Re: The reality of entity

Haines,

I suspect this is the nub of the issue. Scientists are empirically
oriented, as indeed they should be, and so naturally focus on objects
and measurements.

It wouldn't be so bad if they would police their own extrapolations.
Since our world is possessed of conscious beings, how do you exclude
consciousness when proposing hidden dimensions? Ghosts anyone?

However, any scientific practice is theory-laden, and this theory in
part shapes the reality of the objects we observe and measure. Usually
the implicit theory is left un-inspected, but when there are "scientific
revolutions" or when a science probes an unknown where the dominant
theory is not well established, philosophical speculation leading to a
new theoretical orientation can really change the whole direction of the
science.

Paradigm shift. Phase transition. Punctuated equilibrium. Systemic
failure. Revolution. When they blow theoretical bubbles upon
theoretical bubbles, sometimes they all pop at once.

I would not venture as far as Thomas Kuhn and reduce science to little
more than a consensus among peers, but the most standard of works in
traditional science insists that theory is constructed and arises
somehow from a dialectic between the scientific community and the
world. For example, a classic discussion of this is that of I. Lakatos,
"Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs", in
Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, _Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge_,
Cambridge, 1970. This is a good read, although I don't entirely agree
with all of it.

I'm afraid what reading time I have gets mostly consumed with current
news and trying to understand the forces at work. The tipping point is
when you fall out the window. The crash is when you hit the ground. We
seem to be somewhere in between.

Consider that if time is a consequence of motion and the only absolute
is like absolute zero to temperature, the complete absence of it, then
there is no such thing as a specific defined point in time.

I don't know that time is simply a consequence of motion (of change). Of
course, we impose a time scale, but the reality of time is a hotly
contested issue. Time itself may be associated with motion, but to
suggest it is a consequence of motion, of that I'm not at all
convinced. A good discussion of the time issue is D.H. Mellor, _Real
Time II_, London, 1998.

I think if you really follow through the consequences of this
proposition, it doe make some sense. As Newton pointed out, "For every
action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Now apply this to my
observation that to the hands of the clock, it's the face going
counterclockwise.

Not sure I follow this, although I suspect I'm in agreement. Yes, the
present time may not be real, in which case measurement will be
fuzzy. I'm not sure how this results from the Uncertainty Principle. In
terms of quantum states, the observation changes the object observed
because the systems are imposed. However, at the macro level in which we
live, such an effect would not be noticeable. On the other hand, if you
are thinking of a energy-time uncertainty in relativistic physics, that
also represents a scale that far exceeds our normal existence. I would
take these as offering some justification for the universality of a
probabilistic causality, but not proof. Your example seems yet a third
view, which is that our measurement affects the object measured. While
this is often pointed out and true, some have objected that it is simply
not always true and therefore is not a general principle.

It's not quite my point. What I'm saying is that you cannot freeze
time at an exact point, as that would effectively require a cessation
of motion and if all motion were to stop, reality would effectively
vanish, even to the sub-atomic level, since everything is mostly empty
space occupied by wave particle relationships that function as motion.
So since you can't stop time or motion to measure it, objects do not
have an exact location. It's the fuzziness that ties it all together
and makes it real. Without the fuzziness, there is nothing. When
physics tries to measure "position," it does so by directly impeding
the particle to narrow its location to the smallest degree of
fuzziness and this obviously does change the momentum, but that's not
the central thrust of my argument.

Well, maybe a bad example. Would the example of a meteorite get around
the issue of human intentionality?

Even meteorites have causal histories.

Yes. To put in in old terms, it is the contradiction of being and
becoming. I'd agree that it is difficult for us to grasp both together
in thought. The question is, is that not simply due to the limitation of
our thought? We can see a process such as the setting sun and it does
not seem at all problematic; to describe what we saw to someone else in
formal language is another thing. We can only approximate it, just as
differential calculus approximates change. In the other hand, in the
sciences we do often need ways to represent a reality that cannot be
adequately comprehended in thought, most often by the use of
mathematics. All I was suggesting above that our consciousness, which is
adapted to our daily lives, may not suffice for problems that are quite
alien to our daily life, such as quantum entanglements or a black
hole. There seems no reason not to look to theory or a mathematical
model to represent realities that cannot be adequately grasped in terms
of our ordinary thinking.

Math is still another form of language, a logical shorthand. By
providing a framework for our comprehension, we can build far more
complex and far reaching concepts than we could without it, but like
all tools, it can be abused. As government and business frequently get
caught doing. To quote Churchill, "There are three kinds of lies.
Lies, damn lies and statistics."

Not sure I follow you here. I assume you are not making the tautological
point that there are energy fields, such as RF, all around us all the
time. I get the feeling you are also not speaking of the fact that for
our organism to maintain its far-from-equilibrium state, it must
constantly process (dissipate) energy. I see no indication that you are
thinking of cosmological dark energy. Once popular (Wilhelm Ostwald, for
example) was the view that everything can be reduced to energy, but no
believes that today.

Think of it in terms of how our eyes function. Obviously there is far
more visual information than we can conceivably process and it is
traveling at the speed of light, so our mind breaks it down into
flashes of perception and then ties it together into a narrative. Sort
of like frames of a movie. Like a movie, much gets edited out as well.
Our minds digitize reality. As our minds go from past perceptions to
future ones, these perceptions that are the essence of our self recede
into the past.

However, I agree that the brain cannot comprehend a field, and so
Maxwell comes to our aid. And I agree that the brain must describe a
process as a sequence of system states that are somehow empirically
differentiated. But I don't see how this ties into energy, although
clearly work must be done for change to take place.

Energy is what is conserved. The information it records isn't always
preserved. So energy is what goes from past information to future
information, while the information goes from being future potential to
past circumstance.

Oops. The "traces" of the past that exist in the present are, of course,
not the past, but mere empirical effects. In that sense, reality has the
memory of the past in a sense. But it is not the past in any
sense. Robinson Crusoe saw Friday's footprint in the sand, and he
inferred from it that someone was on the island with him. But the
footprint surely is not Friday. That things have a time function (by
which I assume you mean McTaggert's A-time) is hotly denied (see
Mellart, for example).

You are modeling time as a dimension in which the past is somewhere
back there and the future is somewhere up there. If you think of time
as a consequence of motion, then reality is like a rope being woven
out of threads pulled from what had been previously woven, so as the
energy is recycled, past information is constantly being absorbed and
incorporated. Energy and information are like two sides of a coin, as
energy manifests as form/information and information doesn't exist if
it isn't physically manifested. (There are no Platonic Ideals.) The
best model for understanding this is Complexity Theory. Rather than
complexity as the intersection of order and chaos, think of reality as
the intersection order and energy. Both intimately bound, with the
past trying to control the future and the future constantly breaking
down the past.


I don't follow. Neither the future nor the past exist. At one time the
past existed, and hopefully there will be a future. And especially if
there is not really any present (in relativistic terms), then there's no
possible way for energy to "flow" through these non-existent things.

you are looking at it only as information, so yes the past is
information that has been churned up and scattered and the future is
forms that will emerge, but it is still the same conserved energy. The
present is fuzzy. It's just our digitized thoughts that perceive time
as a linear series of flashes and not continuous energy.

I assume that stored information (traces) is static by definition.

By definition, but not completely. We think of the past as
unchangeable, but it is dissipating.

No idea what you mean by energy accumulating elsewhere.

Think in terms of generational change. Growing up is like grass
pushing though the concrete. Then one day you wake up and you're the
concrete and there is this damn grass trying to push you out of the
way. As we grow up, we consume energy and information, but it builds
up and we slow down. Then the next generation is growing up and they
are running around like mad and using lots of energy, but since we are
old and cranky, they react by occupying the mental and physical spaces
we have left or can't fill.

As a student some fifty years ago, I was much taken by Manfred
Engelbert's _Evolution und Revolution in der Weltgechichte_ (Recalling
it so moved me that I just ordered myself a copy of it so that I can
relive the past ;-). So for me, the couplet has a rather specific
meaning. I've no certain ideas what the alteration of evolution and
revolution might mean in physics. Phase shifts? I don't think so.

Often times revolution is more a function of the old breaking down
than of the new displacing them, because the new are always rising up
and usually it just carries the whole a little bit higher.

Are you saying that your physicist colleagues find it hard to accept
that the present is not a time? Strange; I thought this was kind of
common currency.

Mostly I get ignored. Try arguing that information goes future to
past and it doesn't register nearly as well with those with advanced
training as it does with those who don't. Yes, tomorrow will become
yesterday. Duh!

Yes, that's true. Even if not infinite, it is not closed unless we have
space bending back on itself. However, the term "entropy" has (since
WWII) acquired a much broader meaning, or at least many real processes
are analogous to entropy change, such as the relative probability of
outcomes in relation to an initial state; such as information content
(Shannon), etc. As I suggested before, that classical thermodynamic
entropy started out in terms of closed systems, that restraint did not
last very long. Boltzmann I mentioned before, but a more recent example
would be the work of Prigogine, which can be described as the
thermodynamics of open systems.

Fuzziness is hard to ignore.

True, but I think this fourth dimension approach has fallen on hard
times in recent years. The basic issue is whether time is a property of
things (as implied by the "fourth dimension") or not. McTeggart argued
back in 1908 (?) that it was a property of things (A-Time), but I don't
know that anyone would seriously maintain that today.

It is unsettled.

Who said the world was supposed to be logical? One could make a very
long list of things that are anything but logical. One of my main
interests has to do with the reality of contradictions (and I don't mean
Kantian real oppositions). Well, a basic rule of logic says there can be
no contradictions. But I have no trouble at all showing that
contradictions can be quite real.

I think a good part of the reason we don't appreciate contradictions
is because we think the goal is to distill out the "meaning" and so
much is lost that would explain the calcium deposits that are left
when we boiled everything else away. A prime example is defining space
as three dimension, when that is just the coordinate system of the
center point. Since every point is the center of its own coordinate
system, space is infinitely dimensional. You might say the Arabs and
the Israelis use different coordinate systems to define the same
space.

But here you seem to slip from the issue of the ontological
un-reality of a time dimension to the practical utility for presuming
such a time dimension. Einstein argued that there is no ontological
dimension clocking events, and that even synchrony is relativistic.


The presumption, whether dimension or point of present, is that time
some type of fundamental frame. As a measure of motion, it's no more
logical to consider a precise time as it does to consider a precise
temperature. Yes, they both can be measured very accurately, but both
are subject to circumstance, not the basis for it. So it is
meaningless to say two points in space exist at the same moment in
time because time is fuzzy and subject to conditions for even one
point.

Yes, I recommend you give it a try. It's as nice an intro to statistical
mechanics of which I am aware.

Unfortunately I grew up in the horseracing world and since it's a
nice way to live, even if it's not very profitable, I'm still stuck in
it and free time has been in short supply, with an extra project
consuming most of it. Of course racing does prove many interesting
examples of statistics in action.

Regards,

John Merryman
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: E = 1/2mv^2
    ... Any kind of energy should involve mass and motion. ... | constant velocity overthrows that reality. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: E = mc^2
    ... that of motion. ... In Reality, everything is in motion within the ... universe, and motion requires energy, so any calculation of a mass must ... and not how they relate to the universe. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: what is the relation between force and energy?
    ... > distances between electrons and nucleons, which increases energy). ... Having no temperature, VPs have no motion of their own, ... >> involve time, although in my opinion it does, because gravitation ... energy with more distance from a gravitational source, ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: E = 1/2mv^2
    ... Any kind of energy should involve mass and motion. ... momentum is another property of a physical system. ... more objects at constant velocity wrt each other. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: No infinite energy needed for lightspeed
    ... That would correspond to the motion reflecting ... W is energy transformation ... means finite mass still. ... Actually I learned classical physics better than the relativistic ...
    (sci.physics)