Human Thinking And The Fabric Of Reality

I just wanted to add that I think we today, do posess a great deal of positive, actual knowledge regarding some of the deepest secrets of the universe. And I think that human thought and scientific physics are the final frontiers for us, as we have already crossed so many and have been so successful.

I'd like to post an article here that has influenced me in construing human thought as an actual physical part of reality. It regards the very nature of space and time, which is the nature of reality itself.


[CENTER]Quantum foam[/CENTER]



Is the fabric of the Universe a seething mass of black holes and wormholes? We may soon be able to venture into this maelstrom in search of the theory of everything, reports Michael Brooks

ON YOUR kitchen table are the following implements: a chainsaw, a wooden mallet and a pair of boxing gloves. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use one of these tools to split an atom.

It is, of course, a ridiculous assignment, but it would sound like child's play to researchers studying quantum gravity. They believe that the very fabric of space-time is a seething foam of wormholes and tiny black holes a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. But the experimental tools available to test this idea are absurdly clumsy: the best particle accelerators can barely examine scales a million billion times larger.

"Many people have said it's going to be impossible to test quantum gravity, so there's no use even thinking about it," says John Ellis, a theorist at CERN, the Geneva-based European centre for particle physics. But, he says, it's too important to ignore. Quantum gravity is needed to describe the first instants of creation, when quantum fluctuations ruled the Universe, and it could even lead us to a full understanding of how our Universe works-the elusive Theory of Everything that will tie all the forces of nature together. "This is the grand theoretical challenge the 20th century has left physics to solve in the 21st century," says Ellis. "Even if it looks hopeless you should nevertheless think about it."

Astonishingly, it doesn't look hopeless any more. Since the beginning of this year, physicists have proposed a handful of foam-probing experiments that could shed light on quantum gravity. Against all the odds, they can now embark on a journey down to the lowest level of reality, where quantum mechanics and gravity meet.

Quantum mechanics describes how particles interact with each other to generate all but one of the forces in nature. So most physicists believe it must work for gravity, too. But how? The best description of gravity we have is Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that what we feel as gravity is actually the effect of curved space-time. General relativity works beautifully for gravitational forces in the Universe, successfully predicting the existence of such outlandish objects as black holes.
But problems are looming, Ellis says. "We know there are inconsistencies in these theories. It's just a question of when the inconsistencies are going to show up in the data." The best solution would be to find the underlying theory from which relativity and quantum mechanics can be inferred.

There's no telling what insights such a theory would yield. Physicists struggling to marry Einstein with quantum mechanics have already made one startling discovery. In 1971, Russian physicist Yakov Zel'dovich guessed that black holes aren't truly black, but instead combine with quantum-mechanical fluctuations to emit photons and other particles. Stephen Hawking proved the idea three years later, and these emissions are now called Hawking radiation.

All fledgling theories of quantum gravity also make a more general and even weirder prediction: the structure of space and time is very different from the gentle curves predicted by general relativity. The American physicist John Wheeler realised in the 1950s that if you look at things on a scale of about 10-35 metres, quantum fluctuations become powerful enough to play tricks with the geometry of the Universe. Space and time break down into "fuzziness" or "foaminess". A spaceship that size could find itself negotiating virtual black holes, or getting sucked into one wormhole after another and tossed back and forth in time and space.

If you think this idea of a space-time foam sounds horribly vague, you're in good company. So do the researchers. "It's a very vague thing," says Chris Isham, a theoretician at Imperial College, London. "General relativity is about space-time, and quantum theory tends to involve quantum fluctuations in things. Therefore, if you talk about quantum gravity, there might be some sort of fluctuation in something to do with space-time. It's that sort of level of argument."

In the race to create a more substantial theory of quantum gravity, there are two main contenders. Abhay Ashtekar of Pennsylvania State University contends that space and time aren't fundamental properties of the Universe. Instead, they are supposed to emerge from a purely mathematical theory ("Beyond space and time", New Scientist, 17 May 1997, p 38). But impressive as the mathematical framework is, no one is sure how to pull physical realities, like space, time and gravity, from it.

Cat's cradle
The other idea is based on superstrings: minuscule loops or strings about 10-35 metres long, floating through space-time. Matter arises from specific kinds of vibration in these strings, just as notes are the result of certain vibrations of a violin string. There are a huge number of variants of the strings idea, but researchers believe that they are merely different versions of a single, all-encompassing structure called M-theory ("Into the eleventh dimension", New Scientist, Decay and transformation
Ellis has helped to develop yet another plan for unveiling quantum gravity, one first suggested in 1995. The delicate physics of neutral kaons, subatomic particles that exist for less than a millionth of a second, could be affected by quantum fluctuations in space-time. Kaons and their antiparticles (antikaons) decay and transform into each other, but they do it at very slightly different rates. Ellis believes that quantum gravity may affect-in a very small way-these decay and transformation rates. As with the gamma-ray bursts, predicting the effect precisely is still beyond the theorists, but it might be possible to isolate it in future particle accelerator experiments

While we wait for these experiments to mature, a new generation of interferometers could eliminate a few more theories. These interferometers are designed to search for another peculiar gravitational phenomenon: gravity waves. Although gravity waves have nothing to do with quantum gravity directly, they could still have a big impact on its theory-makers. When massive objects such as stars move very suddenly, general relativity says that they should send space-time ripples out across the Universe. Astrophysicists hope to see these gravity waves emitted by supernova explosions, or by black holes orbiting one another or even colliding.

The biggest new gravity-wave detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), is being built at Hanford in Washington State, and Livingston, Louisiana (two versions are needed to rule out the effects of seismic waves). As in the Caltech interferometer, laser light from a single source is split and sent down two perpendicular arms, and reflected by mirrors suspended at the end of each. But LIGO's arms are 4 kilometres long, and two more mirrors at the junction of the arms send the light back along the same path so the beams can bounce back and forth many times before recombining. A gravitational wave passing though this apparatus would change the lengths of the two arms by different amounts, and so change the interference pattern caused when the two light beams recombine.

When it is fully operational by 2002, LIGO will be the world's largest precision optical instrument. The device is so sensitive that, despite its massive scale, it should detect movements in the mirrors as small as 10-18 metres, or a thousandth of the diameter of a proton. VIRGO, a slightly smaller European interferometer, will have about the same sensitivity.

Amelino-Camelia says LIGO's noise levels will set new limits on quantum gravity. Mark Coles, head of the LIGO Livingston observatory, is unsure. "We don't have any operational experience as yet, so all the predictions of noise performance are simply extrapolations from the Caltech interferometer."
But even if that is true, there is a grander scheme to look forward to. LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna project, will consist of six spacecraft arranged in pairs at the corners of an equilateral triangle orbiting the Sun-an interferometer stretching over millions of kilometres. LISA is due for completion in 2015.

In the meantime, atom interferometry could provide yet another avenue for quantum gravity research. Ian Percival, a theoretical physicist at London University's Queen Mary and Westfield College, believes that atom interferometers, which replace laser light with a beam of atoms, should be able to detect fluctuations in the time element of the foam.

It's not just space that is beaten to a froth: time is also stretched and squashed, fluctuating by around 10 -44 seconds as the bubbles appear and disappear. Small, but possibly detectable, Percival says. According to quantum mechanics, atoms have a wave-like nature, so a single atom can be split into two separate waves and sent along two different paths. When the two atomic waves recombine, any difference in their "internal clocks" due to the effects of quantum gravity should destroy the atomic wave interference pattern.
Steven Chu of Stanford University and Mark Kasevich of Yale University have managed to separate atomic wave packets by 1 centimetre before recombining them. They saw an interference pattern. According to Percival, that could be interpreted in two ways. Either space-time fluctuations don't exist-in which case quantum gravity theories are in real trouble-or both paths experienced the same fluctuations. He favours the latter: the fluctuations could be "correlated" over these distances, he says. They might even spread from one place to another. As yet, however, no one really knows.
Few people believe that a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity is just around the corner. "It may be that the actual theory is so different from anything we know about that we are hundreds of years away from it," Ellis says. But now experiments are now becoming possible, things are looking up. Eventually we should narrow in on one true description of the fabric of the Universe. The apple, one might say, has fallen from the tree.

Further reading:
* Further reading:Gravity-wave interferometers as quantum-gravity detectors by Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, Nature, vol 398, p 216 (1999)
* The Elegant Universe: Superstrings Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene, Jonathan Cape (1999)
Author: Michael Brooks Lewes, East Sussex
From New Scientist magazine, vol 28 issue 2191, 19/06/1999, page 28

It is not suprising to me that our "private minds" form thoughts in the same maner that we speak; for it is the thoughts that are the progenitors of language. How would we think in one way and speak in another?



Time itself is a conceptual construct to reprisent progression. Progression, or succession, is vital to human thought because it is how things work in our experiance. Who has seen a giant oak tree shrink and shrink until it becomes a nut?



Again, the concept of time is a natural and neccissary tool in cognition, so what.



Is space or time a measurable physical reality? OK, you sub divide a measure of time and keep subdividing the remainder and tell me when you get to the end of time. Likewise, measure space and find the end of it if you can. I'm not suggesting that space or progresion are not real, only that they are arbitrarily quantified by humans for our pragmatic convinience only.



I'm not sure I follow your reasoning here. Yes we use space and time in cognition, and space and time are consepts of physical reality, so then thoughts must be made of physical reality? Anyway, I agree that thoughts are indeed made of physical reality. A physical brain cannot produce something that is not physical can it? whatever the mechancs of thought are, (electro/chemical interaction on nural transmiters and reseptors?) it is indeed physical.



I am unable to access the link.

I think there is an initiative on the part of the mind. Language does not come first as an absolute artifact that we are bound to but thought is the maker of language and this is how languages grow and change. The two, human thought and human language are not identical. We can continually revise our language and construct concepts. An idea is not the same as a thought, thought not the same as language.






We can easily imagine an oak to shrink or we can even rewind the universe to construct what are probably the first instant of creation after the big bang. Time is not a creation of man's imagination but something that cirumscribes our lives and the experiments that scientists make as well as the computers that we use and the thoughts that we think. Time or space-time can easily be measured just as the growing of an oak tree can be measured. These are attributes of matter as we know it and use it in our highly technical world.





I am not arguing with anyone right now so I don't know "so what". But again I think that time is not a subjective "tool" but an attribute of matter.





I think the end of time and the end of space are the quantized world at the subatomic level of matter. Once we get to the subatomic level space-time can't be measured in the way normal everday objects and events can be measured.





I agree. Thought is ontological and I say that its measurement in nature is similar to the way it is experienced by the individual. I mean to suggest that thought has the power to influence phenomenal reality. That's my hypothesis, for what it's worth.[/quote]





I will PM you the address. This is a three part science series produced by the BBC. Each part is 60 minutes. It is available for free on the web via Google video. It is one of the best I have seen lately.

Hi Pyth,

I think that what this article is all about is just what Immanuel kant was pointing out to us. Empiricism dictates that we gain knowledge (thought-objects) by observation. The observations are then compared to what we already know and thus what we understand of what we have observed is made into new thought-objects (a link towards an explanation of how this process takes place).

If what empiricism dictates is true, then a necessary consequence is that something needs to be present a priori to help us understand our first observations, as rationalism explains. These a priori intuitions (Space and Time according to Immanuel Kant) are needed for us to percieve anything at all and might very well exist only in our minds. Immanuel Kant writes about causality in the sense that it may only exist in our minds and not in reality. He is an idealist however and thinks that space and time also exist in reality.

I think the core of your post/question is how this works; how our mind understands reality. It just so happens that I wrote a grounding of Kantian ethics into Kantian metaphysics. In this I explain what judgements are and what their nature is. The example used are ethical judgements, but everything we percieve are judgments, just like our ideas on what exists in reality. The topic can be found here. Perhaps it is of use to you.

... and possibly physical forces, as well ... to look at things from an evolutionary perspective for a moment: life itself does not define the shapes of the proteins that enable terrestrial life, but rather terrestrial life evolved to take advantage of the chemistry of proteins that was already there; mammalian brains do not possess the computing power to control in absolute terms the acts of walking and running, but rather mammalian walking and running evolved to take advantage of the dynamics of the body and the forces of physics to significantly reduce the need for absolute control; DNA does not contain nearly enough information to compute the human form, but rather DNA evolved to take advantage of the exponential amount of information within a gene regulation network as well as its interaction with the environment and historical contingency in order to compute the human form ... should human thought be any different? ... that is, how much of the physics, the chemistry, the dynamics, the networks, the environments, the historical contingencies of the world has human thought evolved to take advantage of?

Thank you, Arjen for your constructive reply. You've understood me well. I would like to try to further explain my ideas. I am essentially a philosophical idealist.

I have become convinced that at the very most basic heart of nature, reality, or the cosmos that there does not exist any absolute points or location. Nor does there exist any thing that could be measured that posesses duration in time. The fabric of reality is essentially timeless and spaceless, it posesses the quirky characteristic of throwing time and space in dissarray. And that is because at this level there is nothing physical. But there is this 'noise' that is there and it is 'real' in some sense. And it is upon this counter-intuitive substratum of the universe that our everyday world is based.

The human mind can be very subtle. Subtle enough, I think, to detect this basic structure.

I think we must ultimately do away with the traditional notion of an empirical world. For example, let us say that reality, our everyday world, contained no specific points or no specific time to measure and we measure all things according only to the meanings that they appear to us to have. There is therefore no God-appointed times or locations only a relativistic set of psychic meanings.

We can do away with empirical reality by conceiving all things as events in a causal chain instead of traditional 'points' and 'locations'. We do this by intellectually idealizing the real world of nature we take for granted.

Let's take the Pyramids of Egypt for instance. We must learn to see these not as empirical objects but as natural "events." Because they are made up of atoms and because these atoms originate from outside, it should be easy to imagine the Pyramids of Egypt within a causal chain from cosmic particles to stone over millenia. And from stone to the minds of the Egyptian architects etc. right on through to our conceptions of them today and projecting further into their eventual decay back into the dust. There is no time frame or spatial location necessary here, only a framework for the meanings of things which is their real nature. We must learn to see the entire world, especially ourselves in this manner.

The important thing is this causal chain wherein the real meaning of things lie. Where we can construct a framework and place them into our familiar world and vice versa. I believe when we deconstruct our world into causal chains of idealistic form, then we may begin to understand this counter-intuitive truth that lies as the heart of nature itself. Non-locality, such as is displayed by subatomic particles, follows this idealistic conception of the universe and is actually amenable to the human mind.

But we should use thinking to go even further and not merely deconstruct the empirical world into causal chains, because what is more revealing is to deconstruct our very thinking into chains of psychic moments of meaning that are without time or place. I believe that once we derive a thought then that thought has the capacity (depending upon its meaning, its import, or its 'weight') to reach a physical impression at the basic level of the universe, an impression of the meaning of our thought that never really fades away in time, and once we move from one psychic impression to another and then back again, our minds take the form of a causal chain, an idealistic form, a kind of virtual form, containing within it the unity of thinking with being; the expressions of thinking as material being. This because nothing really moves in the world but sub-atomic passages of being from one meaning to the next, retaining its prior form. We, therefore, take on 'meaning' much in the way that a mathematical equation takes on symmetries.

Within this idealistic unity the mind spreads us out across time and space, retaining all of its prior forms and our thought may thus appear as non-local phenomena. We appear more like spirits in a material world. From here the mind may influence events in the phenomenal world at large thereby proving the effectiveness of thought as a physical force.

It is the physical impression that events make, a sort of eternal impression of absolute stillness in this sub-universe that allows us to construe the Pyramids of Egypt, and all of nature whose causality we can know, as a process and that allows us to psychically become an ideal outside of time and space. We can reach this ideal by construing our thinking within this type of process as an ungrounded chain of causality, as a form of meaning. This for me, is where universal truth lies.

This is part of my theory of philosophical idealism, roughly. It requires first hand human experience and experimentation and does not rely soely upon written theories or scientific fact.

Those are some excellent points you make. You demonstrate great knowledge.

Your post has also reminded me of something: I believe it was Aristotle who suggested that matter itself posesses modes of intelligence; that anything that deserves that title of 'existence' must be tied to some type of meaningful form; matter itself is obliged to participate in an intelligible reality. It is the universe conceived as 'organism', and this is an ancient belief.

--

Hi Pyth,

I think I have caught you making an error in reasoning. I have had the same line of thinking and so has Kant, but if it is based on what I think it is based on it refutes itself. Here goes:

I think you are basing your case on the ontological levels known as actuality and potentiality and that you are saying that causal chains only exist in actuality. From that you take the next step (which Kant also takes) in saying that maybe actuality only exists only in our minds, or is less 'real' than potentiality. As mentioned Kant takes that step as well. He suggests that causality only exists in our minds and that this is merely the way we understand reality. That which exists is of another nature (supposedly). That in which everything exists is that potentiality and time and space do not exist there, so causality cannot either.

Is that indeed what you mean?

The concepts of actuality and potentiality are pertinent. It makes no sense to say that a particular chain of causality that we are experiencing springs from, or has its source in, a type of cosmic 'fabric' that in itself contains no determinate space-time coordinates, even though it does indeed formally arise at some point (or in some way) from this fabric. The finite determinations of these causal chains that we experience are ultimately, physically ungrounded and independent of space or time, but they are also psychic and metaphysical in the Aristotelian sense of metaphysics. Artistotle's metaphysics being, of course, his treatise on theology.

Thought obtains ontological status from an empirical perspective, it has the capacity to influence the physical world from a distance with the charges of its immanent meanings. But once the idealist method is applied to the psyche, by the psyche, then it reaches its own metaphysical satisfaction.

The difference between Aristotelian senses of actuality and the sense that I hold are important and you are so right in raising these questions. My basic notions of philosophical idealism are derived from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy as outlined in his magnum opus, Process and Reality: An Essay In Cosmology.

Unfortunately the language that he used in that book is replete with neologisms, some opaque and complex and some quite readily understandable. But I would request of you that you skim a paper that was written to contrast Whitehead's and Aristotle's differences regarding the concept of actuality. From this paper hopefully one could get a better understanding generally of Whitehead's philosophy and my appropriation of the parts of it that have fitted my experience.

Here is the link to the essay: Aristotelian and Whiteheadian Conceptions of Actuality

Generally speaking we fulfill our own ideal by participating in an idea. We have direct experiential access to a metaphysical status, which cannot be altogether deprived of its theological tincture.

--

... not really - there's a huge void there when it comes to understanding how all those elements come together and inter-relate! :perplexed:



... it always amazes me the extent to which selected elements of Aristotle's thought obtain new relevance in light of ongoing scientific discovery ...

I am wondering Pyth, is it this Whitehead The article is referring to?

Yes, Arjen. That's the one. You might want to check out this Wiki on Process Philosophy or the Ontology of Becoming.

I thought so. I have a couple of this to say:

1) Reto Luzius Fetz has, for some reason, not described the process with which thoughts (judgements) are 'gained'. That is strange to me because it is just that what so strikingly shows the connection between our thoughts and what takes place in reality.

2) I pointed you to the work of Gottlob Frege concerning thought-objects earlier in this topic. I think Frege describes it very nicely.

3) Bertrand Russel studied Frege's works to come to a critique of them and becoming world famous over it. Apparently Whitehead helped Russel in his work. I have not read Whitehead, but it seems to me that he may have got an idea from Frege's work.

A few more indirect referrals.


4) Reto Luzius Fetz has, for some reason, not described the difference between the thought-objects and what exists. That is strange to me because it is just that what so strikingly shows the difference between our thoughts and what takes place in reality; as well as in what process they relate.

5) I pointed you to the work of Immanuel Kant concerning the process of deriving judgements earlier in this topic. I think Kant describes it very nicely.

6) Kant gained his ideas through Hume, Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes. Descartes reached even further back, but to me what is important is that Whitehead was definately not the first to have thoughts like this. A number of works I saw in his bibliography point to this:


7) These two thoughts lead to an understanding of the way we derive our idea of the univers, our thought-object of reality; the image of which we project onto that which exists. The article you linked to makes no mention of this though. It makes mention of 'reality-poles', which can also be called that which is a priori and concludes that it is a material thing in which this a priori part houses. This a priori 'pole' is in fact a causal chain. The error in reasoning I pointed you towards earlier in this topic is the fact that if indeed this a priori part exists it necessarily is potentiality and therefore no seperation can exist of it or in it. Because no seperation can exist of it or in it, it cannot be causal. There the theory refutes itself, as opposed to Frege's and Kant's Theories.

8) If somebody had thought of all these things himself that difference would have been clear. Therefore I would like to ask if you know Whitehead's work yourself because it seems as if he merely took things as being true without having a clear understanding of them himself. On the other hand that may just be the shortcoming of Reto Luzius Fetz.

What are your thoughts on the matter Pyth?

Arjen, sorry for my delayed response. I really do appreciate your input on this and these are issues that are important to me, to be sure.

It may be helpful to point out that Whitehead's metaphysics is explicitly speculative. It is an open system. Whitehead owes his speculative outlook to Plato and like Plato in the Timaeus says that at best it is 'a likely story'. In this regard Whitehead is different from Kant.

The important thing for me is to actually achieve the 'moments' in nature. I take it in the sense of a 'vitalism'. A philosophy of 'life', if you will. The concept of 'being' in the Aristotelian sense of being qua being is to be met with on the wing. On the move is where we encounter those occassions of experience so primary to Whitehead's cosmology. In this sense he is akin to Hegel, as has been said by some.

I think Whitehead was hoping that his critics -those that oppose his philosophy most strongly- would be the starting point of a new school dedicated to metaphysical speculation. I think he succeeded to an extent. I am currently gathering up some information and making some notes and eventually I will be capable of producing an introductory essay on Whitehead that I would post somewhere here in the forums.

Thanks as always, Arjen, for your constructive suggestions.

--