Dear Karl,
I am so glad I managed to get to your essay! It is simultaneously deeply insightful and a genuine hoot to read!
I'm still scratching my head a bit on how exactly Oscillatorland relates to your four pillars, but reading about Linestein and company gave me good vibes. And it reminded me that any space with less than three dimensions creates a number of interesting constraints for its inhabitants. I still recall the day I realized that in two-dimensional Flatland having an alimentary canal is a bit of a problem, since it splits you into two halves. That puts a whole new spin on eating!
Getting back to Oscillatorland, did you hear about the unfortunate intellectual split that developed between Linestein and the early quantum physicists of that linear world? They theorized that at sufficiently small scales of space and time, their line continuum could break apart briefly and then reconnect in ways that would allow a small object to "tunnel" from one side of a larger object to the other side. Linestein was appalled at this proposed violation of the continuity of their world, and famously stated that "God does not play splice with the universe." :)
Regarding your four pillars:
#1 Generality: Yes! And you stated the idea with such nice simplicity. Dare I say that the word "generality" covers a lot of things at once?
#2 Parsimonious: I'm jealous, that would have been so much better of a word for me to use than "binary conciseness," if I had just thought of it early... :)
#3 Relational: This one was the biggest surprise for me, yet it rings both true and important. I think there is a habitual tendency in most of us (certainly in myself, I just saw it in action!) to equate fundamentalism with reductionism, an thus towards the contemplation of isolated entities and objects with smaller and smaller scopes.
That is precisely why I found this pillar so exceptionally interesting! You literally flipped some of my thinking upside down, and I suspect (hope!) the change is irreversible.
That's because I'm a huge advocate of the importance of networking. In one of my post comments (I haven't a clue which one) I suggested that the reason why human intelligence can be so hard to distinguish from that of other clever creatures is because it is the language-mediated networking of human intelligence across space and time that makes it unique, rather than the intelligence of any single individual. Intelligence is relational! And in fact, even without in our own heads it seems to be true, since the rather profound asymmetries in the cognitive abilities of the two hemispheres of our brains seems to enable a sort of two-member "community conversation" whose synthesis is more powerful, more positively synergistic, than would be possible with identical brain halves.
I would even speculate further that it is heterogeneous relationships that for the heart of your concept of relational fundamentalism. When absolutely identical components participate in a relationship, such as bosons in a condensate, they produce no new complexity and no new innovations. They are like the sterile Creationism, adding no new perspectives or ideas, since they all see the same world.
But otherwise identical fermions must by definition always differ slightly in location, or velocity, or both. This physics-deep contrariness literally forces diversity and emergent complexity upon the material (fermionic) world. But more importantly, if distant parts of that world interact -- if somehow they form relations with each other through some form of long-distance networking -- then the underlying fermionic drive encourages these more complex fermionic complexes, such as people, to reach still higher and more complex levels of abstraction and innovation. Niches interact with niches to form still more niches at higher levels, until the new niches that are so complex and unexpected that their form could never even have been conceived using only the lower-level levels. Paramecia just do not dream of televisions, even during their most animated chemical-exchange-based discussions.
(And very likely we are totally missing out in major way on the intelligent-in-other-ways global conversations in which heterogeneous bacterial communities engage. After all, the repeated success of these globally linked communities at defeating the scourge of antibiotics was very unlikely to have been accomplished without some pretty intense and intensely networked conversations.)
I should note also that unlimited diversity is called chaos, so a careful balancing act is always required for effective relational networking. There must be enough simplicity and commonality to allow distant parts to, well, relate to each other in ways that carry meaning and direction. Or stated using an everyday but accurate example, smartphones need to be similar enough to share software. But to build a vibrant, niche-generating relational community, there must also be enough diversity to enable the emergence of new ideas. And so smart phones differ in the apps they contain, the places to which they travel, and the ways in which their owners use them, resulting after sharing in a much richer overall community.
But wait! Isn't your relational fundamentalism supposed to apply to physics, too, and not just emergent complexity, which tends towards the future?
That is, if I may play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't your relational fundamentalism principle nothing more than a belated biological bandage that only comes into play after some deeper set of unchanging principles has big banged itself into existence? Is your principle truly fundamental in general, that is in keeping with your #1 principle, or is it just an incomplete rule that applies only after all the "really hard physics stuff" has already been accomplished?
I don't think so. In fact, I think you nailed something that pierces the very heart of how our universe works! But how so? What do I mean by that?
What I mean is this: Space itself, which is if you stop and think about it an amazingly complex package of highly unexpected properties, is the first and in many ways ultimate example and enabler of relations. Space literally defines both what it means for two entities to be "separate" -- without which there would be no entities to relate! -- and "next" to each other, that is, to be in a relationship.
Thus I would propose that far from being some sort of belated bio-only principle, your concept of relational fundamentalism was the origin of the kind of universe in which we now find ourselves. It is embedded so deeply within space itself (and also time, but that's a somewhat different story) that we simply don't see or notice it, a fish in water, a human in space.
If space is the fabric of relations, if some vast set of relations spread out literally across the cosmos, defining the cosmos, are the true start of reality instead of the deceptive isolation of objects that these relations then make possible, what are the components of that relation? What are the "bits" of space?
I don't think we know, but I assure you it's not composed of some almost infinite number of 10-35 meter bubbles of Planck foam. Planck foam is nothing more than an out-of-range, unbelievably extrapolated extremum created by pushing to an energetically impossible limit the rules of observation that have physical meaning only at much lower energies. I suspect that the real components of space are much simpler, calmer, quieter, less energetic, and well, space-like than that terrifying end-of-all-things violence that is so casually called "Planck foam."
I'll even venture a guess. You heard it here first... :)
My own guess is that the units of space are nothing more radical than the action (Planck) conjugation complements of the angular momenta of all particles. That is, units of pure direction, which is all that is left after angular momentum scarfs up all of the usual joule-second units of action, leaving only something that at first glance looks like an empty set. On closer examination, though, a given spin must leave something behind to distinguish itself from other particle spins, and that "something" is the orientation of the spin in 3-space, a ghostly orthogonality to the spin plane of the particle. But more importantly, it would have to be cooperatively, relationally shared with every other particle in the vicinity and beyond, so that their differences remain valid. Space would become a consensus fabric of directional relationships, one in which all the particles have agreed to share the same mutually relative coordinate system -- that is, to share the same space[/]. This direction consensus would be a group-level form of entanglement, and because entanglement is unbelievably unforgiving about conservation of conserved quantum numbers such as spin, it would also be extraordinarily rigid, as space should be. Only over extreme ranges would it bend much, to give gravity, which thus would not be an ordinary quantum force like photon-mediated electromagnetism. It would also be loosely akin to the "holographic" concept of space as entanglement, but this version is hugely simpler and much more direct, since neither holography, nor higher dimension, nor Planck-level elaborations are required. The entanglements of the particles just create a simple, easily understood 3-space network linking all nodes (particles).
But space cannot possibly be compose of such a sparse, incomplete network, right?
After all, space is also infinitely detailed as well as extremely rigid, so there surely are not enough particles in the universe to define space in sufficient detail! Many would in fact argue that this is precisely why any phenomenon that creates space itself must operate at the Planck scale of 10-35 meters, so that the incredible detail needed for 3-space can be realized.
Really? Why?
If only 10 objects existed in the universe, each a meter across, why would you need a level of detail that is, say, 20 orders of magnitude more detailed for them to interact meaningfully and precisely with each other? You would still be able to access much higher levels of relational detail, but only by asking for more detail, specifically by applying a level of energy proportional to the level of detail you desired. Taking things to the absolute limit first is an incredibly wasteful procedure, and incidentally, it is emphatically not what we see in quantum mechanics, where every observation has a cost that depends on the level of detail desired, and even then only at the time of the observation. There are good and deeply fundamental quantum reasons why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that found the Higgs boson is 8.6 km in diameter!
The bottom line is that in terms of as-needed levels of detail, you can build up a very-low-energy universal "directional condensate" space using the spins of nothing more than the set of particles that exist in that space. It does not matter how sparse or dense those particles are, since you only need to make space "real" for the relationships that exist between those particles. If for example your universe has only two particles in it, you only need one line of space (Oscillatorland!) to define their relationship. Defining more space outside of that line is not necessary, for the simple reason that no other objects with which to relate exist outside of that line.
So regardless of how space comes to be -- my example above mostly shows what is possible and what kinds of relationships are required -- its very existence makes the concept of relations between entities as fundamental as it gets. You don't end with relations, you start with them.
Um... uh, where was I? I have this odd feeling that I've gotten just a little off track on something important... Oh yes, Pillar #4!
#4 Mechanism-Suggestive. I love this one! For me it brought to mind Maxwell's early adamant insistence that if he could not come up with a good physical model of every aspect of his emerging electromagnetic model. (This was the same model that later became Maxwell's four equations, after Heaviside massively reworked them). He succeeded, and the mechanical "vortex cell" models that he created provided the insights he needed to translate his models into differential equations.
So at last, I again say thanks for a great essay! It was fun to read, and for me transformative in the sense that I now interpret "relations" as the foundation of space itself, and thus fundamental to the very existence of our universe. I never would have looked at relational fundamentalism that way had it not been for your bold willingness to assert that something many would consider to be fundamental only to biology as meriting inclusion in a very short list of fundamental attributes. Nice work!
Cheers,
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)
Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger
