What is space and how do we perceive it?

Known unknowns and unknown unknowns!

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AP-S.knight
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Joined: Thu Dec 31, 2015 10:46 pm

What is space and how do we perceive it?

Post by AP-S.knight »

Space is not how we perceive it; Space is, and we perceive it.

1. The fundamental laws of math and physics which hold true on the planet earth have existed prior to man, and therefore is something that exists in and of itself, not due to our perception of it.
2. The discovery and understanding of the governing laws and theorems of math and physics through experimentation and empirical formulation is a process which still continues today. The laws and theorems that have already been discovered and have not yet been contradicted can be used to strengthen and further “prove” one another, along with providing the building fundamentals for, and validating, new found phenomena. It seems obvious that we must be uncovering such phenomena as it exists in and of itself, and has existed previous to our discovery and comprehension of it.
3. It is true that our perception of objects in space and through time may be subjective; however, there still must exist the object in space and through time that abides by the governing laws of math and physics and that is true in and of itself, regardless if we can correctly perceive it or not.
4. Because there is some object that truly exists in and of itself, then it must follow that there can be some correct mathematical representation of the object, regardless of whether or not our perceptions support that representation.
5. Earth exists in space, and therefore Earth and space must share the same governing laws of mathematics, and even in the event of the discovery of a form of physics completely different than from here on Earth; mathematics must logically support said form a physics.
6. If the laws of mathematics are true and universal, then it must be true that space is something that exists in and of itself, and that as observers of space and the objects existing in it through time, our minds use the senses to create perceptual constructs of mathematically correct, naturally occurring, entities and phenomena.

In the time that humans have persisted on Earth, we have observed and noted patterns that have led to the creation of the physical sciences. The major scientific fields are typically regarded as biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. We have come to see that our different observations from all different fields are actually related, and one supports the other in the sense that mathematics provides the fundamentals that allow for physics to be true, physics provides the fundamentals that allow chemistry to be true, and chemistry is responsible for biology and the greater physical world. By this hierarchy of comprehensiveness alone, it seems that we have a long way to go from our immediate physical observation and our adjectival explanation of it to some accurate and supported mathematical reasoning. For many reasons it would be, at least, impractical to try and comprehend any phenomena in its absolute entirety, even an event so simple as sitting on the floor in an all-white and completely empty room with no noise or any changes in the physical or chemical environment. In science, we see quite frequently that things in nature act differently than one might suppose, or in ways that are too complex for us to keep in constant consideration. An example of this complexity found at such fundamental levels can be represented by the use of Lewis structures in chemistry, which are simple renderings of molecules that are incredibly misrepresentative of what is actually happening between electrons, atoms and molecules. For a lay person, the presentation of a Lewis structure as the representation of a molecule may only suggest the connectivity of different variables; but for the chemist it is a tool used to determine bond lengths, angles, strain energies, basicity and nucleophelicity; all of which are rather complex in their own respects. It is not the case that for the lay person that those attributes did not belong to the Lewis structure when he saw them, but simply that he was unaware of them until he learned of them. But this is still not a posteriori, as once a true understanding of chemical principles has been acquired an individual could be presented with two different Lewis structures in solution and very accurately determine what will happen through their interaction; like mathematics, this is an example synthetic a priori. Now if we imagine that how we perceive space is similar to the way in which we perceive the Lewis structure, being that the more we understand of reality and how things behave, the more information we can draw from any one image or phenomena. However, when we have come to fully understand the Lewis structure, we realize that we still know nothing significant as there is something even smaller and more fundamental than the Lewis structure that validates the existence and behaviors of the Lewis structure itself. It could be imagined that for every fundamental element, there is a more fundamental element that supports it. If we relate this idea to set theory, we could imagine a fundamental element as a grouping of objects that support an idea, and we can call this grouping of objects a set. Every time you perceive space, you experience a grouping of “objects” that led to your emergence of an idea, and assume the more insight and knowledge you have upon the event of perception, the more comprehensive that set of objects is. Between different people there will be different levels of comprehensiveness of their respective sets, and so we can see that each set, or idea, belongs to a set more comprehensive than itself, and it can be imagined that there are infinitely many supersets to any given set, or idea. It seems that, due to the incredible complexity of space and time, it would be too time consuming and impractical to attempt to observe space in and of itself. More likely it is the case that space exists as it is, in and of itself, through time, and we exist in space; surviving off the intuition provided to us by our minds and senses, our perceptions.
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