Questions we'll never solve

[PoeticUniverse]

20. What about the continuing claims of something from nothing?

Vilenkin has such a claim, but at the end of the day it is the laws of physics that he has as the What IS for the beginning of our universe. This is similar to having math as the basis.

Roger Ellman has a theory of nothing, too, but with more details, these being that energy must be conserved and that the rise from nothing must not be abrupt, but near infinitely gradual, and then he looks for a needle in a haystack, which turns out to be easy.

He settles on waves, since they are both ubiquitous and simple continuous functions, as the ‘needles’ that write reality, via a cosine function, for its derivatives conform to the requirements, too.

There are more waves with waves as more cosine functions in order to not have the wave envelopes begin anywhere but at zero, and an infinity is avoided since this whole cosmic egg as a giant neutron the size of the universe blows up before an infinite regress to create the universe since all these waves (2x10**85) cannot be compressed to infinite density.

The sets of waves with positive amplitude (charge) are matter and the negative ones are inverse matter. The wave frequencies make for mass/energy and the wave lengths make for extension into dimension.

The wave envelopes become electrons, the waves themselves become protons, and waves 180 degrees out of phase become photons.

So, we have the perfect symmetry of the main stable particles—the electron(-)/positron(+), anti-proton(-)/proton(+), and the photon(neutral). It very tidy that there are only those ways described ton make these matter and energy particles, meaning that there can’t be uncharged matter particles nor a charged energy particle.

Yet, there must be some mechanism for this to come about and that would be something, not nothing.

Next time: Is there implicate order behind the explicate. This should be as music to Leo’s ears.

[Obvious Leo]

Vilenkin has such a claim, but at the end of the day it is the laws of physics that he has as the What IS for the beginning of our universe. This is similar to having math as the basis.

All of physics is Platonist and thus essentially creationist because it assumes a priori that the universe had a beginning and thus a causal agent external to itself. This is built into the very paradigm of physics as laid down by Newton via Descartes via Aquinas.

For as long as physics continues to operate under this flawed assumption then no unification of its models will EVER be possible.

Keep going, Austin, because we know where this goes. The universe we live in is self-causal and thus sufficient to its own existence. Newton didn't understand determinism because of god.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Vilenkin has such a claim, but at the end of the day it is the laws of physics that he has as the What IS for the beginning of our universe. This is similar to having math as the basis.

All of physics is Platonist and thus essentially creationist because it assumes a priori that the universe had a beginning and thus a causal agent external to itself. This is built into the very paradigm of physics as laid down by Newton via Descartes via Aquinas.

For as long as physics continues to operate under this flawed assumption then no unification of its models will EVER be possible.

Keep going, Austin, because we know where this goes. The universe we live in is self-causal and thus sufficient to its own existence. Newton didn't understand determinism because of god.

I think you have a point historically, and I might agree that physics is hampered with the legacy of an Aristotelean method and of its linguistic structure. But I can't agree that this means it is incapable of thinking outside the box that it has traditionally grown into. I do not think it carries around these assumptions as you suggest, and there are examples where this assumption as been challenged (one thinks of steady state theory), and at least one paradigm (uniformitarianism) suggests otherwise than you would have it.

[Obvious Leo]

It's a fair point, Hobbes, that for every sweeping generalisation there must always be some glaring exceptions, and physics is no longer the rigid priesthood of conformity which it was even a generation ago. There are the outright renegades like Smolin and Tegmark who openly question the eternal verities but even many of the less strident like Greene, Randall, Davies and Wilczek have come to realise that Kuhn was right and that the problem of physics is not a problem of physics at all but a problem of the way in which physics thinks the world. Capra knew it 40 years ago.

This all goes back to a fundamental disparity in thought which arose between Leibniz and Newton at a time before physics was even born. These blokes thought the world differently and the wrong bloke won the argument. Newton was in the Platonist/Thomist/Cartesian/Bacon camp who saw a universe of objects moving in space but this was not the world which Leibniz saw. Leibniz was cast more in the mould of Heraclitus, Buddha and the Persians and was firmly in the camp of Spinoza with a universe sufficient to its own existence. To Leibniz the universe was not a collection of objects moving in space but a sequence of events occurring in time which the observer merely constructs within his consciousness in terms of objects moving in space. To Leibniz neither the objects nor the spaces had any ontological provenance.

Leibniz was right and physics has confounded itself with "the problem of the observer" ever since. The holy grail of physics is the unification of its models and this can NEVER be possible until physics first understands what an observation is, since physics is entirely predicated on observation.

An observation is a construct of the human mind.

[Hobbes' Choice]

It's a fair point, Hobbes, that for every sweeping generalisation there must always be some glaring exceptions, and physics is no longer the rigid priesthood of conformity which it was even a generation ago. There are the outright renegades like Smolin and Tegmark who openly question the eternal verities but even many of the less strident like Greene, Randall, Davies and Wilczek have come to realise that Kuhn was right and that the problem of physics is not a problem of physics at all but a problem of the way in which physics thinks the world. Capra knew it 40 years ago.

This all goes back to a fundamental disparity in thought which arose between Leibniz and Newton at a time before physics was even born. These blokes thought the world differently and the wrong bloke won the argument. Newton was in the Platonist/Thomist/Cartesian/Bacon camp who saw a universe of objects moving in space but this was not the world which Leibniz saw. Leibniz was cast more in the mould of Heraclitus, Buddha and the Persians and was firmly in the camp of Spinoza with a universe sufficient to its own existence. To Leibniz the universe was not a collection of objects moving in space but a sequence of events occurring in time which the observer merely constructs within his consciousness in terms of objects moving in space. To Leibniz neither the objects nor the spaces had any ontological provenance.

Leibniz was right and physics has confounded itself with "the problem of the observer" ever since. The holy grail of physics is the unification of its models and this can NEVER be possible until physics first understands what an observation is, since physics is entirely predicated on observation.

An observation is a construct of the human mind.

Yes it is, but not JUST a construction. This is what makes the distinction between science and fantasy

Truly the problem lies in the interface of the working scientist and the rest of the world. A good philosophical scientist, knows with full humility that all he is doing is offering a model of increasing complexity to shine a light on dark areas of understanding. Science is only descriptive, when is strays into the teleological and the purposeful is when it tends to loose its credibility.
Any one with a tiny appreciation of the history of science knows full well that at any time 90% of all cosmological constructions and other theories are redundant, and (the current) 5% will be redundant in the next generation. The other 5% core of the obvious remains solid, and I think we can hope that this might increase- or maybe the 100% just gets bigger???
There are bad scientists who fool themselves that they are masters of explanation rather than description, and pretend to find what they might laughingly call eternal verities; some tainted with childhood religious indoctrination, applied inadvertently and sometimes even intentionally. But most are deeply skeptical of divinity, as they have to be. Nonetheless they can succumb to this foolishness of certainty.

The interface between science and the world is political. Politics requires certainty- especially when it is well constructed certainty.

[Obvious Leo]

Yes it is, but not JUST a construction.

In what way is it more? I'm not trying to dispute the existence of an objective reality but merely pointing out that a subjective interpretation of such a reality is all that is available to the domain of science and that such a subjective interpretation is a continuously movable feast. A quark is only a quark because this is the way we have chosen to codify a theory, which is nothing more than a particular procedure of thought for the interrogation of the sub-atomic world. We have then designed our empirical protocols of experimental observation in accordance with this codification, which leads directly to a self-referential confirmation bias which Einstein was acutely aware of,( as indeed was Heisenberg, although Werner was much confused on most other metaphysical questions).

"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe"....Albert Einstein.

The point I'm making is that quarks will no longer be observed in nature once a better theory for the atom has been devised, just as phlogiston and the luminiferous aether are no longer observed in nature nowadays.

Science is only descriptive, when is strays into the teleological and the purposeful is when it tends to loose its credibility.

I quite agree and most of the sciences are fully cognisant of this inherent limitation of their disciplines. However this limitation cannot be applied to physics, which is teleological by its very nature. Newton designed it that way because the created universe was his a priori assumption. Physics can claim only a Pyrrhic victory for confirming Newton's assumption for the simple reason that it couldn't have been otherwise. When we design our models of physics to predict only what the observer will observe we can scarcely be convincingly astonished when the observer duly goes ahead and observes what the models have predicted. Physics is intrinsically tautologous.

The interface between science and the world is political. Politics requires certainty- especially when it is well constructed certainty.

Sadly from the early 20th century onwards it has also become increasingly commercial. With a few lone and highly honoured exceptions most academic physicists are nothing more than technocrats serving the agenda of global commerce.

[PoeticUniverse]

21. Is there an implicate order behind the explicate?

One experiences the explicate order of What IS in its transformations indirectly, and of that only what makes it into consciousness, one ever only experiencing the inside of the head—via the brain’s inside-out view, via resultant brain analysis quaila outputs as phenomena representing, to a presumably useful degree, some portion of noumena impinging on the senses, the noumena perhaps even still as the message rather than the messenger itself, which would be the implementation of the entire scheme—The Theory of Everything itself.

So, how are we supposed to get through perhaps two levels of explicates to the ultimate implicate? Well, there may be scarce clues about, and so set set afoot on the quest to find them, for we know that the appearances that seem to be have gone through several transformations/representations, including the initial one of What IS going through its paces.

The notion of implicate and explicate orders emphasizes the primacy of structure and process over individual objects. The latter are seen as mere approximations of an underlying process. In this approach, quantum particles and other objects are understood to have only a limited degree of stability and autonomy.
Bohm believes that the weirdness of the behavior of quantum particles is caused by unobserved forces maintaining that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. In the words of F. David Peat, Bohm considers that what we take for reality are “surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order”. That is, the implicate order is the ground from which reality emerges.

In analogy to Alfred North Whitehead's notion of actual occurrence, Bohm considered the notion of moment–a moment being a not entirely localizable event, with events being allowed to overlap and being connected in an over-all implicate order: I propose that each moment of time is a projection from the total implicate order. The term projection is a particularly happy choice here, not only because its common meaning is suitable for what is needed, but also because its mathematical meaning as a projection operation, P, is just what is required for working out these notions in terms of the quantum theory.

Bohm emphasized the primary role of the implicate order's structure: My attitude is that the mathematics of the quantum theory deals primarily with the structure of the implicate pre-space and with how an explicate order of space and time emerges from it, rather than with movements of physical entities, such as particles and fields. (This is a kind of extension of what is done in general relativity, which deals primarily with geometry and only secondarily with the entities that are described within this geometry.)

Bohm also claimed that “as with consciousness, each moment has a certain explicate order, and in addition it enfolds all the others, though in its own way. So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘’holds' all the others enfolded within it”. Bohm characterises consciousness as a process in which at each moment, content that was previously implicate is presently explicate, and content which was previously explicate has become implicate.

One may indeed say that our memory is a special case of the process described above, for all that is recorded is held enfolded within the brain cells and these are part of matter in general. The recurrence and stability of our own memory as a relatively independent sub-totality is thus brought about as part of the very same process that sustains the recurrence and stability in the manifest order of matter in general. It follows, then, that the explicate and manifest order of consciousness is not ultimately distinct from that of matter in general.

A key motivation for Bohm in proposing a new notion of order was the well-known incompatibility of quantum theory with relativity theory. Bohm 1980, p. xv summarised the state of affairs he perceived to exist: ...in relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well-defined. Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events connectible by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well-defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness.

Bohm maintained that relativity and quantum theories are in basic contradiction in these essential respects, and that a new concept of order should begin with that toward which both theories point: undivided wholeness. This should not be taken to mean that he advocated such powerful theories be discarded. He argued that each was relevant in a certain context—i.e., a set of interrelated conditions within the explicate order—rather than having unlimited scope, and that apparent contradictions stem from attempts to overgeneralize by superposing the theories on one another, implying greater generality or broader relevance than is ultimately warranted. Thus, Bohm 1980, pp. 156–167 argued: “... in sufficiently broad contexts such analytic descriptions cease to be adequate ... ‘the law of the whole’'will generally include the possibility of describing the ‘loosening’'of aspects from each other, so that they will be relatively autonomous in limited contexts ... however, any form of relative autonomy (and heteronomy) is ultimately limited by holonomy, so that in a broad enough context such forms are seen to be merely aspects, relevated in the holomovement, rather than disjoint and separately existent things in interaction.”

— Wiki

One clue is that What IS has to be sufficient unto itself, for it’s all that is and thus only only itself to work with. Other names for it could be Totality, the All, the Something, the Universe (if only one), the Basis, or the Cosmos.

All of our somethings, no matter their particular degree of realness, in that they may not be primary, are still real somethings to some extent because they can only be of the Real—the Realest.

Even an electron’s charge could be secondary, an effect of some kind of more basic wave’s negative amplitude, perhaps, or even the electron being the effect of something like a center of oscillating waves.

The whole task is so daunting that it has driven many of the wise to waste over thousands of years, to at least knocks them about to their core.

The circling orbs that in the night skies abound
Do the minds of the learned ones confound.
Dare not loosen the grasp of wisdom’s thread;
Even the wise grow faint from the whirls around.
—OK BM #58

The second clue is that time appears to be quantized, for we have discovered the Planck length, plus that having time to be infinitely divisible, rather than a duration, leads to paradoxes like Zeno’s.

This leads me toward the concept of time known as presentism, in which only the ‘now’ exists, with the past all gone and the future being not yet and so not anywhere either. We ourselves cannot be and need not be extended in time, because our minds have memory of the more recent past, sensation for the present, and anticipation/imagination of the at least near future. And of course these three, such as when listening to music, provide a light that none of them could alone.

Some of the difficulties and paradoxes of presentism can be resolved by changing the normal view of time as a container or thing unto itself and seeing time as a measure of changing spatial relationships among objects; thus observers need not be extended in time to exist and be aware, but rather they exist and the changes in internal relationships within the observer can be measured by stable countable events. — Wiki

The opposite of presentism is eternalism, as Einstein’s SR block universe, in which past and future both exist, although few get into the implications of this arrangement, which, for one is that at some point, perhaps even all at once, all the interactions in the block were predicted and laid out, which is quite a lot of foreseeing, not to mention keeping all the histories and futures without breaking some ultimate bandwidth. Eternalism is essentially a real 3D movie playing its 2D frames, like that of a flip book’s pages turning, with no alternate parts, beginnings, or endings, which might be called pre-determined, as opposed to determined as it goes along (presentism). Note that both are deterministic.

So, perhaps Einstein’s special relativity, though it works, is more of an explicate model.

At any rate, the ‘nows’ march on.

The third clue is that we get the message that simplicity in the past leads to the less simple, such as composites, and onto complexity unto, eventually, very high complexity, which, as the fourth clue, took such a long time that we can hardly comprehend it, but demonstrates that there are no short cuts such as those presented in the mythical ages.

The TOE is then so simple that many might at first not even find it remarkable, having expected some big fat complicated monstrosity.

The fifth clue:

A fundamental lesson of general relativity is that there is no fixed spacetime background, as found in Newtonian mechanics and special relativity; the spacetime geometry is dynamic.

While easy to grasp in principle, this is the hardest idea to understand about general relativity, and its consequences are profound and not fully explored, even at the classical level. To a certain extent, general relativity can be seen to be a relational theory, in which the only physically relevant information is the relationship between different events in spacetime. — Wiki

So…

Loop quantum gravity is based first of all on the idea to take seriously the insight of general relativity that spacetime is a dynamical field and therefore is a quantum object. The second idea is that the quantum discreteness that determines the particle-like behavior of other field theories (for instance, the photons of the electromagnetic field) also affects the structure of space.

The main result of loop quantum gravity is the derivation of a granular structure of space at the Planck length. This is derived as follows. In the case of electromagnetism, the quantum operator representing the energy of each frequency of the field has discrete spectrum. Therefore the energy of each frequency is quantized, and the quanta are the photons. In the case of gravity, the operators representing the area and the volume of each surface or space region have discrete spectrum. Therefore area and volume of any portion of space are quantized, and the quanta are elementary quanta of space. It follows that spacetime has an elementary quantum granular structure at the Planck scale, which cuts-off the ultraviolet infinities of quantum field theory. — Wiki

Well, any comments so far?

(This may be continued at some point, perhaps on the holographic principle.)

[Obvious Leo]

The TOE is then so simple that many might at first not even find it remarkable, having expected some big fat complicated monstrosity.

Both Einstein and Wheeler predicted exactly this. The unification model for physics would be (dare I say it) bloody obvious. And so indeed it is because reality as a process has been well understood for millennia. It was Newton who fucked it up.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Yes it is, but not JUST a construction.

In what way is it more? I'm not trying to dispute the existence of an objective reality but merely pointing out that a subjective interpretation of such a reality is all that is available to the domain of science and that such a subjective interpretation is a continuously movable feast. A quark is only a quark because this is the way we have chosen to codify a theory, which is nothing more than a particular procedure of thought for the interrogation of the sub-atomic world. We have then designed our empirical protocols of experimental observation in accordance with this codification, which leads directly to a self-referential confirmation bias which Einstein was acutely aware of,( as indeed was Heisenberg, although Werner was much confused on most other metaphysical questions).

"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe"....Albert Einstein.

The point I'm making is that quarks will no longer be observed in nature once a better theory for the atom has been devised, just as phlogiston and the luminiferous aether are no longer observed in nature nowadays.

Science is only descriptive, when is strays into the teleological and the purposeful is when it tends to loose its credibility.

I quite agree and most of the sciences are fully cognisant of this inherent limitation of their disciplines. However this limitation cannot be applied to physics, which is teleological by its very nature. Newton designed it that way because the created universe was his a priori assumption. Physics can claim only a Pyrrhic victory for confirming Newton's assumption for the simple reason that it couldn't have been otherwise. When we design our models of physics to predict only what the observer will observe we can scarcely be convincingly astonished when the observer duly goes ahead and observes what the models have predicted. Physics is intrinsically tautologous.

The interface between science and the world is political. Politics requires certainty- especially when it is well constructed certainty.

Sadly from the early 20th century onwards it has also become increasingly commercial. With a few lone and highly honoured exceptions most academic physicists are nothing more than technocrats serving the agenda of global commerce.

I can demonstrate my sensory construction of a gun and a bullet to give you confirmation that your construction of my gun and bullet are just as real as mine. I don't really give a damn about quarks. Things outside our direct perception are always going to be subject to further interpretation.
My demonstration does not rely on any bogus construct "objective reality". We can both remain firmly in our "subjective" constructions, but find that we can agree with utter clarity upon things that others also can agree upon. You can argue about the divine, but science provides us with speeding bullets that will not submit to be argued away. The problem comes when we attach "law" like principles behind what we can all agree with.
However I don't agree with the out-of-context ("It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe"....Albert Einstein.). I'd prefer to say that it is the Theory that determines the way in which the observer will describe his experience; not what they observe. Theory or not the experience of a bullet is much the same what ever theory you might have about it.
I do not think a tautology is a bad thing, necessarily. When the argument and description comes full 'circle', is the moment when we have clarity. What is more important is what has been included on the trip. It took 2500 years from Aristotle's first musing on the subject to arrive at the tautological "survival of the fittest". But this great journey encircles the life's work of Darwin. The tricky part is expressing with accuracy the degree to which natural selection is significant alongside other natural mechanisms of evolution. A similar problem exists with carbon's role in GW; and in the medical profession what degree of reductionism brings catastrophic failure to good diagnosis.
Whilst science continues to reduce the problem the nature seems to demonstrate a deeper complexity that challenges the simplicity of law making.

On the political front, a simplistic "reduce carbon" has been adopted to the detriment of the planet as far more important things go unnoticed. When the floods come the morons wag their finger at carbon emissions when all around them 100 years of field drainage could explain the problem more easily, as previously forest and wetlands were capable of holding back potential floodwaters like a sponge in times of high rainfall" drainage ditches throw the whole lot straight towards low lying towns. Complexity needs to be embraced.

[Philosophy Explorer]

This article relates to the subject matter:

http://www.philosophytalk.org/community ... philosophy

PhilX

[Hobbes' Choice]

This article relates to the subject matter:

http://www.philosophytalk.org/community ... philosophy

PhilX

Yes, but only in ways you are too dull to express.

[Philosophy Explorer]

This article relates to the subject matter:

http://www.philosophytalk.org/community ... philosophy

PhilX

Yes, but only in ways you are too dull to express.

Of course brain hobbled, I see how well you express yourself by main religion thread (no need to explain what the article does so well itself).

PhilX

[PoeticUniverse]

21. (con’t)

The seventh clue is that the maximum entropy of a black hole’s event horizon depends on the area, not on the volume, as would be expected. The third dimension may not exist.

The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region—preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn. As pointed out by Raphael Bousso, Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way.

In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information on the cosmological horizon, such that the three dimensions we observe are an effective description only at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the particle horizon has a non-zero area and grows with time.

The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory. However, there exist classical solutions to the Einstein equations that allow values of the entropy larger than those allowed by an area law, hence in principle larger than those of a black hole. These are the so-called "Wheeler's bags of gold". The existence of such solutions conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not yet fully understood.

For a given energy in a given volume, there is an upper limit to the density of information (the Bekenstein bound) about the whereabouts of all the particles which compose matter in that volume, suggesting that matter itself cannot be subdivided infinitely many times and there must be an ultimate level of fundamental particles. As the degrees of freedom of a particle are the product of all the degrees of freedom of its sub-particles, were a particle to have infinite subdivisions into lower-level particles, then the degrees of freedom of the original particle must be infinite, violating the maximal limit of entropy density. The holographic principle thus implies that the subdivisions must stop at some level, and that the fundamental particle is a bit (1 or 0) of information.

The most rigorous realization of the holographic principle is the AdS/CFT correspondence by Juan Maldacena. However, J.D. Brown and Marc Henneaux had rigorously proved already in 1986, that the asymptotic symmetry of 2+1 dimensional gravity gives rise to a Virasoro algebra, whose corresponding quantum theory is a 2-dimensional conformal field theory.

The physical universe is widely seen to be composed of “matter” and “energy”. In his 2003 article published in Scientific American magazine, Jacob Bekenstein summarized a current trend started by John Archibald Wheeler, which suggests scientists may "regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals."

Bekenstein asks “Could we, as William Blake memorably penned, 'see a world in a grain of sand,' or is that idea no more than 'poetic license,” referring to the holographic principle.

Bekenstein's topical overview “A Tale of Two Entropies” describes potentially profound implications of Wheeler's trend, in part by noting a previously unexpected connection between the world of information theory and classical physics. This connection was first described shortly after the seminal 1948 papers of American applied mathematician Claude E. Shannon introduced today's most widely used measure of information content, now known as Shannon entropy. As an objective measure of the quantity of information, Shannon entropy has been enormously useful, as the design of all modern communications and data storage devices, from cellular phones to modems to hard disk drives and DVDs, rely on Shannon entropy.

In thermodynamics (the branch of physics dealing with heat), entropy is popularly described as a measure of the “disorder" in a physical system of matter and energy. In 1877 Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann described it more precisely in terms of the number of distinct microscopic states that the particles composing a macroscopic “chunk” of matter could be in while still looking like the same macroscopic “chunk”. As an example, for the air in a room, its thermodynamic entropy would equal the logarithm of the count of all the ways that the individual gas molecules could be distributed in the room, and all the ways they could be moving.

Energy, matter, and information equivalence

Shannon's efforts to find a way to quantify the information contained in, for example, an e-mail message, led him unexpectedly to a formula with the same form as Boltzmann's. In an article in the August 2003 issue of Scientific American titled “Information in the Holographic Universe”, Bekenstein summarizes that “Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement…" of matter and energy. The only salient difference between the thermodynamic entropy of physics and Shannon's entropy of information is in the units of measure; the former is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, the latter in essentially dimensionless “bits” of information.

The holographic principle states that the entropy of ordinary mass (not just black holes) is also proportional to surface area and not volume; that volume itself is illusory and the universe is really a hologram which is isomorphic to the information inscribed on the surface of its boundary. The Universe is a projection of information on the boundary.”

What Maldacena came up with was a concrete mathematical formulation of the hologram idea that made use of ideas from superstring theory, which posits that elementary particles are composed of tiny vibrating loops of energy. His model envisages a 3D universe containing strings and black holes that are governed only by gravity, bounded by a 2D surface on which elementary particles and fields obey ordinary quantum laws without gravity. Hypothetical residents of the 3D space would never see this boundary because it is infinitely far away. But that wouldn’t matter: anything happening in the 3D universe could be described equally well by equations in the 2D universe, and vice versa. “I found that there’s a mathematical dictionary that allows you to go back and forth between the languages of these two worlds,” Maldacena explains.

Hyakutake et al. in 2013/4 published two papers that bring computational evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true. One paper computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon, its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory and the effects of virtual particles. The other paper calculates the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two simulations match. The papers are not an actual proof of Maldacena's conjecture for all cases but a demonstration that the conjecture works for a particular theoretical case and a verification of the AdS/CFT correspondence for a particular situation.

— Wiki

[PoeticUniverse]

(con't)

So, then, using input from my friend, the great Johann de Jong (aka Obvious Leo), since time and gravity are quantized, Totality must be digital, that is, Boolean at heart, all its finite divisions ending up with 1 or 0, its lone monad, as it being on or off, with an energy level, as precisely time’s variable interval (it’s variable due to gravity pulling time backward), time’s interval being the Planck time.

As such, there is only now and here, albeit that we view our subjective reality slightly in the past, for the broadcast takes time. Events come and go. Our universe is an event in time, not a place in space.

The past ‘now’ is not kept but in our memories, for the previous state of ‘now’ is consumed as it goes into the construction of the next state of ‘now.

Since there can’t be anything outside Totality a completed block universe of eternalism with both extant past and future couldn’t have been constructed, leaving Totality having but to transform itself at each ‘now’ of presentism without the future or the past existing, which is also because time is intermittent, that is, quantized, and not continuous.

So there is no ‘place’. Space does not exist. Only ‘here’ exists. Everywhere you are is ‘here’. There cannot be anything but ‘here’, and it’s just the fact that ‘here’ looks different depending on what happens across time that causes people to think that ‘there’ is a coherent concept.

There is no distance, because after all you can never reach out to what is at that ‘distance’. It's always only the inside of ‘you’ that is known and ‘seen’. ‘Across the room’ doesn’t exist; it’s an illusion one gets by mistaking the progression of heres for being an implication of a ‘there’.

Our reality is a succession of heres across time, and that is all there is to it, as the ultimate simplicity.

The block universe of eternalism that cannot be would be as a 4D book all of whose 3D pages exist beforehand, each page a whole universe of 3D space, these prebuilt pages flipping very quickly, whereas in the presentism of only the ‘now’, there is only one page, the ‘now’, which refreshes itself very quickly through immediate cause and effect, input and output. Note that there is no ‘random’ in either case.

Both are deterministic. Eternalism is a pre-determined kind and presentism determines events as it goes along. Both provide an illusion of motion, for the brain blends the frames/states; so now we are both homeless and motionless, having lost our place and our movement, not to mention being stuck ‘doing’ what we have to ‘do’, which isn’t even any kind of ‘doing’ at all, since it’s the other way around: Totality does you. We can apply to the government for aid.


22. How come the expression of human nature is so wide-ranging?

Well, not only are we in a great diversity stage because so many more actions of activity are possible now, it’s that people can be good to bad, smart to not, healthy to ill, etc., for that’s what how the human constitution has come to be.

Further, evolution and simplicity having to got to complexity made us what we are, so it’s no use blaming a ‘God’ for making us as He fully intended us to be and then getting surprised and disliking the result, thus not even taking responsibility for the failure of his own invention.


23. Can there be something extra or super, a so called ‘intangible’ that still can interact with the tangible?

No, for what could walk the walk and talk the talk with the tangible would have to speak its language and thus be tangible as well.

[surreptitious57]

All of physics is Platonist and thus essentially creationist because it assumes a priori that the universe had a beginning

Even if this were true [ it is not ] it would not be scientifically valid unless it could be potentially falsified
Science has nothing to say about the nature of reality. For all it does is investigate observable phenomena
It is not actually known at this point in time whether the Universe had a beginning or not nor it is assumed