Paul,
As you were kind to read and comment favorably on my essay, I feel compelled to respond. Which is difficult, as I am of the dualistic camp and you present a very detailed argument for a discrete model, along with a comprehensive historical foundation for it.
That said, I still think you are missing part of the picture. I don't have the attention to detail required to fully question the body of your essay, but think of it as a pyramid: If you want to make it higher, you can't just add more blocks on the top, you need to start with adding blocks to the foundation and make that bigger first. So I will try to offer a few foundational blocks to expand the parameters of the issue.
If I may offer a basic philosophic observation, I think the traditional concept of dualism as the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is flawed. The thesis and antithesis balance each other, but if you combine them, they cancel out. There is no synthesis. Yes, there are two sides to the coin, but you can only see one at a time. I think we in the west have this monolithic view that there is some Godlike, bird's eye view and if we keep at it, eventually we will find this TOE. The problem is that an objective perspective is an oxymoron. If we combine all perspective, we have no perspective.
What you have done is to present a fairly wholistic argument for discrete reality. So my challenge isn't to say it's wrong, but to expand the foundation in order to present an argument for why there is an analog connectivity which balances the discrete structure. The problem is that we cannot view them simultaneously.
I realize this is probably not good form, but I would like to post a somewhat long comment I made to Thomas Mcfarlane, who presented a more philosophic argument for discrete reality. Then I would like to build on a few ideas which occurred to me while reading your essay:
"You make a good argument for why reality can only be understood in terms of its discrete relationships, but it's wrong. With your last paragraph, it's clear you understand your point has its limits, but relegate the wholistic view to mystery. It isn't mysterious at all. It's overlooked because it's so basic. Math says that if you add two things together, they equal two. Well, if that's the case, you haven't actually added them together. Necessarily actually adding things together means you have one of something larger. In basic terms, it's like adding two piles of sand together and having one larger pile, but in reality it's more like components combining to create a larger whole. Whether physics, or biology, we like to take things apart to see how they work, but the fact is that they work together. Much like all the parts of your body add up to a larger whole, or all the components of an atom add up to an atom, not to mention all the various levels between, above and below the atom and the person.
This dichotomy is basic to the difference between eastern and western philosophy. In that we in the west tend to focus on objects and view their actions as emergent. While in the east, there is the contextual view and the particulars within the context are as much a part of the larger whole as your nose is part of you.
One aspect of this that I raise quite frequently and was the subject of my entry in the Nature of Time contest, is that we are looking at time backward. The basis of our rationality and from that, language, culture, history, etc, is the concept of time as the present moving from past to future. So it is natural to include this into our physical theories of how reality functions, but the fact is that it is the changing configuration of what is, the present, which turns the future into the past. We don't travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. It is not that we move from a decided past into a probabilistic future, but that the continuous collapse of probabilities which turns the future into the past. Time is an effect of motion, not the basis for it.
In fact, in eastern cultures, the past is considered to be in front of the observer and the future behind, because both the past and what is seen are known, while what is behind one and the future cannot be seen. Physically we do understand what is in front of us and can be seen is of past events, be they across the room, or across the universe, but we consider ourselves to be moving through our environment, rather than part of it, so we think of ourselves moving from past situations to future ones, as a function of our own spatial action. The irony is that this creates a deterministic view of time, since we only exist at the moment of the present and cannot change the past, or affect the future. On the other hand, when we understand ourselves as fully integrated into our own context, then our actions are part of the process creating these situations and we affect our context, as it affects us.
You do conclude your essay with a nod toward Complexity Theory, with its dichotomy of order and chaos, but I think this relationship can better be described as a dichotomy of information and energy. Energy manifests information, while information defines energy. The information is the top down view of the details, while the energy is bottom up process. They are like two sides of the same coin, such that there cannot be one without the other. They are still opposites though, as energy is fundamentally dynamic, while information is necessarily static.
Think in terms of how you perceive the distinctions you use to define your view of reality: Necessarily you must move from one to the next, otherwise it is that frozen featureless void. So there are the distinctions and there is your movement from one to the next. That is time. Remember the clock has two features; the hands and the face. We think of the hands as moving clockwise, but from the context of the hands, it is the face which moves counterclockwise. The hands represent the present, as it moves from one unit of time to the next.
As I pointed out though, it is the energy of the present which forms and dissolves these units of time. The future becoming the past.
So it is the wholistic present which is creating these discrete units which come into being, grow as long as they absorb more energy then they lose, eventually to lose all energy and fade into the past.
One way to think of this is as a factory: The products go from initiation to completion, but the production line faces the other direction, consuming raw material and expelling finished product.
The mind functions in a similar fashion, as it consumes masses of information, turns it into discrete thoughts, which are then replaced by the next. The brain is physically real, thus it exists in the present. Thoughts coalesce out of the future and fade into the past."
Paul,
Some have argued the point about information and energy, as information implies consciousness, so make that form and energy.
Another way to consider this relationship is light vs. mass. Light/radiation expands out, while mass gravitationally contracts. These are the two primary features of our universe; The great swirling vortices of galaxies, pulling mass in and radiating energy back out across billions of lightyears.
Just suppose, as I suggested in my essay, that what we detect as expansion, the redshift of distant galaxies, is actually an effect of the expansion of light. So just as gravity causes space to contract, light effectively causes it to expand. Now rather than thinking of this in terms of those macroscopic features, consider it as happening on the microscopic scales as well. The result would be a constant tension across all of space and it would only be due to purturbations which create these larger galactic features, as variations create areas of collapse, yet there remains constant mixing all up and down the scales, leading to the complex interactions or energy constantly pushing out and form making an equal effort to stabilize and then contract, due to loss of the dynamically unstable energy. Consider how it creates the processes of punctuated equilibria that motivate and define all activities on this planet, from the geologic to the political.
Now consider it in the terms I laid out for Tom, that you can't have one without the other, that they are like two sides of the same coin. You can't have formless energy, or platonic forms without energy to manifest them. Consider it in terms of your own essay, as you try to give form to light. When we don't measure light, it has no form, but measuring it gives it the form we measure.
An interesting way to consider this is how form and energy play out in society. There are many aspects, institutions and disciplines primarily interested in form; Academics, teachers, scientists, writers, news media, etc. Then consider those aspects of society which are more concerned with energy and other forms of power; Businessmen, bankers, resources providers, from miners and oil companies to farmers, politicians, though they might be on the line. Think how they relate on some levels, yet have totally different views, much like the point about thesis and antitheis not having a coherant synthesis. Yet existing in some larger cycle, as those with the power start to stagnate and those with the information dismantle the monuments to power.
While this is long and rambling, somewhere in your essay, I keep getting this subconscious impulse that it can be inverted and used to explain gravity, as the structure you define takes on its own momentum...
I know this was a very long post, but hopefully not completely confusing.
John
