Tag: Physics

My answer to the Quora question “is it possible that the Big Bang didn’t have a cause?”

I think there’s a tricky thing about answering this question that most people never consider. “Cause” may not be as simple as a binary “it was caused” versus “it was not caused.” There may be a plethora of relationships or sources in the universe/in existence that are like cause, or like what we think of how cause works, but not exactly it.

Our notion of causality is (a) 100% mechanistic; (b) 100% deterministic (to clarify, science doesn’t necessarily regard the universe as deterministic since the advent of quantum physics, but we tend to only regard events as being caused or causal to the degree to which they’re deterministic, while the rest is just “meaningless randomness”); (c) physical; (d) linear in time; (e) strictly a progression of time advanced by the same absolute, immutable set of laws; etc.

So, that’s a lot of constraints, and it’s possible that there are modalities of “causality” that satisfy some of those constraints and not others. Those possibilities are just rather hard to wrap our heads around, maybe because they’re different from what we observe in our everyday, macroscopic, non-relativistic, biological-perceptual, physically incarnate lives, or maybe because the success of science and technology has culturally entrained us to be scientistic, physicalist, mechanicalistic and entirely left-brain dominant.

For example, one possibility for this kind of causality-adjacent relationship may be found in science itself, or at least philosophy. We observe that the nature of this physical universe is just right for life to come into existence. If the fine structure constant were just a fraction of a percentage different, for example, matter and thus life would be impossible. So, we say that maybe there’s a multiverse, and every possible reality with every possible physical set of laws manifests “somewhere,” and this is just one of the ones in which life is possible to come about and hence to ask, “why is the universe suited perfectly for life?”. And physical theories themselves such as MWI and string theory tend to lead to such a conclusion, too, albeit without any direct evidence.

But the thing is, the big bang is thought by many to be the beginning of time itself. Or not exactly a “beginning,” but that time “curves around” at the big bang in higher-dimensional space in a way analogous to how the Earth’s surface curves around so that you can travel around it forever even though the earth itself isn’t extended infinitely in 3D space. So how, then, could the multiverse, or the principle of creation of universes, have created, or caused, this particular universe? It must have been done in some way that stands outside of time, or outside of time as we know it. This obviously violates a number of implicit constraints placed on our typical notion of causality, if not all of them.

Another such possibility is that God created the universe, or that maybe it was some spiritual being that’s enormous and advanced but not quite (directly) God. What is spiritual “causation” like? Who can imagine!?

My answer to the Quora question, “Is it possible that everything is made of information?”

Scientifically minded people tend to like to think of everything as being information because information is the object of science. You can only perform physics (which aims to be the ultimate description of the universe) on measurements, and when you measure something, you get information. I see information as nothing other than an act of “informing,” hence the word “information.” When we’re informed of the state of things, in the way that we like to be informed, we call the resulting knowledge information.

One way of being informed is by taking measurements. This reduces any whole thing-in-itself to numerical values, which carry neither the qualitative nor the substantive aspects of the thing in question. It reduces the holistic gestalt of an item into a specific number of linear values.

So, information can never compose everything, as it’s essentially empty. It can’t even in-itself give rise to experience, because experience is qualitative. If all were information, what would information be made up of, and what would cause the body of information in the world to have one set of values as opposed to any other? These things go deeper than information.

Information exists as a series or other structure of absolutely separate values, which means bits of information can’t interact with each other for the same reasons absolutely separate objects or substances can’t as explained above.

I guess that’s debatable. I guess you could say the universe is all its information plus the laws that act on it, similarly to Conway’s Game of Life, but I find that dubious. How are the laws connected to the information without a more fundamental underlying continuum? (Note that Conway’s Game of Life actually runs on a computer or is otherwise simulated by, or even conceived by or encoded with, something or someone that’s much more than the Game of Life itself.) And not to mention the questions of in what form do the laws objectively exist, why and how they act, and why they are the way they are instead of some other way. I guess those could be problems either way, whether the universe is made up of information or not, but they seem to be more tractable in a less simplistic, more holistic, more continuous, more substantive, and maybe even unlimited kind of universe or multiverse. And, of course, the problem that pure disembodied information can’t give rise to qualia or experience or even independently exist applies.

I tend to think that the universe is one holistic thing, and the laws and the things they “act on” are not fundamentally separate. Laws are just parts of a physical model that are inferred from what’s ultimately all patterns of measurement. I guess if laws are not truly separate from what they “act on,” then this implies that the laws (which actually are just parts of a working coherent model of the universe) are ultimately no less complex or whimsical than the universe itself. (If you don’t think it’s rational to say the universe is whimsical, just replace “whimsical” there with “random” or “stochastic.”)

I believe much of the Universe, including life/consciousness itself, is ineffable, non-mechanistic magic, which is necessarily anything but informational.

Information, like math, is merely abstraction. I guess information is mathematical. So, for information to be real and the basis for all existence, mathematical Platonism would have to be correct. I wrote about why mathematical Platonism is untenable here: 

Part of this essay was copied from https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/kants-phenomena-and-noumena/.

Solidity is Not an Illusion

Just in the interest of being Less Wrong™, let’s explore why it’s not true that solidity is an illusion on account of matter (supposedly) being mostly empty space.

The popular aphorism goes that matter is mostly empty space. The reasoning is that matter is made of atoms, which are situated and vibrating some distance apart from each other in space, held in place by physical forces, and within those atoms the distances between the electron shells and the nuclei are extremely far relative to the size of the nuclei. Maybe one would also extend the argument to the space between the electrons in the shells (okay, technically electron shells aren’t actually made of electrons; the electrons don’t exist until you detect them and collapse the wave function), the space between the shells, the space between the protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and the space between the quarks within the protons and neutrons.

But the thing is this: why is it notable how much space there is, when there is no solidity to contrast it with? Electrons aren’t solid, protons aren’t solid, and quarks aren’t solid. They are forcefields of some sort with no clearly defined boundaries. You’re in a forcefield right now—the earth’s gravity. That field extends infinitely in all directions. Similarly, an electron’s electric field extends infinitely, just with faster attenuation and extremely small intensity. The electron itself (when it even exists) is just an excitation within a field. So, all you have is space and fields within it that permeate it everywhere.

Solidity is therefore not a concept that applies to the micro scale. If solidity exists at all, it is merely a mode of material interaction, applying only on a macroscopic scale, by which objects cannot pass through each other. Being understood as such, it makes no sense to say that things are any less solid than they appear to be due to sub-nanoscopic structures, because the solid-vs.-vacuum dichotomy doesn’t exist on that scale. If anything, nuclear physics tells us that, solidity being a purely macroscopic phenomenon, things can only be exactly as solid as they appear and not any less so. And as for the empty space supposedly existing within matter between particles, there is nothing other than empty space, so that idea is meaningless. (You could say only space without forcefields in it is “empty,” but all space is full of fields and forcefields.)

Related article: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/july-2013/real-talk-everything-is-made-of-fields

Cascades of Flux (Brief Version)

All matter/energy is constantly in flux. What appears to be solid, such as a desk, is actually made of trillions of tiny atoms, each one vibrating in place, and each one made up of waves of electron fields around nuclei that are made of vibrating protons and neutrons which are in turn made of moving quarks. Force fields are in flux because they emanate from matter which is in flux, and force fields aren’t matter or energy anyway—they’re just mathematically defined causal relationships between physical things.

The laws of physics appear to be static, but they all boil down to two aspects: 1. the aspect of it that is necessarily true just because it’s logically consistent with the rest of physics (this aspect is why we’re able to do derivations in physics), and 2. the aspect of it that comes purely from observations. The first aspect is necessarily static just because logic itself can’t logically be any different, but there’s no justification to assume the other is static just because the observations seem consistent over time.

Since everything else we observe is in flux, chances are that those things are in flux as well—they just change too slowly to be noticed. Add to this the fact that there’s no ultimate way to distinguish between the physics of matter and energy and the physicality of it. The so-called “laws” of physics are not a separate thing “acting on” matter and energy. The closer you look, the more these two things blend together. One way of saying this is that form is function. How can you know the form of something other than through how it interacts with the observer? And how it interacts with the observer is its function. And the functionality of matter and energy is the physics of it. I wrote more about why form is necessarily function here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/form-is-core-function-identity-is-core-properties/.

All of physicality boils down to matter, energy and fields. Matter is in turn a pattern of seething energy, and fields can’t, even in principle, be defined or observed in any way other than as causal relationships between matter (or likelihoods of observing matter, in the case of probability fields), so it’s safe to say that fields are merely an aspect of physics rather than of physicality per se. And what is energy other than an aspect of matter’s behavior, and what determines its behavior if not the internal logic and mechanics of it which is what physics reveals?

Also, as I mentioned in this essay, Emmy Noether proved that the conservation of energy logically follows from the consistency through time of the laws of physics. And what is the concept of energy other than an invariant? What sense would energy make if it weren’t conserved?

So, everything physically observed is in flux, and there’s no ultimate way of distinguishing between physics and the physical. And physics is derived from only from a combination of observations and pure logic, while we can only observe the physical, and most of what we observe seems to change constantly. So, all of this would seem to suggest that the constants in physics, such as the speed of light and the gravitational constant for example, aren’t actually constants but are only assumed to be because they’re so slow to change.

This essay is the third installment of essays of mine conveying basically the same idea, for some strange reason. One can be found at the link above, the other can be found here.