Obvious Leo wrote:My dog is the same dog today as she was yesterday not because she is physically composed in the same way because she simply isn't.
These kinds of conversations happen because reality is inherently paradoxical, where multiple realities coexist depending on scale, be it quantum, molecular, insectoid, mammalian, planetary, galactic ad infinitum. These "dimensions" intersect and overlap in all sorts of ways and I you rightly point out that the reality we observe and experience is only the reality we see - there are numerous possible interpretations of any given event.
Still, cosmic bodies have had a long history of interacting gravitationally and sometimes smashing each other into smithereens, and this was happening long before they had an audience. The audience doesn't make events, they just provide an interpretation.
The poetry of reality dissolving into the past is attractive, but the dissolution is not performed uniformly and that results in lumpiness. The lumps are not random but they have evolved to specific types of forms, matter shaped by memes, by information.
Still, we are largely on the same page in that we acknowledge the likelihood of multiple universe production being at the heart of seemingly fortuitous biocentrism - a natural rather than supernatural answer. Either way, we all figure that multiple universes over countless iterations can form entities like us.
No physicist would argue that the distance to my home was not x kms, with x describing either the distance as calculated by GPS or the arc of the Earth's surface between two points - take your pick. Given that such a small distance wouldn't require reference to light speed, physicists would not refer to that distance in terms of time because they wouldn't know my speed of travel.
Obvious Leo wrote:True. At such a scale distances are calculated for convenience as distances but a metre is nevertheless officially defined as a time interval on a light clock. All the models of physics are regarded as effective models only and therefore approximations only. I'm often critical of the procedural flaws in academic physics but not usually of the physicists who wield the tools. In general they know perfectly well that the models they work with are only predictive tools which have no explanatory authority, so what pisses me off is that they seldom bother to make this clear to the general lay public, many of whom then see science as a belief system no different from any other.
We don't need metres to measure - the fundamental of distance remains. We could find a long stick and decide that was a unit of measure. So there'd be x thousand sticks between me and home that is pure distance, no time required. By contrast, there might be y million sticks between you and the Moon - but y would not be a constant due to the Moon's orbit and that measure would be be dependent on time.
You can fairly say that spatial dimensions are not what we think they are due to their relativistic nature, but you can't say that they are not reality. I don't see why entities should need be significant or noticeable at all scales in order to be considered real.
Obvious Leo wrote:I think this is simply an issue of semantics and making a distinction between that which is fundamentally real and that which is emergently real. At the Planck scale my dog is just little informational bits being processed at the speed of light. Although this is the ding an sich of the dog it says nothing about her dogginess, which is a property which emerges at a far higher level of informational complexity. However all the interwoven informational hierarchies which constitute the dog cannot be said to be objectively real because as observers we can change them simply by choosing to model the physical insides of the dog differently. The reality of the dog is specified by the observer of it.
What is "emergently real" must in some way be fundamentally real in one sense already, or it wouldn't have emerged. Something else or nothing would have emerged. The emergent can only logically reflect and expand on the nature of its source. The term "emergence" is basically a black boxing placeholder concept for "new things pop up and we don't know what all that's about". Just like its entities and objects, reality is developing and becoming more eloquent.
Greta wrote:Space is present at quantum levels, hence electron orbitals. My understanding is it's Planck scale where space is supposedly meaningless.
Obvious Leo wrote:No. Electron orbitals are purely mathematical objects. They are generally defined as a probability function of three different components, these being energy, angular momentum and a particular vector component. In a physics popularisation you might occasionally see a geek say something spatial like an electron is to its nucleus as Pluto is to the sun but this is very bad imagery and a rather foolish thing to do. It actually makes no sense at all to speak of the dynamic relationships between the various sub-atomic particles as spatial distances when in fact what counts is the time interval between one event and the next. This is why the absence of gravity in the SM is such a serious problem because time and gravity are the same thing at the Planck scale.
There are radial distances from the nucleus of an atom at which there is a probability that you will find an electron of a particular state.
These orbitals represent different distances from the nucleus (and the fact that there are particular orbitals rather than an infinite number of them has been of interest). Thus the famous analogy of the baseball and the football stadium, with the outer limits of the stadium imagined as a spherical probability cloud representing the relative scale of the nucleus and one of its orbital's radial distances.
Edits: typos only
