Month: October 2020

“I think, and I am; therefore, I think I am.”

Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Personally, I prefer “I am, and I think; therefore, I think I am.” To say “I,” as in “I think,” already implies “I am.” This beingness already exists before you think, and it’s already felt and used ­before “think” follows when writing “I think.” Therefore “I am, therefore, I think” might have been more accurate, except that I don’t think you have to think to be.

Yes though, I am aware that “I think, therefore I am” is meant to be a deductive relation rather than a causal one. But either it is logically possible to think and not be, in which case “I am” doesn’t necessarily follow from “I think” (deductively), or the statement is mere logical/semantical tautology (since we are defining being as including thinking a priori) and therefore cannot say anything significant about oneself or the universe, and “I am” becomes something much less than what it purports to be.

In other worlds, I guess you could say that “I think,” then there is an “I” that’s doing the thinking by definition, but if we’re merely dealing with definitions then we’re not deriving any ontological truth; all logical deductions are tautologies. And if we don’t take it to be true by definition, then it’s not proven; all we can say is “there is thought” or “thinking is occurring,” whilst who is to say that there is an “I” and all the things an “I’ entails behind the thoughts or the thinking?

Also, I believe that using the word “I” implies being, and using the word “am” implies being. “I am” is therefore reflecting the same thing in two separate metaphorical mirrors, which just goes to show that language, or logic, is just being used in this case as an attempt to reunify that which it itself had divided. (Also, since “I” implies “am,” the “therefore I am” part is superfluous because “I” is already included in the “I think” part; but I guess you could say that’s the point, that’s one reason the statement “I think, therefore I am” is satisfying and truistic.)

Conversely, thinking to oneself “I am” cannot logically be false, because if it were false, then you would not be and therefore you could not think that you are. So saying, “I am” suffices as the self-evident truth, no need to bring in “I think.”

I mentioned earlier that it’s not proven that an “I” and everything than an “I” entails follows from “there is thought.” What are some of those things? I’ll list a few things here that tend to be implied by an “I.” While some or all of these attributes aren’t logical necessities, it may be natural to associate some of these properties with an “I” when thinking “I think, therefore I am” without realizing it’s not proven.

  • A unified/coherent self/entity
  • A mind with its accompanying psyche, emotions, memory, history, fears, desires, beliefs, current mind state, etc.
  • A context of experience/external reality
  • Personal relationships with everything in one’s contextual experience.
  • Consciousness/experience/awareness/life
  • Self-awareness
  • A body

So anyway, despite the fact that “I think, therefore I am” is supposed to be the most basic self-evident axiom, I don’t believe it says anything. If it’s really derivable from pure logic, then it’s just a trivial reflection of logical axioms. If it’s not, then it might as well be a plain statement of fact instead of a deduction, in which case my own formulation, “I am, and I think; therefore, I think I am,” is more sound. The entity exists, and it so happens that he thinks, and because he exists, his thinking apparatus is cognizant of that, so he thinks that he exists, thinking that one exists not being a requirement for existence—instead thinking and existing are two phenomena, and “I think I am” is their ensuing synthesis.

Space Doesn’t Exist

For something to exist it must, hypothetically, in some way, either directly or indirectly, affect us. Or if it possibly exists then its existence would have to imply that it might possibly affect you. Otherwise, its existence has no meaning because, with no possible way to be affected by it even in principle, it has no properties. Such is the case with space. It can’t be seen, felt, heard, touched, or tasted, and it can’t in itself affect anything, even in principle. It’s not a causal agent, it’s not a part of our universal matrix of cause and effect. You can’t measure it itself with any scientific instrument. I wrote more about why something must be able to affect you in order to be said to exist here, and also in a couple of other essays in this blog.

Surely you can measure distances, but distances are no less abstract than any other subtracted difference between values. Position can be accounted for as a property belonging to material objects, and distances are merely the differences between those properties’ values. A part of empty space is just the potential for an object to exist with a particular position-property that doesn’t currently exist. It’s just the lack of something. It’s analogous to a shadow, a hole, or the concept of “nothing,” is that it’s easy to think of it as something that exists, but technically it doesn’t.

Yes, materiality behaves in a way as to make it intuitive/obvious/useful to see distances as very real things, and to see space as an extant container, but metaphysically distance and space are superfluous as real things. This has to be true because there is no possible way, even in theory, that you can interact with, affect or be affected by or measure space in itself. You take measurements of actual objects, and based on the differences in those measurements you can abstract space. Because you can’t do anything more than that even in principle, the existence of physical objects makes space superfluous. Consider Occam’s razor. Space is merely our way of conceptualizing an aspect of nature’s mechanism by which objects affect each other with respect to their individual position-properties.  

It’s not as if space would not be superfluous if there were no matter; on the contrary, if there were no matter, if you were a bodiless point of perception “in the center of the universe” and there were no matter anywhere to be seen, you would never dream up such a concept as space. The concept would have no application. You would not see space; if you had the sense organs of a human, you would simply be seeing black.

“But,” you might argue, “The theory of relativity indicates that space-time is curved; and if it’s curved, and especially if can even detect that it’s curved, then it must be real.” No, all it really shows is that mass/energy interacts with other, remote mass/energy in a way described by the relativistic equations. The equations are such that it is convenient to think of the process as involving curved space-time, but that is only an interpretation; space itself is not being measured and used as a point of data input for the formulae, and if you tried to measure space itself you would, by logically necessity, actually be measuring the atomic movements, electrical impulses, etc. within your measuring device, because there is no action/reaction feedback loop between your measuring device and “space.” There can’t be, because if there were, it wouldn’t be space, it would be an local, invisible entity, because space, being the concept of locality itself (more or less; maybe the concept of a universal container?), has no local behavior, and if the matter in your measuring device indicating something extant behaves the same way at all points “in space” then we’d understand that that simply a property of matter itself.

Also, Einstein himself didn’t even come up with the idea that space-time is curved as a part of the theory of relativity. Minkowski did, and Einstein originally called the idea “superfluous erudition.” See EINSTEIN DIDN’T SAY THAT! – Quantum Field Theory and Paul Mainwood’s answer to What is spacetime? What did Einstein mean when he said it was curved?. In fact, Einstein also said, in “On the generalized theory of gravitation,” ”According to general relativity, the concept of space detached from any physical content does not exist.” And he said, in notes on the fifteenth edition of Relativity, “Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept ’empty space’ loses its meaning.”

However, does it suggest something about metaphysics that the theory of relativity is made simpler by imagining space-time as curved? Maybe, but I know that to imagine empty space is to imagine nothing except for specific possibilities involving movement, so whatever it suggests about metaphysics, it’s not that space exists as a thing-in-itself.

The question then arises, “If space does not exist, what causes matter to behave in the way it does: to have the properties of locality, to interact in three dimensions of motion, etc.—basically, to act in such a way that it behooves us to think in terms of there being space?”, and the answer is as it has always been: “We don’t know.” We don’t know anything about why matter/energy behaves in the way it does on the lowest levels. We’ve struggled just to make models to predict it, let alone explain it and why it has the fundamental properties it does. My observation that space does not exist doesn’t change the fact that we don’t know and have never known what all this means metaphysically; it only sheds new light on the question. Not that the point of this essay is to shed new light on our metaphysical questions, the point is only that it’s illogical to think of space as having its own existence.

Note, by the way, that we can now say that the answer to the age-old question, “Does space extend outward infinitely?” is “No, but it extends outward indefinitely,” because it doesn’t really extend in itself, being in-itself non-existent, but it’s true we that may, theoretically, send any physical object outward as far from the rest of the universe as we could imagine.

Solidity is Not an Illusion

Just in the interest of being Less Wrong™, let’s explore why it’s not true that solidity is an illusion on account of matter (supposedly) being mostly empty space.

The popular aphorism goes that matter is mostly empty space. The reasoning is that matter is made of atoms, which are situated and vibrating some distance apart from each other in space, held in place by physical forces, and within those atoms the distance between the electron shells and the nuclei are extremely far relative to the size of the nuclei. Maybe one would also extend the argument to the space between the electrons in the shells (okay, technically electron shells aren’t actually made of electrons; the electrons don’t exist until you detect them and collapse the wave function), the space between the shells, the space between the protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and the space between the quarks within the protons and neutrons.

But the thing is this: why is it notable how much space there is, when there is no solidity to contrast it with? Electrons aren’t solid, protons aren’t solid, and quarks aren’t solid. They are forcefields of some sort with no clearly defined boundaries. You’re in a forcefield right now—the earth’s gravity. That field extends infinitely in all directions. Similarly, an electron’s electric field extends infinitely, just with faster attenuation and extremely small intensity. The electron itself (when it even exists) is just an excitation within a field. So, all you have is space and fields within it that permeate it everywhere.

Solidity is therefore not a concept that applies to the micro scale. If solidity exists at all, it is merely a mode of material interaction, applying only on a macroscopic scale, by which objects cannot pass through each other. Being understood as such, it makes no sense to say that things are any less solid than they appear to be due to sub-nanoscopic structures, because the solid-vs.-vacuum dichotomy doesn’t exist on that scale. If anything, nuclear physics tells us that, solidity being a purely macroscopic phenomenon, things can only be exactly as solid as they appear and not any less so. And as for the empty space supposedly existing within matter between particles, there is nothing other than empty space, so that idea is meaningless. (You could say only space without forcefields in it is “empty,” but all space is full of fields and forcefields.)

Related article: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/july-2013/real-talk-everything-is-made-of-fields

The Better Solution to Zeno’s Paradox of Motion

This is about Zeno’s “dichotomy” paradox of motion.

As described by Wikipedia:

“Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a fourth, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. […] This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility.”

Since I’m not necessarily a mathematical Platonist, I won’t maintain that there “is” an infinite number of points to a number line; they don’t exist until you construct them individually (and then they only exists as abstractions/ideas). The paradox presumes distance should be idealized as a number line in which an infinitude of infinitesimally small distance-intervals exists already. Even if mathematics were Platonic, it would still be questionable whether an ideal number line characterizes real, physical distances.

Now, the standard calculus answer does work—that as time intervals and distance intervals diminish, they both approach the same limit (being zero) simultaneously. But that answer deals with infinities, as well as relies on mathematical equations, which are not process-oriented, and I believe that infinities are unnecessary—since distance intervals don’t exist until you create them—and that, as such, the problem could best be understood as a process—particularly a thought process, given that the problem is a thought experiment. (Yes, motion does actually happen in real life, but there’s obviously no paradox in motion intrinsically, or it wouldn’t happen; thus, to contemplate the paradox, per se, is to contemplate the thought experiment as a thought process.)

So here is my deconstruction of the paradox as a thought process.

Here’s what we do: we take one step in this thought process—we imagine the thing to move half-way (say, 4m). Then we take another step in the thought process—we imagine the thing to move half-way again (2m). Then we imagine it moving again (1m), again (.5m), and so on and so on. The problem here is that, while the distance traversed diminishes for every successive iteration of the thought-loop, the time it takes to think it through, doesn’t. Thus, it appears that, while time (being easily conflated with thinking-time) carries on indefinitely, the distances traveled get shorter and shorter incommensurately with the time intervals associated with them. If one could reduce one’s thought-process time by half for each successive iteration as the distance intervals diminish by half, then perhaps one would see things differently.

The proof that this mental effect is what’s responsible for the appearance of a paradox would be that we wouldn’t formulate the argument as so: the object must travel for half the time it takes to get there, then half the remaining time, then half the remaining time again, etc., and therefore it can never get there since it takes an infinite number of steps. That formulation is symmetrical to the distance-based one and carries the same implication, but somehow it just wouldn’t work—­it doesn’t have the same poignancy as the distance-based one.

One other point that comes to mind is that the idea alone that infinitesimal distance intervals don’t exist until you imagine them resolves Zeno’s paradox because there is no infinitude of steps; there is only the circular thought process, which carries on for exactly as long as one carries it on. In the same vein, contrary to popular belief, the value pi is not “infinite”…it’s a prescription for constructing a procession of digits of indefinite length. (Actually, it’s just a value. What was described is the algorithm for expressing that value in decimal form.) The actual value of pi can actually be expressed more succinctly, and precisely, as follows:

(Maybe there’s a more concise way to express that in summation notation, IDK.) Admittedly, this is actually another prescription for iterating in a loop; it just isn’t about creating digits, per se. The more iterations you step through, the closer your approximation is to the limit л. To use this as a prescription for generating accurate digits of pi, you would have to (a) convert your value to decimal (or another base, if you preferred), and (b) know how many digits are accurate at a given iteration and discard the rest. In any case, the above

formula itself is not an approximation, and taken as a whole, it is not infinite; that is, it does not contain an infinite amount of information, or it couldn’t be shown on your screen.