necessarily the case. Otherwise it just 'might be' the case. So anything less is not an answer at all, for if there is doubt, then our efforts are no more than conjecture. Presently, despite the illusion of knowledge through physics, mathematics and indeed any discipline, all is conjecture, as the philosopher is keen to point out.
Holding a principle that can only be the case, independent of human centered notions, changes the import of inquiry. Rather than considering how the world might be and looking for evidence to support it, as is the way of science, we ought to admit that we hold a model of an actual condition of the world, to which the world must comply. Then the development becomes active, rather than passive. More than this, we found that this condition of the universe is the engine that drives the world, drives change. Proving the necessary truth of such principle is, of course, the same kind of challenge as that which faced René Descartes in proving the particular, 'I think, therefore I am,' and, being endpoint skeptics, I applied his method of doubt.
Moreover, it became clear that holding such knowledge provided very direct methods of inquiry and allowed us to turn our back on our everyday world for a while and get to the heart of things. This ability to turn our back on the world as it appears to be to us, is essential if a person wants to get at truth. The idea that studying the spacetime objects of our world, as do physicists (of which I am one), can in any way inform on the nature of that which gave rise to these objects, is a flawed idea, for it is to seek cause from effect, and this can at best only be a guess, as the philosopher David Hume argued with reasonable effect in the 1700's.
In that light, the idea of position assumes an idea of and existing background space. The Endpoint Skeptic is not in a position to accept that space is well-founded. Indeed, when placed in the possible ontology, every 'position' is different from every other, and there is no connection sustainable between them (see my comments on Grupp in the essay).
Zeno's paradoxes are generalized in my wider argument. His argument was against the possibility of infinitesimals. Mathematics purports to deal with this through the introduction of limits. But Hilbert highly doubts this as a proper solution, recognizing that it just shifts the problem on step to the left. I agree with Hilbert and find that my argument is global. Of course, Zeno's paradox and other aspects are all founded on a human-centered assumption of a background space/spacetime, where my work generalizes the problem beyond spacetime concepts. It doesn't matter what background one assumes, the system freezes and indeed degenerates to my so-called minimally simple omnet, thence generating a new world with extension. The extension is in the interactions of the system, and the idea of monad, if one wants to retain the idea, needs to accommodate/be made to conform to the structure of the Harmony Set and its equivalent descriptions in other dimensional interpretations.
One needs to be very careful with this last idea of different but equivalent interpretations, and I have wrestled with these for some time. In three space, one has to, loosely speaking, 'spin' the vectors into the space, which creates fuzzy objects, meaning the values of the vectors are spread into space, and the negative pointing vectors incorporate square root minus one, not evident in the lower dimensional Set. These seem to be interacting fuzzy balls, in a simplistic interpretation. I guess if one flipped the vectors, the positive would become negative and vice versa, so one would say it has spin 1/2, maybe. Just typing as I think here. Haven't really considered these as being equivalent to electrons before, and they probably aren't. Probably...
Hi Stephen,
As I promised in my Essay page, I have read your Essay. I have found it interesting, also from the philosophical point of view. It is surely a good thing that your model is consistent with the Holographic Principle. I had a lot of fun in reading your Essay. Thus, I will give you s high score.
Cheers,
Ch.
Thank you Christian!
Dear Stephen,
You have offered an interesting and attractive written essay. And for me more valuable that you have critical and realistic position, which are close to me. I will reading it more carefully then I will tell you some more certainly. I hope my work ESSAY may deserve your attention because it also call to realism. I think we can have many common points. I hope on your response in my forum.
Sincerely,
George
Thank you George
I will read your essay immediately.
Stephen
Dear Stephen,
I did not yet rated your essay, but now I will quickly do it (on good nine point!) You see as it better for you! (And were from you known the Armenians?)
All the Best!
George
Stephen!
Thank you for your good attitude. I have some atherantes also; if you see it will reasonable then I will recomended them your work. Kindly let me know.
Sincerely,
George