Re: Single atom universes, etc.

["John M" <***>]

Judith,
a beautiful post you wrote!
did it occur to you that the term "unit" is derived from 'more than one'?
I wrote an "ode" about my naive ontology in 1991 and started with
'nothingness' which by its ow definition leads to 'somethingness' (allow me
to skip the rest of it here as not anymore held applicable by myself).
Nothingness, when spelled out (=considered) has a meaning, like: the 'lack
of anything'. Which implies some 'anything' to consider. We know the vacuum
only, if we know some non-vacuum.(Consider deep-sea fish not realizing the
concept of water).
I agree that there are no paradoxes in the (material or else) world, - just
our misunderstandings do get us into "paradoxical" troubles.
Mathematics is not supposed to have 'references' (a variant maybe to
'referents?) in its completely abstracted domain, requiring only a paper and
pencil as its material world (~Hilbert) IF memory needs help... - the
difficulties arise when the math-results are applied to "referents" in the
(material?) world. The forced "meaning-transforms". To apply math formalism
to restricted models and consider them as natural systems.

I find ALL thought experiments unreliable games (including the EPR) - with
arbitrary conditions, believing, however, the conclusions of irreality into
tenets of  reality. (Sorry, John, that pertains to the "one atom universe"
as well. )

Including and concurring with the idea from JJK's remark below,   'western'
(reductionist) science is a study of the snapshot-models (things, as JohnK
said), excluding dialectics, "good only to blurr the 'clearcut' definitions"
<G>.
I concur with your next to the last par below, while I feel the last one is
based
on (the ubiquitous and natural) reductionistic views of the world and
science we carry. I think "dynamical" means progressing in time and I have
NO idea how to figure out "time" (the reason why I stayed out from Tim's
line so far in spite of my big mouth).  The constipation may come from the
static (snapshot) position in a dynamic situation.
The "relation" is a qualifier - a difference- used also as comparison -
APPLIED!
(I used to call it: 'acknowleged') as the definition of (my) "information".
We all think reductionisticly and it really takes a rape of our mind to
abstain from the good old comfortable reductionism. Indeed we cannot do it
altogether.

John Mikes



----- Original Message -----
From: "Judith Rosen" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 7:46 PM
Subject: Re: Single atom universes, etc.


> It's interesting to compare the observations that unity or wholeness is a
> sum and nothingness is the lack of anything that makes up unity. In
> mathematics, zero is a number. A singularity. An entity. A set with zero
in
> it isn't the same thing as an empty set, mathematically speaking. When
> mathematicians try to divorce mathematics from any "referents" (as my
father
> referred to them), they wind up with weird, unresolveable paradoxes. It
was
> my father's contention that there are no such thing as paradoxes in the
> material world.
>
> It was the lack of referents in the theoretical "universe with a single
atom
> in it" that my resistance was about, by the way. Anything we think we can
> infer about such a universe is likely to be an "optical illusion" of the
> mind's eye, much like mathematics creates under specialized and artificial
> circumstances.
>
> Similarly, when studying a dynamical system,  it is common sense that any
> relationship between two parts-- that has observable effects-- means that
> the relationship is an integral "part" of the system. It has to be given
the
> same weight in study as the two parts themselves or there is little hope
of
> true understanding. Is it just because I was raised by Robert Rosen that
all
> this seems OBVIOUS to me? Why does science have such constipation over
it???
>
> Judith
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Kineman" <***>
> Even nothing-something must include
> > the dash, which is the relationship, so the most basic percept actually
> > involves 3 aspects; the two aspects being related, and the relationship
> > itself. Western science threw the relationship out of the model and kept
> > the idea of things. Then the only models you can create are dynamical
> > ones, i.e., models that relate the things. But we need models that can
> > relate relationships too, so they have to be put back into the system.
> >
> > JJK
> >