Dear Edwin,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. We seem focused on the same targets, but with some variance in perspective.
More than consciousness, my concept of mind is classical - the faculties of intellect, will/volition, memory and emotion. Computers can't model humans until the last item is included! Even then, how do you add the immaterial life principle...how does the robot come alive?
Anyway, the mind- brain connection pondered by psychologists is the first causal step in making your arm move. The mind changes the brain's neural network (final to formal cause) which links through the nerves to the arm muscle(formal to efficient cause) which causes the muscle to contract(efficient to material cause). A classical causal chain.
Materialism can't address this; it's outside the scope of science as practiced today. Modern philosophy, starting with rationalism, has contaminated and fragmented what should be a common worldview of reality. But realism/scholasticism - which I recommend you investigate and consider adopting - fills the knowledge gap of limited science. No, we can't measure the immaterial causes, but we can see the logical material effects - which we can measure. When the immaterial source of life leaves the body, we see the effect - death.
The Sufficient Causality Rule of Realism (nemo dat quod non habet) is what refutes all the essays that attempt a material/physiological solution. In his essay George Ellis related these modern biological details of physiological causality, but left out the final cause....the immaterial final cause. Was the baby thrown out with the bathwater??
Aether might be a bridge between the two domains... My Best Current Thinking on aether is that there are several types: the EM aether plenum of Maxwell, the GI discrete aether(your gravititational(static) and inertial(dynamic) field) ...and perhaps two more.
Thanks to Big Al the 20th century was wasted by ignoring the existence of aether, though pseudonyms like zero point energy and quantum foam were often used to replace the verboden word. There were actually more aether tests in the 19th century than the 20th.
I ..... further suggest [in my essay] that current century-old paradigms contain similar errors, repeated endlessly, hence "true". Right on! We must correct the wrong turns/interpretations of the past, using the sci. method and realism...before trying to advance.
Re Mach vs. Newton, as revealed in the 1687 NB test: Newton believed in an absolute space, but declined to define its location. Mach thought the whole universe influenced the bucket's water, which included the Earth. In the ALFA model which interprets NB, I propose they are both partially right (and thus also partly wrong). There is an absolute reference frame for dynamic prediction, and it is the Earth.
Bennett's Hiker - such modesty - is the linear analog of NB...with the same conclusion as rendered above.
Can you believe, Edwin, that decades of students have been taught fake physics using fictitious forces to substitute for the results actually predicted only in the absolute Earth frame, the only frame where the laws of physics are valid? General covariance in GR??? LOL! What a scam.
Suppose we were taught fake arithmetic in school... 2+2 = 4 in the lab frame, but 2+2 = 0 in any other frame of reference??! So to get the valid sum on a moving train or car, you have to add in the fictitious number 4 (from the lab frame) to get 2+2 = 4 !! By analogy that's just what fictitious forces are ..a dodge by mainstream physics around the absolute status of the ECEF/lab frame in dynamics. Adding in fake numbers(the fudge factor) is what we did in HS physics lab...
The MMX is too involved to develop here.... A summary:
- If the result were truly null, then why didn't Michelson include the Earth at rest as one of his 4 logical options for interpretation?
- Later tests of the data by Dayton Miller and others(see Reg Cahill) find variable aether motions having periods of a stellar day and stellar year.
You know about the axis of evil?? Wow...I thought that embarrassing discovery was safely buried in the info backwaters of the technical press. Yes - The low multipoles of the CMB align with the equinox and ecliptic of the Earth's local cosmic environment..... as if the universe were really geocentric! That should be headlines in the NY Times...
As you say...GC? Why not , if it matches testing? What's not impossible is possible.... A truism.
You realize that a geocentric world with a fluid aether destroys much of 20th century physical 'progress'...the BB, SR, GR...but not QM. Quantum Mechanics and its strange interpretations are consistent with the realism of immaterial sources espoused in my essay...with a suitably enhanced analysis, of course.
E.g., SR #1 is disproven by the Ruyong Wang glider test of 2005.... With the Fiber Optic Conveyor Galileo could have detected the ship's motion relative to shore while below deck.
SR#2 is vitiated by all the positive light anisotropy tests ...all those done with a gas interferometer - NOT vacuum.
What you hear in the distance are the pillars of MS physics crumbling to dust....
I have read your essay and will add some comments shortly.
All the best,
Robert
