Index 
Senses Animal Souls Epistemology
Physics: (labeled 6/17) Modern physicists, it seems, are obsessed with “information” as a keystone to “reality”, i.e possibility which “collapses” as information (any “interaction") is exchanged. “In form”, the meaning of information at least etymologically, as opposed to the formless. A triangle is a form, so is a word, and speech itself is a “form”, in this case a form of communication. Is the “form” of speech the compression and relaxation of air-molecule density or perhaps the movement they cause upon impinging my eardrum? Or the waving of cilia? Or the resultant firing of neurons in my brain? Or the “images” of words resulting from such cascades? So is an image “in form”? I think physicists tie knowledge to form, just as Plato did. In the modern case "form" can only be known in space-time accessible only through mathematics which lives outside the cave. In this sense, information is anything that has or had or can have an effect on matter in space-time, anti-matter, “dark” matter, and “dark” energy included. Some dismiss “had” or “can have” maintaining information to be restricted to current effects (E = mc2 notwithstanding, which expressed as E = kg • (m/s)2 shows E α 1/s, or time and E α v, so velocity α time and other simultaneity problems of relativity, added August 23, 2016) noting of course they are at least for any “observer” current effects of previous (past, as in “passed by”) causes now extinct, past causes at least within the “space-time cone” of any observer. Anything “in form” can be and therefore is a cause or an effect. Always lurking around the edges of this perspective the question of whether information must be perceived to be knowable. Physicists place “observers” in all sorts of hypothetical imaginary situations and places. “The laws of physics appear the same to all observers” no matter how they define their reference frame, their “perspective”, perhaps Euclidean, perhaps Riemannian. So if we, observers of universes, go away, do the laws go away? Oh I almost forgot, God solves that problems nicely, she observes all with or without “us” humans; maybe spiders do as well with or without us. Pond scum? Yeah, maybe; granite? My doubt is beginning to have sway. Machines? Part of me say, “Probably”, others, “They are just granite”. I just watched a tiny jumping spider, a gorgeous creature, moving about its universe totally aware of its surroundings in its universe; totally unaware of me. I am outside its universe. Random things occur in the spider’s universe: a strand comes loose, a gnat entangles itself, a sparrow gobbles it up. Along came a beautiful flying thing trying in vain to go where the window blocked its way, over and over again, maybe pursuing the bright infrared glow or my window or perhaps dark infrared haven from the summer solstice heat (96F). The flying thing paused between some attempts to clean its wings, body and antennae. Such a fastidious, clean creature, for cause. Dust motes, organic and inorganic cling like they do to my electric fan blades, and seem to appear daily on my polished furniture. At my scale such dust is but a tiny nuisance, an instigator of my vain attempts at “proper” appearances, a polished desk. But for the flying creature those same dust motes are troublesome annoyances at the space-time scale of the beating of its wings, viscosity and such, turn those motes into the equivalent (using the physicists’ term, symmetry) baseballs glued to a jet fighters wing. Give the aerodynamic engineers that problem, maybe 50 or so baseballs, or shrapnel tears at random spots along the planes surface. They will probably have told us that is will take more energy to achieve the same speed, maneuverability, and stability as without the “baseballs”. However stability may improve. The “roughness” provided by dimples on a golf ball will distribute average air-transition velocities across a greater distance, diffusing the gradients (averages at distances normal to the surface) and increasing response times to changing boundary conditions, to use an old computer modeler’s term, thereby stabilizing but slowing responses, maneuverability sacrificed also. However out intrepid fly has it even worse, the motes don’t accumulate evenly about the body, perchance building up at a 2:1 ratio from wing to wing, or wing insertion to wing tip, and changing all the time, a very difficult, in fact currently “impossible” engineering problem (i.e. in the language of differential equations, the “exact” solution”). But we (and God, if you wish) can conceptualize and obtain an approximate, or “good enough” solution. I think that is a large part of the difference between engineers and scientists. God solved the problem with bumblebees who carry gobs and gobs of motes in the “fur”, but still keep their wings immaculate, as our delicate fly on the window. Engineers solved it with attach helicopters, jets, and blimps and trawling nets, but we still can’t match the speed, maneuverability, and stability of the fly on my window, where the spider lives, oblivious to my babblings. |