bapowell said:
Of course, you need a model first. If what you are saying somehow fits into general relativity or some other accepted gravity theory, then you'd do well to utilize such a theory to substantiate the claims you are making here. I have a hard time seeing how much of any of what you say fits into any accepted theory. If you are attempting to strike out in a new direction, I caution you to read the forum rules about overly speculative posts.
Agreed, but which model comes first - the physics or the metaphysics?
However, yes, it is sound practice to take existing workable physics models and generalise from that sound basis. That is, relax their inherent constraints to achieve higher symmetry solutions. Which was, for example, how physics went from Newton to Einstein. And the next step now is to generalise in some fashion that "unites" GR and QM (and thermodynamics too!).
But what I am talking about here now is a
specific method of generalisation. So it is not contra known physics but a systematic approach to generalisation that leads to more symmetric outcomes.
The big metaphysical difference in the line I'm taking is that a logic of vagueness seeks to generalise both the local and global scale of action. Standard reductionist logic seeks only to generalise the local scale because it views all causality as being micro-physics - events, particles, atoms. The global scale is traditionally treated as "the void", the big fat nothing which is an a-causal stage or backdrop. The global scale has no action and therefore can be left out of physical models as a factor to be generalised.
Of course this is a convenient fiction. Global causality intrudes even into microphysics-based descriptions of reality. In QM, you have nonlocality. GR is a holistic view in which spacetime (location and change) are an active constraint (the backdrop is fully dynamic and has the speed of light as a global limit on interaction). Even generally speaking, we consider the laws of physics to be a constraint on local action that exists "everywhere at all times".
So global causality is there in conventional models. But not explicitly as part of the fabric of the models.
A condensed matter physics approach to modelling is more used to explicitly representing global constraints. This is why solitions, spin networks, phase transitions, self-organising criticality and such-like are proving so useful in thinking about the fundamental issues of cosmology and physics.
So you have acceptance of a general program - physics moves backwards to the fundamental by the successive relaxation of constraints found in its current models. By achieving higher states of symmetry in its modelling.
And you also have domains of science with experience at granting causality to both the local and the global scale of a system. Domains where it is quite "logical" to speak of top-down constraint as well as bottom-up construction. Concrete models exist.
I am then linking these two things to the third thing which is the metaphysical tradition of logic based on the notion of vague beginnings, as opposed to crisp beginnings. This offers a way to fold both local and global scales of a system into an actual higher state of symmetry. Again, plenty of hard technical data here.
Even the actual suggestion that all can be modeled as pure curvature - both the local and global scales of existence - is in the spirit of Wheeler's classic pregeometry and geometrodynamics.
The difference again is that pre-geometry took the little atomistic fragments of spacetime to exist crisply first, then they became knit together to form a continuous flat spacetime vacuum. The vagueness approach treats all geometrical possibility as a QM foam which self-organises into its "atoms and void". You have the large and the small all mixed up as one (one higher symmetry state) at the beginning of things.
It is interesting that the likes of Smolin and Rovelli are beginning to namecheck CS Peirce and Anaximander - the two key thinkers when it comes to vagueness-based logic. So it is all stuff at least on the edge of the current radar. I just happened to have studied it in detail because of its application in systems science and neuroscience.
) then I agree.
