The state of physics is worse than I thought

Because of the similarity of “cause” and “affect”, you can also say “to cause means to cause a change”. The word “affect” and the word “cause” are not completely, but almost completely interchangeable. If you say “to affect means to cause change”, you can also say “to cause means to cause change”. Well, we all know that both statements may not mean exactly the same thing, but they mean almost exactly the same thing.

“All of science is built upon ontologies”, yes, but scientists would never admit that. In fact, it is so much the case, as Heidegger once said, that scientists depend on thinking or philosophy (metaphyics/ontology), because they themselves do not think, are not capable of thinking. Scientists have nothing to do with thinking and do not want it at all, but they are dependent on thinking, and this being dependent is denied by them since their triumph over thinking (philosophy).

Interestingly, the Ancient Greek at the time of the Presocratics, “logos” meant “gathering”, but after that it became more and more what we know as “speech”, " talk", “lecture”, “exposition”, became a system with Aristotle and we know it since then as “logic”.

If one undertakes a linguistic-historical (philological) investigation, one soon notices that in the course of time the understanding of being has changed fundamentally at least three times. The understanding of being, as it has been attempted since Aristotle by means of the logic system just mentioned, is that which also underlies RM:AO. One can also say that RM:AO has its orientation between the great masters of this system - Aristotle (in the beginning) and Kant or Hegel (in the perfection).

But does that solve the problem that this thread is about?

As I said, a cause can also be defined as “(the ability to cause change is) the ability to change - something”.

Ultimately, language (including thinking [including mathematics]) was, is, and will be used here - as always when it comes to knowledge.

Existence is that which has a cause.

Existence is that which has an affect.

In RM:AO it is called “affect”, so that it can be applied to psychology and sociology as well.

Existence is that which the Presocratics knew much more directly and of which after them more and more farewell was taken, that’s why for a similarly more direct knowledge more and more patience has to be applied (detours have to be accepted).

It is probable that the original meaning of the word “affect” was limited to human psychology but nowadays the word can be (and often is) used in the broader sense to refer to an act of something causing change in something else. And that’s how James and Observer use the word. To them, affect as a noun is not an emotion but any kind of caused change. When you kick the ball, you affect it – you cause it to change its position as well as its constitution. So the meaning they assign to the word is not strictly human. It kind of merely means “change”. Nothing human about that.

As for its falsifiability, whether or not you affect a ball when you kick it is pretty falsifiable, right? You can easily test it and thus prove it or disprove it.

As far as information-theoretic approach to physics is concerned, I don’t really know how they use the word “information”. Do they use it the normal way it is used to refer to any portion of reality that represents someone’s knowledge (at the very minimum, someone’s true beliefs) that thereby has the potential to inform others?

And somewhere he explains that back in his time the word “affectance” was used exclusively in the world of psychology to refer to the subtle influences on infants - but he expands its use to include the subtle influences on ALL things.

I don’t think so. James’ explanation seems more credible - the root “log” referred to the immutable - as in a heavy log or to “log” or to document - make secure and undeniable. And Aristotle’s “dialectics” - the use of consistent language - became known as “logic” - indisputable statements.

No, if you didn’t affcect it, then you didn’t kick it. Affect is implicit in kicking, it is an interpretation of a physical event, applicable to all phyisical events, and not a postulation on an external phenomenon separate from human interpretation. No, it cannot be falsified. No matter what interation takes place, it can be said to be affected, the affectedness of it cannot be broken down, cannot be disproven, it is atomic, it is a thought indicating a thought. And we went over what thoughts are.

Sort of.

I mean yes.

It is an admission that the only referenceability of these readings is our knowledge of them. And it does constitute knowledge, because it is based on readings received from the physical world, external information that was not a theoretical postulation, but an instrumental reaction to the physical world.

Yes it is a useful word, can be used to usefully describe many aspects of physical phenomena.

We have just received this report:

In order to directly ‘observe’ a quantum field in terms that would allow us to form an image and develop an actual falsifiable postulation of what they ‘might be,’ we would need a collider roughly the size of the Solar system. Not outside the real of possibility, hopefully some century they do it.

Falsifiable = the ability to arrange an experiment that could show if a theory is false.

The theory = kicking a ball will affect it.
Experiment = take measurements of a ball and its situation - kick the ball - remeasure.

Theory -

• False if no measurements change
• Not false if measurements change

Science doesn’t deal with what might be true - only with what hasn’t been proven false.

The theory = kicking a ball will generate information in it.
Experiment = take measurements of a ball and its situation - kick the ball - remeasure.

Theory -

False if no measurements change
Not false if measurements change

The theory = kicking a ball will generate change in values in it.
Experiment = take measurements of a ball and its situation - kick the ball - remeasure.

Theory -

False if no measurements change
Not false if measurements change

Falsifiability doesn’t refer to logical consistency.

It refers to whether the postulation itself is true or not.

How do you disprove the truth of affect? Or value? Or information? They are implicit in language, they are interpretations. They do not refer to the world. They refer to methods of interpreting the world.

How do you disprove string theory ‘strings?’

There you go.

You all are welcome.

_
When did physics get so messy?

When winning a Nobel Prize for One’s efforts and One’s Peoples became a must, these last few years… which theory will win the day, and the prize?

The holographic AdS/CFT correspondence theory, it’s already been settled. Now they’re crunching numbers.

It’s fairly recent, so it took about 50 years for physics to get its shit together after Einstein was proven wrong.

They are dealing with stuff that is smaller than the galaxy is bigger than us, so it gets complicated.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

…but not very refined imo.

Also… labelling Space ‘information’ is very Akashic Record, so not new at all… it is an ancient concept, as I’m sure you know.

It’s more refined than it sounds.

It’s just also alien. Nothing like it has been seen before. So it’s jarring.

But it’s of an unrivaled elegance.

Also, that is very kind of you, but I know next to nothing about budism.

Space is not what is called information here. Instead, and for convenience’s sake, not as a metaphysical statement, it is used to refer to that which interacts at the quantum field level that produces space.

All these images, Feynman’s slits and Schrodinger’s cat and endless other by now pop references, were designed by physicists not to describe some fantastical magic, nor to imply a paradoxical impossibility in the findings, but to illustrate how unfamiliar the territory is.

Alright, so you’re saying that the word “kick” is defined in such a way that it implies affect. In other words “To kick a ball is by definition to affect the ball.” I am not really sure about that, but instead of discussing what that word means, let me provide a different example. When we decide to kick a ball, what happens immediately before we do so? We move to a position close to it and we do so at certain speed. These terms clearly do not imply that the ball will be affected. So in order to determine whether moving close to a ball at certain speed will affect it or not, we have to look at more than just language.

Here’s another example. Instead of kicking a ball and asking ourselves “Did we affect that ball?”, let’s press a light switch and ask ourself “Did we affect the light bulb?” Here, it is pretty clear that the statement “Press the light switch” does not imply an affect upon the light bulb. At best, it implies an affect upon the light switch. This means the question cannot be resolved through the analysis of definitions. Instead, one has to look at something other than language.

In the general sense, “falsifiable” simply means “it can be proven false”. 2+2=4 can be proven false. It’s either true or false and we can discover which one is the case by looking at the definitions of the terms involved. It’s certainly not arbitrarily true. The same applies to every other statement about language. Any statement that says that some portion of the world is such and such is either true or false, and thus, can be either proven to be true or proven to be false. But before we can test a statement, we have to understand what it means. If we can’t do that, we can’t test it. Many statements that are deemed unfalsifiable are deemed so because they either have no meaning or they are not properly understood by those trying to evaluate their veracity.

What exactly do you mean by “the truth of affect”? I understand what it means to prove that affect exists and I also understand what it means to prove that a thing that has no affect exists. Is that what you’re asking?

Affect is merely an act of one thing causing change in another thing. You can prove or disprove that such things exist.

Value is merely a measure of how useful something is to someone. Any given thing is either useful to someone or it is not. For any given thing, you can prove or disprove that it is of value to someone. You can also prove or disprove the idea that valuable things (i.e. things that are of value to at least one person in the world) exist. (I am not sure this is how FC is using the word though. There’s a possibility he’s using it figuratively.)

Information is a portion of reality that represents someone’s knowledge and that has the potential to inform other people. Any given portion of reality is either information or it is not. You can prove it or disprove it. (I am, however, not sure this is how information theorists and modern physicists use the term.)

All three words can be used to describe (and they often are used to describe) what is out there.

The peculiar thing about “value” and “information” is that they are not terms that describe things in terms of how they affect our senses (e.g. how we see them) or how they influence the position and motion of other objects in space. I would say that’s the reason they are not a good fit for physics. Albeit I still don’t know what FC means by “value” and what physicists mean by “information” (my vague guess is that they use that word more in the sense of “sign”, kind of like how Charles Sanders Peirce, the original pansemiotician, used it.)

The ‘its a wave and a particle’ observed anomaly isn’t a current finding tho, so nothing new… this article is from 2013: wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/01/16 … or-a-wave/ so why the current excitement over the finding?

What has Buddhism got to do with it? …with the concept of all information being eternally accessible.

Sounds like a by-product of entropy, to me…

Well, that is sort of what I have been going over in this thread, and if all you are noticing is the fact of something not being a wave or a particle then I don’t think I can explain it to you. I will say it’s a fair bit more complicated than that, and that, as obsrvr also noted, the wave particle non-comformity was already a feature with relativity.

I really am not entirely sure what you are saying here.

Also not entirely sure.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the thing of it.