Illusionary reality
(Statements made are conjectures, brain candy.)
Energy and matter are often separated due to matter being a “physical” substance, while energy is not. However, if that is so how does energy affect matter? That is because matter isn’t “physical,” or as the scale grows smaller, the physical particles appear to lack physical substance.
Models and often show chemicals as spheres with sticks as bonds that connect to other chemicals. However if one takes a more accurate look at these sphere models, the components of those spheres typically only actually compose of a very small portion of that sphere, and if models of the smaller components are made into spheres as well, the same situation occurs. In other words, matter appears physically substantial from afar, but in reality, is as physically substantial as space.
Matter is empty, so energy fills it up. Energy exists on every scale without a fundamental change, while matter is a mere illusion that changes according to perspective. Energy interacts with this illusion and the world as we know it functions due to this relationship.
If matter doesn’t exist then what do we see? I don’t know. There’s obviously something there, but it has no true substance, which is why I call it an illusion. Calling matter physical is a joke. Matter doesn’t exist on any level, while energy exists on every level, which ironically makes an illusion made of light more substantial than the every day objects we recognize as matter.
Energy and matter are often separated due to matter being a “physical” substance, while energy is not. However, if that is so how does energy affect matter? That is because matter isn’t “physical,” or as the scale grows smaller, the physical particles appear to lack physical substance.
Models and often show chemicals as spheres with sticks as bonds that connect to other chemicals. However if one takes a more accurate look at these sphere models, the components of those spheres typically only actually compose of a very small portion of that sphere, and if models of the smaller components are made into spheres as well, the same situation occurs. In other words, matter appears physically substantial from afar, but in reality, is as physically substantial as space.
Matter is empty, so energy fills it up. Energy exists on every scale without a fundamental change, while matter is a mere illusion that changes according to perspective. Energy interacts with this illusion and the world as we know it functions due to this relationship.
If matter doesn’t exist then what do we see? I don’t know. There’s obviously something there, but it has no true substance, which is why I call it an illusion. Calling matter physical is a joke. Matter doesn’t exist on any level, while energy exists on every level, which ironically makes an illusion made of light more substantial than the every day objects we recognize as matter.
Comments (37)
Do you mean there are obvious perceptions that show it's real? I think that's right, there are some perceptions where seeing is proof it's real.
I have studied sense all of my life, and the way the atom moves is not like an illusion, you can see this and think any arguments for illusions must be stray off a liden fact.
I find this attempt to capture human life within the brain a little odd and absurd, as it clearly is not the case. Our wholeness is not within; it's on the very surface. If there can be a very surface.
Goes to show that physics can be both speculative and poetic. :smile:
I’ve thought about that too. What’s interesting about that would be when parts of the body are separated. Often you hear stories about people who lose body parts and feel phantom pains. Since everything is in unison, would I become less “me” if I lose a part of me? The fact that people feel the after effects of losing a physical part of themselves might then be because it damages the very being. Then there is organ transplants. You often hear about people who pick up on habits that the organ’s original owner had, even if the two people never knew each other personally. If I were to put a part of “you” into “me” it would only be natural that part of “me” would start to resemble “you” wouldn’t it? Referring back to how energy is the true substance, transplanting organs not only transplants the function of the organ, but also the way that organ guided energy, a way that was originally unique to the first owner.
Kant called that "illusion" Transcendental Idealism. In that case, ". . . what we think we see, is not absolute reality but our own ideas about reality."
Donald Hoffman uses more modern terminology, when he calls those "illusions" Icons; alluding to the little symbols on a computer screen. Instead of throwing up his hands at our illusory reality though, he presents a metaphor by which we can make sense of Plato's shadows-in-the-cave, and make use of the encoded information they provide about the "absolute" reality outside the cavern of deception.
Matter is a form of Energy that our physical senses are tuned to detect. So, for all practical purposes (i.e. Science), matter is reality. But for the theoretical purposes of philosophy, there is more than meets the eye. :nerd:
Reality is not what you see : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
Argument Against Reality : https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
Model Dependent Realism : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism
Oh, icons sounds like a pretty good way to describe it. Though we see things by using light, which according to my understanding are collections of specific amounts of energy, doesn’t that mean matter is actually something outside our senses? So we use something invisible that might not exist as an icon for something that does exist, sounds like a pretty roundabout way of doing things.
Materialism has given way to physicalism.
Matter is solid enough to our bodies but mostly empty to a passing neutron, "misplaced concreteness".
Wouldn’t that be because a neutron is too small to actually encounter any of the matter within our bodies? It’s like a comet flying through space, the chances of hitting anything are pretty small. Which goes back to my original issue regarding models. While we represent chemical particles as balls and forces as sticks, those balls are mostly empty to begin with and the parts that make up that ball are in a similar situation. To clarify, the go to example would be atoms. An atom model is a ball and the intermolecular forces are sticks, but that atom in reality is made up of electrons, neutrons, and protons. The relative distance between the electron and nucleus is described as the distance of a football field from the perspective of the electron. But the electron model itself is a ball, and that electron is made of smaller particles we know as quarks. Who knows how much empty space there is between the quark particles? Not to mention the particles that make quarks and so on. There’s so much empty space that it makes me question if anything is really there. It kind of feels like a paradox.
Converting mass to energy is essentially disintegrating the bonds between the atoms in the bomb within a short time and space, resulting in large quantities of energy and force. Basically haven’t we just taken the hypothetical energy constructs known as matter and returned it to its base form? That just seems to reinforce the lack of difference between the two. Since you brought it up, unstable elements require more energy to temporarily exist in that state so, wouldn’t it mean it uses energy to be matter?
Fission (fusing two lighter nucleii also releases energy (the source of energy in stars) and also the source of the creation of heavier elements (hydrogen to helium).
Werner Heisenberg — 'Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.'
Hoffman's theory is based on a specific understanding of how evolution has constructed the human body and mind. His concept of Model Dependent Realism, which goes back to Kant's notion of "ding an sich", says that we never know the "real" object, but only a mental image of the object (subjective meaning), constructed in the mind from abstract inputs of energy (quantum dots of photons). You could think of the human mind as an old-timey telegraph operator. What his senses receive are meaningless dots & dashes of energy, which must be translated into ordinary language with conventional meanings. So, yes, Matter is like the telegraph sender, "outside the senses" of the receiver.
Why not just transmit meaning directly into the receiver's mind? Apparently evolution doesn't have ESP. So, just as the eye is built backward, with blood vessels in front of the light sensitive retina, Evolution sometimes gets the job done in a "roundabout way".
For an even more roundabout explanation, In terms of my own unconventional worldview, Reality begins as Generic Information (mind stuff), which is the precursor of Energy, which then is transformed into Matter via phase changes. And light bouncing off that matter is received by the senses, and then transformed back into Mind Stuff via brain functions. Hence, the stuff you "see" is two steps away from ultimate reality. But that's another long & winding story in itself. :joke:
Model Dependent Realism : Crick was a Metaphysical Realist : “we believe that experience accurately depicts the thing-in-itself”. By contrast, Hoffman, “despite the consensus of experts, . . . doubted that natural selection favors perceptions that describe reality”.
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page22.html
Generic Information : omnipotential EnFormAction which generates all things. Similar to Plato's Forms.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Physics without math is Philosophy : i.e. Metaphysics.
If so, then Philosophy is nothing. :cool:
Metaphysics : Arguably, metaphysics is the foundation of philosophy: Aristotle calls it "first philosophy" (or sometimes just "wisdom"), and says it is the subject that deals with "first causes and the principles of things".
https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_metaphysics.html
Possibly. But in the quantum world much of the physics is the math. For example, a virtual particle may simply be a mathematical entity, an yet amateur philosophers may refer to these things popping in and out of physical existence.
I recently read of Feynman's lectures at Cal Tech back in the 1960s. Even there, with very bright physics students, most were unable to understand his attempts at explanation. A few followed the math and comprehended his ideas, but the majority were left in a state of confusion. When he first presented his "sum of all paths" formulation to an audience consisting of prominent physicists, very few initially comprehended what he was saying.
Physics without math is philosophy - if the philosopher is a physicist. That's my opinion, but I'm sure others here will disagree. That's OK. :cool:
The OP is pretty typical of a certain type of post; a physical theory without any maths. Physics has required maths since before Newton. It's a confusion of vaguely understood physical notions.
It's not metaphysics, either. It's just bad physics.
That should be obvious from event the first line:
Quoting Braindead
It's terrible, and in multiple ways. What's terrible about it? Well, it is tempting to say that it is not even wrong, after Pauli. The very positing of the sentence demonstrates that the author is not talking the same language as physicist. Now this should be obvious, since E=mc²; and since substance is not an expression much used in physics. @Marchesk, @TheMadFool, @remoku @neonspectraltoast and even @jgill attempt rebuttals, as if there were content here to rebut.
It's just lazy to say that the mathematics of physics can be translated into words. As if mathematics were not language. If you want to understand physics you have to understand the mathematics. And if you don't understand that, you do not understand physics.
Metaphysics might have been central to Aristotle's concerns, but then there have been a few changes since his time. He might have dimly envisaged the physics we now understand, and doubtless would have been very pleased. Much of what we call physical science would have been considered metaphysical. Consider modern chemistry and its relation to Democritus' ideas. They are only very loosely related, chemistry giving us far more rigour because it is embedded in, expressed in, mathematics.
All of this to say that @Braindead's OP is nonsense, in the technical sense of not saying anything.
Of course that it is nonsense does not count against it if it has the purpose of showing us something of interest. The Tractatus being a case in point; or the poem Antigonish. But what the OP claims to show is Illusionary reality, and this is in itself another nonsense, a confusion of how reality and illusion are used. Illusions only make sense given a reality against which they can occur, and hence claiming that reality itself is an illusion is contradictory.
Can it be honestly claimed that he world described by physicists differs markedly form that which we see around us. in such a way that we might describe as being wrong? Well, no, since physics sets out to describe that very world, and goes to great lengths to explain how it is that what we see is how we see it. So when the physicist claims that the table is mostly space, they add an explanation as to why it is that despite this the cup remains firmly on top of the table, and rejects the Dunning-Kruger suggestion that somehow the table is not solid.
Anyway, that's far more explanation than an OP which is neither physics nor metaphysics deserves.
A. The Atom works as thus - physics.
B. Time is, and is not - metaphysics.
If not, can you draw it like I did, A - physics and B - metaphysics?
The difference is as simple as considering I(what science I can conduct), and, considering We(what science we, not including I, can conduct).
This is what recently I concluded was metaphysics - it's prone to error.
You wouldn't be able to conceive time without this generality with others. Highlighting it may be a 'we' question.
Yes. Quantum physics is mostly non-empirical, and mostly mathematical. But the interpretations of their equations are philosophical metaphors and analogies. My own interpretation of Virtual Particles is that they are "popping" into and out of space-timeQuoting Banno
. When their properties are mathematical instead of physical, they are nothing more than Potential particles. But when the waveform collapses (another metaphor) virtual ghosts transform into Actual measurable material objects. The virtual state is what I call Enfernity (eternity & infinity as a single state of potential being). That may be "bad physics", but it's perfectly good philosophical metaphysics.
If the OP was on a Physics forum, it would indeed be "bad physics". But it was posted on a Philosophical forum where speculation & conjecture beyond known physics is part of the job description. The OP is not a physical theory, but a metaphysical theory, where math is limited to Fuzzy Logic. So, let's see where the dialog goes. :cool:
So we will treat it as on a par with:
Is it OK to say something about how things might be? For example, in the spooky realms of physics like Dark Matter, "where no materials are to be had". :joke: