Old Book: Chapter 3
The Joy of GLOI
[In this section, I'm going to play at amateur physics in a way I really have no right to (having next to no training in the subject), but I can't help myself. Wise readers will question all my purported expressions of physical fact and theory.]
The ostensible naturalness of stasis to which I've been referring can be stated as a law: An object will tend to remain as it is unless acted upon. Persistence in time comes pretty close to defining what it means to be an object—something that naturally persists. I will refer to this law as the Generalized Law of Inertia (or GLOI) because of its resemblance to the Law of Inertia (LOI): An object at rest or in constant linear motion will tend to remain so unless acted upon by a force.
Newton saw LOI as natural, a brute fact for which he sought no explanation. With LOI as a starting point, he derived the mathematical definitions of force and energy as the "stuff" required to change things from this natural condition. GLOI, like LOI, has been a fundamental tenet of science not because its denial has never occurred to anyone, but because it too has seemed to be a brute fact, and there have been no reasonable sounding alternatives to it within the confines of the Fully Automatic Model. It has always seemed, in a Euclidean sense, to deserve the status of a "simple truth."
However, in science, and in mathematics as well, the notion of a simple truth has been steadily eroded during the last century or so. Many scientists no longer seek true theories (or at least so they say) but only formal constructs that are consistent with observations and can be used to make predictions. This modern view does not transcend the need for assumptions since any argument still must have a starting place, a foundation on which to build, but these assumptions become provisional or ad hoc; none has a special truth status. There is no longer the sense as there was in classical times that the world was made so as to be comprehensible, so as to conform to linguistic or mathematical forms or to logical arguments, so that people can come to understand it. The world just is and whatever comprehensibility it has now stands either as the supreme mystery of existence or as the crowning achievement of brain evolution.
Since its formulation, quantum mechanics and its implications for the nature of reality have perplexed any who have tried to understand them. So much of it seems to contradict common sense. Part of its strangeness I feel comes from our almost built-in expectations of a GLOI world. Quantum mechanics doesn't obey GLOI. Particles can no longer be thought of as perfectly isolated "billiard balls" but rather must be seen as stable processes affected in principle by every other particle in the universe. Within quantum mechanics we find that, for example, the decay of a particle is not caused by an outside force nor caused at all in the usual sense, but is seen as inevitable, spontaneous and probabilistic. There are no inert parts of matter whose enduring we can take for granted. In this case, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask of neutrons what we can of people: What are the conditions conducive to their enduring? Why do they persist in time? In fact particle physicists are interested in such questions although the mathematics of the presumed stable solutions to the quantum equations are too complicated given our current state of knowledge. Well now, if we can ask these questions of electrons, then we can ask them of atoms, rocks and ovens.—————
If we are willing to suspend the presumption that only change ought to be explained, then we seem bound by logic to replace GLOI with some other postulate about the natural state of things, presumably with something deeper, something that yields persistence as a prediction. Perhaps, for example, the apparent fact of persistence can be subsumed by the principle of least energy. That is, patterns will remain stable if they reside at the bottom of an energy well (like a marble in a bowl) and require outside energy to come out of that well and settle in another. Better yet, maybe a more sophisticated assumption than GLOI would be to explicitly cite the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy: Unless a system is acted upon, it will tend toward equilibrium, the state of maximal entropy.
If states of least energy or entropy are the source of all stability, then it is indeed a deeper axiom than GLOI, but since they don't ever and can't ever transcend the need for some assumptions at the bottom of explanatory schemes it must eventually suffer the same fate as GLOI. In an egalitarian world, every natural state must ultimately be discarded, the principle of least energy no less than GLOI. All possible patterns of matter, energy, and space in general are equally natural and equally subject to explanation.
If no axiomatic system is sufficient to epitomize nature, then to arrive at an understanding of nature we must admit the limitations of one-way approaches. We must find ways to combine different and even contradictory approaches. Rather than look for something deeper than GLOI, perhaps we should postulate some explicit reversal of it to generate a complementary theory that fills in the gaps left by the mismatch between GLOI and the world it describes. There are many such reversals to choose from. We have:
1. objects will naturally and spontaneously cease to exist
2. objects will naturally make a slow transition into something else (as in growth or aging)
3. objects will suddenly undergo transformation (as in radioactive decay)
, etc.
Suppose we take spontaneous cessation of existence as the natural tendency of systems in the manner of Meir Ben Gabbai. Inertia would then occur as a kind of action against that natural tendency. We'd have to imagine the world of persistent things being remade or at least held in existence at every moment. That hardly seems parsimonious, but Occam's Razor is about our ability to understand and not about nature. For one thing, since it requires energy to do anything (in the usual sense of doing), the rock that is persisting quite nicely in your backyard would seem to have an unlimited and constantly acting energy source at its disposal, though it would be energy of an odd, nonstandard sort.
Assumption Switching Revisited
Let me try to give a general form to the Assumption Switching process. Suppose we observe that system x sometimes has property p and sometimes property p' or "not p". We can choose to say that p is a "natural" property of x and build up a theory from there that describes the cause of the occurrence of p' or we may choose to suppose that p' or is natural and we must explain how p sometimes comes to hold.
It may seem odd or even silly to suppose as I have here that something which is not always the case is the natural state of things, but that's exactly what we always do. For example, when Newton framed LOI as a natural law, he said that constant motion was natural, but constant motion never really happens. One would be hard-pressed to find a projectile which keeps going without change. Everywhere things are speeding up, slowing down, colliding. Balls stop rolling, orbits slowly decay and photons are absorbed. Friction, as I will label the general heading for those things which act against constant motion of an object, is as close to a universal as I can imagine at least on the human scale of events, and yet from the point of view of LOI it is "epiphenomenal." Friction comes up immediately as a consequence of the existence of other things besides the projectile. Constant motion only can happen in perfect isolation. We act as if constant motion is the default value, and friction is glommed onto existence at some later stage. It must be clear that motion and friction arise mutually. Which one takes precedence in our thoughts depends only on a foreground-background orientation, a choice.
In fact, since cessation of one sort or another is inevitable for nearly all systems—decay, death, dissipation—an anti-GLOI assumption (law of decay? law of friction?) is as reasonable ultimately as GLOI as a beginning point for inquiry.
Using the facts of nature (whatever those might currently be) as a guide, any given set of assumptions, especially ones about what is natural and what is caused, we can generate a whole new and equally valid way of seeing the world. Assumption Switching is a very powerful and efficient way to produce insights very different from those of the original formulation of a theory. Some theories generated in this way certainly will seem absurd, but only, I believe, because our minds are habituated to the culturally (and biologically) perpetuated ways of seeing. Again no foreground-background orientation is natural.
Won't the dual theories generated by Assumption Switching lead to contradictory conclusions about almost everything? How do you superimpose contradictions and arrive at anything like a single body of facts, the universe? There is a misconception lurking here. Only the axioms of a given theory would be reversed. The way the theory develops, the laws we conjure up, on the other hand, would still be constrained by the facts of nature. What will change after an Assumption Switch are the processes which require explanation. It would of course be silly to try to develop a theory based on an assumption that the helium atom really contains 3 protons rather than two or that 2 + 2 = 5. We ought to confine these switches to more abstract and general assumptions about foregrounds and backgrounds where both sides of the dualism are represented in the world (both p and p').
Alternative modes of explanation arise to bring the different theories into line with the facts and those differences will lead to different sorts of predictions, but I would not expect contradictory conclusions. In fact, I would expect that the predictions of one theory would largely overlap with those of its dual theory but that each theory will tend to encourage different sorts of questions and make certain types of derivations simpler.
An anti-GLOI theory, for example, will not look at all elegant in explaining the facts which a GLOI theory illuminates. The dual explanation is intended to illuminate the other half of the question, those areas in which the original version fails to shed light. A theory only seems parsimonious when we use it to look at the very questions it tends to lead us to ask. I imagine that all theories lead to messy explanations when investigations go in different directions from those implied by the assumptions behind the theories.
In the formative centuries of scientific thinking, there was the assumption that God created the world with a subtle perfection and that this perfection offered an absolute criterion for choosing between competing theories. The simplest and most elegant one to fit the facts is the truest one. I see no particular merit in that reasoning. I see no particular relationship between the simplicity of what is and the simplicity of our descriptions or theories. The world is rich enough to be described in infinitely many ways. Territories aren't maps.
We tend to think that the law of gravitation really exists, but laws are just maps for what really is. Yes, it's a little disconcerting to think that we can just conjure up alternative laws on a whim, but I believe we can do just that. The relationship between scientific laws and the world they describe (the MT relationship) is a very subtle one which requires new approaches to be understood. Ultimately, however, the world does not follow laws. The world simply is. Again, the real mystery that needs to be solved is to account for the apparent lawful behavior of the world.
The Main Attraction
Despite what I've said so far, ordinary causation is not diametrically opposed to the processes, whatever they may be, which hold things as they are. Dynamic open systems—hurricanes, people, ecologies—won't persist without being caused to do so in very nearly the usual sense. That is, we can imagine tracing their stability through chains of contact, through the application of coercive force. Hurricanes and people require constant upkeep in the form of information and energy—heat, food, oxygen, stop signs, heart surgery, etc.—which can be said to cause their enduring. Left to themselves in a perfect vacuum each would quickly dissipate or die (Pardon the gruesome image of a person being placed in a vacuum).
A kind of mathematics of stability is simple and well-understood, although it is not clear how to apply it in many cases. Quantitative stability can arise when repeated applications of a function to its own outputs are "attracted" to a single solution or set of solutions. The mathematical field of chaos (or "strange attraction") has overshadowed the more ubiquitous and fundamental process of simple attraction in the popular imagination. A later chapter will discuss the importance of mathematical attraction to any coherent theory about how things stay the same. Persistence can be seen as arising out of a kind of iterative feedback.
As a simple example of this process, let me suggest something to try on a calculator and with paper and pencil. Pick any number from 1 to 100 as a starting value and call this number X. We are going to make successive changes in the value of X by repetition of the following recipe. The new value of X is going to be the average of two quantities. The first quantity is just the current value of X. The other quantity is the result obtained by dividing the current value of X into 25.
Suppose 10 is the original value of X. The second value of X is the average of 10 and 25/10. The computation (10 + 2.5) / 2 yields 6.25.
The third value of X is the average of 6.25 and 25/6.25 (= 4), and we get 5.125. Continuing with this same process, the next few values for X are 5.001524, 5.0000002, 5.0000000, 5.0000000, etc.
The outputs get sucked toward or attracted to 5. Had we started with 78 as the original value of X, the sequence of values would have been 39.1602464, 19.8993294, 10.5778266, 6.4706305, 5.16712082, 5.00270260, 5.0000007, 5.0000000. In fact, any input whatsoever gets sucked toward either 5 or -5.
To see how attraction relates to the persistence of systems, we will have to use a little imagination. Suppose that this attracting process which can expressed as
x5 = (x4+ 25/x4)/2
x(n+1)=p*xn+ (1-p)*f(xn)
is a mathematical representation of the dynamics of some system whose current state is X and whose steady-state is 5. To help picture what is going on we can use a guitar string as our system. The state of the string is the shape, tension and direction of movement of the string at any given moment, while its only steady-state is its straight line rest state. Generally, one can't specify the state of a system with one number as I'm doing here with my mathematical attractor. Theoretically, however, one could specify the state of even very complex systems with some huge array of numbers which might for example give the locations and momenta of its constituent particles. A reasonable one number summary of the state of a guitar string might be its maximum deviation from the straight line connecting its endpoints.
This means that its undisturbed steady-state is given by 0. Now, if we pluck the string and once every second record its "state" given by that maximal displacement, we will get a sequence of numbers not entirely different from the ones given above that will slowly head toward zero. The dynamics of the guitar string system uniquely determine the next measured state given the current one.
Likewise, if we sneeze, our normal mode of being or "state" of mind may be disturbed for a few moments until some internal process "attracts" that normal state. We might call it recovery time but it is equally attraction time. Or if a community is shocked by a tragic event, there will be a time of alternative experience that we might call mourning that will replace the normal day-to-day "feel" of living in that community but that will ultimately be "damped" out. The new normal state may be somewhat different than the old (as in the case of epochal events like, for example, the assassination of JFK), but most of the specific mourning phenomena will be gone, and normality will continue to be an attractor; slow change will take place in the context of stability. Attraction is the mathematical reason there is such a thing as a normal state.
If there is some kind of iterative procedure or feedback responsible for the return to normal states, it is generally very difficult to specify it. Tension, friction and the unchanging physical properties of the materials involved produce the continuous feedback system of the plucked string. For the case of the sneeze or the tragedy, however, one can barely imagine the analogs for tension and friction. The physics of psychological activity in particular are hard to picture.
This sort of thinking does give a starting place for discussing the nature of stasis, but, as laid out here, we are explaining stasis of a system in terms of a deeper stability, that of the iterative procedure itself, like the formula above, that creates the stability. That is, we have not accounted for the ongoing nature of the system itself but only for a particular state of that system. This can be a fairly subtle distinction. What system, for example, is my current self a steady state of? My real and permanent self? I have already rejected the idea there is a deepest, most natural me.
There is also the problem of understanding what it means for the state of a system to be fed back into the stabilizing procedure. It's not as if the guitar string is checking at regular intervals to see how far from equilibrium it is. If there is feedback here, it is instantaneous and continuous rather than discrete and punctuated like the example equation.
Self-Facilitation
The odd twist on standard causation and the causes of stability for dynamic open systems like people and hurricanes is that each such system seems to take an active part in its persistence. They cause themselves to endure. There is no "outside" force involved. Humans, for example, seek the food, shelter, etc. necessary to survive. In fact, this seeking is among the most fundamental activities of people (which we generally chalk up to the pressure of natural selection or the survival instinct). In a lesser but real way, hurricanes also tend to maintain themselves—by wandering toward conditions conducive to their development. Systems of rain clouds consist of moisture but somehow seem to be able to replenish themselves as that move across the seascape.
Lancelot Law-Whyte, an undeservedly forgotten polymath, put it succinctly: "Systems facilitate those processes which facilitate them." This deep and crystalline statement goes a long way toward expressing the two-way character of causation, the mutually supporting bootstrap between things and processes. It sounds like natural selection at the level of being rather than biology. People facilitate feeding and sex, and feeding and sex facilitate them. Bureaucracies create environments that make bureaucracies essential. There is feedback between a system and its environment, between a system and its products. Systems that fail to facilitate the processes that facilitate them will not persist for long. The survival instinct goes far deeper than our genes. Only the very special processes which possess this self-facilitating quality even get to play the evolution game.
Rocks, of course, take no part in maintaining their own existence, at least not in the standard sense. If rocks participate in their own continuation, it is in some much more subtle or invisible way. They are assemblages with little coherence and consist in molecules and the geometry implied by the relationships between those molecules. Half a rock is still a rock, but half a hurricane isn't a hurricane. Rocks persistence in time is the persistence of these particles and relationships. Thus to consider the persistence of rocks largely boils down to questions about the persistence of its parts. These parts must be engaged in self-facilitation as well. But in what does self-facilitation consist? The mind boggles. We have a logical bootstrap problem. You need to have a system to begin the facilitation but you need the facilitation to produce the system. Once again we seem to be faced with a case of mutual arising that is offensive to logical linearity.
Do Rocks Naturally Persist?
A system is said to be closed if it is completely isolated from outside influence and open otherwise. The law of entropy says that for closed systems, the total amount of disorder can only increase or hold steady but never decrease. Another way to say this is that the only stable or steady state of a closed system is equilibrium with heat energy spread roughly evenly across the system. The ecological system of the Earth is extremely open because much of the energy that sustains it is gotten from the outside, from the Sun. Thus the extraordinary fact that a bunch of chemicals can be drawn from highly disordered states to states as highly organized as clouds and pine trees and human beings is not a contradiction of the law of entropy. The ecology of the Earth maintains a steady-state; which is to say that various measurements remain roughly steady—the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, etc. even though oxygen is constantly being captured and released, used up and created. The complex structures on the Earth are such that the amounts being used and created will always be brought back into balance unless the levels are knocked too far out of whack (by cutting down the rain forests perhaps.) Things operate in much the same way a thermostat-heater system assures a constant level of heat. Some kind of mathematical attraction is holding sway. The idea that the Earth will find ways to maintain these levels through creative adaptation as if It knows what's going on is known as the Gaia Hypothesis. In the 1980s this was a hot and hip idea, but has grown more and more politically tenuous with the rise of concern about climate change. If the Gaia is assuring our steady-state, what have we to worry about rising CO2 levels? Still, we can't throw away the baby with the bathwater; there may be something to Gaia.
If there is an ecology on Pluto, on the other hand, it will be almost entirely closed since little energy of any kind comes in from the outside there. Much is often made of the distinction between open and closed systems and between equilibrium and steady-state, but we will not focus too much attention on these distinctions. There are no truly closed systems (except perhaps the universe as a whole) and equilibrium can be seen as nothing but a steady state that happens to be in agreement with the surroundings. That is, if the environment changes the equilibrium disappears. Open and closed systems and their stable forms are defined by their environments.
People, hurricanes, and rocks all rely on conditions conducive to their enduring. All maintain themselves through some range of conditions. Open systems in dynamic steady-state seem to be more sensitive to and dependent on conditions, but that's an illusion generated from our presumption of the naturalness of certain conditions—those approximating the human milieu. At extraordinarily high temperatures or at high velocity impact, for example, the rock will be very sensitive to conditions. It will melt or break into pieces. The commonplace nature of a rock's appropriate conditions for enduring and the relative rarity in our human environment of adverse conditions for rocks fool us into thinking there is a difference in kind here.
For rocks, the conducive conditions seem more like non-events, but once again this has to do with a Foreground-Background orientation. Is a conducive low temperature, for example, any less of an event than the very high temperature which will end the rock's existence (as a particular rock)? Only in the sense that heat is more real or more of an event than cold, an idea I will look at shortly. It comes down again to what one considers to be natural, what constitutes the background against which we see things "happening." Stable ovens are among the conditions conducive to the family's survival.
The rule "X endures under X-conducive conditions" seems to hold equally well for all things.
X-conducive conditions cause X to endure while those unconducive cause it to change. Is Passive Causation nothing but creating conducive conditions for persistence? The word "conducive" evokes the sense that the event takes part in its occurrence rather than being coerced to happen. The thing just "behaves" as it does, not by force or by decree or natural law. It gives causation the feeling of human communication and influence, with systems "deciding" to comply with wishes.
"X-conducive conditions cause X to endure" sounds rather bland, bordering on tautological, but it may be the price we have to pay to salvage a concept of causation inclusive enough to contain both our usual meaning and the passive, holding version I'm seeking. When we try, as mentioned before, to combine the two complementary Foreground-Background orientations in a single system, blandness may be an automatic consequence. We end up with a more complete but rather toothless model, too general to create definite statements. Good philosophy, bad science.
Euclidean and Non-Euclidean
In discussing Assumption Switching, I may have given the impression that scientific theories are generally given axiomatic treatments. This is almost never the case. Neither are mathematical theories for that matter. The important thing is that mathematicians and scientists act as if such a treatment were possible, in the faith that it is possible, as if there is an internal consistency to nature that can be reduced to a few simple principles. The less fundamental can be derived from the most fundamental, and the most fundamental must be accepted without proof. The only proof is consistency and induction.
One of the few systems of thought that has been thoroughly axiomized is Euclid's geometry. It is the inspiration for a general belief that axiomization of theoretical systems is possible, proper and desirable. Many of us first learned of the beauty and power of mathematics by building up ever more sophisticated geometric theorems beginning from the most trivial and "self-evident" facts. In a deep sense, the beauty of this treatment rested on the simplicity of the postulates. Since the time of Euclid, one of the five postulates has always seemed less simple, elegant and self-evident than the others and has compromised the beauty of geometry in the eyes of many mathematicians. Countless hours of work by hundreds of amateur and professional mathematicians were devoted over the centuries to proving this parallel postulate from the other four, but through the centuries, no one managed it. Finally in the first half of the 19th century it occurred to several mathematicians independently that this approach was doomed to failure. The parallel postulate must be independent of the others. This raises the possibility that the parallel postulate seems less obvious because it is untrue. At least two alternatives that contradicted the postulate were put forth as possible postulates. These were used to generate whole new bodies of theorems. As far as I know this is the only historical precedent we have for Assumption Switching, but it shows beautifully the benefits of the approach.
The theorems of these two noneuclidean geometries and the old Euclidean one overlap, and the ones that differ do so in a subtle enough way that we cannot yet tell for sure which is the true geometry of Nature. The current wisdom says that one of these alternatives rather than the original euclidean version is correct. I would submit that any such final absolute solution is meaningless. Each alternative will give insights under appropriate conditions. What I am seeking at the moment is a non-inertial or anti-GLOI physics analogous to our non-Euclidean geometry.
Coldness
It would be nice to see an example of an anti-GLOI theory to test its feasibility. Of course that is a rather tall order. Such a theory is not about to spring fully developed from my brow. With that disclaimer, however, here's a glimpse at an anti-GLOI theory.
Until the scientific era gave us a kinetic theory of heat, the warmth of a fire and the chill of an Arctic blast of air would both undoubtedly have been treated as having equal ontological standing. They were opposing forces of equal but opposite power, and they were both equally real and both presented equal threats to the well-being of temperate human beings. I imagine that even today most people still routinely picture hot and cold as ontological equals despite the fact that science no longer supports such a view. Heat, we are told, is nothing but the motion of particles, and cold is simply the lack of heat. If we take away this overlaid kinetic energy from a system, its default temperature value will be absolute zero. In other words, we are now told that heat is a something and cold is a nothing, just the natural background temperature.
In the manner described above, the natural state of matter and space is the motionlessness of absolute zero while deviations from that motionlessness (i.e. heat) are (caused by) infusions of energy. Absolute zero is the ultimate in stasis. It, by definition, means no movement, no change. Here there are no steady states, no vibrations, not even chaos—only equilibrium, stasis, perfect persistence! But persistence of what? Experimental findings seem to confirm a hypothesis of Bose and Einstein that at temperatures very near absolute zero, the whole idea of a particle-as-we-know-it completely transforms and so therefore does the very notion of temperature since it is defined in terms of the kinetic energy of particles. All that remains at these temperatures is a sort of plasma with its own new set of properties. That is, absolute zero cannot be reached because, aside from technical difficulties, before we get there, temperature as a quality of nature ceases to exist. Whatever causes particles to persist is absent by the time we get to zero.
The sequential nature of our reasoning makes it appear as if heat is a layer of reality that comes temporally after the background coldness layer is laid down. In fact, however, heat and cold only make sense in respect to each other. They must arise mutually and simultaneously.
What if we try to flip the relationship between heat and cold? One major stumbling block is the asymmetry of the temperature scale. There are no generally recognized limits on how hot a substance can get while there is an absolute zero on the other end. A zero on a scale can be seen as a reason to choose that side as the default value, the side that implies nothing is happening. For example, the fact that there is a zero on the jump scale and no obvious maximum, may contribute to our feeling that a non-jump is more natural than a jump. In the next chapter, we will discuss the peculiar status of zero in some depth, but for now we can say that it is not always the hard stop that it appears to be. An instructive image is the single perspective point in a drawing of, for example, railroad tracks heading off into the distance. That single point is really a compressed infinity.
We assume that the linear scale we have chosen represents something real, but nature does not come with natural scales, and we are free choose another one that stretches that last millionth of a degree out to any length whatsoever. We accept the naturalness of our linear temperature scale only because it works out well in several physical laws like the ideal gas law. A compelling reason to accept that naturalness is that, when you mix a cup of 40° water and a cup of 60° water, we get two cups of more or less 50° water. A point that has come up a number times, however, is that the world has no tendency to choose one thing as natural over another. There is a simple mathematical demonstration that can help illustrate this essential point about scales. The diagram below illustrates that there is a simple mapping of any interval, like that between 0 degrees and 1 millionth of a degree for example, onto an infinitely long scale.
Bend the open interval into a half circle, place it above the real line and mark the center of that implicit circle with the point P. Notice now that every line through P that goes through the interval also goes through the line, and for every point on either the interval or the line such a ray exists. This simple association of points on one scale with points on the other turns one "linear" scale into another that has just as much right to be called linear but extends forever.
In my example, .1 degrees Kelvin might be mapped onto -10 modified Kelvin, and .01 degrees to -100.
We can try to imagine that the natural state of space is, far from being a simple void, filled with some maximum quantity of (heat) energy and then something, an as yet unrecognized process, causes deviations from the natural state. The something must have plenty of neg-energy at its disposal because it brings this immense background energy way down the scale to 4° Kelvin (the so-called background radiation left over from the Big Bang) in much of space and a few paltry million degrees even in the centers of stars. David Bohm, in a very different context, has said that empty space is full of such unexpressed energy.
"If one computes the total amount of energy...in one cubic centimetre of space,...it turns out to be very far beyond the energy of all the matter in the known universe.
What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small...excitation on top of that background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea. In current physical theories, one avoids the explicit consideration of this background by calculating only the difference between the energy of empty space and that of space with matter in it. This difference is all that counts in the determination of the general properties of matter as they are presently accessible to observation. However, further developments in physics may make it possible to probe the above-mentioned background in a more direct way. Moreover, even at present, this vast sea of energy may play a key part in the understanding of the cosmos as a whole. In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty. (p.191 in wholeness and the implicate order)
The existence of vast quantities of neg-energy necessary to mask the equally vast reservoir of energy would go a long way toward explaining where rocks get the strength to go on. The fundamental characteristic of neg-energy, as I envision it, isn't doing as it is for ordinary energy, but reining in, damping, not doing. Instead of asking what has caused a particle to move as we would in the standard model of heat, now we must ask what is keeping it from going at its natural infinite speed. We want to study the nature of the anti-jump muscles or friction. We can imagine for example that space has a kind of viscosity, an inherent and real chill. Motion is the lack of this neg-energetic chill. Or we can imagine that a tiny piece of space is filled with innumerable little neg-energy vectors pointing independently and chaotically so that they cancel each other out. The trick will be a align them, as we'll illustrate shortly
Brain Power
The passive versions of force and energy don't seem to make much sense in our usual physics, but they may be reflected in our everyday language. We speak of the "force of will", "mental energy" or "brain power" as if physical force and energy are involved, but, in actuality, these phenomena are about stability rather than referring to expressed movement. They have more to do with discipline, control, concentration, resisting temptation, and resisting influence. That is, they have to do with holding things together, maintaining a continuous focused attention. They don't involve movement but rather keeping still. It is a truism that listening requires more mental energy than speaking or expressing oneself. On the other hand, I doubt that more calories are burned up when listening than when speaking.
The standard model sees mental exertion as essentially computational, dealing with abstract information, and although computation necessarily requires some theoretically minimal expenditure of energy, it is not essentially energetic at all. It takes as much energy, for example, for a PC to continually refresh the screen as to compute the digits of pi. Likewise mental concentration would require no more energy than spacing out or passively watching TV. I think neg-energy, the energy of holding, probably must bear some relationship to information—in the sense of "forming within." Perhaps the term "influence" expresses the notion of something that is essentially information but which has some power to induce change.
The concept of energy in physics comes out of GLOI. Energy is that which can cause change. In the world of passive, holding causation, this neg-energy or inertial energy would be that which causes stasis against a natural condition of change. And somehow, again, rocks and other stable, relatively closed systems seem to have plenty of it and seem to get it for free out of nowhere.
We have to allow ourselves to fully enter this strange neg-energy world where cold and heat are switched. We can take nothing for granted. Particles may be completely something other around here. Perhaps the concepts of space and particle exchange places, background becomes foreground as in the face/vase picture. Particles may be like bubbles in the pudding rather than pebbles in the void. One similarity in all such speculations which reverse the place of cold and heat is that "empty" space takes on a more central role.
The unintuitive notion from relativity that the speed of light is an absolute limit could result in this model from the nature of that pudding. The speed of light is a property of space rather than of photons. It would be analogous to the terminal velocity of an object falling through the atmosphere. Like the classic finger-trap puzzle, the harder you pull, the tighter the space squeezes, and it squeezes infinitely hard at the speed of light.
The heat/cold reversal brings to mind a similar switch between light and darkness. Imagine once again that, underneath it all, space is pure energy but it has the property that its points emit fantastic quantities of damping inertial negenergy. Thus space would be like a veiled or masked fullness, a self-canceling process. In the next chapter, I discuss this image of emptiness as perfect cancellation. According to this view, what we see as sources of light, the Sun for example, have the capacity to affect these points of space so that the veils are partially lifted, perhaps by orienting or aligning those points in a particular way that inhibits the inertial neg-energy. Imagine that the points of space are discreet and fixed (despite the fact that General Relativity explicitly forbids such a formulation). The alignment process could work point by point the way that a magnet magnetizes a pin which magnetizes another and so on. [Insert photo here].
The points are like these little magnetized pins or compass needles which get oriented toward the light source. The apparent outward movement of the photon is only virtual. The only real movement is orienting inward. The apparent motion outward is the crest of an expanding wave. To help you picture how inward movement can appear as outward movement imagine that we position the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner over a dusty floor and turn it on. For a moment we get an expanding circle of clean floor, but the only motion is the dust toward the nozzle. The sun then in this model is a tremendous neg-energy inhibitor or darkness vacuum. The more intense the light in the standard approach, the more effectively the shades have been subdued to reveal the background energy. What is described as a photon in the standard model is the ripple of the "suction" wave as it propagates through space. The speed of light is the speed of darkness suction. The points of space, being fixed, cannot move toward the source but are merely reoriented or aligned. Quantum vacuum fluctuations are like leaks in the points of space, the failure of these points to rein in their immense spontaneous creativity. The relative nothingness of space in the standard model is replaced with a plenum whose infinite potential is ready to burst out all over.
Is the Universe a Cellular Automaton?
Again, in this model there is no motion of photons away from the light source. On the contrary, all we have are the energy shades orienting toward the source. Despite the fact that General Relativity precludes such a possibility, we can think of each point of space as fixed, a tiny cell surrounded by other cells that can take on a number of states -- naked, veiled, etc. The darkness attractor snatches darkness away from a surrounding cell of space. Each cell in turn snatches its neighbors darkness as the darkness wave spreads. Here is a wave that, because it advances cell by cell, can appear to be a particle. This cellular approach gives the fundamental reality to space rather than matter, with matter occurring as a specific state of space.
As these ideas begin to sound more and more absurd, I want to repeat in my defense how difficult it is to re-imagine a whole scientific theory in one fell swoop. The chance that any specific detail of this image will ultimately prove useable is small, but there still may be some insight or inspiration to be gained. It is clear to me that, with sufficient knowledge, creativity and contrivance, it must be possible to produce alternative pictures like these that are consistent with the known facts. Again, I have no desire to replace the particle approach which renders space as the natural background with a theory that has space as a foreground. All of this is proposed an alternative description. Reality is too subtle to be captured by any one approach.
Computer scientist, physicist Edward Fredkin has developed what he calls digital physics which similarly treats space and its contents as a vast collection of discreet point-like "cellular automata." These are envisioned as the real world counterparts of a genre of computer programs, the most famous of which is Conway's Game of Life. In that program each square of a rectilinear grid, which we see represented on the computer screen, is thought of as a cell which is either dead or alive, turned on or turned off, (much as the neg-energy model has them as naked, veiled, etc.) as determined by applying a rule to the previous "generation" of cells. Living cells in the real world might reproduce if there is sufficient space and food available and yet perish if they are either too crowded or too isolated from other cells. The rules of the Game of Life reflect this idea in the following way.
1) Each cell has eight neighbor cells. If a "dead" cell in one generation has exactly three live neighbors, then in the next generation that cell will be alive. We can imagine that those surrounding cells have given birth to the new cell.
2) If a live cell from one generation has either two or three live neighbors, that cell will stay alive in the next generation. Otherwise it will die from loneliness or overcrowding.
(diagram)
Depending now only on the configuration of live cells at the beginning of the run, the program will create generation after generation of configurations following these rules for each cell in each generation. The mathematical property of attraction is very important here. The initial arrangement of lives cells may quickly be attracted to a stable dead state, or it may flicker in rather random looking patterns, but, amazingly, they may also exhibit periodicities and stabilities and generate beautiful images on the screen. One especially significant phenomenon for us, known as a glider, looks like a stable object that moves across the screen square by square, but a particular cell X of the stable pattern does not continue in any normal sense. Rather some group of cells (that may or may not include X) from the old generation create the new cell corresponding to X. (diagram of simple glider). The interative feedback and mathematical attraction that are at play here will be discussed in the next chapter.
Fredkin's model of physical reality, like that of the Game of Life and my alternative picture of light propagation, sees all change, even the simple movement of a particle through space, as the result of local communication between adjacent points. In his model, the apparent movement of a persisting particle (or even, presumably, some arrangement as complicated as a human being or a solar system) through space is really just the propagation of a computational stability, a glider, consecutively inhabiting points or cells in space. Physical reality is just information pattern of a glider rather than any absolutely tangible stuff of matter, and the only thing that has an immutable existence is the playing field for rules of propagation—the space of cells and the underlying laws of recombination available uniformly to each of the cells that takes the place of the computer program and the computer itself.
David Bohm, on a completely different basis than Fredkin, also models the unchanging phenomena of physical reality as a kind of mirage. He sees a persisting object as a standing wave or stability in the "holomovement" (or deepest reality) so that, once again, objects are really just chimera which appear to recreate themselves at each moment. Here is an extraordinary, if somewhat disturbing and unsatisfying cause for persistence. We are more information than substance. We are caused to go on by a kind of algorithm that recreates us moment by moment. The object's very existence is recreated in each generation, is held together by the rules, and at the same time consists, one might reasonably say, in information alone. There is no stuff there. You could even say that there is no persistence at all but only gliding. What was in the last generation, is no more, except perhaps the background cells themselves and their program. This formulation, therefore, more or less bypasses the question we've been looking at: Is change or changelessness more natural?
To keep things relatively simple up to now I have acted as if the superposition of one side of the dichotomy and the other would circumscribe the descriptive possibilities, but now we can see that there can be way more than two sides to the issue. Just as there are two denials of the Parallel Postulate that lead to fruitful alternatives to Euclid, there is more than one denial of GLOI.
·Things spontaneously cease to exist unless they are continuously maintained by holding forces.
·At the deepest level, continuing is essentially random and probabilistic. Each kind of phenomenon has its characteristic half-life.
·Neither persistence nor change is more natural. The evolution of the world is the playing out of the struggle between these two equal and opposite forces.
·There are no things that continue. The phenomena of the world are remade with every tick of the cosmic clock.
·Everything is trying to happen at once, but most failing due to massive cancellation of influences
All of these and the myriad others that I have yet to imagine must be given their weight in coming to the most complete picture of the issue (Don't forget about the Melonquescence!).
The 7 Ages of Man
Up to now, our discussion has generally turned toward physics in the search for caused stasis, but some of the most obvious justifications for such a notion come from the life sciences. There are some glaring failures of the standard scientific models to provide insight into seemingly basic questions of biology. Many writers have observed, for instance, that every kind of organized living system from a person to a species to a civilization seems to have a natural life span, from birth to adolescence, maturity, senescence and death. GLOI implies that we should stay roughly as we are unless something makes us change, so we must ask why people, animals, cultures grow up, grow old and die in somewhat predictable ways. So far, science has not been able to do much with this question. Why is it, for example, that the number of heartbeats allotted to the typical life span of all mammalian species is roughly the same, from a chipmunk to an elephant? The law of entropy is often invoked to explain why things decay, but it is hard to see how that applies to people and other far from equilibrium systems.
Most people may vaguely picture aging as a simple process of parts wearing out as if we were made of gears and pistons. This metaphor doesn't hold up under scrutiny since our parts are constantly being replaced. For some reason our cells slowly lose their ability to make copies of themselves, but it is not because of wear and tear. And remarkably, whatever the age of the parents, a newborn gets a clean slate as far as its cells' abilities to make copies. There was some enthusiasm a few years back that biochemists had found the mechanism of this limitation on copies (research!). Is this built-in limit on copies a mere necessity of chemistry or has it been selected for. One feasible GLOI theory of aging says that we die to make room for the young. In order to keep a species adapted to its changing environment there must be new potentially mutated generations. And the old generations are competing for natural resources with the new. Thus the old generation must get out of the way. If the level of selection is the gene, as many argue, rather than the individual, it may be possible to show that it is in our genes' best interest to terminate the lives of their carriers (us) after some period of time, particularly if we assume declining fertility throughout post-pubescent life.
There is another argument for the cause of aging which we might call the associationist approach. Somehow the genes that produce aging and death also produce other characteristics that are of very great selective advantage or necessity.
Like most arguments based on natural selection, these have a certain appeal, but until researchers find a universal aging gene in all higher life forms (which unlike all other genes never mutates) we get no insight into the nature of aging, the way our cells progressively lose their ability to replicate themselves. Such arguments also fail to account for the strong analogy to non-genetic systems—species, societies, etc.—that also exhibit life cycles.
An antiGLOI approach, on the other hand, is more consistent with the idea that aging is natural; it is stasis that's caused to happen. If aging is a given, an inherent and inevitable consequence of existence, then our focus shifts to how we maintain our identities in the face the natural tendency to dissipate. The exact course of aging may provide clues to the nature and limitations of the holding forces involved. Since holding together seems to be related to the idea of control, one guess would be that as we age there is somehow more of us over which to maintain control as if having a past literally weighs us down and that ultimately the quality of control is reduced.
Ever since I learned as a teenager that one leading model of the expanding universe held that the cosmos is the 3-dimensional surface of an expanding 4-dimensional sphere, I have amused myself by imaging that each of us is a 4-dimensional creature in our own personal space-time. This is closely related to the Hollow Earth image I brought up in the introduction. In this cosmological model, the past states of the universe are in the interior of this 4D sphere. Thus in my extrapolation, our pasts are, in a sense, within us. To this way of thinking, therefore, the idea of a real past which is in touch with and affects the present is not so far-fetched. It could be that the reason researchers have failed to find the seat of memory in the brain is that memory actually consists in real if imperfect connections to the past. The argument goes something like:
fact of aging <=> loss of control over copying procedure <=> more to control <=> reality of the past <=> new theory of memory
Pretty wild, huh?
It is important once again to keep in mind here that I do not wish to replace a GLOI world with an antiGLOI one. My position is that we will gain a more complete understanding of the world by superimposing switched theories. No one side has the market cornered on truth. We can just add another formulation to list of denials of GLOI:
·Continuing is a product of control and control is a function of history.
Neither do I want to give the impression that GLOI is our only assumption whose reversal will yield interesting theories. Here is another assumption:
Events in the past cause the events in the present.
To put it figuratively, the past pushes us into the future. The reversal of this one is even harder to swallow than antiGLOI, but there are plenty of circumstances for which the idea that the future pulls us out of the past is the most obviously practical choice. In General Systems Theory, we see a concept called equifinality that refers to the way certain systems such as developing fetuses seem to be attracted to predetermined endstates no matter their specific histories. In theory, we get just about the same baby whether the mother preferred to eat pickles with her ice cream or not. As we have seen, attraction in general tends to erase histories and emphasize endstates. Since our physics is remarkably time symmetric, its laws will allow any of our traditional causal agents to be transformed into one operating out of the future, but there are clearly hurdles. This approach will probably be poor at describing entropy—the reason that a smashed plate will never unsmash—but it could be much more effective than the conventional view in providing simple explanations for physical healing as well as other phenomena of nature.
________________________________________________
Here are a buncha ideas that may eventually work themselves into this chapter
life consists in balance of "change"-"same" identity and influence. What happens when you superimpose GLOI and anti-GLOI perspectives.
Selfhood is a singularity (like the intensity of gravity at the center of an object. The infinite spring of stasis force is this singularity. It would be good to look at the equation Gmm/r2=F to define sing.
Forces from the inside looking out. Forces that emerge from identity, systemness, suchness. Forces are not things but explanatory principles. Hard not to reify them.
Consciousness is being from the inside looking out. Energy is not real in this model, its opposite is. Does conservation of mass and energy translate into a conservation principle of negenergy? Mass is negenergy? Persistent of position, inertia. Einstein's general theory (thought experiment showed that an elevator being accelerated through space was indistinguishable from resting in a gravitation field) showed that gravity (standard force) and inertia (negforce) were two aspects of a single process.
When one coerces, or applies force to, the self rather than against others, we call it discipline or ,more neutrally, control. When we think of the forces of not happening, perhaps the image of control will be instructive.]
Is there mathematics which shows a neutron to be a least energy state (( of what?)) ((what is so fundamental about least energy? Is there an explanation for the principle of least action. I know from QED that the subhead of principle of least action that says that a beam of light will follow a shortest path has a quantum explanation-- the equations miraculously give shortest paths as most probable)), that thinks of neutrons or stable atoms or molecules as having an inside. Is feedback, attraction involved? On a larger scale what are the causes of the stability of a solid or a crystal or a glass?)
Supposing an electron is a stability, it must be a stability of some process and thus the underlying process must, from the point of view of an antigloi theory, be more fundamental that the particle.
The aether (or at least the idea of space as a plenum) is not dead. Lorentz conceived of fields as "configurations" of the aether.
self mass or electromagetic mass-- clamping of space on an object. As a charged particle moves, some of its kinetic energy must transform from the motion of the particle to the surrounding electric field. Well isn't that what inertia is in some yet to be determined sense?
Massless particles are traveling at the speed of light. As they gain relativistic mass the tendency toward infinity comes into balance
Need to work on the action-of -the-self-on-the-self angle. self mass, self action, renormalization
Summary: If there is a cause for stasis it is constantly acting, it involves a reworking of the idea of doing and therefore of energy. It seems to place space, what we normally see as a kind of nothingness, in a positon of increased importance vis a vis objects. May be the act of a thing upon itself.
The standard becomes less effective and the antigloi version more effective as we look at softer and softer sciences-- psychology and anthropology
{Superconductivity cold frees movement negenergy performs an action of a kind.}
naturalness of stasis built into null hypothesis of statistical tests
More about maintenance as perpetual "work", how you cannot isolate a single event. If I resist the temptation to eat excessively on 100 consecutive days and then give in to temptation on the 101st, I gain weight anyway. You can't store manitenance. Many other phenomena are like this but something in me suggests a one time character to them. One can create or destroy in a moment but keeping is forever.
Earlier we got a look at what this antiflow when we saw how light sources could be conceived of as darkness attractors. By assuming the alternative stance that spontaneous change is natural while stasis must be caused and exchanging the relative priority of matter and space, we saw how emission was like attraction. Just as the emission of light can be thought of as an attraction of a sort,