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It from bit in process physics
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Posted by: Tam Hunt
I've been reading with great interest the work of Reginald Cahill and his colleagues, who have developed a potentially paradigm-shifting model of physics known as "process physics." This physics is based explicitly on the process philosophy of Whitehead and others, which is how I came across it.
A major problem I have with both process philosophy and process physics, however, is the notion that "substantialist" ontologies simply got it wrong by focusing on stuff instead of process, and positing matter as ontologically fundamental instead of process. The problem I have comes from a real difficulty in seeing how process or information (it from bit, as Wheeler termed it) can make the ontological leap into substance.
This argument is completely analogous to the materialist's problem of explaining how inert matter produces something that is clearly ontologically dissimilar: experience/mentality/subjectivity. This is of course the mind/body problem.
The generally satisfying solution (to me) for the mind/body problem is panexperientialism, as developed by Griffin, a follower of Whitehead's who has refined Whitehead's process philosophy into what Griffin terms "panexperientialist physicalism."
But process physics and Whitehead's version of process philosophy seem to continue to have a major problem with the ontological transition from process/information to matter, substituting one type of unconvincing ontological leap for another.
I'm pasting below an exchange I recently had with Cahill on this topic and I welcome anyone else's thoughts on this topic.
Prof. Cahill,
Clearly definitions are important here. If you define information as patterns of connectivity, I agree that this is different than my definition of information as the structure of matter or the content of experience.
However, if you are using information in an ontological sense to build a system that explains how reality is constructed I think you may face a serious ontological problem. How can "patterns of connectivity" produce anything solid? Patterns of connectivity are abstractions and require a mind to contain them (as is the case with all abstractions). Minds, to the best of our knowledge, require matter as a substrate.
I'm having the same difficulty with Whitehead's works that posit process as fundamental. Again, process requires some thing as a predicate. Without some thing that is being processed there is no process. Process itself is, again, an abstraction.
Whitehead attempts to skirt this problem by stating:
"[T]he process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation." (Process and Reality, p. 7).
It is not clear from this passage, however, how the solidarity of the world is explained if process is ontologically ultimate instead of matter itself.
Where do the first actual entities, which are the precursor for the next set of actual entities, ad infinitum, come from?
Similarly, it is not clear how information itself can make the leap into matter.
I came across your work, in fact, in trying to find a solution to this problem. From what I understand of your process physics, it seems to support a neutral monist ontology (which makes sense b/c that is what Whitehead's is) by substituting the gebit network structure for Whitehead's "creativity." The network of gebits represents the potential to produce either space or matter - and matter has a number of fundamental properties, including experience, thus supporting the panexperientialism of Whitehead and Griffin.
Are you suggesting, then, that there is an underlying structure to the universe, which is neither space or matter, but is instead "mere" potentiality and that this structure consists of the holonic gebit network and your process physics attempts to describe the rules by which this neutral "stuff" behaves and manifests as either space or matter. Is this a fair description?
If this is the case, it would seem to be more accurate to eliminate the "bit" from bit > gebit > qubit > it because bits are just abstractions and don't have any ontological significance in themselves.
Tam
On Jan 2, 2008 4:33 PM, <cahi0014@flinders.edu.au> wrote:
Hi Tam
Your assumption that information requires a matter substrate is naive. In
particular you don't attempt to account for matter. I use the word
`information' to mean patterns of connectivity, with such connectivity
happening at all levels - i.e. a fractal system - with no bottom level.
Matter is then a particular mode of connectivity - so the proposition is that
matter requires an information substrate - this is the oppsite of your
suggestion. One must not be too mechanical or conventional is thinking about
these issues.
Reg Cahill
Quoting Tam Hunt <tam.hunt@gmail.com>:
> Prof. Cahill,
>
> I am reading with great interest your work on process physics. First, bravo
> for such a comprehensive and revolutionary theoretic construct!
>
> I am, however, having some trouble with your notion of bit > gebit > qubit >
> it in that I just don't see how information as an ontological *thing* can
> lead to matter as an ontological *thing. *It seems clear to me that
> information requires matter as a predicate. In other words, all information
> requires a physical substrate - with the possible exception of qualia, which
> may not be completely correspondent with physical states of the matter
> giving rise to the qualia. In yet another formulation, information can be
> viewed as simply the structure of matter or the contents of experience -
> both requiring matter as a substrate.
>
> My difficulty with your variation of Wheeler's it from bit argument is
> analogous to the similar hard problem of consciousness: how does
> experience/consciousness arise from inert matter? How does one ontological
> category produce another?
>
> Of course, your process physics and its precursor process philosophy -
> particularly in its panexperientialist version as developed by David Ray
> Griffin in Unsnarling the World-Knot and other works - provides a very nice
> solution to the mind-body problem by simply positing experience as a
> fundamental property of all matter. But whereas Griffin/Whitehead assume
> experience as fundamental, they don't take your further step of positing
> information as the basic ontological stuff.
>
> Or am I mis-reading your works?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Tam Hunt
> Santa Barbara, California
Posted by: Jason Cawley
First to be clear, all of this is philosophy and speculative metaphysics at that, rather than physics or any specific basis for it. Different ways of setting up physical theories can appeal to different philosophical views or seem more compatible with one than another - but ultimately, metaphysical ideas are flexible enough to accomodate the operative content of any physical theory, without a given physical theory specifying this or that exact metaphysics. (I am speaking of broad metaphysical positions when I say they are that flexible - e.g. materialism or realism or idealism etc). That is part of what makes them philosophical rather than scientific - not that there is anything wrong with that.
Otherwise put, metaphysical ideas are underspecified by the world. We can come up with multiple different schemes or sets of conceptual relations that can appear adequate to our experience - though typically each such scheme has some murky areas or bits that "stick out" and "worry us". It isn't a deductive matter and isn't going to become one. Sufficient familiarity with the variety of positions that philosophers of all stripes have elaborated over the years, is sufficient to disabuse us of the notion that things "have to be" way X, or that "only my view Y" can possibly be squared with this or that evidence or experience. An uncharitable way to say this is "philosophers say the darnedest things". More charitably, as a varied group they have shown by example that some conceptions are much less necessary than people familiar with only one opinion typically suppose.
Materialists start from matter and think everything real is composed of matter, and anything that appears not to be is an accident or abstraction out of properties of ordered matter. One is immediately led to ask them "what is this matter stuff, anyway?" Well, it is meant to be that which remains unchanged in any underlying transformation - transformation is all supposed to be of arrangements or accidents, the stuff so transformed is a bare "underlying" that is not itself affected. Another word for underlying is "substance" - it is just latin - sub = under, stance = standing or lying. Thus on analysis the concept "matter" is seen to be the privative of the concept "transformed" - any other meaning ascribed to it is instead seen to be predicated equivocally - e.g. if "matter" is implicitly being thought as a specific stable form (say "protons"), the matter-ness is not the proton-hood but a deeper "unchangable", while proton-hood is a specific arrangement or form.
In modern physics we think of that unchanged quantity as the energy not, say, the mass or particular forms of baryonic matter, and regard matter in the sense of mass as convertible into energy of various forms, as a merely formal transformation. As Poincare pointed out over a hundred years ago, there is a certain circularity in the law of conservation of energy once this view is taken. Some physical theory expresses constraints to be satisfied by some integral equation or other; for every such equation there will be some constant of integration, therefore something that is an invariate, and among all these invariates one of them will turn out to be the energy - or we can call one of them the energy and allow it to collect lots of different terms (potential and kinetic and chemical and binding and rest-mass etc). "Something doesn't change" will be true if there is any integral equation in a theory. But theory is remarkably free to relabel things - when it becomes obvious that kinetic energy is not conserved for a body in a potential, we invent the idea of potential energy to keep a newly expanded "energy" constant.
Well, idealists don't start with matter. They do not regard thought-like things as abstractions derived from accidental properties of arranged matter, but regard "matter" as a term and a concept derived from properties of a conceptual scheme for explaining appearances within the life-world. At bottom the world is thought-like to an idealist, and matter is one thought among others, sometimes adequate to some aspects of reality. They would stress that we accept or reject theories based on whether they are adequate to experienced phenomena, and those experienced phenomena are all themselves thought-like.
Merely being an idealist does not commit anyone to an opinion about whether the thought expressed by the term "matter" is a true thought or only a crude approximation in the mind of a bewildered ape. Some theistic idealists might regard it as an entirely true thought and one out of which some deity willed the world, as it is. Some skeptical idealists might regard it as warmed over and readily deconstrucible bit of medieval Aristotle-ry, while conceding its practical and historic usefulness in physics.
But the philosophic spectrum in the matter does not consist of materialists on the one hand and various species of idealist on the other. Formal realists agree with the materialists on an objective reality "out there" and independent of any thought about it, constituting the world, and regard thought as a quite limited and special emergent phenomenon within that objective reality. But they focus on the arrangements that the materialists bypass as too contingent to care about, and regard form as the actual content of everything. Hence the name. They are unimpressed with the leftover residual of "what does not change, ever", regarding it as a nullity without actual content. They see in the materialist's notion of an underlying something-or-other an attempt to say something about instantiation, or a real distinction between possible and actual, which has a purely formal meaning.
Process philosophy types aren't simply formal realists nor are they simply idealists, though I've seen both more common views mixed with it by readers of Whitehead, often enough. Compared to the formal realist, process wants to focus on successions among forms rather than the forms themselves, or in more NKS language on the transformation rules rather than the output. A formal realist sees that as just another form, one with a time dimension in its internal relations or structure, but the process types want to make the notion of time-embedded change fundamental, largely because it eases the task of explaining instantiation or what potential means. They think they are being somewhat more historico-objective than the math-ee abstracted-ness of formalists. At bottom, they want to say the world does not consist of matter (everything else an abstraction) nor of thoughts, nor of formal relations (everything else a potential or actual instance), but of events.
Now, whichever bit one makes the fundament, it is still in some sense the "substance" all the others are talking about. But no, one cannot just pretend that the other schemes "need" one's own preferred scheme and all of its terms in their specific relation in one's own preferred scheme - e.g. that thoughts are "only" accidents of matter, or that forms are "only" abstractions, or that events are always events occurring to material things. All the other schemes have places to put what you are thinking of as "matter", they just don't put it where you do.
The place this whole discussion, which is otherwise pure speculative philosophy with no relation to NKS, touches on NKS matters, is Wolfram's proposed network theory for physics. He specifically wants both ordinary (rather than philosophical term) matter, and space, to be emergent phenomena within the network, and not prior entities the theory is composed of but does not attempt to explain. In this sense the ontology of his model is formalist. I've no doubt idealists could also fit it in easily. As for process types, it is not natively a process theory, but it is pretty easy to translate formal to process or vice versa (state - event - state - event sequences are just "parsed" at a different "pairing", or in a "phase" that is "off by one").
Materalists might want ordinary matter to be a fundament of a theory, but a philosophically flexible one could fit it by just regarding the network as the "real matter" and common matter as a particularly stable, common form arising from it. Which has to be possible for any such theory to work (which is not to say it does!), since the characteristics of ordinary matter are phenomenal, so any theory has to fit them to be acceptable. Otherwise put, no materialist is in any danger of having the stuff his "pigs is pigs" are made of, behave any differently than he is used to.
Philosophy is useful for broadening perspectives by allowing us to consider quite distinct ways of carving up the space of concepts and explaining the world with them. It is not prescriptive, but free and speculative. It does not determine scientific theories, but is interested in them, and occasional provides a view or piece of a scheme that theoretical scientists find useful.
I hope this helps.
Posted by: Lawrence J. Thaden
According to Wolfram what is emergent space?
Posted by: Jason Cawley
http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/section-9.6
Next 3 sections outline his basic idea on that question. FWIW.
Posted by: Lawrence J. Thaden
Very worth while. Thanks, Jason. But that was published 6 years ago.
Any updates?
I was thinking along these lines:
E = mc^2 is commutable. So we collide hadrons (m) and get energy (E) and then seemingly instantaneously a plethora of particles (m).
Certainly it isn’t a one way process. So to explain it completely, both directions must be taken into account. If one takes the position that E is simpler than m and that there is only one direction, what is the basis for that position?
Similarly, with GR, isn’t their commutability? So can we have gravity a variation of space? Don’t we need an explanation that includes all of the elements in the GR formulation?
Hawking’s explanation of black holes comes to mind. A recent photo from NASA of 3C321 blasting a jet of particles a light year long from a black hole makes you ask: what was the cause of these particles? Did gravitons (gravitinos) transformed into energy give rise to such matter? If so, how does Wolfram’s explanation that gravity is a variation of space fit that picture?
It seems to me if matter (particles) is explained in terms of persistent structures, then the entire neural network must also cycle and be a persistent structure.
I know, Jason, too many questions.
So for now only the one question: Any updates since 2002?
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Jason,
Thanks for many interesting responses.
I agree that there is some level of speculation behind philosophy and metaphysics especially. In fact, the first chapter of Process and Reality is a defense of "speculative philosophy."
But I don't agree with you that there is a categorical difference between science and philosophy. In fact, science is in my view a subset of philosophy with much the same underlying rules. Rationality is of course the primary rule.
Metaphysics, or ontology, to use the more precise term, is an attempt to discern underlying reality in terms of its basic forms and structure. Science, and physics, in particular, is an attempt to figure out the rules by which that basic form and structure behave. There is some overlap, of course.
An adequate ontology should satisfactorily explain known phenomena, as good physical theories do. Ontology goes further, however, than physics in that a good ontology will be able to at least give some explanation of all human experience - not just the more narrow physical phenomena that physics examines. This, again, is Whitehead's aim in Process and Reality, which I think is a good start but not entirely adequate.
Wolfram himself discusses the limitations of modern science and mathematics in terms of computational irreducibility and the fact that we may be approaching the limits of what can be known in our system of science and mathematics because we have solved much of the problems that are computationally reducible - and the rest, comprising the vast majority of the universe, are likely computationally irreducible, which means we just have to sit back and observe without being able to make any predictions through modeling and thus shortcutting the natural processes.
Seth Lloyd, in Computing the Universe, makes much the same argument: the universe is a quantum computer computing itself. To accurately model the universe we would have to re-construct the entire universe.
But back to ontology. It is my hope, and the hope of philosophers going back to Thales and before, to develop a system of thought that adequately explains all known phenomena, or at least provides a framework in which all known phenomena could theoretically be explained.
By overturning our established notions of space and time - a domain that belongs with ontology as much as it does with physics - Einstein ushered in a new understanding of the universe.
With Cahill's process physics, we may come to realize, however, that Einstein got it very wrong by rejecting the notion of absolute motion and thus creating his special and general relativity theories. Cahill claims that no experiments have denied the existence of absolute motion and thus there is in fact an established frame of reference for all things in the universe. He posits the gebit nodal network as that frame of reference, which is the ground of being for both space and time - essentially another version of Whitehead's "creativity."
In this ontology, there are no "particles" either of matter or of energy as we currently envision. Instead, we have what may be thought of as 3D pixels at the Planck scale (and possibly lower as Cahill posits the structure continuing down ad infinitum in a fractal form) that are either space or matter, depending on the network connections to that "pixel." This is a very different notion than defined particles traveling through empty space, which is the current physical and ontological model.
And there are many potentially revolutionary implications of this new process physics and its overarching ontology.
However, back to my original question: how could information possibly become matter (or space for that matter)? Cahill argues that matter simply "emerges" from gebits, which emerge from bits. I can grok gebits as the neutral monist stuff of reality, but cannot grok how bits create gebits b/c bits have to have some kind of structure for their existence.
I think instead of Cahill's formulation of bit > gebit > qubit > it, it would be more accurate to establish this ontology: gebit > qubit > it.
Your thoughts?
Posted by: Jason Cawley
There is a categorical difference between science and philosophy. You admit there is a difference if you think one a proper subset of the other. That leaves difference of degree, and categorical difference - just what the word means. Two terms can have the same real intention - then there is only a semantic difference and the meanings coincide - or can differ only as more and less within the same category - then it is a difference of degree. Or, different predicates rightly apply to them - then it is a categorical difference.
Sorry, that was a word quibble, I just dislike seeing "categorical" used to mean "really big and important" instead of its technical meaning.
I think there is an important difference as well a categorical one. Scientific theories are meant to be marked off from one another based on their predictions about observables, or real distinctions in your "how - behave" question. Two theories with the same hypothetical outcomes but different internal terms are not strictly speaking regarded as different. You might say they are equivalence classes over observable predictions. They try, in this sense, to be overspecific or discriminating - the less possibility space a theory is compatible with, the stronger it is.
Philosophical explanation does not have that character. Instead philosophical views are typically underspecific, sometimes to an extreme degree, on purpose, and on principle. This is particularly true of the broadest class, metaphysical views. They are meant to be predicable of whole swaths of possible worlds, deliberately indifferent to their specific content. A materialist doesn't care what you saw, he claims a priori that it was matter or an accident of it, as he intends the term. If a man says "all is thought", he is not reporting the result of a measurement, but outlining an explanatory scheme, one intended to have not specificity but generality.
There is always something a bit forced about explanations that explain too much, but especially when it is unintentional. "You can't find anything incompatible with this explanatory scheme" is considered a boast by an ontologist, but one does not boast of such things in science.
Ontology specifically, in the contemporary as opposed to the original Aristotlean sense (multiple meanings of the term "being"), is simply a doctrine of what sort of entities exist, according to some philosophic view or theory. It need not be consciously stated. What sorts of things have to really exist, for sentences like these to be true? - is the test question that probes the intended ontology of a theory or a set of sentences. Material particulars exist, real generalities exist, mathematical truths exist, formal structure exist, thoughts exist, events exist - may stand as examples. Any of them can be denied and the appearances normally traced to them instead constructed out of some subset of the others, as epiphenoma or illusory or as emergent (but real) properties etc.
The embarassment of ontology is not that we can't find one compatible with our experience but that we can find about a dozen, more if one counts finer distinctions generously. Most of them not only compatible with our experience but with lots of other things we do not experience, occasionally with all possible experience. Many people find one or another more congenial or as you put it, a "convincing", explanation. But being convinced of anything is a remarkably poor test of its truth. Many people are not familiar with any one of these systems in any detail, and most who are familiar with one are familiar with numerically one of them, and typically a few straw man cartoons about one or two rivals. This leaves us all quite free to entertain them speculatively, sometimes to squash pieces of them together eclectically, and sometimes (rarely) to come up with another one.
Each also typically has characteristic problems or places the view is less than perfectly convincing. Empirical facts, experiences, or theoretical views from other areas may also provide some evidence or indication about them. Typically just suggestive evidence though, not dispositive (the views are too broad and flexible for that - a source of historical resilience as views, but something of a failing philosophically speaking).
The annoyance that practical scientists typically have at philosophical discussions cropping up in or adjacent to their disciplines, is usually that those helping that cropping up come about typically care far more about their prior philosophical disputes than about anything properly belonging to said scientists' actual field or its specific content. So instead of discussing control theory in definite terms, say, one gets to discuss general issues of epistemology that have nothing specifically to do with that subject (cf "second order cybernetics") and a lot more to do with historical wrestling with Humean skepticism or subjectivist idealism or what-have-you. It is experienced as a flippant interruption by territorial ego-maniacs.
Philosophy is better than that, done right. Done right includes a proper humility stemming from awareness of multiple views and the lack of dispositive criteria for deciding among them. Everyone can have an opinion about such matters, and it is much better for them to be informed and conscious than the opposite. But nobody is going to settle the magnetic moment of the electron by debating general skeptical subjectivism vs. formal realism vs. whatever the flavor of the week is. Philosophical opinion is not even trying to be discriminating among worlds, so it would be silly to expect the world to parse out exactly which of them can and must be true, to the exclusion of all the others.
So much on the meta question in the early part of your reply. Now to bits specifically.
There are various ways of coding a graph. Simple fact. One way is to make a big list of all nodes and construct a matrix with the same nodes running across the top row and down the first column, as labels, and then marking in each location of the matrix whether the node named by the specific column is connected to the node named by the specific row, or not. Put a 1 if they are connected, put a 0 if they are not. This fully specifies the graph. (If the graph is undirected then A connected to B will imply B connected to A and the matrix will have a symmetry, but the set up is general and will cover a directed graph).
OK. Suppose some graph model specifies a possible world in your theory. That graph can be viewed as (1) a collection of point nodes and segment edges as bare abstract or math-like entities (2) a quasi-material "webbing" object (3) an emergent representation of the 0-1 valued matrix that codes that graph, with that matrix of 0s and 1s being the "real" "underlying" or substance. They encode the same relations, as a matter of mere math. If your theory depends only on those relations, your theory cannot distinguish among these "readings" or senses given to its model-graph. Multiple distinct ontological positions are fully compatible with it. Some will read one of these codings as "real" and the others as results or re-interpretations of that reality, or as abstractions from it. You can juggle the order like balls. The graph is the same, so the theory is the same. The intended explanation may differ, but only "below" that level.
The "bit" idea is that at bottom we are always operating on primitive distinctions, articulated somehow or other. We articulate some structure of distinctions. We can always choose to view that structure as being "at bottom" the information it encodes (keeping in mind that specific encodings are usually "unforced" or have multiple equivalent forms available, with the same operative content or outcome). Or instead we can see the information as just an abstraction culled out of the object we choose to think of "as" the structure "itself". Any choice or opinion in the matter, being below the level we constructed the theory for, cannot affect the specific content or outcome of said theory. (If it did, it would instead be part of the structure we'd have to encode etc).
This was the reason behind Cahill's comment of "naive". I'd say "optional", instead - though since you intended a "must" (to apply to others, not your own view) where there isn't one, really, his comment was fair.
I hope this helps.
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Jason, thanks again for your thoughtful response.
A couple meta-thoughts first.
I'm still not convinced that there's really much distinction between science and ontology. Yes, ontology is by definition more general, but it is more general b/c it is attempting to explain far more phenomena than any particular scientific theory, no matter how well developed.
And ontologies may be tested just as scientific theories can be tested, through either their explanatory power (ex post) or their predictive power (ex ante). A good ontology will satisfactorily explain the range of phenomena it seeks to explain. Yes, "satisfactorily" is inherently subjective, but so is all of reality! Science is on a more firm foundation than ontology and one could argue (as Whitehead does, and he should know considering his mathematical and physics background) that (a good) ontology is on firmer ground than any physical theory.
Where ontologies may be predictive, they start to overlap with physical/scientific theories, the degree of overlap being dependent on the degree of specificity of the prediction at issue.
My personal interest in ontology is a desire to understand reality. As with science, there is a perpetual process of increased understanding, leading (hopefully) to better and better theories. So, yes, there are many extant ontologies, but some are better than others. And, in my years of thinking on this topic, panexperientialism is the best one I've found.
I highly recommend Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot, a tour de force explaining his panexperientialist physicalism as a refinement of Whitehead's process philosophy. He starts by explaining the reasons materialism (of the non-panexperientialist type) and dualism are simply unconvincing when we examine the mind/body problem, requiring violation of "hard core" common sense notions.
But back to its and bits. I still don't think you've gotten to the heart of my question in your response.
My real question is, how could bits be fundamental? Bits as we know them absolutely require a physical substrate. The pixels on my screen as I type reflect the letters I am typing. Those pixels are composed of the molecules of my screen and the letters contain the information I am trying to convey. No matter how deep we go, all information is contained in a physical substrate, with the possible exception of some qualia, which for all we know may not completely correspond with actual physical states (though this is entirely speculative). But even with qualia, we have absolutely no reason to believe that minds, with their qualia, exist independently of matter/brains.
At its most basic level, information is about structure and pattern. But this begs the question: structure and pattern of what?
No matter where we look, information has a physical substrate, so isn't it simply wrongheaded to posit information as the fundamental reality? You acknowledge as much with your acceptance below that information may be rightly viewed as an abstraction from the actual structure. I don't see how it can, at bottom, be anything other than this. And abstractions reside in minds, not in the unknowable ether.
Posted by: Jason Cawley
I do not believe you have understood a single word I've said so far. You are free to try to show you have I suppose, or not to care. Your last, at any rate, shows exactly the same errors and hang ups I've explained at length in the previous.
To see that being on solid ground is not a recommendation, consider my grand metaphysical theory that A goes to A. There is some existent something or other, that undergoes the transformation rule, Identity, or endures unchanged. There, I am on solid ground. My theory is consistent with experience - the universe is still there the next minute, just as I predicted. The problem with it is not its unfoundedness, but its non-specificity - it tells me literally nothing about the actual content of the world. In order to tell me something about the actual content of the world, it has to make a distinction - that things will be this way and not that way. Moreover, if it only makes a distinction from someone else's theory of things ("he thinks everything is thought, but I say everything is matter"), and not within my own, then it may be proposing a conceptual scheme, but it is not making a claim about the actual content of the universe. A claim so broad it fits everything is not "attempting to explain more", it is succeeding in saying less.
Science does make real distinctions about actual contents of the universe. Emphasis on "real" (definition - does not depend in any way on anyone's opinion of the matter).
The materialist says to the idealist, "everything is matter". The idealist says "fine, but to be clear on what you mean by matter I need to know what you think it means, so please point out to me something real that is not matter". "I just told you there isn't anything real that is not matter - only unreal things aren't matter". Sigh. Replace matter with thought and reverse the roles. Sigh. They are making distinctions in their claims about the universe, but they are distinctions from each other, and not within the single universe either of them is positing, taken alone. Therefore, there is no determinate content of the experienced universe that can distinguish between them.
One explanation may be more plausible than another, to this or that person, for these or those reasons. It may handle the problem of mind better or explain how understanding occurs or account for a subjective sense of time better or... But you can't go find the McGuffin that shows the universe is A-like or is instead B-like that will definitively and regardless of anyone's sense of conviction or favorite problem, come down for the one and reject for all time the other.
Everyone familiar with even two consistent philosophic theories knows this. Is as familiar with it as with breathing. Eats the resulting crosstalk for breakfast. Is sick of it. Gives up trying to force everyone else to think of the world his way. They simply don't have to and that is why in fact they do not. No, it isn't because they don't understand all the fine nuances of wonderful consistent theory Foo. It is because consistency is a dime a dozen and settles nothing - objectively. No, this is not a process of progressive approximation to reality, because reality doesn't bump into the schema and force them to move. Well occasionally, quite new phenomena manage to force slight adaptations, or clever argument moves the division lines a bit. But all of them are hardy perennials that can be and are readily patched to accomodate anything that comes down the pike.
This doesn't make such theories pointless, but it does change their point, and clearly distinguish them from actual science. A leading cause of bad science and of wasted intellectual effort is not being clear about this and thinking that a scientific theory can be made more powerful or all encompassing or convincing, by becoming more like one of these schema. It can't. They are among the least powerful intellectual structures in existence. They achieve their resilience by deliberately saying very little, if anything, about the actual content of their own posited world. They are modestly more elaborate versions of A goes to A. Repeating them ad nauseum is then tried, with blockheaded inability to see the existence of alternative schemes, and cartoonish versions of those others knocked down as straw men.
This is exactly what you are doing when you say scheme A is the most convincing you've found, everybody go read it, it is way better than limited straw men B or C. Just hopelessly parochial.
Your "real question" is a perfect example of begging the question, and that is why it isn't a question. First, allow me to point out that you do not in fact believe a process philosophy view. Your last paragraph shows perfectly that you are a materialist nominalist, and are unable even to conceive any other schema. Process philosophy holds that the fundamental constituents of existence are not material substrates (a somewhat redundant expression incidentally), but events.
To a process philosopher, material substrates are abstractions, inferences, and posited entities set between actual (stem concept "act", event-in-history, transpiring) events. According to a process philosopher, no one has ever encountered a material substrate except in their dreams, loosely speaking. Men instead encounter events and then some of them posit the existence of stable entities as terms between them, and then imagine that the stability is seperable and that imagined seperated stability they call "matter" or "substance" or "substrate".
"No matter how deep we go" - and why should going deep make a difference? Why should reality be at any bottom? If I go deep enough, all that is left is the bare A goes to A persistence-concept, but content has thereby evaporated. "all information is contained in a physical substrate" - assuming the conclusion, aka begging the question. All physical substrates inferences occur as thoughts in your head (or maybe mine, or someone else's). All those thoughts are events in history. Every determinate content of those thoughts or that information, is a formal structure, in principle separable from it and existing off in some mathematical realm whether you think it or not, allowing others to come along and think it too. Every such formal structure can be regarded as an equivalence class of encodings of similar information. Each of these positions has fully elaborated versions claiming the single stated term is fundamental and all the others are illusions stemming from their chosen fundamental term. Isn't begging the question fun?
When you can't think of qualia as anything but accidents of material substrates, you are enacting the definition of nominalism.
Materialist nominalism can be elaborated into a consistent philosophical position, though it has definite problems in some areas - notably mathematical truth, but more acutely explaining accurate understanding as an historical happening and distinguishing it from other neighboring concepts. This led to a classic aporia in Aristotle's De Anima as he tried to explain accurate thought about eternals e.g. mathematical truths, without recourse to Platonic ideas, and slipped into idealism to deal with it. It has been revisited n times since, remains a fundamental chestnut of modern ontology, etc.
But no, materialist nominalism is not remotely a requirement of rational thought. It is one purely voluntary, unforced scheme for explaining some aspects of truth.
Being unable to conceive the alternatives to a proposition is not a recipe for doing good philosophical work.
Cahill's statement to you was entirely fair.
When someone has learned a consistent philosophical scheme for the first time, they are usually quite impressed with its merits, and think they are unique, special, unprecedented. They typically think others cannot possibly have seen the point, or they would be much more impressed. They typically think it is enough to point to their scheme and its merits, to settle everything and convince everyone else, and that only irrational or confused people could think differently, once informed.
The solution is to up the dosage. Learn six consistent philosophies, entire, without believing their straw man criticisms of each other (for the time being). Then and only then are you left a free judge amongst them.
On the initial meta points about philosophy and science, I also prescribe at least a short course of Popper.
I hope this helps.
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Jason,
You seem to be making the mistake of reification: you are taking an abstraction and attempting to give it concrete reality. In fact, you and Cahill are attempting to give it the most concrete and fundamental reality.
Neither you nor Cahill have answered my basic question: how can information exist separate from any underlying substrate?
Please think about this.
When you do, I think you will realize that it simply can't.
One can argue that the moon is made of cheese and others should try really hard to see how this could be so. But it doesn't eliminate the fact that it is simply ridiculous, based on empirical evidence and every notion of rationality, to believe that this is so.
Similarly, to posit information as the fundamental reality simply flies in the face of reason and common sense.
Information is an abstraction. Abstractions have no independent reality outside of minds.
I welcome your further attempts to convince me otherwise.
Re process philosophy and events, I never said I subscribed to Whitehead's process philosophy. I said I found Griffin's panexperientialist physicalism to be the best ontology I've found. Griffin's version of physicalism is closely aligned with Whitehead's process philosophy, but it is different in a key way: it recognizes the importance of process and events, but it also acknowledges that physical reality is fundamental (hence the term "physicalism"). Even Whitehead gave a physical pole to each actual entity/occasion of experience/event. Each event begins with a mental pole and ends with a physical pole. Consciousness proceeds from one event to the next and in some ways "lays down reality" through its passage, providing an explanation for both time and experience. I find these features of Whitehead's thinking attractive but this does not mean I have to accept his notion of events as fundamental reality b/c I think he made the same philosophical mistake you and Cahill are making: reification of an abstraction into something real (or "actual" in Whitehead's terminology).
Last, what I find truly interesting about Griffin's, Cahill's, and Whitehead's ideas is that they open up the current physical model and its accompanying ontology in many ways, not least of which is the possibility of fundamental forces other than the four commonly accepted today: strong and weak, EM and gravity.
We have very convincing evidence from RNG experiments and many others of the reality of PK, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc., which are simply impossible in the current physical model/ontology. (See Entangled Minds, by Dean Radin).
Through creating a new and improved ontology, that provides an explanatory framework for such phenomena, we may accept such phenomena as natural (instead of supernatural) and actively look for ways to harness such phenomena and possibly to magnify them to the level of practical significance.
Now that would be interesting.
Posted by: tomjones
I don't think you're understanding what Jason has been trying to tell you. Correct me if I am wrong Jason, but the point I believe that he was making is that you are projecting your philosophy this materialist nominalism philosophy and saying that everyone must agree with you, that matter is the base of all things rather then information. This particular position, is not necessary, your claims about philosophy as Jason pointed out are not conducive to good philosophy.
In fact thinking that your way of understanding things is the only way only limits your ability to understand what is around you.
You believe that matter is the base, Cahill argues that matter is a higher level of an information based system. But if you think about it either one can work, at a philosphical level, the science is what shows it to be the case or not. You can say the world is based on whatever you want, the real test is does the theory accurately describe what we see.
So lets take an example I claim that the basis of everything is to use your example cheese and from there everything else comes. Now this is not a necessary claim, and it is only a valid claim if it matches reality.
Jason has been trying to tell you that science is specific in its claims it does not make general statements about a given thing. One can quantify that thing and understand that thing in its specifics.
"Through creating a new and improved ontology, that provides an explanatory framework for such phenomena, we may accept such phenomena as natural (instead of supernatural) and actively look for ways to harness such phenomena and possibly to magnify them to the level of practical significance. "
An ontology will never do this, rigorous science will do this where one makes a claim then proves that it is or is not the case. This is never going to happen at a purely philosophical or ontological level.
All philosophy does is gives a base for your ideas it gives you some connective tissue and can give a broad filter, but if one wants to make a claim about the actual workings of the world one must look to science.
Thanks
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Tom,
Thanks also for your thoughts. I agree that when we get to specifics, science takes over from ontology.
I do, however, disagree with your other points - no surprise there!
You and Jason seem to be missing the point that ontologies are subject to much the same tests of rigor as any scientific theory: does the ontology/science explain known phenomena well; does the ontology/science provide meaningful predictions that may be shown to be wrong, making the science/ontology falsifiable, or at least modifiable such that it avoids becoming a bad joke?
Just any old ontology, as you suggest, won't do. This is why ontologies evolve, just as scientific theories do. And it is no surprise that they often evolve in tandem. I'll agree with you that science has in the last few hundred years led this evolutionary process b/c the discovery of the modern scientific method led to so many revolutions in human knowledge.
I believe, however, that we are at the point where there are so many scientific anomalies that are inexplicable under our current mainstream science and its accompanying ontology that only by developing a rigorous and powerful new ontology will we be able to return to the same level of progress we've previously witnessed in science.
It's no accident that science and philosophy and mathematics were considered a single field (sometimes termed "natural philosophy") until the modern era. They share many of the same tools and aims - not least of which is rationality as the primary guide for validity.
One practical outcome of widespread acceptance of a new ontology (or even acceptance by the intelligentsia only) that allows for more than the four fundamental forces currently accepted could be increased funding for study of paranormal phenomena. Paranormal phenomena, while accepted as real by the more open-minded and educated among us, are still not accepted as real or scientific by the large majority of scientists, funders, or the general public (if we exclude a primitive belief in God from this category).
So, in terms of a new ontology, we should resist the urge to simply posit any old ideas regarding basic reality. If we posit information as basic reality, we quickly hit the problem I've repeatedly highlighted: what the heck does it mean to posit that information has some independent reality?
Please explain this to me, in terms even I (with my meager 30 or so years of education) can understand, as I really would like to know. I'm not claiming any absolute knowledge by any means, so I'm open to alternative views. But I just can't see how - given your, Jason's and Cahill's explanations thus far - that information can have any independent existence.
Posted by: tomjones
Here is a possibility, think about what is at a more fundamental level then matter according to string theory? Energy in the form of very tiny strings, is it really so hard to believe that information which can be represented as energy, ie electrical current in a binary pattern, could be the base. And to be honest all matter contains energy and is made up of energy, so to posit an information theory (which I personally don't agree with, for other reasons) is that far off base. Since one can ask the same questions of both. For example where did the energy come from, what held the energy before it was mass?...
FWIW
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Tom,
Your comments on string theory go to the heart of my interest in this topic. I recently read The Trouble With Physics, by Lee Smolin, after reading Brian Greene's books, The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Elegant Universe. Greene is a proponent of string theory. Smolin thinks it's a dead end that has resulted in not one testable prediction in 25 years of work. Smolin has convinced me that string theory is on the wrong track.
This is why Cahill's process physics is appealing to me. I'm not a physicist, so cannot judge this theory from a mathematical point of view, but I can judge it from a philosophical/ontological/rational point of view and much of his theory fits with my current thinking in ontology.
In particular, I am intrigued by the idea of the gebit nodal network structure he posits as fundamental reality (the "neutral stuff" that make his theory accurately labeled a neutral monist ontology). With a gebit network, energy is not a thing - it's simply the network of connections between each gebit and each gebit manifests either as empty space or as matter depending on the type of connections.
These connections are the "prehensions" of Whitehead's ontology.
So energy doesn't exist either, as a "thing," in Cahill's ontology - or at least in my understanding.
Where Cahill goes wrong, however, as I've tried to explain in these posts, is in positing information as more ontologically fundamental than gebits. This I think should be discarded in his theory.
So it seems that gebits > qubits > its is a better formulation, or possibly just gebits > its in terms of ontological category transitions, as an even cleaner formulation.
Two other formulations: gebit > it > mind, reflects the notion that mind is inherent in all matter; gebit > it > mind > bit, reflects the notion that information resides in minds, which are predicated on matter, which is predicated on gebits.
Posted by: tomjones
You can posit anything you like at the base of everything, and ascribe any philosophy you wish, the ultimate point is that in the end for the theory to be worth anything it must be testable. I would agree that string theory has its issues, I personally am more of a loop quantum gravity person myself.
When you talk about Cahill going wrong by having information -> gebits as being problamatic, I don't quite understand the hang up. You have to get past the intuition that information is what you see in a computer where there has to be this defined structure of matter for information to exist.
Think about it this way consider NKS which would claim a sort of computational base, where even a rock is doing computations we just don't know what they are. Well if you think about that and consider a network base where a given thing or element of matter is a network of connections. Then consider the information idea as its base, what travels over a network is information, except in this case the infromation is to some extent defining the network. Then from there one proceeds to matter by the pattern of connections.
I think your mistake seems to be getting held up by your materialist perspective, and thinking that some how inorder for rational thought one must adopt a similar materialist perspective. This is just not the case. Philosophically what you believe is going to have no impact on rationality. One can say that your philosophy is rational, but being rational does not imply on philsophy over another.
Philosphy is not like science where either your experiment proves the point or it doesn't, your model maps to real world elements or it doesn't. Philosophy is far more general, one must look to science to determine the rationality of the view. So you wish to say matter is the base of all, you believe this is rational, fine, now you need to show through science that this is the case. You need to make a case a theory with testable predictions.
Thanks
Posted by: Jason Cawley
"increased funding for study of paranormal phenomena"
Oh. Well, good luck with that.
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Tom,
Why do you think philosophers have spent lives trying to develop a more rigorous and comprehensive philosophy? To pass the time?
Please read some works on ontology and you will better understand that metaphysics/ontology/philosophy is not just a useless exercise in picking your favorite fundamental substance of the week and running with that as a whim.
Read Leibniz's Monadology, Descartes' works, Whitehead's Process and Reality, Chalmers' The Conscious Mind, or Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot or Reechantment Without Supernaturalism (for a mix of pure philosophy and theology).
The whole point of ontology is to develop a theory that gets at what is real. This is what ontology is. To get at what is real requires far more than just tossing out ideas like "how about we posit information as fundamental and don't really think about what that means?"
Yes, rocks can be conceived as computing themselves - as quantum computers, as I wrote in an earlier post re Seth Lloyd's Computing the Universe (in which he conceives of the universe as computing itself as one gigantic quantum computer that is irreducible to any smaller computer). But this doesn't mean rocks are made of computations/information. This is something they DO, not something they ARE.
I'm trying to get at what things ARE. This is what ontology means.
Whitehead states in Process and Reality that he begins with actual entities/events as the fundamental constituent of the universe b/c they are the only stable thing. Substance/matter is not stable in his ontology, so he posits process/events as the basic reality.
He gets it half right, in my view. Process is an abstraction, so cannot be the basis for any reality. Events as basic reality reflects the correct notion that there is no such thing as timeless instantaneous substance - it exists in time. So an event is substance plus time.
But there still has to be substance to have an event.
So events/process/forms are abstractions from physical reality and do accurately describe features of that reality, but forms themselves change and nothing is stable.
Similarly, I reject Whitehead's "eternal objects" which are the same as Plato's forms and could be thought of in the same way as information in Cahill's ontology. Where do eternal objects reside? Where does information reside?
When we think about, we realize that form and information must have a physical substrate. Information and process are abstractions that reside in mind, which as we can tell requires a physical substrate.
Posted by: tomjones
I see the problem here, and you have been told what the problem is, philosophy will never be a substitute you can claim any rigor you want of your ontology it is still not science, hence the two terms.
As to recommendation on reading, thanks, I have already read many of the great works of philosophy. The difference being I don't try to force my personal philosophical views on anyone else. Nor do I deem philosophy to be the arbiter of science as you seem to.
You seem to be stumbling about in some well understood snares of an individual who has recently discovered some new philosophical viewpoint and is eager for everyone to agree.
So good luck with your materialism, if you ever broaden your views to accept science into your world great, if not you will always have these problems when speaking with scientists.
Personally I couldn't care less what your ontology does or doesn't do, or what rigor you claim for it. The determination of how the universe works in practice is and has been the domain of science. With philosophy being able to examine and filter a wide range of ideas. But the final determination will always be science.
"Please read some works on ontology and you will better understand that metaphysics/ontology/philosophy is not just a useless exercise in picking your favorite fundamental substance of the week and running with that as a whim. "
This is merely false, not once have I claimed that philosophy is useless. What is more this is a false dilemma since this is not the only option. What is fundamental is not dictated by philosophy, science tells us that, always has and always will. The sooner you learn this the sooner you will start to understand the area your dealing with.
If you want to understand some of the problems of Cahill's paper read this:
arXiv:gr-qc/0407059
If you want to continue to foist your philosophical views on me, that have no aspect of necessity, then fine, we're done, go find someone who cares about your philosophy, and shares the same misguided view of the place of philosophy relative to science.
Jason has tried, I have tried, but you seem to be utterly determined to not hear a single word anyone has said to you. So if your determined to stay ensnared in these simple issues then fine, continue to be stumped by the simple. Continue with your naive ideas, and think everyone else is wrong. Thats fine its your choice, but don't expect that anyone is going to rollover all of a sudden and say oh look how smart you are.
Thanks
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Tom,
It looks like you're right that we won't benefit much from further dialogue, but I'll give it one last shot.
You state that science is the ultimate arbiter of reality. I agree that science takes over from ontology in terms of empirical experiment.
But the topic you bring up, string theory, is a great example of, first, the overlap between ontology and science, and, second, the limits of science and our current ontology.
String theory has been explored seriously for about thirty years now, yet it has yielded no testable predictions. It also posits extra dimensions and other very interesting ontological features. M Theory, the latest version of string theory (under some interpretations) also posits "branes" that may be different universes, which can interact in some ways, possibly explaining dark matter/dark energy and thus satisfying the problems with relativistic gravity that astronomers have observed at the cosmic scale.
Strings are purely theoretical constructs, as are quarks, electrons, etc. They may exist in actuality, but we don't know currently b/c we simply can't peer deep enough to know. They're abstractions, so science at this level is very similar to ontology: it posits constructs and sees if they stick and are helpful in testable predictions, etc.
Here's a great quote from Anton Zeilinger, one of today's preeminent physicists, re the real nature of the photon (from Nature, 2005):
"When analysing quantum interference we can fall into all kinds of traps. The general conceptual problem is that we tend to reify — to take too realistically — concepts like wave and particle. Indeed if we consider the quantum state representing the wave simply as a calculational tool, problems do not arise. In this case, we should not talk about a wave propagating through the double-slit setup or through a Mach–Zehnder interferometer; the quantum state is simply a tool to calculate probabilities. Probabilities of the photon being somewhere? No, we should be even more cautious and only talk about probabilities of a photon detector firing if it is placed somewhere. One might be tempted, as was Einstein, to consider the photon as being localized at some place with us just not knowing that place. But, whenever we talk about a particle, or more specifically a photon, we should only mean that which a ‘click in the detector’ refers to."
So a photon is not, according to Zeilinger, a real thing. Rather, as we understand it today, it is simply the click of a detector indicating some relationship between the photon emiter and the detector - a notion that is supported by my interpretation of Cahill's gebit nodal network ontology as allowing us to drop "energy" as a thing from this ontology and replace it with network connections between gebits.
Last, you have still not given me a single hook to hang my hat on regarding how information can have any existence independent of matter. You have said, thus far, essentially: "Some people like to think of information as fundamental. I have no idea how it might have any independent existence, but I'm fine thinking it does b/c I'm not too concerned about ontology as it's all a silly game really."
I think perhaps we will simply have to agree that you're not interested in ontology.
You can focus on science and mathematics and I'll continue to worry about creating a comprehensive ontology that meets the basic tests of rigor/rationality.
I highly recommend Griffin's Chapter 3 in Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism as an overview of the criteria for a good ontology.
Posted by: tomjones
First of all none of what you list has anything to do with what makes string theory wrong. Forget about the string theory example its doing nobody any good.
"Strings are purely theoretical constructs, as are quarks, electrons, etc. They may exist in actuality, but we don't know currently b/c we simply can't peer deep enough to know. They're abstractions, so science at this level is very similar to ontology: it posits constructs and sees if they stick and are helpful in testable predictions, etc. "
What? strings are a theoretical construct yes, electrons, no, quarks, not so much. What do you think makes your computer run. These ideas are well documented and widely accepted with the scientific community no serious scientist would argue electrons are merely theoretical constructs. Please inform your self of these topics before speaking on them.
"So a photon is not, according to Zeilinger, a real thing. Rather, as we understand it today, it is simply the click of a detector indicating some relationship between the photon emiter and the detector"
This is not at all what was being talked about, he is referring to non-locality, that we cannot precisely identify the location of a photon.
Please read about this stuff, you obviously know nothing about, and are thus drawing completely incorrect conclusions.
I would prescribe:
Bohm, David. 1989. Quantum theory. New York: Dover Publications.
Greiner, Walter, and Andreas Schäfer. 1994. Quantum chromodynamics. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Rojansky, Vladimir Borisovich. 1979. Electromagnetic fields and waves. New York: Dover Publications.
....
and others of this sort.
"You can focus on science and mathematics and I'll continue to worry about creating a comprehensive ontology that meets the basic tests of rigor/rationality. "
Prior to attempting this learn about these topics that your creating an ontology of.
This involves math, and science, put aside the philosophical waffling and get to some hard study of science, then you can hope to succeed.
Thanks
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Tom, now I see the difficulty we're having. You think scientific constructs are REAL. Look, has anyone seen an electron, a quark, a string? The answer to all three is a resounding "no."
These are constructs posited to explain the evidence collected. Yes, most scientists accept the existence of quarks today, but this doesn't mean they're real. They're posited to explain phenomena, and are a result of mathematical advances.
This goes to the heart of what we're clearly missing each other on: you think science deals with firm reality and nothing more, and ontology is loosy goosy abstraction.
What you haven't realized yet is that much of what mainstream science holds to be true in terms of underlying reality is posited and is a matter of interpretation.
Why do you think there's so much debate about the two-slit experiment still, a hundred years or more after it became well-known? Photons as waves AND particles? This is an interpretation of quantum reality known as the Copenhagen interpretation, which has become the dominant interpretation, but it is by no means the only interpretation or even the best interpretation.
Have you read the Bohm works you recommend to me? If you had, you would realize that much of his career was trying to develop a better interpretation of quantum phenomena, than the strange interpretation of photons being both waves and particles!
Have you read his Wholeness and the Implicate Order? He explicitly develops a new ontology, relying on a posited "implicate order" that underlies all of reality in this work! Lo and behold, that sounds a whole lot like Cahill's gebit nodal structure. Hmmm.
Bohm states in the introduction to WATIO:
"I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole..." (P. x).
Bohm also writes, in The Undivided Universe, about the problem of the particle interpretation of energy (photons, gravitons, etc.):
"We shall begin by giving reasons why it is necessary ... to give up the notion of particle as fundamental and to regard our basic 'beables' as the field variables themselves." (P. 230.)
The chapter I pulled this quote from is called "The ontological interpretation of boson fields."
Maybe there's something to this ontology quackery after all...
What's interesting to me is that you've been defending the notion of information as fundamental reality without apparently realizing that this is a very new notion that is not a mainstream idea at all. It is the result of people like John Wheeler (who popularized the phrase "it from bit") seeking a new ontology to better explain the scientific evidence.
Physicalism, the idea that matter is fundamental, is in fact the mainstream scientific view. I've been proposing a panexperientialist physicalism as a better ontology, and this is most definitely not a mainstream view.
The advantage of panexperientialist physicalism is that it provides an elegant solution to the mind/body problem as well as opens up many other possibilities that are currently denied reality in the mainstream ontology.
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Jason, check out Entangled Minds, by Dean Radin. It may change your mind about the reality of paranormal phenomena.
He shows that numerous experiments over the last couple of centuries have demonstrated, with p values of less than 0.00001 in some cases (due to very large trial numbers), the reality of certain paranormal phenomena.
Here's the abstract to a recent article on PK and RNGs by Radin:
http://content.apa.org/journals/bul/132/4/529
Posted by: tomjones
Did you read any of the material I recommended to you?
In terms of string theory I don't agree with it so no I don't think strings are real.
Electrons you can only see where they have been not where they are.
I say quarks and electrons are real due to the fact that the evidence shows they are real. Reality and being able to see something aren't the same.
You may waffle about in you philosophies that have no necessity whatsoever as long as you want, they will never be more right.
What your saying is like saying, well since I have never seen wind and never will, I am going to say that the wind is purely theoretical.
So tell me if electrons don't exist, what makes your computer run? Any ideas? Of course the current ideas of these things may well change, but some particle exists in reality that performs the task of electrons.
"What you haven't realized yet is that much of what mainstream science holds to be true in terms of underlying reality is posited and is a matter of interpretation. "
What you don't realize is that you are speaking out of you hat. This is garbage nobody should pay this any mind. Science makes predictions and then tests them. Science makes models of the world to understand the world, yes Quantum theory is a theory its a model, but it does a good job of reproducing what we see in the quantum universe.
Oh and thanks for helping me to better understand scientific constructs, I only have been doing this stuff for years, and only taught myself quantum mechanic, physics, nuclear physics, quantum chemistry... and skipped from high-school algebra to differential equations, while teach myself calculus at the tender age of 18 upon completion.
"Have you read the Bohm works you recommend to me? If you had, you would realize that much of his career was trying to develop a better interpretation of quantum phenomena, than the strange interpretation of photons being both waves and particles!"
Hmmm... let me see here? no of course I haven't.. I talk out of my hat like you. Your point about career is irrelevant. The point was for you to learn about quantum physics, which you obviously don't understand. He may have spent his career doing anything, doesn't matter, you still don't know quantum physics and thus are still unqualified to speak about. And yet here you are speaking and critiquing things you know nothing about.
By the way congrats you realize that there is the issue of the wave particle duality, the most intelligent thing you have noticed yet.
"Maybe there's something to this ontology quackery after all..."
I never stated ontology was quackery, just that you are a quack. You are not a philosopher, nor a scientist, go learn something about this stuff and stop wasting peoples time with your foolish unfounded ideas. Apparently that "30 years education" was completely wasted on you.
Please read the books I suggested, then we'll have something to talk about. Till then I shall address you as you demonstrated intellect deserves: Tam Hunt (AT) or amateur thinker, and shall confine my comments to poking fun of you till such time as you have read and understood some real science.
Thanks, my young amateur thinker...
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Tom,
It's unfortunate you resort to such language and tone. I'd expected more from this forum. Thanks for your time.
In the meantime, try reading Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order or Unvidided Reality.
Posted by: RLamy
Originally posted by tomjones
"So a photon is not, according to Zeilinger, a real thing. Rather, as we understand it today, it is simply the click of a detector indicating some relationship between the photon emiter and the detector"
This is not at all what was being talked about, he is referring to non-locality, that we cannot precisely identify the location of a photon.
Please read about this stuff, you obviously know nothing about, and are thus drawing completely incorrect conclusions.
No, Tom, Zeilinger talked precisely about this and he refuted quite clearly the view that the problem is just about non-locality ("Probabilities of the photon being somewhere? No[...].") And this vision is no novelty, it is exactly what the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation prescribes.
I believe you should perhaps heed your own advice.
Posted by: tomjones
Perhaps try reading the post that was being responded too:
"So a photon is not, according to Zeilinger, a real thing. Rather, as we understand it today, it is simply the click of a detector indicating some relationship between the photon emiter and the detector"
In fact he said no such thing, what he was speaking of as you said the copenhagen interpretation of the photon. But that interpretation is not that a photon is not a real thing. One may make that argument just not like that.
It is without question that what we term photon today exists in some form, what the precise function is may be debatable, our model may be wrong, or some property we ascribe may be wrong, but there is still some real element there. As evidenced by the fact that one can use these "non-real" particles in Quantum Computation.
Nor did I ever claim that the problem of the photon is only one of non-locality. I was merely bashing the argument that photons are not a real thing. There is some real element to the idea of a photon as evidenced by there many applications.
Ah, as I said read the paper, and it makes Tam's conclusion more ridiculous.
And thanks for the advice, but I read more in a day then you in a week. Add to this the playing dumb on the forum to see who knows and doesn't know there stuff.
Thanks
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Rlamy,
I think that Zeilinger was going a little further in fact than the Copenhagen interpretation. The CI, of course, deals with waves as the probability of a given "particle" being in any particular location.
Here's the link to Zeilinger's full article, summarizing the state of our knowledge re the photon upon the centenary of Einstein's famous photoelectric effect paper:
http://intl.emboj.org/nature/journa...51E19359B60DD22
His point was that even the CI goes too far: all we can say about the photon is that it is a "click in the detector" and represents "SOME" relationship between the photon emitter and the detector.
I am exploring the notion of energy "particles" as not really particles but, instead, network connections between gebits in Cahill's nodal network structure. This interpretation provides a simpler ontology, avoids the tricky problems of positing gauge bosons like the graviton as the gravity "particle," which have never been found, and provides an ontology that satisfies Zeilinger's statement that a photon reflects SOME relationship between the photon emitter and the detector.
The particle model for the four forces has always made me uncomfortable, as it did people like Bohm, which is why he developed his ontological interpretation of bosons as field strengths instead of particles (as I described in a previous post, quoting The Undivided Universe).
Brian Greene, in his book The Elegant Universe provides some support for the notion that photons are not particles, though he may not agree with my interpretation. He states:
“It's as if the photon is not so much the transmitter of the force per se, but rather the transmitter of a message of how the recipient must respond to the force in question.” (P. 124).
Clearly, the photon is not a particle, like a mini-billiard ball, if it's a transmitter of a message. The particle acted on by the photon may move toward the photon or away from the photon, so it's certainly not a billiard ball kind of relationship.
Rather, information is being shared. But how is that information shared? Here's where Cahill's network connections come in handy as a possible explanation, which also fit Whitehead's notion of occasions of experience as unmoving entities that flicker in and out of being.
So in this new synthesis, drawing heavily upon Cahill, Whitehead and Griffin, we can envision the basic stuff of the universe as gebits (geometrical bits) connected to each other and manifesting either as space or matter depending on the type of connections for each gebit.
This is a "neutral monist" ontology and it provides a bit firmer conceptual foundation for Whitehead's process philosophy, while connecting it to the world of physics (as Cahill has tried to do explicitly).
Sincerely,
Posted by: tomjones
"Photons, atoms and beyond
As mentioned above, the initial question of whether it is only matter or also radiation that is quantized has finally been settled in favour of the photon. It has now become possible to investigate the interaction between photons and atoms in great detail. For example, Kimble's group at Caltech showed that it was possible to observe the phase shift experienced by an atom while it interacted with a field of, on average, less than one photon. Haroche and his group at the École Normale in Paris were able to construct entangled states between single photons trapped in a high-finesse cavity and atoms passing through (Fig. 7). Such experiments have also been used to demonstrate several interesting aspects, such as time-resolved quantum interference phenomena, trapping of atoms with single photons or quantum non-demolition measurements, in which the presence of single photons can be determined without destroying the photon."
Yes indeed photons are not real, they are merely theory... yes...
Please tune in next time for chatting with people who don't know jack about anything...
Thanks
Posted by: RLamy
Tam, notwithstanding the fact that there's no such thing as *the* Copenhagen interpretation, you are probably right in the sense that Zeilinger seems to consider the photon's existence in the same way as CI considers its state, while the latter wouldn't. However, I think that this is merely a consequence of the fact that CI was formulated before the advent of quantum field theories. These showed that it is more accurate to consider particles as excitation states of an underlying quantum object than as unchanging and objective elements of reality. Therefore, I am convinced that Zeilinger's position conforms perfectly to the spirit, if not to the letter, of CI.
"So in this new synthesis, drawing heavily upon Cahill, Whitehead and Griffin, we can envision the basic stuff of the universe as gebits (geometrical bits) connected to each other and manifesting either as space or matter depending on the type of connections for each gebit. "
We can. It certainly doesn't mean we should, not unless we can infer convincing new knowledge from it.
Posted by: Tam Hunt
Rlamy,
I agree that there is no compulsion to agree to a new paradigm: it must earn its stripes. I'm still trying to bring the relevant issues together and see if this new formulation makes more sense, explains more human phenomena (it's ultimately all human phenomena or how else would we learn of anything?), and leads to a more sustainable worldview.
I'll come back at a later date once I've worked out my ideas in more detail.
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