Is Christianity compatible with Determinism?

[Obvious Leo]

Obvious Leo wrote:
We know from GR that time passes more quickly between galaxies than it does within them and this not only accounts for the redshift but ALSO accounts for the fact that more distant galaxies appear to be accelerating away from the observer. So much for dark energy. The same simple FACT that time passes more quickly between galaxies than within them is also a complete and adequate explanation for gravitational lensing. So much for "curved space".


You mean the curved space on which GR is predicated and which you cite in support of your initial premise?

This is a disingenuous rebuttal and unworthy of you, uwot. I always use the quotation marks "" when referring to a "curved" space to illustrate the point that this is NOT a physical statement but merely a mathematical metaphor for the fact that time passes at an inconstant speed, as mandated by gravity. This is a perfectly legitimate and non-contradictory way of interpreting the evidence supporting GR without the need to invoke any spooky-action-at-a-distance, and exactly the same explanation can be applied to the so-called "expanding" space suggested by the galactic redshift. To say that space can "expand" and "contract" and "bend" and "twist" and "curve" is not in fact to make a physical statement at all but merely to make a mathematical statement about the relationship between gravity and the speed at which time passes.

Obvious Leo wrote:
And after it has all turned to dust the thinking philosopher turns to Anaximander. The dust re-accretes under the influence of gravity and forms itself into yet more complex structures.


Anaximander's apeiron was a plenum, sounds more like Democritus. Anyway, nah. What happens is that every time a star goes nova, it fuses lighter elements into heavier ones, which could be construed as more complex structures, but a lot of the interesting chemistry is dependent on lighter elements. Heavy elements are great if a universe of hammers and fishing weights is what you're after, but since all the hydrogen will have been fused into iron and lead, there won't be any water to fish.

Once again you ignore galactic motion and treat the galaxies as closed systems, or "island universes", as they were once supposed to be.

Obvious Leo wrote:
Chemistry has come a long way in 13.8 billion years via exactly this mechanism and you and I are the living proof.

Make the most of it, chemistry that results in life, at least as we know it, has a limited shelf life. Why do you cite 13.8 billion years? If you attribute the red shift to gravity, how big do you think the universe was, and how big do you think it is now?

I don't think of the universe in terms of size because I don't define it as a place. In process philosophy the universe is defined as an event, which brings us back to the nature of determinism from whence this digression proceeded. It has been known since Newton that the motion of every single entity in the universe is causally determined by the motion of every other,and NOT by any such thing as a "physical law". Kindly address your remarks to this unassailable proposition because it applies to the motions of planets. stars and galaxies on the cosmological scale as well as to electrons, quarks and bosons on the subatomic scale. It is for this reason and this reason alone that such subatomic processes can only be modelled probabilistically and NOT because these processes are indeterminate. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a statement about relativistic gravitational motion because the motions of subatomic particles are continuously being determined by EACH OTHER and NOT by some over-arching transcendent suite of laws whose origins lie external to the universe itself.

If you're seriously trying to suggest that the behaviour of subatomic particles is being determined by laws which pre-existed the existence of the particles themselves then you're making IC's Platonist argument better than he's making it for himself but your argument still makes exactly the same amount of sense as his does. NONE.

[uwot]

You missed a bit:

...if colour shift is not due to Doppler, what makes you think Andromeda is coming towards us?

[Obvious Leo]

You missed a bit:

...if colour shift is not due to Doppler, what makes you think Andromeda is coming towards us?

I didn't say that colour shift wasn't due to Doppler. What I'm saying is that the Doppler shift isn't caused by the propagation of light through space but purely by the propagation of light through TIME. This interpretation of the evidence contradicts none of the known facts but it defines the cosmos as a vastly simpler entity than does the spacetime narrative, which conflates the physical with the non-physical by representing time as a spatial dimension, which it is transparently NOT. To stay on topic. I define the universe as a self-determining system rather than a law-determined system because this is exactly what relativistic gravitational motion means. It simply means that there are NO LAWS which govern the behaviour of matter and energy in the universe beyond the meta-law of cause and effect and that this meta-law is scale invariant. It holds just as true on the subatomic scale as it does on the galactic scale and on every scale in between. At any given point in time the universe is simply the way it is because that's the way it has caused itself to be and there is simply no other organising principle required to account for the continuous and inexorable decrease in entropy from the big bang to the present. Complexity from chaos is a completely uncontroversial metaphysical first principle which manifests itself absolutely EVERYWHERE in nature, a truth which dates back to the pre-Socratics and beyond. Heraclitus was of the view that such a universe could never be modelled scientifically and until very recently he was right. However the topological space in which such a principle can be modelled mathematically is now known to every science except physics. A self-determining reality can only be modelled in a fractal dimension, which is exactly what time is, and events in a fractal dimension can only be modelled with the tools of fractal geometry, NOT with the tools of Euclidean geometry which Newton used to model events in a Cartesian space. Physics is attempting to linearise the non-linear, which is putting the cart before the horse by mapping an observation of reality as if it were reality itself. The silly buggers are looking at the universe BACKWARDS.

[uwot]

I didn't say that colour shift wasn't due to Doppler. What I'm saying is that the Doppler shift isn't caused by the propagation of light through space but purely by the propagation of light through TIME.

That's not Doppler. Doppler is simply the change in frequency of waves due to the relative velocity of the source and the receiver. Back to the point: what makes you think Andromeda is heading this way?

[Obvious Leo]

That's not Doppler. Doppler is simply the change in frequency of waves due to the relative velocity of the source and the receiver.

I know this well enough, thank you, and am simply pointing out that this effect is the same whether the waves are being propagated through space or through time. If you want to dispute this then knock yourself out.

what makes you think Andromeda is heading this way?

I didn't say Andromeda was heading this way because there's no such thing as "this" way or "that" way. I said that Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course with each due to their relative gravitational motions and the reason why I say this is that the light from Andromeda is blueshifted relative to us. This fact is well known to science but once again if you want to dispute it then knock yourself out.

[uwot]

I said that Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course with each due to their relative gravitational motions and the reason why I say this is that the light from Andromeda is blueshifted relative to us. This fact is well known to science but once again if you want to dispute it then knock yourself out.

My point is that you are being selective with your interpretation. On the one hand you agree that the blue shift of Andromeda is a Doppler effect, but the red shift of distant galaxies isn't.

[Obvious Leo]

I said that Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course with each due to their relative gravitational motions and the reason why I say this is that the light from Andromeda is blueshifted relative to us. This fact is well known to science but once again if you want to dispute it then knock yourself out.

My point is that you are being selective with your interpretation. On the one hand you agree that the blue shift of Andromeda is a Doppler effect, but the red shift of distant galaxies isn't.

No I'm not, and if I seem to have implied this then you've either misunderstood me or I haven't made my point clearly enough. Both redshift and blueshift can be explained in terms of the Doppler effect and it's not me that's being logically inconsistent about this but the physicists. If the redshift is due to an "expanding space", as they claim, then the blueshift must be due to a "contracting space", which they don't claim. Whilst it's perfectly OK to say that the space between Andromeda and the Milky way is contracting we need to bear in mind that this is not a physical statement. When we say this all we're actually saying is that these galaxies are moving towards each other.

When you walk to your front door do you attach a physical meaning to the fact that the space between you and the door is contracting? When you watch a car driving away from you on the road do you say that the space between you and the retreating car is expanding? When a comet is travelling through its highly eccentric orbit around the sun does it spend half its life travelling through an expanding space and the other half through a contracting one?

The more we overthink these things the more obscure the bloody obvious becomes. Leibniz was right and Newton was wrong. The space we observe is a purely relational construct which applies only to the way in which physical entities MOVE and the only place they're moving to is into their own future. Just like you and me, cobber. The only place we're moving to is into our own future and once we stop doing it the party's over.

The journey of existence is a journey through time.

[uwot]

If the redshift is due to an "expanding space", as they claim, then the blueshift must be due to a "contracting space", which they don't claim. Whilst it's perfectly OK to say that the space between Andromeda and the Milky way is contracting we need to bear in mind that this is not a physical statement. When we say this all we're actually saying is that these galaxies are moving towards each other.

I agree, but why is red shift not evidence that galaxies are moving apart?

[Obvious Leo]

I agree, but why is red shift not evidence that galaxies are moving apart?

It is, but you should be more careful with the tenses of your verbs. If we observe a redshift between a distant galaxy and our own then all we can meaningfully say is that the distant galaxy and our own were moving apart from each at the time when the light from the distant galaxy commenced its journey towards us. From this conclusion we may not then extrapolate the further conclusion that they are still doing so now, even though many of them very well might be. We simply don't know how galaxies and clusters of galaxies and clusters of clusters of galaxies etc move relative to each other. This is quite literally unknowable and will always remain unknowable because these relativistic motions are self-determining. However what we do know is that over the long haul gravity is always attractive so at some point in the far distant future Humpty Dumpty will eventually put himself back together again. So the heat death is bullshit, in other words, but the main source of the confusion lies in the conflation of space with time. If the Cartesian space is stripped of its ontological status and becomes merely a mathematical co-ordinate system, as Leibniz insisted all along, then this confusion simply evaporates because the space we observe is merely an observer effect. The journey of the galaxies is through time alone, just as the journey of all matter and energy in the cosmos is. When you walk to your front door you are moving closer to it in time. When a car moves away from you on the highway it is moving further away in time. It couldn't possibly be any simpler.

[uwot]

It is, but you should be more careful with the tenses of your verbs.

Fair enough. So all we know is that when the light left Andromeda, it was moving towards us.

However what we do know is that over the long haul gravity is always attractive so at some point in the far distant future Humpty Dumpty will eventually put himself back together again.

Gravity is an attractive force by definition. What we don't know is whether there are other forces that overcome it. My model of a relativistic aether implies there is. Since this is consistent with mainstream interpretations of red shift, I see no reason to change my mind.

If the Cartesian space is stripped of its ontological status and becomes merely a mathematical co-ordinate system, as Leibniz insisted all along...

And I completely endorse.

...then this confusion simply evaporates because the space we observe is merely an observer effect.

What we observe is that Andromeda and the Milky Way are not in the same place, although, as you say, that looks like that will change.

When a car moves away from you on the highway it is moving further away in time. It couldn't possibly be any simpler.

Personally I find the idea that the car is moving further up the highway than me much simpler.

[Obvious Leo]

Obvious Leo wrote:
It is, but you should be more careful with the tenses of your verbs.


Fair enough. So all we know is that when the light left Andromeda, it was moving towards us.

Yes. But given what little is known about relativistic gravitational motion it remains a more than reasonable assumption that it it is still doing so and that these galaxies are indeed on a collision course. There is ample evidence that galaxies have been both merging with each other and moving away from each other ever since they first began to form, just as stars within galaxies do. However such an assumption becomes far less reasonable in the case of a galaxy lying 10 billion years away from us. A lot of things can happen in 10 billion years and just because it was moving away from us in the very early universe this doesn't mean it is still moving away from us now. Because relativistic gravitational motion is chaotically determined this is quite literally unknowable. On a more local scale the same applies to stars within our galaxy. Although our instrumentation is not sensitive enough to measure this some of these stars will be moving towards our sun and some away from it, but even if this were measurable we would still only be making a statement about how these stars were moving relative to each other at some finite time in the past and from this information we could extrapolate no conclusions about what's going on now. This is even true within the solar system itself, although in the case of our own planets we can certainly make statements about their relativistic motions which hold true to a high order of probability. Nevertheless a high order of probability is not a certainty. Just because we can say where Pluto was X hours ago relative to where Jupiter was Y hours ago this doesn't mean we can say precisely where these planets are relative to each other right NOW. This is a simple physical FACT, and as you should be able to see this is nothing more than the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle written on the cosmological scale.

To get back on topic. The HUP is simply a statement about the intrinsic nature of chaotic determinism, which is why the Schrodinger wave function only holds precisely true for the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom is a two-body system where the motions of the electron and its nucleus only need to be specified relative to each other but once we chuck more electrons into the mix then all bets are off because then the motion of one these bodies relative to another holds true for these two bodies only and not for all the other moving bodies in the system. Therefore these multiple relative motions can only be modelled probabilistically to a finite order of certainty. This simple truth of gravity was first recognised by Newton himself and he named it the 3-body problem. Nowadays it's known as the n-body problem where n is any finite number greater than 2 and this was the very problem which Henri Poincare was working on when Einstein published SR, the theoretical basis of QM. Poincare was the true father of modern relativity theory and he rejected Minkowski's modelling immediately on the grounds that it completely ignores the n-body problem, which in turn means that QM ignores it. It is a matter of no small irony that the first bloke to figure out that the universe is a non-Newtonian entity was Isaac Newton himself but that's exactly what the n-body problem means. It means that the universe is SELF-CAUSAL and that therefore the future motions of every physical entity within it is quite literally unknowable beyond a finite order of probability and that this fundamental truth of nature is scale invariant.

This is EXACTLY what one would expect to conclude if time is a fractal dimension.

Gravity is an attractive force by definition. What we don't know is whether there are other forces that overcome it. My model of a relativistic aether implies there is. Since this is consistent with mainstream interpretations of red shift, I see no reason to change my mind.

Bear with me. You have a flexible enough mind to follow a logical argument and I've always been scrupulous about never contradicting ANY of the empirical evidence. All I'm doing is interpreting this evidence within a different paradigm which accords more precisely with millennia of philosophy and defines a universe which makes sense. However I'll remind you that this alternative paradigm does indeed meet the gold standard for scientific theories because it is easily falsifiable.

Obvious Leo wrote:
If the Cartesian space is stripped of its ontological status and becomes merely a mathematical co-ordinate system, as Leibniz insisted all along...


And I completely endorse.

This is why my mind lit up when we first started discussing this, uwot. This is the central plank of my entire philosophy and I know perfectly well that I can never be understood by somebody who doesn't get this. The biggest problem I encounter in getting people to follow my reasoning is their persistent reluctance to take me literally. When I say that space does not physically exist this is exactly what I mean. I start to feel a bit like John Cleese in the dead parrot sketch screaming at the pet-shop owner. THERE IS NO SUCH FUCKING THING AS SPACE. Space is a convenient heuristic created in the consciousness of the observer and nothing else whatsoever. Once this is accepted then the fog will lift from physics as if by magic because ALL of the "quantum weirdness" simply vanishes. The twins paradox and the grandfather paradox disappear. The black hole firewall is shown to be a myth. Entanglement becomes a perfectly routine feature of GR because it's just an alternative expression of the so-called "wormhole" and there's nothing in the least bit mysterious about either. The Big Bang gets to have a perfectly logical origin. AND the list goes on.

Accepting that Leibniz was right and Newton was wrong about the ontological status of the Cartesian space reaps a handsome dividend in human reason, but the real irony is that this truth was well known to pre-Socratic philosophy 2500 years ago, as indeed it was to the Hindus, the Chinese and the great philosopher/mathematicians of early Islam. I may yet be burnt at the stake for heresy but I'm certainly not claiming to be proposing something original. All I'm trying to is follow the lead of the Blue's Brothers and put the band back together. Philosophy and science should never have been torn asunder because one is useless without the other. The nature of the universe and the nature of existence and the nature of Being are all one and the same thing. Reality is an EVENT and everything that reality contains is a part of this event.

Obvious Leo wrote:
When a car moves away from you on the highway it is moving further away in time. It couldn't possibly be any simpler.

Personally I find the idea that the car is moving further up the highway than me much simpler.

Me too. The car is moving away in space and in time simultaneously but it is the time interval which is expanding and not the spatial distance. The speed of light is finite so what we're actually observing is the steadily increasing amount of time it takes for the light from the retreating car to reach us. The great man himself will have the last word because even the other great man, Immanuel Kant, couldn't have said it better.

"Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we exist"....Albert Einstein.

[uwot]

Bear with me. You have a flexible enough mind to follow a logical argument and I've always been scrupulous about never contradicting ANY of the empirical evidence.

I have made the point, several times, that any interpretation that is consitent with the evidence could be true. As you acknowledge, the fact is that you interpret the evidence differently to me and as it happens, a good number of professional cosmologists. Any consistent interpretation is underdetermined (not to be confused with undetermined), in my view. It's the problem of induction; no amount of confirmation can ever prove that all future empirical evidence will remain consistent. That is true of anything I think, of any mathematical model, metaphysical belief and it is true of you too.

However I'll remind you that this alternative paradigm does indeed meet the gold standard for scientific theories because it is easily falsifiable.

You need to remind me of the details of the experiment that might do this.

The car is moving away in space and in time simultaneously but it is the time interval which is expanding and not the spatial distance. The speed of light is finite so what we're actually observing is the steadily increasing amount of time it takes for the light from the retreating car to reach us.

Well, yes. A perfectly reasonable explanation for this is that the car is further away, it doesn't require that any substantial 'space' has expanded.

"Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we exist"....Albert Einstein.

I have never challenged this, so it doesn't need repeating, but as you keep saying it, it would be useful to cite the source (yeah, I know it's Einstein, but what was the context?)

[Obvious Leo]

I have made the point, several times, that any interpretation that is consitent with the evidence could be true. As you acknowledge, the fact is that you interpret the evidence differently to me and as it happens, a good number of professional cosmologists. Any consistent interpretation is underdetermined (not to be confused with undetermined), in my view. It's the problem of induction; no amount of confirmation can ever prove that all future empirical evidence will remain consistent. That is true of anything I think, of any mathematical model, metaphysical belief and it is true of you too.

I don't dispute this and never have. What I'm saying is that empirical evidence is merely raw data and that therefore evidence cannot simply explain itself. It must always be explained within the framework of a pre-defined narrative which must be specified in advance by the observer of it. This is the inherently tautologous nature of physics which kept the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology alive for 1400 years. Any new data could always be appended to the geocentric paradigm simply by the ingenious use of mathematics. What I'm saying is that physics has been doing EXACTLY the same thing with its spacetime paradigm for over a century and thereby driven itself further and further into a conceptual cul-de-sac. This is a straightforward matter of confirmation bias which is intrinsic to the methodology of physics itself as pointed out by the great man:

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

Planck and Heisenberg were also aware of this inherent shortcoming in the physics method, as indeed was Bohr, but these cautions have largely gone ignored for at least the past half century. However any scientific theory is only as good as the questions asked of it, so the spacetime paradigm can only be falsified by an alternative paradigm which answers a specific question differently from that predicted by current theory. As Planck rather quaintly put it a scientific theory can never die a natural death but must be assassinated in a coup d'etat. This is what my model can do because it yields an easily testable prediction which would unambiguously falsify SR, and without SR the entire spacetime story is down the toilet.

You need to remind me of the details of the experiment that might do this.

I won't do it without the necessary argument to explain how the prediction was arrived at and such a detailed explanation lies beyond the scope of a forum such as this. However I have detailed it in my synopsis, where it appears very near the end of the essay.

https://austintorney.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-de-jong/

I'm currently in the process of doing a complete rewrite of this essay but the experiment itself will be largely unchanged in it.

Obvious Leo wrote:
The car is moving away in space and in time simultaneously but it is the time interval which is expanding and not the spatial distance. The speed of light is finite so what we're actually observing is the steadily increasing amount of time it takes for the light from the retreating car to reach us.


Well, yes. A perfectly reasonable explanation for this is that the car is further away, it doesn't require that any substantial 'space' has expanded.

The point I stress over and over again is that an observation is an act of cognition. As the car retreats from you the only thing you're directly observing are quanta of light being projected from the car onto your retina and after that it's entirely up to your mind to attach a meaning to these informational "bits" by translating them into a comprehensible representation of your external world. The light quanta are the noumenon and the way you interpret this data is the phenomenon and there simply is no preferred way in which you should be doing this. The car is only a car because that's the way you've learned to interpret this particular suite of data within your cognitive MAP. The dog standing beside you watching the retreating car will no doubt have a different story.

It goes without saying that light quanta always travel at the speed of light so the time taken for the light quanta to reach your senses as the car is retreating from you is steadily increasing. The car is retreating into your own past and it is this steadily increasing temporal separation between you and the retreating car which your consciousness is interpreting as a spatial distance but your mind is playing tricks with you, cobber, and this is well known to neuroscience. Your 3 dimensional map of the world is an artefact of your own creation and you're not even very good at creating such a map compared with many other animals. We don't observe distances at all but in fact we CALCULATE them and we do so in a very inconsistent and rough and ready manner. What our consciousness is actually doing is spatialising time by calculating a spatial extension to what is a purely temporal phenomenon. Do you "observe" a galaxy a billion years away or are you calculating how far in your past it lies? This is the most important question ever asked in applied metaphysics and modern physics has got the answer WRONG. It is modelling the cognitive map of the observer instead of the ding an sich and that is the complete reason why the current models of physics make no sense. They mistake the map for the territory.

I have never challenged this, so it doesn't need repeating, but as you keep saying it, it would be useful to cite the source (yeah, I know it's Einstein, but what was the context?)

I never make notes and I can't remember. Einstein had a very long career in science and he was never reticent about offering a running commentary on whatever it was he was thinking at the time. Consequently he often said things which then appear to contradict other things which he had said either earlier or later. However to understand the works of a man we need to understand the mind of the man and a consistent theme of doubt runs through all of his writings. Quantum mechanics utterly floored him and yet he was one of the pioneers of its early development as a theory. Albert was a man of instinct and he just KNEW that this model could not possibly be representing the real universe, a conviction which remained unshakable until the day he died. He also KNEW deep within himself that the reason QM made no sense lay in the Minkowski modelling of SR, a mathematical representation which he eventually accepted, only reluctantly because he could never quite put his finger on the problem with it.

This need never have happened. He could have taken two steps back to Michelson and Morley and looked to this groundbreaking experiment for his answer. That the speed of light should be a constant irrespective of the relative motions of the observer and his observation is a logical impossibility in the Cartesian space and yet this is what Michelson and Morley conclusively demonstrated. The philosophers were asleep at the wheel, uwot, because the Law of Parsimony should have been applied to this finding. Instead of accepting a logical impossibility as a physical fact they should have concluded that the Cartesian space is purely a mathematical construct and not a physical one, just as Leibniz insisted. If light travels through time alone then the observer will ALWAYS perceive it to be a constant because the observer can never observe light in the act of actually moving. He can only observe light after it's already moved, by which time its speed is a constant zero. Incidentally this is much closer to the way in which Maxwell originally defined the speed of light. Rather than seeing this speed in terms of a spatial extension he saw it as what he called a "dimensional constant". Maxwell wasn't quite a Heraclitean but with a bit of philosophy under his belt he easily might have been.

[uwot]

I'm not sure how fine tuned your sense of irony is, Leo, but you say this:

What I'm saying is that empirical evidence is merely raw data and that therefore evidence cannot simply explain itself. It must always be explained within the framework of a pre-defined narrative which must be specified in advance by the observer of it.

Quote this:
"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe".....Albert Einstein
And when I ask this:

You need to remind me of the details of the experiment that might do this.

You reply thus:

I won't do it without the necessary argument to explain how the prediction was arrived at and such a detailed explanation lies beyond the scope of a forum such as this.

However I have detailed it in my synopsis, where it appears very near the end of the essay.

It's really none of my business how others choose to interpret the data, but if data can only be supplied with a given context, it isn't raw data.
Anyway, you lost me here:

This time we send a radio signal to A, which re-routes the signal to B, before B sends the return signal to G. We can call this the signal trajectory GABG.

[Obvious Leo]

if data can only be supplied with a given context, it isn't raw data.

I didn't say that. I said that the data can only be interpreted within a given context. Without a theory the data has no meaning.

Anyway, you lost me here:

In Philosophy of the bloody obvious, Leo wrote:
This time we send a radio signal to A, which r

G was the closest point of co-location as the cars passed each other. A and B are equidistant from G so the return signal GAG or GBG will be the same. However according to SR the signal GABG should take twice as long as either GAG or GBG because the distance AB is twice the distance AG or BG. In the grav/time model the GABG signal will take considerably less time than that predicted by SR because the cars are entangled. In other words the information will appear to be transferred between A and B at superluminal speed. ( It isn't, by the way, because the "space" between A and B is illusory)