howlsyawn

Physics and Potentiality

Possibilities are closely related to but different from potentials, like voltages or gravitational potentials or those corresponding to the other physical forces. Physical laws aren't in any particular directions, they are both the processes and the memories scientifically found by empirical research of physical matters and energies, through measurements in our universe, or perhaps possibly new universes, separate universes, or produced universes. There is a lot to learn to understand physics, such as the fundamental interactions and forces, which go together. There's strong and weak, which bind together atomic nuclei, some of the smallest stuff, but have very limited range; gravity, which binds together some of the largest stuff and has supposedly infinite range, and electromagnetism, which binds together things at many ranges, and has very unique mechanisms because of the attractive/repulsive force of electrical charge being related to the torquing/rotating force of magnetic forces. A quick way to remember it is: things can have electrical charges, like electrons and protons, or not (neutrons), and magnetic fields are generated by the motion of electrical charges. Rotational motion and spin are closely related to these, although I'm not sure about how the spin of individual particles is related to the spin of conglomerates like an atom or astronomical object. Don't spin yourself too fast+long or you'll get dizzy.

What is an interaction? What is a field? What is a force? I'll get to that. These 3 concepts are very closely related to each other and to the process of measurement/observation, which is important to quantum mechanical uncertainty. I believe measurement/observation is directly related to interaction, as if interaction itself produces an entanglement of the underlying states of quantum systems. Even though hidden-variable theories of quantum mechanical uncertainty are currently not believed by scientists to be possible, without violating other principles such as locality, these entanglements appear to produce coherency out of what may be incoherent wave functions that determine-indeterminately the states and changes of quantum systems. If there is some wave system underlying this universe, the uncertainty may be a matter of unavoidable perspective as it relates to fourier transforms. Regardless of the continuity of waves of certain kinds, discreteness is absolutely generated out of them and their interactions, such as separate wave peaks and troughs and crests and verges, and wave interference/interaction. Continuity and discreteness are both not going away.

Light is electromagnetic packets, called radiation, called photons, but not the only kind of radiation. Each of the fundamental interactions is believed to have what are called carrier particles, which carry something between locations to produce the interaction and force through that distance. There are more than the 4 forces that I mentioned, and the carrier particle for gravity is not currently known, perhaps because gravity is unique, but the concept of carrier particles producing the effects of forces through interactions is meaningful I believe. First, something produces carrier particles which separate from it, and they move through spacetime, and hit and interact with other things, which causes effects to both the producer of the carrier particle and that which is interacted with when it hits the other, perhaps like a game of catch. This model is probably not perfect, gravity could be very unique, one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics right now is the incoherence of theories which merge quantum mechanics and gravity. Quantum mechanics explains things at the smallest scales, at the level of individual particles which behave somewhat like waves; and gravity explains things at the largest scales, at the level of things with significant mass. The most difficult problems caused by this incoherence between quantum mechanics and gravity are exemplified by black holes and the big bang, within which very large masses exist within very small 'distances' of each other. There are paradoxes and absolute uncertainties with these things because we cannot literally rewind time to the big bang, and we cannot stay alive or send signals outwards if we go into a black hole. Things simply explode out of the big bang, or fall into the singularity of the black hole. What happens at singularities is anybody's guess.

A field is a mathematical abstraction used by mathematicians and physicists and engineers to understand a system with consistent force fields. It requires measurement to know with any degree of accuracy, but in most systems, it's consistent enough to produce workable and effective structures. It works like this: The spaces which things are said with these mathematical abstractions to exist in have some shape, a topology, and the field is an operation which outputs numbers, such as scalars or packed numbers such as vectors or tensors, which are defined at every point in and/or on that shaped space. These fields can describe many things, such as the gravitational potential or electrical potential (voltage) relative between locations, and the equations for each can be very similar. Things move (change position/location, which is relative to others) with some momentum (mass x velocity), their velocity (vector of rate of change of position/location) changes according to acceleration (rate of change of velocity) and the acceleration is determined by a variety of factors, such as in newtonian (non-relativistic) mechanics wherein acceleration is a simple sum of forces divided by the mass of the accelerating body. There's a lot of complexity and exceptions to newtonian mechanics, but the everyday world operates fairly close to it, with friction and shear forces and tensors to describe things like stresses or spacetime shape attributes like a stress-energy tensor. These things have physical meaning.

How do fields, forces, and interactions relate directly? How are they related to plurality, multiplicity, the many of/in this universe? Some things are unfortunate, some things are unavoidable. Forces and fields are abstractions used to model the tendency of systems to behave in certain ways over time, such as a gravitational field or electric field or magnetic field. Even though electromagnetism is one interaction, mediated by photons, it still produces two fields: electric and magnetic. They call it 'electrostatic force' but it's never exactly static. Color is magical, wavelengths/frequencies are magical. Magnetism is mysterious. The fields and forces, abstractions built by thinking beings to model/simulate Other Things, are built either separately from a 'corresponding' actuality, as computation on some hardware or software or wetware or inscribed/written-on medium, such as paper, trees, tables, skin, glass, etc. Or they are built as themselves, as corresponding to themselves, as not a model or simulation but as something running on its own medium.

The correspondence isn't really existent or actual anyways, it's also mediated by actual things, by our empirical processes that link together models to the things we are intending to model. The actuality is never perfectly modeled, or else I would be lying about quantum mechanics, or talking about something more discrete and unreflective. The interactions which a model uses to carry out its processes are its own, separately from the interactions which relate it to the modeled, and within each and every thing, self-action is also possible, uncertainty and divergence from inertia are possible. This is partly what I mean by reflection, but I also mean reflection through interaction with others. Self-simulation is fundamentally imperfect because it will always cause changes which are new and not part of the simulation. The only perfect simulations can be those which simply are themselves (not really a simulation), or are un-interacting-with-the-modeled/simulated and exactly identical and possibly parallel to the simulated/modeled things. The motion of things due to forces is measured as work, as changes in energy, as the transfer of energy between 'pools' or locations. An orbit involves constant interchange between kinetic energy and gravitational-potential energy. The kinetic energy of the bodies/objects in motion, and the potential energy of their continual interactive-bonds, like chemical bonds.

Stocks, Plurality, and Politics

Politics is a great deal more difficult and expansive than you might imagine. We live in societies. Individuals attempting to cohere to it are swept away from themselves, to the social, to the plural, to the appearance, to the representation, to the "representatives", and to the physical. We produce things, or we die, it's as simple as that. We produce words or interactions which cause effects desirable to us. Stocks are not just information on a stock market. Producing-for and stocking shelves is extremely important to any social organization, simply because the availability of resources is necessary to keep us all alive. If we wanted to reduce ourselves to something lesser, then we could destroy civilization as we know it through climate change or nuclear weapons or war, but there are other things to critique about civilization than production and resources simply as production and resources. They are necessary. For now, we need currency to keep roles rewarded and production flowing. I don't like pay rates or protections given for our roles as they are now, but I'm not the one who decides that stuff.

There are such things as supply chains, supply lines, supply webs, transportation, and shipments. Envelopes (analogous to wave envelopes) and packages (which can hide more 3-dimensional contents or bodies) are part of the system already too. These things can be mapped onto graphs and onto production nodes and consumption nodes and maintenance nodes. Organization and administration and management are part of our systems now too. Different structures are possible but it is impossible to get away from nodes and lines and arrows between them, absolutely impossible. Each living being consumes things and produces waste, which ideally could be recycled into the environment instead of polluting it. Each living thing deals with our capitalistic system which charges us (charge not the same as electric charge) in order for us to obtain the materials we need to survive and be satisfied and enjoy our time alive, to feel things we want, like happiness or a stomach that isn't empty and a mouth that isn't parched, or organs inside of us that operate for us. It is a fact of life that we all deal with, with our accounts and balances. Some of our accounts don't have currency balances, and none of them quantify the exchange rates which are the basis of how currency actually works in practice. Marx was absolutely right that commodity production relies upon exchange-value, or perhaps more accurately, exchange-rates. You could package it with use-value and call that a commodity as he did, or talk about utility functions, or you could ignore these words that do not accurately quantify what you want and need out of your life.

The basis of capitalism is exchange rates, not as barter, by which 1 home with running utilities and upkeep could be exchanged for one life, which might be similar to slavery or similar to freedom, depending on the conditions, such as freedom of movement. The basis of capitalism is exchange rates MEDIATED BY currency, by currencies of different types. These are currently necessary for us to organize production and consumption and ownership agreements. Cryptocurrencies are a more recent invention, and have very particular attributes to them, such as a limited stock available, or a diminishing rate of potential stock available. Proof-of-stake currencies appear to have finite and un-increasable totals of potential stock tied to their blockchains, and proof-of-work currencies appear to have finite but diminishing potential to increase their stock tied to their blockchains. These are all still currencies though, and they only have 'value' because we exchange them for things which 'have value' to us, such as food, water, or shelter. Of course these exchanges are agreements between the individuals or groups involved in the ownership of the things being exchanged/interchanged. That is how capitalism works at the basic level.

Into the future, I believe the rate of profit will be run into the ground, into the dirt, into the fields, into the land, into the fertility of farms and the productivity of factories (which are part of how capitalism started, with enclosure and ownership of land and ownership of factories, mediated by forces carried out by individuals and groups 'filling roles') and into the freedom of the ones and groups that organize upon these rates of profit, determinable in accounts by the amount of output currency and input currency to their process ((output - input) / input), and less precisely by their works and commodities (I wish I could accurately measure how much I worked on all of this stuff, I feel like I should get payed a lot for it but I don't get to decide that, I did it for free. Intellectual property is difficult to measure the worth of, labor-time is difficult to measure worth of, commodities are difficult to measure the worth of. Exchange-rates are produced out of choices and labels).

These rates of profit reaching lower and lower percentage levels will continue to cause changes to our societies, to our planet, to the environment. The environment is a huge reason why the rate of profit decreases over time, because there are finite resources available. Things like helium or oil run out. Possible and potential routes of profiteering can sort of run out. In the case of unsustainable profit, we may very well still need ownership of certain kinds, and currency of certain kinds, and states of many kinds, but the way it functions/operates could change significantly over long enough time scales. Alternative energies like solar or fission or fusion and the others all make significant differences and need to be balanced. Solar energy is one of the cleanest and most plentiful (it's how life exists on earth so widely, because of chlorophyll), but fusion energy is like harnessing the power of the sun without the sun, by extracting hydrogen or other low-proton atomic elements, and putting them in very carefully and precisely built fusion reactors. Fusion energy is somewhat of a pipe dream though, with lots of grants and excitement and hesitation and uncertainty, because producing a fusion reactor that produces more energy than is put into it is very very difficult for earth right now. It would fundamentally change how we view energy though, since we would probably acquire a lot of hydrogen for fusion from the oceans. The specifics could get hairy and solar energy will continue to be extremely important, such as in the very far future, dyson spheres. Energy production and storage and transfer are each different from one another and these all have effects on environments. They are never quite closed systems.

For now, physics and politics are intertwined and entangled too, and we will continue with capitalism unless someone has better operations available to organize the production and storage of resources. Call it individual and social property if you like, but certainly there's differences between one and multiple, between single and plural. I think that will be a big focus of both property and holoscopic understandings, because handling and not wasting the contributions (ideas, materials, physicality, work, thought) of the plurality is something that anyone with a functioning mind should not sleep on. I do not take that lightly. You can rename work to labor to differentiate it from the physical work, but then you confuse it with the labor of parents birthing their children. We all perform activities, we all carry out behaviors. There are many possibilities and I cannot control them all, you cannot control them all, they cannot control them all. That is a fact and any system that we purport to understand as overcoming the current systems will need to handle that plurality, that multiple, that multiplying of forces and thoughts. There are so many, so many unavoidable things. Things which even cavemen and barbarians knew, even if they didn't know the 'rules' or 'laws', things which civilization only helped us organize and put into words and equations and processes, things which capitalism purports to own. Newtonian physics is actually intuitive, to humans, to animals, to plants, and to all life, if you get the hang of it. Learning these things is not as difficult as you might think, if you can find ways to relate it to what you actually find interesting, if you find ways to correlate and differentiate and understand. Qualified and/or quantitative and/or existing things change through spacetime. You don't need relativity or quantum mechanics to understand that. All these layers we construct are still on the surface of our planet, our world. Height isn't nearly as important as we make it out to be.

Recommendations

Don't worry too much about my recommendations, but do worry about reality some, do worry about life, do worry about truth and falsity (is truth about consistent correspondence of models to realities?). Don't let worry be a drug, don't let it be totally/completely empty or disconnection, don't let it be something you simply imagine as possible. Make it real if you believe in making it real. I recommend you learn, you study, you think carefully about things, like conditions, math (discrete and continuous), algebra, calculus, vectors, tensors, languages, codes, biology, health, history, and perhaps philosophy, stories, entertainment, games, and other media, if you find them helpful somehow. I certainly do, in many ways. I often tend to rush and distill things to simplicity, but the truth is that there's plenty of time to go around, if you learn to appreciate it. We rank and rate our choices, regardless of what mediums we exist of/upon/with. We have possibility spaces and languages and structures to build with, try to enjoy your time. Try to engage and communicate with those different to/from you. Try to consider the voids and spaces between things as significant and worth considering and respecting. Try to care and to love sincerely and honestly, to and from yourself and to and from them and to and from the world. Find reasons for your directions and aims or tolerate the uncertain outcomes of the unreasoned.