I think your thinking is seeing only one side of a two-sided coin. My model is both Mechanical (scientific) and Organic (philosophical). — Gnomon

Sure. So is semiosis. Code leads to mechanisation. A system of logical switching behaviour is imposed on the entropic flows of the world.

In the Enformationism metaphor, the real world was originally an idea in the Mind of G*D, with the infinite possibilities of Omniscience, that was realized by an act of Will. — Gnomon

But even as a metaphor, that is quite the wrong kind of causal model for the kind of self-organising immanence I’m talking about. We diverge big time there.

even though they are at root vague values, being irrational numbers. — apokrisis

Hmm. As usual an education in your post(s). But as to the vague, it seems to me the only thing vague about, e.g., the irrationals is the inability of exactly representing them in some number systems. When it's at home, I'm sure the square root of two knows where its pipe and matches are, and its footrest.

That is, the irrationality is not in the thing itself, but its relationship to other things. For I can define the hypotenuse as an integer value if I care to - of course everything else then slips into irrationality. Or maybe the word "value" covers all of that: its value being apart and different from what it is. Sense?

When it's at home, I'm sure the square root of two knows where its pipe and matches are, and its footrest. — tim wood

Sure. We can construct a machinery that homes in on a fixed point, a singularity. The square root operation can be modelled as an infinite series of increasingly more refined acts of measurement. It all promises to converge to a point. Yet also, the very notion of an irrational number tells us that point lies at infinity.

So that gives two choices. Either there really is a singularity sitting at infinity or there must be something that cuts off safely before that kind of abhorrent breakdown occurs.

It is the same as the Big Bang. A naked singularity where the laws of nature disappear up their own arse must be avoided. A cut off must be introduced to protect them so that their structure could in fact emerge in the first place. And the Planck scale provides that safe horizon. A theory of quantum gravity would cloud the scale beyond the Planck minimum in the vagueness of quantum uncertainty. The singularity would be avoided by all the physical structure dissolving into the pure potential of a quantum foam, or geometrodynamics, or causal dynamical triangulation, or imaginary coordinates, or holographic information horizon on, or whatever other equivalent picture physics plays with to talk about a singularity avoiding beginning to everything.

What I am describing is pretty standard thinking. But no one has really nailed it mathematically as yet. So we get a lot of handwaving versions.

And then in maths, vagueness is not taken seriously at all. It doesn’t even seem something that could be mathematised. So physics ain’t getting much help there.

Even Peirce never properly wrote up his logic of vagueness. You have to do a lot of reconstruction to understand the direction his project was taking.

But the point is that it you can construct a machinery of asymptotic approach to a fixed point, then the inverse of that mathematical operation has to be able to pop back out of that point to. The value of the irrational number that stands at the end of the square root of 2 must also be able to generate only that particular constructing operation. From the answer, you would have to be able to directly derive the question.

But a singularity is where such reversibility breaks down. A singularity points back equally in all directions. Like falling into a black hole, the information would be lost forever. And that is unphysical. We need an event horizon - the notion of a grounding vagueness - to protect our maths from the breakdown of its reversible structure,

That is, the irrationality is not in the thing itself, but its relationship to other things. — tim wood

Vagueness is the “thing” that stands at the limit of thingness. This was Peirce’s formal definition. Vagueness is that to which the PNC fails to apply. And that then makes it the “thing” from which the constraint of the PNC could emerge. If there is a lack of something so specific, then it becomes what could specifically be the big change that gets a new more orderly and structure world - such as the one we exist in - going.

A singularity is a dead end. A vagueness is the open possibility of everything that it is not.

It is fine for maths to talk about irrationals as points that exist at infinity for some mathematical operation - an endless asymptotic approach to some fixed point on the number line. What we know is that the operation, like a square root, will continue to hold true without ever breaking down. This exactness is built into the maths itself. And we know we will never care in practice beyond the first few million places of the decimal expansion. Or even the first dozen in any real world calculation.

But physics has the need to formally introduce a cut off point where the laws of physics dissolve into a safe vagueness. The quantum and relativistic description of nature must be joined in a way that smooths over their essential differences. Gravity must run its couplings as the scale factor shrinks towards the Planck scale, but it can’t be allowed then to keep on going to infinity, as a spacetime with infinite curvature can make no physical sense.

Gravity must run its couplings — apokrisis

Why should gravitons have a running coupling constant?

But the point is that it you can construct a machinery of asymptotic approach to a fixed point, then the inverse of that mathematical operation has to be able to pop back out of that point to — apokrisis

Just a minor point, but in dynamical systems this is not necessarily so.

It's too bad Graveltty has been banned. He has a grad degree in physics and some interesting ideas. Do you, by chance, have such a degree? You seem very knowledgeable.

Why should gravitons have a running coupling constant? — LaRochelle

Are gravitons even real, rather than virtual calculational devices?

And gravity increases in effective strength as you shrink the scale factor. As the spacetime metric is shrunk towards the Planckscale, it gains energy density - also up to the Planckscale. So things run nicely up to that event horizon. Then we have to decide what really happens beyond.

I am contrasting the options of singularities (the naive choice from the metaphysics of mathematical objects like irrational numbers) and vagueness (the logical choice, and the one physics on the whole seeks in current interpretations like asymptotic safety, loop quantum gravity, Hartle-Hawking imaginary time, etc.)

Just a minor point, but in dynamical systems this is not necessarily so. — jgill

Do you mean in the models of dynamical systems? Which models exactly?

Chaos theory is a good example of how this issue is fudged. The shadowing lemma is needed to smooth over the embarrassment of claiming an actual infinity of diverging trajectories in a strange attractor, for instance.

Do you, by chance, have such a degree? — jgill

My background is biology and neuroscience. Through that, I became pretty expert in complexity modelling and thermodynamics. I then went back over fundamental physics as a hobby interest.

Are gravitons even real, rather than virtual calculational devices — apokrisis

Very real! Like photons are very real. The running coupling constant of photons is based on a wrong interpretation of a particle, be it a one dimensional point or a two dimensional string. Both give rise to problems like renormalizition, and strings still give rise to a singularity of spacetime, though a less severe one than poit-like particles do. Virtual particles are said to be mathematical tools, that's a common naive approach, made by people who don't care to investigate further. They maybe virtual but are certainly not unreal. Like gravitons are certainly not unreal. How else is the connection made?

Virtual particles are said to be mathematical tools, that's a common naive approach, made by people who don't care to investigate further. — LaRochelle

But to call them real could be just to compound the error of calling them unreal. That way lies a sterile debate where both sides are wrong because they frame the issue as a simple binary.

What I am arguing is the larger logic of Peirce - a triadic valued logic where that which becomes the definite, the actual, does so by emerging out of the murk of a vague potential via a dichotomous act of symmetry breaking.

And this is what the Planck triad of constants directly encodes. The facts stare us in the face. The Planck scale is both the extreme of smallness, and of hotness.

In simple terms, the less spatiotemporal context that frames any energetic event, the more uncertain is its energy state. Or in geometrodynamical terms, the more things are contracted to a point, the less sure you can be that the metric is flat and not curved.

So for a graviton to be a graviton, it needs a global metric of which it can be the local fluctuation. It can definitely exist only by virtue of there being the dichotomy where there is an actual difference between some event and its background.

If we shrink the scale factor to the Planck scale, we arrive at the realm where the accepted laws of physics say the fluctuations are the same size as their metric. We do seem to have a dichotomy of the local and global. But both are the same size. And so the distinction has just become moot. The PNC fails to apply. In Peirce's logic - and Peirce founded modern logic, even if Frege gets the credit for sociological reasons - that means we have reached the event horizon where the critical distinction has become fundamentally vague. Fluctuation and metric are indistinguishable.

Conventional thought can try to push on past the Planck scale by talking about the quantum foam - virtual fluctuation with no spacetime metric. Or it can allow relativistic spacetime to dissolve into a "space" of disconnected black holes and a "time" composed of innumerable wormholes.

Particle physics also can push on to talk about anomalies/singularities like monopoles and branes. Every extrapolation can produce its pathologies.

So there are choices. You can either remain bogged down in pursuing some ultimate ground of definite being - the bottom turtle of the infinite stack - or you can start to think organically in terms of a vagueness that can beget a crispness or definiteness in terms of a logical symmetry breaking - a dichotomy which divides pure possibility into precisely opposed directions.

A virtual particle is a calculational device that allows us to talk about the kinds of particles or fluctuations that could be realised, if only a matrix or background manifold also existed to be their contrasting context.

So they are certainly real - as possibilities ... if their matching spatiotemporal context can also be realised as the "other" of the backdrop void or vacuum that is in turn relatively lacking in particles or fluctuations.

That is, what makes gravitons real (as quantum vacuum fluctuations) is that there is also the generalised coherence of a connected spacetime metric to stand as a contrast. There is a place in which such an event could happen.

So a virtual particle is its own free possibility. Yet that possibility is strictly tied to the vacuum expectation value. There has to be a context in which things are starting to become more cool, more expanded, and so everything is no longer a Plankscale fluctuation of the same size as the metric. A fluctuation can actually register as an event that happened at a time and place within a backdrop starting to become cold enough, and large enough, to stand as the "other" of its historical context.

Oh, and there is the little difference that makes gravitons hard to observe against the actual spatiotemporal back drop. Photons are spin 0 objects, and gravitons would be spin 2. So one would stick out like a sore thumb, the other rather blends into the backdrop fabric.

Do you mean in the models of dynamical systems? Which models exactly? — apokrisis

Simplest example in the complex plane. $f(z)={{z}^{2}}\Rightarrow {{f}^{-1}}(z)=\sqrt{z}$ Single-valued to multi-valued. One could toss in a t for time.

Thanks for your reply.

Oh it's just you again "Marco". :razz:

Let's hear again how you waste your education with a turn towards crackpottery....

Now you are putting words in mu mind. I don't have a binary view, however long your array of words may be to explain that. I simply stated the reality of gravitons. That may seem binary to you but it surely isn't. It's kind of unitary! But luckily I pull this view within the boundaries of a tertiary system. — LaRochelle

Yup. The expected panicked flurry of words, but no organised argument.

A virtual particle is just a particle not abiding to the usual energy-momentum relation. It takes care for interaction and as such cannot be directly observed. That's why it's called virtual. It mediates between real particles. — LaRochelle

So we know they are real because they are possible contributions to the particle's state ... contributions from the quantum vacuum. Contributions from the background.

Have you stopped to think about what I said rather than just hit insta-response and regurgitated what you thought you already knew?

The accounting trick is to start with a bare particle and then build up its full state by including its off-shell contributions. We pretend that there is a particle that is not entangled with its world, and then make that work by adding back all the ways that it has to be still entangled with that world - still vague and not disambiguated as "a real particle".

Reality is only ever relatively split or divided into event and context. You know that from quantum decoherence and the whole collapse issue. But what makes physics wonderful is its tricks to get around that - stuff like sum over history path integrals or the taking into account of off-shell contributions.

We glue together the absolute counterfactual definiteness of classical dynamics with the equally absolute counterfactual indeterminacy of quantum dynamics and - hey presto - we come up with a mathematical framework that can be refined to as many decimal places as we find useful.

It is then only the metaphysics that troubles us. How could the Big Bang quantum tunnel its way out of literally nothing? How can we accept a kluge like renormalisation when there has to be something that actually produces an exact number as a QG calculation?

It is this clash between the functionality of the models, and yet the patent failure of their metaphysical base, that drives so many "physicists" to crackpottery. What the textbooks say both works in the most splendid fashion but also is so obviously rooted in irreality. All kinds of quite acceptable madness results, like Block Universes, Clashing Branes, and Many Worlds.

Yet also, the very notion of an irrational number tells us that point lies at infinity. — apokrisis

Not so. Number yes; point - length - no. I construct a square. By assumption the sides are of a determinate length to which, say, an integer value is assigned. The hypotenuse is certainly a determinate length. The problem only trying to assign a distinct value in terms of the side. And as that value can be carried out to an arbitrary degree of precision, it would seem that "vague" itself would need some qualification.

Be nice to ask a dimensional analyst this question.

Hard to find those folk.

Simplest example in the complex plane. — jgill

Ok. You give me an example from maths and not from physics. :roll:

But the complex plane is a good example of how maths works its way backwards by removing the constraints, while the Cosmos must have developed - out of vagueness - by adding constraints.

Euclid constructs the world by allowing a point to be a line, then a line to make a plane, a plane a volume, and so on. The number line does the same, and then looks to see how much algebraic structure remains as it ups its dimensionality.

And what do you know? It turns out the structure rapidly vanishes. You get normed division algebra in 1, 2, 4 and 8 dimensions.

But these resonances get weaker, vaguer, and then you are into the spotty faint echoes of algebraic structure that continue into the distance of the exception Lie groups, and the real last gasp of the monsters, before the true vagueness of infinite dimensional "number" - completely unconstrained mathematical being - closes over.

And also what do you know? Physics appears to have arrived at the structure of our actual world by coming back at us from this far distance. Our Standard Model world smashes its way through all possible symmetry groups - including the residual quantum uncertainty of imaginary numbers - to arrive at a classical, well-behaved, Euclidean realm where particles are just points carving linear trajectories.

Do you see the connection?

By assumption the sides are of a determinate length to which, say, an integer value is assigned. — tim wood

Sure. You call the length 2. If it is 1.99999... in actuality, you also call that 2. And if 2 is in fact only 2.0000... - that is, a fact still be to absolutely determined - you again shrug off the inherent vagueness of the the "interger" value you wish to assign.

Any argument can be won by making your conclusion also the premise.

And as that value can be carried out to an arbitrary degree of precision, it would seem that "vague" itself would need some qualification. — tim wood

You don't seem to understand that my view doesn't challenge the success of the mathematical operation. It justifies it.

Peirce founded pragmatism after all. Descartes started the business of infinite doubt. Peirce fixed that by saying that we model the world for a reason. And so an arbitary degree of precision is the definition of pragmatic success. We have eliminated doubt for all practical purposes - and that is what constitutes a belief.

So science is all about finding the maths that can ground acts of measurement. We don't have to grab hold of the thing in itself. We only have to box that ultimate form of uncertainty into a space so small we no longer have to worry what it "actually is".

So science is quite right to apply mathematical models that work to build belief by eliminating uncertainty.

I just point out that there is still a vagueness trapped in the box. That is where metaphysical speculation again must kick in if we might want to dig even deeper.

Not quite. But intuitively pleasing. It's again the popular naive view of the layman. A quantum vacuum is not involved in interaction. Well, minorly. — LaRochelle

As usual, you agree even though you disagree. You first assert your position as the expert, and then start mumbling into your fingers.

The exception being the gauge for the weak interaction, giving rise to massive ones, which only indicates that the invoked symmetry breaking is an unohysical state of affairs, though mathematically satisfying. — LaRochelle

Like a cat sniffing its vomit, you keep circling back to your anti-Higgs unhappiness. Is this where your career went off the tracks?

I mean, I would be interested if you had a good reason to reject the Higgs mechanism. But the way you present your thoughts here just comes across as another bullshitting crackpot.

Meanwhile in another few hours you will be banned again, then reappear from another little cloud of sockpuppet identities. :up:

It is like you are the forum's own virtual particle, forever erupting and self-annihilating from the cyber void. Your contributions exist because the PF vacuum expectation value must manifest its daily quota of crackpottery.

But if you can organise a real argument, I would recognise it.

But even as a metaphor, that is quite the wrong kind of causal model for the kind of self-organising immanence I’m talking about. We diverge big time there. — apokrisis

OK. So what's your Causal Model or God Metaphor?

I'm only superficially familiar with the "vague" vocabulary of Peircean or Postmodern Semiotics or Semiology. They are like Greek to me, σας ευχαριστώ. So, my personal model is the relatively simple algorithm of Hegelian dialectic : the world progresses toward the future along a zig-zag path of positive & negative causes, which tend to sum to a Middle Way (Buddha) or Moderation (Aristotle). The evaluation of those Causes is symbolic, hence subject to subjective interpretation. But that wavering path is "self-organizing" in the sense of Synthesis (bring together) of oppositions. See images in the Maleus Scientia thread. :smile:

It is like you are the forum's own virtual particle, forever erupting and self-annihilating from the cyber void. Your contributions exist because the PF vacuum expectation value must manifest its daily quota of crackpottery. — apokrisis

Careful!! I'm not sure what you are saying here, but it sounds like putdownery. :cool:

Do you see the connection? — apokrisis

You must not be talking to me.

Modern physics is reduced to a mathematical exercise without being in touch with the reality of the stuff it describes, — LaRochelle

You misunderstand the pragmatism on which the scientific method is based.

I asked questions about the both on a physics forum and the response was, as usual, axiomatic. With almost an instant ban following. But axioms are there to broken. — LaRochelle

Hah. I got philosophy banned on Physics Forum and yet was not banned myself. :grin:

All physics is just modelling. You have to accept that and then move on from debates about whose intuitive axioms represent what is "really real", as opposed to being a measurably pragmatic reference frame.

OK. So what's your Causal Model or God Metaphor? — Gnomon

I've talked about it in every post ever. From Anaximander to Peirce to modern systems science. The immanence of self-organisation. The triadic process of a vagueness, a dichotomisation, then the synthesis which is global laws that constrain local freedoms.

If folk need to squeeze the God word into this causal metaphysics, they talk about some kind of divine immanence or pantheism.

I don't feel that need.

So, my personal model is the relatively simple algorithm of Hegelian dialectic : the world progresses toward the future along a zig-zag path of positive & negative causes, which tend to sum to a Middle Way (Buddha) or Moderation (Aristotle). — Gnomon

Hegel did seem to break it down into a series of stages. But read more carefully and he becomes more Peircean – seeing the dialectic as a hierarchy of increasingly recursive involution. Or what you might call, enformation.

Though also, Peirce believed Schelling and Duns Scotus to be still closer to the mark. And for reasons that escape me, perhaps Spinoza most of all.

Anyway, Fichte so corrupted the popular understanding of Hegel that I don't usually find it useful to reference it.

Careful!! I'm not sure what you are saying here, but it sounds like putdownery — Gnomon

It was a joke. Perhaps at his expense, but he ought to appreciate it as he himself has confessed to all his bannings everywhere else, and yet here on PF, he can keep spamming us with sockpuppet accounts to rejoin the forum multiple times a day.

I'm not even sure that this was his first incarnation of what must by now be 50 or so.

And despite that, for a quite a few of us I think, he fits the spirit of the place. Another curiosity like shawn or banno or SX.

Most folk don't even notice it is him again until some clue like the Higgs mechanism comes up. The crackpot energy on PF is generally quite high.

The scientific method does not exist. — LaRochelle

It certainly does. In a pragmatic sense.

you only have a superficial and a naive layman's knowledge of the model we are talking about here. — LaRochelle

You're the one that gets banned from physics forums, not me.

And this is a philosophy forum. The ability to separate epistemology from ontology is how you make the step up from lay naivety, whether you are talking particle physics or anything else.

What governs negentropy in our universe?

That happens usually when you attack the orthodoxy. — LaRochelle

If you want to attack the foundations of physics, get published in a major journal. A physics forum is not going to be the place. It is for explaining technicalities and keeping abreast of interesting news.

Of course, negative entropy has to be compensated for. — Fredastar

What do you mean?

Well, entropy always increases. — Fredastar

Yes, I keep on hearing that. But, doesn't it seem as though entropy decreases for supermassive objects? I.e a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy maintaining the GR gravitational potential field of the orbiting nebula, stars, and star clusters?

The gravitational field is huge. — Elisabeth

Yes, and it seems as though gravity alone can induce ordered states, such as the supermassive black-hole at the center of our galaxy.

Yet, even then, over the span of billions of years if all that remains is a black hole from the remainder of the matter created during the big bang, then Hawking radiation would evaporate it away?

Do you think entropy or negentropy affects the passage of time through physical mechanisms?

Yes, and it seems as though gravity alone can induce ordered states, such as the supermassive black-hole at the center of our galaxy. — Shawn

Remember that cosmology relies on the kinetic explosion of the Big Bang being exactly balanced by the gravitational potential of all the crud being flung apart. So the Big Bang actually creates as much negentropy as entropy in the bigger picture.

Blackholes are local collapses that use up that negentropy. But there is also the negentropic potential of the cosmological event horizons that would be released if the universe reversed and headed into a Big Crunch.

The notions or order and disorder applied to the universe as a whole get tricky. You can take the view that in the end no entropy is ever created. The heat of the Big Bang is a source of energy or negentropy that is simply swapped for an equivalent amount of spatiotemporal order.

This is another example of what I was saying about reality being a product of its own symmetry breaking division.

Order and disorder are produced in equal amounts. So the Big Bang doesn’t require an energy source to make it happen.

Of course there are open questions here - like whether inflation was a thing, or whether dark energy is an external acceleration force.

The big bang needed a whole lot of energy to happen. A negative gravitational energy. It pushed matter away from each other, in the blink of a blink of a blink of a blink of an yeye. In a tiny fraction of a second the whole universe came into being, filled with charged particles scattered all over.

At the very moment of the triggering of the bang, all particles were part of a virtual matter field, fluctuating around the singularity. The truly elementary and massless rishons then became real by the force of the negative gravity pushing them apart.

Two universes emerged. One with matter and one with anti-matter only, though both comprised out of the same particles, but in a opposite combinations. So in both of them equal amounts of rishons and anti-rishons were present. During the bang, all matter was pulled into real existence from its virtual state, that was fluctuating in time.

Massless rishons were forced to form quarks and leptons, in our universe and anti-quarks and anti-leptons in the mirrored one.Because this it is that our universe is left-hande (all leptins and all quarks were left-handed back then, the only one of them still showing this being the neutrino. After the bang, lasting about 10−36 seconds (!), all quarks and leptons were distributed over the vast space, which had already a considerable size.

The universe stopped accelerating on dope, after this tiny time, Most parts were casually disconnected. The size was about one third of the size it has today! So indeed, a BANG!!! All quarks were already forced to become protons and neutrons.

A huge virtual photon field filled the cosmos, including a virtual graviton field to pull ordered mass structures into existence, at the same time fighting the negative energy, which was present, and will always stay present. It was (and still is) the virtual graviton field that stopped inflationary expansion. Ordered structures developed when the virtual interaction fields pulled ordered states into existence. Turning them real to compensate for the decreasing entropy going hand in hand with the formation of structure, be it gravitational or electromagnetic. Which makes our Sun radiate, giving rise to a welcome heath reservoir with the help of which, and the cold of the void ordered dissipative, self-organizing structures could grow, while real photon fields could take away superfluous entropy.

How it ends is obvious.

Entropic time is needed to define time with. Entropic time is just the time it takes for irreversible processes, as measured against a periodic background. These periodic processes in the background are clocktime, and these are measured. Their pace can vary. Time stands still in a black hole, and runs max in empty flat space, and it's pace is relative. If I say that time stands still in a hole then that is relative to our own pace. Entropy increase doesn't influence time. It merely serves as a basis.