Dear Marcel,
I somehow missed reading your essay during the contest period. I would have voted for you had I read it. I recently saw some of your comments on Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe" thread, which caused me to come back to your essay.
Your paper naturally divides into two parts: natural philosophy and physics.
Your treatment of natural philosophy is masterful. I have never seen your perspective on truth before, and I found it very enlightening!
Your essay is wonderful. The first half is so clear but the second half is more confused. To the unbiased observer, this would seem to indicate that the first half is 'true' while the second half was based on a false choice. I believe that this is your choice of 'time' as the 'fluid substance' that your first half implies as the basis of the universe. But I am not an unbiased observer -- because I believe that the 'fluid substance' that is the basis of our universe is gravity, or more properly the gravito-magnetic field.
In my essay I claim that this field is sufficient to account for the physical universe, as we know it. I go further to attach an interpretation to the 'magnetic' part of the gravity field, that of consciousness, but even if this interpretation is rejected, the theory still accounts for all of the known particles, the basic universal constants, the inflationary force, the logical character of this substance, and much more (everything else!).
Because the first thing you pull into your theory (after time) is gravity, I ask you to 'willingly suspend your disbelief' and consider that the gravitational field is the 'fluid substance' from which the universe is built. The field has energy (Maxwell) and hence mass (Einstein) and the self-interacting vortices in the field essentially condense into particles, from which the rest of our universe has evolved.
Marcel, if possible, I would have taken your first five pages and appended my essay to it. Yours is so beautiful and of course I believe that mine answers more fundamental questions of physics than other essays. But your metaphysical reasoning is superb.
As is illustrated many times in these comments, by the time someone develops their ideas sufficiently to be able to submit a qualified, original, essay to a contest like this, they are pretty much wedded to their ideas. That's quite natural.
But I hope that you will consider the fact that others have admired the first half of your essay, while arguing with the choice of 'time' in the second half, to attempt a fresh look at the problem. I invite you to study my essay (and associated comment thread) as a logical extension of your wonderful metaphysics.
Because the first thing you do after your choice of time is to incorporate gravity, you may be amenable to consider starting with the gravity field, and choosing it as the difference between 'something exists and nothing exists'.
You also state that it is postulation of an impossibility, or a 'limit' that revolutionizes physics. In my essay it is the limit to the curvature of a gravitational vortex in space-time that brings about a new phenomenon, the electromagnetic field, and establishes the basis of charged particles. Everything else depends from these constituents, ALL of which are simply 'phases' of the primordial monistic substance.
For an exposition of this, see my essay.
For example, from the Quantum Flow Principle, I derive three compatible physical possibilities. If, according to your exposition, these are to be found in a single truth system, they must be self-consistent. Since the term defines a value in each system, the value must be the same. This turns out to be Planck's constant (in reality) and the relation specializes to Heisenberg's uncertainty relations in addition to other consequences, such as the quantization of angular momentum, mvr = h.
Elsewhere I show how logic arises from physical construction; silicon, protein, neural (or other) and the fact that such logic, regardless of implementation or instantiation, gives no choice in its operation clearly defines a central character of the physical universe, ie, it supports logic.
Marcel, I find your discussion of gravity and time very interesting, and wonder if, from a monistic gravito-magnetic substance, you could not derive similar, but perhaps new and insightful relations. Else you seem to be faced with the problem of explaining particles, inflation, etc, etc. I would love to hear your thinking on this.
As you state, we make choices in order to proceed with a new theory, whatever the reasons for our choices. For example, I had decided, after long consideration, that consciousness was best represented by a field, and, since my consciousness interacts with the physical universe, I decided there must be a force equation (no matter how unlikely this has always seemed to me!). It did not take long to find a reasonable, or at least interesting guess for the form of this equation, which I did 3 Jan 06, exactly 4 years ago. Since then it has been cornucopia! No end of results and explanations of current mysteries have flowed from this choice, and not one contradiction in four years.
Thank you for such a clear exposition of truth as the absence of choice. I will quote you and paraphrase you in the future. You have made a major contribution to my thinking.
With my compliments,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
