[Process Physics compared with Leibniz] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

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Process Physics compared with Leibniz

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Posted by: MikeHelland

Process physics
starts with: time
(through something like a neural network)
derives: space and matter


Leibniz
starts with: absolute matter, space, time
(through something like a neural network)
derives: relative matter, space, time


It's clear to me NKS and Process Physics are onto something.

But they are catching up to Leibniz.

They'll have to accept the whole picture before they can really revolutionize physics.


Posted by: Tony Smith

... but in the hope of helping some to try to seriously open their minds ...

The only time that has ever existed or will ever exist is called 'now'.

The idea that time is a dimension through which we journey has turned a productive mathematical concept into a serious delusion about reality and our place in it.

Even Einstein's equations show that time is imaginary.

"There is no time like the present" takes on a whole new meaning.

All we actually have is a very large present everywhere occupied creating its own next state from its present local state ... 10^45 times per second if you accept the calculations of Planck scale ... or something like that even if you don't.

The past only exists as (often slowly) fading traces in the now.

This all works because expanding bubbles with locally conservative physics arise inescapably and indestructibly inside chaotic inflating seeds, but the details of that is a story for another day.


Posted by: MikeHelland

Saying the only time that exists is "now" because it's your conscious experience is like saying:

The only emotions that are real is what I'm feeling right now.

Which is like saying:

Unless I feel love now, love isn't real.

Which is absurd.

So we attribute reality to emotions we have felt in the past.

If we felt love in past, and that's real, then time in the past has to be real too.

Anything else is absurd.


Posted by: Jason Cawley

As a point of information, "real" in philosophic contexts means "not dependent on anyone's opinions or experiences". It is distinct from "true" or "actual" - there are true statements about matters that do depend on opinion or specific experience, things that do depend on them may really be instantiated and transpire within history ("be actual", etc). "Reality", as a technical term, designates that specific subset of truths or of existence that remains invariant as opinion or experience is arbitrarily varied.

(Naturally, a philosophy or a theory may posit that said set is empty, if it likes, but that is the intended reference of the term).

Experience on the other hand is usually considered phenomenal (greek for "appearance") - that is, it has the status of evidence and can falsify any theory that cannot account for it, but does not by itself force any particular explanation of that evidence, including claims that something is misleading or illusory, if a rational explanation can be given for the phenomenon that way. A blanket claim that any experience has to be real is usually considered a category error. That said, I have no position in your discussion.


Posted by: MikeHelland

Thanks Jason,

That's a fair description of empirical philosophy.

In a broader philosophical context, such as rationalism,

then truth and reality often have dual natures.

For example, Critical Rationalism.

In Popper's worlds, who stressed we shouldn't take words like "world" "universe" or "reality" all too seriouslly, objective truth and objective reality is world 3.


Posted by: Jason Cawley

The usage and distinction are actually from the scholastics and predate modern empiricism, but it is a quibble.


Posted by: MikeHelland

Just out of curiosity.

I have a research topic.

I discuss it quite a bit with physicists.

They think I'm stupid.

They don't accept anything without equations.

I tried to explain some of the central points of NKS.

It's rarely successful.

I'm wondering how much support I could get from Wolfram in getting a grant.

I'm not an academic.

I'm a crackpot, longshot.

But I seem to have independently devised something along the lines of Monadology and Process Physics.

I've got good ideas.


Posted by: Tony Smith

Having spent lots of now just observing (mostly simply constrained) evolution of Life (Conway's CA), I've absorbed the idea that what persists from now to next now is pattern, especially cyclic pattern. Even the ubiquitous "blocks" aren't truly stable but are created anew each cycle in what can easily be seen as a period one loop, as is "empty space". (Rules in which empty space persists are just easier on human perception.) All apparent stability can be disrupted by the growth or movement of more seemingly active patterns.

While Reg Cahill doesn't emphasise it in his papers, Process Physics is intellectually grounded in experimental particle physics and it is that perspective that has convinced me that seeing the universal now as process rather than imaginary time slice is the way to go.

But Process Physics was also motivated by a wish to do away with "dark matter" so as to restore baryonic matter to the status of "all there is", albeit by also restoring a view of empty space that is not conspicuously different to aether (by arguing, which recent planetary probe data might be confirming, that the interpretation of Michaelson-Morley is far from as unambiguous as it has been long taken to be).

From a broad view of the history of science every tactic to return our (in this case baryonic) selves to centre stage in face of evidence to the contrary has been ill conceived, no matter how understandable such motivations might be from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology.

Following my 2004 examination of graph-theoretic network evolution under a uniquely simple rule and the consequent realisation that there were serious scale constraints to what we could look at with computer simulations, I've become more and more focused on producing at least a descriptive account of the aforementioned (cubicly) expanding bubbles of locally conservative space.

Right now I'm looking at the collision rate of ultra high energy cosmic rays in the voids as a possible source of the higher degree expansion currently being described as "dark energy", intellectually guided by the potency of something as simple as glider collisions in Life.

If you are going to try talking to physicists you might have more luck with the experimentalists than with the theory-laden.


Posted by: Tam Hunt

Folks, for a wonderful exposition of Whitehead's notions of time, see David Ray Griffin's recent Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy. This is a great overview of Whiteheadian metaphysics written by a towering intellect in his own right. Griffin is very keen to show that Einsteinian relativity, which leads to the conclusion that time is an illusion (the equations don't lead to a forward arrow of time or "irreversibility in principle"), is not the whole story. Rather, Griffin attempts to show that time has always existed and is a manifestation of the relationships between actual entities. Talk of "timeless" entities or beings (like some conceptions of God) is meaningless.


Posted by: Tony Smith

'Late Night Live' has been the most popular podcast emanating from Australia and I just finished listening live to Philip Adams interview Reg Cahill about his theoretical baby and throwing out Einstein's bathwater.

The program is rebroadcast 18 hours later if you are in Oz. For others there will be downloadable audio linked from the web page within their 24 hour update cycle.




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