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...
