Lorraine Ford Your argument has become a repetitive and futile exercise in straw-man reasoning and circular logic. You keep insisting that I tacitly assume existence implies knowledge of existence despite my repeatedly and explicitly stating the exact opposite. Your response is now essentially that I secretly hold an assumption that I don’t even know I’m making.
That is not a demonstration of anything. It’s merely an unsupported accusation unless you can identify the actual premises in my framework that logically entail your conclusion. Otherwise, you are simply perpetuating the same straw-man arguments and circular reasoning rather than addressing my actual position. Repeating these logical fallacies will not strengthen your argument, much less establish its validity.
You even acknowledge that existence and knowledge of existence are two separate things. That is precisely my position. Yet you continue to irrationally attribute the opposite position to me. You are arguing against a premise that you have invented and then presenting your rejection of that premise as though it refutes NVM. That is the oldest trick in the book, a STRAW-MAN ARGUMENT.
Your reasoning about mathematics is equally problematic. You begin by identifying physical change with numerical change, then argue that numbers cannot move themselves, and finally conclude that matter must possess knowledge and continually assign numbers. But your conclusion depends on the very premise you have yet to establish, namely that physical change literally consists of numerical assignments. That is CIRCULAR REASONING and not a derivation of physical necessity.
Within NVM, I propose an underlying NONLINEAR, nonequilibrium physical substrate (nonclassical AETHER) whose changing configurations can produce persistent physical organizations. Mathematics describes those dynamics but does not initiate them, and abstract numbers do not physically move. Whether NVM can successfully derive the observed behavior of nature remains a mathematical and empirical research question I am currently addressing.
You dismiss “fundamentally dynamical” as mere words, yet your own explanation that matter somehow “knows” and “jumps” numbers is equally incomplete until you explain the physical mechanism, establish why knowledge is necessary, and demonstrate how your proposal reproduces observed physics.
And your sweeping assertion that virtually all of mathematics, physics, and philosophy secretly assumes existence equals knowledge is an extraordinary claim for which you have provided NO supporting evidence.
You have not exposed a hidden contradiction in my framework. You have repeatedly inserted your own assumptions into it, attacked those assumptions, and then declared victory over a position I never held, which is a straw-man argument. It’s one of the oldest debating tactics in the book, and I’m not going to let you get away with it. Plain and simple.
If you genuinely believe my framework logically requires knowledge or consciousness at the fundamental level then demonstrate that necessity from premises I actually accept. Otherwise, repeating the same accusation does not strengthen your argument. It only demonstrates that you have yet to address mine.
