Alternative Models of Reality

John,

"I think though we have different understandings of what disunity is. For you, it seems to be the proposition that nature may be acausal and disconnected, therefore physically illogical."

I am unclear about your second sentence so I will write it the way I think about it. The universe cannot contain disunity. The basis for this claim is that the properties of the universe work together. I do say that no one knows what cause is, because, no one knows what cause is. However, that does not mean tha I think that cause does not exist. It does and it is singular although it portrays itself from different aspects of itself. My approach to demonstrating this includes the photon model that I have begun to describe in my 'alternative' thread.

I am certain that the universe is logical and that it has shared that logical ability with us. I say that theoretical physics has embraced disunity, and, I am saying that this is clear evidence that it contains errors, the first one being the choice to make mass a fundamental indefinable property. I have explained why this choice was unwarranted and unnecessary and that correcting it removes disunity from the equations of physics. There are two other similar problems but I will leave them out of this short explanation.

"My understanding is when we cannot perceive the underlaying causality and connectedness, nature seems outwardly chaotic. So the issue from my point of view, isn't nature, but how we perceive it. And the act of perception is fundamentally, inherently subjective, so there will always be loose ends to our knowledge. If we think otherwise, then we just haven't sufficiently examined our own biases."

Yes we have biases. My opinion or bias as others may view it is that we will never know by scientific means what cause is. at least not so long as the present 'foundational' science is biased to believe that cause consists of mechanical properties yielding just patterns in changes of velocities of objects. Theoretical physics has nothing to offer to address the explanation for the existence of intelligence. Darwin knew better when to back off than do physicists.

I don't know enough and will never know enough and my efforts to understand will end while still not understanding. What I do believe that I understand is that we already contain everything we need in order to understand what we come to understand. This statement is referring back to the photon storm and our ability to discern meaning from it. We learn from it because we know what to look for in it. That re-introduces in short form what I think.

James Putnam

James,

I think we have slightly different starting points. Yours is more focused on the actual physics. Mine tends to start simply from the state of awareness, as in 'Cogito, ergo sum.' That's why to me, understanding the act of thinking has to come before what is being thought about. It is the primary lens through which everything is filtered and has to be taken into account.

Also due to injuries and general decrepitudes of age, my thought processes can get a bit too free form and so I personally need to have some understanding of what's going on.

Regards,

John M

John,

"That's why to me, understanding the act of thinking has to come before what is being thought about."

We are talking the same starting point. I am talking about the act of thinking. The data is what is being thought about. It is our ability to discern meaning from the photon storm that involves the act of thinking.

Do you have a view to express about the origin of understanding? That would help me to address why you thought that I was not addressing the act of thinking?

James Putnam

James,

From our different views on disunity, disorder, unknowability, chaos, etc. From the perspective of perception there is quite a lot of the unknown and to even think it must ultimately be ordered is even a leap of faith. One which I also am willing to make, but quite hesitantly, given the history of pitfalls by those who thought they had things figured out, only to find the niggling details were hiding endlessly more layers of complexity. The feedback loops from the oceans of the unknown are what make the subjectivity of thought a primary factor to me.

In your above statement; "This statement is referring back to the photon storm and our ability to discern meaning from it. We learn from it because we know what to look for in it." I'm not sure we quite know what we see in photons. Right now I think the entire cosmology is a mess for the very reason we believe the only way to redshift light traveling for billions of years, is by actual recession of the source.

Now you also see mistakes being made from assumptions, such as the property of mass, so we are on the same track, just focused on different aspects.

Regards,

John M

John,

""This statement is referring back to the photon storm and our ability to discern meaning from it. We learn from it because we know what to look for in it." I'm not sure we quite know what we see in photons."

I have argued the photon storm question many times in the past, I assumed you would know what I was talking about. I will explain it again because I find it to be one of the most important scientific questions to ask. It doesn't refer to what we learn about photons. It refers to what we learn from photons. The answer is that we learn everything about everything from photons.

The question is how is it that we can discern meaning from what I choose to call the photon storm. The storm is the wildly mixed bombardment of extremely tiny individual increments of information, arriving at the speed of light from innumerable sources, informing us about innumerable numbers of charged particles having changed their velocities.

From that ever changing, never repeated mix, we have learned everything that we know. We 'look' into that mess of a storm and even though it is always different and changing very, very rapidly, we pick out patterns. We attach meanings to those patterns. We transform those meanings into pictures generated within ourselves about what the outside world is like.

Again, the question is: How is it possible for us to discern meaning from the photon storm. My answer is that the only way we could possibly find patterns in that mess of photons is if we already contained within ourselves all and any patterns to be used. That we fill in for missing photon information or disregard much received photon information. We know what to look for, how to fix it up and make it more useful to us.

We choose from an internal store of possible meanings and attach our choices of meanings to the patterns we chose to recognize as probably or even possibly the most important. We disregard the vast majority of information that we receive. We add imagined patterns to the 'recognized' photon patterns and imagined meanings to the assigned photon meanings and self complete the incomplete empirical photon information. We do this very rapidly and very well. We, so many individuals, are always receiving different unique mixes of photons and extremely quickly form in our minds pictures of the outside world that are very much in agreement.

James Putnam

James,

I do have some sense of how you are using the term. It's just that this is a situation where the entity in question is the light itself, when cosmology is willing to project an ever more fantastical view of galactic and intergalactic processes, in order to support what they are sure they know about light, when the evidence keeps mounting that redshift is an optical effect, even if as yet unexplained.

There are far more patterns contained within ourselves, then we care to admit. Consider the idea that information is indestructible, yet the very act of testing and measuring affects and thus destroys information. We exist as information, but of a very finite duration, as the underlaying energy, physical and spiritual, is constantly wearing away old information and depositing new.

" We do this very rapidly and very well. We, so many individuals, are always receiving different unique mixes of photons and extremely quickly form in our minds pictures of the outside world that are very much in agreement."

Consider how much of those quickly formed impressions that are very much in agreement, are what motivate crowd behaviors and ask yourself as to how much of our science is shaped by such actions? The first solution to a problem invariably trumps the best solution to a problem. Just consider the qwerty keyboard you are writing on. It takes a significant breakdown to revisit the situation and then it is whatever works best for that situation.

While this seems problematic, this seeming lack of efficiency is also necessarily foundational to reality. If everything naturally worked out immediately, there would be far less levels of complexity to reality. There would be little more than the efficient hum of a fluctuating vacuum. So while we may want to look deeper into how it all works, the parts we ignore in order to do so, are as necessary as any forms and patterns we do pick out.

Consider that patterns are simply those actions that repeat and if there were only such repeatable patterns, there would be no overall direction, only cycles. No arrow of time without chaos.

Regards,

John M

"I do have some sense of how you are using the term. It's just that this is a situation where the entity in question is the light itself, when cosmology is willing to project an ever more fantastical view of galactic and intergalactic processes, in order to support what they are sure they know about light, when the evidence keeps mounting that redshift is an optical effect, even if as yet unexplained."

John,

I do read your messages. I think observational data is of course valuable. The theoretical descriptions are probably transient. I don't know what the redshift results from. I can imagine reasons. One is not the claim that space expands. My main idea that might fit with the rest of my work, but I haven't worked this out yet, is that the speed of light has been increasing. You may be aware that I think, and my work thus far supports, that all mechanical effects result from the variation of the speed of light. What could be predicted from my approach is that if dense clumps of matter are moving away from one another that the increasing separation will result in the speed of light increasing between them. That means there could be two possible reason contributing to the same amount of redshift. It also means that if mass is separating that it is doing it slower than believed. I'll leave it there because space phenomena may not be well enough understood to depend too heavily on it.

I wouldn't want to argue in favor of a conservation of information although on the mechanical level it probably is the case. The main interest I have regarding information is why does it mean anything to us beyond reacting mechanically to it? I do see information as always fresh. I am not suggesting that we do not receive old information. Rather I am suggesting that the photon carriers of information are constantly being affected, as well as affecting, their environment as they travel and interact. In that sense, information does not remain constant although it does remain possible to retrace much about the photon's history. For example, we can figure out what element may have released it even though the photon energy has changed.

"Consider how much of those quickly formed impressions that are very much in agreement, are what motivate crowd behaviors and ask yourself as to how much of our science is shaped by such actions? The first solution to a problem invariably trumps the best solution to a problem. Just consider the qwerty keyboard you are writing on. It takes a significant breakdown to revisit the situation and then it is whatever works best for that situation."

I understand. My comment was purposefully restricted to that very first step of intelligent comprehension. We make great sense out of a never repeated mish mash of photon data. The patterns have never appeared the same twice. They are fogged out to varying degrees by their inevitably being mixed up with other possible patterns that mix, by virtue of their own photon delivery agents, and mess with the patterns we are attempting to discern as being most prominent and sometimes difficult to discern but recognized as being most important. None of the patterns that we think we see carry meaning with them. We decide that we can see a pattern and we decide what that pattern means. The reason for saying it this way is that all resulting visual concepts contain innumerable mixes of patterns that we decide that we may see and that we put together in our minds while forming our visualizations of the outside world.

"Consider that patterns are simply those actions that repeat and if there were only such repeatable patterns, there would be no overall direction, only cycles. No arrow of time without chaos."

I am not sure about the role of inefficiency being a significant problem. At times, no doubt it is, but when I consider the process described in parts above, I see incredible efficiency and intelligence at work. The patterns that I speak of consist of more than mechanical patterns. Perhaps the photons do carry only mechanical information to us, but if that is the case, our major efforts of making use of it do not consist of generating a view of the outside world as being mechanical.

One short point: No patterns that we see let alone patterns that we decide we see are ever the same. In that sense they are not cyclical although we may decide that they do derive originally from cyclical events. I do think that we tend to decide our interpretations of information to fit with what we have become accustomed to knowing.

I know you think a lot about these matters and have opinions to share about them.

James Putnam

The four fundamental indefinable properties of physics. Two are naturally indefinable. The other two are artificially indefinable. They were simply declared to be indefinables. The two artificial indefinables are mass and temperature. Neither are natural indefinables and should have been defined from their first introduction into physics equations. The price paid for making mass an indefinable property is that disunity was introduced into physics equations. The price paid for making temperature an indefinable property is that the property of thermodynamic entropy remains unexplained. Not a great deal of damage is done due to not knowing what thermodynamic entropy is, because, it is skipped past in favor of unrelated versions of entropies. The real damage done is due to making mass an indefinable property. The disunity that comes with that choice cannot be undone until mass is made a defined property. F=ma must be fixed so that both force and mass are defined properties, and, their definitions are formed from the pre-existing properties of empirical evidence. It is those properties that have been fully capable of informing us of the existence of both force and mass. Everything we learn about either force or mass is learned from the properties of length and time. Those measurements of length and time combined in the form of measurements of acceleration must be fully relied upon as the sources of the definitions of force, mass, and, later for correcting thermodynamics' temperature.

James Putnam

James,

My first clue that physics may be off on a tangent was reading that overall space is apparently flat, with the expansion balanced by gravity. While it was being treated as a fortuitous coincidence, in order for the universe to be as stable as it is, it seemed much more likely to me they were two sides of the same cycle. Convection comes to mind, given that gravity is the contraction of mass and the expansion is intergalactic, ie, between these giant gravitational vortices. It seems like the model simply forgets that galaxies are not simply inert points of reference, in this relativistic model, but 'space sinks.' So yes, if they want to argue space is actually expanding between galaxies, no problem, but don't forget that 'space' is falling into these galaxies at an equal rate, according to the very same theory!!!!!

As I've stated here, I think gravity is not so much just a property of mass, but the vacuum effect of energy coalescing into mass, while redshift is some foundational measure of the actual expansion of radiation, given that all this light radiation is crisscrossing the same space and possibly resulting in some pressurized effect to balance the gravitational vacuum.

To me, the issue of; "I am not sure about the role of inefficiency being a significant problem."

Is a function of; "No patterns that we see let alone patterns that we decide we see are ever the same."

It is that instability of the pattern I would characterize as inefficiency.

Regards,

John M

Hi John,

With regard too a vacuuming effect on heavenly bodies due to the absorption of space by matter, I have seen you explain this. It may be analogous in some ways to the efforts to solve the problems that the theoretical development of an eather faced before Einstein. I would guess that since you see it as being a logical result of relativity theory, at least in part, that you may not have to account for the transmission of electromagnetic waves through space, etc. However, if I did ask a question, my first would be that if space has the structure necessary to carry matter along with it, then the motion of matter horizontally to the direction of flow of space would need to be explained. Why can the horizontally moving matter cut through space that is not in motion in the same direction as the object is moving?

My main interest is in stating that the lack of clear repeatability of patterns observed is for me the door opened that makes intelligence effective a certainty that it exist as a capability that goes far beyond anything that can be captured in the uncertainties and unpredicted behaviors that are parts of mechanical theories. There is no intelligence nor free-will properties in mechanical theory. There is a need for intelligence and intelligent free-will for one to form their theory, even mechanical ones. I could go on, but only if there is interest in a back and forth.

James Putnam

James,

I'm not equating space with what permeates it. These fields of mass and energy are what contract and expand. Necessarily if you are in a very strong field, such as the earth's frame, then weaker fields permeating the larger space would be drowned out. This doesn't refute space as a foundational frame, in which all these finite dynamic processes ultimately balance out. I don't see space as dynamic, I see it as both inert and infinite. That it is inert is what sets the speed of light. Otherwise you could have different frames moving past each other at faster than the speed of light. It is the 'vacuum' against which the speed of light is constant. Light(and clocks) can only be slowed from that constant. As I keep pointing out, saying 'space expands,' but neglecting to include an increasing speed of light in order for it to remain constant to this increased dimension, overlooks the foundational premise of relativity. The question then becomes as to what in intergalactic space could cause the redshift of light, other than the source physically moving away, since without being able to claim it's some fourth dimensional trick, we would be at the physical center of the universe, not just at our perceptual center. Which would neatly explain what is observed.

There seem several possibilities to me. One, that it is an effect of the expansion of light from its source and since we can only detect it as quanta, our receivers are stretching out the light from very distant sources, as it takes longer for each quanta to register. In that the wave is being 'stretched' between the receipt of each photon. Think in terms of turning off a spigot of water. After the flow stops, since drips, like photons, are all the same size, further reducing the flow means these drips take longer to form. Now if a photon is a collapsed wave, then the wave is being stretched more between each photon. Sort of like a rubber band being stretched between each drip.

Another might be some as yet undetected interaction of all the various sources of light permeating deep space, such that they create pressure on the light. In a sense, 'tired light,' but not by any form of mass that would disrupt its trajectory.

[link:www.fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/2008CChristov_WaveMotion_45_154_EvolutionWavePackets.pdf]Here[/link} is someone else's proposal I post on occasion, that seems logical.

A pervasive lack of repeatability makes all linear processes possible. If it were only repeatable, it would be 12121212, not 123456....

As for the notion of free will, I think it is something of an oxymoron. To will is to determine. We don't spend our lives distinguishing between right and wrong choices in order to then randomly pick one or the other. We are part of the decision making process of the universe. What we do, affects our context, as our context affects us. If we were not intimately bound up in that relationship, then life really would be meaningless.

Regards,

John M

John,

"As I keep pointing out, saying 'space expands,' but neglecting to include an increasing speed of light in order for it to remain constant to this increased dimension, overlooks the foundational premise of relativity."

In relativity theory, when space expands time dilates. They do this in unison and preserve the constant speed of light. I presume you are aware that this is not my approach. However, you need to confront the very successful theory of relativity through its proponents. This is just one question that will arise.

"As for the notion of free will, I think it is something of an oxymoron. To will is to determine. We don't spend our lives distinguishing between right and wrong choices in order to then randomly pick one or the other. We are part of the decision making process of the universe. What we do, affects our context, as our context affects us. If we were not intimately bound up in that relationship, then life really would be meaningless."

In what I wrote, I am presently limiting my approach to looking for origins. There is a great deal that happens afterwards that may or may not be judged among other after-effects as acting more or less free or more or less intelligent. My point in what I wrote has to do with establishing the separation between physics mechanics and intelligence. Along with my example of a photon storm and our ability to discern meaning from it comes an explanation for the existence of human free will. I already am aware that it can't be worked out in these messages. It isn't a physics problem. It is a nature problem. Physics is not about nature. It is about learning mechanical effects and writing equations to model those effects. Along with that effort comes theory. Physics theory is not about intelligence or free will.

James Putnam

John,

I said 'time dilates' when it is the opposite that I meant. As space expands, time shrinks, shortens, quickens, whatever fits.

James Putnam

James,

Yes, in theory it should speed up, but that's not how the theory is presented. The argument with the expanding universe is that ultimately those distant galaxies will keep moving away, such that we will no longer be able to see them. That means they are still assuming a constant speed of light across this increasing distance. It's basic doppler effect and doppler effect isn't about expanded space, it's about increasing distance in stable space. The train moving down the tracks isn't stretching space, but simply moving away through space. So when they argue these galaxies are moving away, such that the light will take longer to reach us, it's the same situation.

Determinism is an issue with blocktime.

REgards,

John M

Hello Peter,

I had a look at the paper that you referenced and the view of the author seems to have similarities to those expressed in my paper:

The unification of physics

which describes the Spacetime Wave theory.

He says on page 115:

e) The wave interpretation. This is the position proposed in the present thesis, in which the wave function itself is held to be the fundamental entity, obeying at all times a deterministic wave equation.

Then he goes on to say:

The wave theory is definitely tenable and forms, we believe, the simplest complete, self-consistent theory.

In the Spacetime Wave theory, the search is for a real physical wave function which describes the real physical spacetime wave.

I was mystified by the title of the paper as Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as it does not seem to refer to this interpretation of QM at all within the paper. I do like his treatment in Appendix II on interpretations of QM. Despite the title the author seems to prefer a wave interpretation and the Spacetime Wave theory is intended to describe the nature of the wave.

Richard

John,

I am not clear on this. Are you saying that time 'dilation' is not included in their description of an expanding relativistic universe?

"Determinism is an issue with blocktime."

If this was referring to the subject of intelligence and free will, then for me it is not relevant. It isn't just that I don't accept relativity theory. It has to do with physics being limited to a mechanical interpretation of the universe. Blocktime is no different. It is just another presentation of what some believe happens to a strictly mechanical universe. I know its proponents will argue against this, but, theoretical physics is not about this universe except on a low unnaturally restricted level of imagining it to consist of mechanical properties. This is of course me expressing my strong opinion. Perhaps you are more accepting of the mechanical foundation of theoretical physics.

I have presented excerpts from my work here in essays and in discussions. That work also takes a mechanical approach. I don't do that because I believe in it. I do it to show that theoretical physics, even as a mechanical model, is wrong. My mechanical model does away with their mechanical model. The end purpose, if I ever get to it, is not to argue that I have achieved the correct model of the universe. My work can't be a correct model of the universe. It may be that it is a better mechanical model, but no mechanical model actually models the properties of this universe.

James Putnam

James,

That's exactly what I'm saying. Consider the measured relativistic effects are that when length is shortened, time is slowed, so the speed of light, ie. rate it covers the distance, is constant. Yet when they say space expands, they don't say the speed of light increases, otherwise those distant galaxies would, presumably, never disappear, since it would always take the light the same amount of time to cover the distance. That would throw a monkey wrench into using it as an explanation for redshift, since presumably the light would be 'energized' (as opposed to 'tired') and not be redshifted.

Math is reductionistic, ie. the inconvenient, messy parts of reality are ignored. The problem is when you simply start ignoring whatever is inconvenient to your particular assumptions. You end up with some C.S.Escher version of reality.

I probably conflate mechanistic with causal. I think that when you get away from causality, it is inherently speculative and not physics. Which is not to say there isn't aspects of reality that might well fall outside of this effort to fit the parts we can understand together, but first things first. I don't see mechanistic causality as deterministic, because total input can never be fully known from any frame, before the event in question occurs.

Regards,

John M

John,

I need to look into it. I picked out 'Einstein's Theory of Relativity" by Max Born. I read this may years ago. It is an uncomplicated presentation. I looked at what he wrote and found that I do not recall what I am now reading. He says that:

"...it is always possible to choose a system of reference such that Minkowski's world geometry holds in the immediate neighborhood of any arbitrary point - that is, so that the geometry is Euclidian, that there is no gravitational field ... With respect to this system and in this narrow space the velocity of light c=3x1010 cm/sec is the upper limit for all velocities.

As soon as these conditions are not fulfilled, however - if gravitational fields are present - the velocity either of material bodies or of light can assume any numerical value."

I will have to read more about this, but, I post it in case you have anything to say about it.

James Putnam

James,

Presumably any numerical value less than the speed of light in a vacuum.

What is this 'vacuum,' other than blank space?

Now if they say 'space expands,' yet this speed of light remains constant to some other measure than the expanding space, what is the source of that value? If they are going to measure distance, of this 'expanded space,' in terms based on the speed of light, ie. lightyears, then those are the denominator and the expanded space is the numerator, so the 'ruler' in this equation is the stable distance set by C, in the vacuum.

If you come across any arguments for why it is argued this expansion of space is relativistic, I'd like to see them. All I've ever read is that, 'Einstein proved space can either expand, or contract and that is due to the cosmological constant.' As I recall, Einstein's issue, for which he invented the cc, was that gravity caused space to contract and he put it in to keep space stable. As I keep pointing out, expansion and gravitational contraction balance out. So since gravity is mostly manifest as gravitational vortices and the expansion is only of intergalactic space, than logically what is expanding between galaxies, is collapsing into them, proportionally.

Now mass falls gravitationally inward and Einstein considered space to be a measure between spatial points, so this resulted in the contraction of the measure of space. Now radiation is what expands away from galaxies and it is by the redshift of this radiation that we consider intergalactic space to expand and it is only light from those very distant galaxies that manages to travel inbetween all intervening ones, that we can see. In fact, light that slides by galaxies is magnified, as waves that would have spread out, are focused.

So if light is being redshifted by the optics of space, then we are only at the center of our view of the universe, so it makes sense this effect makes us appear at the center. Since these galaxies are not actually moving away, there is no need to invoke an amputated relativity to explain doppler shifting.

As an optical effect, it would compound on itself and create a parabolic increase in the rate of redshift, which is exactly what we see, in that the rate of redshift appears to rapidly decline, then flatten out. Big Bang theory considers the initial decline from the singularity, then invokes dark energy to explain why it then continues at a steadier rate.

The reason why the cosmic background radiation is both very flat, at 2.7k and slightly mottled, won't be because it is the energy of the initial explosion, smeared out by inflation, containing the seeds of galaxies, but because it is light from ever more distant galaxies, that has been redshifted completely off the visible spectrum, down into black body radiation and the variations are simply the faint shadows of those distant sources. The 2.7 temperature would likely be some phase transition level.

I predict that when the James Webb telescope goes up, they will keep finding ever more distant galaxies and galaxy and quasar clusters, that will be increasingly difficult to shoehorn into their model.

Regards,

John M