The unification of physics

[Obvious Leo]

I can't for the life of me see how a dynamic reality needs a background to enact itself on at the Planck scale. As you say, PU, all you need are "bits" which are simply themselves Becoming and the entire self-causal reality simply unfolds however it unfolds. Welcome to the shit happens universe.

I know it's a rather far-fetched thought experiment but try it anyway and try to take it seriously. Imagine yourself as the mind of a species as smart as us but one which has never evolved sight? How would you model your world within your own consciousness? Would you imagine a place "out there" where the entire history of the universe would still be observable? I think you not. Your world would be one solely of events occurring in time and once they're gone they're gone forever. Our background belongs to us and we each make our own. According to the neuroscientists the way we model the 3D space in our minds is unique to each individual and differences of several orders of magnitude can occur from person to person, a point proven empirically many times over. Take a group of people out to the desert and get them to guess how far away a tower is in the distance? No kidding, some might guess in hundreds of metres and others in thousands and all will have full confidence in their estimate.

You hear a plane flying overhead and you go outside to look at it. How high up is it? You can't even begin to answer this question if you've never seen a plane before and even if you have you can't make an intelligent guess unless you know what sort of plane it is. It might be a mosquito two feet above your head. We don't observe our spaces at all, folks, we CALCULATE them and absolutely any psychologist of perception will confirm this in a heartbeat.

Just think about it properly and it all becomes bloody obvious.

Q. How far away did the ancient astronomers think our heavenly bodies were and what tools did the modern geeks use to correctly establish these "distances".

A. Clocks.

[petm1]

Why do we think that massive objects resist a change to their own position? Maybe it has more to do with the fact that we are receivers/processors and there is no way we actually see the present so we do not sense where the massive object is, but where it was. If you think that the present moment is marked with emission then the fact that we are receivers means that the leading edge of my one-second frame of reference is always time delayed from the present moment held by my consciousness. Time in Physics today is imaginary, not unlike the imaginary god of religion, but at least in Physics we all know that the square root of a negative one is always going to be positive. We need to think of time as real, space is an illusion of our minds, and the center connection, not an observable, is a temporal connection.

[Obvious Leo]

That the observer observes only his own past is a self-evident conclusion drawn from the fact that the speed of light is finite so the observer lives his entire conscious experience on a temporal delay. Far from being irrelevant this fundamental physical FACT is central to the entire debate about the ontological status of the observer's observation because this means that the observer is not observing the real world but a holographic representation of the real world.

This argument is so exquisitely simple that I can't imagine how anybody could possibly lay a glove on it, and indeed nobody ever has in all the years I've been putting it. However the message I can't seem to get across is that this simple physical FACT is the entire flaw in spacetime physics because it is this HOLOGRAM which spacetime physics is modelling. Physics is modelling our observations of the world rather than the real world itself because the real world is coming into existence too quickly for us to observe it. In fact the real world is coming into existence at the speed of light. This is not some bleeding edge fruitcake hypothesis which contradicts the evidence but simply an entirely different way of interpreting exactly the same evidence which we already have. I've said it so many times that I grow weary of saying it but what I'm talking about is NOT new physics but a more intuitive way of thinking the world. Reality is not some eternal frozen tableau which is somehow miraculously presented to us for our examination but an ongoing process which is continuously being MADE.

The truly frustrating thing about all this is that when I put this perspective to a physicist, as I have done countless times in online forums, the response is invariably this: "Well yes, that's perfectly true, but that's not the way we do physics". I kid you not, it makes me want to scream because it is exactly BECAUSE that's not the way we do physics that physics makes no fucking sense. The real universe has a BOUNDARY and it is only ON this boundary that reality can be said to physically exist. The boundary can be thought of as a wave of time which is continuously coming into existence at the speed of light but we must be cautious with this thought procedure because the wave itself is merely a mathematical convenience which we use to model the points on it. The use of such heuristics is perfectly acceptable in science as long as we don't ontologise our toolkit, which physics has done since the day Newton invented it. The points on the continuously emerging wave of time are our moments NOW and each moment NOW exists solely in its own referential frame, somewhat analogous to Leibniz's windowless monads. However unlike in the Leibnizian model the behaviour of the monads is not determined by god but rather by the behaviour of every other monad on the emerging wave and so this is a SELF-CAUSAL universe. I have given more detail on how this works at the Planck scale elsewhere and don't propose to repeat myself here because the point I wish to make here is that it is this REFLECTION of the moments NOW from the ever-changing boundary of the universe which the observer observes. We observe our world in a temporal mirror.

Once again I need to stress that this different paradigm contradicts none of the evidence available to science, and nobody has ever suggested to me that it does. However what it does do is offer a starkly different narrative for science because it defines the 4D manifold of spacetime as an observer effect and the spatio-temporal world of our experience as illusory. None of this is breaking news in philosophy because what I'm stating here is nothing more than the wisdom of the ancients passed down to us throughout the millennia. All of the major philosophies of both east and west have spoken of these truths in the language of their own times and within the cultural zeitgeist of their own era.

The philosophy of the bloody obvious has been nothing more than an exercise in synthesis whereby I have sought to unify the ancient truths of philosophy with the modern truths of science and combine these truths together under the single umbrella of Natural Philosophy. These two different approaches to human knowledge should never have been torn asunder but my philosophy has been very carefully named because this truth of our universe is intrinsic to the very nature of the human experience. We all know perfectly well what our universe is because we're standing up to our fetlocks in it. We all know perfectly well what existence is because existing is what we're doing. Existence is a process and a process is only definable as a journey of information through time but the miracle of existence lies in the self-causality of it. Self-causal dynamic systems EVOLVE over time because the determinism in such systems is non-linear and in science this is a truth as fundamental as 1+1 =2. However this is also a truth which is innate to the human experience because we already know this for ourselves. Our journey through time is an evolutionary one and this is more than simply a statement of biological fact because our minds began to evolve before we were even born and they will continue to evolve until the very day the grim reaper makes his final move. The human mind is a universe in miniature, a rather elegant little thought bubble which is modelled quite majestically as a self-similarity in the Mandelbrot set which is the ultimate template for reality itself.

This is the non-Newtonian universe and it is the holy grail of physics.

[surreptitious57]

That the observer observes only his own past is a self evident conclusion drawn from the fact that the speed of light is finite

It is incredibly paradoxical and counter intuitive to realise that whilst the arrow of time moves forward we can only experience
events in the past. The external present is an illusion since even over small distances light has to travel from any object before
we can acknowledge its existence. Even if the object is right next to us and we are unaware of any time having actually passed
between light travelling from it to us. So consequently the present can only truly exist within our own minds and no where else

[Obvious Leo]

So consequently the present can only truly exist within our own minds and no where else

Not even there. The present in your own mind is actually your past as well because your mind is only definable in terms of your awareness of it. Awareness is an observation and you can't be aware of thinking something until after you've actually thought it, a simple truth of cognitive neuroscience elegantly demonstrated by Benjamin Libet. The moment NOW is quite literally beyond the reach of the human experience so the noumenal and phenomenal realities are such that never the twain shall meet.

However your above statement does make an important point about the ontological nature of space and time. Far from being interwoven, as modelled by the spacetime paradigm, space and time are in fact mutually exclusive. Spacetime physics models space as a property of the universe and time as the property of the observer but on balance you'd have to agree that this idea hasn't been working out all that well for them because their models make no sense. However if we conclude from this that they've got this arse-about then all the ducks line up in a neat little row and physics makes perfect sense. My entire philosophy proceeds from the opposite interpretation of exactly the same evidence, namely that time is a property of the universe and space is the property of the observer.

This could hardly be seen as a crackpot position for a philosopher to take because time has physical properties and space doesn't.

[surreptitious57]

Objects obviously cannot experience time in a psychological sense but still move through it nonetheless. And in that scenario time
is not the property of the observer because no observer exists. Remember that time has three arrows and the psychological arrow
is but one of them. The thermodynamic and cosmological ones being the other two. So even if no observers existed to experience
time objects would still experience it from a thermodynamic or cosmological aspect. Remember also that time did not come into
existence as soon as human beings started to measure it or question it. For it has existed since the Big Bang and maybe before if
that event was not the absolute beginning of this Universe. And it shall carry on existing long after we have become extinct too
For it is not conditional upon our existence or our acknowledgement of it no more than the other three physical dimensions are

[Obvious Leo]

I agree with you about the nature of time, although a physicist would not, but which would these other three physical dimension be?

[surreptitious57]

Height and width and length. Now I know that you will say that spatial dimensions are an illusion. But like time they
do not need an observer to experience them. If space is an illusion then everything within it must be an illusion also
Since without it nothing can exist for everything that does has property or dimension. To accept this is idealism so I
in turn reject that as I know physical space exists otherwise I my self would not be able to. Even if I am a brain in a
vat the brain and vat still have to exist. And therefore space exists. So there is no way that you can define it out of
existence as you would have to define everything else out of existence too. And note I am talking here about space
as a real thing that exists in its own right and not as a consequence of relativity. It existed long before Einstein did
and will carry on existing after him too. His theories changed our understanding of it but it functions just the same

[Obvious Leo]

The dimensions you speak of are mathematical objects and not physical ones. Since you defend a minority position in philosophy and make no argument in support of your claim I'll take your comment as a statement of belief, to which I need offer no response.

[petm1]

That the observer observes only his own past is a self-evident conclusion drawn from the fact that the speed of light is finite so the observer lives his entire conscious experience on a temporal delay. Far from being irrelevant this fundamental physical FACT is central to the entire debate about the ontological status of the observer's observation because this means that the observer is not observing the real world but a holographic representation of the real world.

People who think that their memories of past events are the past are short sighted to me, time is more immediate than that, Our present is always held in place by the past hence mass is the past.

This argument is so exquisitely simple that I can't imagine how anybody could possibly lay a glove on it, and indeed nobody ever has in all the years I've been putting it. However the message I can't seem to get across is that this simple physical FACT is the entire flaw in spacetime physics because it is this HOLOGRAM which spacetime physics is modelling. Physics is modelling our observations of the world rather than the real world itself because the real world is coming into existence too quickly for us to observe it. In fact the real world is coming into existence at the speed of light. This is not some bleeding edge fruitcake hypothesis which contradicts the evidence but simply an entirely different way of interpreting exactly the same evidence which we already have. I've said it so many times that I grow weary of saying it but what I'm talking about is NOT new physics but a more intuitive way of thinking the world. Reality is not some eternal frozen tableau which is somehow miraculously presented to us for our examination but an ongoing process which is continuously being MADE.

It is the ontological status of matter that is continuous in time, no being made but dilating into the future, anchored in the past by the center connection we all share. Everything started at the same time, everything shared the same clock, and everything is still connected in time by the present or the tick rate of that same clock or our universe, of course this is thinking of big bang unil heat death of the universe as Einstein's calendar.

Not even there. The present in your own mind is actually your past as well because your mind is only definable in terms of your awareness of it. Awareness is an observation and you can't be aware of thinking something until after you've actually thought it, a simple truth of cognitive neuroscience elegantly demonstrated by Benjamin Libet. The moment NOW is quite literally beyond the reach of the human experience so the noumenal and phenomenal realities are such that never the twain shall meet.

However your above statement does make an important point about the ontological nature of space and time. Far from being interwoven, as modelled by the spacetime paradigm, space and time are in fact mutually exclusive. Spacetime physics models space as a property of the universe and time as the property of the observer but on balance you'd have to agree that this idea hasn't been working out all that well for them because their models make no sense. However if we conclude from this that they've got this arse-about then all the ducks line up in a neat little row and physics makes perfect sense. My entire philosophy proceeds from the opposite interpretation of exactly the same evidence, namely that time is a property of the universe and space is the property of the observer.

This could hardly be seen as a crackpot position for a philosopher to take because time has physical properties and space doesn't.

The present in my mind is my one second frame of reference as counted by my clock. "now" on the other hand is tied to my awareness, but if you want the way physics thinks of the present is emission. Space is how my mind shows me the time between objects as measured by the age of the photon I am receiving now. I think that space and time are two ways to describe the same thing just opposites.