So I don’t know.
You can’t measure affect, you can’t find it occurring.
One could just as easily say that nothing can be claimed to exist that doesn’t have value, or doesn’t have information. They describe ways in which we interpret the world, they are thoughts.
You could just as well have imagination ontology, because you can’t think of anything you can claim exists that you can’t imagine. It’s silly.
But, unlike those two, there is an obscene wealth of data on the dynamics of information. Information technology is probably the most accurate mathematics that exists. How to transfer it, how to store it, how it interacts. You can track identity through it, history, what went where, how, why, what transformations did it undergo. The math on it is bountiful, and precise.
So, in terms of usefulness, I’m waiting to hear a case that trumps information’s.
But I like how James uses the color scheme from The Matrix.
what is the difference between affectance and energy?
Don’t they both mean - the ability to change something?
After he builds his ontology - having explained everything that science has actually observed - he then concludes - “because my ontology is coherent and appears to exactly align with the reality we see - RM:AO is truth” (Truth being whatever aligns with reality).
I think any and every criticism you can think up - I can explain away without deviating from his ontology.
I could ask how information ontology answers those “why” questions that I posed above - but perhaps to you those are not relevant.
So let me ask another question - How does information ontology detect truth?
It can’t, that’s the problem. It can trace it, but it can’t detect it. But neither can any ontology. Ontology purports to dictate what truth is, not find it.
Many, come on now. But one is that energy doesn’t read a human action into naturally occurring phenomena. Energy, undoubtedly derived from some ancient Greek word, describes a inanimate thing. For example, you can ask ‘how does gravitational energy affect a quantum island system?’ But it sounds silly to ask ‘how does gravitational affectance affect a quantum island system?’
No. Affectance means the effective changing of something. Because it is affecting.
Heck, why not thought ontology? You can’t think of anything you can claim exists that you can’t think of.
And then you study how thoughts behave, and miraculously find it in everything you think about.
But information is far more accurate.
“The effective changing”?
How is that different than applying the necessary energy to cause an effect?
To affect means to cause change.
What good is an ontology that cannot discern truth from quantum fantasies?
But yes a good ontology certainly can. All of science is built upon ontologies. They suppose that something exists then test to see if it probably does. The ontology forms a hypothesis and an experiment is performed to falsify.
How do you do that with only “information” - information is the result of an ontology being physically tested for consistency. Information is a tool and dependent entirely on the ontology that was presumed when gathering that information.
Yeah, exactly. As opposed to the ability to change.
Yes. For that to happen, the thing purported to exist can’t be thought itself.
Yes, absolutely. That we agree on this is what puzzles me. Affect is a quality, a description, a dynamic, a concept, a thought. You can’t falsify it. Anything you find, you can say its relationship to anything else constitutes affectance.
What relationship between two things would not constitute affectance, that we could consider affectance to be false in that relationship?
It isn’t the ontology of ability to be changed. 
And neither is energy about the ability to be changed.
The ability to cause change is the ability to change - something.
Energy is actually that same thing - and how much change it makes is it’s measure.
No. no. You are thinking of a different kind of “affect”. I am talking about the ability to change something being the ability to affect that something - to create an effect. An Affect creates an Effect.
I am not talking about the feeling.
Yeah listen, it was you who said this.
Well, I mean, there’s also potential energy, which you can’t measure until it does make change. Like you can’t measure gravity until gravity changes something.
I know you are not talking about the feeling. But there is something human about affecting, it is a human action, like behaviour, even though behaviour is useful to apply to the world, ‘how does this system behave?’, but is not inanimate and utterly inhuman like energy or matter or time.
We can’t measure anything until it affects our senses or instruments.
And if you watched the video it explained “Potential-to-Affect - PtA”. - the potential to cause a change that has not yet occurred. - same as storage energy.
You are using the word “affect” in a very limited way. Doesn’t your thermostat affect whether your heater turns on? What is human about that?
Doesn’t the weather affect your garden? - A bomb going off affect its surroundings?
That’s the charming thing about general relativity, that energy is matter and matter is energy. Like, energy can become so passive that it is actually matter (or so active?).
The problem quantum mechanics poses is that you can’t call what you find either energy nor matter, and it doesn’t have the limit of the speed of light which is the limit of energy and matter, which isn’t really surprising to find when you get down to such a small scale. Why would anything be familiar? And because, indeed, you cannot study a system without affecting it, without changing it, and quantum fields are so small that anything we manage to do to observe it changes it so much that it alters our readings, we find that we can’t look close enough yet to make relevant descriptions of what’s there. That’s what I find more and more elegant about the information paradigm, it doesn’t even try, it accepts the limitation and goes about the business of making sense of what we can see.
You can say that, and it’s useful, but there is still something human about the word, like I said about behavior. The bomb going off behaves a certain way, but behaviour is even more clearly a human thing.
Yes, but also, until our instruments affect it. Or something affects it. Like when we look at a rock, we see it because light bounces off of it. This light does affect it, though on such a small scale that it is irrelevant to our understanding of the system. But at the quantum field level, really anything you ‘bounce off it’ radically alters the system.