Opinions on the fundamental nature of reality.

[Doctordick]

Since the validity of my "Fundamental Equation" doesn't seem to interest the people who could varify it, I thought I might comment on the implications. If the equation is false, then of course none of the implications are meaningful; however, suppose it is true just for the fun of it. The first thing is that, as Qfwfq has commented on many occasions, being an abstract logical construct, it has absolutely nothing to do with reality. On the other hand, it has everything to do with how reality could be interpreted. It is nothing more or less than a possible way to interpret information such that the interpretation is always guaranteed to be perfectly consistent with the information. And that is not an easy thing to do when the volume of the information to be dealt with becomes excessively large.

The equation does nothing more or less than provide constraints on predicting expectation consistent with what is known. You have all taken these tests where you have been given a list of numbers and asked what the next number is. The object is to find a pattern and deduce the next number. The goal of understanding anything is finding patterns which you can use to predict what will come next. Anyone familiar with mathematics knows full well that there exists an infinite number of ways to mathematically fit any finite set of known numbers. One common procedure used to fit a set of points is a power series. Now a power series can be made to fit any data but the problem is that it is quite often a poor predictor for new data. The fault with a power series fit is that the predictions are highly unstable and only give correct answers when the data actually are explicitly represented by a power series. There are probably an infinite number of other ways to fit a collection of data all of which become unstable when the data doesn't actually follow method. That is why experimental data fits are usually done by what is called "least square" methods.

My equation is actually little more than another way of fitting a set of points. Dealing as it does with probability of a number and not with the actual number, it has a number of freedoms not found in methods which requiring an exact fit. One of the effects is that the expectations predicted by the equation are "uncertain". That hits on two fronts; first the predictions are not uniquely fixed and second it doesn't assume the data on which the predictions are made are exactly known. Those are certainly valid aspects of reality.

Now let's look at the simplicity of the equation. As Qfwfq has commented, it bears a striking resemblance to Quantum Mechanics equations (one of the single most dependable theories by the way). I think that those who know a little about Quantum will support the fact that the equation is exactly what one would expect of a universe which consisted of nothing except massless infinitesimal spinners. That's a pretty simple universe! Well, simple except for the far reaching consequences of the extreme numbers involved and the great number of possibilities in the Feynman sums of virtual exchange phenomena. There's a whole lot of room there. What is actually astounding is the fact that I can show that most all of modern physics comes directly out of that equation; all the way from Classical Mechanics to General Relativity. It unites modern physics in much the same way Maxwell's equations united E & M a hundred and forty years ago.

Actually it is roughly analogous to Newton's simplification of astronomical orbits. It just happens to be my great misfortune to be born during the existence of a powerful well indoctrinated academy wholly convinced the need for their extremely complex collection of theories is absolute and incontrovertible. They react to me about how I think the great followers of Ptolomy with their celestial spheres mechanically driven by complex cycles and epicycles would have reacted to the idea that the moon was just plain falling? They would find the idea just too simple minded to consider. How about a little help shaking their cages?

Have fun -- Dick

"The simplest and most necessary truths are the very last to be believed."
by Anonymous

[hallenrm]

Well! itried to go through your paper on the net, and I must confess it was not easy, although I have significant training in maths (I had taken a PG course in topology while I was a chem. graduate student). But, what so ever I could comprehend is as follows: ( I hope you will indulge with me, go through it and let me know if that is what you mean)

"You trying to find some logical framework for the scientific explanations offered in response to various questions that arise during scientific discourse. According to you, whenever a question is raised, a part of the knowledge framework is already present. The question arises because the curious is not able to connect the various knowledge elements present in the questions and is either unaware of several other knowledge elements that are relevant. Therefore a scientific explanation should clearly point to these elements or to some new elements that are required."

This is my comprehension, it may be your idea or not I am not very sure. I often indulge with teenagers, trying to satiate their natural curiosities about science. The statergy I normally adopt, is to cunter question the curious about the various elements in his question. In the process I try to help him/her to find remember connections between them. Often I have to tell them about some concepts and phenomena they may be unaware of.

I am often successful.

Perhaps my practice is the reason, I comprehended your theory in the way I did.

[Doctordick]

Originally Posted by hallenrm

( I hope you will indulge with me, go through it and let me know if that is what you mean)

I will try!
The first step is to define an explanation. Unless you define what you mean by "an explanation" how can you expect others to know what you mean by the expression?

You don't seem to buy my definition, "an explanation" is "a method of obtaining expectations" from "given known information".

An example of "an explanation" given to my wife Sunday morning: given known information (probably category C),"I came home drunk Saturday night." Method of obtaining expectations has two parts, additional information (maybe C, maybe D) "I'm a good guy" and (probably category D), "two guys held me down and poured whiskey down my throat" and the rule (already understood by my wife) "too much whiskey makes one drunk". Maybe not a good explanation but it is an explanation and if she had understood it when I came home her expectations would have been exactly what happened. An explanation is a method of obtaining expectations. A story leading to specific results! It's my story and I'm sticking to it!

I have done the best I can to make my definition clear. Would you do me the favor of telling me what you mean by "an explanation"?

Have fun -- Dick

[hallenrm]

Thanks DoctorDic!

I see no difference between your POV and mine.Let me now put forward my story.

A child asks me, Why is there a rainbow in the sky? Now, if he is familiar with the various phenomena around light, I can try to give the standard explanation about the formation of light, but in case she does not, she will not buy my explanation, till I am able to demonstrate it (additional information (maybe C, maybe D)). If she has an open mind she will be perhaps convinced, otherwise she may prefer the conventional explanation that rainbows are the acts of gods.

[Doctordick]

Originally Posted by hallenrm

I see no difference between your POV and mine.

Does that mean that you accept my definition of "an explanation"? That it is a method of obtaining one's expectations from known information?

Originally Posted by hallenrm

Let me now put forward my story.

I don't understand why you gave your story. Are they supposed to be examples of "explanations" which don't fit my definition or "explanations" which do fit my defintion.

From my perspective, both are explanations. I don't know that I would think of them as being of the same quality; but that is a totally different issue. You seem to regard the "standard explanation" as better but I won't hold you to that opinion. "Rainbows are the acts of gods", is none the less an explanation. Of course, in both cases, you omit to bring forth a lot of information bearing on the question. If one accepts the explanation, "Rainbows are the acts of gods", that acceptance usually includes a lot more information than you give here. As I said the explanation is a method of obtaining your expectations. In this case one's expectations are identical to what they expect the gods to do and, if I am to understand their explanation, it requires I understand what they think the gods want to do. They could think the gods are capricious or maybe the gods like to paint the sky after a rain. Whatever their thoughts are, the explanation is a method of generating their expectations.

Originally Posted by hallenrm

There is nothing absolute, nothing the ultimate truth, nothing eternal, everything is transitory. There is more then enough scope for you and me to explore, to find the next level of truth, it only depends on our will to do so.

Ah but what is really in your past is eternal and unchanging; all you can do is add to it or forget parts of it; you cannot actually change anything that is already there.

Have fun -- Dick

"The simplest and most necessary truths are the very last to be believed."
by Anonymous

[Erasmus00]

I don't have a ton of time right now to go write a very detailed response, but I did read through your paper.

It seems to me like you recover quantum mechanics only because you WANT to recover quantum mechanics. If you had chosen to represent your explanation in a different way, it seems you could have easily recovered classical mechanics.

Once you have decided that any explanation can be represented by a wave function analog (your psi function), you recover "conservation of momentum" by exploiting the same translation symmetry expected of a free particle in quantum mechanics.

Now I ask, what if our set of information A cannot be mapped continously, but must be mapped discretely to the number line? How then can we use a wave function psi to represent our "explanation?"

Sorry if this isn't making much sense, I'll go into more detail sometime next week when I have a bit of time. Forgive the haste.
-Will

[Doctordick]

Originally Posted by Erasmus00

I don't have a ton of time right now to go write a very detailed response, but I did read through your paper.

Thank you and a detailed response is not necessary. Either you understood what I was saying or you misinterpreted something. If you understood it all no response is really necessary and if you misinterpreted something, you might as well stop with the first difficulty.

Originally Posted by Erasmus00

It seems to me like you recover quantum mechanics only because you WANT to recover quantum mechanics.

Let us say that I understand the fundamental reasons quantum mechanics works. And you are right, the vanishing of that derivative is closely related to conservation of momentum. In quantum mechanics the relationship arises because of translation symmetry which is exactly the consequences of the fact that no particular point has preference over any other. In my presentation, where I convert element references to numerical notation, exactly the same symmetry exists as no particular number has preference over any other.

In any language, no particular symbol has any inherent preference over any other but the fact is only usefully handled in a numeric representation. So that fact, thought of as "conservation of momentum" is embedded in any explanation of anything. It is a fundamental truth.

Originally Posted by Erasmus00

If you had chosen to represent your explanation in a different way, it seems you could have easily recovered classical mechanics.

My only real answer to that is, show me. I personally am convinced it is not true (except as an approximation to truth).

Originally Posted by Erasmus00

Once you have decided that any explanation can be represented by a wave function analog (your psi function)

I don't think the word "decided" is accurate there. I might say, once I defined expressing expectations by probability ... . It seems to me that once one decides that any expectation can be expressed via probabilities, the representation of probabilities by a vector inner product is pretty general. I don't think you can come up with a probability function which cannot be so represented.

Originally Posted by Erasmus00

Now I ask, what if our set of information A cannot be mapped continuously, but must be mapped discretely to the number line? How then can we use a wave function psi to represent our "explanation?"

Now you ask a very serious question; one which requires you to really understand the fundamental underlying nature of an explanation. The number of elements in A may be finite but you can not prove that. The fact that, no matter how much you know of A, you must allow for the possibility of an element of A you have never encountered, requires you to consider A to be an infinite set (that is the very definition of infinity). It follows that a valid explanation must yield a result for an infinite number of possible B(t_k)'s. Remember, the actual information you have to work with is C, a finite collection of B(t_k)'s.

The equation does nothing more or less than provide constraints on predicting expectation consistent with what is known. I am sure you have taken one of these tests where you have been given a list of numbers and asked what the next number is. The object is to find a pattern and deduce the next number. The goal of understanding anything is finding patterns which you can use to predict what will come next. Any computer scientist knows any information can be reduced to a collection of numbers. And anyone familiar with mathematics knows full well that there exists an infinite number of ways to mathematically fit any finite set of known numbers. So given this tremendous quantity of pure numbers, just how should one go about deciding what number should be next? Clearly for any symbol, language or number, the absolutely best one can really do is to make an estimated of the probability for a given symbol based on the collection of symbols you have already seen. What we are looking for is a rational way of predicting expectations consistent with what is known, and our method must be reasonable with unbelievably large amounts of information. Think about the common approaches to such a problem.

One common procedure used to fit a set of points to a power series. Now a power series can be made to fit any finite volume data but the problem is that it is quite often a poor predictor for new data (a poor model of the situation). The fault with a power series fit is that the predictions are highly unstable and only give correct answers when the data actually are explicitly represented by a power series. There are probably an infinite number of other ways to fit a collection of data; all of which become unstable when the data doesn't actually follow that method. That is why experimental data fits are usually done by what is called "least square" methods.

My equation is actually little more than another way of fitting a set of points. Dealing as it does with probability of a number and not with the actual number, it has a few freedoms not found in methods which require an exact fit. One of the effects is that the expectations predicted by the equation are "uncertain". That hits on two fronts; first the predictions are not uniquely fixed and second it doesn't assume the data on which the predictions are made are exactly known. Those are certainly valid aspects of reality.

And finally, if you are asking me if an explanation which presumes A consists of a finite set of discrete elements (thus a discrete set of number references) can be represented by my equation, the answer is yes. Psi becomes what is often called a salt and pepper function (it's not continuous) and the number of elements in D become infinite. And, lastly, the vacuum of the real space representation (that is the absence of real elements) becomes essentially infinitely hard: i.e., it is totally filled with virtual element pairs of all possible energy and the exchange forces become so high that nothing can move (the whole collection becomes one infinitely hard object). A somewhat unrealistic circumstance.

Originally Posted by Erasmus00

Sorry if this isn't making much sense, I'll go into more detail sometime next week when I have a bit of time. Forgive the haste.

I like haste. What I hate is no response at all. A simple complaint about a single factor is a wonderful response. And your complaints made a lot of sense.

Have fun -- Dick

"The simplest and most necessary truths are the very last to be believed."
by Anonymous]

[hallenrm]

Originally Posted by Doctordick

.........................
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Ah but what is really in your past is eternal and unchanging; all you can do is add to it or forget parts of it; you cannot actually change anything that is already there.


"The simplest and most necessary truths are the very last to be believed."
by Anonymous

Ah!!! but my total past is not eternal, it is changing every moment. Nor am I eternal, so how can be my present past?

[Qfwfq]

Originally Posted by Doctordick

My equation is actually little more than another way of fitting a set of points.

Perhaps we are gradually getting somewhere, but I still don't see why you keep comparing your method to ones which "require an exact fit".

The least squares method is the case of a more general method, when the distribution for each measurement value is known to be gaussian. More in general one can maximize the product of probability densities, since the measurement results are independent events. How does your psi compare with this? Is it even more general? In what way?

I was also wondering if your talk about symmetry and conservation intends to be an improvement on, or a replacement of, Nöther's theorem, or what. I don't see a need for this. Or were you just saying that Emmy's all-fundamental theorem holds in your formalism?

[fivish]

If you write in such a way that nobody can understand you, whats the point?
Writing hundreds or thousands of words that have no clear meaning wastes everybodys time. I have read many documents and books on all sorts of scientific theories, but they are all flawed by being overly long. No theory should need more than a pamphlet let alone a book.

Reality is very simple.....

Stuff exists.
'I' experience the stuff thorugh my senses.
'I' interact with the stuff with my physical being.

We will never know what 'stuff' is or why its here.
We will never know why 'I' am me and not another 'I'.

Reality is just stuff. Real stuff.


Now go get a life.....................