What is time?

[modest]

Yup, I agree. As every good relativist would tell you, it is not the particle which takes on energy from velocity. It is, rather, the particle's path relative to something else.

 

Well, I would say that's a bit careless statement as well; whether one assign the energy to particle's path or particle itself, it has still got exactly the energy one simply decides it has got (which inertial frame one happens to choose for plotting the path in).

 

[...snip]

 

I may need to take a step back and explain...

 

it never was something that ontologically existed inside the spaceship somehow

 

You are correct.

 

If you place a 3D box at the center of the room you're in and step back from it, it will appear a certain way to you. As you change your position in the room the box will change appearance. Your view of the box is 2 dimensional—you see it as a 2 dimensional form. Your choice of where to stand in the room and which specific 2D projection of the box you get is arbitrary and there are essentially an infinite number of 2D projections you can get.

 

This is a geometric effect. The box does *not* change in ontological form as you view it differently. Rather, if you force a 2 dimensional view of a three dimensional object then changing the position from which you view it will change the two dimensional form without changing the 3 dimensional object.

 

Kinetic energy in modern (spacetime) relativity is similar. It is a 3 dimensional concept in what is described as a 4 dimensional world. If you force your view of a particle to be 3 dimensional then changing the frame of reference from which you view it will change the energy of the particle. This is a geometric effect same as the box above. The particle does *not* change ontologically as the frame of reference from which it is considered changes. The invariant mass stays the same as the energy and momentum components (like time and space components) of the geometry describing the particle change.

 

A google search for "four velocity" or "four momentum" might explain in more detail.

 

~modest

[AnssiH]

Excellent point. Kind of brings doubt into the whole idea of energy as an existent, doesn't it?

 

To me, it is yet another demonstration of how people confuse the human made definitions with reality itself. (Like any good constructivist would tell you :rainbow: )

 

I see people making that mistake all the time, but most people just don't seem to have the ability or will to question their beliefs about reality...

 

I wonder how widespread the practice of this sort of mental projection really is? I suppose the fear that such thoughts evoke depends upon how essential these concepts are to one's worldview.

 

Maybe so. I am often amazed by how people who keep repeating how relativity needs to be understood exactly in terms of how everything is relative, still consistently communicate issues in terms of "things moving" rather than "coordinate systems moving"... And I see the same people saying things that imply halfway newtonian ideas to time evolution, while they are supposed to stick with the definitions of relativity... And I see the same people saying in one context that "such and such relativistic situation is impossible", just to refer to exactly the same situation in another context and suddenly say it is "made possible by relativity".

 

Like think about how faster than C travel of information leads to violation of relativity (with spacetime interpretation anyway), and on the other hand spacetime construction allowing "wormholes" as valid solutions... If you had wormholes, that is exactly the same as bringing information through from one place to another, faster than light.

 

Yet if you bring "faster than C" to the table, it's automatically thought of as "false". If you bring wormholes, it's suddenly all okay.

 

It's all a bit thoughtless if you ask me.

 

Why do I find such things so incredibly beautiful?

Perhaps the beauty is in the nature that could contemplate them.

Or perhaps because it's like another shoe has dropped and we're moving toward a more comprehensive understanding that doesn't have pillars made of smoke.

 

Well I for one would like to see people drop their faith a little and look at the logical consequences of their definitions little bit closer...

 

Oh, and;

 

...what is the practical purpose of clarifying our understanding of time?

 

For me it would be to solidify a truth, a formula, that would then be applied to understanding other concepts that still allude us.

 

Now that hits the nail in the head...

 

Note also that "clarifying our understanding of time" is not about "understanding time ontologically correctly", but rather about stripping the undefendable aspects out from our conception of "time". I.e. being exactly and entirely self-coherent in our ideas of it.

 

Reaching self-coherence, as you might expect, does resolve all kinds of things that presently elude us. But people don't seem to be very receptive when the resolution to those self-conflicting things requires a transformation to concepts they have great faith in. Would require too much painful thinking with no guarantee of success, I guess.

 

-Anssi

[AnssiH]

Kinetic energy in modern (spacetime) relativity is similar. It is a 3 dimensional concept in what is described as a 4 dimensional world. If you force your view of a particle to be 3 dimensional then changing the frame of reference from which you view it will change the energy of the particle. This is a geometric effect same as the box above. The particle does *not* change ontologically as the frame of reference from which it is considered changes. The invariant mass stays the same as the energy and momentum components (like time and space components) of the geometry describing the particle change.

 

Like I said;

"Believe me, I do understand how people look at relativistic spacetime as an explanation exactly to that conundrum with "parameters that are dependent on our choice of inertial frame."

 

And;

"What I was trying to point out earlier was that there are some very good underlying reasons as to why our definition of "length" and "time" behave that way, and it's got absolutely nothing to do with the existence of a hypothetical entity called relativistic spacetime (nor ontologically real "relative simultaneity")."

 

I.e. relativistic spacetime works as an explanation, but it is by no means the only possible explanation, and furthermore it is resting entirely on human made definitions, not touching the raw data that we are explaining at all (=ANY raw data is well explained via definitions that lead to a model of "relativistic spacetime")

 

It would do good for people to understand those "underlying reasons", to loosen up little bit of that faith on their ontological ideas.

 

-Anssi

[modest]

Does your decision about which inertial frame to use actually somehow change the kinetic energy of a particle?

You cannot simply “change the kinetic energy of a particle” by deciding to use a different inertial frame. When you change your frame of reference, you change the apparent kinetic energy of every particle in the universe.

 

Agreed.

 

~modest

[Little Bang]

Thank you Modest. You have made a brilliant post which has given me some very interesting points to ponder. A possible lead to time and charge.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Time is used as a frame of reference for all those things, that I can see, but how is it the cause?

 

Bill

 

Beautiful point Bill.

 

That is the crux of the whole issue. On the one hand, if you believe that time is an existent, then it becomes the 'cause' of all change and that pretty much covers the whole enchilada.

 

On the other hand, if it is an internal concept we project into existence, then it doesn't exist and cannot be the cause of change. What then, is?

 

From a practical point of view, it would seem that our ability to command nature will be directly proportional to the accuracy of our model.

 

The current model of physics is loaded with concepts that have no more ontological reality than a rainbow. Yet they are used and we create and build and comprehend with them. Imagine what we could do with an accurate model.

[Michael Mooney]

Beautiful point Bill.

 

That is the crux of the whole issue. On the one hand, if you believe that time is an existent, then it becomes the 'cause' of all change and that pretty much covers the whole enchilada.

 

On the other hand, if it is an internal concept we project into existence, then it doesn't exist and cannot be the cause of change. What then, is?

 

From a practical point of view, it would seem that our ability to command nature will be directly proportional to the accuracy of our model.

 

The current model of physics is loaded with concepts that have no more ontological reality than a rainbow. Yet they are used and we create and build and comprehend with them. Imagine what we could do with an accurate model.

 

I agree ('cept that rainbows are actual refraction of light into the full spectrum, while time is.... yes... simply the ongoing now... for whatever measured duration.)

Though this is a "philosophy of science" section, the "good relativists" here refuse to even consider what time is (if anything) in and of "itself"... beyond the constructs/concepts "in our minds"... as event duration per se regardless of measurements based on specific "frames of reference."(Ref: my last post.)

 

It seems to me that subjective idealism is the prevailing philosophy upon which this whole discussion is based, except our "camp", addressing the ontology of time.

 

Incidentally, concerning a trivial point... Bill, re your statement:

Just a not Mike, but it was the sadistic captain in Cool Hand Luke who said, "What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach." He was saying it because Luke would not obey his rules.

...

The above turned out to be the "punchline" of the whole movie, as Luke parroted it back to "Boss" right before Boss shot him dead.

 

Sooo...I've kind of adopted it as the theme of this "communication" (or lack thereof) on "time" here.

Michael

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Michael, I agree with you too. I was using a 'rainbow' as in, "Hey Michael, let's go slide down that rainbow over there!"

 

AnsiH used it too, although he immediately wished he hadn't - perhaps because a rainbow is sensed and references something external, whereas time and energy are pure abstractions and directly reference nothing external to ourselves.

 

This is so new that the only analogy I can give for the discussion is that we have just entered a room with very few footprints in the dust. And it is dark and we can't see clearly yet because we don't really understand the key that opened the door - other than the lock was made up mostly of fear.

 

The hope is that over time... :shrug: we'll come to illuminate the objects in it.

 

What was + X = What is. What is + X = what next.

 

What we 'see' = what we sense + what we invent. It isn't always easy to separate the two, especially if the thing that we 'see' seems to be part of change, that is, part of everything we sense.

 

Time is the placeholder of change. If it doesn't exist, what is driving change? How do we get from 'what is' to 'what next'?

[Little Bang]

The one thing which gives us a clue to time is that the acceleration of a particle slows it's clock whether its force that accelerates it or gravity that does the acceleration. I think this explains gravity and inertia as stated in, http://hypography.com/forums/physics-and-mathematics/20552-gravity-and-its-relationship-with-time.html . Time has a bearing on a magnetic field in that how we see the field is relative to our motion with respect to that field. I suspect this has something to do with how we see the photon in that we see it as having both an electric and magnetic component.

[Michael Mooney]

Hey, y'all... don't "make me" :) start a thread on subjective idealism as the philosophical basis for time as reified by relativity!

 

Anybody here think there is no "sound" when a tree falls in the forest unless "someone" is there to hear it?

We have been here before.

Air is compressed to make "sound waves" (call them what you will) when the tree falls, whether any eardrums oscillate or brains register a "crashing sound."

 

Likewise, if there were no clocks or observers measuring event duration, would the universe simply freeze up and cease to have movement/change? (Rhetorical question!)

Can we "get real" about this subject, as mature and thinking "philosophers of science"?

Michael

[AnssiH]

Michael, I agree with you too. I was using a 'rainbow' as in, "Hey Michael, let's go slide down that rainbow over there!"

 

AnsiH used it too, although he immediately wished he hadn't - perhaps because a rainbow is sensed and references something external, whereas time and energy are pure abstractions and directly reference nothing external to ourselves.

 

That's not why actually :)

 

I was originally referring to a rainbow as an example of something that we refer to in our mind as "one persistent thing", when at the same time we know that ontologically there is no such "one persistent thing" there. Every person sees a rainbow in different location for one, and think about what would be the meaning of saying that the rainbow has got persistent identity to itself over time? It's different "stuff" all the time. It is much like a spot of "shadow", just a persistent pattern in our view, but we still call it "shadow" and label it as the "same persistent thing" over time.

 

Epistemologically speaking, what we call "the rainbow", is a huge avalanche of specific "patterns" (or "features" or "noumena" or whatever you'd want to call it) in some raw data. I.e. it is all just a matter of defining something to mean "the rainbow".

 

So when I say "rainbow does not exist ontologically", I do not mean that when we see a rainbow, it is somehow just an illusion out of "nothingness"... I mean, it is completely up to us whether we have defined such and such pattern TO MEAN ANYTHING. I.e. rainbows exist inside our epistemological constructs, because we have defined them. But if there is no one there to say "this means rainbow", there does not exist "rainbows" as such, there only exists some unknown nature in some unknown form that one just can't even "think about". (Michael, this is what I mean by sounds not existing ontologically; that we do not know what they are ontologically, even when we have defined such and such patterns to mean "sounds")

 

And, the reason I regretted making that rainbow example was because people might jump to think it is just these special kinds of "observer dependent" objects that are "erroneously thought to have ontological identity". It is important that the reader understands, that absolutely ANY object you can have a perception of, or even think about, is a case of having defined some data pattern to MEAN THAT THING.

 

Think about how we could, in theory, define almost any sort of pattern to mean "an object X", just however our hearts desire. What is there to stop us? Take a little corner of that box and little piece of that wall and some portion of air, and call that "schlabuuga". Probably very useless definition predictionwise, but just as valid ontologically as any other definition for all we know; it's just bunch of patterns.

 

At the end of the day, whatever pattern you define to mean this or that is not important by itself for prediction ability. What really matters is that your set of definitions as a whole does not run into self-conflict. I.e. whatever your worldview is like, it must be self-coherent. And of course valid in that it actually makes correct predictions.

 

The ability to make correct predictions about reality does not tell you that your model of reality is exactly how ontological reality is. There always exists many ways to model the same data (via different definitions), and you can never tell which one of those models is correct (that information simply is not available to us). What matters more is that reality is modeled in some self-coherent way, and it is those definitions that give you your expectations in the terminology of your own world-view.

 

I first came to think about this in the context of AI, trying to figure out how could an AI come to build a world conception that would tell it "how things evolve" around it, i.e. that would allow it to make meaningful predictions. I certainly don't know what reality is like around me, but I know how the things I have defined will behave. But I cannot enforce my definitions on it, as it needs to be able to pick up on new definitions when it comes across new patterns. If you think about it, you can see that there always exists many ways to see any situation, that all yield meaningful predictions. And the ontological correctness of that interpretation never comes into play at all.

 

Note that the ability to make correct predictions in multitude of valid ways is evident every day in our ability of semantics. Semantics is a case of understanding the same exact data in terms of very different (internally self-coherent) concepts and entities, and yielding equally useful predictions. Same thing is evident in all the different QM interpretations etc...

 

And I find it particularly telling, that to this day some of the most respected people from the field of "philosophy of the mind" are convinced that a mechanical system can never become capable of understanding semantics. To me, that issue has become quite simple; it is a consequence of modeling unknown data in self-coherent way, as oppose to somehow "correctly". And DD's work is the description of exactly that mechanism.

 

Now I would invite the reader to continue from that note over to:

http://hypography.com/forums/philosophy-of-science/18861-an-analytical-metaphysical-take-special-relativity-7.html#post276228

 

-Anssi

[Michael Mooney]

Soooo... AnssiH, correct me if I'm wrong but I hear you saying (regarding "what is time?') that it's all semantics and it's all in our heads.

You say:

But if there is no one there to say "this means rainbow", there does not exist "rainbows" as such, there only exists some unknown nature in some unknown form that one just can't even "think about". (Michael, this is what I mean by sounds not existing ontologically; that we do not know what they are ontologically, even when we have defined such and such patterns to mean "sounds")[/quote

 

"Rainbow" is of course just an English noun. But the phenomenon of light refraction, as seen from a precise angle to the sun relative to various observers (not of course "in the same place" for each observer) is an observable phenomena in nature. In that sense the phenomenon described above, regardless of its label as a "rainbow" (in any language... or a "made-up" language) "exist" in a way that "time" does not.... as a phenomenon/medium which "dilates" etc.

 

Obviously speeding clocks slow down relative to other clocks at lower velocities. No argument about that. The jump from that fact (assuming we agree on the meaning of "clock","velocity", etc.) to "therefore time itself 'dilates'" is one of the major points of debate here at hand.

So if we are going to communicate intelligently about the "sound of the tree falling with no one around to hear it" (classical subjective idealism example) we must begin by agreeing that there is, when a tree falls, a compression of air into waves which we call "sound"(or whatever!) whether anyone experiences the sound or not. When a tree falls anywhere in earth atmosphere, it generates such an air compression-into -waves phenomenon. (period.)

 

If you will not grant that point, then we can forget about serious scientific discussion of the subject "what is time?" if it is all semantics and all in our heads.

 

So then you can say, with the subjective idealists, "There is no cosmos 'out there', cuz it is all in our heads." (What heads?? There are heads but no cosmos?? )This is the height of absurdity, and all scientific inquiry into the nature of "the world/cosmos" would be rendered entirely futile by such a philosophy.

 

Michael

[ldsoftwaresteve]

AnsiH

:"What really matters is that your set of definitions as a whole does not run into self-conflict. I.e. whatever your worldview is like, it must be self-coherent. And of course valid in that it actually makes correct predictions"

Ok. That seems to be the jist of what you are talking about.

 

But here we are talking about Time. The link between DoctorDicks mathematics and Time is that he uses it as a placeholder for what some would call 'Time Slices' (which is necessary because they think time has ontologoical reality and has to be sliced up).

 

But, DD's math was such that he has concluded that Time does not have ontological reality - and I agree with that. He arrived at that from a different direction than I. He used mathematics and I had the benefit of a different worldview (McCutcheon's). With respect to understanding Time, my way seems to be a lot simpler. Assuming our idea of Time is accurate, then the mathematics that identifies that is very special and anyone calling themselves a mathematician should dive in and either agree with it or disprove it.

 

You use the concept of 'self-coherent' in discussing this. But isn't that really the application of logic to identify contradicting identifications (patterns)? And you use 'on the whole', meaning, within the worldview one pattern definition cannot or should not contradict another. The implication in contradiction identification is that there is a common thread between two identifications (patterns). And that seems like it is going to be an abstraction or a pattern within two patterns and one does not quite agree with the other when it should.

 

To turn that into functions that could be understood or used in software or firmware you'll need to identify every logical fallacy type and make it part of the housekeeping processes - unless you have abstracted a pattern in all logical fallacies and can short circuit that.

 

And I get the idea of 'rainbow' being a pattern. In a sense, it's a good example because you have to be in the right place to see it. It doesn't have a back or side and you certainly cannot slide down it. So it pops out as something different. It doesn't fit into my idea of a toaster or a slice of bread and it's even different than a cloud.

[Little Bang]

Amen Micheal, but I would disagree on one point. I think clocks are dilated not because of their motion with respect to the observer but due to their acceleration with respect to the observer.

[Michael Mooney]

Amen Micheal, but I would disagree on one point. I think clocks are dilated not because of their motion with respect to the observer but due to their acceleration with respect to the observer.

 

This brings us back to the question "what 'dilates'?"

My position all along (through the tedious "spacetime" thread) has been that time is not an entity that can speed up or slow down, but rather that clocks do that as they are accelerated to different velocities.... that the different forces of accelleration (change of inertia) effect their rates of "timekeeping", not that there are different "local time environments" (my quotes) for each locus or trajectory of each moving clock... which the clocks simply monitor.

 

I got tired of arguing this point with Modest, so I simply speak of different clock velocities... with the implicit understanding that they have different velocities because they were/are subjected to different forces of acceleration**... even if that difference is simply because of differences in altitude ( velocity relative to earth's center.)

 

** Google "momentary co-moving reference frame (MCRF) " The"trick" to saying that velocity alone, not acceleration, accounts for differences in timekeeping is indeed the "slices of time" concept in which, at a given *instant*, the force of acceleration is negligible so it can be ignored in the calculu0us-like math applied to the MCRF context.

 

Michael

[AnssiH]

Soooo... AnssiH, correct me if I'm wrong but I hear you saying (regarding "what is time?') that it's all semantics and it's all in our heads.

 

No that is not quite what I am saying; there's quite a bit more to this. I'll get to that in a min, but there's something that first needs to be understood properly and I think went completely by you (and this will turn out to be important for the topic of time):

 

"Rainbow" is of course just an English noun. But the phenomenon of light refraction, as seen from a precise angle to the sun relative to various observers (not of course "in the same place" for each observer) is an observable phenomena in nature. In that sense the phenomenon described above, regardless of its label as a "rainbow" (in any language... or a "made-up" language) "exist" in a way that "time" does not.... as a phenomenon/medium which "dilates" etc.

 

Like I said;

...I mean, it is completely up to us whether we have defined such and such pattern TO MEAN ANYTHING. I.e. light refraction exist inside our epistemological constructs, because we have defined it. But if there is no one there to say "this means light refraction", there does not exist light refraction as such, there only exists some unknown nature in some unknown form that one just can't even "think about".

 

I quoted myself, but I just replaced "rainbow" with "light refraction", and I expect you to understand why I could do that for any given argument one could have against this.

 

It is important that you understand this from the perspective of building a world model out of unknown information. Anything you refer to as "real" or "what exists" is exactly like that english noun "rainbow"; a shorthand reference to a familiar pattern. It is "observable" for the simple reason that a definition exists for that pattern. Still, you do not know explicitly, what gives rise to that phenomenon you have a name for, i.e. you do not know its ontological nature.

 

Your response is painfully typical though, people often like to inform me what something "really is" (rainbow is REALLY a light refraction, or sounds are REALLY compressing air), without taking into account that they are just referring to another pattern whose nature is just as unknown.

 

If you can follow the epistemological analysis, you will explicitly understand that the same patterns can be referred to via very many different sorts of "sets of definitions" (alternative worldviews), and the defense of one is simply a matter of having faith on specific undefendable assumptions.

 

And just to be sure;

So if we are going to communicate intelligently about the "sound of the tree falling with no one around to hear it" (classical subjective idealism example) we must begin by agreeing that there is, when a tree falls, a compression of air into waves which we call "sound"(or whatever!) whether anyone experiences the sound or not. When a tree falls anywhere in earth atmosphere, it generates such an air compression-into -waves phenomenon. (period.)

 

I am not talking about that at all; I am not saying that reality is somehow different whether we are there to observe it or not. I am saying, that our mental model of reality is different from how ontological reality is. This will turn out to be an important point to grasp, because it can be shown why our model of reality obeys relativistic time relationships, even while ontological reality holds no suchs features. (Understanding this fact properly has to do with understanding the consequences of defining unknown patterns into persistent objects, when no explicit information of "real objects" exists in the patterns)

 

Obviously speeding clocks slow down relative to other clocks at lower velocities. No argument about that. The jump from that fact (assuming we agree on the meaning of "clock","velocity", etc.) to "therefore time itself 'dilates'" is one of the major points of debate here at hand.

 

Indeed no argument about that, and I know for a fact that if you took the time to walk through DD's work, you would find it to be an exact explanation to the conundrum that you have in your mind, and yes it does point out explicitly that relativistic spacetime is an ontological concept that is just a matter of defining the data in such and such ways. (And defending its ontological reality is exactly like defending the ontological reality of any pattern we have an english noun for, albeit it is often defined via its associated concepts. Of course; it is part of a self-coherent set of definitions; the other definitions do "support it" if one takes them on faith)

 

Now, I know from your past posts that you agree on the validity of relativistic time relationships; I take it that is what your comment means that I just quoted. But you do not agree on the ontological interpretation that people make; the interpretation that says "time must be a real dimension of real minkowski spacetime" (or something akin to that).

 

Isn't it interesting though, that the relativistic time relationships are valid? If you are really interested of looking into how those relationships arise from self-coherence between defined persistent entities (and that consequently explains exactly why those clocks show a different reading without taking time as a real dimension at all), you should take a look at that "analytical-metaphysical" thread. You can take the assertions in the beginning on faith for time being, if you don't want to trace their validity yet. (Just remember, none of that is suggesting an ontology, all that is expressed are logical relationships, and they could be expressed via many arbitrarily chosen concepts that would look completely different)

 

You should realize though, that newtonian space is just as much a matter of defining data patterns in specific ways; you need to define some patterns to mean an object with persistent identity through an "evolution of data patterns", and that is when the meaning of "motion" arises, and that is when the meaning of "space" arises.

 

But here we are talking about Time. The link between DoctorDicks mathematics and Time is that he uses it as a placeholder for what some would call 'Time Slices' (which is necessary because they think time has ontologoical reality and has to be sliced up).

 

What he calls "time" in his treatment is an evolution parameter that is required for representing "change in one's knowledge". That's the initial premise in all its simplicity. I.e. this is not an ontological concept.

 

But further down in the analysis (via the symmetry requirements) it yields a way to express, what some set of information looks like after we succesfully (self-coherently; without changing its meaning) transform it from one coordinate system to another.

 

When you also include a construction that modern physics would call "a clock" (2 massive mirrors and 1 massless oscillator, where the definition of "mass" is arrived at via epistemological means), it is explicitly shown that the count this construction yields, as it has been defined, will depend on which coordinate system the construction is plotted in. The difference in that count is exactly the relativistic relationship (interested yet?), and you can see how it is completely a consequence of the underlying definitions that got us to define those mirrors and that massless oscillator in the first place (remember, they are based on patterns whose meaning we just do not know; we do not know what is the ontological identity of "the photon" or "the mirrors")

 

But that reading on those clocks is what people usually take as "time", i.e. people take it that the best information we have about time is via measuring it with clocks. And that leads to the idea that "time dilates". Oops.

 

Just to be sure, that is not a consequence of "the geometry of spacetime", nor is it a mechanical effect (~a clock under mechanical stress), albeit perhaps both could serve as an (undefendable) valid explanation. It is an effect of ordering unknown data patterns that way (for some very good reasons).

 

But, DD's math was such that he has concluded that Time does not have ontological reality - and I agree with that. He arrived at that from a different direction than I. He used mathematics and I had the benefit of a different worldview (McCutcheon's). With respect to understanding Time, my way seems to be a lot simpler.

 

Yes but then there is very different purpose behind DD's work, as it does actually display why relativistic time relationships are valid, for one. (I would not call it a philosophy per se, it's a bit more)

 

Assuming our idea of Time is accurate, then the mathematics that identifies that is very special and anyone calling themselves a mathematician should dive in and either agree with it or disprove it.

 

Yup.

 

You use the concept of 'self-coherent' in discussing this. But isn't that really the application of logic to identify contradicting identifications (patterns)? And you use 'on the whole', meaning, within the worldview one pattern definition cannot or should not contradict another. The implication in contradiction identification is that there is a common thread between two identifications (patterns). And that seems like it is going to be an abstraction or a pattern within two patterns and one does not quite agree with the other when it should.

 

To turn that into functions that could be understood or used in software or firmware you'll need to identify every logical fallacy type and make it part of the housekeeping processes - unless you have abstracted a pattern in all logical fallacies and can short circuit that.

 

Well you make it sound very complicated... At least the initial premise is very simple, it is just few symmetry arguments that are individually very easily expressed and understood mathematically, but it gets a bit complicated when all those constraints are to be expressed via single differential equation (his fundamental equation), and when you start to factor in the approximations that are normally made by modern physics so to arrive at specific expressions "about reality" (negligible feedback from the rest of the universe etc)

 

I hope this is helpful.

 

-Anssi

[HydrogenBond]

If time is a mental construct, then that implies the bending of space-time is only in the mind, since one is bending only a construct and not anything that is real. How can one bend something that is not even tangible? This is why I have argued, many times, that time has to be a thing or else we are only bending a construct (imagination).

 

Let me give an analogy. If we could catch a leprechaun we could get his pot of gold. The leprechaun is not a tangible thing, but only a construct of the imagination. If we bend the leprechaun and his gold, this is only occurring in the mind, since these are not tangible but only constructs of the mind. Only the mind is actually bending.

 

To make the leprechaun appear more tangible, let us plot (sketch) the leprechaun on paper and express the lines and contours with mathematics. We can use numerical methods and computers if straight math won't work. Now we have an image of the construct, we all can agree on, so we can bend him. But again, since he is not real but only a construct, we are only pretending to do something with reality.

 

Let us now build a real physical devices to bend the leprechaun. If we get any results that seem as predicted, does that mean we actually bent him, or have we simply bent the construct as it appear in math/paper?

 

Again ,I have tried to present time and space in terms of things so we when bend these things we are doing something real and not just on a construct. But I get into trouble for stressing the need for real.

 

To make time real, we need to look for something in nature that is expressing increments of the construct time. The frequency of energy quanta is one natural source. Time is not all of energy, just the frequency without wavelength. Now we have something to bend that is outside a mental construct. It is not the leprechaun any more.