Saying that something came out of nothing and arguing that this needs a “creator” or there happened the Big Bang and the rest is cosmic pre history just begs the question of existence.
IE “Where did Big G come from?” or “What caused the Big B” are valid enough questions but the better question is What is the universe? and Why/How does it continue to exist?
What provoked this?
Someone whose opinion I had come to respect in these matters [Khush Singh] told me that, contrary to my assumption, my assertions about what I call Primary Absolutes [PA for short] make me a Platonist. I was surprised to realise this is true. Previously I expressed only limited esteem for what I thought to be “Platonist” ideas, particularly the claims of Mathematical Ontologists, as I call them, so I now feel pressed to make haste and clarify what I am on about. It’s not that I have any particular worry of being labelled Platonist if it is the truth, but I want to make clear why I think it wrong to consider numbers and other mathematical objects as the foundation of existence. In my opinion [IMO from now on], we cannot take existence per se for granted. In fact, as I will explain below, we should be prepared to accept that what we normally consider to be existence is only the emergent properties of existences [plural!] which are permanently beyond our knowledge. Happily, IMO anyway, this does not imply anything ‘supernatural’ in the common or garden sense or an ecclesiastical sense.
Why “Primary Absolutes”?
About 30 years ago I came across the idea that our consciousness – which for these purposes I always define as rememberable awareness – is what it is like to be a model of self in the world. I learned this from Susan Blackmore in her article Waiting for Consciousness – Science tackles the self, in New Scientist Magazine, April 1989. For me this idea has evolved into UMSITW [pronounced “um-see-two”] my acronym for updating model of self in the world. The relevance here is that I became convinced that my mind, conscious and unconscious which includes every bit of my subjective experience, is all and always actually inside my skull but [usually] about everything outside it.
This means our normal experience of being here now is intrinsically paradoxical because we normally act as if we are naive realists due to that being the default state that Darwinian evolution has left us with. Not a problem until you start questioning how it all works. Elsewhere I will deal with how brain and mind relate; here it is enough to say I decided that the strangeness and wonderfulness of the world described by Quantum Mechanics [QM] and Einstein’s relativity are features of the natural world, the Great It, and not merely products of the human mind.
I encountered the thinking of mathematical ontologists sometime after the turn of the century, hearing about Max Tegmark’s ideas now and then and then actually reading on-line discussions by Bruno Machal and occasionally dialoguing with him. I always felt provoked to try and imagine some way to combat their apparent belief that: before all else, numbers are. My gut instinct says they are begging the very question of existence per se.
Slowly my view has evolved to see:
- My knowledge of my existence is a synthetic a priori – because its denial involves a self contradiction
- Similarly, denial of the existence of a universe is also self contradictory and this carries with it the implicit acceptance of basic not-self, as a bare minimum, but also the recognition that denial of the existence of others and of factual knowledge about the rest of the world is basically stupid. Yes, those of a trolling disposition who really don’t get out enough may like to assert solipsism as their solace and from their own perspective it is logically possible but, that way madness lies. And them denying my existence is also rude and oppressive to me.
- Multiplicity is therefore also necessarily entailed in the very concept of universe which is just as well because the scientific revolution has provided us with the Copernican/Hubble expanding universe, the table of elements and a rigorous basis for understanding and dealing with potentially millions of different kinds of molecules, evolutionary biology, Einsteinian relativity, and quantum physics.
- Quantum physics and relativity theory have both been found to correctly predict measurable features of the ultimately small and the astronomically big and/or ultimately fast respectively and are considered to be very robust mathematical descriptions of their respective domains.
- QM and relativity theory do not tell us why the laws they describe are as they are and not just a little bit different or totally other than what they are.
Primary absolutes [PA] in more detail
PA provide me with a way of relating to what QM seems to describe without needing a degree in higher mathematics. I believe PA also help in visualising some aspects of relativity theory. I was pleased recently to come across a theoretical paper: Quantum Quandaries: A Category-Theoretic Perspective explaining how physicists and mathematicians are exploring new formulations for describing the QM world.
There is also a website showing the author John Baez’s earlier detailed presentation of his ideas. I skimmed through several pages of the pdf file but chugging through the web site was easier – only relatively speaking. I was struck by how some of what the author describes has at least a smidgeon of similarity to what I keep trying to imagine.
Thus – reasonably conjectured potential properties of PA so far include:
- Each PA exists in and of itself, is only itself and truly connected only to itself – as far as we can speculate – never mind purporting to know
- Each PA is different from each other, and at least some of them, do not merge with each other but meet [ie abut] at a mutual boundary
- speculatively: it maybe some PA simply do not ‘recognise’ some others which would mean that for any two such PA to influence each other requires that they both influence or be influenced by a third PA which somehow makes them “adjacent” in some causally effective way
- an occurrence of this sort might be part of the explanation of how dark matter can have such a profound gravitational effect on EM matter but be otherwise completely undetectable
- From our point of view each PA is eternal, but we can never know this for sure
- It is assumed each PA is not simply-connected within itself but every part must be connected to the rest of itself, [so its boundary with other PA is likely to be unbelievably complex].
NB: a simply connected space – means that if a string were to connect any two points within it those two points could each be moved to anywhere that is also a point of the space and the string will still connect them and if those two points at any time should be at exactly the same place, the string can always be pulled in to itself become part of the point. So I am saying this is *not* the case for the PA underlying our universe. - This last point above would seem to be a critical requirement if existence as such is not to be taken for granted – in the complete absence of any other assumption implying an absolute background. So ‘not simply connected’ means that PA are penetrated by regions of other PA such that all are connected to the rest of themselves at separate places. Thus the different PA are each like a different kind of holey cheese where the holes are all interconnected but the holes as such are not empty, they are made of other cheeses! From a simplistic point of view it might be said that PA as such form “strings”.
- From the above it is reasonable to assert that the word “exist” means something different – and absolutely so, in the case of each respective PA. [It’s a different kind of cheese!]
Nothingness, vacuum, or void
- True Void, AKA “Nothingness”, may be a PA whose occurrence is an emergent property of the existence of the other PA’s [but simply is where they are not]. It is possible to think of Nothingness also as a direction of “smallwards” in that where it occurs other PA may expand into it
- IF True Void is assumed to be the emergent result of the [presumably temporary] absence of other PA’s then it may reasonably be considered the only PA which retains its intrinsic nature when separated from other instances of itself. This may be a crucial insight into the way other PA may “lose” pieces of themselves or, much more speculatively, some pieces of a PA may change the way they are or become disconnected at one end whilst significant topological changes are happening
- However, if True Void is considered as the direction of “smallwards” then
a/ it seems feasible that it may have a “smallest possible” limit, which would be the Planck length in which case it may be more like the other PA’s and had become entangled in the knots [Qnots] of others, and this may be what links what are taken to be particles-with-mass to space time, and
b/ what is taken to be the ‘true vacuum’ may be the manifestation of two PA’s: Smallwards, as above, and “Bigwards”, AKA ‘Inflation’. - A reasonable question arises then as to: What would be the boundary of these two PA’s? I have often wondered whether the [seemingly increasing rate of] expansion of the universe which is taken to be the result of “Dark Energy” may be something that operates on Dark Matter, not EM matter. Is Dark Matter composed of Qnots incorporating/entangled with the boundary of Bigwards and Smallwards and whatever boundaries are involved with the weak nuclear force?
- From the above: what we call our universe is in fact the emergent properties of the existences and boundaries of primary absolutes – PA.
- From the above it appears to follow that:
- the archetypal feature of our universe is a virtual two dimensional surface – the boundary of two PA
- [Note, this makes wave motion potentially more fundamental and/or more pervasive than particularity because the latter would seem to require loops and/or knots. ]
- the boundary locus of 3 PA together is a line
- possibly the maximum number of PA which can each be in contact with all the others is 5 [needs check via Google, Quora]
- the archetypal feature of our universe is a virtual two dimensional surface – the boundary of two PA
- Wherever two particular PA are in contact the properties of that locus of contact will be the same – [minimalism requires this] – but the presence of other PA abutted may change aspects of it
- Relative motion amongst the various PA will have a number of manifestations:
- stretching and compressing of regions of boundaries
- wave motions both sinusoidal and longitudinal
- resonance of wave motions
- disconnections/reconnections
- rotation and twisting resulting in various consequences:
- stretched associations of boundaries twisted into yarn-like and rope-like ‘filaments’ and ‘fibres’
- coiling and coiling of coils
- rotational oscillations such as repeated twisting, untwisting and over-twisting
- disconnections/reconnections in combination with rotations, twisting and twisting oscillations would potentially result in the formation of
- simple and complex loops including Moebius loopings
- knots of twisted PA ropes
- The concept of friction does not apply to PA boundaries, not at the basic level anyway, because the boundaries as such are not a separate ‘thing’ from the PA.
- The speed of light is one limitation we know to apply to the interactions amongst PA boundaries because the testing of Einstein’s relativity theory and QM all confirm, as far as I know, that Einstein’s supposition that c is the fastest speed possible is correct; c applies everywhere
- The Planck length ℓP is another limit relevant here. It is derived from Planck’s constant h which relates the energy carried by a photon to its frequency. Basically the Planck length is a unit of length that is the distance light travels in one unit of Planck time, that is to say ℓP = 1.616255(18)×10−35 m. This makes it about 10−20 times the diameter of a proton, ie 20 orders of magnitude smaller!
- Possibly this length may be related to the smallest of possible cross sections of the most tenuous of stable stretched PA.
- Alternatively it may point to the smallest distance between nodes of a standing wave on a strand of twisted thread of PA boundaries where at least one of the boundaries embodies an aspect of EM force
Potential emergent properties
The dot points above are a work in progress.
Any bona fide suggestions for improvement will be gratefully received!
I feel reassured now that a coherent description is possible. The key would seem to be the fact that the Planck scale of things is umpteen orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest ‘particles’ of Quantum mechanics – quarks, electrons, neutrinos, photons, etc.
This belies the idea that something like the electron, for example, has no ‘internal structure’.
My intuition – based of course on profound ignorance and the wish for things to be as simple as possible – is to see what we call particles as structures of space time and not fundamentally different in nature from space time itself. Therefore even something as supposedly simple as an electron consists of a characteristic, and very stable, configuration of loops and folds of various PA boundaries.
- The connectedness of PA must rely on a process such that, as some strands of PA break, each broken end is far enough from the other end so that re-connection occurs and the speed of light limit prevents the “information” about the break travelling that distance before the re-connection has occurred
- To be consistent here it seems that if a particular strand is broken at one end and no re-connection occurs then True Void replaces the lost piece as it retracts
- How the surrounding PA strands and their boundaries react will depend on the existential nature of each.
- Motion, as such, is first and foremost the changing of the shape of boundaries which is primarily a stretching into one PA and then back into the other. These stretches and recoveries must usually travel as wave forms along the boundaries.
- Motion also includes rotation as well as translation so yarn-like twists of PA strands/strings would seem to be as likely to occur as not
- In the case of twisted ropes of PA stretched out and spiralled around one another there will be potential for
- helical, sinusoidal, waves running back and forth along and around the ropes
- various modes of standing waves of the whole ropes as both
sinusoidal oscillations in a plane across the overall rope, and
combinations of these just like, for example, a long playground skipping rope held at each end by different people
- Each of the basic forces of QM must involve at least one boundary ie pair of PA
- a quandary for contemplation is the nature of the interrelationships amongst the various manifestations of strong nuclear force features and the electroweak force features
- this is hard if one thinks of the electron charge as being something primary because why are quark electro charges either +2/3 or -1/3?
- it is easier to suspect that the electron charge comes about as the complement of the combinations of quark charges ie:
- the quark charges reflect the tripartite nature of quarks [AKA ‘colour charges’, etc], ie the numbers of PA boundaries incorporated, which ways they may be twisted, looped and knotted including how this may cause one PA rather than another one or more to be most on the ‘outer’ part of the rope
- given that the net effect of quark trio electro charge is normally either +1 (= +2/3 +2/3 -1/3) or nil =-2/3 +1/3 +1/3) with the very rare antiproton being -1, it may simply be that electrons e– are the most stable and simple complementary structure (ie -1/3 -1/3 -1/3) that survived the turmoil of the Big Bang!
- a quandary for contemplation is the nature of the interrelationships amongst the various manifestations of strong nuclear force features and the electroweak force features
Optimistic realism 