DanielAugust 20, 2022 at 00:496425 views57 comments
Is it possible for something that has no parts, a unity/particular, to affect itself directly? Can a unity act on itself EDIT: directly? Elaborate concisely if you wish.
Comments (57)
absoluteaspirationAugust 20, 2022 at 01:03#7309700 likes
By "no parts", do you mean no separable parts or no parts at all?
Going with the latter interpretation, say we're dealing with a perfectly indivisible singularity. Now the question is: Let's say that over time, this atom transforms from state A to state B thanks to natural laws: A ---> B
If state B was reached because the atom was previously in state A, would that manner of causation qualify as "affecting itself" in the sense you intended?
By "no parts", do you mean no separable parts or no parts at all?
If by separable parts you mean that it has parts but they cannot be by any means separated (I'm aware this would be the literal meaning of "separable parts", I just wanna be as clear as possible), then I would say that by "no parts" I mean no parts at all.
If state B was reached because the atom was previously in state A, would that manner of causation qualify as "affecting itself" in the sense you intended?
Now, I will answer with another question. Could there be change in an entity that has no parts? What sort of change, or transformation, would this be?
Again, how can there be change when there are no parts? Please, please, please! Answer the question! Explain to me the process in which something changes when it has no part at all! What changes? In which property of this "simple"is there a variation of such nature that it can be said it experiences change? Change is of something, and it implies a "transformation", that takes place in this something, from one state to another that if able to affect its environment would affect it differently from its original state. What is different in one state compared to the other so that they affect their environment distinctly?
We ourselves are simples - entities with no parts - and we can change what mental state we are in.
So apparently we are in fact entities with parts because there is some distinction between global selfhood and particular states of mind that it is is useful to mention
Sun: Every second, the Sun's core fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, and in the process converts 4 million tons of matter into energy. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that almost all stars form by this process.
absoluteaspirationAugust 20, 2022 at 05:34#7310370 likes
Reply to Daniel I answered your question. The text you quoted was change in an entity with no parts. If you want a concrete example, a photon can spontaneously decay into an electron and positron pair. These are all fundamental particles.
absoluteaspirationAugust 20, 2022 at 05:38#7310410 likes
Reply to apokrisis If you grant that the self is an entity with no parts, which sounds questionable to me, then you could argue that the change in state in each step is an entity with no parts interacting with itself:
A ---> B ---> C ---> ...
absoluteaspirationAugust 20, 2022 at 05:39#7310420 likes
Reply to Agent Smith What about a photon decaying into an electron-positron pair?
Yes, but referring to an entity which is made by parts and acts thanks to them.
If you check the universe there are tons of entities with no parts which can interact and affect themselves directly. Stars are the main example and the sun is one of the biggest stars
If you grant that the self is an entity with no parts, which sounds questionable to me,
My ontology is structuralist and holds that all entities are hylomorphic processes. So I simply reject this view at root rather than merely thinking it questionable. :grin:
This applies even to fundamental particles. After all, even photons are composite in being a linear superposition of a weak hypercharge boson (B) and a weak isospin boson (W3) according to Standard Model effective symmetry breaking.
then you could argue that the change in state in each step is an entity with no parts interacting with itself:
A ---> B ---> C ---> ...
One could argue it. But fundamental physics would again caution against it. Contextuality rules in quantum theory.
As I argue in the other question thread, the systems view prevails. Everything is a holomorphic structure. So there can be no partless wholes or wholeless parts. Everything arises from a process of local and global interaction between material potential and formal constraint.
Reply to Daniel I am a mind, a simple thing. Now, being simple means having no parts. But it does not mean having no properties.
One of my properties is that I think. That, note, is a state of a thing. It is not the thing. It is a state it is in.
So, I - this simple thing, a mind - am currently in a state of thought. And indeed, I am in other states as well, and I am no less simple for that. I am not just thinking something, I am also desiring something.
But anyway, let's just stick with one state. I, a simple thing, am in a state of thinking about beer. Now I cause myself to think about wine instead. There. Note, I am still in one state, it is just that I have changed it from being a state of thought about beer to a state of thought about wine.
So apparently we are in fact entities with parts because there is some distinction between global selfhood and particular states of mind that it is is useful to mention
I don't know what you're talking about.
Does half a mind make sense?
No.
Minds are indivisible. They are the example par excellence of an indivisible thing.
And they can change their states.
spirit-salamanderAugust 20, 2022 at 07:46#7310720 likes
If one understands something in a very wide sense, so that no weight is put on the thingness in it, then indeed some unitary being is assumed by some theologians, which has no parts at all, but can affect on itself directly, namely by self-limitation. The universe would be a result of such self-restriction.
I was pointing out that you had divided the mind into its general selfhood vs its particular contents, thus contradicting your own claim.
absoluteaspirationAugust 20, 2022 at 08:29#7310770 likes
Reply to apokrisis In that case, you've rejected the premise of this question.
Regarding the photon: Its decay is in no way caused by the bosons of which it is a superposition. In fact, the bosons don't behave like physical components in any way you might imagine. They only "exist" as a mathematical characterization of the photon. My understanding is that you could describe the superposition as an attribute of the photon, like the redness of an apple.
Could you elaborate on why the bosons nevertheless qualify as "parts" in the relevant sense?
In that case, you've rejected the premise of this question.
Certainly I rejected it. But hopefully providing a solid motivation.
The OP posits the idea of the partless whole. I argued that this would be as nonsensical as making claims about wholeless parts. Parts and wholes only make sense as the reciprocal aspects of a system of relations.
This become clearer once we move out of an object oriented ontology and adopt a relational view. It is hard to see until we are using language that explicitly captures the idea of inverse relations, such as constraints and degrees of freedom, or integration vs differentiation.
So the OP starts with a misuse of language in my view. Rather than accept it on its own terms, I reframed it.
In fact, the bosons don't behave like physical components in any way you might imagine. They only "exist" as a mathematical characterization of the photon.
You are making wild guesses about how I would imagine things here. But Ive said Im an ontic structuralist on this. So I dont believe in material particles. It is a structure of relations that produces the observables we like to read off as a photon connecting A to B.
Could you elaborate on why the bosons nevertheless qualify as "parts" in the relevant sense?
They are parts in the gauge symmetry sense. They are differentiated while EWs SU(2) reigns but integrated once the Higgs breaks that symmetry in effective fashion to allow EMs U(1) to be a thing.
So photons and electrons are fundamental in the sense that they are where a cascade of symmetry breaking might eventually end, but not in the sense you may be suggesting of some unbroken wholeness that grounds the whole game of material existence.
The cosmos isnt composed of photons, electrons and protons. It arrived at them as the stable way to balance a collision of structural possibilities - the symmetries that define the Standard Model. They were the crud left as the hot soup of the Big Bang boiled away to its most enduring residues.
Reply to universeness This down and up refers to their spin right? I'm no physicist.
universenessAugust 20, 2022 at 15:07#7311500 likes
Reply to Daniel
My physics is limited as well but from my reading there is 'no particular reason' for the names given to the various quark types. Up and down has nothing to do with quark spin as far as I know.
The up and down quarks are the 'lightest' quarks, up is the lightest and then the down quarks.
The problem with the OP Quoting Daniel
Is it possible for something that has no parts, a unity/particular, to affect itself directly? Can a unity act on itself
is that any claim of a fundamental unit is still conjecture so the answer to your question imo is YES if you are convinced that we have identified mass or energy fundamentals and NO if you are not convinced.
Even if your answer is YES, a fundamental that changes state does so through a process but there is the concept of underlying quantum fluctuations and phenomena such as quantum tunnelling (The wavefunction may disappear on one side and reappear on the other side of a barrier), which when I read about them I personally don't garnish much understanding at all.
Minds are not made of their states. They 'have' states. They are not made of them.
So, by distinguishing between minds and their states one is not thereby dividing the mind.
Consider a lump of clay that is cuboid. It has six sides. But then it changes into a pyramidical shape. Now it has five sides. It has not been reduced by a sixth.
Minds are not made of their states. They 'have' states. They are not made of them.
Even the kinds of states are divided. Most would agree the mind is composed of visual states, auditory states, gustatory states, tactile states, and so on.
So even the divisions have divisions. And yet there is the opposing thing of a wholeness too. That is how the divisions can even exist as a positive contrast.
This is not puzzling from a systems science point of view. The dialectic of differentiation~integration is simply what is expected. Only variety can be combined in a cohesive and directed fashion.
Reply to apokrisis You seem to have missed the point. When the cube becomes a pyramid, has it been reduced by a sixth? Has some part of the clay been removed?
Aren't parts relative/abstract fictions linked to the value/perceiving apparatus of a kind of being/observer. Nothing really has (or does not have) a part that isn't relative to what conceives the the part as a part (or not part).
A unity is always within something which plays a necessary part in creating that unity. There are no absolute unities, only relative ones that break apart according to the various schemes/methods of part making.
Is one single atom of a nuclear isotope that decays a unity without parts? When the particle decays, does it act upon itself? Does the presence/fields of all other things (as parts) in the universe have no bearing on why/when/how that particle decays? It can't be a unity without parts if it decays, can it? Is time a part of that unity?
When the particle decays, does it act upon itself? Does the presence/fields of all other things (as parts) in the universe have no bearing on why/when/how that particle decays?
I just want to say that there are models of a Supreme Being that it is no thing at all. For example, Hegel asserts that absolute Being itself seems to be indistinguishable from nothingness. So God transcends every something in these mystical models. But he is still an absolute unity and simplicity. A universal principle or source of all multiplicity which transcends all multiplicity, qualification, and differentiation.
David Bentley Hart writes about this:
"For the Neoplatonist Plotinus (c. 204270), the divine is that which is no particular thing, or even no-thing. The same is true for Christians such as John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815c. 877) or Meister Eckhart (c. 1260c. 1327). Angelus Silesius, precisely in order to affirm that God is the omnipotent creator of all things, described God as ein lauter Nichtsa pure nothingnessand even (a touch of neologistic panache here) ein Übernichts." (David Bentley Hart - THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD. BEING, CONSCIOUSNESS, BLISS)
In some of these theological models of God, the simplicity directly affects itself - resulting in the creation of the world.
Check out the quantum Zeno effect. Just as the watched kettle cannot boil, the measured particle cant decay.
So we have experiments to show that a particle is an instability being stabilised. The holism of the context is what prevents it breaking up into some more entropic, less ordered, state.
It aint really about parts and wholes imagined as composites. It is about the (thermal) equilibrium balance between global constraints and local degrees of freedom.
In the Big Bang universe, everything is sliding down the hill to its Heat Death. A stable particle emerges at the temperature where there is some barrier preventing its immediate decay. It becomes a trapped scrap of hotness - a thermal island in a sea of increasing cold.
But decay can still happen if the particle can exploit quantum uncertainty to borrow enough energy for a short enough time to vault its barriers and gleefully rejoin the wider world that is doing the generalised spreading and cooling deal.
So the world left the particle behind, walled in on its energy island. But there is a constant possibility - if the particle is left isolated and unmeasured - of it grabbing enough energy to decay, and then repay its debt with interest (in the sense of it producing a world with an even greater entropy content).
So is the particle acted upon, or does it act upon itself?
The two are in fact entwined as I say. And the quantum Zeno effect shows that particles and environments are in a dynamical balancing act. Crud can get stuck behind negentropic barriers as a result of historical accidents. A neutron exists because it ran out of antineutrons to be annihilated by. It is doomed to exist as a fundamental particle forever.
Or does it? In fact isolated neutrons have a half-life of about 10 minutes as they can cheaply borrow the energy to decay into a proton, electron and antineutrino. A collection of parts that increases the disorder of the cosmos as the second law requires.
It is only once further environmental constraints are added - like being bound into a nucleus by the strong force - that this decay is halted because the neutron aint now isolated but closely watched.
Or to be more accurate, the neutron is no longer merely contemplating its fate as a trapped heat wanting to rejoin an ever cooling environment. It cant make the supreme sacrifice of jumping its barriers to merge with that which is cosmically fundamental. Instead it has to hang around with a bunch of nosy neighbours that keep it from jumping. It is stuck with being part of a higher level of composite crud-ness until a black hole eventually comes to its rescue.
universenessAugust 21, 2022 at 01:15#7313440 likes
When the particle decays, does it act upon itself? Does the presence/fields of all other things (as parts) in the universe have no bearing on why/when/how that particle decays?
No, a process is involved but that process is also 'of the universe,' nothing external to the universe is involved. The question becomes 'is the universe more that the sum of its parts?' I think the answer is no.
universenessAugust 21, 2022 at 01:25#7313480 likes
A neutron exists because it ran out of antineutrons to be annihilated by. It is doomed to exist as a fundamental particle forever.
A neutron is not fundamental, it is made up of two down quarks with charge ? 1?3 e and one up quark with charge + 2?3 e . Like protons, the quarks of the neutron are held together by the strong force, mediated by gluons.
Reply to apokrisis And remember that I answered it. Yes. A thing can cause a change in itself. We are things and we cause changes in ourselves. Note too that if every change in a thing has to be caused by some other change, then one would have to posit an actual infinity of changes. As there are no actual infinities in reality, we can conclude that some changes are caused not by some other change, but by a thing. It's called substance causation.
My physics is limited as well but from my reading there is 'no particular reason' for the names given to the various quark types. Up and down has nothing to do with quark spin as far as I know.
Pro tip: up and down quarks were called that because they formed an isospin doublet.
So again, how does your lump of clay change itself from a cube to a pyramid? Does it have a change of mind or sumthink?
The question is whether something can cause a change in itself, yes?
The answer is 'yes'.
We can demonstrate this, in the manner that I just did. I'll do it again and you can tell me which premise is false.
1. If there are changes in things, the changes have causes
2. There are changes in things
3. Therefore, the changes in things have causes
5. If the changes in things have causes, they do not have an infinity of causes
6. Therefore, the changes in things do not have an infinity of causes
7. If all the changes in things are caused by changes, they will have an infinity of causes
8. Therefore, not all changes in things are caused by changes
9. If a change is caused, it is caused either by another change or by a substance
10. Therefore, some changes in things are caused by a substance.
Now, substance causation is causation by a thing. Not by an event. So, not by a change. But by a thing.
To the question, then, whether a thing can change itself, the answer is demonstrably 'yes'.
What you are now wondering is 'how'. That's a different question.
The answer is 'by doing so'.
That too is the answer to a similar question about how a change causes a change.
Not everything requires explanation (if it did, nothing could be explained).
Note too that one does not have to be able to answer the 'how' question in order to answer the 'does it happen' question.
I do not know how the tapping of my fingers on my keyboard produces these words on the screen, much less how you're able to see them too. Yet that does occur and I have good evidence it occurs. That evidence is not undercut by my inability to explain 'how' it is occuring.
So, again: can a thing cause a change in itself. Demonstrably yes. How? I don't know. I don't even know what you'd want by way of explanation there. I assume you want a question begging one in which I explain how the thing caused the change by undergoing a change.
5. If the changes in things have causes, they do not have an infinity of causes
Why not?
But anyway, Ive already argued that casualty acts in the opposite way. It acts to constrain possibilities, to stabilise instability.
That is the holistic framework I am working from. A hylomorphic theory of substantial being where material states are self-organising, and so indeed the cause of their own existence. The material aspect of being is not some inert clay but infinite free possibility that then imposes stabilising limitation on itself because much of that free possibility cancels itself away to nothing.
Standard QFT-based particle physics, in other words. :smile:
Reply to apokrisis The argument i gave you is a good one. It is deductively valid and appears sound too.
You ask why we cannot have an infinity of actual causes. It generates contradictions, that's why. You can't have an actual infinity of anything, because half of infinity is infinity
Anyway, if you think you can have an actual infinity of something, then the burden of proof is on you to explain how.
But also you framed your position in terms of clay changing its shape, which led you smack into a contradiction over such change being effected by substantial being. That was pointed out. You pretended nothing had been said. :down:
Reply to apokrisis No you didn't. Identify a premise you believe to be false and then provide actual evidence it is false by constructing a deductively valid argument that has its negation as a conclusion and premises that seem self evident to reason.
Oh, and you clearly didn't understand the clay example. Your view is that the clay was divided when it went from a six sided shape to a five sided one. Presumably you think a pizza gets bigger the slices it is cut into.
Reply to apokrisis The clay example was designed to show you that it is a mistake to confuse changing something's properties with taking something away from the thing.
The argument I provided demonstrated that substance causation exists. That is, substances can cause events without doing so by means of a change You have said nothing to address that argument.
Pro tip: up and down quarks were called that because they formed an isospin doublet.
Sounds quite arbitrary to me! what has isospin got to do with the dimension up/down?
From wiki:
[i]In nuclear physics and particle physics, isospin is a quantum number related to the up and down quark content of the particle. More specifically, isospin symmetry is a subset of the flavour symmetry seen more broadly in the interactions of baryons and mesons.
The name of the concept contains the term spin because its quantum mechanical description is mathematically similar to that of angular momentum (in particular, in the way it couples; for example, a proton-neutron pair can be coupled either in a state of total isospin 1 or 0). But unlike angular momentum it is a dimensionless quantity, and is not actually any type of spin.[/i]
Perhaps you are the one experiencing bum bite's you don't understand!
But unlike angular momentum it is a dimensionless quantity, and is not actually any type of spin.
The story is much more interesting than that. Isospin was at first conceived as an analogy in that it used "up~down" spin maths to argue for some unknown quantum property that could "rotate" protons into neutrons.
That was a bust.
But then it reappeared as a fix to make a doublet/triplet structure out of up, down and strange quarks - an effective symmetry that connected them as they were all "close enough" in their quantum mass.
And next this strong sector version of isospin became even more properly spin-like when the same maths machinery was employed in the weak sector the trapped chiral world of left-handed matter particles which rotate into each other via weak force exchanges.
So spin in its familiar spacetime basis of ISpin(3,1), or classical angular momentum, sets up some basic symmetry maths. But QFT is about the internal gauge symmetries that structure the Standard Model particle zoo.
The U(1) quantum spin of QED is already "not spin" in the concrete Newtonian sense, just in a permutation symmetry sense. And that sense got extended to the gauge symmetries of the SU(3) strong sector, and SU(2) electroweak sector.
Hope that clears things up for you!
universenessAugust 22, 2022 at 05:48#7317760 likes
Comments (57)
Going with the latter interpretation, say we're dealing with a perfectly indivisible singularity. Now the question is: Let's say that over time, this atom transforms from state A to state B thanks to natural laws: A ---> B
If state B was reached because the atom was previously in state A, would that manner of causation qualify as "affecting itself" in the sense you intended?
Quoting absoluteaspiration
If by separable parts you mean that it has parts but they cannot be by any means separated (I'm aware this would be the literal meaning of "separable parts", I just wanna be as clear as possible), then I would say that by "no parts" I mean no parts at all.
Quoting absoluteaspiration
Now, I will answer with another question. Could there be change in an entity that has no parts? What sort of change, or transformation, would this be?
Again, how can there be change when there are no parts? Please, please, please! Answer the question! Explain to me the process in which something changes when it has no part at all! What changes? In which property of this "simple"is there a variation of such nature that it can be said it experiences change? Change is of something, and it implies a "transformation", that takes place in this something, from one state to another that if able to affect its environment would affect it differently from its original state. What is different in one state compared to the other so that they affect their environment distinctly?
So apparently we are in fact entities with parts because there is some distinction between global selfhood and particular states of mind that it is is useful to mention
[sigh]
:up
Origami-folded paper? Fluctuating vacuum? Knotted string? :chin:
Yes. There are some examples inside astronomy.
Sun: Every second, the Sun's core fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, and in the process converts 4 million tons of matter into energy. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that almost all stars form by this process.
A ---> B ---> C ---> ...
Haven't you answered your own query?
Yes, but his own parts. The sun acts and affects directly itself.
I'm way in over me head mon ami! Sorry.
Yes, but referring to an entity which is made by parts and acts thanks to them.
If you check the universe there are tons of entities with no parts which can interact and affect themselves directly. Stars are the main example and the sun is one of the biggest stars
And some of them are...
My ontology is structuralist and holds that all entities are hylomorphic processes. So I simply reject this view at root rather than merely thinking it questionable. :grin:
This applies even to fundamental particles. After all, even photons are composite in being a linear superposition of a weak hypercharge boson (B) and a weak isospin boson (W3) according to Standard Model effective symmetry breaking.
Quoting absoluteaspiration
One could argue it. But fundamental physics would again caution against it. Contextuality rules in quantum theory.
As I argue in the other question thread, the systems view prevails. Everything is a holomorphic structure. So there can be no partless wholes or wholeless parts. Everything arises from a process of local and global interaction between material potential and formal constraint.
One of my properties is that I think. That, note, is a state of a thing. It is not the thing. It is a state it is in.
So, I - this simple thing, a mind - am currently in a state of thought. And indeed, I am in other states as well, and I am no less simple for that. I am not just thinking something, I am also desiring something.
But anyway, let's just stick with one state. I, a simple thing, am in a state of thinking about beer. Now I cause myself to think about wine instead. There. Note, I am still in one state, it is just that I have changed it from being a state of thought about beer to a state of thought about wine.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Does half a mind make sense?
No.
Minds are indivisible. They are the example par excellence of an indivisible thing.
And they can change their states.
If one understands something in a very wide sense, so that no weight is put on the thingness in it, then indeed some unitary being is assumed by some theologians, which has no parts at all, but can affect on itself directly, namely by self-limitation. The universe would be a result of such self-restriction.
I was pointing out that you had divided the mind into its general selfhood vs its particular contents, thus contradicting your own claim.
Regarding the photon: Its decay is in no way caused by the bosons of which it is a superposition. In fact, the bosons don't behave like physical components in any way you might imagine. They only "exist" as a mathematical characterization of the photon. My understanding is that you could describe the superposition as an attribute of the photon, like the redness of an apple.
Could you elaborate on why the bosons nevertheless qualify as "parts" in the relevant sense?
Certainly I rejected it. But hopefully providing a solid motivation.
The OP posits the idea of the partless whole. I argued that this would be as nonsensical as making claims about wholeless parts. Parts and wholes only make sense as the reciprocal aspects of a system of relations.
This become clearer once we move out of an object oriented ontology and adopt a relational view. It is hard to see until we are using language that explicitly captures the idea of inverse relations, such as constraints and degrees of freedom, or integration vs differentiation.
So the OP starts with a misuse of language in my view. Rather than accept it on its own terms, I reframed it.
Quoting absoluteaspiration
You are making wild guesses about how I would imagine things here. But Ive said Im an ontic structuralist on this. So I dont believe in material particles. It is a structure of relations that produces the observables we like to read off as a photon connecting A to B.
Quoting absoluteaspiration
They are parts in the gauge symmetry sense. They are differentiated while EWs SU(2) reigns but integrated once the Higgs breaks that symmetry in effective fashion to allow EMs U(1) to be a thing.
So photons and electrons are fundamental in the sense that they are where a cascade of symmetry breaking might eventually end, but not in the sense you may be suggesting of some unbroken wholeness that grounds the whole game of material existence.
The cosmos isnt composed of photons, electrons and protons. It arrived at them as the stable way to balance a collision of structural possibilities - the symmetries that define the Standard Model. They were the crud left as the hot soup of the Big Bang boiled away to its most enduring residues.
Wine on beer makes you feel queer.
My physics is limited as well but from my reading there is 'no particular reason' for the names given to the various quark types. Up and down has nothing to do with quark spin as far as I know.
The up and down quarks are the 'lightest' quarks, up is the lightest and then the down quarks.
The problem with the OP
Quoting Daniel
is that any claim of a fundamental unit is still conjecture so the answer to your question imo is YES if you are convinced that we have identified mass or energy fundamentals and NO if you are not convinced.
Even if your answer is YES, a fundamental that changes state does so through a process but there is the concept of underlying quantum fluctuations and phenomena such as quantum tunnelling (The wavefunction may disappear on one side and reappear on the other side of a barrier), which when I read about them I personally don't garnish much understanding at all.
There are minds and there are states of mind.
Minds are not made of their states. They 'have' states. They are not made of them.
So, by distinguishing between minds and their states one is not thereby dividing the mind.
Consider a lump of clay that is cuboid. It has six sides. But then it changes into a pyramidical shape. Now it has five sides. It has not been reduced by a sixth.
Even the kinds of states are divided. Most would agree the mind is composed of visual states, auditory states, gustatory states, tactile states, and so on.
So even the divisions have divisions. And yet there is the opposing thing of a wholeness too. That is how the divisions can even exist as a positive contrast.
This is not puzzling from a systems science point of view. The dialectic of differentiation~integration is simply what is expected. Only variety can be combined in a cohesive and directed fashion.
Remember the question.
So this lump of clay. Does it change itself, or does it get changed?
A unity is always within something which plays a necessary part in creating that unity. There are no absolute unities, only relative ones that break apart according to the various schemes/methods of part making.
Is one single atom of a nuclear isotope that decays a unity without parts? When the particle decays, does it act upon itself? Does the presence/fields of all other things (as parts) in the universe have no bearing on why/when/how that particle decays? It can't be a unity without parts if it decays, can it? Is time a part of that unity?
I don't understand this; specially the part in bold.
@absoluteaspiration @apokrisis
Could you address his questions, if possible.
I just want to say that there are models of a Supreme Being that it is no thing at all. For example, Hegel asserts that absolute Being itself seems to be indistinguishable from nothingness. So God transcends every something in these mystical models. But he is still an absolute unity and simplicity. A universal principle or source of all multiplicity which transcends all multiplicity, qualification, and differentiation.
David Bentley Hart writes about this:
"For the Neoplatonist Plotinus (c. 204270), the divine is that which is no particular thing, or even no-thing. The same is true for Christians such as John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815c. 877) or Meister Eckhart (c. 1260c. 1327). Angelus Silesius, precisely in order to affirm that God is the omnipotent creator of all things, described God as ein lauter Nichtsa pure nothingnessand even (a touch of neologistic panache here) ein Übernichts." (David Bentley Hart - THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD. BEING, CONSCIOUSNESS, BLISS)
In some of these theological models of God, the simplicity directly affects itself - resulting in the creation of the world.
Check out the quantum Zeno effect. Just as the watched kettle cannot boil, the measured particle cant decay.
So we have experiments to show that a particle is an instability being stabilised. The holism of the context is what prevents it breaking up into some more entropic, less ordered, state.
It aint really about parts and wholes imagined as composites. It is about the (thermal) equilibrium balance between global constraints and local degrees of freedom.
In the Big Bang universe, everything is sliding down the hill to its Heat Death. A stable particle emerges at the temperature where there is some barrier preventing its immediate decay. It becomes a trapped scrap of hotness - a thermal island in a sea of increasing cold.
But decay can still happen if the particle can exploit quantum uncertainty to borrow enough energy for a short enough time to vault its barriers and gleefully rejoin the wider world that is doing the generalised spreading and cooling deal.
So the world left the particle behind, walled in on its energy island. But there is a constant possibility - if the particle is left isolated and unmeasured - of it grabbing enough energy to decay, and then repay its debt with interest (in the sense of it producing a world with an even greater entropy content).
So is the particle acted upon, or does it act upon itself?
The two are in fact entwined as I say. And the quantum Zeno effect shows that particles and environments are in a dynamical balancing act. Crud can get stuck behind negentropic barriers as a result of historical accidents. A neutron exists because it ran out of antineutrons to be annihilated by. It is doomed to exist as a fundamental particle forever.
Or does it? In fact isolated neutrons have a half-life of about 10 minutes as they can cheaply borrow the energy to decay into a proton, electron and antineutrino. A collection of parts that increases the disorder of the cosmos as the second law requires.
It is only once further environmental constraints are added - like being bound into a nucleus by the strong force - that this decay is halted because the neutron aint now isolated but closely watched.
Or to be more accurate, the neutron is no longer merely contemplating its fate as a trapped heat wanting to rejoin an ever cooling environment. It cant make the supreme sacrifice of jumping its barriers to merge with that which is cosmically fundamental. Instead it has to hang around with a bunch of nosy neighbours that keep it from jumping. It is stuck with being part of a higher level of composite crud-ness until a black hole eventually comes to its rescue.
No, a process is involved but that process is also 'of the universe,' nothing external to the universe is involved. The question becomes 'is the universe more that the sum of its parts?' I think the answer is no.
A neutron is not fundamental, it is made up of two down quarks with charge ? 1?3 e and one up quark with charge + 2?3 e . Like protons, the quarks of the neutron are held together by the strong force, mediated by gluons.
No lecture involved, just discussion, do you have a lot of physics quals?
So again, how does your lump of clay change itself from a cube to a pyramid? Does it have a change of mind or sumthink?
Quoting universeness
Pro tip: up and down quarks were called that because they formed an isospin doublet.
The question is whether something can cause a change in itself, yes?
The answer is 'yes'.
We can demonstrate this, in the manner that I just did. I'll do it again and you can tell me which premise is false.
1. If there are changes in things, the changes have causes
2. There are changes in things
3. Therefore, the changes in things have causes
5. If the changes in things have causes, they do not have an infinity of causes
6. Therefore, the changes in things do not have an infinity of causes
7. If all the changes in things are caused by changes, they will have an infinity of causes
8. Therefore, not all changes in things are caused by changes
9. If a change is caused, it is caused either by another change or by a substance
10. Therefore, some changes in things are caused by a substance.
Now, substance causation is causation by a thing. Not by an event. So, not by a change. But by a thing.
To the question, then, whether a thing can change itself, the answer is demonstrably 'yes'.
What you are now wondering is 'how'. That's a different question.
The answer is 'by doing so'.
That too is the answer to a similar question about how a change causes a change.
Not everything requires explanation (if it did, nothing could be explained).
Note too that one does not have to be able to answer the 'how' question in order to answer the 'does it happen' question.
I do not know how the tapping of my fingers on my keyboard produces these words on the screen, much less how you're able to see them too. Yet that does occur and I have good evidence it occurs. That evidence is not undercut by my inability to explain 'how' it is occuring.
So, again: can a thing cause a change in itself. Demonstrably yes. How? I don't know. I don't even know what you'd want by way of explanation there. I assume you want a question begging one in which I explain how the thing caused the change by undergoing a change.
But I have now questioned your answer to that question. So again, where is the cause of the change in form If the substantial matter is a clay?
There must be some reason you thought this was a good argument.
Quoting Bartricks
Why not?
But anyway, Ive already argued that casualty acts in the opposite way. It acts to constrain possibilities, to stabilise instability.
That is the holistic framework I am working from. A hylomorphic theory of substantial being where material states are self-organising, and so indeed the cause of their own existence. The material aspect of being is not some inert clay but infinite free possibility that then imposes stabilising limitation on itself because much of that free possibility cancels itself away to nothing.
Standard QFT-based particle physics, in other words. :smile:
You ask why we cannot have an infinity of actual causes. It generates contradictions, that's why. You can't have an actual infinity of anything, because half of infinity is infinity
Anyway, if you think you can have an actual infinity of something, then the burden of proof is on you to explain how.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. You need to refute the argument I gave you.
I did. You couldnt follow. So it goes. :up:
But also you framed your position in terms of clay changing its shape, which led you smack into a contradiction over such change being effected by substantial being. That was pointed out. You pretended nothing had been said. :down:
Oh, and you clearly didn't understand the clay example. Your view is that the clay was divided when it went from a six sided shape to a five sided one. Presumably you think a pizza gets bigger the slices it is cut into.
Your evasions are pitiful. The nature of the transformation is irrelevant. The source was what was in question.
Again, how does the clay change its shape from a cube to a pyramid? That was the claim you made.
The argument I provided demonstrated that substance causation exists. That is, substances can cause events without doing so by means of a change You have said nothing to address that argument.
Sounds quite arbitrary to me! what has isospin got to do with the dimension up/down?
From wiki:
[i]In nuclear physics and particle physics, isospin is a quantum number related to the up and down quark content of the particle. More specifically, isospin symmetry is a subset of the flavour symmetry seen more broadly in the interactions of baryons and mesons.
The name of the concept contains the term spin because its quantum mechanical description is mathematically similar to that of angular momentum (in particular, in the way it couples; for example, a proton-neutron pair can be coupled either in a state of total isospin 1 or 0). But unlike angular momentum it is a dimensionless quantity, and is not actually any type of spin.[/i]
Perhaps you are the one experiencing bum bite's you don't understand!
The story is much more interesting than that. Isospin was at first conceived as an analogy in that it used "up~down" spin maths to argue for some unknown quantum property that could "rotate" protons into neutrons.
That was a bust.
But then it reappeared as a fix to make a doublet/triplet structure out of up, down and strange quarks - an effective symmetry that connected them as they were all "close enough" in their quantum mass.
And next this strong sector version of isospin became even more properly spin-like when the same maths machinery was employed in the weak sector the trapped chiral world of left-handed matter particles which rotate into each other via weak force exchanges.
So spin in its familiar spacetime basis of ISpin(3,1), or classical angular momentum, sets up some basic symmetry maths. But QFT is about the internal gauge symmetries that structure the Standard Model particle zoo.
The U(1) quantum spin of QED is already "not spin" in the concrete Newtonian sense, just in a permutation symmetry sense. And that sense got extended to the gauge symmetries of the SU(3) strong sector, and SU(2) electroweak sector.
Hope that clears things up for you!
The up and down labels assigned to quarks are quite arbitrary.
Perhaps this repetition will help you!