Earthlinks

Philip Franses

Abstract

As Michael Kosok writes ‘The field of immediacy is a predifferentiated ground‑state serving as the context relative to which formation, differentiation, and categorization have meaning when they are regarded as activities of creation… of forms being formed.’[i]

The root of physics

Throughout the history of physics, the way the relationship of individual to world has been interpreted, has determined how mathematics has been turned into the world picture of physics. Newton and Leibniz with the same mathematics of the calculus came to opposing world pictures through the different basis of relationship of individual to world. Newton applied the wholeness of intuition to gain insight into the logic of processes. Leibniz on the other hand identified the wholeness of monads by a logic that characterised its living reality.

The simple procedure of calculus arrives at a calculation of instantaneous change that allows a system to be evaluated, considered and developed in terms of energy, mass, acceleration.

At the beginning of modern physics, the two co-founders of calculus competed for dominance as to which world-picture the mathematics should be applied. Both imagined they had stumbled upon an absolute world-description: Newton of mechanics; Leibniz of the wholeness of monads.

For Newton calculus applied to the inert bodies of matter and described how forces interacted with bodies essentially resistant to change. Identity was conceived as the static inhabitancy of physical law. For Newton the world would like to be at rest and has to be wrought out of that state by forces implying change.

For Leibniz, calculus applied to the innate capacity for change and described how interactions between participants, brought about the monad, the wholeness of being transcendent over change. Identity emerged through phenomena. For Leibniz, the world was in change, seeking completion, to come to rest in the monad.

When Einstein’s relative perspective of the observer toppled the notion of the absolute world, Newton’s mechanical picture was the natural dominant interpretation to which Einstein’s logic was applied and compared against. Yet equally it moderated the monad of wholeness cast absurdly in its extreme as an isolated perfection, in Leibniz philosophy.

As Reichenbach says: ‘The system of causal ordering relations, independent of any metric, presents therefore the most general type of physical geometry. If rigidity and uniformity were to disappear, the causal chain would still remain as a type of order. Although everything is in continuous flux, there is a structure discernible in this flux. It is striated and can be resolved into chains that define a strict topological order.’

‘While we thus see in the causal theory of space and time the philosophical result of the theory of relativity, we wish to point out that this idea of a causal space-time order was conceived long before the advent of the theory of relativity. It was none other than Leibniz who developed in his ‘Initia rerum mathematicorum metaphysica’ the basic ideas of this conception. It is the most remarkable that Leibniz, the genuine philosopher, was able to understand the nature of scientific knowledge to such an extent that, two hundred years later, a new development of physics and an analysis of its philosophic foundations confirmed his views.’[ii]

In the celebration of Einstein’s revolution of Newtonian mechanics, the implications for Leibniz’s monads were ignored. This failure was compounded when quantum theory arrived explicitly addressing wholeness at its philosophical foundation. Quantum theory provides the detailed understanding how different approaches to wholeness addressed into the future of possibility, may be integrated about a solution sensitive to each. It was assumed, following Newton, that this outcome related to an observation extracting the sense of wholeness into our causal subject-object picture. It missed Leibniz’s path that left wholeness in place to hold possibility in the fulfillment of an ongoing wholeness.    

‘“Participator” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics; it strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says. Even with the lowly electron one must participate before one can give any meaning whatsoever to its position or its momentum. Is this firmly established result the tiny tip of a giant iceberg? Does the universe derive its meaning from “participation”? Are we destined to return to the great concept of Leibniz, of “pre-established harmony” (“Leibniz logic loop”), before we can make the next great advance?’[iii] (Misner, Thorne, Wheeler)

World and measurement

The world-views of physics of the twentieth century revolve around the central tenet of how information is extracted.  All the four known forces of physics are deduced from the issue of local freedom, to do with measurement.

The macro-picture of the world contains a freedom in its micro properties. Each local point can be transformed without affecting the structure of the theory. When these local transformations obey a universal symmetry, then they allow the capacity for an actual physical effect to manifest between different parts of the system. In this way forces are arrived at completely naturally as symmetries upholding the local freedom in the description of a system.

The freedom of the construction of space and time in measurement respective to the absolute speed of light is an example from Einstein’s relativity. This returns a macro-picture of the world, based on the relativity of perception. Einstein smoothed out the relativity of perception by a regulatory force of the responsiveness of a space-time geometry to matter. This deduction of force, as the universal realignment of the local freedom in definition of space and time, gives a description of gravity far improving upon Newton’s setting of gravity within a literal interpretation of space and time, absolutely conceived.

In quantum theory, described on the plane of complex numbers (real plus imaginative dimension) there is even greater freedom to imagine a local transformation of coordinates, which has no effect on the theory itself. This allowed Weyl to found Gauge Theory (or measurement theory) positing electromagnetic potential as the compensation of the world picture to incorporate into a physical effect the latent information in the local freedom in measurement. Gauge theory was later further applied to incorporate the strong and weak forces that hold together the nucleus as corollaries to the freedom in measurement being compensated by a physical force.

The basic strategy is the same. A freedom of measurement (and hence in Shannon terms, a potential for yes/no question) is integrated into a universal picture where this freedom is worked out as a force that can be seen as the cause of the informational source. There is thus implicated in local freedom a consequence of universal wholeness and symmetrical coherence. In normal physics, the wholeness is taken to lie on the side of the material manifest world, balancing for the unpredictability of observation. In our approach wholeness is implicit in the question the participator asks of the world and physics finds the elemental oneness attached to the phenomena.

The potential whole nature is included in the description of phenomena as part of the imaginative involvement of being. The universal level of coherent wholeness describes how the content of these natures makes itself real in a symmetric statement of potential. Real encounter names those seekers who have committed their wholeness to the future.

The double perspective of science is found in the work of Chris Clarke[iv], mathematics professor, until recently at Southampton University. Chris Clarke makes the jump from a science of knowledge to one of knowing. Wholeness as impetus for experience is bounded to a greater calling in the symmetry of its inclusion. Possibility selects itself in the imaginative realm so as to realize the unit that is wholeness in the real.

Making the present

The calculus of differential equations abstract a numerical value of change by letting the actual distance over which the change is measured tend to 0. This paradigm of reductive change is replaced by a holistic conception of inclusions, where operations of transformation of separate potentials aggregate together into a realised action that has a proof of identity 1. It is recognised from any logical test as being unique and autonomous to itself.  

This type of logic is already known to quantum theory, where the wave equation replaces the variables of a classical theory with operators. Each potential transforms every other potential. An action is quantified according to a percentage of how statistically its involvement in the transformations adds up to a likelihood of being.

Transformations resolve when the common potential they represent finds a clear action that proves in actuality their authenticity to be. In quantum theory this is the action that defines measurement to an observer, at which point the potential wave collapses. We seek to unify the arising of being known from quantum theory into the properties of relativity. It is required that the emergent present of quantum theory exists in relation to the light definition by which time frames of relative participators are mutually synchronised. At the point at which transformations of potential commit to an actuality, the bridge between future and past is crossed; the new present marks itself as the origin of light, the currency in relativity of immediate happening.

Light stands between the conditionality of connections of possibilities exploring a mutual involvement and the actuality of a single outcome that proves the aggregation as viable existence. Quantum theory is dropped in at the centre of relativity as providing the core of the origin of light as a feature of immediacy. In doing this quantum theory no longer dissolves at the stage of laboratory measurement, potentials for transformation are defined in their immediacy through single lines of actualisation naturally in relation to other systems of potential.

Science is hereby transformed from dealing only with the exchange of information from systems actually present, to inferring connection between the future potential and past arising of systems each manifesting a capacity of informational assertion in single actualisations. The test that distinguishes the event of realization is then the expression of light as the mark of immediacy between the connections of potential influences and the verification of actuality, sanctifying a new present, a new beginning.

The transcendent nature of the future validation is what makes immediacy a living dynamic between logic and actuality. Immediacy intervenes between the freedom of the inner being to imagine itself and the universality of action to measure the contribution of the logical input into a physically staged outcome. Once one has granted immediacy as a valid reference for a universal continuum of event, then the continuum is self-revelatory of the inner balance of potentials that will equip a mutual unfolding.

Nucleation of a new cycle

Wholeness in the individual casts all that has been before in a new transformation of wholeness. Where physics sees the electron inhabiting an atom, guarantor of material existence, wholeness of the electron transforms the world at every point anew into an exhibition of wholeness of the atom, of which the electron is a part. Strings of molecules, called DNA, loosely hold the wholeness imagined as life, the continuity of its message. Existence is able to transform the wholeness through its individuals.

In the theory of the atom according to the standard model, the nucleus is the inner sanctum of the observed world, where matter is guaranteed. However in allowing the multiplicity of the freedom of informational capacities, nucleation endorses the freedom of individual assignments. Nucleation gives conclusive meaning in the working of the whole, refining individual significance revealed within a collective act. 

The forces that hold together the different protons and neutrons in the nucleus are themselves described by a three-dimensional gauge freedom. The three-dimensional freedom of the nucleus is based on a resolution of the one-dimensional freedoms of participation already expressed. A new law of the interaction of multi dimensions of relationship, more complex than that conveyed by participation, aligns all the separate local aspirations into a single statement that is the manifestation of the whole. There is thus in the nucleus a resolution where each existence is not there for itself but is distributed in a threefold manner, whatever that may be. This threefold logic embeds into immediacy (as past, present and future are described upon simultaneity) a threefold aspect of Origin, Presence and Implication, entered into light.

The goal of participation within a freedom of action is to sum the total of relationships within a newly conceived statement that is totally unbound to the dimensions of participation. This creates amongst the freedom of all such involvements, a nucleation of matter and information that asserts freedom at a totally new level of existence. As Michel Kosok writes ‘All elements are circularly self-referential — each element being a function of itself through the mutual determination it has with its context of other elements. Every element formed (i.e., making a determined appearance) within a state of immediate presence is thus not only transformed through its context, but appears as a self-transformation; all self-relation or self-reflection being self-transformation.’[v] In realizing the freedom of freedoms at the nucleus, or in the nucleation, the initial assumption of freedom of action is fulfilled by the realization of a dimension, become one with the teasing freedom of action first addressed.

Wholeness rewrites the logic of being in the encounter with a new coherence.