Deciding on the nature of time and space by Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Edwin,

I always read your essays with interest and follow the movement and development of your ideas on the basic problems of fundamental science, your original and radical ways of solving them. This is an unusually important conclusion for a future brainstorming session:

聽"In current approaches the question of ontology (if it even arises!) Is often left up in the air; efforts are focused on mathematics. For those who believe that physical reality arises from mathematics, this probably makes sense. For the rest of us, physical reality (ontology) is a given, which we attempt to model with mathematics. This makes sense and has worked well for centuries."

Here we have slightly different views on the movement of Mathematics and Physics towards PHILOSOPHICAL ONTOLOGY. But this is good. The main thing is to find a reliable single ontological basis for mathematics and physics. Yes, here, first of all, the problem of understanding space (the nature of space). To understand is to "grasp the structure." (G. Gutner "Ontology of mathematical discourse"). Add: ONTOLOGICAL STRUCTURE. Philosopher Pavel Florensky is right: "We repeat: worldunderstanding is spaceunderstanding." ... I give the highest rating to your ideas. Let's hope that we, all interested participants in the contests, will be able to assemble a team for the global think tank on the ontological problems of modern mathematics and physics. Notice that in the article Physics Needs Philosophy / Philosophy Needs Physics Carlo Rovelli poses first the main ontological questions: "What is space?", and then the question: "What is time?" This is an ontology issue. But the ontology also needs to be pulled out of the crisis... The philosophical ontology requires extreme thinking about reality, about being... Let's remember how Menelaus caught Proteus in the network with the prompts of the "form goddess" Eidothei ... That is the task of physicists and mathematicians is to "grasp" the absolute (unconditional) forms of the existence of matter (absolute states) in their unity, to "grasp禄 the ontological structure of space and then its ontological and gnoseological dimension.

Best regards,

Vladimir

Hi Edwin,

thanks for commenting on my essay Je suis, nous sommes Wigner!

Your notion of a consciousness field (C-field) is something I've been thinking about for some time. I take it the C-field is what gives phenomenal form to our individual empirical experiences, and this physical field would go some way to answering the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness? In other words, the complex (3+1)D world of our waking experience, or say the presumed phenomenal world of a frog with its simpler CNS, would just be a complex perturbation of the self-aware C-field.

A couple or three questions come to mind:

1. Is the C-field induced dynamically by the mass flow--and its fluctuating gravitational field--in a neuronal network, such that at some point when our foetal brains reach a certain neuronal threshold the corresponding individual C-field arises specific to that individual physical entity?

2. Or is the C-field a primordial universal field that is perturbed by matter flows/gravitational fields in general? Our individual neuronal network would then be an evolved physical system that uses the same universal C-field that we share with everyone else and all other sentient lifeforms.

3. In terms of the feedback loop I can see how a particular neuronal pattern might induce its particular C-field configuration, but not how that C-field then induces a physical change in the neuronal patterning. How would the C-field produce fluctuations in itself that then effect the relevant changes in the neuronal mass flow? Does the self-awareness that arises in the reflection of the C-field and its neuronal patterning have a resonance in the field that then drives the neuronal patterns appropriate to it?

This physical feedback mechanism would be important to ensure the C-field isn't seen as a merely ideal part of a substance dualism ala Descartes.

Edwin,

Mathematical relativity theory is a bit outside my expertise, but I was interested to see Wolfram's "hypergraph" theory - discussed a lot recently - brought in. It will be interesting to see if this "new foundation" of Wolfram works out.

And thanks for the nice comment on my "Essay", which I revise here:

https://codicalist.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/substrate-targeted-programming-stp/

Philip Thrift (@philipthrift · Twitter)

Hello Ed!

I've just looked back in on the essays and just downloaded yours. I'll get back again but have to say right off that you have made the most profound statement on SR that is the crux of the matter from which the contrived paradoxes issue. "However, Einstein provided each world with its own absolute time and space by assigning each world its own universal time dimension..." page 1 of 10.

Which beggs the question; if SR is universally correct, then how can each world have its own universal time dimension? And this leads many to argue that relative simultaneity is universally no different that absolute simultaneity and just mathematically proven as measurement constrained not only up to light velocity, but AT light velocity.

"Time stops at light velocity" is a mind crabbing headline, but not the whole story implied by Special Relativity. The other side of the coin is that light velocity is the observed limit because that is as fast as time can go. Physical connectivity need not be consistently conducted at any one single velocity. In reality, it cannot 'know' its velocity, only that it is everywhere, somewhere between nil and light velocity.

So as you point out in your response to Klaas Landsman's excellent essay, a free particle (as a unitary field) could be theoretically determined in a model construct, but the manifold particle interactions globally must be treated statistically. And its arguable that a successful Quantum Gravity Theory must eventually accept that the unitary fields that globally interact are the gravitational amalgam of unit fields that each have inertial discretion by virtue of time seeking at what velocity it is operating. And that connectivity is everywhere in that unitary field, somewhere between nil and light velocity. Hence for the absolute velocity of light to be universally measurable suggests that SR is in reality correct, yet also that would necessitate that Light Velocity is the root exponential mean of a peak periodic velocity. Like Bilbo Baggins' memoir "There and Back Again" - time seeking it velocity of connectivity. Non-linear Time, in a spherical unitary field, each of every radii would be the root of the exponential change of rate of passage of time condensing energy to matter from gravitational minimum density at light velocity to a greatest proportional density relative to the quantity of inertially bound masse of energy. It is only in linear algebra that the exponential rate unit can only be used as the base, not the root. But in a unitary field the exponential change in energy density along any radii would be the root of all raddii as computed of any one radii to account for the quantity of energy required by density in diminishing spherical volume continuously in a spherical boundary.

NOW! I can get back and enjoy the rest of your essay! Best of Luck jrc

Dear Edwin Klingman,

I agree that special relativity looks like 'an exceptionally simple theory'; I thought pretty much the same (and I thought tensors made it look complicated) but good theories always look like this in retrospect and not when people are struggling towards the theory.

After all, the Lorentz transformations were discovered by Lorentz via his theory of local time and that was hardly a simple theory. But I think that special relativity shows its subtlety when we try to incorporate it into other theories, that is into gravity - which took Einsteins (and others) and into quantum theory - that took Dirac & Feynman (and many others) and was quite a bit more complicated. I guess the lesson to learn from here is that a theory can look simple in isolation but show their teeth, so to speak, when we try to put them together with other theories.

I also think Rovellis observation that distant simultaneity is not measurable and that we have is a local frame of reference is a good one. I'm not sure about his contention that Einstein fully embraced the geometric view - going on from his paper - I think he used it more as a tool. I recently came across a paper that showed that Einstein didn't consider GR as a geometric theory, but as a unification of inertia and gravity.

Having said that I do think think the geometric view is a useful perspective, I never really understood tensors until they were explained geometrically. I guess I had been spoilt by vectors that made Newtons ideas seem more natural. Not that they weren't natural already.

Warm Wishes

Mozibur Ullah

"It is a primordial field, here since the beginning."

Yes that's how I think of it too, rather than a field that is produced by the biochemistry and thus a secondary phenomenon, which is how various pan-psychisms try to shoehorn consciousness into physicalism... the fundamental particles just each have an inherent C property that then somehow combines together en mass in the biological form to become a correlated individuated C-field. But how do quantum bits of C all combine to make one unified C self?

If the C-field is primordial and universal then there's no combination problem, just physical stuff floating around in a C-field and eventually self-organising into ever more complex self-aware forms of sentient matter--morphogenesis via your gravitational C-field theory!

So I sort of get how this might work in the purely physical sense, just as a magnetic field works with electrons, so too the gravitational field is effected by and effects the neuronal mass mechanisms ... more or less? But I'm just not sure how the self-awareness property works in terms of transforming the G-field into a C-field.

The hard problem of C is that of how not just self-awareness arises in us but also how that is accompanied by phenomenal experience, as in I'm aware of phenomenal stuff ... so what's the stuff and how does it arise reflected as it were in the C-field such that I can become aware of it?

For me, given this wider phenomenal hard problem, any 'self-awareness' property would need to include a sort of self-reflective property, where self-awareness is itself an effect of this reflective property of C. I call this the 'Open Field', and we are the opening within which phenomena such as a 'red thing' for example, as well as our awareness of the red thing, and our awareness of being aware, can arise. All phenomena, all mental and physical phenomena, need the openness of a self-reflecting open field in order to appear as phenomena.

But now I'm getting a tad Heideggerean!

Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman!

All the difficulties and paradoxes associated with the Special Theory of Relativity arise from the misinterpretation of the results. The comprehension of SRT is based on the presumption that all what one sees, hears, measures or in some other way perceives is reality. In fact, the measured values are apparent and the SRT is a tool for calculating the actual values. There are no paradoxes and conundrums in this case. More in: New Concept of Special Relativity. http://viXra.org/abs/1911.0367

Best regards

Ilgaitis

Interesting point about Lorentz Invariance only required by SR, Ed.

In GR the only place it enters equation is as a non-zero vector tangent to elapsed time on a curve. It was Tom Ray whom finally dragged me into the understanding that GR is not simply an elaboration or extension of SR. And where we find singularity in GR is largely due to mass density treated as an average in a spherical volume approximated from the visible aggregate (electro-static) ponderable body. It is profoundly different to consider 'averaged' mass density apart from 'constant' mass density. In a free rest particle, the constant density of a core volume would also be an average throughout that volume, but not any sort of average of the total energy of the particle field where the inertia of a closed system is equal to its total energy. We are still lacking a general consensus that would provide a universal proportional mass upper density bound relative to the mass:energy quantity of any isolate free rest mass. So a successful gravitational unified field theory could be constructed topologically on a single pole but that continuous change of 'mass:energy' density would have to agree with the Spherical geometric field aquations in GR in predicting the time dilations consitently observed and exploited in such technologies as GPS and earth based altimeters.

There is a lot yet to become revealed. :-) jrc

Thank-you Ed,

I've downloaded the paper and will give it a couple reads. I don't argue against anyone's treatment of Time. It's too personally precious to everyone whether they admit it or not :-), and I've had some success modeling a unitary field in 3D+T myself as a condensate of a primordial field. Where I find time dilation convenient is that in treating the rate of passage of time as a range of velocity itself, limiting at C, is that if time is propagating at C the the field energy can reach a finite limit spatial boundary because it need not, nor could not continue to expand (to infinity?) at any additional velocity through space. Its handy! But in theoretics, what is necessary is that the theory constructed meets the rigors of accepted and/or proven observations. The sticking point for Time in any scenario is "How can we know how fast time flies?" One second per second is a meaaningless tautology. Einstein skipped right over that elephant in the room in SR, the speed of time is an ambiguous universal stasis in both reference frames and only the Lorentz Transform then gives the difference between points of observation. Is the speed of time on earth a coefficient of escape velocity? Good Luck with your efforts and best wishes, jrc

It's my pleasure to play! And your essay is an excellent playground, so thanks for the opportunity Edwin, much appreciated.

"The universe is conscious, but the awareness does not come from the equations. It comes from the primordial field evolving to where we are today. You're living it. You'll never get an explanation that produces awareness, it's there to start with. You might find this frustrating. I think it's great. Enjoy it!"

Again, I concur, and am never frustrated but rather have only ever enjoyed fundamental ontology! And yes, you, me, and the pan-psychists all agree that the universe is conscious and that we just have to posit consciousness as a fundamental physical property ... which also means we need to rethink what the physical in physicalism means, but probably only if you care about the current (deplorable) state of the philosophy of science. And I definitely think your primordial C-field is a better way to go for the reasons I gave above.

However, as for your contention that we are incapable of discovering what or how 'conscious awareness' is or arises, simply because 'we are it' therefore it's a fundamentally unknowable fundamental property and we should just leave it at that ... well that contention would depend on how you might define the term 'consciousness' ... which (perhaps annoyingly) is where the philosophy of mind starts.

And if you care about the philosophy of mind then just positing 'C' as a fundamental property attached to a primordial gravitational field doesn't answer what it is that is being attached. If we refuse to define what C is then how do you define what a C-field is, or how it interacts with gravity, matter, and the generation of (3+1)D patterns via our neuronal processes? Do you even need to posit C for your (3+1)D neuronal mass flow theory to function?

Otherwise, what is 'C' such that it can be a primordial property of a C-field?