Karl Popper; Analysis; He's Anarchist!

Got a bit about Karl Popper. Found out it supports Philosophical Descent and The First Step.

Small problem though; Popper was very impressed with deduction.

There's a thing called 'the problem of induction' if you weren't aware.

Popper's ideas about deduction are unimpressive to me because I seem to have solved the problem. Deduction, you see, is a special case of induction. To say "Popper stresses that we ascertain whether one theory is better than another by deductively testing both theories, rather than by induction." is complete nonsense. It's like saying you're hammering with a hammer, not a tool. Programming with Lisp, rather than a language.

Notably, Popper is one the few philosophers that I don't hate...so far. It goes recursive because not hating a philosopher is so refreshing, leading to greater enjoyment of his work, leading to more relief, and so on.

Also, Popper rejects the empiricist doctrine that empirical observations are, or can be, infallible, in view of the fact that they are themselves theory-laden.

This needs to be corrected to "observations are infallible, but our application of them to theory is most certainly fallible. " The reality is that, as I've mentioned before, to distrust your senses is to be insane. As such every single observation ever is infallible, even schizophrenic hallucinations. However, the simplistic way everyone applies these data to theory is flawed, to say the least. The hallucination is indeed data - but of what? Well, first it means they're hallucinating, which can be verified with whatever senses aren't involved in the hallucination, or at the very least by a separation in time. Therefore, the most meaningful way to apply this data is to a theory of how the schizophrenic's brain is working. They hallucinate a girl on a busy street, but she isn't hit, passersby are unhorrified, etc... Thus, they can safely conclude that their visual system has an interesting bug, and [safely conclude that they (cannot safely conclude that objects in their visual field exist, without some independent corroboration.)]

Regardless of how 'faulty' our senses may be for some particular purpose they cannot help but provide a wealth of valuable information.

One of the reasons I like Popper is that he's capable of saying things I haven't thought of.

"But if this is true, Popper argues, then, paradoxical as it may sound, the more improbable a theory is the better it is scientifically, because the probability and informative content of a theory vary inversely - the higher the informative content of a theory the lower will be its probability, for the more information a statement contains, the greater will be the number of ways in which it may turn out to be false."

Learning is so awesome!

On the other hand,

"Popper, then, is an historical indeterminist, insofar as he holds that history does not evolve in accordance with intrinsic laws or principles, that in the absence of such laws and principles unconditional prediction in the social sciences is an impossibility, and that there is no such thing as historical necessity."

I mention this to illustrate a common truth; there are so many different ways history could logically arrange itself that there must be some logically nontrivial historical necessities. On the other hand, due to the chaotic nature, these will almost certainly be inaccessible to science and philosophy. In any case, the evidence suggests that there aren't enough to be useful in particular, even if you could use ESP to find them.

Later,

"At a very general level, Popper argues that historicism and holism have their origins in what he terms 'one of the oldest dreams of mankind - the dream of prophecy, the idea that we can know what the future has in store for us, and that we can profit from such knowledge by adjusting our policy to it."

So, we predict the future with certainty so that we can change the future? Uhhh...about that....

I don't actually know whether prophecy is a longtime human longing or not, but it doesn't actually matter. I'm treating this idea a bit like the schizophrenic does their visuals; the explicit or base knowledge is of no consequence. Instead, the higher meanings dominate.

I like fantasy books, especially the ones with prophecy. This prediction accords with my experience. But why? The way prophecy in fantasy works is that the world is somehow predetermined to follow an ironclad pattern, usually through sheer force on the part of the source of prophecy. But, if indeed the entire world (is prophesied or can be prophesied are logically identical for this analysis) then prophecy is useless. The information of the prophecy either cannot be acted upon, or else the prophecy takes into account its own effects, leading to an infinite regression that most likely does not converge.

On the other hand, if some of the world is free to decide, then prophecy basically can't work, because it would have to shield the prophetic events from any and all feedback, which in practice is an impossible task. I'm going to neglect completely trivial prophecies like the ones we can make ourselves. "I'm going to finish writing this post. I'm even going to edit it and add links and stuff like that." These prophecies are dependent on free will, basically. I'm not sure how to clearly demonstrate this, but it's true anyway.

On the other hand, what is science but the first successful attempt at prophecy? I prophecize that if I drop an object in the vicinity of the Earth, it will accelerate at 9.8m/s/s in the approximate direction of Earth's center of gravity. Woot! I'm a prophet!

Notably, I'm equivocating quite a bit here, but I think that's okay because hominid brains are good at parsing crap like that.

Popper clearly wanted to be anarchist; he wanted piecemeal evolutionary solutions to social problems, he just thought for some reason that the state can accomplish instead of impede this. It's not his fault - while it's logically necessary that states be hypocritical, the arguments are extensive and emotionally charged - not the easiest thing to get your head around, unless you're already predisposed to the emotional charge.

It's not the first time I've run across a thinker who wants to be an anarchist but rejects anarchist solutions. In fact, it seems to me that if you gathered everyone together in the town square and made them vote for what they actually want, we'd all end up anarchist. Even people who explicitly state that they don't believe in anarchy.

Skimming the Blog

If you're skimming my archives and have the urge to read something you're not obviously interested by, in case one of my tangents is interesting, it's better just to ask me about it. I'll have a quick look and summarize all the tangents, and you can pick the ones you like.

No Infinities Principle: Proof

1. Physics can be described mathematically,
   
2. Therefore every phenomenon corresponds to an equation.
3. Equations with infinities in them are not meaningful
4. No variable can ever be infinite.
   

QED

So yeah. That's how bad modern physicists are at thinking. The proof really is that short.

Remember, they already use this principle. They simply don't recognize its full implications.

For example, as I said before, space and time are considered to be infinite by some, and this is socially accepted.

Nevertheless it is not mathematically acceptable. If space is infinite, then consider the very simple equation of constant motion in a straight line.

x=Ct That is, every second, the particle goes C meters further away from the origin.

So at t=9, the particle is at 9C. Simple.

Because space is relative, we can redefine the origin.

x - 12=Ct.

So at t=0, the particle is already at x=12.

Because space is infinite, we can redefine the origin to be infinity.

So at t=0, the equation reads

∞-∞=0

The problem is that ∞ - ∞ is undefined.

To show this mathematically, consider t!=0.

x-∞=3

x=∞ +3

Infinity + 3 is infinity

x=∞

Ergo, the particle hasn't moved. This is inconsistent. If we take any infinity to be physically meaningful, any equation with the infinite constant becomes meaningless.

The physical interpretation of this is that if space is infinite, then a particle can't ever reach a local area through finite movements. Ergo, it doesn't actually exist.

Therefore, either space is not infinite, which means the universe must have some sort of edge, or it is infinite but all the infinite space doesn't exist.

These statements are exactly equivalent under physics.

Ergo, the universe isn't infinite. It has an edge. Well...it can also wrap around in the manner of a video game world, or indeed the Earth's surface.


The proof for every other relative physical variable follows similarly.

And, out of curiosity, do you think absolute variables can be infinite? Infinite charge? Infinite mass? Infinite density? Infinite force?

Incidentally, this inevitably means that infinitesimals also cannot exist.

Because of this, I can NIP string theory right here.

1. No infinities or 1/∞ exist.
   
2. Strings are one dimentional.
3. One of their physical properties, such as width, is infinitesimal.
4. Strings do not exist.
   

QED

Now that's sad. Pathetic and tragic. Twenty years of string theory and the proof that it was mostly a waste is four lines long.

Four lines.


Similarly, we know for a fact that particles are not point particles.

A point particle has infinitesimal length, width, and depth, and therefore doesn't exist. But, particles do exist. Ergo they are not point-like.

Now, I can hear one objection. What equation uses the width or whatever of a particle?

Luckily, there is a separate proof. Given these two proofs are consistent, I use Axiom Two, say self-consistency is sufficient evidence for truth.

Here it is.

Assume our world has three dimensions of space, just as it appears to.

Assume a two-dimensional object exists. A plane, much like the thinnest piece of paper ever.

Now, according to cartoons, if you view it from the front, you'll be able to see it. However, if you view it from the side it will disappear.

We can verify that from the side, it disappears. Without width, it will not impede the flow of information from one side to the other.

But this leads to a contradiction! If the object does not exist from one angle, then it cannot exist from ANY angle! This is the principle of relativity.

To check this, ask; 'as a three-dimensional object passes through the plane, what part of the object will the plane intersect?' None. The intersection will have a volume of zero.

Look at this another way. If you stick your finger into the edge of the plane, it won't exist. It forms no barrier to entry. What happens if you now move your finger sideways? Well, it still can't form a barrier! That's relativity.

As such, true zero-dimension particles cannot exist. Therefore, they must have at least infinitesimal volume. But they cannot have infinitesimal volume, by the NIP.

As such they must have a regular amount of volume. And indeed the uncertainty principle ensures that the exact position of the 'point' particle can never be known. It always has some spatial extent.

Similarly, two colliding electrons cannot ever actually touch and produce infinite force. Either there must be a limit on their velocity to prevent them from exceeding their limited ability to produce force, OR when their maximum repulsion force is exceeded, their interaction will change them into some non-electron.

Or, you know, something completely surprising.


NIP has at least one surprising consequence. Nothing is continuous, at least physically. Everything must be quantized. Space, time, energy, everything. This is because the definition of continuity is that infinitesimal changes are allowed. However, infinitesimal changes are physically meaningless, and therefore continuity is physically meaningless. Physically meaningless things do not exist.


Also of interest is that NIP is equivalent to causality because it's equivalent to the fact that we can describe physics mathematically.

Consider any physical variable. It can vary, and it can only vary in quantum jumps. If the universe can be described mathematically, then these jumps will follow a formula. Each jump will be directly dependent on the position reached by the previous jump.

This is causality. Each cause has a unique set of effects. I say set because there is some leeway in the quantum jumps, but these are described by fixed averages, so you can't really say that causality is weakened by randomness.

(There is just one tiny problem. Particles are actually conscious. We can tell because we have brains. More on this later.)


On a human note, would you like to know how I discovered the NIP? I was considering fundamental particles one day, and how quarks are more fundamental than protons. I was wondering if it were logically possible for quarks to be made up of yet more fundamental particles.

After all, we've already gone from atoms to protons to quarks. Could we keep going? Yes, we could keep going, in principle. However, we cannot keep going indefinitely. Eventually, there must be a most fundamental particle. Otherwise it's turtles all the way down. Infinite regression.

(Note that this isn't just logically repugnant, it also violates Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. An infinite regression, if true, would technically be able to prove its own consistency. For any particle you wanted to prove was consistent, you could go one level deeper and use those particles as proof.

Because you can make the level arbitrary, this proves it for all levels. (Infinity is weird.) Godel proved that any such theorem can only prove itself by being inconsistent, and thus false.)

In short, Zeno was right, in a sense. However, he wasn't applying his theory in the right domain.

Also, he didn't know space and time are quantized, and so at some point the arrow will be touching the soldier, and one Planck-time (approx 1/10^43 s) after that, it must be at least one Planck-length (approx 1/10^35 m) inside the soldier.

Mathematically you can do continuous calculations. However, physically, you cannot.


I just found out about Compton wavelengths. These are minimum uncertainties in particle locations. These cutoffs satisfy the NIP.

Also, reading about de Broglie wavelengths, I just realized that the wavelength of a person is smaller than the Planck-length. This is why people never display, say, quantum tunneling behavior, not even really really rarely. The wavelength of a person isn't really really close to zero, it's actually indistinguishable from zero.


Notice again that physics has already discovered many of the predictions of the NIP, and yet has somehow failed to discover the NIP itself. I really do find this boggling.


So yeah. Take that, government-funded physics. Accept your ignorance lest I have to do it for you.

The Stock Market and Government Intervention

Inspired by an article on the new recession.

The stock market is not, as this and every other article treats it, the economy. It's not even like the economy. The economy is a heart - it drives the entire body. The stock market, by contrast, is the spot on my wrist that I can use to take my pulse. In fact, exactly like that.

Because of this fact, when the government tries to 'inject liquidity' into the stock market, it's exactly like injecting blood into my wrist, from another part of my body...as a strategy for increasing my blood pressure.

Naturally, this is, compared to its objectives, unfathomably harmful.



The economy is about the exchange of objects to accumulate value.

Notably, there is no objective way to define value. It's totally subjective, but it does exist. Because it's subjective, it doesn't have to be conserved, which leads to the real difference between the wealthy and the poor. While it's true that wealthy people generally have more objects than the poor, the real difference is because the wealthy have more things they value, and these things happen to be objects. They have taken advantage of the nonconservative nature of value by trading things they value less for things they value more, reciprocally. Wealthy people simply do this more effectively.

Notice that these trades do not, in themselves, significantly change the physical world. A camper is traded for some dollars which are traded for some building materials, say. Now, the dollars, camper, and two-by-fours are in a different place, and could easily be moved back, but suddenly the total wealth and value of the arrangement has greatly increased.

(This is, naturally, one reason government redistribution never works. There's no way for the government to determine who really values what, which means it will inevitably destroy wealth on a disastrous scale, compared to anything it tries to do.)

(The only way (we know of) to determine what people really value is to put it up for auction on the free market. Government is simply the manifestation of the idea that people want the wrong things. )

(Also, don't forget that ownership isn't physical in any sense either.)

It's these trades that actually increase wealth. Production is quite separate. Production is merely motivated by the future possibility of these trades; without that production would halt.

This is the basic truth of a recession. The expectation of future trades diminishes, and so production declines, ensuring that through normal wear and tear, wealth declines, and everyone feels the pinch.

What does this have to do with the stock market? In a healthy society, nothing you'd ever need to worry about. Why not?

Because the stock market does not trade in anything of real value. No one values stock in and of themselves, but only as a means to obtain new things they do value.

Similarly, dollars are not true wealth. The only real value to dollars is that they facilitate trade, they are never an end, a value, unto themselves, unlike campers and two-by-fours. Also unlike similarly intangible but truly valued things like communication or the various types of security, or a feeling of well-being from a massage or similar service.

Stock is, actually, very like the banknotes that, way back, actually preceded fiat currency, back when banknotes were in fact notes from the bank. Both are, in a very real sense, merely currency.

Currencies all take their entire value from the fact someone will agree to trade that currency for something of real value.

So, the stock market is a big currency exchange. This gets a bit complicated and subtle, so I'm glossing over some things. Regardless, like all currency exchanges, a stock market cannot truly create or destroy wealth. Every dollar 'lost' to a portfolio is merely gained by another portfolio.

And, like all currency exchanges, it can tell you something about the conditions affecting the underlying real values backing the currencies. It cannot, or rather should not, affect those underlying values.

It doesn't matter what happens to your money. If you value huge, delicious steaks, the only reason you value your dollar is because it represents, to you, huge, delicious steaks. The association cannot run in reverse.

As such, the stock market can tell you stuff about the issuing entities - the corporations. (A word that just means 'reification of legal arrangement,' in this case reifying through a corpus - pretending that the legal arrangement is a body, a person.) It cannot, however, work in reverse. Indeed, if I own a factory that makes huge, delicious steaks, does that factory care what its stock price is? Do the buyers of my steaks? My workers?

That would be hilarious actually.
"Crap! I bought this steaks, but the corporation's stock price crashed yesterday and now it tastes terrible. Ugh."
"Urgh! Cheap stock steak! Gross! I hate it when that happens."

The stock market is the pulse of the market - not its heart.

In short, the Great Depression wasn't caused by a stock price collapse. That's preposterous. The stock price collapse was caused by the Great Depression.


There is, of course, one problem with this analysis. It's pretty clear that our economy is affected by what happens in the stock market. Why is this?

Basically, because of the government.

Through various, generally unrelated intentional corruptions, government regulation is now supporting a situation where the actions of America's Wall Street account for, I'm not making this up, half of all American economic activity. The situation is similar in all wealthy countries.

And even this wouldn't be a problem. It doesn't matter if Wall Street accounted for 90% of the economy, it still can't break logical truths. The currencies are valuable because they can be traded. For steaks.

However, the basic support government is providing, without which Wall Street would have to contract drastically, is risk protection. Some institutions have been perceived as too big to fail. There's an actual policy named after it.

Since the people in these institutions aren't dumb, and higher risks generate higher payoffs, this has naturally lead to a drastically blase attitude to high risk. After all, if an investment fails, the government is going to bail them out. They can't lose.

I suspect this is due to a basically voodoo association between the stock market and the economy. The stock market suffers when the economy tanks. It's hard to see the economy, but easy to see the stock market. Therefore, the association gets made between recessions and stock market failures.

As a result, lobbyists can successfully convince lawmakers to prop up the stock market as a method of controlling the economy.

Is my little sub-theory true? Is this voodoo? Well, the opposite is surely false. The Americans are right now pumping vast sums of 'liquidity' into their stock market...but the economy is still tanking.

But wasn't the tanking economy due to the subprime thing? Isn't that simply an extention of the stock market? Yes! So how, according to my theory, did it affect the real economy?

Ask yourself: "Where does the money for these 'liquidity injections' come from?"

The simple answer is, "From the money-printer."

But value cannot be created out of nowhere. Despite being subjective, and nonconservative, it still exists. As I've repeated already, money is valuable only in relation to real values.

Creating more money only causes...drumroll...inflation. Or, for those who read the John Law piece, debasement. The philosopher's stone of taxation.

And this is how the stock market affects the real economy in diseased societies, like ours.

All these 'liquidity injections' represent massive tax levies at the expense of anyone who has a positive asset balance. And while the dollars aren't value themselves, they do represent someone of value that has been previously traded. It's value waiting to be realized, except now it's being realized at Wall Street, by investment bankers, instead of by the person who actually created the value.

Naturally, their store of excess value depleting, these people start sending signals that they won't be engaging in future trades. Which causes stock prices to fall, in addition to various other financial instruments. Which means the bad investments are going to get worse. Which means there will be more 'liquidity injections.' Which means there will be more debasement. Which means these people will start sending signals that...

When I said unfathomably harmful, I meant it. As said in Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, we never see all the things we would have made with the destroyed wealth. We only get to see the protected wealth on Wall Street. Cuz you know, that's where it's needed most.

Because, obviously, government has only our interests at heart. It is our mommy, after all. Or we own the thing, or something like that? We vote, right? This is a democracy, right? Yeah, something like that.

In short, another day, another reason to be an anarchist.

Factory Assembly Lines: Evil?

If I take Axiom One and I go look at the job of the average assembly line worker, I find that there's probably something wrong. Their job sucks. But why? My sonar is detecting an anomaly, but I still have to go out in the submersible to see what's wrong. Standard procedure.

It would appear it's because the factory system is evil.

I was reading this and while the author makes a few mistakes, such as assuming that capitalism is inherently evil instead of merely historically evil, I was struck by their contention that factory production lines are generally manned by slaves only, and that this is because there's no inherent production benefit to the division in labour, only in the division of tasks into repetitive blocks, to cut down on set up time.

They use a pin factory as an example. Rather than having one person repeatedly drawing the wire and another repeatedly sharpening the end, you can have one master artisan draw a large lot of wires, followed by that same artisan sharpening the end of the whole lot.

Notably, you can test this yourself. Next time you need to make a whole bunch of something, try making a production line out of it. You will probably notice, as I did, that you don't need one person per task to make most of the gains. A single person filling in all the stations will do fine.

Also, it's fun.

Obviously, this does not apply to robotic assembly, which supplies profound production gains.

Still, if this contention is correct, it would relieve the stressful lives of tens of millions of factory workers. Clearly, being treated like a slave sucks. If it's not really economically necessary to lower retail prices, then it is evil.

But all we have is this basically historical correlation. Roman factories used slaves. Our factories, according to their analysis, use slave-like labour. For real proof, we need more.

Like this.

A whole factory, at GE, run not as slave labour but as master artisans. Specifically, their most productive factory. By far. Still using a production line system, but really, calling this a factory is a misnomer.

So why are our factories evil? Why don't they take the obvious production gains by converting to a worker-responsibility model? As it turns out, it's exactly as accused; because the owners are greedy. Slaves are cheap. Even with the market costs of higher retail prices, the owners can retain more cash. As long as the markets remain fairly uncompetitive and everyone is doing it, the slave labour paradigm can work.

In case you haven't read the whole article about GE/Durham, let me just show you a few quotes.

'Clearly, not everyone has the temperament, skills, or intellect needed to work in an environment like that of GE/Durham. So who, in particular, doesn't fit in? "People who expect to take orders," offers Dave Hyde wryly.'

As in, not slaves.

'"Multiskilling is how the place is kept together," says Derrick McCoy, 32, a tech-3 and a buddy of Duane Williams's on Team Raven. "You don't hoard your skills. That way, when I'm on vacation, the low-pressure turbine can still be built without me."'

Every artisan can do the entire process, or at least large parts of it. Skilled labour ends up being cheaper than unskilled labour...unless you can pay slave wages. Similarly, this is a story that highlights the entrapment of other workplaces. Hoarding skills, either because management punishes cross-learning or because you're afraid of being fired, ultimately imprisons the worker.

For instance, consider this.

'The technicians not only build the engines; they also take responsibility for the work that middle management would normally do. "I was never valued that much as an employee in my life," says Williams. "I had never been at the point where I couldn't wait to get to work. But here, I couldn't wait to get to work every day. That's no BS!"'

Similarly, it shows the basic soundness of Axiom One. Your workers are unhappy because you are mistreating them. If you're unhappy at your job, it's usually because you're being abused.

'Two months later, Sims's boss sat in his Office in Evendale, just outside Cincinnati, and offered a slightly different perspective on GE/Durham's performance. "They have been producing the CFM engine for eight weeks," said Bob McEwan, 46, general manager of Evendale assembly operations. "In Evendale, we have been producing it for years and years. And in Durham, they are already producing it for 12% to 13% less cost than we are here.'

Humans, given freedom, produce better.

The factory assembly line is evil. And it's tragically easy to end. Nearly every factory in the world could be converted to the GE/Durham model, and anyone who cares to do so will immediately thrash their competitors in the marketplace.

At some point, I will discuss how this situation came about, how similar situations continue to arise today, and I'll enumerate the steps necessary to stop it.

Redefining Purpose

Even if things and processes have a transcendent purpose for which they're 'good' for following and 'evil' for contravening, we can't access this purpose directly, not through instinct, nor through logic.

Therefore, I propose a new definition of purpose, a completely functional one.

If it becomes obvious that a process's purpose cannot be fulfilled, it will be terminated. So if you find something that needs to be true so that no one will decide to terminate the process, then that is the purpose of the process.

Notably, all so-called objects can be rearranged, conceptually, into processes. This is partly because of decay, such as a hammer actually being an arrangement of atoms that are currently being hammerlike, but are proceeding inexorably toward a film of rotten wood and a rusty lump.

Partly, by using this new definition of purpose, we can talk about the process of owning a hammer, and using it for hammering. A hammer that's not used for the purpose of hammering isn't a hammer anymore. For instance you could use a hammer for a display, but if it's permanent, it's not a hammer anymore, but a decoration. The process of owning a hammer has ended, while the process of owning a decoration has begun.

In the case of the hammer, if the hammer breaks then it can't be used for hammering anymore. It will be thrown out. The process of owning a hammer will end. In the case of the hammerlike display, if it becomes ugly (and the owner is rational) then the hammerlike object will be thrown out.

Therefore, if the purpose of a human is indeed to be happy, then if it becomes obvious that a human cannot be happy anymore, then they will kill themselves. More often, perhaps their immune system will collapse and they will die of infection or senescence.

Similarly, using this definition, you can usefully analyze much more abstract processes, such as philosophies or political formulae.

If it becomes obvious that the purpose of a philosophy cannot be achieved, then that philosophy will be forgotten. Similarly, if it becomes obvious that the purpose of a political formula cannot be fulfilled, it will be discarded.

By working backwards, if you solve the relatively easy problem of, "What will cause this body of thought to be discarded?" you can work backwards to the purpose.

You can also play a game with this, by turning this method on non-artifacts. What is the purpose of a rock? Well, the rock isn't really owned, so it can't be discarded. Using this definition, we realize that talking about the purpose of natural objects is meaningless.

Alternatively, you can say that that since the rock can't be discarded, then its purpose is always fulfilled, no matter what it's doing or what happens to it.

Even further, you realize that for the universe to have a real purpose, it needs an owner. In other words, a God. Still, this is, as usual, a buck-passing scenario. If God owns the universe, who owns God? Notably, if your God is perfect, they cannot change, and thus can't be said to be owned at all, even by themself, which naturally nukes purposes further down the line as well. If God can be said to have no owner, then any purpose defined by God can't be said to be owned, and is thus more or less just an illusion. If your God is imperfect, then you have to find out what reflexive ownership means. The consciousness owns itself because it controls itself, but that means it defines its own purpose, which means the purpose is arbitrary.

Rocks are fun, eh?

Identity or Happiness?

Just a question I want to flesh out next.

If you had a choice between being yourself, the person you are now that you defend as yourself, and being happy, fulfilled, joyful, etcetera, which would you choose?

If you could slowly turn from yourself into happy?

If you had a hard choice, and you had to suddenly become someone totally different - someone happy?

If you were allowed to keep a few totally cosmetic quirks?

Which would you choose?

Physics: No Infinities

( Now with part 2)

I studied physics for three and a half years at university, just long enough to understand the stuff.

Unfortunately, I have found that, like most people, scientists are bad at logic-fu. Really bad.

This would obviously come as a shock to most scientists, and they would scoff. After all, supposedly their reasoning abilities are vital for their job.

To demonstrate my point of view, I would like to propose a new fundamental law of physics, on par with conservation of mass or Newton's Third.

The No Infinities Principle
The Principle states that anything that requires an infinity doesn't exist.

Said differently, it means that whenever a mathematical model of the universe goes to infinity, or can be rearranged to go to infinity, that equation is wrong.

Why does this demonstrate that scientists suck at thinking? Because it's completely obvious. To a physicist, an infinity always represents a mistake. They don't talk about it in class, and I suspect they don't talk about it at conferences either, but an infinity in the equations doesn't mean that a physical quantity is going to infinity. It means the equation has broken. Everyone just assumes this is true, and works accordingly - as it turns out, with unintentional good reason.

For instance, a physicist can say, "When does a neutron decay? At infinity." This is equivalent to saying, "Never." Similarly the place where parallel lines meet. When we say that a black hole's density is infinity, we mean that we have no fucking clue what's going on in there. Also, there are many different types of coordinate systems one can use to describe space, but some of them go to infinity at various points - and even if they perfectly describe the physics everywhere else, it means that at these points, it's wrong.

And yet...and yet...occasionally, physicists forget this.

For instance, the idea of an eternal universe is respectable. However, it can be debunked like so:

Assume time is infinite. Since time is relative, we can designate now as t=0.

Let us perform a transformation to go infinitely far in the past. In an eternal universe, this is possible.

Therefore, we are now at t=0-infinity=-infinity

There is a problem. There is no transformation that we can perform to get back to the present. t=infinity-infinity is undefined. In other words, the present is undefined in terms of the past.

For the layman, this means that any equation that describes the past cannot also describe the present, and vice-versa, because to find the relationship between two points in time, you have to perform a transformation.

Also, because the time t=0 is arbitrary, this is true for all points in time.

If time is infinite, time is undefined.

Which, given the nature of the No Infinities Principle, is exactly what you would expect. Infinite quantities are undefined.

Indeed, with infinite time, one would naturally expect that time would become meaningless. Any finite quantity would be swallowed up infinitely far before the present, and only time-independent phenomena would remain.

Additionally, the idea of an infinite universe - one that goes on forever in space - is also palatable. In fact, it is nonsense. In an infinite universe, there would be infinite matter. Therefore, there would be infinite energy, and small perturbations in the energy would be allowed.

Mathematically:

Energy=E_1=infinity.

Let's violate conservation of energy!

E_2=infinity+10,000,000GJ.
E_2=infinity=E_1

According to the math, we haven't actually violated conservation of energy. Therefore, in an infinite universe, conservation of energy would also be meaningless. I suspect space itself would be meaningless as well, pretty much exactly the way time would be, but can't as yet prove this.

There is, of course, the De Sitter horizon. Everything is accelerating away from us, it appears, which means that there is an event horizon in the cosmos. This is because of complicated General Relativity conclusions that I don't actually understand well. But basically, everything further away than the De Sitter horizon is accelerating so fast that light will never manage to cross the entire distance from it to us.

There is a small problem with the De Sitter horizon. The cosmos are expanding, but it's staying put. Energy can disappear behind it forever. This violates the law of conservation of energy. But, I hear you say, it's not really destroyed, is it? We just can't reach it anymore?

Ah ha! We can't tell the difference. We learned from Einstein's relativity that something that appears, for instance, foreshortened, is actually physically foreshortened, whatever it's 'rest length' is supposed to be.

If energy is disappearing forever, it's actually disappearing forever - being destroyed. It doesn't matter how or why, or even if it secretly still exists. Even black holes obey conservation of energy. Physics would collapse without it.

In fact we learn from physics in general that whenever two things appear to be the same, they are the same. There's no secret hidden variable that make things actually different.

For instance, we worked out the mathematical description for waves in water, and in air and so on. Later, I can't remember if it was Maxwell himself or if Einstein did it first, but we found the exact same equation when we combined Maxwell's equations in a specific way.

The problem is, we knew that waves in water were just an aggregate, emergent phenomenon. In reality there's no such thing as a water wave, just a bunch of water atoms moving in circles.

However, we quickly found that there doesn't appear to be anything for electromagnetism to wave around. It seems that it's a wave...of waves. Just sort of a wave in itself.

Nevertheless, the math is the same. They look the same, therefore, they are the same. A wave is a wave is a wave, even if we don't really know what a wave is.

So clearly, because modifying conservation of energy would literally bring physics to its knees, and we haven't had to bring physics to its knees to describe most of the universe, we can assume that if we can construct a system that violates conservation of energy, that system does not exist.

I can hear the distance rustlings of counter-arguments on this point, so while I can't definitively prove it, I find it very hard to believe that one such system is the whole physical universe.


That was rather longer than I intended, but there you go. Things look like what they are, and the universe can't be infinite.


I've now demonstrated two very obvious conclusion from the No Infinities Principle. This is a principle widely accepted by physicists, and yet no one, as far as I know, has brought up the fact that it means time and space are finite. Thus, we can conclude that they're fucked in the head, and also that the principle is sound.

Like conservation of energy and Newton's Third, the No Infinities Principle often manifests in surprising ways, almost like magic. At first glance, it seems like various conserved energies and various conspicuously missing infinities have little in common. It seems like all the proofs that it must be so are quite different and individual.

Yet, each time, you can predict with certainty that conservation of energy isn't being violated, but perhaps stealthed, without having to go through the tedious business of proving it. I submit that the same is true for infinities. Any physically relevant infinity that you can construct must not exist. It will always be so, but not necessarily obvious.

My first prediction is that black holes cannot exist. While clearly, something very similar exists, black holes as such cannot, because singularities are impossible.

However, anyone who's actually qualified in physics will find this unimpressive. I'm hardly the first to predict this.

However, there is a similar phenomenon that I haven't seen connected. I hope, for the sake of physicists, that they simply don't feel the need to mention this to undergrads. It would be very embarrassing for them if I am actually the first to formalize this.

Electrons also don't exist. They are point-like particles, in other words infinitely small. Also, their charge density is infinite, and the electric field at their core is infinite.

If you are a student of physics you will notice, dear reader, that the electron never, ever acts like a point particle. It is shielded by the uncertainty principle. Because the electron's position is smeared out over space, it's origin is similarly smeared out. The field will never actually go infinite, the charge density isn't ever actually infinite.

Two separate phenomena. Entirely different - one an aggregate formed from gravitational interactions, the other a fundamental particle with an electric nature.

One is shielded by an event horizon which, while theoretically things are happening behind, we can never cross, the other protected by a fundamental property of quantum mechanics. (Also, waves in general, incidentally.)

Both, however, preventing actual physical infinities. Hmm. Hmm!


I will mention one other prediction. Space must be quantized, because otherwise infinitely small distances can exist. While there's some speculation already that space may be quantized, by the No Infinities Principle it cannot be otherwise. In this case, it appears that a particle with enough energy, and thus a small enough wavelength, to probe below the Planck Scale becomes a black hole and swallows itself.


Elsewhere I will prove that the No Infinities Principle is equivalent to causality, which is equivalent to the fact that the universe is describable using math. If so, then A: there's no chance in hell I'm wrong and B: physicists really had their thumb up their butts not to formalize this before I did.

While I haven't studied other fields as comprehensively as physics, as I don't consider them as important to philosophy, it appears that their doctorate-holders are as gormless as the physicists.

Indeed, it's quite clear that not one single university course in existence teaches the ability to think. Quite a few may pretend to, but not one does. Given this environment, it is unsurprising that while professors are certainly intelligent and knowledgeable, they are horrendous thinkers.

Still, I usually welcome being wrong. Finding that I was wrong almost guarantees that I just became right, after all. If there are non-stupid objections to the No Infinities Principle, I will hopefully welcome them.

But frankly, my only real concern is that someone may have thought of it before me. However, I had to personally prove that time and space are finite. I find this reassuring.

Not for science, sadly. Our science is moribund. For philosophy. Battered and beaten, nearly stillborn, philosophy may finally be raising its head out of the mud.