[Martin Taylor 2018.07.20.16.35]
A message with no subject and no content, but an attachment that
might be provocative to some physicists, and might possibly be
relevant to the on-again off-again thread on the relation between
perception and real reality.
FWIW, here’s my take on the topic (you probably have to have read
the attachment to understand what I say). Firstly, Emily Adlam
treats “particles” as being potentially fundamental, but this can
hardly be correct. What matters to the Universe is how these
entities (if such they be) influence each other. The particle
considered as an anonymous grain of sand of a size that decreases
over time as more and more experiments are performed is nothing by
itself. Maybe it’s just a resonance in some wave-like feedback loop,
in the manner of the resonances that define electron orbitals in an
atom. But it has some influence on other possible resonances in a
structure of interactions that create hierarchies of emergent
properties.
From the other end of the telescope, I side with Bill Powers, who
asserted that the only fundamental truth is our perception of the
moment. All the “fundamental particles” mentioned at the start of
Adlam’s article are extremely distant derivations from natural
perceptions. We ask why tree leaves are green, and come up with
ideas about light propagation and spectra and reflection and
absorption, all relationships. Is a “particle” of light a particle
or a wave? Probably “yes” is the only answer, but which form you see
depends on how you look, not upon the light. The light just IS.
In our theories of PCT we require “emergent properties”. A control
loop is not determined by its constituent parts, but when the right
kinds of parts are connected in the right kind of way, theories
developed in physics tell us that a new property of “control”
emerges from the structure, and not from any of its components. When
a particular set of three quarks interact in a certain way, a new
“particle” emerges, perhaps a proton or a neutron. But what is this
“particle” but a way that the particular structure of quarks
interacts with other structures of quarks? It’s an emergent, not a
property of the quarks. Likewise, if the emergent “particle” happens to be a proton, and it
happens to encounter an electron in the right way, a new emergent
happens, a fundamental particle we call a hydrogen atom. Hydrogen
atoms interact with other “particles” (atoms, mostly) in ways quite
unlike the ways a proton or an electron interact with those same
other “particles”. And so we go. At the macroscopic level, a
tensegrity structure has emergent properties that are not at all
obvious from examination of the separate struts and cables of which
it is composed. The tensegrity property is an emergent, just as is
the control property. My take is that each such emergent is as
fundamental as is any other. What we do by delving deeper into
smaller interacting units at ever higher energies is encounter new
fundamental emergents built on the even smaller things we have just
“discovered/imagined”.
At one point in Adlam’s article she says that it is a puzzle why the
Universe should have started in an extremely unlikely low entropy
state. But did it? One must consider the possibilities. What has
changed since the currently believed Big Bang start to the Universe
is the size of the Universe visible from any standpoint. Ten minutes
after the Big Bang, had anyone been there to look, they could have
seen no further than ten light-minutes in each direction. There just
isn’t much space for probability variation as there was even ten
minutes later. At the beginning, the Universe may have been in a
maximum entropy state. Ten minutes later, the eightfold increase in
volume accessible to mutual influence implies not an eightfold
increase in the maximum entropy, which is defined by the possible
physical arrangements of whatever “particles” might then have
existed, but a factorially (greater than exponentially) greater
opportunity for varying patterns of influence. On the other hand the
actual number of extant patterns may not have changed very much at
all, or if it did, it probably changed polynomially, not even
exponentially. In other words, the relative entropy was very high
initially, perhaps maximal with very few degrees of freedom, and has
been reducing ever since, though presumably the absolute entropy has
been increasing over time. And it is relative rather than maximum
entropy that matters, because that determines how likely it is that
the entropy of a closed system will increase over time.
On page 5, Adlam says: “.”
But neither of these is really true, is it? The present doesn’t
explain the future, and the properties of parts do not explain the
emergent properties of the whole. The present has exactly as close a
connection to the past as it does to the future, and the emergent
properties of a functional structure cannot be deduced by listing
the parts without placing their mutual influences within a
structure. Consider the simple concept of “bounciness”. For
something to be bouncy, it must have a suitable combination of
weight, volume, and elasticity, and be in a position to interact
with a surface that has compensating properties. A lump of lead can
be bouncy on a stretched membrane, but a rubber ball cannot be
bouncy on a marshy soil. Bounciness is an emergent property of the entire interacting complex.
What is simple and fundamental is what we perceive directly, such as
bounciness. But what we perceive is not necessarily what other
organisms perceive. We have nothing like the lateral line organ of a
fish, and we cannot see the colours that a bee can see in a flower.
Why should we even imagine that we can build from our fundamental
perceptions up to an understanding of a Universe that includes
ourselves? No structure can include a replica of itself, so our
understanding must always be incomplete.
But we can imagine something else, that the experiences of our
ancestors in influencing and being influenced by the environments in
which they lived, and our own similar experiences in our own
environments have resulted in our personal existence at this moment,
so what we perceive of our environment and the way we act upon it
must have some relationship with the way that environment truly is.
And from that we build our understandings of expanding networks of
influences, interactions, and “particle”-producing feedback
processes so well that we can use our mathematics to anticipate that
a certain flash in the sky will be accompanied by readings of
scintillations in huge containers of liquid deep underground – we
say that there was a supernova in the Magellanic Cloud we saw as a
flash that “should” produce “particles” called neutrinos that will
cause the scintillations. A long, long way from our fundamental
perceptions, indeed. But as Adlam says: “”. My take on
this is that they may exist only because we ask those questions, and
the “deeper” we probe, the less fundamental are the answers. What
may be fundamental are the emergent properties that build on
“deeper” emergent properties, and that we perceive as elements of
reality. The structures of mutual influence are what we perceive as
solid objects or as abstractions, as quarks or as sociopolitical
concepts. Those may be real. The objects in the form of “particles”
or “waves” may not be anything more than more or less ephemeral
nodes of stable interactions that I called “resonances” above.
···
On 2018/07/20 3:36 PM, PHILIP JERAIR
YERANOSIAN ( via csgnet Mailing List) wrote:
pyeranos@ucla.edu
-
Consider the following apparent truisms.
The present explains the future, and not vice versa; properties of
parts explain the properties of the whole, and not vice versa**perceptible*
-
So maybe it really is the case that there is
no endpoint to this process of questioning nature: as we build
bigger and bigger particle accelerators to probe ever more deeply,
the universe will be forced to invent deeper and deeper levels of
reality that exist only to answer our questions*
As somebody on some ancient radio show once said: "Them's my
thunks."
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Martin