Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cognition is discrete There's little evidence even of this, except in the trivial sense that language (minus prosody) is composed of discrete units.
It is discrete insofar as we're talking about sequences of thoughts, ie., reasoning. What offends the minds of some people is the world might not be like their mind at all. They want always to analogise everything to Reason. Everything should be countable, everything should be knowable, etc.
Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
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Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cognition is discrete There's little evidence even of this, except in the trivial sense that language (minus prosody) is composed of discrete units.
It is discrete insofar as we're talking about sequences of thoughts, ie., reasoning. What offends the minds of some people is the world might not be like their mind at all. They want always to analogise everything to Reason. Everything should be countable, everything should be knowable, etc.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> continuity of spacetime is a convenient approximation I disagree, and there's no evidence for this. This is computer science leaking out; physics has no formulation of spacetime in discrete terms, and indeed, all of physics presumes continuity. In QM, the space of wavefns is infinite-dim continuous, and if wasnt, QM wouldnt be linear. Cognition is discrete, but the world is continuous.
> the world is continuous Is it though? Does it matter one way or the other? Do we think reality is the math in some way, or is the math a really darn good model of the reality?
What matter is a subjective topic. What we all have in common is logistics constraints. So if some people set as a goal something that requires to settle if reality is more easily handled when modeled in continuous or discrete manner for logistical reasons, then it this scope it matters. But whatever you settle on, human brain is thus built that it can always assume that the perfectly fitting model is only valid in its scope which is built on top of an other more subtle level of reality which is on it’s part better modelized with an antithetic approach.
Now, on a very personal out of blue opinion, I fail to see how any causal series might happen without an underlying continuous flow of event. I mean, supposing causal discontinuity is to my mind as relevant as supposing that universe as it is right now, actually just appeared, without anything we can think about it being relevant, and in the next instant could be completely different or nonexistent since universe is not bound in any remote way to what we might expect on our delusional just created sense of causality.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#74My proudest moment in high school was getting a 5/5 on the calculus based AP Physics C exams at 15 with no calculus and only rudimentary algebra knowledge at the time. That experience permanently colored my thinking, and made me much more open to practicing thorough visual imagination as a way to solve problems. I found that practice useful all the way through my EE degree's vector fields courses a decade later. I th…
> continuity of spacetime is a convenient approximation I disagree, and there's no evidence for this. This is computer science leaking out; physics has no formulation of spacetime in discrete terms, and indeed, all of physics presumes continuity. In QM, the space of wavefns is infinite-dim continuous, and if wasnt, QM wouldnt be linear. Cognition is discrete, but the world is continuous.
Here are some quotes from "Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity", Rovelli and Vidotto (slightly redacted). I suggest the whole chapter 1, in particular 1.2 to get an idea of why fundamentally spacetime may be discrete.
"In general relativity, any form of energy E acts as a gravitational mass and distorts spacetime around itself. The distortion increases when energy is concentrated, to the point that a black hole forms when a mass M is concentrated in a sphere of radius R ∼ GM/c^2, where G is the Newton constant. If we take L arbitrary small, to get a sharper localization, the concentrated energy will grow to the point where R becomes larger than L. But in this case the region of size L that we wanted to mark will be hidden beyond a black hole horizon, and we lose localization. Therefore we can decrease L only up to a minimum value, which clearly is reached when the horizon radius reaches L, that is when R = L. Combining the relations above, [..] we find that it is not possible to localize anything with a precision better than the Planck length (~10^-35 m). Well above this length scale, we can treat spacetime as a smooth space. Below, it makes no sense to talk about distance. What happens at this scale is that the quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field, namely the metric, become wide, and spacetime can no longer be viewed as a smooth manifold: anything smaller than the Planck length is “hidden inside its own mini-black hole”."
"The existence of a minimal length scale gives quantum gravity universal character, analogous to special relativity and quantum mechanics: Special relativity can be seen as the discovery of the existence of a maximal local physical velocity, the speed of light c. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted as the discovery [..] that a compact region of phase space contains only a finite number of distinguishable quantum states, and therefore there is a minimal amount of information in the state of a system. Quantum gravity yields the discovery that there is a minimal length lo at the Planck scale. This leads to a fundamental finiteness and discreteness of the world."
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#75Only tangentially related, but I highly recommend watching Veritasium's YouTube video on electricity if you're curious as to how Maxwell's fields create the current / amp abstractions in EE [1]. It's a common misconception that electrons or current transfer energy. In reality it's the electric field that exists between the wires that is doing the heavy lifting, the electrons in the wires are just controlling the fiel…
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#76Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> continuity of spacetime is a convenient approximation I disagree, and there's no evidence for this. This is computer science leaking out; physics has no formulation of spacetime in discrete terms, and indeed, all of physics presumes continuity. In QM, the space of wavefns is infinite-dim continuous, and if wasnt, QM wouldnt be linear. Cognition is discrete, but the world is continuous.
It is true that there is no experimental evidence, but I think there are some convincing arguments that something must happen at the Planck scale (for very short distances) in a full quantum-gravity theory. Here are some quotes from "Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity", Rovelli and Vidotto (slightly redacted). I suggest the whole chapter 1, in particular 1.2 to get an idea of why fundamentally spacetime may be discrete.…
It may be the case that there's a minimum length beyond which "no meaningful laws of physics apply", but it really says nothing about whether real numbers are indispensable in the formulation of physics, or about whether spacetime is continuous.
There being a minimum length doesnt mean that everything is a discrete multiple of this length, or that space is broken into units of it, or that objects have to be aligned on grid boundaries defined by it.
Whenever people try to do philosophy of physics the inevitable place everyone lands at is a series of false equivocations, often caused by the language of physics being ambiguous and polysemous. But "minimum length" here does not mean a sort of grid length.
Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#78Re: Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
#79My proudest moment in high school was getting a 5/5 on the calculus based AP Physics C exams at 15 with no calculus and only rudimentary algebra knowledge at the time. That experience permanently colored my thinking, and made me much more open to practicing thorough visual imagination as a way to solve problems. I found that practice useful all the way through my EE degree's vector fields courses a decade later. I th…
> continuity of spacetime is a convenient approximation I disagree, and there's no evidence for this. This is computer science leaking out; physics has no formulation of spacetime in discrete terms, and indeed, all of physics presumes continuity. In QM, the space of wavefns is infinite-dim continuous, and if wasnt, QM wouldnt be linear. Cognition is discrete, but the world is continuous.