This is because quantum fields are not in spacetime — Gnomon

Because quantum fields are Fundamental.

Because quantum fields are Fundamental. — PoeticUniverse

The fields operate in spacetime, as far as I know. They don't constitute spacetime, as far as I can see. Particles move in spacetime, don't they?

Particles move in spacetime, don't they? — Dijkgraf

'Particles' are directly field quanta, so they move along the fields like kinks in a rope.

Particles' are directly field quanta, so they move along the fields like kinks in a rope. — PoeticUniverse

But the you presume them to be in some state. A kink in a rope has defined positions.

scrambled pig brains — Gnomon

This thread...same old menu...nothing's changed. :rofl:

This is because quantum fields are not in spacetime — Gnomon
Because quantum fields are Fundamental. — PoeticUniverse

Yes. They are fundamental because they are mathematical, and consist of non-dimensional Information instead of 4D space-time. Physicists know that their mathematical models of "fields" and "virtual particles" are not real, but for simplification, they treat them as-if they are. But that reverse-abstraction could lead to a confusion between Physical (terrain) and Phenomenal (map).

Dialogs, that hinge on definitions, often get cross-ways because of our language, which doesn't necessary distinguish between real references and metaphorical allusions. Theoretical (mathematical) physicists tend to be more poetic in their language than empirical physicists. That's because the ideal (abstract) objects of their study are invisible, and hard to describe, except by analogy to real (concrete) things that are visible and tangible.

Unfortunately, some non-physicists may treat their imaginary grids & zero-dimensional points as-if they are real things out there in space. That's OK as long as they are communicating with mathematicians. But others may take them literally, instead of poetically. :cool:

Reification Fallacy :
Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

Poetic Metaphor :
Metaphor: compares two things directly without using “like” or “as”; the subject IS the object.
Note -- in 80's slang, the "as-if" retort means "no way"!

Is ‘Information’ Fundamental for a Scientific Theory of Consciousness? :
we are led to the exciting proposition of David Chalmers’ ‘double-aspect information’ as a bridge between physical and phenomenal aspects of reality.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-5777-9_21

The words physical and phenomenal are synonyms, but do differ in nuance. Specifically, physical applies to what is perceived directly by the senses and may contrast with mental, spiritual, or imaginary.

A point is a 0-dimensional mathematical object

1."Fields are mathematical constructs only. They suggest the interactions of forces, as in gravitation and magnetism. However, far from being forces, gravitation and magnetic effects are interactions."
2."Fields are mathematical constructs only. They are not physical. They are not real."
https://www.quora.com/In-physics-are-fields-merely-mathematical-conveniences-or-models-or-do-they-have-a-physical-existence-of-some-kind-If-physical-what-are-they-composed-of

It is not at all clear what electromagnetic fields are, nor if there are fields of other kinds, like Sheldrake's 'morphogenetic fields', which are not detectable by electronic instruments.

Let me give it a try. If I hold two magnets in my hands I imagine them to be elementary particles (the micro world is really not that different from the micro world). The particles long for each other or want to get away from each other. What exactly this will is, I can't tell. I mean, it can't be explained materialistically. You can describe it with charge, three kinds even (electric and two color), but what it is...? You can feel it though.
Like the hate felt towards Wilhelm Reich (a scientific outcast, who made a very astute observation of the drives in Nazi Germany and whose books were burnt in the US, in the fifties! How can you not love the man, who died after a year in prison...).
(I just had to mention it.) As we all are combinations of these charged particles, we are conscio⁸us, with a will, with faces, arms and legs, etc. Our consciousness is derived from these basic longings (+ and -). We have not evolved according to what people like Dawkins claim. It's just love and hate we are, or driven by.
God is love. God is hate. — Cornwell1

I'm certainly very sympathetic to your emphasis on the continuity between the basic properties that determine the behavior of matter and whatever it is that determines our behavior as complex living organisms. And there are several, in my opinion, very good arguments for panpsychism. But you haven't quite explained how you know what particles feel. You are speculating that charge is will, and that the subjective aspect of positive and negative charge is love and hate experientially. But why isn't it, say, more like hot and cold, experientially? I'm already thinking of some responses, but you have a go.

It is not at all clear what electromagnetic fields are, nor if there are fields of other kinds — Wayfarer

How about a fundamental consciousness field, per David Chalmers?

I think she means something along the following lines. If you put yourself in a particle's shoes it depends on the particles around you how you feel, and basically there is the feeling of to be with them or not to be with them (that's the question...). At the most fundamental level, massless charges feel so attracted by each other that they only can exist in massive triplets, which can have color and electric charge. The further colored triplets (quarks) are apart, the stronger they feel one another pull. Colorless states like protons, neutrons, electrons, and neutrinos are formed. An electron (a triplet of massless particles feeling hyperbolically attracted) has a will, a primordial consciousness, to be with, say, a proton. They reach out to other charged particles, and reaches out to an oppositely charged proton because it wants to be together with it. But how does that feel? An electron feels pure love for the proton and pure hate for another electron. The latter interaction mixes up the identities of both electrons. What love is supposed to do is actually achieved by hate on the fundamental level!
So fundamentally there are love and hate only. Without further embellishments. Love and hate defined as longing to be or not longing to be with other particles. There is no deeper reason for this primordial love affairs. You can describe them by in physical terms, like charge, emission and absorption of virtual particles in spacetime, but in doing so you don't really understand the nature of the fundamental states of (love) affairs. Two oppositely electrically charged particles literally feel attracted. They run towards each other but can't kiss as they combine in a neutral state in which they get close but never touch (real touching is achieved in the depths of black holes, but as soon as zillions of particles kiss simultaneously they get annihilated by negative energy particles, negative love, that is, so the perfect kiss only lasts the blink of an eye...).
The electron hops around the proton nervously, longing for the kiss. The proton watches amused and realizes he needs the electron just as much as she needs him. Only interference by other charges outside can end their happy relation. A rapid evil expansion of the space between them has the same disastrous consequence. So even if one happy pair has survived all universal turmoil, the evil expansion, speeding up and up, will break them up eventually. But... an electron and three quarks (uud) contain unequal amounts of matter and antimatter, so luckily for the electron and proton, this only happens in fairy tales with no happy ending. Imagine a single lonely electron looking for a lonely single proton in a vast inflating space... Reaching out in vain...

I like it! I really do. I know it's funny as well, but panpsychists are going to have to start talking like this at some point. I eagerly await when Strawson and Goff start publishing this kind of thing in respectable journals.

Glad you like it! Most people consider it nonsense, but if you actually know the physics it makes even more sense! It's fun and gives reality a content that's lacking in most theoretical models in physics. :wink:

Who are Strawson and Goff? Physicists?

Yes. They are fundamental — Gnomon

The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes:

Sean Carroll on QFT: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07884.pdf

At the most fundamental level, massless charges feel so attracted by each other that they only can exist in massive triplets, which can have color and electric charge. — Dijkgraf

Good write-up!

THE NEAR DECLINE OF PHYSICS
DUE TO ITS UNDRESSED TERMS

The quarks, those constituents of the orgy
Playfully bound within the nucleons’ chamber
Are named up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top,
The last two once being called beauty and truth;

However, when just one of a type was contained
It became referred to, say, as a naked beauty,
And thus nude tops & bottoms their charms revealed—
To ever be in closeness binding, and bonding,

So they even tried just u, d, s, c, b, and t
To prevent some ultimate collapse of physics,
But the truth of the flavors beneath the veils
Remained as the sheerest vision preferred.

So we have these vibrant dancing ladies:
The naked heavyweight top, charming up,
Down, the strange beauty of the raw truth,
And a bare bottom just around and behind.

They gyrate, spinning their charms, twirling
In the universal dance of stunning motion,
The polarity sometimes reversed,
Whirling, their bottoms up and tops down.

And then there are Eden’s many colors,
In this flower garden filled with flavors,
Such as red bottom beauties, blue tops,
And magenta undulations unstopped.

Gluons are the bees of the flower beds,
Carrying pollen back and forth to bond
The many relationships that make
This loved world go ‘round as reality.

Eyed in views that probe the fundamental,
Quarks strangely swirl in and out of sight,
Pulsing, throbbing with elemental delight,
Back and forth—the love-made life of eternity.

These attractions in the altogether denuded
In the buff became the strong force manifest
That these mother-nature-naked terms exposed
To denote the stark beauty of truth uncovered.


THE ENTRANCING DANCING

They were all dancing within love’s treasure vault
Within the framework of the broadening thought,
The lights pulsing and the waves reverberating,
Where the good times had become everlasting.

Tribal primal field currents were raging
From speakers of the energy matrix pounding;
They whirled and twirled as loving gestalts
Of sentient consciousness knowing no halt.

There were rhythms of constant contraction
And expansions of bosom-energy projections
Converted to scalar waves of blinking attraction,
As fission and fusion beckoned the connections…

Ever forming in this Omni-sound emporium,
Where tone waves vibrated in waves of creation.


“THREE QUARKS FOR MUSTER MARK”

Naked quarks would really love to go wild and dance,
But there’s only a finite amount of energy and chance;
So they would spiral out of control,
Having quite a blast!

Such they’ve been confined within the proton—
To last.

They’re made bottoms-up;
Can we see them tops-down, a go-go?

No, for the quantum censor protects the charm show,
Their strange beauty and flavor bound up and down,
For the proton is much immune to disturbance around.


CHARMS

A new kind of microscope
That works via gravitational waves
Has revealed the actual interior
Of a quark for the first time.

The charming beauty
Of the ultimate truth
Is that ladies are
In charge of the universe!


WE ARE MOST FREE WHEN
WE ARE ASYMPTOTICALLY CO-JOINED

The strong family unit, as the three quarks,
Is bonded by the power of its grouping,
But, loses identity if the home breaks—
Other pairs soon forming after divorcing.

Or comes the prison of solitude,
Chained to isolation with fortitude,
Floating, lost, without effects of affects,
Losing the identity conferred by others.

Within the proton, gentleness becomes strength,
For the members are free to explore at length,
Never smothering, but building unity,
The unit’s direction adding to the one.

The strong force grows weaker near the quarks,
And so we may observe them someday,
Shining in their primordial glory—
The beginning of all things composite.

Identity is not lost in the co-joining—
True loves don’t crowd the hearts of the others,
But, rather, look outward, in the same direction,
Close, joined, but don’t block the others’ section.

It is a seeming arithmetic violation,
That in summation we become greater;
We don’t merge, having supported freedom,
Yet still share the same good vibrations.

Love matures when partners let it flow beyond,
Free to wend its way to places dear and fond.
Love’s butterfly prospers when winds blow free;
Unconditional love never binds—it bonds.

But how does that feel? An electron feels pure love for the proton and pure hate for another electron. The latter interaction mixes up the identities of both electrons. What love is supposed to do is actually achieved by hate on the fundamental level

If particles are conscious, I guess that takes care of the observer effect, and physicalism is back on steady ground! Hmmm, maybe there's something to this panpsychism after all ...

THE NEAR DECLINE OF PHYSICS
DUE TO ITS UNDRESSED TERMS

The quarks, those constituents of the orgy
Playfully bound within the nucleons’ chamber
Are named up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top,
The last two once being called beauty, and truth;

However, when just one of a type was contained
It became referred to, say, as a naked beauty,
And thus nude tops & bottoms their charms revealed—
To ever be in closeness binding, and bonding,

So they even tried just u, d, s, c, b, and t
To prevent some ultimate collapse of physics,
But the truth of the flavors beneath the veils
Remained as the sheerest vision preferred.

So we have these vibrant dancing ladies:
The naked heavyweight top, charming up,
Down, the strange beauty of the raw truth,
And a bare bottom just around and behind.

They gyrate, spinning their charms, twirling
In the universal dance of stunning motion,
The polarity sometimes reversed,
Whirling, their bottoms up and tops down.

And then there are Eden’s many colors,
In this flower garden filled with flavors,
Such as red bottom beauties, blue tops,
And magenta undulations unstopped.

Gluons are the bees of the flower beds,
Carrying pollen back and forth to bond
The many relationships that make
This loved world go ‘round as reality.

Eyed in views that probe the fundamental,
Quarks strangely swirl in and out of sight,
Pulsing, throbbing with elemental delight,
Back and forth—the love-made life of eternity.

These attractions in the altogether denuded
In the buff became the strong force manifest
That these mother-nature-naked terms exposed
To denote the stark beauty of truth — PoeticUniverse

Ha! This is great! Without mushrooms you wrote that up?
The bare bottom...

If particles are conscious, I guess that takes care of the observer effect, and physicalism is back on steady ground! Hmmm, maybe there's something to this panpsychism after all ... — Real Gone Cat

Particles love and hate but are shy. Under the save wings of the wavefunction, beneath the hidden variables constituting space, they jump around non-locally. Interacting them forces them to be in a region of space. Without interacting, without a love or hate to answer to they get lost all over space... So yes, it solves the observer effect...

How about a fundamental consciousness field, per David Chalmers? — PoeticUniverse

Well sure, I’d consider that, but you’ve moved a long way from ‘mind is made from atoms’ ;-)

Well sure, I’d consider that — Wayfarer

On Consciousness

What the meaning to this play we’re befit,
From dirt to dust within the script that’s writ?
The wise in search have thrown themselves to waste;
Experience alone is the benefit.

Physics describes but the extrinsic causes,
While consciousness exists just for itself,
As the intrinsic, compositional,
Informational, whole, and exclusive—

As the distinctions toward survival, 
Though causing nothing except in itself,
As in ne’er doing but only as being,
Leaving intelligence for the doing.

The posterior cortex holds correlates,
For this is the only brain region that
Can’t be removed for one to still retain
Consciousness, it having feedback in it;

Thusly, it forms an irreducible Whole,
And this Whole forms consciousness directly,
A process fundamental in nature,
Or’s the brain’s private symbolic language.

The Whole can also be well spoken of 
To communicate with others, as well as
Globally informing other brain states,
Via qualia, about what’s been made.

Imagine a single lonely electron looking for a lonely single proton in a vast inflating space... Reaching out in vain... — Dijkgraf

From time’s shores toward oblivion’s worlds,
The quantum ‘vacuum’ fields send forth their whirls,
The sea parting into base discrete swirls,
Unto stars and life—ephemerals pearled.

When the universe ends—sparse photons left,
All splendor, life, and objects will have gone
The way that all temporaries must go,
To oblivion—oh, grand complexities!

Only the Eternal Basis stays put
As potential for all possible books
In Everything’s Babel Repository
To author another universe’s story.

Damned! You tell with poetry here something physicists need pages of math for! 5000 calculations were needed to arrive at the simple fact that the black hole interiors radiate their inside information to the outside. Photons will be all that's left! Accelerating into oblivion, a "lucid memoryvof massive past"...

The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes:
Sean Carroll on QFT: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07884.pdf — PoeticUniverse

That's interesting! Sean Carroll's Effective Field Theory postulates a level of reality underlying the old Quantum Field Theory. 19th century Materialism was an update of ancient Atomism. But that was soon superseded by sub-atomic somethings (particles), then by sub-particle Quarks, as the foundation of reality. Now the sub-basement of reality is an even less substantial "approximation" of a Theory of Everything.

Maybe I could sneak my own Enformationism theory into that vague virtual class of un-excited Nothingness that is "more fundamental" than an empty place of Potential particles. I used to label that Ideality as "Meta-Physics", but now I can call it "Sub-Physics" : the "underlying reality" that sub-venes the material Macro & mathematical QFT levels. :nerd:

Quantum field theory :
QFT treats particles as excited states (also called quanta) of their underlying quantum fields, which are more fundamental than the particles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory

Effective field theory :
In physics, an effective field theory is a type of approximation, or effective theory, for an underlying physical theory,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .HERE BE DRAGONS


Ideality :
In Plato’s theory of Forms, he argues that non-physical forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate or perfect reality. Those Forms are not physical things, but merely definitions or recipes of possible things. What we call Reality consists of a few actualized potentials drawn from a realm of infinite possibilities.
1. Materialists deny the existence of such immaterial ideals, but recent developments in Quantum theory have forced them to accept the concept of “virtual” particles in a mathematical “field”, that are not real, but only potential, until their unreal state is collapsed into reality by a measurement or observation. To measure is to extract meaning into a mind. [Measure, from L. Mensura, to know; from mens-, mind]
2. Some modern idealists find that scenario to be intriguingly similar to Plato’s notion that ideal Forms can be realized, i.e. meaning extracted, by knowing minds. For the purposes of this blog, “Ideality” refers to an infinite pool of potential (equivalent to a quantum field), of which physical Reality is a small part.
BothAnd Blog Glossary

"Thusly, it forms an irreducible Whole,
And this Whole forms consciousness directly,
A process fundamental in nature,"

Photons will be all that's left! — Dijkgraf

Given that photons have no mass and no time, Roger Penrose thinks that since no mass will be left at the end of the universe then there is no distance because there is no mass or something like that … and so a new universe can begin since the spread-out photons will be as if they are near each other. Sorry, I don't remember where I saw that, but photons already seem to get emitted and absorbed without traveling in between.

HERE BE DRAGONS — Gnomon

And they breathe fire into the equations.

Sorry, I don't remember where I saw that, but photons already seem to get emitted and absorbed without traveling in between — PoeticUniverse

Yes. Photons act instantaneously. Because they have finite velocity though, nothing can happen at once or at the same place. Newton thought action was instantaneous. But this would imply that everything happens at once. Which is prevented by a finite light speed.

HERE BE DRAGONS — Gnomon
And they breathe fire into the equations. — PoeticUniverse

Yes! And in my information-centric thesis, that "fire" is the universal force that I label as Potential EnFormAction, which works as active Energy, and rests as mundane Matter. :smile:

Potential EnFormAction — Gnomon

Your Award for finding the needle in the haystack:



The great needle plays, stitches, winds, and paves
As the strands of quantum fields’ webs of waves
That weave the warp, weft, and woof, uni-versed,
Into being’s fabric of Earth’s living braids.

Must be the mushroom soup...

Your Award for finding the needle in the haystack: — PoeticUniverse

Sometimes it seems like finding a needle in a stack of needles. :joke:
I clicked on the Austin Torney award, but it just sits there and slowly cycles, from beginning, to between, and back to the origin. Am I supposed to just stare at it, and meditate while mumbling a mantra, and sipping 'shroom soup? :cool: