Where is "here"?

[PoeticUniverse]

So if I say my house is 50 feet tall, that is meaningless because height does not exist? There is also no such thing as volume (my house takes up this amount of space) because space does not exist?

Yes, meaningless, ontologically, in the implicate order, since there is no 'place', but useful to navigate the explicate order.

Since distance is an illusion then all is one. There is only one object in the universe and it has no height, depth or width! I disagree.

There's no 'in the universe' as a place; it's not a place, but a series of events. You can have that there is only one Totality.

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 then they go and then they come….

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.

[Obvious Leo]

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

Clearly you agree with my point about the exquisite simplicity of the Leibnizian world-view and that it relates precisely to the question posed in the OP. In fact it was Galileo who first dispelled the idea of the physical space and pointed out the illusory nature of the "here" but Newton was a religious fanatic who simply couldn't understand relativity and therefore he missed Galileo's point. Another important point which Newton overlooked by insisting on the physicality of the Cartesian space was the finite speed of light. That the speed of light was finite had been established by Romer and was known to Newton and yet he ignored it despite the profound metaphysical consequences of this fact.

A finite speed of light means that it is utterly impossible for the observer to observe the real world. When we are "here" and observe something which is "there" we are observing something which no longer exists. All of Newtonian physics is based on such observations of the past which means that Newtonian physics models a world which no longer exists. This is the eternalist block to which you refer, PU, the dead universe of a finished past, the cadaver on a slab which Hawking wants fire breathed into as if a corpse might be resurrected.

The universe is not a place and thus it needs no HERE. The universe is an event and thus needs only a NOW.

[Obvious Leo]

the previous state of ‘now’ is consumed as it goes into the construction of the next state of ‘now.

As simple a statement of non-linear determinism as the ToE requires.

[Obvious Leo]

Events come and then they go and then they come….

I take it then that you agree with my description of the universe as a reality MAKER and that the existential nature of reality is that it is a PROCESS. The universe is that which is continuously making itself and this is very much where the speed of light comes into the story because the speed of light is the speed at which this PROCESS occurs at the Planck scale. The speed of light determines the rate of change in a physical system at this scale and this speed is continuously variable because of gravity. Changes take place more quickly in the atoms of your head than they do in the atoms of your feet because the speed of light is faster at your head than it is at your feet. This is quantum gravity.

[Obvious Leo]

PU. I presume you can see how this model offers an extremely simple explanation for the EPR paradox and possibly an even simpler one for gravitational lensing.

In fact its sublime simplicity is such that it simply can't be wrong which is quite interesting. Most of the major theorists in physics over the past half century have offered the view that this should be the defining characteristic of a true unification model. Most agree that it should be immediately recognisable as such.

In my own vernacular this means it should be bloody obvious.

[PoeticUniverse]

So perhaps someone could mathematically derive the necessarily finite light speed limit that's due to the quantized Planck time scale.

[PoeticUniverse]

PU. I presume you can see how this model offers an extremely simple explanation for the EPR paradox and possibly an even simpler one for gravitational lensing.

In our admittedly more explicate view, light bending from gravity would be because light is energy and the equivalence principle equates energy to mass. Also, in Newton's explicate universe, light bends, too, but in Einstein's explicate universe it bends twice as much.

The nonlocality of two explicate entangled particle events could mean that the supposed two particles are really as one in a lower, implicated order.

[Obvious Leo]

So perhaps someone could mathematically derive the necessarily finite light speed limit that's due to the quantized Planck time scale.

Do you mean at the BB, inside the universe-sized black hole? I'm not sure that this would be calculable but in terms of our years my guess is that it would take quite some time for all its information to leak out. ( Not that this statement has any meaning in an absolute sense).

[PoeticUniverse]

In my own vernacular this means it should be bloody obvious.

And "bloody obvious" can make for bloody battles for the ones that resist learning, even as scientists/philosophers, which is the stubborn part of whatever will be will be, although less so than 'God' believers, so at least our knowledge such determinism can relieve agitation or even prevent it before it can arrive.

Long live Time; the Space King is dead.

[PoeticUniverse]

So perhaps someone could mathematically derive the necessarily finite light speed limit that's due to the quantized Planck time scale.

Do you mean at the BB, inside the universe-sized black hole? I'm not sure that this would be calculable but in terms of our years my guess is that it would take quite some time for all its information to leak out. ( Not that this statement has any meaning in an absolute sense).

No, just proposing, as you do, that the finite and top speed of light has something to so with there being time quanta, and so it could be useful to try to calculate it.

[PoeticUniverse]

For raw-thought,

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

[Obvious Leo]

The nonlocality of two explicate entangled particle events could mean that the supposed two particles are really as one in a lower, implicated order.

With a subtle little twist of nuance. Imagine the photon striking the semi-silvered mirror and splitting into two identical daughter photons. Only at the precise quantised Planck instant of this split can the two daughter photons be said to be exactly co-located in time, or superposed. Thereafter their trajectories into the future must necessarily be at slightly different speeds because of gravity. Thus Einstein's spooky action at a distance is literally instantaneous for only a single Planck interval and only almost instantaneous thereafter, assuming a benign gravitational environment. This would appear to the observer as faster-than-light information transmission but in fact it is nothing of the kind.

Also, in Newton's explicate universe, light bends, too, but in Einstein's explicate universe it bends twice as much.

In fact the light being bent by an intervening galaxy in gravitational lensing is no different from the bent stick in the water trick we learnt in high school to understand refraction. Light does NOT move at a constant speed and the observer observes this inconstancy as bent light.

[Dubious]

Long live Time; the Space King is dead.

Congrats! It's about time something was settled!

[Obvious Leo]

Long live Time; the Space King is dead.

Inevitably this is what the unification model for physics boils down to. Einstein was a genius without question because he could see that time and space were mutually exclusive in the ding an sich but he nailed his colours to the wrong mast. Minkwoski modelled time as relative to the Cartesian space but all this does is model the holographic world of the observer which exists no longer. In the ontological underpinning of this epistemic world it is in fact space which is relative to time because the space lies in the observer's past, along with the events which occurred in it.

When Einstein said "Bullshit, the moon is still there whether somebody is watching it or not" he was right, even though QM says otherwise. The moon is always still "there" whether somebody is watching it or not but the space between the observer and the moon is not. The space between the observer and the moon only exists when somebody is actually looking at the moon because the space exists solely in the consciousness of the observer.

Einstein was also right about something else of profound importance. He spent 40 years of his life looking for a unification model and not long before he died he expressed his certainty that all along he had been using the wrong mathematical tools in his quest. Indeed he was and this was something Henri Poincare, the true father of relativity, had pointed out 50 years earlier when he utterly rejected Minkowski's 4D manifold. Poincare had really only just got started on the three-body problem when the grim reaper snatched him away when he was at the peak of his powers. This was truly one of the greatest tragedies in the history of science because Poincare understood the true nature of determinism and the role of gravity in it. His non-linear mathematics gradually evolved into an entirely new way of modelling every science except physics and is nowadays known as fractal geometry. Self-causal physical systems can ONLY be modelled in this way.

[Obvious Leo]

Unfortunately the physicists who are the products of modern academia learn nothing of the history of their science. Most know nothing of how addled Newton's mind was by religious mysticism and the occult, to say nothing of his loyalty to the strictures of the holy Roman Inquisition. Most know nothing of the bitterness of the clash of ideas between Leibniz and Newton about the physicality of the Cartesian space, which in Newton's mind had already been specified by Aquinas. Most don't understand that Newton contradicted almost every major thinker in the history of science by adopting this doctrinal position mandated by his religious beliefs and that this position contradicted Galileo, Alhazen and Omar as well as Leibniz. These were unquestionably the most enlightened mathematical philosophers in the business prior to Newton and he simply rejected them on the grounds of his faith. These facts are not well known. Most physicists don't realise that the "Newton's bucket" proof of the physical space was logically flawed and comprehensively refuted by Ernst Mach and others. The physical space was also empirically disproven by Michelson and Morley in a seminal experiment which was completely misinterpreted for ideological reasons.

However what most physicists really should and don't appreciate is that Einstein knew perfectly well that spacetime was bullshit, even though he was credited with inventing it. He knew that the dice-playing god and spooky action at a distance of the EPR paradox were his own fault because they are mandated by SR. He was harder on himself than he needed to be because the true blame lay with Minkowski, the inventor of the frozen block who Albert never liked or trusted. This is where the pathos of the story lies because Einstein was a crappy mathematician. Albert was just an ideas man who always needed someone else to do his his sums for him and this was true for all of his work in science. Once the logical positivists took over physics Einstein was done for. While he spent the last 40 years of his life trying to figure out where he'd gone wrong the rest of the priesthood just wrote him off as a quaint and eccentric old has-been. The ontology of the equations became the canonical orthodoxy and physics has never made a lick of sense ever since.

The history of 20th century physics will be much written about in future years and many of its leading characters are going to look pretty fucking ridiculous.