Our universe was not measured until intelligence evolved on Earth (as far as we can tell atm). Intelligence is the ability to imagine two or more futures, and act to make the future more likely that enables it to persist. Human intelligence drove our species towards ever more secure arrangements (until the discovery of fossil fuels) and part of that was possible through trade, the exchange of resource without conflict. Essential to that trade was counting. Humans started counting items, volumes, weights, time. That was the origin of numbers.
Numbers where positive mostly, basically one amphore of olive oil was different from two amphore of olive oil. Symbols where invented to represent that difference. The reader of the symbols could imagine the amphores and feel the difference. Just like you can feel the difference between imagining eating one Burger King’s Whopper of ten Burger King’s Whoppers. Don’t throw up.
Zero did not exist. But empty store houses did at times exist, unused ship, dry wells, things that felt like zero so to say. It was added and was quite an invention. Later negative numbers where used. The art of mathematics took shape, as people tried to enumerate the stars and calculate the course of stars. Mathematics became a powerfull tool to not only recognize the present state of things, but also simulate the future.
If we stick to the basic intuitive functions of math, so addition, substraction, multiplication, division, we can see that these model events in reality. Addition : Combine stores, Substraction : Sell goods from store, Multiplication : Repeat labour with a similar result. Division : Share goods among a group. Even without any knowledge of chemistry, physics or biology this kind of symbolization and simulation of possible realities was usefull.
At some point mathematics became a thing in itself, a world to live in. Its predictive powers and its conincidences motivated people to form sects when it was combined with philosphy (the precursor of al natural sciences). Quantity had alure. Big numbers still do, we see news of a billion dollar investment in XYZ, it registers : This is a looot of money (which most people confuse with resources or wealth). The game was turned around, reality is in its fundament mathematical, we just don’t know how to mathematically represent all of it yet! I don’t believe so. It is actually impossible to represent reality in mathematics, as I will explain later.
To see where the world of mathematics is diverging from reality we have to go very deep into physics, but let’s take a simpler example : Repeating fractions. What happened is that humans developed a process to calculate divisions. You take 10/3, you find 3 x 3 = 9 is almost 10. You have 1 remaining. Then you say I can divide by 3 but then I first divide 1 by 10. So that’s 0,9 and I represent that as 3.3, then I am left with 0,1 which I can divide by 10 and then by 3 again, finding 3.33, and this never ends. It never ends because I have the algorithm of division by 10 which keeps yielding something to divide. This all happens entirely in the mathematical universe (Mathematica), which is governed by rules. You could say it goes on for infinite digits. That is true in Mathematica, but the result stops representing reality pretty quickly. We can not keep cutting up a piece of gold in 3 repeatedly for an infinite number of times. This is no shock, the math was just a model to simulate possible outcomes, it is not reality.
We can also take a square root of 2. This is the length of a diagonal of a square with sides 1. The setup is already a projection, because you can make a perfect titanium block with two sides of 1 meter for example, but you use a standard, then you switch to perfect mathematica where you symbolize the length as “1”. You have a process of taking the square root which is a model of how you would go about measuring the length of the diagonal in reality. You take a piece of wire with one side to the ‘origin’ and the other having a pencil attached and you draw a circle segment until you hit the ‘x axis’ (floor), then you measure the floor length or estimate it. Or you go to maths, you take a number you can multiply like 1,4 times 1,4 which is 1,96, so you are left with 0,04, so it has to be more than 1,4. Of course you use the simulation tool for multiple additions to find out how close you are. If you take a piece of wood, you will be able to put the spot that is square root of 2 from one end in say inches or cm within an interval you mark. SQRT(2) cm exists. But its quantity is irrational, meaning the number never ends. Our calculator stops at 1.41421356237 or so but you can go on. Same with PI. Reality however very much ends. The fascination with irrational numbers is really a confusion because the endlessness of SQRT(2) comes from not stopping to calculate it. It is the (seeming) endlessness of a procedure. Humans make SQRT(2) irrational, the number itself does not exist, there is no place we can actually measure it in reality.
The above divergence between mathematica and the universe is largely ignored, which means we think things may be real but we are hallucinating them because mathematics predicts them. The validity of mathematics however is pure coincidence, literally a coinciding of the mathematical simulation born out of procedural execution of mutations with the real universe. We don’t have negative speeds or mass. We see processes that run into ‘limits’ that are real world impossibilities, but mathematically we can imagine a world where the limit is passed, and spend time exploring it. We are travelling inside our own imagination. To keep the coincidence mathematicians had to invent complex numbers and many other tools in their simulation tool box. Quaternions, complex calculus, all to improve the simulation and its outcomes. It proves highly succesfull and extends even to the quantum mechanical world, where the predictions are statistic and uncertain. You can see that if I role a dice and you give me a probability distribution of the outcome, you will never be able to actually predict a real outcome. The ‘intelligent’ use of the mathematics ends where you can make a choice for a better outcome based on your simulation.
The fundamental building blocks of our universe are not particles or waves, but the medium that wave is stored in and propagates in. ‘Medium’ is most likely a misleading term, because to us it may seem like a medium (in which you can make and detect waves). It is most likely a computational process which we simply have not found an explanation for yet. Pysicist think there are multiple media, or fields as they call it. Their math allows them to make predictions of likelyhoods of events in fields, which is fantastic. The math can never capture the calculation process that creates the dynamics of fields. You can say “but we can calculate the wave form of a electromagnetic wave”. No you really can’t because you can never use the information to actually capture a wave in its exact phase or something.
An example of the mental overreach of mathematics and modelling of physics is Maxwells Demon’s experiment. Its a thought experiment where we would have two rooms with gas molecules where we where able to open and close a -one molecule- door (controlled by a demon) so that we let the fast molecules move to one of the rooms and block the slow ones. This would create a thermal gradient between the rooms which could then be used to extract energy.
The reasoning about this experiment is imho quite shallow. It goes into what the demon thinks etc. The problem is how do you see a molecule at high speed coming when you have this door. Part of the answer is, well you can’t. Its between all the other molecules in brownian movement. The demon can not control a door to let it through because it can’t see it coming. At the same time you could spontanously select the fast molecules. This happens when you suck a vacuum above water. The fast water molecules can escape the mutual attraction (van de Waals) and enter the thin air and become water vapour.
The above shows that you get better results in trying to simulate the actual reality as is, (at the scale that is persistent enough) than to look at mathematical or abstract information processes based on formulas. The confusion and expansion of the imagination caused by wrongfully overlaying a simulated world (mathematica) over reality can be quite large.
The computation that I think happens to create our universe is one between ‘nodes’ pushing outwards. The pushing creates a spherical form that likes to have a volume in a non dimensional space. The space has no dimensions because it is too dynamic to measure a straight distance in. Also the spherical space is just a result of enough mutual pushing between nodes. The nodes can collapse (two into one) under ‘pressure’ from other nodes. The mystery is how they find each other so they can push on each other (with a single point or line of contact). Energy is the ability of a node to emit more lines. A node can thus contain all the energy in the univese and take up zero volume in a zero dimensional world. The result of these nodes and their constant pushing is a liquid, that has similarities with a real liquid or an ocean of tiny spheres unver very high pressure (I wrote about this before). This all happens on the sub Planck scale.
An electron is a complex swirl in a node liquid, a photon is a collapse of nodes that propagates accompanied by wave distortions of the liquid of nodes.
It seems particles in quantum dynamics form from dynamics of this liquid, swirls and interactions between the creation of new nodes and the pushing between them. It is possible to imagine flows of the nodes which do not interact, forming barriers which can be of complex shape. energy (the pushing) can not cross through these barriers because it is always directed perpendicular to it. There is nothing else at that scale. Dimensions do not exist, but the flow of the nodes and their fields can regularize into a grid that can only be traversed along three directions, hence our three dimensional world. It is a result of the computational preference for pushing at short distances in a spherical direction (although I don’t know exactly how you come to a limited 3 dimensions that way). Waves, particles all exist in this liquid of nodes (or liquids if you believe the physicists).
The above view means you can’t count the nodes, you can only interact with them in the aggregate. We don’t really understand the calculations that could underlie the pushing outward against other nodes, where it starts. We can look for ways to make the movement of the nodes more macroscopic, like to create a worm hole, but that as we all know requires massive amounts of energy. This is because these nodes never stop trying to push against each other.
Maybe quantum computation becomes a way to model this fundamental level of reality, but maths is unfit. The fact mathematica has to be adapted and extended to facilitate simulation of every more detailed reality (with a bit of cop out when probablilities are used), means it should not be believed at face value. It is not the basis of our univers, although some process of calculation seems to be. I claim that the expansion of our universe is because the nodes push out against ever less counterpressure, as more space is created. Eventually all the nodes will be some what equidistant, but you can easily see that the dynamics of the calculations (especially below the level where it radiates through the node network) may never seize.
More of this kind of thinking can be found with Thad Roberts and others, but he doesn’t want to speculate on the nodes level.
