Ark - where are you headed?

Updated: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,27044.msg329839.html#msg329839

Interesting paper: "A.Connes: Advice to the beginner"
_http://www.alainconnes.org/docs/Companion.pdf
 
Bluelamp said:
Approaching Infinity said:
Jerry said:
If we‘re to determine the most fundamental unit of space (monad) then it follows that it would be the simplest form which if reduced or divided would no longer define any space.
At first it seems that this reduction would lead us to consider a point, but isn’t a point dimension-less thereby not satisfying the condition? Unless location is enough to allow demarcation.

Maybe a monad would be the least amount of points (locations) that would allow a defined space?

That was my first thought, but then again, I am totally out of my league when it comes to these concepts. 0 and 1 did bring to mind matter and anti-matter, however, or particles and anti-particles. Can particles be said to code for information? And if so, is there any 'simpler' structure that can be said to do so?

There are certainly models like Feynman checkerboards with points spaced say the Planck length apart and these vertex points would have Spinor information that specifies matter/antimatter and which quark/electron/neutrino. The spinor information is a matrix and is kind of the square of what you'd think the minimum information would be; the extra information is kind of for quantum purposes I think. Links coming out from a vertex point would have Adjoint information specifying types of force particles (photon,weak boson,gluon, graviton).

To my mind "the simplest, but nontrivial structure of a monad" would have to be an address of some sort. It designates a location and presupposes a grid of some kind as the underlying reference system but without knowing beforehand any specifics of either.
 
dant said:
Updated: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,27044.msg329839.html#msg329839

Interesting paper: "A.Connes: Advice to the beginner"
_http://www.alainconnes.org/docs/Companion.pdf

I can vouch for the first two items of "practical advice," walking and lying down. I having been using them for many years to help solve difficult problems. Quite a few ideas have come to me in the shower as well.
 
Bluelamp said:
Classical isn't bad. Einstein is a great starting point. The idea is to merge classical and quantum.

I considered to let the above speak for itself, but let there be no misunderstandings of what I mean and how I feel about it since I seem to be having difficulty expressing my meanings clearly.

As far as I can tell, 'Classical' already lies in state (in more ways than one) as an "island of truth" in quantum reality with limited usefulness in limited contexts. As dominant mode of thought, today, at any scale or on any level, Classicism refuses to submit to the Law (of change) and I feel it to be responsible for much ignorance, suffering and death. Despite possible appearances to the contrary in our societies today, as the dominant mode of thought, I see it as spoiling everything it touches outside the realm of electronic and mechanical technology - dying, not growing.

Since Classicism, like false personality and pathological governments, tend to avoid acknowledging and submitting to the Law of change, the "change/no change scalability" perspective is partially what allows "noticing classicist tomfoolery" which was quoted of me. Though I understand no one is perfect, this has nothing to do with Laura and Ark.

As concerns my addressing "binary reality" attraction, this is merely related to my own understanding of some of my own workings. I.e., how our words and concepts are extracted from our continuity of experience and can become static, meaning-less and obsolete as reality continues on. It's when we come to emotionally identify with, and believe in them that we can find ourselves in a sort of intellectual stasis, I think, perceiving reality as a series of intellectual 'snapshots' from the comfort of a fixed state a la Barbour and somehow deduce that the 'time' between frames is identical with a blink off or whatever. That's a description of a binary-only reality and that's saying more about the intellect and perception than it is about reality, I reckon. This is what I believe at this point.
 
I must admit, I am far from understanding everything brought up in this topic.
But interesting? Not only interesting, but fascinating and eye-opening. :shock:
This topic is one of the reasons why we all have to keep Sott and Cassiopaea and QFG financially solvent.
Please, don't stop this discussion now.
 
Monads – elementary building blocks

Scientists do their research, but they also speculate. In fact speculation, closely related to an active imagination, is an important element that accompanies all innovative activities. Some speculations prove to be productive, some other, when followed, need serious corrections. But we should not be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes are absolutely necessary in the learning process. I suggest that in our speculations we go even further than Alain Connes himself. We go beyond the continuous paradigm and follow the direction described succinctly by an American physicist John Archibald Wheeler as “it from bit”.

Can we ever expect to understand existence? It from Bit
Information, Physics, Quantum.

John Archibald Wheeler

Physics Departments, Princeton University
and University of Texas at Austin,
February 1990 Preprint.


This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question,

How come existence?

No escape is evident from four conclusions:

1. The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any preestablished continuum physical law.

2. There is no such thing at the microscopical level as space or time or spacetime continuum.

3. The familiar probability function or functional, and wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information theoretic source from which they derive.

4. No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy. Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.
 
Buddy said:
I seem to be having difficulty expressing my meanings clearly.

As far as I can tell, 'Classical' already lies in state (in more ways than one) as an "island of truth" in quantum reality with limited usefulness in limited contexts. As dominant mode of thought, today, at any scale or on any level, Classicism refuses to submit to the Law (of change) and I feel it to be responsible for much ignorance, suffering and death. Despite possible appearances to the contrary in our societies today, as the dominant mode of thought, I see it as spoiling everything it touches outside the realm of electronic and mechanical technology - dying, not growing.

Ummm... Buddy, we are talking about physics here where "classical" has a very specific mathematical meaning that is not related to what you are talking about.
 
So will the general thrust of this thread be going in the direction of information physics being primary? It seems, from my very limited understanding, that's where all the promise of future breakthroughs lies. The more progress is made in information physics, the more this would open up our understanding of consciousness. All the information and the transfers have to be coming from somewhere, right? I mean that in the sense of putting a period to the fundamentalist materialist/mechanical dogma.

But I'm also not sure of the problems of weighing and measuring things that are not material. I think it's a problem with our current level of technology/measurement instruments, but probably it's more than that. Perhaps it will eventually be determined that pure consciousness can only be "measured" by consciousness. I can't really clearly express what I'm trying to say. I guess that's another advantage of having advance math skills: there are somethings that will always be too fuzzy when expressed in words. OSIT.
 
ark said:
...It sounds almost unintelligible, but I think I will be able to explain the main idea in simple terms.

I am following you to a considerable degree (I think) and I appreciate your mathematical references. I understood "equivalence relations" and noncommutative algebra, having been exposed to group theory in college. Pre-equivalence relations and "groupoids" start to lose me, but what is the difference between not understanding and "starting to understand?"

I have been reading a great deal of material lately about modern physics and cosmology (and about some of the not-so-modern physics that may still unduly influence our thinking). By reading a variety of books from different authors (Greene, Susskind, Randall, and Kaku among others) I encounter the same material repeatedly but from different points of view and some of it starts to sink in. Always, however, it is "dumbed down" to a large degree, for popular consumption. Otherwise the books would not sell.

What I am wondering now is, is there a readily-approachable level of mathematical understanding that would allow a person significant insight into this material, just for the purpose of understanding what is being said? Assuming, that is, that a physicist somewhere were willing to "come down" to that level? :)

In other words, are there particular areas of mathematics that might be beneficial for us to study, and that are fairly close to the surface ("not too deep"), that could provide a common ground for communication?
 
every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications

It sounds like rhythms: yes/no, 1/0, consciousness/void etc.

The structure of monads as elementary building blocks potentially seems to me something like a vibrating string from the String Theory, may be 10-33 centimeters (Plank's Length).
Then, how to give a definite structure to an oscillation ? Is there a true way to draw, to write, to symbolize a non static structure ?

In the concept of information the universe looses information, transforming it in energy, which cannot return in full the initial power.
How may it still contain information in the long term ? What about consciousness (as some kind of an electromagnetic field across all dimensions and densities), introducing new informations able to give new directions ? [ http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,27106.0.html ]

Now, could there be any available structure for such an electromagnetic field of information, where monads would appear and disappear at the edge of a virtual world ?
Can we ever expect to understand existence ? That's the question here and now !
Yes or no, or in between may be ?
 
At this stage it's looking like a monad would be 0 1, on off, yes no. A hologram is a 3D representation from a 2D structure. Like on a credit card. The possibilities seem endless.
 
Richard said:
At this stage it's looking like a monad would be 0 1, on off, yes no. A hologram is a 3D representation from a 2D structure. Like on a credit card. The possibilities seem endless.

Well, a hologram also brings in the whole issue of optics. Not only can you create "3 dimensional images" from 2 dimensional patterns, but when a holographic image on a film is cut up into small pieces, the whole is contained in each piece -- just scaled down / lower resolution. But I'm not sure how it all relates together to where this thread is heading. Yes, the possibilities are endless, I just don't have enough understanding to really grasp any of it.

There ARE some theories that have been around a while that the whole Universe is a hologram. It kind of fits in with esoteric / 4th Way concepts somewhat, as well. Also the C's have mentioned that we're all holographic projections in a certain sense in answer to Laura's question about holographic projections. I've always been fascinated with holography ever since I first found out about it and looked into it a bit many years ago. One other really fascinating thing is that the patterns on the holographic film seem to have no relationship to the 3D image that can be projected out of them. Mostly they're beautiful mandala type light patterns and then the 3D image could be anything that you would never have imagined. So it's very similar to our reality where we perceive all sorts of things not as they really are but according to the nature and limitations of our perceptions.
 
The hologram theory is interesting.

A short piece from

_http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=223236 [link deactivated by moderator]

Gerard t' Hooft says, 'One must conclude that a two-dimensional surface can contain all information concerning an entire three-space. In fact, this should hold for any two-surface that ranges to infinity. The situation can be compared with a hologram of a three dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface.' This leads us to the 'screen theory' in modern physics. The 'screen theory' might describe a screen as something like a quantum computer, with one bit of memory for each pixel - each pixel being two Planck lengths on each side. Physicist Lee Smolin says that if we assume that there are no things but only processes, only screens exist.

Lee Smolin summarizes: 'All that exists in the world are screens, on which the world is represented.'

J R Minkel (a Science Reporter) adds: 'You're holding a magazine. It feels solid; it seems to have some kind of independent existence in space. Ditto the objects around you-perhaps a cup of coffee, a computer. They all seem real and out there somewhere. But it's all an illusion. Those supposedly solid objects are mere projections emanating from a shifting kaleidoscopic pattern living on the boundary of our Universe. The world is a hologram.'
 
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