Almost

(But not quite)

Version 1.1

Nemo Bourbaki
Nemo.Bourbaki@gmail.com

01_Introduction View this as a series of essays. View this as rejecting everything you know. Call it the whispers of a dissident. View this how you will and call it what you like. Now, I admit this is incomplete, but I invite you to criticise and improve. I think there is a decent argument to be made that there is a physical law of Almost. If physical law is based on observation then I observe that physical laws are always almost exact. Well almost always which sort of proves the point. Almost always always almost exact. Symmetry is always broken as the correlation length grows infinity. If the Bohr/Copenhagen restriction on the applicability of quantum mechanics is finally lifted (and this seems natural as time goes on) then the ramifications of quantum uncertainty are, after all, forms and measures that are inexact. It occurred to me that the liar paradox could be thought of as a system state exchange variable of Pi/2 rotation. I thought then maybe that applied to Gdel too. There is an essay on this at Chapter 9 which suggests a dynamic reinterpretation of Gdel opens some interesting avenues for research. I hope Chapter 3 leads toward a better way to think about time. Being born in an age and culture when and where relativism seems natural and classical universality absurd I am surprised by the commonplace neglect of what that means. We think badly about time and seem to assume some sort of universal definition. Not just time. Commonplace ideas about space are very odd too. The not so commonplace of the blend of Euclidean, perspective and Riemannian that the mathematically inclined use to describe a state of affairs is a fudge. If a space interval is a measurement intrinsically derived locally from event information from a referent it really doesnt signify much except the measure itself unless the referent system is invariant. Indeed the categorisation of objects, compound or otherwise, the space between them and worse within them has a pathological flaw. If you read the essays and accept that element you have to go on to accept differential calculus needs reinterpreted too.

31 July 2013

01_Introduction Perhaps it was a mistake to seek a unifying theme; it was certainly overly ambitious. The essays have become tied to an exposition of the ground-rules for a philosophy of unified theory and of course that is too hard. Rather than re-write, simplify and separate, I have chosen to release the sketchbook now in an incomplete form as otherwise it may never be done. I invite you to criticise and improve. Nemo Bourbaki 2013 July

31 July 2013

02_The Necessity of Misunderstanding The Necessity of Misunderstanding It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
1

It seems to be part of our makeup that we want to have a complete understanding of everything we experience. One of the most famous quotes from Aristotle is the opening maxim of the Metaphysics: 'All men by nature desire to know.' We seek knowledge and make sense of it using reason. However, reasoning as an activity and the apparatus of reasoning logic has lost its standing. Logic doesnt appear on the curriculum as an essential course for all students as it once did. We have lost confidence in logical thought as it seems ineffective against brute force and is undermined by doubts introduced by irrefutable findings, mainly in the 20th Century. Indeed the notion of reality itself the bedrock of reason we now know to be very poorly defined. For me the glaring omission from the Western scientific tradition has always been the acceptance and accommodation of the irrational. While you can see that rational analysis, the reduction of difficult problems into simpler ones and discovering laws of nature are extraordinarily useful and successful, any elevation of the status of the scientific approach beyond a practical way of solving problems is very questionable. For example, the word error not only implies a mismatch between (say) experiment and theory but that this mismatch is wrong in some way. It is as if there is some form of misbehaviour going on and there is something to be corrected. We really need a separate word for error in these circumstances which doesnt carry the connotations of fault. It is not just careless use of language like calling a technology bad or weathermen talking about

Charles Baudelaire

31 July 2013

02_The Necessity of Misunderstanding deceitful fog. The concept is tied up with the notion of progress, and I think illustrated by the following quote: Disorder is merely order waiting to be revealed. 2 This sounds rather attractive, but is utter nonsense. We know about entropy, quantum mechanics, Gdels incompleteness theory and Russells paradox (and there may be other results not covered by the scope of that short list) which each tell us aspects of the irreducibility of disorder, the irrational and the irresolvable. It is enough that nonsense exists and misunderstanding happens for it to be necessary to account for them in a world view. What we really would like is a world view which has the integrity of a theory a series of concrete testable statements about how things work. If it is accepted that chaotic behaviour and dysfunction are unavoidable and intrinsic then it becomes unclear what basis remains to form a new world view from, or indeed how to reason within the irrational. Pure logic and reason are insufficient for the task of explaining what needs to be included as the design of logic and reason are for the avoidance of nonsense, not its generation. However, being released from the assumption that we are rational beings in a rational universe is rather liberating. We also observe that the absurd needs a reference point to be absurd. Assuming some world view theory (WVT) exists leads to some very strange conclusions. If a world view is defined as encompassing all things then immediate problems arise. You can directly conclude that the world view theory would include itself which sounds painful. From Russell and Gdel we know that there are undecidable logical propositions (neither true nor false) so we must include the unprovable and therefore, you might think,

Quoted by Saramargo

31 July 2013

02_The Necessity of Misunderstanding the theory would be unprovable itself. If this world view includes everything then it includes all the mistakes, imperfections and errors as well: the rational and irrational alike. There must be room for every oddity. We might dismiss the idea of world view theory as a myth or surmise it actually needs to embody error to model how things really work. We are led to think misunderstanding is somehow necessary. We hope that one day there will be a mathematically based theory which makes perfect predictions without fail. It would be unsettling to think that there is no complete understanding available to us. What we can also say is the notion of seeking perfection recorded from Aristotle to the end of the Enlightenment failed because the strange puzzles that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century from several sources brought the programme of development of pure logic, reason and determinism to something worse than a grinding halt. There has been no recovery from that position. To form any argument you have to use reasoning. For example, WVT is the WVT; there cannot be more than one. Thus you are led to reason that there has to be one central statement that encapsulates the idea. Bootstrapping the argument this way leads to some inescapably odd conclusions that in the end stop seeming odd and start seeming obvious.

31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time Difficulties with the Notion of Time

Alice sighed wearily. I think you might do something better with the time, she said, than waste it asking riddles with no answers. If you knew Time as well as I do, said the Hatter, you wouldnt talk about wasting it. Its him. I dont know what you mean, said Alice.
1

There is an antique shop full of clocks. There are mantle clocks, long-case clocks, bracket clocks, carriage clocks and more. When the hour comes the clocks begin to chime; some grave, some bright, some apologetic but none of the clocks quite chime together. Our shop has a clockmaker who knows the structure, history, accuracy, stability and maintenance requirements of every one. Our clockmaker tells us, What you have to remember is that in every tick is an error, all the skill and design is to minimise it but it's always there. The finest timepiece in the shop is a black-case early-English Puritan clock. Such clocks are wonderful working pieces of history. How could you possibly better encapsulate the birth of the Enlightenment, the age of reason? The clock is declaring mortality, the precise passing of the hours and the need of man to rationalise and strive to reach perfection. An idea which can be first attributed to Socrates although it recurs without that knowledge. The elaborate face of the clock is an earthly demonstration of power and wealth. Time at this point in Western history is also becoming a measure which is beginning to be used as an authority to control activity. On another day I had a discussion about a design for a new Stratum 1 atomic clock. If a clock was able to measure time absolutely perfectly I suppose you would term it a Stratum 0 clock. The discussion covered existing atomic clocks, their structure, maintenance, reliability; the new atomic clock and the importance of synchronisation in a variety of applications. A Stratum 1 clock is sufficiently accurate that there are issues of synchronisation between one clock, say, at sea level and one in the high Andes or on a satellite where, after all, time proceeds at a slightly different rate.

Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland, obviously.

31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time To calibrate a clock in a static location one might propose to tune how fast the clock runs (the clock frequency or rate) or alternatively correct errors later (post process). The new clock design as yet had no data or predictions on noise and drift error, which do play a role even in Stratum 1 technologies. Stratum 1 is real, Stratum 0 is perfection. No-one has built or will ever build a Stratum 0 clock. As we were talking to the clockmaker he explained that through tiny adjustments of the movement he could attain an accuracy of three minutes per week for some, four for others. Of course as he talked about accuracy I wondered - three or four minutes measured against what? Compared to what 2? How did they set clocks in the 17th century? Did they perform some astronomical or helio-metric calculation? Or did they have a reference clock? The term regulator is used for those clocks worthy of reference in this way, but how, in turn were they set? If you look for a clock to set a clock and if you called the antique clocks Stratum 4 you would look for a Stratum 3 or better to calibrate against. If you calibrate against something better you end up referencing to the best Stratum 1, but where do you go from there? Relativity would have given the old Puritans a headache. Time is not absolute. In one way it is a conventional measure of rate used to calibrate different processes against one another. There were many clocks in the shop, there are many, maybe billions of clocks across the world all telling different times, going at slightly different rates not due to relativity (or only in a minuscule way), but due to their construction. Even if there were such things as Stratum 0 clocks relativistic effects would mean that even they wouldnt be synchronised. Why would anyone imagine time was absolute? Better accuracy allows closer synchronisation. Most watches and clocks are quartz crystal so that if you arrive at a meeting everybody knows and agrees if you are late even by a minute or two. Yet the absolute authority is much the same as the definition of a kilogram, which refers to a lump of metal probably kept somewhere in Brussels that is, to an arbitrary authority 3. Our authority of time has been developed by a combination of consensus standards and dictat. A social agreement and an imposition rather than a
2

Im tempted to say relative to what? but by using that word I may be taken to be making a false association. You can say that the clocks in the shop were all working at different rates relative to one another, but relativity in the physics sense of the word concerns effects like the same clock working at a different rate depending on the gravitational field it is in; which is much more specific than the casual usage. Maybe we should say Everything is comparative rather than Everything is relative. In discussing Kant, Russell uses the term relational which is slightly broader than comparative. 3 Incidentally, this is a bit of a problem too. The standard kilogram has been degassing a bit and is getting lighter.

31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time profound truth. Historically there were issues of deference, authority and power associated with timekeeping or rather being the local holder of the time that you could declare correct. You cant organise well without synchronisation. In fact time as we regulate it now was only introduced in 1884 largely due to the influence of railway construction and the timetables they created. In the 1960s, conventions for international time were introduced and even more recently international time conventions for electronic networks have been developed. Time seems much more to do with catching trains, planes and synchronising computers - keeping things in order rather than anything else. To set time to some agreed norm the reference may ultimately be to the position of the sun if only because that fits in with our terrestrial mindset. To do this someone has to have the apparatus to measure this ephemeris or dynamical time as it is called, to provide some time standard to set clocks to. The rotation of the earth actually varies in rate due to a number of factors so that our best terrestrial clocks are better time keepers than the ultimate reference 4 which is an amusing contradiction. The daily variations can be measured by inteferometry 5. This shows up to an 80 microsecond daily variation in the Earths rotation rate. Obviously to resolve this variation you need to have a more accurate system. The graph in this reference shows error bars of about plus or minus 5 microseconds. There are also estimates of how the earths rotation has been varying over the centuries. 6 So what are we to think? We could take the position that the suns alignment with a reference point is as good and valid a definition of how to set the time as anything else. When the sun reaches its highest point we call it midday and set our clocks thats all. Wed be ignoring the fact that solar noon oscillates during the year and only coincides with conventional clock noon (in passing) four days a year. We could all set our clocks at any moment as best we could and instantly all our clocks would begin wandering off again, slow or fast and synchronisation will be lost.
4 Precision time and the rotation of the Earth, Dennis D. McCarthy in Transits of Venus: New Views of the Solar System and Galaxy, Proceedings IAU Colloquium No. 196, 2004, D.W. Kurtz, ed., 2004 International Astronomical Union, doi:10.1017/S1743921305001377 5 Rapid variations in Universal Time as measured by VLBI and as predicted by a numerical ocean model. http://bowie.gsfc.nasa.gov/ggfc/tides/intro.html

http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/earthor/ut1lod/lod-1623.html

31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time

Retrospectively we might conclude that in improving clocks we should only have the utilitarian goal of synchronisation to the comparative accuracy required for the efficient conduct of our activities and know that Relativity is an absolute bar to attaining a perfect universal system and suspect that there is something else going on that prevents us from making a Stratum 0 clock. That is the headache for the Puritans and the followers of the Enlightenment the perfection they sought does not exist. Indeed it seems meaningless. Terrestrial atomic clocks allow us to measure the variations in the earths motion and also allow us to confirm Relativity. The non-absolute, the relative, nature of time has been demonstrated experimentally and the earth, if not a lousy timepiece, has imperfections in the same way anything has when used as a reference for an idealised notion of time. For now, we can observe that the perfect synchronisation of clocks is impossible. In any case, our first use of time is as a rate which can be associated with a frequency. A second aspect of time is a measure such as a memory effect. I have mentioned two events, two meetings, in the text above, slightly jumbled together to make a nonsequential memory. Without evidence of sequence how do you know which came first, the trip to the clock shop or the discussion about atomic clocks? It isnt in my diary and I forget. If there are clues in the text I promise you they are unintentional and therefore unreliable. This second aspect is the origin of the concepts of past, present and future. We have memories and there are various forms of memory found elsewhere in nature and not just in man-made objects like CDs and computers. Palaeosedimentology relies on the stratagraphic assumption that the lowest layer is the oldest and perfectly reasonable that is too thereby creating a temporal relation to a sequence of sedimentary layers which can be preserved for hundreds of millions of years. We can see there is memory in various forms, but where are the past, present or future? These are abstract concepts rather than places or material things. The Puritan clock had a twelve-hour dial with the time marked by the state of the hands due to the relative positions of the cogs behind the face. A third aspect of the term time is its use in relation to an interval of time, as in the journey will take two hours. The sum (integration) of rate gives an interval of time. I need to record at least an initial state and a final state on the clock-face to reveal the 8 31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time interval of elapsed time to some final state. The records also have to be sequentially related before I can say I have a sequential memory to record these intervals. I need to create a stable clock too, if I want to be confident of the measure of the interval, and finally I need to be able to recall the memory for it to be useful. Notions of the past come from the existence of forms of sequential memory and memory is created through the recording of time intervals which are in turn generated through the summation of rates. These rates we already know are not absolute or unique. If there were any reality in the notion of the past it could not be absolute. In any case, when we talk of the past, present and future what exactly do we mean? Nonetheless they are essential concepts, so they must have some status of reality. So we have a single word time that embodies at least three related concepts. This gives rise to confusion. Our concept of time is a combination of different ideas: a rate, a measure and an interval. Time also carries aspects or a component of memory. By asking what the time is I refer to a clock that is set with reference to some arbitrary convention the time in this sense refers to a set-point and is a memory component. By asking how much time something takes I am asking about an interval. I am using the word time in the sense of an integral over a rate or a difference in measures. The particular rate we use is simply an agreed, useful convention with an arbitrary reference to an assumed rate of rotation of the earth. There are physical processes of nearly constant rate which we can use and compare to build clocks, make measurements and rely on for various processes. It is a feature of nature that these rates are not quite absolute, not quite perfect and thereby always have an error. It is the comparative element that undermines any notion of absolute time even without recourse to Relativity. The additional impact of Relativity is that even in the limit of perfection of mechanics absolute synchronicity of clocks still couldnt be achieved doubly impossible. You would have to think in a new way to say that these two impossibilities are related. To cap it all time has an association with memory and it is not clear that time means very much without that association. There is a sleight of hand in all this. I am stating that there is no time without a structure. I am denying that there is a proper definition of time without something for time to be created by or exist in. No time without a physical clock to create it. I am really saying time is an abstract phenomenon resulting from objects. This is reification 9 31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time the association of a word or concept with an object. This can well be described as a materialist standpoint. The term materialist is, however, rather ambiguous. In the philosophical sense materialism refers to the standpoint that all things can be reduced to physical entities, things of substance, whereas of course in the more familiar sense a materialist is someone who values money and possessions. To make the distinction clear I will call the philosophical standpoint as that of an entisist though no such word seems to exist. Time is not an object, but without an entity it is still associated with the processes between or within objects. It is not clear how to think about abstract notions, in this case time as a process phenomenon, as one has to be careful about suggesting that nothing can do something, which is nonsense. Nonetheless this is very far away from how we intuitively think of time 7. The alternative to thinking of time as an abstract phenomenon associated with processes in objects is to maintain the intuitive idea of time as existing independently of objects. If we have some keepsake or memento that reminds us of a person or event we cherish, it is nice to think that there is something more substantial than the interaction of our mind with the object and stimulation of memory. The idea that time is just somehow everywhere, that the past and future are places we could travel to is very appealing but, if the entisist viewpoint as defined above is correct, this notion of time is meaningless beyond the psychological. Time existing independently of objects has connotations of what is called an aether theory and physicists do talk about a spacetime continuum without blushing. I rather like the description of the aether as that strange half-matter in which so many different ages have believed, on what seems to a layman very inadequate evidence. 8 There are also things called field theories which picture space as populated continuously as a limit theory on a quantum lattice with various properties. Essentially this is a reification of the vacuum to allow nothing to do something. Before physicists get very grumpy let us say: very successful these theories are too. A field isnt an object but it is a powerful concept successfully and widely applied in several areas of physics. In
The way our intuitive time arises is described by Rovelli [Ref] as analogous to the thermodynamics that create temperature. 8 Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 53. Quoted in Enemies of Science: The Handmaidens Handmaiden in the Early Medieval West, by Michael P. Honchock , Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, April 23, 2007, Blacksburg, Virginia
7

10

31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time looking for the clocks of spacetime I am partly just illustrating the incompatibility of the entitist way of thinking to the continuum thinking of gravitational field theory and quantum field theories in general. The more you look the worse it gets. The assumption I argue above is that time isnt absolute or singular, but has to be associated with objects. To the extent that a field is deformed by the presence of an object there is no intrinsic dispute between these pictures. I am demanding time to at least arise from an aspect of objects the rate generator of a clock. If I do so then I seem to cast out huge tracts of opinion, knowledge and understanding. I can say with some confidence that if I have trouble reifying the notion of time it is a problem with the entisist argument Ive applied. Nothing then would be wrong with the notion of time as abstract. Just because the past and future arent places or things doesnt imply they are meaningless concepts. Yet the material positivism that underpins our physical understanding relies on action, measurement of phenomena and the probability of events. Not nothingness doing things. The aetherial element of field theories jars. Thus we have a disagreement. The argument is entisism cannot entail time as a concept without a clock rate. You can find references that attempt to include processes as something material too 9 but I find myself unable to argue a support for that. Surely processes are the things that objects do? Compare the entisist argument with the Mad Hatters. We all may disagree with the Hatters statement that Time is a him but entisism says time is of something, or entisism fails. In brief we could re-run the argument thus: we have built better and better clocks. Stratum 4 to Stratum 1 in about 400 years. Relativity asks me to believe that there is a mechanism in spacetime which determines clock rate absolutely and repeatably between any two points in the universe due to the curvature of spacetime. As spacetime is made out of nothing at all that sounds like nonsense but it works. On the other hand I can say that clocks are the only reasonable definition of time and that therefore objects which have the characteristics of a clock are the only sensible definition of time. The trouble with that entisism is then I havent a clue what I mean by an object and my interpretation of Relativity would need complete reassessment if I accept the entisist view because I may not like the aetherial clocks but Relativity as a
9

Rupert Crawshay Williams The Comforts of Unreason.

11

31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time theory works. However, if we take a entisit standpoint we are forced to associate time with objects. Doing so we have to conclude time somehow exists within, between and/or because of objects. Thus we should think of time as a process or process component. It is not at all clear that time is thereby singularly defined. Indeed it seems quite the opposite. We are led to think that time has an association with objects on a local basis but are not at all clear about what that means. We will meet the contradiction between the entisit and aetherial again and see that there is a distinctly odd way of resolving the problem. There is a road to travel in achieving this, but its not a simple road. Indeed after more than 1600 years of consideration we still say: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not" 10.

10

St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 11 (11.14.17), AD401

12

31 July 2013

03_Notions of Time

Entisist Notions of Time Summary

Time is an abstract notion associated with a number of object phenomena it has no reality beyond this.

13

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception Visual Perception & the notion of Space One of the key ways we experience the world is through vision. Consider the picture below (due to Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera). Two patches of slightly different shades of gray.

Put a pen or pencil over the division, and hey presto, the greys look the same. The act of placing the pencil over the division has changed our visual perception. Our vision system works in such a way that our perception is capable of being fooled. Optical illusions have been appreciated for a long time. The Taj Mahal is a wonderful mausoleum with at least three tricks that play with our visual perception. The minarets have chevrons that cause a visual dance between a real hexagonal and apparent stellated section. The two smaller domes either side of the main appear to move back and forward depending on your position in front of the building. Absolutely masterful architecture designed to fool the eye. Not magic, but demonstrates again that our visual perception isnt entirely reliable.

14

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception Those with reasonable eyesight may observe that the same object nearby looks bigger than when seen at a distance. This phenomenon we call perspective and it can be described mathematically. Old paintings and young children's paintings (some elements of other forms such as cubist art too) deny or fail to represent perspective correctly. Over a period art began to show perspective to create images which are representational of three dimensions in the way we see visually - objects of equal height depicted as systematically smaller the further away they are from the viewing point. In philosophy the terms qualia, sense perception and sense data crop up. I interpret the terms basically to mean that the only starting point for gaining an understanding of anything is through our senses. Vision is particularly important for the development of geometrical understanding yet we don't seem to have an innate understanding of perspective. You seem to have to experience things looking smaller the further away they are before it becomes instinctive. Perspective has to be learned by artists, children don't do it automatically - but the point is that our sense data reveals perspective as something real but that an understanding of it has to be acquired. If we lived somewhere without open spaces it may be that our awareness and understanding of perspective might not develop. You could get into deep trouble when embarking on DIY if you tried to make a door or shelf unit by sitting at the opposite end of the room making measurements with a ruler by eye, buying and shaping the wood accordingly and then trying to fit it. Wonderfully stupid and horribly wrong.

15

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception

a)

b)

a) The way I see the door from above and at a distance. I decide to make my new door from what I measure locally. b) I then, full of pride and optimism go up to the door and try to fit it into the frame. Something went horribly wrong.

The elementary rules we use to construct geometrical objects are of ancient origin from Greece and Egypt people like Euclid, Ptolemy and Pythagoras. These are taught fairly early on at school. We learn standard shapes. Right-angled triangles, squares, rectangles, circles and parallel lines, things like that - the things we think of as the basic shapes in drawing. This is what we mean by Euclidean geometry. These can be thought of as locally measured shape primitives they too look different in perspective. To understand better what is going on we need to look at how visual perception works. You can trace right back to around the year 1000 and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) the realisation that our visual perception of perspective arises because of the optical properties of the eye. The camera is simpler than the eye so I'll use that to illustrate the understanding of how it works. To form an image there is a plate (a two dimensional surface) at the back that is sensitive to light. Light reflects from objects or is generated by sources and when this hits the plate a distribution of light is detected. If you just take a photosensitive plate and expose it you dont get image information. Light hits the plate from all

16

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception directions in a disordered way. To form an image from this distribution you can use a restriction of where the light comes from by using a small hole this is named an iris 1.

Pin-hole Iris

Now we have the situation where we have blocked out paths of light which created the mess and we have thereby cut out most of the light. In order to capture more light in an orderly sort of way a lens can be added to the system. The lens re-directs light coming at different angles from the same location on an object to the same place on an image plane. I find I still need an iris in front of the lens to ensure a one-to-one correspondence between a source and image on the plate. So you have a mechanical model that reproduces the function of the eye and explains how an image is formed that reproduces the effect of perspective. Like the camera our visual perception relies on a 2D image on the retina and we have to reconstruct a scene. Visual perception is then actually a fairly complex system of neural processes - and this is the reason behind our having to learn about what we see it isnt simple, primary or absolute. It is a complex psychological process of reconstruction using clues in the data impinging on the retina and much else besides. The ideas of perspective (how objects look at a distance and how to represent them pictorially) can sometimes be seen in construction lines, one example is in a sketch by Da Vinci. The earliest known examples of perspective in art are in elements of frescos attributed to Giotto di
1 A camera obscura works without a lens and only uses an iris. As with the eye, the image is upsidedown. Our perception turns everything back round the right way automatically.

17

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception Bondone. Earlier even than that Aristarchus (4th century BC) is recorded as having used perspective in theatre scenes. Perspective gives an illusory perception of depth. A lack of perspective can also be seen in such things as pictures uncovered at Pompeii the colours and figures are beautiful, but perspective is incorrect. There is a fresco which simply looks like three unrelated drawings rather than a coherent scene. You cannot assume that artists are aware of perspective from any particular historical point in time. The use of perspective in art gives a three dimensional appearance and the rules dont need to be applied rigorously to create a fairly realistic effect. Traditional art in Japan used axonometry, a variant of perspective that is slightly incorrect as lines remain parallel, but still gives the three dimensional effect and contributes to the distinctive appearance of the genre. The mathematics of perspective was developed through the work of many people over centuries, but long after perspective was first used by artists. With or without mathematics we have a three dimensional appearance on a two-dimensional surface. As such we have a limited 2D representation of (notionally at least) 3D information from a 3D scene 2. Whether we are talking about a painting, a digital image, photograph or pattern of light on the retina, information has been lost in the reduction in the number of dimensions as well as through the limit of image resolution (spatial, colour and intensity). Where we dont have the Euclidean rules, as in perspective geometry, we call the geometry non-Euclidian. This may hardly be an inspiring terminology but a clear enough categorisation. A first step in this direction is to observe that in producing the three dimensional effect, parallel lines on an object when projected onto a two dimensional surface are no longer
2

This could be equivalently stated a little more provocatively: it is the projection from 3D to 2D that makes objects look smaller at a distance.

18

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception parallel. If extended they would meet at a point called the vanishing point. The mathematical expression of this was formally achieved by the work of Bolyai (often attributed to Lobachevski). The mathematics generalises to the projection of three dimensions onto two. Maps are projections of three dimensional space onto two dimensional paper. Oronce Fine was the first to develop a method for maps and we are familiar with the Mercator projection for world maps. A better representation of the world is a globe. We are used to consulting maps to understand where we are in relation to where we want to get to, yet if you look at a world map in a two-dimension projection such as the Mercator projection you cannot see why a transatlantic flight from London to New York should mean flying over Scotland. If you look at a globe it is obviously the shortest route. The distortions inherent in flattening out a globe onto a piece of paper are unavoidable so there are many map projections each with their own virtues and limitations. The Mercator projections makes Antarctica look huge, for example, but is very useful for navigation as it has an angular preservation property. You might want to choose a different projection if you are off to the poles. If you cut a ball in half and try to squash it flat you can only succeed by stretching and distorting the surface of the ball. There is otherwise a rather special sort of lump left behind called a soliton which is a useful concept some theoreticians use when talking about the creation of particles in physics. For now we observe that projecting three dimensions onto two doesn't go. When you project one onto another there is an error but the error has a specific form. Geological maps add further dimensions by the use of colour and special annotation to record field data about the three dimensional strata of the subsurface to allow the construction of three dimensional sections from the data on the map. The first ever geological map was published by McCullogh in 1840 3. Mathematically these bits of added data to the two-dimensional map are analogous to what are called 'tangent space vectors', which is
3

http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/site/GSL/lang/en/page2699.html

19

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception basically a term for extra information attached to a point in a mathematical space. When theoretical physicists and mathematicians talk about extra dimensions then we can think of the geological map as an analogy. The famous picture The Ambassadors (1533) by Holbein in London's National Gallery has at its base a skull that is highly distorted and appears to have been projected from the top right of the picture at a shallow angle. It is not known how Holbein did this, whether he used an optical technique for this work or in his artwork generally 4, but projection and perspective as terms, techniques and concepts coincide here. The skull complete with shadow when viewed from the 'correct' angle is restored to a normal appearance. Whatever the mechanism or motive, Holbein used a technique of projection rather than a realistic representation of perspective at a normal viewing position. The rest of the painting is heavily laden with symbols of power and intellect but these are realistic scale representations of what were presumably real objects. The painting thereby has two optical systems on the same canvas. We have a projected image of a skull and a normal perspective. This highlights that perspective is just a particular instance of a more general class. Technically speaking perspective geometry is a sub-class of projective geometry. Projective geometry itself is but a sub-class of conformal geometry in pure and applied mathematics. It was Riemann who initiated the mathematical development of this further generalisation. Now heres the rub Einsteinian GR relies on the mathematics of Riemann. It is a four-dimensional Riemann manifold and cannot be visualised uniquely in three dimensions in just the same way that you cannot uniquely flatten a globe to a map or a 3D scene to a canvas. Four dimensions into three doesnt go either. Which is more real GR or our visual perception? There is also something else going on
4

There seem to be issues of esteem and integrity about using optical aids in creating artwork in current times. In Holbeins time things were very different. The social status of artists was very low and they were treated as artisans. It would seem unlikely that there would be any stigma associated with the use of optics so there is no reason why he wouldnt if he could afford to. The definitive answer is lost.

20

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception here the information loss going from a higher number of dimensions to a lower number of dimensions, and that has a symmetry in the difficulty of expressing ideas of complex systems in the limited dimensions of language. Conventionally we think of the world as Euclidian and this accords with our 'natural' sense perception that perspective is an optically produced effect. Yet while we think of Euclidean as real we also think of perspective geometry as real at the same time. We think of the Euclidean as being a bit more real because the apparent size of objects changes with distance due to perspective only as demonstrated by my aberrant DIY. The invariance of the Euclidean makes it seem more reliable. That is a very odd conclusion to come to because we are always at a distance from objects and can never experience the Euclidean. Moreover, perspective geometry and Euclidean geometry cannot be true at the same time. Rationalisation makes us decide between true and false, real and imaginary and our Neanderthal obsession with categorising is misleading. Here we do not have a single truth. I'd like to contest the idea that there is some sort of transcendence in the validity or truth of Euclidean mathematical forms. The ascendancy of Euclidian geometry to the status of reality is appealing but not actually secure. The primacy of the Euclidian comes from its simplicity, historic precedence and near completeness 5. That however doesn't make it any more 'real'. Physical laws aren't Euclidian, the world doesnt look Euclidian once you get your head round perspective. Moreover nothing has ever been made that is exactly Euclidian. What about a perfect triangle or a perfect sphere? Well, there always is an error when we try and make ideal forms. Somewhere along the line we all bought into a concept that is misleading. Somehow or other we have picked up the notion that the mathematical form is the 'true' general form and that whatever we try to realise (i.e. to
5

It is the fifth, parallel, postulate that lets the scheme down.

21

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception actually make) is second best an approximate representation of the correct and pure geometry. If you draw a triangle or circle or other simple mathematical form, the convention is that whatever is drawn is an approximation to the 'ideal' described by a formula or shape paradigm. In three dimensions a ball may be said to be approximately spherical. But I could with more validity state that a sphere was approximately the shape of a ball 6. I say more validity because a ball is a real object. Mathematics has the power of generality - there are elements that are nearly lines, nearly triangles, nearly squares, nearly rectangles and nearly circles in real objects. When we look at objects it is easier to classify into categories and elements. It is an application of the principles of generalisation (induction) and comparison (symmetry), and these are the principle techniques which allow us to rationalise the world around us. These are hard-wired intrinsically approximate techniques of perception. They are misleading. We tend to reason within the constraints of understanding based on visual perception. When trying to describe a complex system or situation I sometimes think of a complex body called a manifold. The root is many-fold, you can think of it as a space of many dimensions too many to visualise. All you can do to attempt to describe this manifold is to take sections of it and describe these. There is a perceptual and linguistic barrier to describing manifolds. Maps and three dimensions are OK, but a four dimensional space cannot be visualised and is harder to conceptualise. We can think of four dimensions in operating a manual car brake, accelerator, clutch and gearing the state of each control combines in determining the acceleration of the car and this analogy has been used to describe the interdependence of parameters in the control of a nuclear reactor, for example. But am I playing too much with the idea of what a dimension is? In fact, I have been
The thickness of the line and the rotation of a disc or sphere are also fundamentally contradictory. The mathematical line has no thickness and is therefore invisible and the rotation of an object is round an origin that rotates around what exactly?
6

22

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception talking about a plane as a 2D surface quite uncritically and using the term dimension quite freely and loosely. I think of a picture as 2D, the real as 3D and the addition of time I vaguely think of as a tag that records a particular set of circumstances at a particular time rather like a snap-shot with following instants of time being represented by different pictures. While a video does this, as far as reality goes I must suspect that this is all complete rubbish. In creating a canvas as in creating a map the artist or cartographer can only capture and represent a limited amount of information. If you wish a portrait to convey more than a mechanically or optically created faithful representation of a pose at an instant of time other pieces of information are needed. Static, pictorial art is thus a limited representation. The artist chooses what to depict and what to exclude. If you look at a Picasso cubist portrait it isnt a realistic portrayal. It isn't a montage of pictures of the same subject from a number of viewing points. (Im thinking of Guitar and Violin, Circa 1912 Pablo Picasso). It is deliberately reductive towards ideal geometrical elements and denies conventional perspective, the temporal limit of an image and the single viewing point. Something non-visual can enter too. In Braque's 1912 'Man and Violin it is possible that the fractionation of the image can be interpreted as a pictorial representation of sound and motion, whether or not that was what the artist intended. There is no reason why an image should attempt to represent a three dimensional scene at a particular instant of time i.e. be photographic. Again we can generalise on these ideas. A canvas, a map, a photographic film or a receptor array all have system-specific limitations on the amount of information that they can store. In fact receptors have temporal characteristics as well film and CCD arrays in cameras have different 'shutter speeds' to allow control of the exposure time so that the image is neither too bright nor too dark. We have a combination of projection,

23

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception information loss and image capture. These are very general phenomena intrinsic to systematics. Note too that while what is being projected hits a surface or, in the case of inks and paint sits on a surface, in fact we really have surfaces of finite depth. Everything is, as far as we can tell, 3D. There is a difference here between information loss and how information is represented. In art this can be a conscious choice but the generality is not yet particularly clear. Hopefully I have succeeded in making you doubt whether there is any more reality in the idea that the world is Euclidian or that it is non - Euclidean, that these representations are useful but that you hesitate to say what is true in or about them. In becoming aware of the limitations of senseperception you can begin to think of it as a process, as we know we must, rather than something true or real. Place an index finger on your nose and slowly move it away in your line of sight. Looks big, getting smaller. Looks big because there is an association of the proportion of the retina area covered by the image of an object to its size. You know it is your finger so you know it only looks bigger, it isnt changing; your viewpoint is changing. It is the same association that allows the notion of perspective. You recognise the object and how big it is when you are close enough to touch it and see it look apparently smaller at a distance. So you are not just engaging sight in visual perception, you are using memory and you are automatically reasoning to make sense of the scene you see. You are reasoning in a natural way and that natural way is in error, contains intrinsic flaws, and is necessarily approximate. The use of visual perception as a basis for physical theory is actually thereby unsound. Complete nonsense. As much of our thoughts about space are based on this folly it is no wonder that we have difficulty in understanding the way things work. In fact we can learn more from the generality of this mistake as the faulty process is rather general.

24

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception Information loss can simply be the limited storage capacity of an image as compared to the original. If you look at a pointillist work or a television screen you don't see more and more detail as you look closer; you see an array of coloured dots. Be it the size of the smallest brushstroke or the number of pixels on a screen, the information is limited. By choosing objects which are similar in appearance but of different scale the visual perception of distance can be played with. If a path is deliberately made to narrow from one end, the path looks longer from that one end than from the other. The way the projection of light works and how we perceive distance gives art its false perspective. The perspective of an image on canvas is false. It is drawn to look three dimensional but it is a flat canvas. For no information loss to occur you would need to create a virtual universe on the other side of the lens. The steps of composing a scene, setting a viewing point and choosing how to render the image puts the viewer into a position of an observer - but a limited one. It is the individual composition of the artist that gives the viewer a particular experience. The canvas is not necessarily a record of what was perceived but in some ways more honestly and truly the reaction to what has been perceived. This allows the individual reaction to be incorporated in the artwork. Impressionism is hugely popular and there is a sense in a number of works that the 'reality' is actually enhanced by what is actually quite an elusive experiential quality. Pictures such as 'The Bathers convey a feeling of heat, light and mood which is quite extraordinary, perhaps conveying more than a photographic picture. Of course we are all limited observers. Partially our own system of perception is responsible. Just as the use of perspective creates a sense of perception of depth, the use of brightness, washed out colours, slightly hazy images, convey mood and immediacy in a way that realism simply cannot. There is an attraction to a different sort of ideal wrapped up in the visual representation. Experience is not limited to an instantaneous view. We are now, for example, used to travelling at speed. Objects in the distance seem relatively static, those close to are blurred. Our rate of visual perception

25

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception cannot keep up. Just like something moving while a picture is being taken, moving faster than the exposure time, there is a temporal limit to visual perception. We also memorise images and if drawing from memory we depict an amalgam of impressions rather than a faithful image of any one instant. Rejecting the difference between what we perceive and our interpretation of what we perceive isnt a simple step. At first this seems to exclude subliminal processes, the autonomous response to stimuli, but this would limit the interpretation of what we mean by perception to a conscious cognitive process. In fact it is a mixture of both they interlace. My personal reaction to art is immediate - subliminal rather than cognitive. I don't consciously learn to like artworks, I do or I don't. However, as time goes by my taste has developed and my immediate reaction has changed too. You can see that a dissociation of purely visual experience with the production of visual art is a progressive step, or at least intelligible as a form of expression rather than a simple representation of a scene. The purpose here was to use art as a vehicle for the discussion of visual perception, perspective, geometric ideals, memory, the loss of information through projection and the convolution of perception and interpretation. In this examination we have seen that there is a field of data which an observer sited at a particular viewpoint receives partial information. The way the data is received and the response to that data depends on factors like the capacity and memory (experience, knowledge) of the observer the properties of the receiving object, in short. Also the process of information transfer has systematic losses. For example, I can look at details within a work rather than the work as a whole, but not both at the same time. I have also argued that no particular geometrical system has an absolute primacy over others in describing reality and whereas traditional ideas of mathematics suggest ideal forms those forms do not exist. We actually have

26

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception to do a considerable job of rebuilding to show that geometries and mathematical forms do represent specific aspects of reality. We cannot rely on visual sense perception for truth. We have a visual system which lets us cope more or less. So our ideas about space and time that derive from sense perception are not securely based. They are successful in so far as our sense perception is natural, but our common sense has limitations which we need to understand. The processes of vision in terms of the physical elements of optics the behaviour of light transmission through materials - are repeatable and calculable. There are observed facts, immutable in the system. We perceive, that is sure. We recognise and depict objects in art, but then there is the ground of the picture too. We see objects in space. We perceive objects separated from ourselves by space. We categorise into objects as part of the process of perception and this is an act of rationalisation. Space and objects are a categorisation of separation. They are terms however that have difficulty which we will examine in detail later. Our visual perception limits our conceptual ability to imagine. The manifold of GR spacetime is four dimensional. We think of space as three dimensional - x, y, z. One dimension for a line, two for a plane or area and three for a space or volume. The fourth for time. We think of x, y, z all being at right angles. Perfect right angles. This is a Euclidean space with Cartesian coordinates. But if there is no perfection, that must be but an approximation. A mathematical perfection approximating reality. In perspective right angles arent preserved so we use a mixture of geometries to suit the best description of a situation. In all this we must remember that we dont need to know mathematics to see, we dont need to know mathematical perspective to draw a realistic picture of a scene. Mathematics may be being applied to describe these things but mathematics

27

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception is not the basis of visual representation. The application is a use of symmetry, but this use is inexact. If these mathematical forms represent something in nature then it is something other than visual representation. Visual perception gives us a notion of space but we cannot rely on this. So far we have a new interpretation of the five dimensions of KK theory as constituting the structure of a clock. Our interpretation of what the spacetime dimensions actually mean is therefore very different to one based on perception. The clock is an object and intrinsically has mass in the form of energy stored in its self-interaction. What has been traded off in this interpretation is an understanding about the space in between objects the aether conundrum. Physicists in the twentieth century had no basic and logically consistent pictures of information being transmitted from A to B as these are based on a visualisation of the transmission process. You could have a link like a wire between them, and the wire carries the information. The alternative was to think of an object carrying the information travelling from A to B. Some packet of information but no need for a wire. This latter view is, of course, fallible. The new object C now has a space between it and A. If A and C are interacting I would then have to follow the same prescription and create a new particle D to express the transfer of information from A to C and so on. The approach diverges. Turtles all the way down. (Figures) Instead of nesting clocks within each other I would now have a trail of clocks one between the next. I seem to have an infinite number of clocks within each clock and an infinite number between interacting clocks. These sort of divergences do appear in the mathematical calculations and very specialised mathematicians know how to handle them. Particles are a lot less complex than we are so again we need to understand the reality of interaction we have been using visualisations again without sufficient care. Consider that if A produces C we don't have to insist that they go on interacting. This is where we can illustrate how very different the

28

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception interaction picture is to our conventional 3D visualisation. If two objects are not interacting then you could define the distance between them as infinite. There is a nod to the 'many worlds' view here. Effectively the objects are in different universes in this approach. We can be much less fancy and simply state that they aren't interacting so that there is no longer any definition of distance internally defined between A and C. The additional object approach to prevent divergences ( or better, to understand why divergences don't occur) is to allow the strings/wire in between A and B instead of a disconnected C. In fact this wire or string is still an object in its own right. You find people mix and match these sort of interpretations even in the scientific literature. Sometimes have intermediary particles and sometimes have connections which we may term bonds. It all seems a bit messy and far too complex for simple particles. We can have these ideas and create all sorts of structures but either approach logically diverges. Something is happening to the notion of distance if we abandon a visual model and rely instead on interaction to define what we mean by distance the problem of divergence is removed. What is traded for this advantage is the loss of a definitive notion of absolute distance which parallels the loss of the notion of absolute time. Relativity tells us we should expect this to be the case. Quite simply we are stating that the notions of space and time arise out of the process of interaction and specifically that KK fields (GR and EM) arise out of uncorrelated actions.

Consider the way we think about matter we have a hierarchy of equal truths that all claim reality. The diagrams below consider the multiplicity of realities of objects. Like the notion of truth if reality is not a single thing then it loses its meaning in some contextual relativism and as such, the notion collapses into meaninglessness.

29

31 July 2013

04_Visual Perception
q q
Objects and Nothingness - the absurdity of Scale We have a gluon pair (or triplet state) from the Standard model that in combination forms a nucleon. Im not sure if a gluon is a particle or a field. Nucleons are bound together by another field to form an atomic nucleus.

The atomic species so formed has an electron orbital structure.

This dictates how they are bound by electrons which we are again dualist about to form a crystal lattice.

M2 r1

Various lumps of condensed matter together form a mass. This mass will be attracted to another by a gravitational field.

m1+M2

Then externally we may arbitrarily consider two attracting masses as a single entity the mass of the solar system or just lumps of different materials on the surface of the earth. All the objects are masses but objects include other objects and therefore must include fields. We also know that there is mass energy equivalence over-riding this wrapping up of space.

30

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue Tricks in the tongue Physical systems and language share a strangely elusive character. Instead of solving problems we seem often to merely displace them. Attempts to deconstruct text, define words and meaning seem often to generate more words and greater uncertainty. You make a more refined clock and need something better as a reference to set the new clock to. The best clock still refers to something arbitrary. You keep improving theories and things but they get more complicated the better they get. You cannot attain perfection. The idea of a perfect machine such as a wheel that turns forever various forms of perpetual motion dont exist and we believe, for well tested reasons, cannot exist. Our notions of time and space arise from memory and perception and that seems a poor basis for understanding. Yet our perception is all we can possibly have. What then of the words we use to describe things? It that the same problem or a different one? If we think there is a theory of everything, we have an immediate problem. If there is this Unified Theory wouldnt we want to say it was perfect? Yet if it encompasses everything then it contains the imperfect and the plain wrong. Is there then a strange idea that Unified Theory would have to perfectly explain the imperfect; deterministically explain the random, perhaps? None of this is clear but it could just be a confusion of words. I could try to choose different words to describe the goal and deny that the concept of perfection is valid and be accused of evasion. To avoid getting completely tongue-tied and lost I need to resort to making assumptions to allow me to continue at all. I must think that if Im tied in knots then I am in error, misapplying some ideas and poorly expressing others. I may be able to save the situation by suggesting perfection is explicable as an abstract notion and not as something real. What words would constitute proof that this was so? There is a reasonable argument that the notion of time arises from material objects and nothing else. There is a reasonable argument that time exists

31

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue independently of matter in spacetime. It may be argued that time is abstract and immaterial but it nonetheless exists. You could also claim that spacetime is created by matter. It is true that these arguments are incompatible. In fact the only thing I know for sure is that there are incompatible arguments. Why is it we can have such contradictions? I can see that none of the terms - time, material, object or spacetime - are free of controversy. Incompleteness and illusiveness seem to be features of nature and language. I turn to a dictionary for the definition of a word but the dictionary explains the meaning with words. My preconception is that nature includes us and thereby it includes language. If you do not accept language is part of nature, then you may yet accept that language embodies the illusiveness of nature. There is a trick in the tongue that prevents absolute, perfect answers. We can state that there is an intrinsic problem in language that bars a direct approach to understanding in general let alone any notion of unification. The enormity of the task of wresting any coherent ideas about Unified Theory out of an understanding of language reminds me of a short story by Jorges Luis Borges called 'The Library of Babel' 1. In it he contemplates an infinite library which clearly possesses rules and has definite symmetry. There is the odd basic principle that seems to hold. As the library is infinite, every possible book exists. Somewhere there are true catalogues to the library but there are also an infinite number of false catalogues. To ascertain that you had found a true catalogue you would have to check it against all the other books, which is a futile, infinite task. It seems entirely possible that there are regions of the library which do not follow the rules or patterns of the one described by the narrator who is a librarian himself, living in the library and in some ways a part of the library himself. In response to this universe the librarians exhibit the reactions you would expect: studious hope, despair, and venal behaviour in turn. The hope and explorations of youth turn into disillusionment.
1

In the collection Labyrinths

32

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue

In this library it seems that every combination of works has already been written so that this universe has no need of authors. Attempts are made to eliminate books with false information but this too is in vain. It is a purposeless and unintelligible place. The very infinitude of the library and the unreliable permutations seem to make reading itself futile. Every statement has a contradictory match somewhere and it is impossible to say which books should be trusted. In an attempt to make sense of this place it is observed that the alphabet and punctuation are a finite set of marks and that the permutations are vast but necessarily finite. Within an infinite library there must therefore be sets of these permutations. This combined with the idea that there is ordering within the library, the narrator conjectures that the library must have cyclicity there could be an infinite number of copies of each book and each library section so that there is structural order yet an infinite expanse. It is a proposition that could be proved to be false if the cyclicity was found not to be true, but could not be proved to be true as the existence of cyclicity is itself not a proof of infinite cyclicity. This is the use of inductive logic in a doomed attempt to construct a consistent view of an imaginary world. Borges' story was written before the advent of the internet, but at a time when the amount of published work had already exceeded the volume anyone could read, let alone understand, in a lifetime. We suffer from information overload; we also find it hard to know what information to trust. If we see patterns in nature, we believe they are not patterns in noise within infinity, we seek meaning. Attempts to rationalise, generalise, use deductive and inductive techniques and use ideas about symmetry create yet more information but do not yield certainty. Indeed the belief in certainty has been abandoned by many. With this body of information it seems impossible that anything new can be said, and it feels as if the key to originality is not to have read the references 2. When authors construct an argument they will someday have an infinite pool of references to choose
2

Clearly this is not an original thought.

33

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue from, thus any thesis will be supportable through a selection of favourable quotations. It would be impossible to check all the references and we have no simple way of judging what is true from what is false. Misunderstandings are necessary and embodied in the elusiveness of understanding of nature and language. We can therefore conclude there is a symmetry between the difficulty of understanding nature and the difficulty of meaning in language. That symmetry may be useful if we can understand the tricks and as we hold to the First Premise we must then believe this to be so. For example I may quote 3 But neither Mill, nor Whewell, tracks this difficulty about language down to its sources. They both presuppose that language does enunciate welldefined propositions. This is quite untrue. Language is thoroughly indeterminate, by reason of the fact that every occurrence presupposes some systematic type of environment. and say this proves my point about language. But I neither agree with nor understand much in that book. If everything seems to have been said already then we are just reworking old ground, presenting permutations of the thoughts and writing of what has gone before. Borges library doesnt seem to get any new books, they are all there already. If we are expecting some book to contain all books we are surely misguided as that book would be of infinite size yet in an infinite library it would be there. You cant compress the entire librarys information into anything smaller than itself in a meaningful way. Infinity isnt a necessary condition for there being too much information to deal with. There is simply more information than we can possibly comprehend. We can state that there is an intrinsic problem of there being too much information, which we cannot undoubtedly rely on and this appears to be a problem for any unification programme. The First Premise
3

Whitehead, p12 Process and Reality, corrected version

34

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue is that Unified Theory exists, from which follows that it is singular, inclusive and intelligible. The corollary C3, the demand of intelligibility would be defeated by information overload if we do not adapt our system. The obvious route out of the dilemma is to state that Unified Theory does not hold all this information rather it explains how all this information can arise as a process, thereby compacting what we need to something manageable. Clearly we need to either add more constraints on what we mean by Unified Theory or at least qualify pC2 the all encompassing requirement because we need intelligibility. There is a symmetry to the idea of compacting information to the way in which we think and learn. The process of learning, acquiring understanding, illustrates the trouble we have by thinking compacting information will work. If you want to understand something complex, you have to first understand a simpler approximation. That simpler approximation must leave things out. In some ways you have to learn something false and then work up to what is true or nearer some perfect truth (which we may never reach). You observe or at least experience gravitational effects before you learn about Newton. You learn Newton before Einstein. In the case of gravitation the final blow is that as General Relativity is the mathematical expression of real phenomena, it is a precise symmetry of what you found hard to understand in the first place. In terms of understanding it is as unfathomable as the original problem, even though it is calculable in limited cases. It works, but remains mysterious. You climb some sort of philosophical ladder to reach a new understanding, throw it away as suggested 4, and then find yourself stranded with an unintelligible truth. If nature didnt play tricks all this would have been sorted out a long time ago. So we learn things partially in successive approximations and if we ever learn something fully it doesnt become simpler for having been fully learnt. We need to replace what we have learnt earlier with a new and more complex model. Yet the simpler models are often more useful. This
Or at least as suggested by Wittgenstein. The idea is that you use reasoning to eventually climb up to reach some conclusion and that conclusion is superior to the route taken, which can then be thrown away well thats how Id rationalise Wittgenstein anyway. The theoretical developments of GR and QM seem to be cases in point.
4

35

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue is confusing, but must be so trivially so. We can conclude that there seems to be an intrinsic problem in the process of learning that makes learning difficult and adaptive. We have to add a faulty learning process to the difficulties of information overload and the unreliability of information. In particular the problem is that the acquisition of information and the compaction of ideas seems to defeat corollary two the requirement of inclusiveness. Yet including the infinite library defeats corollary three the requirement of intelligibility. If we turn from the imagined world of Borges labyrinth to the world of physics we see that physical theories give philosophers extreme difficulty of interpretation and some like Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) and GR are exceedingly difficult to learn. The old Enlightenment ideal of characterising all of nature into one Unified Theory didn't die with the discovery of GR and QED, but it was revealed to be a lot harder. QED and GR are not only very hard to understand they are also mathematically incompatible. Independently they have a high degree of validity and therefore they cannot be changed significantly. You have to treat these theories with due reverence and it seems highly unlikely that you could make a more compact statement which would somehow combine them. So you have a real unification problem, just for these two theories, let alone the rest. In the early part of the twentieth century the other field theory in existence was electromagnetism. The tactic adopted from around 1925 therefore was to extend GR to make a Unified Field Theory which included electromagnetism 5. These theories carry the names of the original proposers and are thus called Kalusa-Klein theories. Certain aspects of these theories also seemed to indicate some prospect of including quantum

There is actually an apocryphal Cambridge tale about electromagnetism that illustrates some of the trouble. James Clerk Maxwell was giving a lecture on his theory of electromagnetism and one of the students fell asleep. After a short period Maxwell thumped the lectern, jolting the student awake. Do you understand the theory of electromagnetism? he thundered approaching him. Alarmed and off-guard the student replied Yes, yes I do, Sir. Well then, perhaps you would like to explain this theory to us all? After a pause the student replied, Im sorry, Sir, I cant. And why not? Err, Ive forgotten. Maxwell turned and walked back to the lectern. Gentlemen, he said, we have today witnessed a tragedy. The only person ever to understand electromagnetism has forgotten.

36

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue mechanics which was also emerging at this time 6. When QED was established in the following decades the task grew again. Successively, gauge theory, string theory and M-theory then appeared towards the end of the 20th Century and at the beginning of the 21st to model new discoveries from particle accelerators. Again the tactic in these theories is to include new phenomena by extension. The Standard Model is a very effective categorisation of a library of fundamental sub-atomic particles, but it is a model, it doesnt tell us much of the how or any of the why (if why is a meaningful question in this context). What we are presented with is unclear, unsatisfactory, highly complex and incomplete. As we have suggested, the trouble with extensional approaches is that the size of the theory gets too big; you generate very different and difficult theories and then try to embed them within one grand theory. If we cant understand the parts, how could we possibly understand the whole? If unification was claimed to have been achieved that way no one would understand it. So it would be of no utility maybe entertaining in some mystical way but useless. Indeed, even if we believe the Unified Theory exists, in setting out to look for it we really need to understand what we mean by the concept before we would know it if we fell over it. Some Columbus might discover, but I personally feel the need of an Amerigo Vespucci to tell me what it means. After all, surely the Unified Theory is a theory about everything and must talk of physics, all physics, but it must also talk of mathematics, language and philosophy too. It must be something that can be learnt and understood otherwise it could be of no value. It wouldnt tell me how to build a perfect clock but would tell me why I cant. The why may be limited to a set of axioms. Children go through a stage of repeatedly asking why and once drained of information you end up by saying It just is. And gradually we learn when to stop asking why? as we grow older. We can keep asking why of mathematical equations too but we dont seem to reach a satisfactory end. If everything is to be eventually reduced to a single axiom of unification that axiom
6

The two independent KK theories of Veblen and Flint, for example.

37

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue doesnt have a peculiar property of answering why but may rather disappointingly say It is thus. If what we expect of mathematics looks difficult, and accept that to meaningfully attain Unified Theory you have to unify mathematics, physics, philosophy and language then it appears to be a hopeless task. They are vast subjects containing endless unanswered questions. They do not compact. Also, if I say language, do I mean all languages? Certainly adding QED to GR is about as satisfactory as adding Cantonese to German. So perhaps we should just give up here and now and accept that it is all too much too big a beast, this unification. Suppose we quite like nature being a bit mysterious. Life without surprise or new, curious entertaining things is a pretty dull idea and then nature has a habit of being wilfully obscure and constantly surprising us. The suggestion that we thrive on that sort of stimulation and surprise would, to a neo-Darwinian, indicate we are so adapted because of the challenges of the anthropological environment. So, the reasoning goes, we have all become inquisitive risk-takers as this confers, or conferred, an advantage in survival 7. I dont know what neo-Darwinians really think, or if they even have an opinion on an anthropological origin of the desire for stimulation. I also dont know how you could test the validity of such a statement it is unprovable supposition. Whether true or hogwash I am able to construct theories that sound reasonable. It is language itself that allows such nonsense, if random words are strung together constrained only to adhere to the structural rules of language they play all sorts of games. The attempts to analyse language interpretation is, broadly speaking, conduced by applying logic and rationalisation. Rationalisation has a habit
7

This is a complete and inexcusable Aunt Sally.

38

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue of making the familiar dull in contrast to nature, which has a habit of providing welcome and unwelcome surprises. Rationalisation is reductive. Vitality and dullness may have a dialectical relation but I cant imagine using vitality to strive to attain dullness as being a happy ending. Analogously, working simply in order to accumulate sufficient wealth to do nothing doesnt really add up yet quite a few people do this to some extent at least. In formal language theories Naom Chomsky8 started the ball rolling with an attempt to analyse theories of language with a simple sentence and its permutations. The sentence he used was John ate a sandwich. One variant he chose not to analyse was A sandwich ate John. Instead of being nonsense, it is actually a humorous image. A whole science has grown in language theories the sciences expand rather than compact. Logic is problematic as formal logic, at least, needs certainty a perfect yes/no or true/false and is thus ill suited for the criteria already set. But then that analysis itself is surely just as susceptible to criticism. The plate forming figure 1 is a cartoon from the New Yorker (Rea Irvin 1929). The worker is puzzled, the policeman, the bell-hop, even the horse is utterly confused. The caption was a quote from Einstein: Everyone gradually began to accept that the states of space themselves are the final physical reality. Well, no they clearly didnt, and this statement doesnt seem to be absolutely true anyway. Having destabilised any notion of the absolute truth of final physical reality with Relativity, he also uses the term space rather than spacetime perhaps because he knows spacetime is a concept which is pretty hard to understand, let alone accept. I say 'destabilised' as relativity is a deterministic theory that allows different perceptions of measurement which is sufficiently close to saying that there is there is no underlying reality at all so that one is left in confusion. Language is a strange thing. The universe is a dynamic place and defies logic and rationalisation although logic and reasoning work to some extent.

Ref

39

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue

Nothing as esoteric as a quote from Einstein is needed to tell us that nature remains mysterious. And its not that were all so dumb that we just dont understand. There are inherent features in nature that cause obscurity. To recap, we have a set of horrendous problems. Part of the trouble is the need for information to enable understanding. Nowadays every subject area is so vast that it has become impossible to encompass but a fraction. If you look at an academic journal library you will appreciate that it is hopeless trying to keep up with the latest ideas. The mixed blessing of the internet also gives access to just about endless stuff, most of it drivel. Then there is radio, TV. We have an infinite library problem overload, unreliability and learning. The other trouble is the inherent feature in language and in nature generally which resists reductive analysis. To turn this into a positive observation we can identify the source of the second problem as one of the contextual dependence of information. To explain what I mean by the contextual dependence of information consider, for example, my use of the term nature. I havent even discussed what I mean by nature but I have used the term assuming that the reader will immediately understand my meaning. That is part of the point. The word nature is bound up in a context. When I say nature, you may put the context and associations of the universe, the way the universe works, laws of nature, nature programme, mountain walk or well known science magazine on the word. I cant be responsible for the way you think, but context needs to be given to make even the meaning of a single word at all clear. You need to understand the language, we have to communicate. But that communication isnt complete and isnt absolute because we must make assumptions about unrevealed context. There are mistakes and misunderstandings. Something is missing and perhaps needs to be missing for nature to work. We are part of nature. Our language is part of nature. If I attempted to define all the terms I use then what terms can I use to define them? That is a classic recursive chicken and egg type

40

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue problem. You would get nowhere, so you need to leave definitions that are axiomatic - that is, assumed self-evident - in meaning. You need to leave some things obscure. We live in a world where there is incompleteness, we live in an age when we doubt causality and probabilities have replaced false certainty. Somehow our language is wrong; even words in isolation do not hold their meaning. Combined to a phrase or sentence they assert, mislead. Deceptive images and misleading words. There is an intrinsic flaw in our thought and tongue that is usefully quite general. To understand nature its inherent tendency to remain obscure must be understood. The absolute meaning of words remains obscure because they can be used in different contexts. Information comes in a form defined incompletely by context. As we are all individuals our contexts vary, thus in communication misunderstanding is inevitable. Yet we can successfully reason with words to some extent because nature is partially ordered. In forming the theory we cannot avoid challenging accepted ideas. By way of example, even the starting point of asserting that we are just part of nature, part of the universe, is highly contentious for some. It is to say that there is nothing special about homo sapiens. Is that opinion or fact? If you were brought up to believe that the sun rotates round the earth and the earth rotates around you - so be it. You have a perfectly consistent and thoroughly unreasonable view of reality. The revolution of thought that is called the Copernican Revolution 9 can be thought of as based on the observation that calculations become very much simpler if we consider the sun as the stationary body in the solar system with the planets rotating around it. In other words the idea can be accepted as true because it is a simpler model than pre-existing ideas. You dont have to learn preCopernican (Ptolemaic) ideas to learn the Copernican system and as preCopernican ideas are more complex to calculate they are thereby redundant. In fact all that has happened in modern terms is that a choice of frame of reference to the earth gives a more complicated picture than
9 That there was a Copernican Revolution at all is actually rather unclear it appears to be modern revisionism.

41

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue the frame of reference to the sun. The reason that the Copernican frame of reference is the simplest is that the sun is by far the most massive body of the solar system (99.8%) so the sun easily wins the gravitational contest. Stating that the earth rotates around the sun is equivalent to stating that the sun is the more massive body. Note that Copernicus completed his initial exposition Commentariolus sometime before 1515 over 100 years before Newton was born. Heliocentrism was considered such a threat (I dont know why) that the Catholic Church only dropped the Commentariolus from its list of banned books in 1835. Were they right to ban it? It could be argued that the heliocentric view demotes humanity to insignificance but in fact it was common enough to think of man as humble and a mere part of nature, not separate from it, even in the medieval. Howsoever, it is very difficult to avoid challenging strongly held viewpoints, whatever is said. I cannot draw the parallels between the way language works and the way nature works without implicitly taking the view of inclusion. Indeed if I hold to belief in the existence of Unified Theory I certainly need to assume all is included within one framework. Notice that you need both ideas gravity and the simplification for the Copernican view to be compelling. One idea complements the other. We will see later that it turns out that the answer to unification is as different an interpretation of the way things are as Copernicus was to Ptolemy it has to be so because that is the essence of change. The power of rationalisation is that it condenses information and allows you to evaluate it and put it in context. Understanding and rationalisation allow us to anticipate, predict, decide and gain advantage. There is sufficient consistency in the results of tests that there are laws of nature that are not transient approximations, but actually tell us about unchanging processes; invariance within the dynamics. Strict rationalists 10 have jokingly invited those who do not believe in objective truth to come and try gravity from their 21st floor apartment, but actually objective truth is hard to pin
10

Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont

42

31 July 2013

05_Tricks in the Tongue down. Gravity is an objective truth, while its origin as a curvature of spacetime is something I cant directly experience so that I have difficulty in understanding it. Indeed I reject it. Perhaps though, I only think that I understand gravity as an objective truth because I undeniably experience it. Perhaps I am looking at things the wrong way. Perhaps we all are. We have to conclude compaction is not the answer. If we cannot compact information without loss then we can still generate complexity. Thus we can only save pC2 by noting that it is possible to generate systems which, because we have limited capacity, can no longer fully comprehend. The conclusion I am drawn to is that we are seeking process, not truths in information and seeking the process of the generation of information and context rather than cataloguing information. There seems to be an intrinsic flaw in language that, while making everything interpretable also makes it rich. That seems a powerful symmetry to the difficulties and richness of physical theory. We are forced to change pC2 and concede Unified Theory could only be all encompassing by defining the processes which generate all. So we have C2 Unified Theory describes all processes. As a language description it remains unclear what that actually means.

43

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane The art of the arcane The sleep of reason breeds monsters Goya I have reached a thoroughly unsatisfactory position. Instead of reaching definitions of time and space expressed in clear terms I have found that nothing is clear at all. Worse, the task of somehow establishing the basis of any unified approach has no clear foundation. Our reason sleeps. Language plays tricks. Tying down the elusiveness of language to make useable statements is to learn the art of the arcane. The arcane is either that venerated ancient wisdom guarded by the holders of the key to the unknown or insufferable hogwash designed to dupe the gullible. The arcane provides a strategy for dealing with and presenting the unknown while engendering a sense of completeness. The arcane is that which requires a secret knowledge, protected further by being difficult or impossible to understand. We all have our limitations, so how can we, or indeed should we, resist the arcane? The arcane is an enemy of rationalism that rationalists abhor, but all things have a capacity limit of knowledge, information or what you will including rationalists. Attempts to form absolute, complete systems of thought have all failed and, because these systems have not included the ability to approach the necessity of misunderstanding, they all had to fail. We have to deal with the arcane because of our inclusiveness premise. It sounds impossible to encompass the unknowable. Rather than statements being true or false we generally find statements are either tautological or implicative. If they are implicative they are not true and if tautological they tell us nothing. The art of the arcane is to know when to stop asking questions and just believe while recognising the limits of that belief to realise that we are all caught in a trap the arcane trap of limitation and that constraint applies to all systems including the supposed Unified Theory. For example, if I seemed to reach the conclusion that gravity is an observed fact because I experience it, then again I am misled. I continually learn and unlearn. Why so? If we use the image of a falling apple to convey the idea of Newtonian gravitation then Einstein used the tale of a painter who survived falling from a 44 31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane roof. The painter said he experienced nothing as he fell; the impact with the ground was the problem. Without restraint of matter holding us up we are in freefall, we are weightless and experience nothing. In the potentially disastrous situation of unrestrained uniform acceleration under gravity I dont experience gravity as a force. I experience nothing. I experience Newtonian gravity when there is opposition to it and deduce gravity exists. In the Newtonian mantra I experience a balancing force. I deduce there is a gravitational force because of the resistance to it not the thing itself. The very idea of gravity as a force loses meaning in General Relativity and in reflection is only implied in the Newtonian model. The arcane has advantages. Strange, cruel, unforeseen happenings are capped off. The religious will say it is some gods will; the Bayesian rationalist will call it a freak or random event. We can psychologically protect ourselves through the arcane. If I dont trust what Im told, how do I learn? To keep doubting is a dead end. If I learn, I must organise what I learn into a system of language, thought and calculation. To learn I have to start with belief. To get through life we need to simplify, have tenets in a philosophy or religion in order to build a defence and an accommodation of what we do not understand. Even in the secular world of business we are expected to toe the company line have an absolute belief in a vision or mission statement. Life is easier if you toe the line. Selectively forget and believe. In order to protect the social environment a severe deviation from expected norms is a sin which will attract punishment. We call it crime or heresy. In the same way as a degree of stability is necessary for the individual, a degree of stability is necessary for the cohesion of a sect or society. The new therefore has connotations of sin unless innovations are restricted to set limits wherein they reenforce the status quo. In any case, the capacity for innovation is dictated by learning and experience, which has its own limits and controls, and innovation happens within a context or environment.

45

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane Somehow, perhaps out of necessity, there is a propensity to innovate beyond the set bounds. We observe and compare. Even if you hold to the position that everything is some god's will, the observation of what we loosely call facts elucidates processes which will gradually build an understanding of how things work and this cannot be controlled with prior information or belief. You may still call it some gods will, the atheist will argue about that, but you will agree about the observation. We interact, and by so doing learn. As we learn we contest and augment a process of continuous change but building a system of learning in the process. We are also not constrained there is a freedom to think or imagine anything, even though, as already mentioned, the consequences of any outward expression of this do vary depending on the society in which we live. We also mustnt exclude the case that an innovation could be nonsense and many new ideas are indeed nonsense. Howsoever belief and innovation are in conflict. If I believe something to be true or false with internal information I can say that the situation is analytic. I can have an absolute standpoint. If I dont have all the information internally I can call a situation synthetic implying I am relying on external confirmation. But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statement simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith. 1 Indeed I can see that a categorisation of situations, statements or information packages generally into analytic or synthetic types is not the only possible categorisation. I could instead choose to call truths provisional, accepted or objective. Provisional and accepted could be forms of synthetic truths and an objective truth could be synonymous with an absolute or analytic truth. We know there is a tick in the tongue. You can end in declaring analytic statements tautologies and the synthetic implicative or alternately abandoning the synthetic/analytic distinction and declaring truth to be a continuum of probability
1

The Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine

46

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane with much work you have little gain. This pattern of dissolution of categorisation and the quantum/continuum dilemma is very general. Nonetheless, in any system of belief there is a set of principles which is taken as absolute. A set of axioms. That is not an analytic stance or not quite so as in declaring something as absolute we are always just making an assertion. On top of these principles a system is constructed which elaborates on the absolutes by inference and induction 2. From an axiomatic premise we generalise, combine, categorise and use symmetry to form a system, be that a religion, political dogma, philosophy, scientific, semantic or mathematical theory. Language is the medium of all these systems. Because language is intrinsically inexact and interpretable it has layers of abstraction so ambiguities and contradictions are inevitable. The whole is not a complete whole. The axioms of thought and language dont produce an analytic framework. Yet the creation of a framework of belief is thus a creative, innovative process and that framework has hierarchical characteristics. Belief is created through innovation but then belief turns against innovation. Why so? There is a category of innovation termed bid'a in Islam, which is variously interpreted but in general is taken as both a restriction on what constitutes valid enquiry and the categorisation of what Christians would call heretical innovations things you just shouldnt think, do or even try to do. This can be abused as a way of rejecting awkward data from experiments and observations that dont fit with a particular world view of someone in power but set that aside. The fundamental aspect is that because we all have belief systems, and need belief systems to live by, we must strive to control change in that belief system. Innovation and belief are antithetical once a belief is formed.

I would say induction is always synthetic, not analytic, which isnt absolutely conventional. I would say an analytic process is one which is a deterministic reversible mapping. An analytic process with this definition doesnt add new ideas; it fills in the space of ideas at a level. Consequently the definition of a synthetic process in contrast brings in new information or reduces information and is therefore not a simple reversible mapping it could be a projection, for example. The synthetic/analytic distinction then reduces to the implicative/tautological distinction and as such is itself arcane. What about mathematics then? You do generate complex constructs by the development of theorems based on axioms. Yet this too turns out to have unavoidable pathologies. We study this later.

47

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane You cant get away without a belief-system. One interpretation of Nihilism is to hold that there is no purpose to anything, and therefore rules are meaningless - so the point of view is that there is no constraint on action yet no point in acting. Nihilism holds to the point of view of no belief being valid, but is thereby a belief system in itself. This inherent contradiction limits the number of adherents to this point of view. We must conclude that belief cannot be avoided. Philosophers might say belief is an ontological necessity without belief there is no being (or they may go wild in an indignant rage at the suggestion, you never know). Indeed one could reverse this and say you must have being before you can have belief. (Which again falls into the arcane trap of tautology.) Language allows these contradictions to be easily formed. Innovation is to some degree antithetical to belief systems because belief systems cannot be very flexible and accommodate any suggestion or again they would not constitute anything. Religions must defend themselves, so that while we may be uncomfortable with concepts such as heresy and bida they are necessary elements of belief which apply as much to a scientific belief as they do to religion. I introduced the notion of the First Premise as a kind of working principle. It isnt a rational tenet but an objectification of a stance which is debatable to establish a Modus Vivendi for doubters. If I decided that there wasnt any Unified Theory Id give up. On the other hand, if I declare its existence without proof Id be more of a fool than I am. I have the First Premise that there is such a theory, so I continue and hope to suspend the disbelief of the sceptic. I would call that pragmatic rather than rational. It would be amusing to debate whether such an approach would be called scientific, particularly if we termed it irrational pragmatism. The interpretation of Unified Theory will have the characteristics of a belief system and must also be able to describe belief systems, but Unified Theory itself, as with physical theory generally, is not a belief system it exists independently of us 3. If it is the final theory then it will understand innovation but actually be very restrictive on it too.

i.e. they are understood not created.

48

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane Let us look at the interaction of the notions of innovation and belief. Suppose there has been some innovation which conflicts with a belief system. The people who adhere to this belief system then have the choice of incorporating the heresy or denying it. The determinant in this choice is multifactorial. Is disproof easy within the belief system? Does the heresy challenge basic tenets or just modify their extrapolations which are the subject of theological or academic debate? How powerful is the proposer of the innovation? Is there a change in circumstances that is generally known necessitating revisionism (e.g. AIDS and the use of barrier methods)? Are the heretical thoughts so supported by observation that opposition is perverse? There is a hierarchy being created as a result of a rational decisionmaking process. It is a natural process. Is this a logical and strictly rational process? Consider the expression if there is an argument between rhetoric and logic, rhetoric always wins - we are not convinced by the logic of an argument, we are convinced by a combination and blend of a number of factors. Rhetoric must appeal to accepted norms, so a logical argument contesting accepted norms and promoting an innovation must be very forceful and must use rhetoric to win through. Logic is incomplete and always contestable. It only works as a weapon of rhetoric. So it is actually much more about an argument than logic. An innovation must have a relationship to existing belief for it to be effective, otherwise the innovation can be deflected or ignored. The innovation must have sufficient contextual relation to norms to be relevant and successful. That too seems natural. That innovation can ever succeed is due to the arcane the interpretability and incompleteness of belief systems makes them open to change. The adoption of an idea does not entirely fall under rational logic a series of events made it seem a good idea at the time. If innovative ideas have a difficult time being accepted we can say that in terms of the systematics of belief it is natural that this must be so. You cannot have innovative activity and stability at the same time. If I want to translate these observations into words that can be used in a physical theory I can say that innovation has a primitive of change and belief has a primitive of stability. Ill be more precise about what I mean by a primitive shortly, but we note that change 49 31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane and stability are antithetical and this premise is symmetrical to the situation of innovation and belief. Religions, philosophies and 'isms' reject doubt to defend cohesion, and attempt closure by declaring the base propositions and the arcane results of their elaboration incontestable 4. Belief is a system attribute that entails a concept of a barrier and the term barrier and its sense of use is the same in physics. We need a system of belief to function and it is much easier to destroy than construct these systems. We have fragile modus operandii and those who attack the underpinning of belief create a void which will be re-filled. The collapse of a belief-system always has individual and societal consequence. To regain stability there must be a new belief. Western secular science from around 1900 to 1940 comprehensively undermined the philosophy and religions that had been constructed over thousands of years with the weapon of logical positivism 5. However logical positivism failed to replace belief as it collapsed under the weight of its conclusion in incompleteness and the void has been filled with a strange combination of randomistic notions we lump into the term Postmodern. You could say that humanity needs to believe but that twentieth century knowledge and understanding has undermined that belief without offering a substitute. You therefore reach the critical point where twentieth century objective truths are being rejected because they undermine our ability to retain a cohesive system of thought 6 which is a very significant failure for a system of philosophy. A conflict between the arcane and the rational. The rationalists, however, dont escape from the arcane trap. Richard Dawkins may rail against religion but cannot escape the systematics of belief. His science is not a complete system and much remains
4 5

I was going to write infallible, but it sounds like the brand-name of an incontinence product.

Logical Positivism is the creed where a proposition is meaningless unless there is empirical verification. This gets tricky as verification is the same old true/false categorisation which isnt always analytic. The creed should therefore restrict itself to this sub-class of problems. As all systems contain axioms, which by definition are not susceptible to empirical verification the sub-class of problems is the empty set. The strength of scientific enquiry is based upon faith in measurement process invariants. It is a belief system, but based on objective truths. The framing of this into logical positivism is a step too far logical positivism isnt of itself an objective truth, and scientists who rely on it have do not escape the arcane. Logical Positivism collapsed in the late 1940s. 6 How widely any scientific ideas have ever really spread is debatable. Do 5% of the global population have a reasonable understanding of scientific rationalism?

50

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane unknown. His system is based on axioms that cannot be proved and the unprovable is anathema to the philosophy of science. Also, on what is respect for secular professions otherwise based except on their knowledge of the arcane and their manipulation of the relevant axioms and illustration of context? We admire their explorations of the unknown, or at least we trust their teaching of what we do not know. Further, religious belief itself has a rationalist origin albeit one that is as a whole (but not entirely) at odds with science 7. Dawkins frustration is that what he knows to be fact (the non-arcane of science) in his mind reduces religion to a fraudulent social control system. His view of science fails to identify either the positive necessity of belief or that science is historically indebted to religion, or yet that science is itself a belief system. Forgive me if I seem dismissive but while our understanding of natural processes has radically grown over the past 300 or so years it isnt complete. We have already said enough about information overload. We have a limited capacity. The limit on knowledge alone means that at some level scientific knowledge becomes arcane. We have to take things on trust. Science purportedly has the advantage of having an accepted change process and therefore can accommodate new ideas and facts. It has a policy of accepting that observations are more important than preconception. For example, theories must be consistent with observed facts and, to be adopted, new theories must either explain some known phenomenon or predict something new which is later found. Science hasnt extinguished religion because science is incomplete and hard to understand and it has no message of hope or consolation within that unintelligibility. The objects of science, after all, exist independently of us and are independent of our interpretation and our being. Thereby science can be interpreted (incorrectly) to be in conflict with humanity and belief itself. Science isnt a being or single entity it cannot be called good or bad as a whole or in part. It can only be well or badly applied.

7 The Consolio of Boethius, written circa AD540[check] whilst awaiting having his brains bashed out by a Goth, has amazing and curious relevance to current scientific debate and thinking. Obviously the logic goes off the rails in places if it didnt I wouldnt be writing this now. The anthropological analysis of Dame Mary Douglas is a fascinating route to study in this vein[REF].

51

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane I am therefore seeking to establish belief as an attribute of natural systems, and this is perhaps the most contentious thing I have asked you to agree about so far. I argue that we need belief because we are caught in the arcane trap. More contentious yet I argue that, in the same way that we are in an arcane trap, systems, all systems, have the same limitations. Perhaps it becomes more palatable if I substitute the word identity for belief? Let us turn to looking at the details of an argument process. In terms of process I have a first automatic response to the idea hard-wired, synaptic, instinctive 8. For example, an idea conflicts with what I have been taught and have accepted in class. I then begin to rationalise already from a prejudiced position. My objections are not ordered in strength, they are ordered in sequence of retrieval from memory. As I proceed I look for detail. At what level will an argument run out of objections and fail, or will the argument overcome all the objections raised and change the belief system? The process is like a projectile breaking through layers and the endpoint is determined by how far the projectile penetrates. The Western approach is to call their approach scientific and rational by stating the alternative approach is not, and claim superiority because of that stance. Is that justified or just our own rhetoric? Thus standing back from an argument we see what is happening is an interactive process, and that process is very like a complex collision experiment in physics. Serious arguments impact belief. As the collision proceeds I have to reveal substructure to develop the challenge. In an argument, each side will use data from memory. The chemical analogy is of separate systems reacting and thereby we have a symmetry to binding energy in the change of belief/identity. Both chemicals are stable pre-reaction as they are separate systems they express a standpoint/belief/opinion/identity but an incomplete closure and again converting that statement into the language of physics, and thereby have the

Following Kanneman

52

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane property of a finite binding energy which is exposed when the chemicals are mixed and react. The point of this exercise is it gives me a way of introducing the trap that the arcane springs. Physical laws are about process and the way we use language displays those process properties too. When developing an argument we use language but actually need to look within language for process commonality. The argument and its outcome are to an extent of only secondary interest. This is a stance sometimes utilised in formal logic. In particular for Unified Theory we are looking at the invariant processes of reasoning, common to all languages. Hence a collapse by thus arguing how language is unified with physical laws through process I suddenly appear to not be speaking about language at all. By now we should be comfortable with that; the transition (we could call it the change of state process, or waveform collapse) is to be expected. Scientists may argue that their position is at variance with belief systems in that they are always open to enquiry. There doesnt appear to be any truth in this. Do scientists really mean that they are always open to enquiry? A perpetual enquiry is presumably towards something - some truth and on the way to this truth as the belief system grows it must become less and less open to question, building barriers as the body of understanding grows. So the state of knowledge must be thought of as a transient state and when science is fully validated the enquiry will be at an end. You would then have an absolute belief that resists all attempts at change and rejects all enquiries except for teaching and learning purposes. Somehow we anticipate a clarification of our view of the world and that the body of understanding will then collapse down to new principles. If it is somehow shown there is still a defect in scientific understanding then if that defect can overcome the greater barrier, the growth cycle of the arcane begins again. Such a process may or may not terminate in an ultimate theory which contains this progression itself. It could only terminate if the final understanding includes the arcane. Alternatively scientists could claim a superior philosophical basis to their belief. Some scientists may say that logical positivism is the correct philosophical doctrine 53 31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane as it imposes empirical verification. It should then be an empirically verifiable belief system. We have already seen the trouble with the notion of verification, and furthermore what on earth does verifiable belief mean? We can disprove Aristotles theory of motion by measurement and verify Newtons the same way we have a valid belief in the applicability of Newtons second law because it is a verifiable process rule. These particular sort of facts are invariants which are phenomenological. That makes it hard to state any linkage between belief and physical law. Science developed as a secular discipline. It may have had origins couched in religion but basically in the broad sense of the word science is utilitarian and empirical an understanding of how things repeatably work. Process. Within that limit it develops outside the sphere of belief the results of measurement. Science doesnt need belief, we do. The measurements and observations act rather like starting propositions. Further measurements and observations are then applied to the synthetic constructs. As observations and measurements are not controlled by us they are therefore hard to contest. We form a scientific belief system using observable, repeatable facts. As scientific belief has grown it has become a proxy for religion and expressing doubt about its propositions in turn has become a heresy. It is all very predictable. The measurements are fine, the process fine but as soon as we interpret and impose a belief system it goes wrong. Worse, we have concluded that any belief system has to rely on a set of starting propositions which are always open to challenge as they have to be assumed true the axioms. The system that is built on these undecidable propositions seems to become less and less secure as the development elaborates and this difficulty seems inherent in the structure of ideas and language itself. And the final output of a belief system? An accommodation with the arcane. So we have a set of assertions which are combined through reasoning to create a system which, because of the inexact nature of the process, is built on sand. I take a second system with a different structure and its own arcane characteristics, bring it together with the first and see them argue each other to pieces over what they think is right, wrong, true or false. We can now see that it is the process within 54 31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane that counts, not the argument itself, and in particular it is the process invariants that we are really interested in, as that is where Unified Theory resides. Thus the trick of the tongue, the art of the arcane and the slight separation of knowledge and understanding. But if we are part of nature and unified theory is all encompassing then belief is part of that theory and is a process in itself. Language in use has a structure, but all languages rely on the same process invariants. Not an alphabet, not words, not grammar. This is the intrinsic flaw of reason and the origin of the arcane. You may note my use of analogy, talking round ideas. That is because a direct approach with reason always fails because of the systematics we now begin to understand. You somehow have to navigate within language using language. I have to use language to try and expose what lies beneath and therefore there is also a tendency to recursion for example, to write about writing as I do now. We have concluded that most important thing is to look for invariants those facts that remain true no-matter who looks at it. It has been said that GR is nothing but a statement of invariance, expressed mathematically and put into words as the Principle of Equivalence. In QM we look for observables. In suggesting that belief is something that seeks to be invariant, I am drawing parallels to self-sustaining structures in language and physics. In language Descartes statement 'I think therefore...'. I know that I think and that I reason I am, I doubt; I believe, and when I cease to believe something collapses. We have to impose a belief system because we have limited capacity and require stability. That does not give that belief system any status of truth value. What works for science isnt perpetual doubt but the elucidation of process. Process invariance appears to be a universal objective truth. There is no validity in asking what that means in terms of philosophy and religion. We live in a middle-ground underpinned by assumptions and limited by belief bounded above and below, trapped in the arcane. In language the meaning of 55 31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane words form the axioms and their interpretation is in context. Mathematics is built on axioms and constructs theories that may be proved. Physics has laws that may be used to construct further theories. We exist and are built of matter and have systems of belief 9. Debates about what is true or false, right or wrong occur within this process dynamic 10. Understand the process; understand that and you will understand all. Many arguments are like clocks in a room all declaring their time; none true, none false, but irreconcilable. You can rationalise about the merits of their function, decide to trust one more than the other to be synchronised with the one at the train station, but these debates are irrelevant to understanding and in them there is no path to objective truth. In terms of seeking the Unified Theory we therefore see these systematics as much more fundamental than the actual beliefs themselves. Unified Theory should seek that which is invariant. We are collecting candidates along the way, and need to add to the collection before moving on. Before doing so we need to address the Goya quotation. The sleep of reason breeds monsters. It would be possible to jump to the conclusion that the unifying theme of maths, physics and language lies in commonality of invariant process, and that process is reason itself. Highly utopian. We all daily experience the casual uses of the idea of reasonable and unreasonable behaviour, the rejection of reason. The particular point is that reason in the sense of a logical argument is only a technique of interaction there are much more unsubtle forces at play that pay no heed to reason. The structure of reason is the structure of logic and the extent to which logic plays in daily life and conflict is minimal. Also reasoning and reasonable behaviour are very different things. If we were tempted to think that reason unifies then think again.

Whether monist or dualist in standpoint these things are objective the connection has been debated endlessly [REF]. 10 Quote on Ramsays principle here.

56

31 July 2013

06_Art Of The Arcane So we are trapped. We have starting assumptions in the assumed meaning of words, in mathematical and logical axioms. This puts a lower bound on knowledge. Above we have the problem of overcapacity of information, consistency and verification. And these too are intractable. We have problems in the dynamics of the growth of ideas the hardening position of belief against innovation. We have the problem too of truth and irreconcilability of contradictory beliefs.

57

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason Chapter 7: Measurement, Interaction and Reason

When what goes up May go sideways It often leads to trouble For as what comes down To the ground The air may make what wobble Adapted from a remark by Milton Babbit

Usually, and perhaps extraordinarily, no matter what belief system people have they agree about measurement. There are notable, if odd, exceptions of course. Galileo had considerable trouble with the Inquisition a number of whom concluded that the devil was in the lens of his telescope and therefore he, or any other user of the instrument, was fooled by the devil into thinking that the planets had moons, breaking the harmony of the spheres. It is interesting that this objection was fairly quickly dropped quite how the unacceptable conclusions were absorbed and accommodated by the Inquisition I do not know. A new observation was in conflict with accepted truth and something had to give way. Normally the pantomime of it doesnt because I say so compared to look you can see it does ends with acceptance of the observed. Generally if data are reproducible they become accepted as a fact. Faith in measurement arises out of the reproducibility of the result independent of the opinion of the observer. That which is invariant can be pretty securely described as true. Firstly there is some object being measured. Secondly there is a result. So far we are all in agreement. Then we say it is true or that something has been shown to be false. It is at this interpretation stage that things get out of hand, because the interpretation of measurement is where the accommodation to pre-existing belief occurs. We need interpretation to fit the results of a measurement in context and to then put this evidence into a reusable generalised form. Specifically we need to assimilate the results into 58 31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason our personal framework of rules and laws. Thus if a measurement supports a belief it is readily accepted and strengthens that belief. Results that cannot be accommodated are termed anomalies and paradoxes things we set to one side. The transition from measurement to accepted fact is therefore not straightforward or unbiased but it is a process. The instinct is to minimise the change in our belief system to accommodate new facts. Self-preservation is a necessity. You may notice that salesmen sometimes use a staircase technique incremental arguments that you will agree to to move your opinion round to buying their product. The success of this relies on the plasticity of the opinion of the customer if you wont simply buy you may yet be persuadable by increment. In maths the malleability would be modelled as a potential barrier functional the resistance changes with the strength (or coherence length) of the interaction. A mechanical analogy could be trying to drive a soft nail in a hard wall. If you hit too hard the nail bends but with many gentle taps it may go in. Thresholds are widely found as critical factors in characterising system behaviour transitia in particular. We can accept opinions change when measurements or arguments are repeatably shown to yield the same result. But why do we accept things as true on the basis of trust alone? As a simple example, one may learn at school about how humans light fires without lighters or matches. If you have actually tried this you will know just how difficult it is to do. I convince myself that I am making heat through the rubbing of wood on wood and term that phenomenon friction, but I confess I have never actually got a fire going this way. I have therefore been a witness to a phenomenon 1 and am convinced of the validity of the method though it is thankfully of no use to me. I rely on evidence from others which I havent personally examined in detail. Ive neither witnessed nor been able to demonstrate the phenomenon myself. I am prepared to take my teachers word for it because people surely lit fires
1

i.e. things heat up when rubbed together due to friction.

59

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason somehow, and I think there are many people who still have to use this method. Crucially it accords or has a resonance with my pre-existing world view. If I am forced to say whether it is true or false I would go for true. To me this idea is not in conflict with my world view and can therefore be accepted on trust. I wouldnt say it was an objective truth, nor yet a relative truth. I would probably term it an accepted truth. I pigeon-hole the concept among my accepted truths. Unlike a measurement where I have enough information to unequivocally agree with one thing instead of another I qualify my notion of truth to a more subjective level according to my confidence about the missing information. I automatically play fast and loose with what strictly is an absolute term something is either true or false surely, but I actually find it more natural and helpful to see even truth in a hierarchical way. Degrees of truth rather than binary logic. This sounds like a probabilistic approach but this is not so it is a question of limitation and pragmatism. Unless you are determined to deny what is repeatably observed (which was the initial position of the Inquisition toward Galileo) because you cannot have experienced everything, your belief system must be open to change. It is undeniable that 'all that has been observed' is outside the scope of experience of an individual. We have a growing understanding and interpretation as we gain experience, and what we choose to add to belief depends on previous accumulation (our growing resistance to new ideas), and whom we trust for information outside our own direct experience. We can be sure of doubt and sure of change, and sure that for all our reasoning what we say will be open to contradiction. We see there is an innate tendency to divide things into categories, usually opposites like true and false, a tendency termed by Richenbach 2 as a disastrous need for certainty. Thus we have another process decision
2

Hans Richenbach The Rise of Scientific Philosophy 194?

60

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason making which is obviously related to categorisation. We need to act, we need to decide, and of course we want certainty. Generalising somewhat, the one process chain we may follow is to categorise, then weigh the probabilities (Bayesian) between the categories then to decide (perhaps binary). We begin to see Bayesian processes as a subset of categorisation methods 3. The decision true or false is a process; the absoluteness of the decision may be elusive. As scientific rules evolve they get more complicated and specific. Philosophical systems similarly evolve. In science, experiments are used to try and test the validity of new rules. In philosophy the measure comes from criticism and the intellectual identification of inconsistencies, contradictions and the application of logical tests. Scientists are generally comfortable with the idea of 'facts' with some statistical measure of the level of certainty. Truth with error bars. Philosophical problems nowadays seem with good reason to have difficulty even with the ideas of fact, and logically true or false measures. If truth is without doubt then it shouldnt have error bars, should it? One particular difficulty is that in order to refute a complicated argument you feel you must understand that argument in order to do so. If the proposition defies your understanding as a whole (even because it seems a preposterous argument) you need to seek contradictions and mistakes within to attempt to undermine the thesis. The rationalist toolkit struggles to defeat mumbo-jumbo. Indeed it often fails. Perhaps the most important thing is the choice of whom to trust to give acceptable data what we have witnessed ourselves is easier, though not without significant problems based as it must be on sense perception. We nonetheless have faith in things to act the same way they did before when we repeat an action. If it doesnt work the next day (like my car) I seek causes. I surmise that something has changed. I decide and rationalise, find this useful (sometimes). If I experience consistency of behaviour I establish
3

See texts on Categorisation Theory for details and background.

61

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason rules. I come to rely on experience to get things done and to predict behaviour. When I am surprised I seek a rational explanation and amend my viewpoint so that I dont get surprised by the same thing again. After all A trend is a trend until it bends. 4 Our measurements only apply to prior experience and extrapolation is less secure. So I learn by experience and the sum of that experience underpins a world view. I often get it wrong nonetheless. I trust process but continually evaluate. I believe in reasoning. Yet reasoning isnt compulsory and surely imperfect. We find the universe the same it is structured even to the extent we can say it has laws, but also has disorder, entropy and chaos elements of unreason. Our reasoning processes work, but only partially not, of course, perfectly. We must believe in the effectiveness of reasoning processes as again necessitates a methodology of constructing a world view and, faulty as it may be, that can only be done by reasoning. The reasoning we are used to works particularly well for machines. That is so because the variety of reason we use for analysing machines is the same as that used for building machines so the fact that it works is less compelling than it seems at first as evidence for the pre-eminence of what we might call classical reason. Another effect to consider is how to avoid new ideas collapsing to a repetition of old ones. As in Borges library, there is bound to be something very close or even identical to any ideas put forward even if we are unaware of the preexisting reference. For example about 30% of the new patent applications made every year are actually fully anticipated in the published, prior art and are thereby invalidated. You build an argument and then compare it with others the similarity or contradiction of the argument against some other causes a kind of reaction that reduces the impact of the statement you thought was original. This disintegration of an argument is a form of waveform
4

Ronald Burgess

62

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason collapse an argument built to reach a conclusion which when reached may suggest nothing new. How about some absolute mathematical equations we need that for a satisfactory theory, dont we? Unless physics is described and translated into maths it cannot be numerically tested for validity. There are many areas of physics which collectively describe all the various phenomena ever experienced, but admittedly with varying degrees of success. There are many physical laws and theories of great utility but in the end what they mean or why they are as they are is unclear. As you come to expect, they are unintelligible in proportion to their success. Tests of physical theories tend only to show if we get the maths right the equation fits the data theories are not so useful or definitive for the interpretation of what is actually going on as that is an extrapolation beyond the actual measurement. The case in point is that even arriving at the simple position of believing in the effectiveness of reasoning I am actually following Descartes well worn statement I think therefore I am. Thinking is about considering and measuring reasoning and experiencing. I think therefore I am entails a belief in reasoning and putting faith in measurement. Indeed it is a more concise statement. It is worth looking at the Descartes formula a little more closely. It is a form of statement that is very important in philosophy and physical theory. In his famous Discourse 5, Descartes developed a proposition that all he was sure about was that he doubted things before he developed the much more useful 'I think therefore...' formula. The difference between All I know is that I doubt and I think therefore I am is very significant and fairly straightforward. The formula of continued doubt is
5

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting The Reason, And Seeking Truth In The Sciences

63

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason unsatisfactory as it endlessly rejects, building nothing. I think therefore I am has a generative quality an axiom on which a philosophy can be built. The statement is almost a tautology being and thinking are nearly the same thing but there is a slight difference and thereby elicits enquiry. Compare this to Newtons first law of inertia 6: Law 1: Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed. Law 1 has been ironically reduced to A body moves with the same velocity until it doesnt. 7 An object travels along at constant velocity until something happens and the cause of the change we term a force. It is almost tautological but the difference from a pure tautology gives the Law its power. The Law demands you look for an origin of change in a force and thereby categorises an external effect on an object it generates ideas. All I know is that I doubt doesnt have that generative quality it is a dead-end. Now I need to go back to the issue of whether or not the idea that reasoning is an effective but imperfect process of measurement generates ideas beyond I think therefore I am or can simply be stated to be entailed by that statement (i.e. nothing else is needed to generate this statement). I think that so far it adds nothing new, but the discussion is about processes in nature. In other words what is different is that this discussion isnt restricted to human reasoning. I seek prevention of collapse through generalisation. If we extend the observation further, human faith in measurement is exceptional the objects of physics dont reason in a human way, but they do follow rules. Actually the characteristics of an object and the laws they obey amount to one and the same thing. The whole notion of objects following laws falsely
6

Isaac Newton, The Principia, A new translation by I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman, University of California press, Berkeley 1999 7 Paul Davis Philosophy and the new physics

64

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason separates the object from the generality of a process which then is treated as if it has independent existence which it does not. Physicists say systems obey laws so there is a process that is followed but we would struggle to define that process as reasoning, as reasoning is associated exclusively with intelligence. So the objects physics talks about must have a function of perception, decision making and reaction in some limited sense. There is a process of interaction. That physics works indicates a separation from other types of fact. These are objective truths associated with process so should rationally be separate from the dialectic of doubt (although physical laws are reached through dialectic processes of reasoning). There is a definition more fundamental than reasoning or doubt which pertains to physical objects. This is a kind of hierarchy of words, each level of the hierarchy performing a symmetric process. Reasoning at the top, doubt more primitive and perhaps interaction underlying both. In seeking to generalise the notion of thinking I assert that the term doubt is a simpler notion than reason but we need something more fundamental such as interaction to include physical processes. I seek a more primitive form of thought and reason that I can apply to physical theory which also applies in mathematics and philosophical language. All I know is that there are interactions is perhaps a suitable first adaptive mutation. We can stand back a little and observe that what is going on is that we have an interesting effect of the growth of notions from assertions, and their subsequent test and collapse, to contend with. The second mutation is to depersonalise the statement. My existence does not affect physical law. So I end up with the simple statement There are interactions as a primitive form of Descartes statement which I seek to apply and develop. I can also note that I cannot doubt that there are interactions though I can doubt that I know what they are. The generative quality of that statement takes us forward.

65

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason The other observation to conclude on is that the laws of physics and the development of arguments themselves seem to have some parallel this is general and abstract at this point. We will return to this later. The evidence I have for there being interactions is that without interaction there is no sense information to observe. There may be much we dont sense, but if objects do not interact then their existence is moot. So we are led to consider another process type change. Our experience tells us that things change. As it is a shared experience by everyone we can agree that things change. Transitia are successfully described in scientific rules about the likelihood of a final outcome given an initial condition 8. These rules are generally described in the literature as Bayesian or probabilistic processes. When water changes to ice there is a dynamic process around the changeover temperature so that underlying the seemingly simple freezing process there is a microscopic game of chance thought to be going on. The opposite is obvious too; ice melts, structures collapse. When successfully challenged, views can radically change. This collapse is also a physical process which is more than entropy. Dissolution and the burning of books are simple chemical and thermodynamic processes, but what is much more interesting is the simplification of concepts by unifying ideas about structure and processes. The formation of a new order. We must recognise reasoning as a dynamic process: the transitia of ideas through use of hierarchies of language is a dialectical process. The process of reasoning has a number of methods. For Unified Theory some if not all need to be used and understood as part of the theory itself. One could be led into reasoning on reasoning methods. Thankfully we need not do that

Particularly by the theory of second order transformations and the path integral formalism of quantum mechanics.

66

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason here, but concentrate only on how we reason by use of measurement in the dialectical process of reaching a decision. We start therefore by defining the principal tactic we all employ to try and rationalise the world around us, a component of the measurement process called symmetry. There are two sub-processes: comparison and categorisation. In order to reduce the information we have to deal with we will compare systems and situations categorising analogous ideas, and forming a set of unifying concepts to make the world more understandable. I should say here that the difference between understanding and knowledge is one of generalisation. I don't know the particular requirements of a houseplant but if its leaves are drooping I should probably water it. I have associated drooping leaves on plants with the requirement for water. Once or twice I have subsequently found that I have waterlogged a plant and that's why its leaves were drooping and I actually was dealing it the coup de grace with yet more water. Generally the symmetry is useful, but not always. Understanding, but not certain knowledge. You have to think what else can be done you have to use prior experience, an internal capacity to compare new information with experience. It is certainly a powerful tactic and we all use it. Indeed the alternative is to put up a barrier. By assessing the information as being the same for different instances I can keep one copy of the information and throw away the duplication. It allows the compression of data. I choose to use the terms knowledge and understanding slightly differently. I dont know the name of the plant, I understand that plants need water. For an example of the comparative aspect of symmetry we can look at the history of the development of physical theories. Early models of the atom were essentially planetary electrons orbiting the nucleus. Maxwell created his equations for electromagnetism by analogy to mechanical cogs (the Vortex). But these are tactics using symmetry and not solutions. They are a way to a

67

31 July 2013

07_Measurement, Interaction and Reason first level of understanding the unfamiliar. A deeper understanding alters our perception of what reality is experience changes our world view. The term symmetry is used more generally than the strict geometrical sense. It sounds more professional than well one tree looks kind'a like another to say that trees are recognisably classified as such because they possess the same elements of symmetry. Symmetry is also used as a synonym of analogy the conceptual symmetry between electrons flying around a nucleus and planets sailing round the sun could be called an analogy. Abstract words like symmetry therefore need to be used cautiously as their meaning is slippery. We do, however, need a word to describe the concept of mapping the forms of abstract objects such as 'tree' on one another. So in a similar way to our tendency to divide observations into opposite categories we have a tendency to think in terms of objects specific or abstract and to compare through use of symmetry. The process of symmetrisation is first to compare new data against categories, and then sub-select within a matching category for an instance to compare to the new data in detail. Categorisation requires a structure. The act of comparison can be a simple measurement. The process can be cyclic and again we can see the application of reasoning as a physical process. This then is the trick to beginning to understand the behemoth of unification. The process of understanding is contained within the theory itself. We may have vast amounts of data to deal with, but we only have a small number of processes that involve incomplete information transfer and comparative processes within a hierarchy. Using techniques of understanding rather than knowledge perhaps unification is a beast that can be tamed. I have arrived at the statement There are interactions. More basic than this would be the statement There are actions. Which statement should be preferred may matter or may be simply a question of preference. 68 31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions

Mathematical Notions You would think that that the fundamentals of mathematics were at least secure. This is simply not so. We have already met the conceptual problem of ideal mathematical forms as expressed in the Theory of Ideals. If mathematics fails to describe the universe, the universe isn't wrong; it's the maths that needs changing and the main problem is that the universe doesnt comply with ideal structures. There had been heroic activities in building a solid, unarguable basis for mathematics. For example, Russell's Principia Mathematica took a decade to write but in doing so the same old thing happened. It collapsed. Russell discovered a paradox. The relation between maths and physics The security of a physical theory relies on experimental verification but this inevitably is matched to a mathematical expression. The physicists ambition therefore is to demonstrate a one to one correspondence between the measurements of some physical process and a theory expressed in mathematical terms. The first confusion is that a world view must encompass all mathematics and its creation, not just use it as a means of validation of a phenomenological model. The constraint of inclusion implies that mathematics is encompassed by physics rather than the other way round. Also there is a confusion which arises as physical laws are expressed as mathematical equations so that it is easy to make the mistake of stating that natural systems obey the equations rather than the equations being an abstraction which model the phenomenology. As with the situation in physics this appeals to a generative approach as inclusion by extension would be meaningless. Yet all attempts at a generative approach have failed on the same point: that of undecidability. Disparate elements of mathematics describe most of what happens in the universe 69 31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions rather well (unreasonably well, some say) or at least can be made to do so. Yet these disparate elements are not unified by an overall theory of mathematics. Mathematics is reliant on our interpretation and expression in language to give the equations meaning in a physical context. On the other hand, what seems particularly remarkable about mathematics is that it appears to have an independent existence from interpretation an incredibly rich structure that today appears to include physics merely as a set of topics in applied mathematics 1. Again, in contradiction to the idea of WVT, theoretical mathematics covers topics which do not have any connection to phenomenology and we need to understand how to regard these mathematical forms. Mathematics is traditionally attributed with what is called topic neutrality the equations and numbers applied to the equations (if this is done at all) produce a set of results which the mathematician may choose to associate with phenomena, but with equal validity may choose to leave abstract. The only recourse for a WVT is to state that all mathematics has a physical interpretation but the unspoken correspondence may be to non-physical systems. We are concerned with the process that generates the mathematics just in the same way I have suggested language must be analysed by process rather than by a categorisation of truth or falsehood. Similarly we must be careful to state what we mean when we use mathematical symbols and understand what equations and numbers represent. The generative basis being sought sounds vague and certainly needs to have interpretability to generate all the structure we know exists. Interpretability is the essence of generative structures and some form of condensation/renormalisation allows abstract mathematics to exist. Interpretation of numbers and equations The easy assumption for a unification scheme would be for equations to correspond to objects and numbers to correspond to energy, but this is too simple and as a categorisation is an arcane trap. When we talk of an equation we could really be talking about mathematical expressions, algebra or functions. Number
1

Indeed much is covered by second order partial differential equations ref. Obolashvillli the oscillator is within this class.

70

31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions concepts also cascade on examination. Being precise about what mathematics itself is again, and by now unsurprisingly, susceptible to the same explosive disintegration. The role of equations as a process constraint on number is evocative, but the origin of such constraint becomes the physics and the interpretive power of the idea thereby slips away. Often the constraint required is a range limit on number in addition to an equation and these facets are not intrinsically linked i.e. they dont seem even potentially to be anything that could be unified. Indeed you can think of a random number as the range constraint (0 to 1 like a probability) without any determining equation to constrain the number found within the range on carrying out a measurement. The Structure of Mathematics The axiomatic method has many advantages over honest work. (Bertrand Russell) Conventionally we proceed using the basic symbols of mathematics to make a highly defensible structure; treatments start out with very simple statements that are pretty much irrefutable - these are the axiomatic approaches. Not all of mathematics is strictly axiomatic but it is all built on logical inference from a set of definitions. These form the basic rules of a particular mathematical representation. Because they are built of pure definitions they are robust. They are axioms of process telling us of the valid procedures for the structure in question. The basic building blocks are then combined to form a new set of levels of statements. Above this, further statements are combined and so on to generate a body of mathematics. The combinations and permutations of these rules give the basic systems of such things as algebra, calculus and number theory. By themselves these are large topics and give an incredibly rich structure to the subject. For example, there is a project to classify mathematics which has 97 sections and many sub-sections 2. Quite a menagerie. Again inconsistent, trivial and meaningless mathematics can be written so as they are possible they should be included by a WVT. The building-up process is not a simple combination. A

71

31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions remarkable level of insight is needed to build mathematics you cannot build maths as an automated process. New ideas are introduced at every stage of the development of a body of work. No matter what system of mathematics you are building a statistical game is created. From a single axiom there is a process implied. From two axioms you have the two processes and the combination a third process. The system grows exponentially with the number of basal axioms. One can think of the analogy to a genetic system where a small number of instructions can be combined to produce a rich hierarchy. In computer programmes there is a small instruction set at the assembler level3 which can be used to create very sophisticated programs and effects. In this case the sequence of operations on a data structure is important in determining the final outcome. If process order is important then a small instruction set will statistically generate an even larger number of potentially different results. In either case the set of possibilities is created by the definitions and their application in a deterministic manner. All the results can ultimately be related to the starting propositions. This is an entailment of properties to fundamental rules. Not any set of base propositions will do, however. The axioms cannot contradict each other and must be independent for the results to be consistent and form a coherent body that does not collapse beyond an irreducible representation. This all makes mathematics sound very straightforward, but this is far from the truth. As stated above, the creativity in proposing and proving theories is not a linear, mechanical process by any stretch of the imagination and if the structure was purely a series of combinations of axioms all mathematical theories would trivialise back to restatements of those axioms. That is not what is going on. Mathematics is a concise expression of ideas and has a progression tightly logically constrained. Nonetheless it is essentially a written ideographic language. You can place an interpretation on the mathematics but that interpretation may not be unique or even valid.
2 3

This is simply called the Mathematics Subject Classification [ref]. There may be other schemes in existence too. The most primitive elements are the memory elements and the shifting of binary code between them.

72

31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions

Set Theory In set theory there are relational symbols for set membership, intersection and union. (In projective geometry the latter two are the meet and join of functions.) The logical relations of set theory can be represented on a Venn diagram in which there are notably two forms of exclusion the complement and the straight not. We can think of the complement as the opposite of one set, but this has a further technical meaning of the same object, but with opposite phase called a conjugate. The opposite of one set from another forms a pair quite specifically we dont think of three or four opposites two exclusive forms easily recognised and common this we have met as the spinor-split. The conjugate relates to the concept of true or false, the middle position being excluded from consideration. This is either a facet of systems as an intrinsic property or simply part of our decision and categorisation process. There is no intrinsic exclusion to having a higher number of split states with restriction on occupancy that need not be exclusive, but the simple two-way split is most common. The Venn diagram lets us visualise membership. We can have a field of apples and collect them into a set, the set of apples. Everything outside are not apples. We could form a similar set of pears to sit alongside the apples and collect them both in a set of fruit. You can see that we are reconstructing a Hayakawa type abstraction hierarchy. We can portray the sub-class membership in a tree diagram rather than a Venn diagram if we wish. Fruit are objects and this categorisation doesnt have opposites there is no conjugate structure (the true/false decision of categorisation has been applied in deciding set membership). There is no sense here of the necessity of the existence of anti-objects. Relational symbols for sets thus seem passive and observational. Apples dont categorise themselves into a set and generally the formation of a set is an external categorisation and as such the process isnt contained within the mathematics in terms of an equation membership is declared. We have seen that categorisation as a process produces systems with arcane characteristics and 73 31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions is error prone. As a trivial observation we can agree that categorisation will not be in error when it corresponds to the structure of the system being analysed. It is then inevitable that we ask what the mathematical apparatus is that creates abstraction hierarchies. When set membership isnt clear you sometimes get a joke or a pun. Jokes come in several forms. Puns rely on an inherent ambiguity such as when there is more than one meaning for a word, such as degeneracy or when phrases sound similar to another such as four candles: fork handles. Ambiguity is also deliberately used in titles such as The Book of Sand4 or The Inheritance of Loss5 because they invite you to read the text inside; there is an ambiguity that needs to be resolved. In musical terms this is a bit like the use of a dominant 7th. A joke or ambiguity resists our tendency to categorise. If we think about these in mathematical terms we can see that we are talking about an ambiguity of set membership. In physics an example of this arises as a phenomenon called entanglement. Again in physical terms the resistance to categorisation is a potential barrier. In considering what would have to be added in the development of a mathematical system the trivial, passive approach is to use a Boolean operator OR in class membership. If the ambiguity in set membership is understood and the OR question is applied as in do you mean fork handle or four candles the misunderstanding and thereby the joke disappears. A dynamical, interactive approach is required to complement this for the trivial categorisation to have any physical meaning. Groups The idea of a group is a coming together of several strands of mathematics ideas about the roots of polynomials and their permutation, invariants, closure under transformations, modular arithmetic, remainders and generators. The history of development is a bit fractured6. When a set is formed by a specific relational operation then we have cyclicity. Specifically if two members of a set operate on
4 5

Borges again. A pretentious title you might wish he hadnt. I dont know who this is by but the title is very irritating. 6 by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, March 2001, MacTutor History of Mathematics, [http://www-history.mcs.standrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Abstract_groups.html]

74

31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions one another the result is a member of the same set. There is an operation that leaves members unchanged, the order of operations is irrelevant and the operation is invertible. Under these conditions we say we have a group. There may be an infinite number of members of a group what is intriguing in terms of translation to physical concepts is that a group is a stable object. The set of operations and the group evoke the idea of an object. A relational definition of a group is actually distinct and more general. For the purposes here we can see that the concept of a group is a fundamental categorisation schema intrinsic to a system of a set and its operations. The existence of a group is also related to stability and that to the concept of an object. Furthermore groups occur in SR (Lorentz Group), QM and particle physics. Sets and groups also introduce the notion of cyclicity. There does at least thereby seem to be some notion of an entity being associated with an interactive loop. Numbers There are more types of numbers than might be imagined. My partial list is: Natural, Integers, Real, Rational, Irrational, Transcendental, Complex, Hypercomplex and (even) Surreal. There are also concepts such as the omega number and super-omega number which we could explore. Much has been written on the concept of zero and its surprisingly short history. If the position is taken that we can have purely abstract concepts this is unproblematic. If we dogmatically state that all numbers must have a physical correspondence then there are many problems. For a WVT there has to be a meaningful correspondence between mathematics and physics. In essence we are looking for measures, state counting, physical quantities such as charge, mass and spin as a number system in a non-trivial way. The electron configuration states of atoms are conventionally counted using angular momentum; which sounds like an antiquated concept. This conjures a 75 31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions mechanical picture of the atom as having spinning masses around a nucleus. In this model natural numbers are used for the state-counting in analogy to the modes of vibration of a mechanical system. It is a first-order way of trying to express how states are counted in atoms, but as usual the correspondence isnt quite adequate. Some argue that there is not enough room in the universe for the set of real numbers, or for even a single irrational or transcendental number. Pi is the familiar instance of a transcendental. Pi can be thought of as a projection between a curve and a straight line and therefore indeterminate. So numbers which have no termination seem to be a kind of fiction and therefore can only arise as abstractions rather than physical primitives. Thus philosophically you would expect energy to be quantised and the conventional concept of number is not quite right for a unification scheme (if it exists). Thus another fundamental challenge is to find a primitive of the notion of number. Even thus far we actually have a number of anomalies and assumptions. Implicit in the notion of addition or subtraction there is the assumption that we are dealing with objects of the same type or set. If I am counting apples, I am being consistent. Then I hit the same old paradox of reason. What variety of apple? Big apple or small? Fresh or fermenting? In carrying out the basic process of addition I have made an assumption of set membership which isnt precise. Modern, industrially produced items are closely similar, but all production is to a level of tolerance. No two objects are absolutely alike. Just as there is no such thing as a triangle or circle there is no such thing as a set of absolute objects (macroscopically). We can search for more fundamental, primitive objects in physics. In physics there are, as far as we know, fundamental objects which are called quarks and leptons. Leptons, like the electron, and quarks dont add arithmetically and you cant really have a single quark they come in pairs and triplets. The rules of addition of quarks and leptons are not simple and as these are the substituents of the atoms that we categorise into the periodic table of elements the different chemical behaviour of the elements is far from simple arithmetic. Any species of atoms or elements are all the same in that Carbon (6) is 76 31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions the same anywhere as is Oxygen (8) and all other elements, so we can count atoms and thereby molecules as well as quarks and leptons in a trivial way but not meaningfully in terms of how they combine. You can nominally add atoms same type but cant add Carbon and Oxygen to get Silicon (14). Chemically you may add in a way (react) Carbon and an Oxygen ion to get carbon monoxide. Atoms arent ordered strictly arithmetically and sometimes come in isotopic varieties. If you look up Atomic Weight (or Relative Atomic Mass) you can see the relation isnt expressible as an addition of natural numbers. Neutrons and protons are the particles we say make up the nucleus of the atom (hadrons). The hadrons are composed of three quarks, but the addition of the mass of three quarks does not make up the weight of the hadron. Again we have an amusing contradiction as the only objects that can be added or subtracted with confidence in that they are absolutely the same and thereby form a well defined set (like the set of all protons) dont follow arithmetic rules. Operator Symbols In mathematics symbols are used of agreed meaning such as the basic elements of equations and numbers all the time7. At the simplest level, the variables are a proxy for numbers in a syntax of symbols for specific operations. Generally you can think of the equations as the apparatus which the numbers run through. The equations themselves are thereby the process rules for the numbers to follow. We are also taught that we can solve sets of equations taking a number of steps to do so. There are processes in the basic form of mathematics that are universal, objective and secure. The process of counting is secure. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing are universally accepted and common. These processes are generalised by substituting a variable for the specific numbers being operated on. The extension to general operators and functions with differentiation allied to subtraction and integration allied to addition is logical and robust. Applied
7

The history of the development of mathematical symbols is quite a good story in itself. The origin of 360 degrees in a revolution, how the number zero was first introduced and how we ended up counting in tens are all enlightening stories.

77

31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions scientists use constitutive equations which can apply to a range of materials which behave the same way except for the substitution of unique constants for a specific material within the range. It sort of works but is all a bit arcane. Counting Conventions We use the Decimal system, computers use binary and hexidecimal, there are a variety of conventional weights and measures such as imperial and metric. In communication science you may come across Grey codes. We think of binary as the simplest and the use in computers is the simplest state counter people have come up with. If there are memory elements in physical primitives then the automatic guess of their form is that they should be reducible to binary elements. As atoms dont behave arithmetically this is undoubtedly wrong. Relational Symbols Relational symbols hide a range of interpretations that can be misleading. The basic syntax of equations relies on the = sign. After a considerable number of headaches you realise the equals sign has quite a few meanings: 'is the same as', 'is found to be', 'becomes', 'is equivalent to', is taken to be, is compared to, is forced to be the same as, or just is are all valid meanings of the one sign. Thus the generality of the interpretation and application of equations, their topic neutrality, is partly based on abstraction. Next we can observe that depending on which sense the = sign is being used in you can throw all the equations to one side of it so that in total they = a number, zero. This may or may not make sense to do. So there may or may not be a tacit constraint in the context which tells you how to treat the equation and interpret the = sign. This relational role is clear in the inequalities (greater than, greater than or equal to, less than, less than or equal to) which occupy the same position as the equals sign. The effect of these symbols is hard to decipher without context, but here we are certainly comparing two sides of an equation two separate objects or sets of objects. Instead of stating or demanding equality we are setting a boundary to the 78 31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions values and speak of values being bounded above and/or below. There is also a symbolisation of an approximate relation in the use of about equals symbols of which there are a few variants used. These together with equalities and inequalities are the basic relational symbols of mathematics. For mathematical syntax to symbolise anything we can ask if we can have an equation without a relational. A mathematical statement or reduction or expansion of an equation may not have an = sign explicitly as part of the syntax between lines. If you have an equation on one line and a modified equation on the next this is equivalent to using = in the becomes sense. If anything is going on in the mathematics then we explicitly or implicitly are using a relational function. We can conclude that the relational symbols in equations are action signs, indicating a comparison or change and that the inequalities are specifically comparators with contextual dependence. Not only abstract we can get it wrong too In the same way it is possible to talk nonsense, we can write inconsistent and incorrect equations and wish to know what is implied by this freedom to create folly. The unified approach implies that even incorrectly formed abstract theoretical mathematics describes something. It must have symmetry to the rest of nature. This is a difficult but unavoidable conclusion. To understand what that means think of a novel. The circumstances, events can be purely imagined. An author is free to imagine anything. As readers we ask for some consistency in the text but there are no real limits. Anti-gravity machines, time-travel and mythical beasts are all perennial favourites. Our reading of abstract mathematics would allow any fantasy or chimeras as well as placing a real interpretation on what was originally devised as abstract mathematics, but we need the mechanism for seeing which is which.

79

31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions Idea of Numbers Some demystification is in order. When we learn to count we do so in positive whole numbers. Indeed they are called natural numbers. We think in objects even though they may be abstract such as Tree or Apple. Ask for a weight of apples anywhere in the world and they will fill the bag to the nearest apple that makes the weight just under or just over the requested amount. How would you regard a stall-holder who got the weight just right by squishing in some apple paste to make the weight up exactly? Thats a quantum rule hes broken. I remember watching a stall-holder in a market being negotiated down on the price of a china horse. Eventually he said You want a bit more off? snapped off a leg and presented it to the customer saying There, thats a bit off you happy now? Galaxies, stars, planets, countries, houses, people molecules, atoms, particles all are countable objects. Conceptually, therefore, we shouldnt have a problem with the idea of a quantum in QM. Admittedly the counting system in units of angular momentum is very queer but aside from that aspect it is pretty clear. Adding by a quantum jump is not quite like adding one to a bag of apples. Im used to the apples all being slightly different, Im happy counting abstract objects, so Im happy counting photons, electrons, nucleons and energy levels. I may be a bit disappointed that the isomorphism between natural numbers and the elements doesnt quite work and the relationship isnt straightforward, but there is no sense of shock. If you dont form abstract categories you dont have a counting system. Categories lead to counting. Again we have the wrong starting point as our notion of counting is based on sense perception and this is in error. The unification agenda is to seek processes that generate types of number - a hierarchy that is generated rather than imposed but including categorisation error. The question becomes that of the relationship between the formation of categories and the act of measurement and to what extent thereby a counting system is defined. The symmetry to language is obvious the processes are well behaved, the categorisation schema not so. When a sentence is constructed the words do not 80 31 July 2013

08_Mathematical notions simply add together meaning isnt formed in an arithmetic process. A better analogy is to the organelles inside a cell parts with function that interact to determine the overall cell behaviour. Counting systems have a hierarchy - units, tens, hundreds and so on whereas nothing in nature seems so simple. In the case of mathematics we can see that the structures being made by us need to be used with care if they are applied to anything that actually matters. The use of simplistic models in policy making is an awful example of the dangers of the application of Ideals. Simplistic models can work but they must conform to a rule of successive approximation.

81

31 July 2013

09_Godel Gdel "The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction." -- Sidney Coleman. Having dismantled any notion that mathematics is fundamental or straightforward (with no discernible primitive) we are left with the difficulty of where to start to rebuild a starting position. Remembering that there was a conclusion that we are seeking a near tautology a statement with an open element which has a generative quality we can go back to the Greeks again for an old chestnut. Epimenidies says all Cretans are liars. Epimenidies is a Cretan'. Thus the liar paradox; you cannot on the basis of this information say whether the statements are true or false. We have an inconsistency a categorisation failure. To bring out the interaction between the statements a common expression of this paradox is using the pair: The next sentence is true. The last sentence was false. This version hasnt quite symmetrised out the temporal aspect. Look at the more mathematically styled pair: A:B is true: B:A is false. That's more like it two independent statements that can neither be true or false, and as compact as I can make them. I could go as far as to make the paradox into the single statement This statement is false, but the paired statement is a bit clearer for the purposes here. If you havent met this one before then we can go through it. Statement A says that statement B is true. So assume statement B is true. Statement B says statement A is false. If B is true then A is false. Statement A says statement B is true. But if statement A is false then B is false. If B is false, A is true...dizzy yet? I can easily cast this pair of statements into a pair of mathematical logic

82

31 July 2013

09_Godel statements as above, but they defeat logic. I could translate them into a computer program and hit the run button. What would happen? Well I can actually program things to run in three different ways. The logic could get stuck in a forever loop as we did verbally above, never coming to any conclusion, going on and on until I get fed up and abort the program. The second interpretation we could form is that it all summed up to nothing at all. Add B true, B false get zero. Add A true, A false get zero. The third possibility is a probabilistic argument. A is true half the time, so probability of A true is 50%. We can realise these different interpretations as computer programs, but are they meaningful and could they be taken to represent anything? A forever loop is reminiscent (i.e. an abstract symmetry) of a stable interaction. Two players saying Yes, you are, the other replying No, I'm not for hours on end. Not the best play to ever hit the stage, but you get the picture an argument without resolution. The exchange is a conversation which we can drive by the act of reading and is reminiscent of the hidden variable quantum mechanical structure proposed by Bell. 1 The second interpretation is that there is really nothing keeping these statements apart and they would conflict and mutually annihilate. Rather like two irreconcilable positions in an argument or a particle and its anti-particle. The final interpretation would be the betting man's solution, 50/50, one of them I'll go for, place my bet. As neither may be true in the end the odds could be unfair but that's gambling for you. Statistically you would say that there is a 0.50 probability of state A being true and 0.5 probability of state B being true at a particular point in time. You could regard the odds just as a game as this is a Bayesian trap - neither of the statements being true or false. Otherwise it is a Pauling-type interpretation of entanglement as a type of resonance. So there are two sub-classes to this final interpretation.
1

The Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics Bell

83

31 July 2013

09_Godel

All three of these interpretations are potentially useful, yet none of them are supported unequivocally by the little information available. There is insufficient contextual or other information for us to discriminate between the possible representations. That in itself is not a problem. Further text can be added to direct us to a single representation. Thus the liar paradox may be a logic dead end in discerning truth, whatever that is, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility of truth and the liar paradox can be interpreted as something useful to the unification scheme. Kurt Gdel 2 was probably inspired by the liar paradox to write out one of the most remarkable proofs in mathematics. Gdel found that that any system of mathematics beyond a very limited level will contain formally undecidable propositions even if they are consistent systems. Russell also discovered a logical contradiction about set membership, which we call Russells paradox. 3 Both paradoxes create loops rather like the liar paradox. These discoveries threw the idea of determinism out of the window for mathematicians as quantum mathematics and relativity did for physicists. These failures of determinism are related but as ever there is no easy symmetry between the cases. Maths and physics were and are left without certainty. A disaster, an embarrassment, and a collapse of the enlightenment programme? Well, as usual, yes and no. For one thing mathematicians have been getting on with it for a long time without the reassurance of any grand, overarching scheme and the development of mathematics since the time of Gdel and Russell has been

If you have escaped learning about Gdels paradox there are several good intros around. I first met him reading Hofstaders Godel, Escher, Bach. 3 A linguistic example is: If a hairdresser only cuts the hair of people who dont cut their own then would the hairdresser cut their own hair?

84

31 July 2013

09_Godel phenomenal. Similarly for physics quantum mechanics and relativity are among the greatest success stories of its development. Of course what this also provides is a three-way link (a non-trivial symmetry) between maths, physics and language. The one thing that language inescapably does is to have interpretative qualities that are often difficult if not impossible to ascribe any true or false value to. If we think that finding indeterminacy in mathematics is a problem then Gdel and Russell pose a problem. However, as we know indeterminacy is intrinsic to physics and language then here is a link to these mathematical paradoxes. To develop an acceptable world view global indeterminacy is a must. Formal undecidability is a foundation in understanding how errors and omissions and interpretability arise and key to learning how to express them in a unified language. A little more needs to be said about the idea of consistency. Gdel had to be absolutely rigorous in proving that undecidability arose in any mathematical system that was consistent because he could otherwise have been attacked on the basis that it was inconsistency that led to undecidability. Enlightenment thinkers would be able to defend their position if they could assert that the only time that logic goes wrong is when the basis for the mathematics contains something wrong. Gdel eliminated that possibility. Even more impressive than this, while putting a limit to certainty in mathematics he fairly convincingly showed that his theory would apply to any mathematics. Thus the theory is a profound undermining of the absolute even in a self-consistent system. In the case of Russells Paradox attempts have been made to contain its impact. These were Russells theory of types, the Zermelo-Frankel theory (ZF) and Quines New Foundations of Mathematics (NF). These are approaches that either ban the description of such contradictory structures from set membership (ZF and I think Type-theory) or use a foundational basis which

85

31 July 2013

09_Godel intrinsically excludes such contradictions (NF). Quine used (and possibly invented) the notion of primitives for the generation of logic which is of course highly relevant to our discussion, but for the moment our concern is the interpretation and accommodation of undecidability (as opposed to inconsistency) in a theory. The liar paradox is notable because it jars. It is a dissonant chord. The contradiction is interesting and some do like a puzzle. Viewed as a dynamical system the change from true to false is anti-commutative and thereby has a symmetry to Clifford Algebra and to Fermi-Dirac statistics (the physics of protons, electrons and the like) and to the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement. The link is therefore quite fundamental. Now look at the opposite, a pair of statements we might call the tautological saint: This statement is true. Which splits into: A:B is true, B:A is true. Not exactly remarkable and nothing to write home about there. If, however, you think of these two statements again in terms of interaction and context, the tautological saint is working in the same sort of way as the liar paradox. Instead of dissonance we now have resonance. In fact, statement A is the same as it was before we have only changed the context by introducing a new version of statement B. Everybody is happy now. The situation of A endlessly arguing with B has been replaced with A and B endlessly agreeing. Instead of annihilating one another everything is true so perhaps they could merge. My

86

31 July 2013

09_Godel probability has gone to 1 certainty. In quantum mechanics I can appeal to the idea of an Eigenstate - that is I have a problem with a well-defined solution called an observable. You could also think of it as a bound pair. We could use a musical analogy and say we have harmony. Harmonics are characterised by a combination of notes of particular relations of phase and frequency. The simple example of the tautological saint is rather like two notes in phase and of the same frequency. The liar paradox is like two sounds in antiphase. In control theory you would talk of positive feedback and negative feedback. The use of the interactive picture in this way is an indication (though not a proof) of a different solution to the undecidability problem. Instead of regarding Russell's paradox and Gdels theorem as obstructions impeding the search for a complete system of logic, we have incorporated them by looking at the problem in a different way. By regarding the logic statements in an interactive framework we have circumvented the barrier of this sort of paradox by relegating them to a type of interaction. In truth most physicists I think were unaware that there was a problem. Let me put it like this: the supposition that there is Unified Theory has a corollary that the theory must be calculable. We demand that Unified Theory is a complete understanding and calculational framework for all phenomena. As mathematics contains propositions that are formally undecidable then there can never be a Unified Theory if it relies on that mathematics. You can't disprove Gdel or Russell. Conventional mathematics is unable to escape the consequences of the paradoxes. The little journey I have taken you on over the last few pages doesn't invalidate any preceding maths. It does provide a way of looking at logic statements with contextual dependency. Interaction therefore provides a methodology of circumventing and incorporating these

87

31 July 2013

09_Godel paradoxes into a unified framework. Instead of being a problem they are, in fact, an absolute (or relative) delight. The paradoxes can be regarded simply as the 'out of phase' relatives of 'normal' proofs. This also invites the consideration of equations and their equivalent logical statements as having the further symmetry of the active, dynamic objects of physics. Like conducting an experiment I can take one equation (or statement) in one hand, a second in the other, see that without any interaction they are just what they are, then put them together and watch them 'react' with each other. True and False are merely contextually dependent states they are freed of being absolute and there is absolutely no reason to restrict oneself to the particular equations we have been playing with. The same works for any equation set. Nor do we have to stand like some like some deity casting equations at one another. There is a mathematical concept of a 'neighbourhood'. That is a bubble-like volume defined within a space that is a construct which allows you to consider one such volume next to another and compare them. Instead of considering these bubbles as initially connected ( i.e. interacting at outset) we can replace the mathematician in the role of deity by thinking of a bubble round each of the equations. When separate, the equations can self-interact within their own bubbles until they settle down, and if the bubbles meet, the initially separate sets of equations begin to interact. What is therefore suggested is a rather unfamiliar picture of sets of equations as some sort of interactive object. Indeed the object is the equation or equation set itself. By now there are quite a few physicists and mathematicians throwing their hands up in horror at such a suggestion. In visualising the act of solving equations essentially as objects coinciding with one another, I am making the direct link between mathematical equations and physical objects. What about the case where the equations have a time dependency? To suggest that the solution of equations is a physical process usurps the role of time in the

88

31 July 2013

09_Godel equations. The solution or proof itself is the temporal element time arises out of the process. In G.R. time is simply the fourth dimension, it is treated on the same basis as the three dimensions of space. We have to re-examine these issues because it would therefore suggest that space arises out of interactions of objects and is therefore not fundamental. Time appears to arise from a rate of reaction between equations. In defence of this suggestion and disclaim any originality this sort of approach was conceived of by Joseph Sylvester in the late nineteenth century. There is a strong link between Sylvester and W K Clifford who invented Clifford algebra and Johns College Cambridge acquired Sylvesters papers at a time when Dirac was there and formulating quantum mechanics. Furthermore the normal approach to ab initio calculations of the spectra of molecules has the same essential form. For now we only proceed accepting that this representation has no proven generality and that if in some way the solving of equations represents some kind of automatic process that is, as yet, completely undefined. There are at least three camps of objectors. First there are those who hold that mathematics is separate from nature, that mathematics does not represent anything other than a model that describes aspects of nature. Well, yes, the argument being put forward here doesn't really disagree with that we are suggesting that in a WVT there must be an exact correspondence for the bits that describe physics, but nothing is excluded. I am suggesting that the representation must be in the most compact form. I am suggesting that an interactive interpretation accommodates Gdels Theorem and Russell's Paradox. It is being suggested that the generalisation of the concept leads to a visualisation of mathematics that is unfamiliar but useful.

89

31 July 2013

09_Godel The second group of objectors would state that the premise that there is Unified Theory of nature is unproven. Whatever proof is anyway. Quite so. I don't see why that sort of objection should be of any interest. A third group would say that the suggestions made conflict with their fundamental ideas of time and space and therefore should be rejected out of hand. Bad luck. The strategy being adopted has a very special advantage. The interactive approach actually includes the objections within the framework. If you imagine the bubbles containing sets of equations you can equally well consider them to contain logic statements or sentences or words or concepts or beliefs. One bubble contains one viewpoint, another may contain the opposite. You can say that one is true in isolation. If the bubbles coincide there is a process of interaction which follows particular rules that govern the possible outcomes. The most general description of what the bubbles contain is information. When there is coincidence the bubbles exchange some information. Ultimately the physical equivalent of information is energy. It is tempting to think of a collection of interacting bubbles making some sort of reality soup but we must draw into the picture the other elements we already know. We must also keep in mind that the bubbles are in energy space rather than spacetime. The basic rules of information exchange mean that if the bubbles are to remain separate the information exchange cannot be complete. When exchange does occur the bubbles must lose some individual identity and there is some validity in regarding them together as a system. The limit of information exchange also means that our world view is incomplete. Each bubble has its own perspective and sees what it perceives: it has its own picture of reality. These are also strange bubbles as there are bubble hierarchies within each bubble. So 'soup' is a pretty limited analogy

90

31 July 2013

09_Godel because this would be strange soup, and we are in the business of understanding not observing. The matrix between the lumps is also still the Neanderthal interpretation of space which is wrong. Gathering things together before moving on, there is, of course, a model which will do fine for interacting equations. This is the Markov chain. Time is split into discrete steps in the Markov model so one could certainly imagine a stepwise process for 'solving' systems. But to say that this represents anything real is too much of a leap. What size or period do these steps in time represent? We have a notion about hierarchies the bubbles we have been talking about could be taken to represent individual objects or collections of objects. What though is actually going on? Smaller is simpler so that there is a notion that the information content reduces with the 'size' of a bubble. All too hazy and abstract. First on the list we must show how Einstein's relativity theories fit in with an interactive interpretation consistent too with the information exchange that circumvents Gdels Theorem. It should be obvious that we have discovered a clock mechanism in interaction that of time steps in the exchange of information. In fact we have a kind of oscillation in the case of the liar paradox. In a sense, because it is stepwise, we can say it is a sort of quantum step oscillation. We can also say that the process is like that of reflection without energy loss. Worryingly this looks like a form of perpetual exchange until we realise that our observation of the two statements in context actually drives the oscillation. Otherwise the statements sit unread and inert. Again a closed loop has an air of confined energy which mass equivalence might lead to an interpretation of mass and charge but this is very tentative. It can also be noted we have an entitist clock and that the object is created by the interaction. Finally an observation was made by Simon Altman that only Clifford Algebras of three dimensions have the property of the rotation group. All other dimensions

91

31 July 2013

09_Godel are effectively mirrors. This suggests a link between the loop characteristic of interaction and the existence of temporal phenomena is only associated with a 3 dimensional representation. Thus we have time and three dimensions intrinsically having an association with loops and objects which is perhaps why the universe appears the way it does.

92

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity Chapter 10: Nothingness and Randomicity Nothingness Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense.
1

Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavour to explain-light, electricity or universal gravitation, and only in so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. 2 Information which is not held because it never existed is covered by exception 12(4) (a) and must be dealt with correctly under Regulation 14. 3 Is space an object? Space is surely what we mean by the opposite of substance and substance is an attribute of objects. Substancelessness or nothingness is what we mean by space. If we use that definition then we cannot hold space to be an object it has no content or properties. We have being and nothingness 4. It is absolutely fundamental that we think of space between objects and the arrangement of objects in space is clear to our perception. Time denotes change in objects or a change in the configuration of objects. This is reduced to a change in the states of space if objects are regarded as an aspect of space. The inconsistency of
1

Albert Einstein, an address delivered on May 5th, 1920, in the University of Leyden. The original version is available in the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. His position changed to anti-aether later. 2 Unamuno again 3 Defra, Environmental Information Regulations, 2004. 4 Sartres book of this title has problems of the separation of perception from reality.

93

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity this reductive categorisation is that there can be no states in nothingness. Do we then conclude that space has a structure and nothingness is an invalid concept? If objects are thereby merely an aspect of space are we fooled by perception that they are separate? Not only our visual perception would have to be wrong. If gravity was the only phenomenon we were aware of we could think of objects, matter itself, as a curved region of spacetime. This isnt so. Chemistry, light, electrons, Van der Waals effects, the great spectrum of phenomena, our sense perception of touch would be difficult to attempt to form theories for without the separation of objects and space. We can categorise different systems as objects and see contradictory elements in them and compare them. In doing so we have the separation of objects from space intrinsic to the process of perception, so at least to this extent the notion of space must have validity. Part of the difficulty lies in the habit of categorisation itself. We need to see the process that gives rise to phenomena and allows us to think of objects and space. We already expect that this process approach will give us a new viewpoint that renders the categorisation redundant. If EM is a wave then what is that wave travelling on? If space is curved then what is there to record the curve if space is nothing? We dont want to believe in the aether as it smacks of mysticism but cannot yet say how the notion of an aether is wrong and it stands in our way. The approach of modern physics has been to set this problem to one side and get on with the phenomenology that is the positive and progressive thing to do in the circumstances and surely nothing to be shy about. If we think of space as nothingness then this is a strange nothingness as it appears that space has physical qualities. We can feel slightly less uneasy about this by noting that the thesis is that physical qualities are produced by the presence of matter objects create the curvature of space. The relief is momentary, because there has to be the apparatus to be curved or the

94

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity apparatus has to be created by the matter itself 5. In fact we need to reassess what we mean by nothingness if we thought that space is an archetypal set member of nothingness then we are wrong as nothing is the empty set. If there is nothing in-between two objects I cannot say what I mean by the distance as I am left trying to argue about the difference between nothing (no distance) and nothingness (no defined distance or an emptiness between objects). The alternative that spacetime apparatus simply exists as something without origin or substance conflicts with the idea that we believe in things we can directly measure. The creation of spacetime by matter is slightly more comfortable, but a unified standpoint surely must be not that the apparatus of spacetime is created by matter (has a separate consequent existence) but that the apparatus of spacetime is an aspect of what we mean by the term matter. In GR there is no distinction between the objects undergoing uniform acceleration. The acceleration only depends on the position of one object relative to another and the mass of the other object determines the acceleration of the first. If we have trouble in thinking that different bodies of dissimilar mass accelerate toward the earth at the same rate then we are thinking badly. We think of an object falling under gravity without opposition as being in free fall. We can observe that there is no distortion in an object in free fall the substituent parts are undifferentiated. As there is no distortion there is no difference between objects of dissimilar mass. This is an observational fact but unintuitive as when we work to lift something the weight matters. If two parachutists join hands you dont expect them to suddenly accelerate downward. My base perceptual knowledge thinks a feather will fall more slowly than a stone and yet this would be absurd. Dont rely on instinct.

By creating the notion of spacetime as a new object we then inevitably categorise that object by demanding a spacetime apparatus. We have shown this logical pattern of categorisation to be flawed.

95

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity For we blithely talk about one mass attracting another. The maths is often approximated to a mass at a point A and one at point B and a line inbetween. If I am approximating I am saying that the real situation is more complex. Then if I imagine myself in free fall toward the earth do I believe that I am a point particle, a mass distribution or what? Liver and kidneys are accelerating at the same rate does that mean any object or sub-object are all merrily calculating the same acceleration? That too seems absurd. We are used to the concept that when we are travelling with a fixed velocity there is no on-board information to tell us what that velocity is. It is relative to something otherwise velocity is undefined within the system. We need a measurement between the moving object and the reference to define velocity. Thus velocity is relative to some reference. There is no uniqueness of that definition and therefore no meaning of velocity in an object by itself. In terms of informatics there is no internal system information about velocity. The same argument applies to the notion of acceleration. There is no internal system information about acceleration either. The acceleration of one body toward another is determined by an exchange of information where the acceleration of one depends on the mass of the other not its own mass. Yet the information about the resulting acceleration is not evident even though the mass information is held somewhere and acts on material objects. Consider further the idea that the mass causing the acceleration is not singular. As we fall to the earth the calculation of how fast we should fall is at first glance impossibly complex. If there is a contribution from every atom of the earth where is that calculation held? Einsteins answer is that this information is held in the states of space. Thus space is not nothingness. We can dismiss the association of nothingness with space but need to decide if the ability to contain information is nascent, an ever-present aether awaiting the presence of matter, created by the presence of matter or an aspect of matter. Nonetheless, the notion of spacetime carrying information remains perplexing as we expect that we need substance to

96

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity hold information. In these terms an informatics approach appears to fail as information is stored in memory of some form. So let us discuss relativity, and the character of spacetime. Understand first that there were two very different theories of relativity Special and General. The statement that the states of space themselves are the final physical reality is general relativity (GR). Special relativity (SR) is a lot easier and a great deal of lunacy has therefore been written about it in a semi-coherent way. SR arose (with a slight quirk of misunderstanding) out of the observation that moving a wire through a magnetic field causes a current to flow. The wire has a relative velocity to the magnet. If there is no relative motion, no current flows. The theory is fixed firmly in the Euclidean surprising given that perspective was known centuries before, but then again I suppose perspective is considered an optical effect 6 only (although we have argued that the ascendancy of the Euclidian is flawed) 7. It is called Special because it is a theory restricted as said before to the Euclidean so special is being used in the sense of special circumstances. SR opened Pandoras Box. 100 years on it seems to me as if what SR really does is to describe the concept of relative velocity and one aspect of the nature of a photon. Yet SRs principal legacy is surely to undermine our notion about the nature of time and the singular objectivity of measurement. As soon as one object is moving with a velocity relative to another it affects the measurements they make with respect to each other. As soon as you introduce a third object nobody will quite agree whats going or when it happened unless they use SR to account for those differences. You can overlay any interpretation you like on these findings to suit your ego and mindset. These interpretations are uniformly fatuous but not baseless. The mathematical oddity about time in SR was that time was introduced as a fourth dimension. x, y, z for space, ict for time. i in ict denotes the square root of -1, c the velocity of light in a vacuum 8. We

6 7

Of course an optical effect involves an EM wave or ray interpretation sowing further confusion. The reason for the confusion enters with the RH and LH rules for the anti-commutative algebra being an orthogonal 3D system which coincides with the Cartesian 3D but these are not the same. 8 The vacuum being nothingness is of course a problem.

97

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity have met i already, as an exchange operator what it is doing here is expressing an exchange between space and time due to relative velocity. However, when SR is extended to accelerative invariance the role of i disappears, and we arrive at GR. In GR time is just the fourth dimension, nothing different from the other three, no i in front of the c. No GR derivations have a role for i. There are several derivations of GR (6 I know of). GR allows the calculation of gravity the attractive force between masses as it had been thought of by Newton expressed completely differently in GR as the curvature of spacetime. The notion of force in this picture is questionable 9. You have a spacetime manifold which has a distortion or deformation due to the presence of matter. The pictorial image often suggested is to think of a rubber sheet with a ball on it. The rubber sheet is stretched by the weight of the ball you have a curvature in the geometry. This is a bit misleading as it makes you think of something sitting in space that gets curved. It is actually spacetime itself deforming. I imagine the situation with the following analogy. Apparently the Aztecs used different colours of string tied together as a form of messaging (a handheld version of flags and semaphore). So imagine we have an Aztec ball of string of humongous proportion. Tie one end of the string to an object and walk a few million miles and sit comfortably at the other end (you deserve a rest). Now this Aztec string is magical. When there are no big masses near the string it is white 10. Along comes a big mass and the colour of the string changes. Nearer to the mass the colour is bright red further away the colours shift towards blue and back to white. The colour indicates the stress in the string. In order to de-stress, the string stretches and bends toward the mass until it is white again 11. I think I see the object I tied to the other end of the string shift slightly but this is only due to the change in state of the string. Spacetime is the great array of the points
9

See Russell ABC of relativity, for example. Transparent might be better if you prefer rather than white. 11 Could explain a black hole here.
10

98

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity along every possible independent magic Aztec string linking all the objects of the universe. Whoever sold all that magic Aztec string made a killing. Each little point on the strings can be thought of as having a position in space. As such the individual points dont contain curvature information. The connection between the points (the difference) contains the curvature information in the form of a clock-rate the colour of the string in the analogy has been compensated away by the deformation between the points the curve so formed being termed a geodesic. These are the states of space that Einstein was referring to and this is what is meant by spacetime. That spacetime may be thought of as curved or having an internal stress not both at once either view can be taken as equivalent. Spacetime is not Euclidian, not perspective geometry, but something more complicated again which, if you remember, is called a Riemann geometry. Newton had offered the idea of gravity as a force of attraction between masses, the space between them being structureless (nothingness again) and the communication instantaneous. The construct offered by Einstein was that mass deforms the manifold and other masses are accelerated in response to this deformation. My Aztec string is attracted by matter. When there is a sufficient amount of matter around my Aztec string forms a sort of flexible mat. Whichever picture you prefer rubber mat or Aztec string spacenothingness is portrayed as an object that is aetherial. The mathematical construct of relativity works, but in truth the complexity of the mathematics restricts the number of testable predictions that can be made. At this point we can be suspicious that part of the difficulty is the assumption of dimensionality the axiomatic 4 dimensional universe, far from being self evident, lacks justification. GR became accepted because it predicted and allowed the calculation of observed astronomical phenomena that were previously unexplained and made predictions about clocks that could be tested and verified. The relative time phenomenon of GR is commonplace where satellite data is being transmitted back to earth at a certain rate controlled by a clock. The 99 31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity synchronisation on the ground drifts, not just because of any inaccuracy in the clocks. The clock on the satellite goes slower relative to the clock on the ground despite the fact that the clocks are often identical. GR at first hand 12. The conclusion that offers itself is that our perception is not reliable, GR works, so it is easy to conclude space isnt nothingness, it is a manifold filled with information. With the publication of GR we then have two aether type theories EM and GR; field theories with effects travelling through space at the speed of light. What more natural than to attempt to combine these? One would have thought it must have irritated Einstein considerably that a further theory was developed, Kalusa-Klein Theory (KK theory 1921), only a few years after his publication of GR, although his correspondence on the subject seems very generous. KK had found that if you bolt on an extra dimension to the four of spacetime this fifth dimension can, if appropriately restricted, unify GR and EM. KK theory didnt blossom in the same way as GR. To add in electromagnetism you need to add an extra parameter. You have to the other dimensions/parameters are rather busy with GR. Veblen, a colleague of Einsteins, published an eloquent paper in 1930, showing that KK theory could be portrayed as GR in a projective spacetime but also could be used to derive the equations of the newly emerging quantum mechanics. In some ways this was a put-down as parameterisation can model anything you like with enough parameters. KK theory may have brought gravitation and electromagnetism together in one theory, but what did it explain? There were no new predictions and therefore no verification. Therefore KK theory was unjustified. The connection of KK theory to QM was more thoroughly developed through the introduction of the concept of a minimum length which arises naturally during the mathematical

Id prefer to replace this with one of the experiments where this was directly observed. (New scientist or simil?)

12

100

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity development 13. But there is no unexpected Eureka in this development and it proved nothing new, nor predicted or explained anything. KK theory variants are much more in vogue again as through string theory and its successors we have lost any sense of embarrassment in evoking extra, unexplained dimensions of reality needed to accommodate high energy particles. At some distance of history we can observe that if KK is simply considered alongside GR then GR could equally be accused of saying nothing new and that KK theory is superior as a starting model for WVT as it is a minimally inclusive parameterisation. The disappearance of KK theory for half a century was a triumph of PR over progress. Either way relativity theory generated a field-day for nonsense interpretation. Everything became interpreted as relative. In relativity it is pointed out that whether or not you experience an event and the details of the measurement depend on your position and relative motion with respect to the event. Not only do we have baffling aether, we have time and space combined in spacetime and a consequent relativity of measurement which destabilises causality. SR and GR are deterministic theories but there is no longer a single universal truth in common as opposed to individual experience and that being so there is a collapse of understanding in Western thought well underway. However, in this picture there is still a universal truth which is not apparent to the individual and that is unfortunately contained in the states of space which is non-physical to the entitist. The separate life of electromagnetic theory, which includes the theory of magnetism (now through the quantum theory of spin) cannot be stated to simply arise out of KK theory. Electromagnetism arises but the unification is not compelling as all we have is the field theory and no detail of the atomic origin of the electromagnetic effects (including magnetism). The mathematics for electromagnetism was initially formed by Maxwell using a mechanistic model (called the Vortex model) of the aether. This was fairly
13

H Flint

101

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity rapidly abandoned as it became apparent to Maxwell that it simply didnt work. The key philosophical puzzle was that without some kind of mechanical picture what did the electromagnetic waves travel through or on? Space again would have to have a structure an aether on which the waves could travel. The Michelson-Morley experiment was designed to find out some basic things about the aether did it exist, did it travel around with the world or did the earth travel through it? After various successor experiments it has been fairly comprehensively concluded that the aether does not exist. We now think of electromagnetic waves as a sort of approximation for photon-exchanges which dont need any aether (and Einstein by this time was probably anti-aether). Around 1930 it also could have been argued that if KK theory is a restatement of an aether theory then what is true for the electromagnetic part is true of the gravitational part. You could imagine a sceptic saying of the aether problem So you say that space is filled with little strain elements and clocks? Do those little clocks move with the earth or move through it? Oh, and these little clocks have you seen one by the way? The push to find a partner particle for EMs photons, the Graviton again is no solution. All that has happened is to replace a question of what waves are travelling on with what particles are passing through. So we find ourselves back at the beginning with the idea that space has no substance and therefore no structure on which to carry gravity. Either an insistence on substance in nothingness is wrong or we have to think that spacetime curvature is an interpretive proxy for something else. A clever spacetime containing information is appealing because all the influences of mass are neatly summed (a vector sum) together so that a mass sitting in this manifold is told how to move. The way the sum works is that one neighbourhood of spacetime only contains the net sum of the vectors it doesnt need to carry all the information about all the
14

14

But I

wonder if around 1930 it would have felt like KK were re-creating the aether

We will deal with the obvious problem of what the photons then travel through presently.

102

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity contributions to that sum. Thus we can lose the vast calculation at every point and replace it with something much simpler. In the picture of gravitation offered by Newton the influence is similarly a sum of the effects of all the masses at any distance but there is no apparatus for this sum and there is a spooky action at a distance an instantaneous effect on one particle by all the other particles in the universe. All this is replaced in GR with a local vector. So far so good, but how local is local, for surely this neighbourhood has size has properties of an object, and how is this measurement of gravity carried out? The gravitational field object must pass information to mass through spacetime somehow. The unification prescription draws us to a generative solution that the states of space are created by objects. Again that is not enough. Much of the difficulty is due to the limitations of perception. If we think of objects then surely we think of separation of objects a space in-between. We think of objects as things and the opposite is nothing. We thereby are led by the nose into the concept of nothingness and that, we suspect, is a mistake, as our paradigm of nothingness space seems to carry object properties. We cannot believe in nothingness on any basis other than perception. The symbolisation of nothingness isnt the circle 0 it is the absence of anything within. The final consideration we have in the is it an object, is it a field conundrum is mass-energy equivalence. Mass is energy. Einstein derived mass-energy equivalence in 1905 (the equation was derived by Poincare in 1900 but Einstein realised the interpretation and significance). If objects are made of energy then this supports the idea that objects and fields are aspects of the same thing. What this equation does not and cannot say is that if there is such an equivalence how does the variety of elements and particles come about? Energy is undifferentiated, mass certainly is not. There is a recurrent acceptance of duality an acceptance of the coexistence of irreconcilable truths in this. The alternative is an acceptance that the categorisation dividing space and matter is false. This is a 103 31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity suggestion I follow and support. Interaction is the primitive. The perception of objects in space and time is a result but a misunderstanding. By 1930 you not only had the new reality of relativity but also an incompatible new reality of Quantum Theory (QT). In practical terms, QT is essential in producing the semiconductor junctions in electronics that enable computers to be built, the a priori calculations for chemistry, SQUIDs and nuclear reactors a whole host of devices and industries in fact have resulted from the development of QT. The proof of the reality of QT is in the whole of the modern economy. So in practical terms QT delivered big-time. The scope for misinterpretation and daft extrapolations unfortunately also blossomed. There are two areas of wonderful misinterpretations - in wave-particle duality and the notion of chance. Wave-particle duality is related to the object and nothingness conundrum so as this is what we have just being discussing in relativity, let us deal with wave-particle duality first. Our perception is of objects and space between them. Instead of thinking about objects and nothingness physicists tend to think of particles and fields. In quantum theory this goes one step further. Erwin Schrdinger described matter in terms of waves. You can usefully regard matter as a wave or as a particle and Schrdinger personally wasnt even dualist, he held the view that matter was wave-like, a confined field. Heisenbergs version of QT is a matrix formulation and can loosely be thought of as particulate in that the matrix elements are objects (yet the uncertainty principle is wave-like). John von Neumann demonstrated mathematical equivalence between the Schrodinger and Heisenberg interpretations through the use of Hilbert space thus supporting a dualist interpretation. Feynmans path integral approach to QT he states is firmly particulate even though modern quantum field theory is wave-like. The approach to QT education today is dualist because there are virtues in both 104 31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity pictures. It is therefore not surprising that we are left with the scope to think anything convenient. In the discussion of objects and nothingness, the wave-like picture is a field and the field is the substance-less information carrier we find troublesome yet we find we can think of objects as being made of fields. Now we have a clue to the solution. If we have space within objects as well as between objects as we have an object hierarchy however vaguely that hierarchy may be defined then surely space is only defined between or within objects. Thus we have a liar paradox type of recursiveness. Particle-field and object-space arguments are moot. They are apparent forms, resultants of interaction and not fundamental at all. Randomicity Having thus addressed nothingness, let us move on to randomicity. The more familiar consequence of the misinterpretation of QT is a central misconception about the notion of chance. A notion has grown up that there is an intrinsic probability, a true and systematic randomicity that can be attached to all the aspects of life. It is accepted that the probability of success of an activity or investment depends on technical issues such as feasibility, yield and cost; market and pricing issues; issues of competition. These are unknowns, but they are neither random nor probabilities, yet the risk industry abounds in the misuse of randomicity. There is also more generally the stuff happens attitude which is very undesirable as well as incorrect. The only physical systems which are strictly considered to be random are quantum mechanical processes on the atomic scale 15. This does not apply to risk or chance. Good risk practitioners recognise that the issue is information, and specifically the lack of information on which to make decisions and take actions. Indeed the function of markets and incentives
15

This is the Copenhagen interpretation of QT. [Bohr quote here] See transactional QM by .

105

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity are nowadays modelled recognising information asymmetry and revelation during information exchange (and hence the use of game theory in strategy). Probabilities as a statistical measure are then applied in the assessment of the potential risk impact of information deficits. On the sub-microscopic scale a number of phenomena are nondeterministic. For example, the position or momentum of an electron, the decay of radioactive nuclei and the scattering of a photon are described by the rules of chance. However, there are also instances of statistical rather than quantum mechanical chance. To be strictly a quantum mechanical phenomenon there has to be an entanglement of states rather than just a statistical number of potential outcomes. Thus the distinction between statistical processes and quantum dynamics are easily blurred. The net result is that chance has invaded the Western conception of reality. The pseudo-validation of chance, probability, uncertainty, randomicity that are introduced by misinterpreting QT more or less caused the collapse of the idea of causality in Western thought. (A causal end to causality?) This has been generalised falsely to some sort of notion that nothing can be understood and when combined with relativity has generated a postmodern mess. The misapplication spreads out to affect the legal system and attitudes to life. The odd voice said the harder I try the luckier I get as a repost but there is now a wonderful refuge for the incompetent, the lazy and the criminal. One expression of entanglement in QT sets a limit on what can be known about the states of matter is the uncertainty principle. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle identifies the fact that there is a limit to which things called conjugate variables can be independently measured. A corollary of this observation is that the act of taking a measurement on a system changes that system through these linked variables. Again the development was at outset strictly limited quantum mechanics.

106

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity In the macroscopic world there are obvious analogies. If you set a target for your workforce the workforce distorts its behaviour to meet that target. You have started to measure performance and that changes the systems behaviour. That is why you set the target in the first place. The difference is again that in the macroscopic situation the uncertainty is a lack of information which could be revealed, whereas for microscopic systems there is no further information available the uncertainty is irreducible. If we try and isolate just what the difference is between a situation that the randomicity in QT can be applied to and where statistical chance applies, it comes down to taking a position on undecidability recognising that there seem to be two varieties undecidability due to the lack of information and undecidability due to intrinsic irresolvable uncertainty. So it is the intrinsic variety that is called entanglement. Entanglement is where the alternatives in a categorisation choice cannot be resolved. Feynman termed these as interfering alternatives. In every decision we take there is a limit to information but usually this is just a lack of information. If we wished to extend the applicability of QT methods beyond the Copenhagen scope there is currently no mechanism to do this securely. However an extension is apparent in the loop statements that arise in logic and mathematics as previously shown. Situations, like the workforce incentive model, will have effects that are predictable and those that are not. People have a freedom and individuality and individual behaviours in response to incentives that probably could never be fully predicted. Thus, in macroscopic systems there is at least an analogous limit to available information as seen in the microscopic world. This is neither formally recognised nor treated differently from other situations. This actually means there is a problem with the notion of a random variable. We have a false categorisation between statistical situations, entangled situations and situations of information deficit. Looking for a WVT using

107

31 July 2013

10_Nothingness and randomicity randomicity is an error. Randomicity is not a primitive. Indeed it may be an unhelpful concept altogether. The boundary between the scale where you can apply quantum logic the definition of the quantum scale was set as atomic (mainly by Bohr). The most popular example Schrodingers cat is actually quite unhelpful. There are actually two issues: entanglement and probabilistic behaviour. The latter you get for any ensemble analysis; thermodynamic, large numbers treated as a set such as populations. Entanglement is the essence of QM. The viewpoint of matter as a distribution or wave is statistical the interference of these waves is an entanglement. That entanglement may describe a single object 2 or more separate states entangled to form one system. With this there is a reality problem at the heart of things which was played out in the Butlerov-Pauling controversy of 1950-51. Therefore we have collapse. The Western notions of space, time and material objects which underpin the whole philosophical system just doesnt make sense.

108

31 July 2013

11_Turtles all the way down Turtles all the way down The word atom comes from the Greek. Imagine a venerable, suitably bearded chap with white robes standing at a cutting-board, knife in hand and a slab of feta cheese in front of him. He cuts the feta cheese in half, cuts the half into quarters and cuts it again and again it must be made of something smaller. He cuts until he can cut no more and concludes that there must be a fundamental, irreducible substance a small component that is cheese essence itself. We can note, however, that what is really going on is that he can keep cutting until he reaches the width of the sharpened blade. The ingredients of cheese can be broken down further into elemental components mainly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and a tad of sodium, but his experiment is limited in using the blade. The atom is the uncuttable. We have the interacting pair of objects A and B. Information travelling between object A and object B defines a frequency when that interaction exchange is stable. This is our candidate generator of a clock-frequency. This clock frequency can be separately identified with the combination of A and B as a process parameter of the interaction of A and B. So this clock frequency actually forms a new object, which we can call C. Also, what are A and B made out of? We can follow the same procedure down the hierarchy splitting A and observing it is formed of an interaction between sub-objects such as a + and a-. OK, but what about a+, a-? Maybe these sub-objects too can be decomposed into sub-sub-interacting objects. There also seems to be no necessity that the split should be pair-wise (a simple 2 way spinor split) although this may be the most common form. For the moment observe that there are different levels of a hierarchy being created. C on top, A and B below, a+, a- and b+, b- beneath. C is defined by a clock frequency that is generated by A and B interacting. A and B have their own separate clock frequencies defined by a+, a- and b+, b-. So within object C there are a number of clock frequencies within clock frequencies. In fact anywhere there are stable interactions there are clock frequencies. Within objects and between objects. Where the action is mirrored back to form a stable circuit I can consider that new system as an object too. We see that the interaction of objects creates further objects and that objects are composed of interactions. We have a recursive loop generator structure. 109 July 31, 2013

11_Turtles all the way down

This very much reminds me of a tale by Feynman in his popular book on QED 1. He was giving a public lecture about cosmology and was taking questions from the audience. Someone remarked to him that he was wrong, the earth wasnt floating in space it was sitting on the back of a turtle. Puzzled, Feynman replied Well what is the turtle standing on? He took a few more questions and the same person asked to be heard again. They stood up and said Youre a very clever man, but its turtles all the way down. So here's the problem. I can form a hierarchy by combining C with something else; I can split a+ down into its (spinor) components. I can split down and down, all the way down to what exactly? Or do I have to say, I'm sorry Professor Feynman, its turtles all the way down? It's not turtles all the way down at least because we have the example our Greek friend with the cheese and knife. Here the limit is the blade width. The interaction representing the observation (cheese-knife) has a finite width and interaction is always at a finite energy. So the way that the observation process interacts with an observed object is limited by the energy of the interaction. More generally the interaction energy limits not only the revelation of structure, but the resulting structure in a limit of splitting. We therefore have a picture of interaction where the observer energy matches an energy characteristic of the subject being observed for interaction to occur. The most primitive form of character we can draw on from theory is that of the existence of a characteristic scale of length corresponding to the limit. We have to be careful and recognise that this length is actually a scale of energy in pre-space or k-space; that is a scale of energy rather than spatial extent. So the action reveals sub-structure to the level of the interaction energy. From this we have a picture of elastic scattering and spectroscopy where the incident energy reflects or is absorbed strongly at certain characteristic levels but also a notional picture of energy splitting structures in high energy collisions and reactions. When the
1

The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

110

July 31, 2013

11_Turtles all the way down energy splits say C into A+B there is a question about the pre-existence of A+B which isnt immediately obvious. Chemistry explains the breaking down of the objects into what we now call the elements, into individual atoms and their building up into compounds, molecules and materials. High energy physicists have revealed sub-atomic particles. The results of the HEP experiments have revealed a menagerie of particles that is sufficiently ordered to be tabulated into what is referred to as The Standard Model. What is startling is that the energy levels so revealed are systematic and universally applicable. There is evidently a set of rules which govern the hierarchy of energy levels. The breaking down of objects into sub-objects tends to neglect the process of the entanglement of sub-systems into an object hierarchy which is the unique characteristic of quantum phenomena. If you try the analogy of language am I suggesting that the reduction of objects to components as the ultimate, fundamental entities makes no sense. In language the equivalent is to look for meaning of words by looking at the individual letters. The mathematical analogy would be to look at numbers or mathematical symbols like the = sign as somehow the fundamental elements which explain mathematics. This is surely wrong we feel it is the process that the symbol represents that is the important if illusive factor. There is also the limit of the reductionist approach in that to reach a satisfactory reductionist conclusion you would have to understand the origin of the fundamental particles themselves and approaching that by further reduction makes no sense either. You would have to start again. Keep chopping the feta. There is something else going on. We are splitting nature down into smaller parts, looking for simple components and it isnt quite working even though it tells us much in revealing a hierarchy of particles. It's the same old cosmic joke again. We are impelled to categorise and this time we are splitting real objects instead of language statements, but we reach the same limit. Also the arithmetic is inexact as the combinations are not complete and the substructure does not entirely disappear. The more complex the combinations of objects the weaker hte binding seems to become but again that is an arcane generalisation. Systems are 111 July 31, 2013

11_Turtles all the way down composed of sub-systems, but we lose sight of the systematics. all the information that reconstructs the whole. For the solution of the production of context in a closed system to provide a satisfactory, complete picture of creation and stability of a system we conclude we would have to argue that the generator first creates an environment and what is created then regulates the generator. You cant have development without the environment being there too as part of a system. If we have the idea of generative structures we have to ask questions about that too we need to understand entailment, reduction, sustention and collapse there are systematics at work. It is an ill-thought idea that there could be a simple thing at the bottom of all this splitting that could contain

112

July 31, 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies Reasoning Hierarchies Apparent order It is inescapable that structures have a hierarchy and that we tend to rationalise the universe in terms of a large set of sometimes poorly defined, even abstract, hierarchies. Universe, galaxy, solar system, planet; genus, species, individual, organ, cell, nucleus, DNA, protein; material, molecule, element, nucleus, nucleon, quark; book, chapter, paragraph, sentence, word, letter; application, high level computer language, assembly code, bits. You know the picture, and that these hierarchies are often not particularly rigid or unique. . You may have macro-economy, market, niche, company, products, technology as a hierarchical chain. It is a way of organising information in a reasoning process but you have situations where either information is sparse or there is too much information to be usefully categorised. Furthermore information can have temporal dependency even the facts change. 'Company A has developed the fastest X on earth.' Well, for how long will this be true? Yet sorting data, making sense of complex structures the context of a small company in a macro-economy, for example, is greatly aided by the recognition of that context as a hierarchy. The small company is at the mercy of the context it sits in. Indeed the individual is at the mercy of the company. We can agree that there are hierarchies, and we can agree that they arent unequivocally defined. Try and think of an absolute and rigid hierarchy. Mathematics develops from the base of symbols, axioms, theorems, but then there are theorems relying on theorems so the idea that mathematics is hierarchical doesn't seem to have immediate utility or seem particularly helpful. The periodic table of the elements has an odd counting system so you can't really say it is definite and absolute. Anything you can think of? No? Nature doesn't do rigid hierarchies. What of these soft hierarchies then? Conventionally if we think of a hierarchy as a series of levels we think of the lower levels being simpler

113

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies than the higher ones. Yet the harder you look at a problem the more levels of complexity it seems to generate. For one thing the levels are ill-defined, the levels have interdependency and you cannot exclude the effects of interaction with the system. How you examine the system influences what 'appears'. So in some ways the existentialists are a bit right instead of being very wrong. Being sceptical about the reliability of sense perception, as it is clearly misleading, leads to a re-appraisal of the notion of order. We know there is a great deal of order and universal equivalence at least to the level of chemistry. The stable isotopes of the elements seem to be universally consistent in their properties and even more, the instability of the radioactive isotopes is also statistically consistent. There is a great extent to which systems behave in predictable ways thermodynamically, mechanically and the rest. These are ordered things, but perhaps perception tends to make us take too much notice of that which is ordered and neglect the chaos so that the level of order around us is more apparent than actual. Obviously the way we consider things is that ordering isnt just a group, set, an isomorphic mapping or simply a list. The concept of order also entails the idea of a hierarchy. That may be through putting things together and naming a list or it may be a relational categorisation as in a business organisation chart. The act of categorisation creates hierarchies. We are now in a position to develop what we mean by reasoning in this context a little further. The law of Abelards Truss says the way our minds work cannot be outside Unified Theory. Our faulty reason must be a symmetry of the way nature works. Reasoning is a process of symmetry: categorisation, comparison and action. We can therefore see reasoning as an instance of a process of interaction. Thus interaction is a primitive of

114

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies reasoning 1. Order is both a result of and perceived as a hierarchical categorisation. Our perception of order is apparent but this reflects what we think of as real order. The unification standpoint is to regard that real order as the result of similar processes of categorisation that occur universally and that we share the defects as well as the successes of that process. Take a large group of objects, form a selection through categorisation. You now have a group and a sub-group. Repeat and you have what begins to look like a hierarchy of objects. This is a hierarchy formed by observation. Now we have taken the word observation before and substituted in the word primitive interaction. The approach is then the primitive interactions create hierarchies which we then observe. It all gives the result of a mess of poorly defined, relatively stable reliable or unstable and unreliable categorisations which we build our laws and theories on. It again appears that the process of interaction is all that is needed to create the sort of hierarchies we perceive. Incompatible Systems In the same way as we started to morph Descartes statement into more general physical terms we can approach the problem of the existence of order and the lack of it elsewhere by talking about systems as the general notion of ordering. You can also observe that belief systems require an absolute adherence for them to be fully stable. For absolute stability systems would also have to be screened from any outside interactions. We couldnt know about systems like that because we couldnt interact with them. You can observe that different belief systems are incompatible they cant all be right. So unified theory must recognise these disjoint neighbourhoods of belief. There should be physical primitives in the theory
For completeness note that reasoning is a subset of thinking and thinking is therefore tertiary for the purposes here.
1

115

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies that allow a universe where nonsense and the dispute as to what is nonsense are possible. It is a system where the meaning of language collapses: if belief systems were fully compatible they would be the same belief. If you accept there are many beliefs you have to accept these are incompatible beliefs. Your belief therefore cannot entail the other beliefs and you cannot claim your belief to be universal. Yet a belief system cannot accept being partially true as belief is absolute within a system. Howsoever stated, a belief cannot entail contradictory beliefs 2. You must assert your belief true and the others false to avoid accepting that your belief isnt universal and therefore invalid, or assert that your belief entails all other beliefs which are mutually contradictory. Belief in Unified Theory must take the latter approach and therefore accept contradictions as inherent facets of the theory and believe Unified Theory as the overriding truth that enables all these beliefs of whatever status. We have observed and can agree that there are different systems of belief. You can doubt the validity of particular belief systems, but you cannot deny that different belief systems exist. While you possess a belief system, you also know that there are people out there who do not believe the same things. If you are madly egotistical you will say that everyone in the universe talks nonsense save you. If you are liberal you may wonder if you are talking nonsense. So again we conclude we have a universe with disjoint sets of belief what would locally be called truths. Structuring Language In formal language theories Naom Chomsky 3 started the ball rolling with an attempt to analyse theories of language with a simple sentence and its permutations. The sentence he used was John ate a sandwich. One variant he chose not to analyse was A sandwich ate John. Pity.

2 3

This is a form of Russells Paradox. Ref

116

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies In seeking out the symmetry between language, thought and physical theory I keep using the word primitive. I have been using it sufficiently often that it is time that I attempted a definition. In categorising language, Hayakawa 4 popularised the idea of an abstraction hierarchy. Instead of a cow, we might be specific say Betsy the name of a particular cow, or we may use something more abstract say livestock. There is then a ladder of abstraction in the expression of ideas; Betsy, cow, livestock. This rather nice observation can be applied as a tool to help in the composition or analysis of text. It makes one aware of how you can clarify or mystify meaning by moving up or down the abstraction ladder. It is a way of thinking about the relational aspect of language but could descend into an endless word classification game. We can agree we have some sort of hierarchical relationship between words, but little more. Notice how only the first step is secure. I could develop the hierarchy any way I please. Bessie, cow, farm animal, mammal, animal. Bessie, cow, ruminant, herbivore. Either hierarchy would do there is nothing unique about the choice. The categorisation is externally imposed with an external purpose. You cant unify concepts by generalising except where the generalisation entails the primitive of the system. Another way of saying this is that when the generalisation is an abstraction it doesnt fit the purpose here. As we are thinking about process, what we wish to do is to set out a suitable vocabulary for the structure of the system. By using the term primitive I am attempting to include concepts by an intrinsic property rather than a ladder of abstraction. The more appropriate visual analogy is one of levels the more primitive the lower the level. I have to decide if I am using the term primitive in a relational sense or an absolute sense. To make WVT communicable you need a primitive as the generalisation for self consistency (in a way this forms a loop).

There is some controversy and accusations of plagiarism in the history of this idea. The differential by ? is also an interesting curiosity in this vein.

117

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies The relational sense I can write: Change p(Innovation) for change is a primitive of innovation and stability p(belief). I need to define the opposite sense of relation of the term too. I cannot find a better word than supervenience, which is a bit of a mouthful. Innovation s(Change) for innovation supervenes from change, etc. In this relational usage I can note that there isnt a one to one mapping between levels. Also, we still have the problem of axiomatic definition. I can say Change p(Innovation) because the existence of change is one of the agreed observations we have found whereas the definition of innovation is more complex. I can be pretty sure that change is in any language it is a basic word-concept, whereas Im not at all sure about that for the term innovation. If you remember the discussion of bida, innovation can be split into good and bad. We dont care if that is true or false we only care that it is possible. Now try and split change. Positive change and negative change. We can re-label those as Improvement and Deterioration. So change p(improvement) and change p(deterioration). By splitting I have created a new level or popped two new words in to join innovation as words generated from the concept of change. This is a spinor split into two phases and a verbal analogue of particle creation by splitting. Equivalently in continuum terms these splits are like creating new dimensions in a manifold. Im determined that Change p(Innovation) because the conceptual baggage the necessary assumed context - is minimal for change. I cant think of a more basic word for the concept of change than change. Alter is a good word but is slightly dependent on an external action altering something whereas change carries no such baggage. This relational usage picks up a new phenomenon the spinor split - but beyond this it leads to difficulties. The spinor-split allows us to introduce new words into a text. Noting that I seem to have put Improvement, Deterioration and Innovation at the same level I can play the same sort of game again. I can split the notion of primitive into lateral primitive and vertical primitive. This gives

118

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies me a new dimension of sophistry. Clearly change is a vertical primitive of Innovation, but I can now say change is a lateral primitive of Improvement. Alternately I can associate innovation only with changes that are improvements. Ghastly definitions and degeneracies are sprouting out like weeds. It gets worse. If I have a complex word I feel as if I need a number of primitive words to make up the connotations. I might choose to define innovation as the act or process of inventing or introducing something new that is of commercial value. I then have a number of word-concepts feeding into the term and change has become tacit. We can regard some words as a collection of concepts bundled together such as innovation and call these abstract words. Innovation may have to involve change but there is much more besides. The lack of a one to one relationship is confusing. This is absolutely not what we are after. So we could pursue some form of word-study this way but we can see that this is merely the process of building text. We can play this game at a higher level of complexity than words. It is how we create an infinite library. If a topic hasnt been written on, a book can be written. If a book has been written, another can be written on the same subject with a different point of view. Further books can be written until every point of view has been covered. Then we can begin a new layer. We can write books of criticism comparing one with the other. Once all the permutations of comparison are filled we can begin writing comparisons of the criticisms. So far we havent even allowed any repetition (called degeneracy in maths and physics), but have a process for generating an infinite library. The idea of introducing a primitive was to seek the simplest common factor that can generate more complex things a genetic algorithm to create a hierarchy, which can then be related to a physical law and corresponding mathematics. This seems only to generate more and more structure in the

119

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies relational sense of the word by successive application of the relational process and spinor-splitting. The notion of a primitive in an absolute sense would be a basic invariant physical process or phenomenon that can by elaboration include more complex processes and phenomena. This would be the entry at the lowest level of the system in rather than the relational sense. Action sounds like a primitive. An exchange of actions is an interaction. I can see that change is a consequence of interaction, and innovation may characterise that change. Change doesnt look like the absolute primitive anymore because there has to be an action to create change. An action must come from an object, so is object the primitive? Stability is implicit in the concept of an object. If I have a stable interaction I have a definition of object so that interaction is a primitive of the notion of object, so object is not a primitive invariant although it may be primitive in relation to something else. I seem to have a logical loop reminiscent of the trouble I got into trying to hold onto a belief implying other beliefs which have the same trouble with my belief as I have with theirs and end up claiming superiority by shouting. The source of the trouble is that meaning cannot be absolute for the reason that if I examine what I have previously declared an absolute primitive I can make it relational and can keep on defining something as a primitive until I run out of ideas or get into a loop. We can observe that the generation of the arcane is intrinsic to language, but the generative processes are stable. All I can say is that, within a context, one term can be a primitive or supervenient to another. I can declare some word a primitive and call it invariant. All I have done is to create an axiom to cut off the inconsistency trap so my use of the term invariant is absolute only if I restrict its use to apply to process. As we have seen, axioms are necessary in any system the existence of axioms is certainly an invariant itself, but definitions of them are contextually dependent. Attempts at examination of axioms themselves can

120

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies split or replace the definition. Rationalisation is defeated. I can use the concept of a primitive and splitting to effect, but I have to know, somehow, when to stop and declare an axiom. I have stressed the need for a belief system to defend itself. The symmetry in physical terms for this is the formation of a barrier. The notion of a change of ideas is symmetrical to the idea of breaking barriers like breaking a chemical bond or other physical transition. I see a belief system as an object, and a set of different belief systems merely as distinct objects which react badly with one another. I see contesting an axiom as a dialectic between systems. For our purposes the result does not matter beyond the process. Making generative categorisation hierarchy is different from imposed categorisation hierarchies again there is a split. I have to interact with the system of words to generate the hierarchy and cause the split or there has to be an intrinsic, captive excess of energy that again makes the split energetically possible. Thus I need to add or have excess energy in a system to create the hierarchy. Argument or Reasoning Now this leads to the question of telling apart an argument from a reasoning process. At the outset of the book I started to cast doubt on accepted notions of time and about the validity of the interpretation of Einsteinian spacetime. I started talking about Prime Belief and the Prime Axiom. I talked about there being intrinsic obscurity in language and the existence of unprovable propositions. I used the word faith when saying we have faith in measurement because the result is independent of opinion. Faith is another arcane word. I note

121

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies that in measurement there are comparative processes, categorisation, splitting and ascribing levels in a hierarchy; a basic form of reasoning process in itself. The objective truths of science were noted as associated with process rather than condition statements. Sometimes you find new words or new senses of usage that categorise ideas together. In seeking a unified theory I am seeking a joining together of concepts, but must be careful how I try to do that. Encapsulating several complex ideas in a single term may be a mistake, not a unification while rationalising I categorise must admit I may categorise incorrectly because I can only categorise against my internal data (irrespective of the origin of new data). If I decide on a tenet and try to defend it, I may be wrong. I am condemned to doubt and only to hold to a few things we can all agree on. We can see the processes of reduction and generalisation of ideas. We rationalise, but interaction is a more basic term so I argue that interaction is the primitive of rationalisation in a hierarchy of words. Here there is also a split. Interaction can build (hypothecation) or reduce (rationalisation). The statement was made that interaction creates objects and that objects interact a statement that entails a recursive relation. Interaction is being put forward as an intrinsic property of objects at the same time as objects are being created by interaction. As we have said, interaction requires an input of energy to a system or for there to be free energy within the system. In all this a structure is becoming vaguely apparent. It is not a fixed structure, looks a bit like a process which automatically creates a hierarchy and is relational. I can order things and being more or less primitive with regard to one another and have identified process as a primitive invariant. It is a dynamic structure requiring energy that is we need to put in effort to create (or reveal) these structures.

122

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies Structure in Jokes To move forward toward understanding this strange, arcane semi-rational hierarchy consider what happens when you have to explain a joke. Reductive analysis kills the joke. Why does that happen? Consider: She was only the bakers daughter but she knew how to raise the dough. The joke is flagged by the opening She was only which may alert us to the fact that we are not being serious 5. She is the daughter of the baker and so is contextually associated with bread-making. The form is also {on the one handbuton the other} inviting comparison between the phrases. The final phrase she knew how to raise the dough uses the dual context of the word dough as bread-mix and, in slang, money. There is therefore a contextual ambiguity created in the use of the term dough which, because I have analysed the text, is no longer funny. The ambiguity once rationalised is static and resolved the ambiguity is the dynamic of the humour. Analysing that dynamic causes it to collapse. That is very redolent of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics you have states entangled together that when resolved break the symmetry of the physical system causing a change of state to definite values called eigenvalues and this in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is termed waveform collapse. To this extent the universe is a bit of a joke. In a similar way narrative constructs rely on our complicity not to rationalise because the acceptance of the make-believe during the experience of watching, listening or reading makes the construct feel real and evokes real emotional and intellectual response. It can alter our world-view. We allow ourselves to be drawn into tales. The opposite of story-making - literary analysis and literary criticism - tends to break down the story into
5

A more standard opening is obviously Have you heard the one about

123

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies constituent parts; story-breaking, in short. I know people who studied literature because of the love of reading. In becoming expert at dissection, the joy and transport was lost in the acquired automatic rationalisation. They therefore now find it hard to read for pleasure. A rationalist might argue that these art forms are exceptions they are not reality, they are make-believe. The same process of rationalisation is applied to texts of legal contracts and patents. The intrinsic properties of language always lead to ambiguity and attorneys have a secure profession thereby. Even rationalists should do jokes. I chose the words primitive and supervenient to describe relational constructs. Loosely, I use; primitive for down a level from, supervenient as up a level from. I have slightly abused the definition of analytic and synthetic 6. Hopefully the reason for this is becoming clear. The term analytic I associate with something deterministically related within a context or nominally closed system. All the information is there for the true/false decision process and in mathematical terms this is related to a function which is differentiable everywhere. Whatever and whoever follows a process in an analytic system will come out at the other end with the same result. The term synthetic, on the other hand, is associated with a connection which is incomplete. You would then say that following a process in a synthetic system will produce a spectrum of results in a Baysean fashion. That is an analytic distinction between synthetic and analytic. Snap goes the trap. When analytic distinctions are forced on synthetic constructs a change in the systemic relations occurs. If things follow but not in an analytic fashion it is pointless to attempt a deterministic solution. To do so generates the arcane. As the term analytic only pertains to closed structures and ultimately no structure is closed the term analytic is an approximation. Thus again we have a joke on formal logic.

The analytic/synthetic distinction originates with Kant. The more recent contributions of Quine and Chomsky develop the debate into a significant minefield.

124

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies Think of the wordplay as an interactive system; the relationship between words is synthetic until you interact and change the relationship to analytic by seeking to define terms. The system then collapses to a more compact state. The joke explained goes flat. A minor industry has been created in the synthetic construct of the meaning of terms like supervenient. This process of splitting and transitia constructs language and is endless and it is pure physics. Case inclusiveness and the continuum In closing this chapter I would like to mention a very old tale called the Dream of Rhonabwy from the Red book of Hergst (the Mabinogion), which was written in the sixth century. Scribes had begun to write down the folk tales of Celts who only had an oral tradition. Largely, therefore, the scribes were listening to tales and then committing them to writing not creating their own tales except perhaps in the case of this one. Celtic myths and legends seem to be strange metamorphoses of historical events and have some lost root in reality. In the case of the Tain the events can be traced to actual places. The Dream of Rhonabwy stands out as different. There is a series of events off-stage which are brought to chieftains playing a game of chess (not a Celtic game). The messengers are all elaborately and differently dressed with the detail strictly recounted. Their dress is in rather confusing permutations of form and colour the significance of which is unclear until the scribe finally states as all these variations are so complex no oral recounting could ever remember them. The tale is actually an attack on the oral tradition. The Scribe is determined to write the definitive, absolute and authentic tales and was probably being driven mad by the variations and inventions of oral re-telling. The written word is immutable, absolute and (nearly) permanent. I think this tale was the Scribes own invention. The other tales appear to be original tales finally written down after being orally recounted over the generations, mutating with each telling, and no doubt becoming fantastical through generations of change. The tales once written were captured, but by being so determined

125

31 July 2013

12_Reasoning Hierarchies their creativity was at an end. Language is oral first, then written. The intrinsic character of language is not written and deterministic but contextual, relational and dynamic. So much effort has gone into the search for certainty through the apparent invariance of the written word. The Celt and the Scribe were in cultural conflict, the Scribe the rationalist and the Celt arcane. A strange symbiosis created the legacy we can read today. The theory we seek is not about true and false, its about process. The process is reasoning in a broad sense, but not reasoning in the sense of formal logic it is much closer to an argument between fools. Language inescapably has interpretability bounded below by axioms of meaning and bounded above by context. This means that no interpretation is unique. This is the key. If the relations become absolute the structure collapses. It doesnt collapse because there are multiple interpretations. I conclude that it is this very multiplicity of interpretation that gives rise to the richness of the structure of language and nature. Therefore it is misunderstanding that is the basis of the world we experience. There are interactions. Interactions are between objects. Objects are created by interactions. Categorisation creates objects that mirror the frame of the observing actor, the action energises a system to create and sometimes reveal a hierarchy of structure that is interactive and dynamic.

126

31 July 2013

13_Differential Perception

Differential Perception losing the definitive moment Two identical clocks in different gravitational fields go at different rates. The fact that identical clocks go at different rates in these circumstances is proven. To me that cannot have any real meaning unless the definition of an instant 1 is relative too. Eyes have a characteristic frequency of perception 2. Human eyes work at a rate of under 60 or so times per second. There is a species of small harmless spider that I perceive as having a characteristic jump and stop motion. Within 1/60th of a second they can start to move and stop again. To me therefore it seems to jump discontinuously. If, however, I take a video of the spider which has a faster frame rate and play it back in slow motion I can see the spider jumping and landing in a smooth fashion. I could take myself out of the experiment and employ a video with a lower frame rate and reconstruct a comparable video track and compare the captured images. Time, as far as it exists at all, exists as the state of a counter driven by a frequency. The clock frequency is the fundamental basis in that it corresponds to what we mean by the present. Time and space are measures, frequency is a rate. Mathematically rates are called differentials, and are described in differential calculus. Two rivals came up with differential calculus at around the same time; Leibnitz and Newton were reluctant correspondents and it is accepted they came up with the idea independently. Certainly their thinking and motivation were very different 3. It is hard to explain what is meant by a differential without writing equations, but here goes. If the position of the spider changes from moment to moment that difference in position in that moment is a definition of the velocity of the spider. To form a differential, indeed the definition of a differential, is the limit when the movement becomes infinitesimally small, the instantaneous change of position is what we generally mean when we talk about 'velocity'. (Strictly I should say instantaneous velocity, but life's too short.)

1 2

Instant, infinitesimal, moment, differential or limit must all be relative terms. Flicker Fusion Thresholds are a bit more complex than this, but all components for humans are less than 60Hz. 3 I am developing notions much more in the line of Leibnitz as it happens.

127

31 July 2013

13_Differential Perception What I have suggested is that the rate of clocks for different sorts of objects varies and that there is a substructure to clocks with other embedded rates. Is there an absolute definition of an instant? If clock rates vary how could there be? The rate of the clock, the clock frequency, is defined by interaction. It is impossible to conclude otherwise than that there are system defined instants and they are not universal. Horror of horror, any clock defines an instant, but the clock rates do not match. There are different visual perception rates which are finite rather than infinitesimal, yet our perception is not disjoint because the finite limit is our differential perception rate. The fact that the limit is finite could only be perceived by a system possessing a faster rate. I am suggesting that different objects carry their own fragments of differential calculus and that interaction defines a system instant. I call this notion Differential Perception. The alternative of a universal calculus to me is absurd. Absurd because of the entitist position; matter carries information and has character, nothingness cannot. That means the apparatus of the objects or the interaction network is all that can be meaningful. Russell contended that Wierstrass had solved the problem of definition of the differential with his limit theorem, but as ever it seems none so clear when applied to physical systems rather than mathematics as an abstract subject. If we think of an instant as a single count of a frequency, we can see that identical objects will have the same instant (although we need to qualify this later) whereas two different objects will have different definitions of instant. Within each object, if there are different layers of a hierarchy hiding within it there could be several definitions of an instant within a single object. More than this because of spacetime equivalence we demand that the definition of k-values (which determine spacetime rather than time) is governed by Differential Perception. This leads to relative values for space as well as time infinitesimals. In physical terms we should associate what we have been calling the clock frequency with what is termed the instantaneous angular momentum. We appear to have done a terrible thing to calculus by making it relative and you could maybe think that there was an irrecoverable situation, having to all practical purposes 128 31 July 2013

13_Differential Perception an infinite number of fragmentary versions of calculus to contend with. Thankfully this isn't so as the implementation at one level simply gives extra meaning to equations which physicists and mathematicians use all the time. For example, in SR the quantity of the differential of relative time with respect to 'proper' time is the square root amplitude that causes measurements of time and length between different frames of reference to disagree. The difference between the intrinsic measures causes an error, a mistake to occur. That mistake is called an action. Obviously the action is equal and opposite from one measure to the other in forming an ineraction. The instant on the one hand is shorter and it sees only a partial element of the slower other. The slower other sees (integrates) more than one 'instant' of the faster. The forces of nature, so called, seem therefore to arise out of this misunderstanding due to differential perception. This effect necessarily arises in theoretical physics, first in the development of KK theory which introduces the concept of a minimum to length - which is the local infinitesimal of distance and later in the many-time theories due to Landau, Podolsky, Fock, Tomonaga and Schwinger. This summing (finite integration) is what creates the counter for our clock. You can't build a clock without a summing machine and mathematics would be pretty diabolically boring without integration. However, the interpretation here demands the derivation of QED to be re-written in k-space rather than real space otherwise the idea of differential perception is consistent with these theories. Terminologically the exposition we have been following uses the square root amplitude for the relativistic factor whereas QM literature calls this an amplitude. What we have been calling an amplitude the QM literature calls a probability. I argue elsewhere that the use of the word probability is actually a proxy.

129

31 July 2013

14_Size complexity and normalisation

Size, Complexity and Normalisation An unsupportable and misleading rule of thumb version 1: the smaller things are the simpler they become. We think of breaking down a problem into components in order to solve it. A generalisation is a simple statement intended to summarise. Yet a generalisation can be short and look simple but actually be complex and misleading. For example, compact statements may contain potential for ambiguity because they have hidden context. If something has hidden context it isnt simple at all. So any ranking for simplicity isnt just compaction it is self-sufficiency. But I am struggling to find a valid exception-free way of further articulating a rule of thumb beyond a notional correlation between size and complexity. Consider a blade of grass. At this level we have a recognisable form / phenotype which we feel comfortable with. It looks pretty simple. As in language the structural level that feels simple is in the same middle-ground between the complexity of the micro-structure and the expanse of a field of grass. Note however, that the cell structure or the field in front of us are mistaken for being comprehensible in exactly the same way. We choose our middle-ground and fool ourselves. I elsewhere discussed the idea that language statements can be simple yet regarded as generative. Statements carry implications and generate a context as well as rely on a context. When I look at a statement I may need to differentiate between generative qualities and contextual dependence. So we can have simple statements that are self-sufficient (tautologies), generative (axioms), and context dependent (pseudo-simple). We just about have a complete and consistent categorization. We can turn this on its head and ask if there is a form that unifies the categories, find exceptions to these category rules and accept categorisation error. I seem to be able to usefully categorise for a purpose but the domain of validity of such categorisations is persistently limited and the approach flawed.

130

31 July 2013

14_Size complexity and normalisation If I consider reflection of light in a mirror I am told that the best description of what is going on is QED which precisely describes what happens in terms of a probability distribution. I can alternately observe that the classical picture of a ray bouncing off a surface is a pretty good approximation and usually the best one to go for in wave-like situations as the calculations are simpler. Hierarchically something interesting is going on. The classical model is simpler than the quantum because the many events of QM form a probablistic summary. When a light-wave bounces off a mirror a lot of complex things are going on yet the categorisation of classical optics has high validity and utility even if it isnt perfect. Indeed the other categorisation to a particle (photon) is a pure object representation which is completely contrary to the wave-type categorisation. But this is itself a categorisation (which incorrectly excludes the middle). The fully QM treatment is quite happy with the entanglement of the wave and particle states they are not exclusive - and the conclusion that these can be mixed states is perfectly allowable if stunningly odd if we dont think properly about dualism. As we are getting accustomed to by now this is the arcane trap and it means we need to think of another level to understand this. The wave-particle duality has the true/false symmetry and therefore generates a new level. The process is the invariant. A:not A categorisations are Gdel type. I put forward the idea that categorisation arises out of the limitations of measurement process and more generally that categorisation is error prone. Again, we have a process of summary and compaction of information but with information loss. The relative comparator A looks smaller than B is much less abstract and nearer to a measurement process as the categorisation definition is contained in the statement. You may note the sorities paradox doesnt arise with this sort of treatment. So in order to reproduce the hierarchies that we actually think of, see and experience we need to have a model or theory that embodies a particular type of imprecision; but the form is frustratingly illusive and categorisation failure is a key problem. Not only must we generate hierarchies and their contextual dependence but also the relations between members of that hierarchy must be described with

131

31 July 2013

14_Size complexity and normalisation the correct balance between precision and imprecision. Some hierarchies are internally defined, others, are defined by observation (in computer-speak you might say they are 'user-defined'). The apparent complexity depends on where you are observing from, how you are observing or perhaps the capacity of the observational device. The attempt to be definitive fails because as soon as you are definitive you lose the generality of connectivity of information which is again the interaction (the waveform collapses). Reasoning itself is subject to this same process. There are interactions and there are hierarchies. We can see the interplay of actions generating levels and the interactions at higher levels generating levels higher still. To make the soft, imprecise correspondences we are introducing ambiguity. We know we can regard each object in the hierarchy as a limited observer in its own right. That limitation is the scope of interactions in energy and number. Conventionally we may picture an action projecting onto an object. It may register nothing (transmission) or catch information (absorb or bond) and maybe then emit information/energy (covering emission, reflection and refraction). The absorption may have a summing/integral function or at least be so modelled. The correspondence to internal states can then result in internal state change and there can be emission thereby at distinct energy levels. For what we think of as simple reflection in classical terms there has to be absorption and emission with a high efficiency to make a good reflection. So if we configure our system to the interaction process then the piece-wise nature of IA gives the sort of messy imprecision we desire. Size and complexity become rather relative and local measures again. As such the coherence is strictly limited and the induction logic thus fails in the manner of random walk. A simple definition of interaction is an exchange of information an exchange of actions. The idea of observers and perception can be expanded a level thus: When two people talk we can categorise there to be eight people in the room. For each person there is the person they are, the person they think they are, the person they think they are perceived as, and the person they are actually

132

31 July 2013

14_Size complexity and normalisation perceived to be. Twice over, eight people in the room. However you cut it, the different personas arise from a lack of precise information which may be because of imperfect transmission, imperfect reception and usually both. Now do some substitutions: Objects people Interact Talk Room - system And get: When two objects interact we can categorise there to be eight objects (six virtual) in the system. For each object there is the object itself, the object self-interaction, the object state corresponding to the external-action, and the projection of one object on the other. Twice over, eight object states in the system. However you cut it, the different objects arise from a lack of precise information which may be because of imperfect transmission, imperfect reception and usually both. OK, Ive cheated a bit, but a satisfactorily clear state-space can be composed this way. The simplest interaction model may have eight dimensions if you feel it will do you any good. We can extend our uncertain rule of thumb with a speculative corollary: Information overload is easier to achieve for simpler objects. If objects have a finite capacity for information they have a finite number of states. When that is exceeded we have a mechanism of information loss. We are used to memory in computers having a fixed size. When computer memory becomes full you can simply overwrite some of what is there. You lose information. If this were indiscriminate it would be distressing for the user. One tactic is to use memory efficiently by data compression. If there are blocks of data all the same then only one copy is needed plus a handle to mark where the blocks should be so that a single copy can replace all the identical blocks. In the end you still run out of capacity. Compression may then be related (primitive) to categorisation. With a

133

31 July 2013

14_Size complexity and normalisation restricted number of interactions, categorisation is a method which stops physical systems crashing through overload. There is a sort of summarisation process going on. I suspect that this sort of unification while appropriately based on information in the information age will simply seem quaint in light of any real progress. The current designs of a memory chips in a computer are just stores. The chip is in a particular state like a clock showing a particular time. But all our current ideas of information are actually flat like computer memory or the states of a clock rather than dynamic and/or hierarchical in any way. It doesnt matter how many dimensions, tangent bundles, funiculations or whatever are associated with a state-space or manifold location unless the dynamic information is contained (traditionally through differential forms) within the state-space model. If we look to a natural analogy then we can look at a block of sandstone. It needs our interpretation to bring meaning to the idea of memory rather than a collection of states. If you learn how to read a block of sandstone you can learn details of the palaeo-environment the stone was laid down in. Otherwise it is a lump of rock. Another example is a book, which is nothing without a reader. Note it is not the reading that preserves the state of the book. We have information stored in a system, but if that information is to be used in an interaction it must be accessible to carry out a measurement process. A measurement process is essentially a comparison. My next contention is that I will need to talk about the logic of mirrors as a mirror is a good candidate for a primitive of a comparator which relates to the utility of geometric algebra. We can see that the size and complexity of a system gives that system a capacity

134

31 July 2013

14_Size complexity and normalisation for interaction. That capacity is limited. We can see that there is a loose sort of hierarchy in systems and the sustention of such systems has something to do with uncertainty and the mismatch of information. Which seems to suggest that physics, with all its complexity, arises out of the malfunction of the interaction process; the lack of definition of the measurement process, categorisation, matching, information loss and the next thing that automatically adds to the list or defeats the attempt at categorisation. Normalisation is the last element I will add here. In the detail of the progress of an interaction there will be characteristic scales of length or energy which determine the transitia. The king of the second order phase transition, Landau, was one of the first on the scene for the solution of divergence problems in the calculation of amplitudes in QED. Regularisation and renormalisation are ways of making the results which were infinite come out finite. Essentially you can get over the infinity problem by insisting on an indivisible scale so that you dont get infinities entering on integration. An unsupportable and misleading rule of thumb version 2: the larger things are the simpler they become. The observation that the process of systems appearing simpler on larger scales is surprising but so familiar that we dont register that this turns our size-complexity assumption on its head. Consider again the transition from QED to classical reflection. The screening of charge in electrostatics, the coupling of magnetic spins in the creation of magnetic states, and obviously being able to approximate planets as a single point mass in calculations absolutely defeats the notion that size and simplicity anti-correlate. This simplification with scale is a normalisation wherein the complex can be simply summarised is quite general and is the phenomenon that allows the old classical laws of physics to work for macroscopic bodies. To what extent the normalisation is consequent of the scale independence of phenomena such as conservation of energy, momentum, relative velocity, gravity, and other physical effects or whether these phenomena are consequent upon this normalisation is worthy of some further digging. It can be argued that differential

135

31 July 2013

14_Size complexity and normalisation perception is actually the primitive underlying all these effects. For the microscopic the spectra from electron-light scattering give an odd sort of hierarchy but when the constitution of the atoms themselves are examined the complexity is actually greater and as yet not modelled or explained in a way I can grasp. The exotics of HEP and the Standard Model are another thing again. Velocity and Momentum There are two more phenomena that I think we should be amazed by but generally just accept; the conservation of momentum and the relativity of velocity which we can deduce and observe by looking at the collision of two identical bodies. The deformation in this idealised case would be absolutely symmetric. This is surprising only if you think of one frame of reference having priority over another. If you are travelling with object A, so A appears static to you and then object B whacks into object A you experience a very asymmetric event. B fast, A not moving, B flies in out of nowhere and whacks A. You pick up the two objects now, say, on the ground and when you look at them you cannot tell which is object A and which is B. The damage is symmetric down to the level of similarity between the starting objects.

Does the limitation of induction give soft hierarchies? Rather like a version of sorities?

136

31 July 2013