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[cr. 2025-05-11T23:51:14Z]
relativistic determinism. relaterminism. rela...terministic? reterministic. reterminism.
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[cr. 2025-05-12T00:20:08Z]
relaterminism and Wavebuilder -
so, say we have a crude physics engine. we can call it a wave machine.
this thing operates a very particular way. it takes in two objects and it gives the general result of putting those two things together.
we can code any two things to produce any other thing, such as coding "red" and "blue" to produce "violet", or coding "rooster" and "dragon" to produce "cockatrice". both of those sign equations are arbitrary. they show the ingredients of a dictionary definition, but they are not yet physics equations.
it would be most useful and interesting to apply this thing to factual statements about reality so it can slowly evolve into a predictive model.
one thing this model is probably sufficient for is chemical equations. we could code into the model that `NaCl + H2SO4` produces `NaHSO4 + HCl`, or simply "sodium salt dissociates", depending on what kind of information we consider the most important.
we do not have to assume there is exactly one result for any two items, but in general, there will always be _one cell on the table of combinations_ for any two items.
this allows us to begin constructing a simple algorithm for guessing the result of any two items being combined.
if we have input the item "NaCl" as containing items such as "sodium salt" and "chlorine compound", and the item "H2SO4" as containing items such as "acid" and "sulfate compound", then there is a certain matrix of possible results of combining sodium chloride with sulfuric acid, which grows larger the more useful descriptors there are. [*p]
```
sodium salt chlorine compound ...
acid (acid salt?) (chlorine acid?)
sulfate compound (sodium-sulfur compound?) (nothing in particular?)
...
```
this table or matrix of combination results has some interestingly _quantum_ characteristics to it.
think about the notion of two fundamental particles interacting. in cases such as seas of virtual particles, two fundamental particles of particular categories can come together and convert into any number of other combinations of particles, somewhat similar to the way chemical elements swap around within chemical equations to produce different molecules. as well, several fundamental particles that should not be different from each other can collide, such as several photons, and this has particular results even if it does not lead to a conversion into any other substances, vaguely analogous to how two tennis balls can collide and go different directions, or one could empty two glasses of water and watch the two volumes of water mix into each other.
when some small number of particles interacts at the quantum scale, the particles do not present a particular easily-observable position, and the most we can know about each of them is that they have some particular smeared outline of where it may be possible to meaningfully interact with them. according to some models, when you toss these smeared wave functions at each other, there can be some remaining uncertainty over the outcome until further interactions with surrounding objects produce more definite results. this is one of the definitions of quantum entanglement — that interacting particles together has not yet removed the fuzziness about where they currently are and what they're currently part of.
until we fill it in with some sort of observed or calculated result, the wave machine table sure looks like a superposition.
assuming we have put good information into it, consisting of descriptions of things or components of things which would actually have some kind of meaningful physical interaction with each other, it is at least entirely _possible_ that one of the cells in the matrix will be the key to exactly the correct calculation to find what the interaction of the two things should result in. if our information about each item on each axis ends up more limited, the prediction will be fuzzier, like a picture of quantum entanglement propagating way up toward the macroscopic level. as our information about each item on each axis ends up richer, with clearer and more mathematical descriptors, the results become more sharply defined, until they look something more like a simple multiple-choice list of a few different possible outcomes. perhaps one of the outcomes will be perfectly obvious based on experience, or produce some kind of exact calculation of the result we observe in practice, in light of the way some information becomes dropped or approximated as one looks down at the same phenomenon from larger physical scales.
is this superposition grid anything more than a fun exercise, where we can play with wave machines and think about different parts of things interacting?
well, to a small extent, this approach has been used practically in real-world physics calculations.
the Schrödinger equation for atoms is the logical result of all knowledge about atoms up to that point, but it is nearly impossible to actually compute as atoms get bigger. this led to physicists approximating the calculation with matrices.
I think it may have been the Dirac equation that was solved that way actually? [*d] I don't have very deep knowledge of these mathematics, only that there were effects in the atom going back and forth and you had to create a weird quantum physics multiplication table to actually pull them apart. it was a matrix. it expanded out into an equation where multiplied things were being added or subtracted. I can definitely find the exact thing I was looking at again later.
I think this hydrogen and helium atoms thing together with the power of the wave machine leads up to a pretty damning argument for "relativistic determinism".
I need just a bit more mathematics to hope to start the proof for real. the bridge isn't there yet from the wave machine to how you "replace differential equations". but I'm getting close. I'm getting close to the simple task of arguing that history is physical and historical materialism can have a mathematics.
last thought:
creativity illustrates to us how reterminism is possible.
take two art creators who know nothing about each other. give them a grid where they combine a couple of concepts. see if you can get one of the rooms of people to predict how the other room of people will interpret the combination of the concepts. see if, given a tiny bit of information about the other room, creating a wider grid with more descriptions helps them predict the result better.
people say there is no way to describe creativity and how more concepts are created, but it isn't true. there are a limited number of ways to think of how particular concepts that are available to people combine. you can even predict what people will create if the situation is simple enough.
if you want a better illustration of reterminism, look at creativity in science.
having particular amounts of knowledge about reality affects how many viable hypotheses people can create. as knowledge about the universe goes up, people become more able to correctly guess what underlying interactions are producing things. our universe can be made of a lot of fuzziness that appears "indeterministic" from a regular old differential-equations way of seeing things, but that seemingly noisy universe ultimately leads up to things we can predict when we throw different bits of knowledge at each other.
that is really weird. is the universe actually indeterministic, or have we just defined _determinism_ wrong?
I have strong suspicions it's the latter. I think there's just a bit of confusion about what is determining things and when.
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[cr. 2025-05-12T09:35:16Z]
Punnett squares. they look like wave machine grids.
two sets of chromosomes are semi-randomly distributed with a few crossover events. then all the chromosomes interact to produce an embryo.
the internal development of the embryo is more deterministic, at least until it gets out and increasingly has things to interact with. the combination of the chromosomes is _reterministic_.
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[cr. 2025-05-10T22:23:01Z]
throwing darts toward a new prediction mathematics -
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(response) [cr. 2025-05-10T22:23:01Z]
This quantum handshake model really makes me think of general relativity. [*h]
The point of relativity was that you can view the universe from any reference frame and it still makes sense, even if the contents of the universe are stretched out enough that when you stand in one of the reference frames light has so much trouble getting to the other part that the two parts experience time differently. For both reference frames to experience time passing there effectively has to be a "handshake" between them.
So the issue here might be that we should be thinking of the future spatially, where each reference frame is the other reference frame's future, just because one definition of physics is the exchange of fundamental interactions between separate objects. It doesn't matter if the exchange of interactions is some mess of virtual particles that's hard to study directly. It matters that the photons or gauge bosons or virtual particles, etc., are going back and forth in the space between two interacting objects. And we may discover that time is nothing more than that: time is created because interactions happen, _out of_ interactions plus relativity, because for some unknown reason exchanging things between reference frames always happens in time.
As for the mathematics? Maybe physicists have to find some relativistic counterpart to differential equations.
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[cr. 2025-05-11T03:41:34Z]
a differential equation is a field of changes that can be used to solve for a particular physics equation.
ordinary physics equations typically describe the relationship between two quantities at each point in time over time. but it is often easier to measure how a quantity changes at each moment relative to another quantity, producing a field of changes which can then become the derivative for the ordinary equation that predicts that process.
this is the part of differential equations that is relatively simple. what is not simple is what they actually mean and how we are supposed to interpret them.
it is very tempting to say that because a differential equation integrates into a function over time, that this time-function represents the actual material reality. but this may be misleading.
Einstein was able to show that the local experience of time stretches or contracts depending on the speed things are traveling at, and it is generally not possible to speak of time as passing consistently across the universe without reference to some particular point experiencing an event at some other point.
having this knowledge about what time really appears to be, it is strange we still all put up with zeroth-order physics equations tracing events "through time" as if time were a universal thing.
perhaps there is a reason that differential equations are more intuitive for directly modeling reality than time equations. maybe the interactions between things are as important to understanding how systems evolve as the path objects take through time in some particular reference frame.
"determinism" is already a fuzzy thing. it's only the simplified regression line for the real-world interactions between two or more objects that we actually observe.
objects are often predictable, even though their exact movements can be chaotic, and chaotic even though their overall track can be predictable.
this leads to some very strange and possibly nonsensical questions
what if a time equation actually had some sort of relativistic data structure below it — in general, one example of a "relativistic" object or function is a Lorentz transform.
do relativistic data structures have derivatives/integrals? is there a way to squash particularly simple interactions into a time equation anyway, even if it won't work for every kind of interaction?
what would it be like if you tried to express the event of something hitting a wavefunction and changing the quantum object using relativistic data structures? is the whole problem with "measurements" that we are trying to put multiple objects into one equation that best describes a single object?
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[cr. 2025-05-12T22:22:20Z]
is there a data structure which is like a wave machine grid but continuous?
assume everything in the data structure is a straightforward mathematical object like an integer. we're not doing quantum physics yet; whatever is in the rows and columns can undergo mathematical operations like addition or subtraction easily and predictably.
but assume you made the grid continuous. each side of the grid is like a real number line, though not necessarily infinite. it's something like a number range.
when you create a grid of things, that can be conceptualized as a matrix operation on two 1-dimensional matrices.
what do you call it when you do that but the 1-dimensional matrix is continuous?
when you do matrix multiplication part of the definition is mapping the rows in one matrix to the columns in another matrix. there is... a word for that in set theory. it's a mapping. binary relation!
matrix multiplication is defined using a _binary relation_ between the rows and columns.
oh god a mathematician definining binary relations just showed how undirected graphs can ultimately be collapsed into binary relations between two sets, and I don't want to think about that just yet [*b]
okay. I think one general way to say that two continuous lines of numbers are being connected and compared in some way _without specifying what operation they're doing_ is that they are a function.
that doesn't get to the whole description of what the wave machine is doing but it does get us part of the way.
some relations between two sets can be functions. some relations are not functions.
in algebra classes, it's pretty typical to say many-to-one relations are not functions. we rule out relations that don't look like graphs of a y-axis variable over time. and in doing that we basically rule out relaterminism from our math classes. it's strange it works like that when the basic process to discover relaterminism only needs a regular binary relation. one part of the steps of this thing is a regular function. one part is not a function.
if the wave machine contained only neat, fully-known, fully-described things, it would be a function taking x and y and combining them with some simple operation such as y = x + 1, y = x^2, and so on.
but there's something really distinct about those functions. they all assume you can use x on its own to get something, and they don't actually combine an arbitrary x and y.
what's it called when you have two number lines, and as the number lines go on you take 1 + 1, 2 + 2, and all the things in between. there has to be a name for that. it's like, a three-dimensional graph. you draw a two-dimensional grid, and you use the z axis to plot the actual answer to combining the two numbers. this is what the wave machine is doing.
so what's the set theory speak for an operation thing that plots itself as a three-dimensional graph?
it seems like one name for it is a _multivariable function_.
I think the essence of what I'm saying is that real physical processes are multivariable functions, and we squash them down to single-variable functions because it's easier to teach.
this leads to a weird bias where we tend to passively believe that individual objects drive themselves, when it's not actually true. for humans and vertebrate animals it may look believable for a moment because the vertebrate animal consists of many interacting parts. but for an inanimate object it quickly starts to look suspect. when we throw a rock and plot a graph of that rock flying, is the rock actually driving itself? it isn't. even Newton knew that the position-over-time graph is an interaction between the rock and the throwing force, or the rock and gravity.
take a simple parabola function that could model an idealized trajectory of a rock. this function will be some variation of `y = x^2`. but the real equation should take a form more like `x^2 - y = 0`. real processes in nature don't have the right side set to something constant, they're calculations of whatever the combination of two things actually produces.
nature is a multiplication table. nature is like `z = f(x,y) = xy`. and we all have a natural bias toward setting z to 0 and solving for only one case of the overall process, just as you would take a two-dimensional graph and set y to 0 to create even simpler equations like linear functions.
it's completely ridiculous we've all done this. because to even define the simplest of mathematical operations you need a three-dimensional graph. multiplication: `z = xy`. addition: `z = x + y`. and so forth. a large number of mathematical operations are binary operations, and every binary operation is a three-dimensional graph. I swear that in the future, grade school textbooks are going to include at least a few isometric pictures of three-dimensional graphs printed onto pages.
------
[*p] a word on "AI": the notion here that the cockatrice sign equation "isn't physics" is very deliberate and important. there is (or is going to be) a whole chapter about why large language models absolutely cannot do the thing that is being proposed here, and so this is probing the method for scrapping large language models and _actually doing it correctly_. [*g]
I have various problems with the notion that "AI" is a simple issue specifically about "machines versus the human".
but, what's going on here is the notion of taking objects and constructing some sort of entire field of mathematics which calculates using material objects. as a field of mathematics, you could do it on paper, and it would be as "human" or as computerized as any existing field of mathematics already is. [*p2]
=> youtube.com/watch?v=zS2WMCimRRY *h. Teleology: Rethinking How We Do Physics - Hossenfelder 2025 ;
=> youtube.com/watch?v=diOnqXE_upY *c. The Most Overlooked Idea in Quantum Physics [Causality] - Barandes ;
=> youtube.com/watch?v=wIDDkmuGdZk *b. binary relations example ;
=> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation *d. Dirac equation ;
;
=> 1733514347 v5.2 chapters/ relativity ; 1101 relativity
=> 1743656980 v5.2 revision scraps/ "free will"/ determinism in physics ; 1111 AE shenlong FreeWill
=> 1709246354 *p2. v4.3^/ toward a new Marxist mathematics ; 6951 plus
=> 1705453888 *g. v5.1/ communication and signifiers ; 1211 gato
;
== research.moraleconomy.au/index.php?title=Philosophical_Research:MDem/5.1r/1101_differentiate
:: cr. 2025-05-11T03:41:34Z
; 1746934894
:: t. differentiate
:: t. v5-1_1101r_differentiate
; v5.1 scraps/ differential equations and relativity
; v5.1r^/ differential equations, relativity, "relaterminism"
; r = scraps, rN = revision scraps, V = revisions, ^ = posted to lithoGRAPHica thesis portal
