Dis-Continuum

Dis - Continuum: Is the "space-time" continuum really continuous?

Is what you see what you get?

As a technological animal becomes more precise, the detection processing time required by a detector -- organic or instrumental -- reveals the secret of motion in the universe.

We use light radiation to see and sound vibrations to hear, but both give us information about the location of an object, or distance. Each is a medium of perception, or of detection. We separate ourselves by naming our measurements as "perceptions" and we name our "perceptors" as "senses." But a process that enables measurement of a kind of motion, including an object that is "still" relative to us, is a detector. The eye and the ear and their mechanical parts and neurons and a sonar device and a radio telescope are all equal as being detectors, and every detector requires detection processing time, or simply "detection time" to complete a measurement result, a detection.

This is a paraphrase of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, or a partial explanation of that principle: "When we detect or measure the momentum of a particle, we cannot precisely measure that particle's position at the same instant in time; and when we detect or measure the position of a particle, we cannot precisely measure that particle's momentum at the same instant in time." This further suggests quantum theory or quantum mechanics, deemed to be so difficult to grasp that even doctors of physics have trouble with it. The guiding concept of quantum theory is that the universe is comprised of "quanta" or "packets" of matter or packets of energy, and these are the real physical matter that we detect and measure.

History trumps physics:

The pervasive flaw in modern physics arises from the fact that physicists inherited a nineteenth-century contempt for the social sciences, especially psychology, that carried over to the more intensively developed biological and neurological sciences. Through the twentieth century and into our twenty-first century a great quantity of useful information has been gathered about how the human brain works and how we perceive the world around us. In the nineteenth century modern psychology was still associated with mesmerism (hypnosis) and extra-sensory communication such as séances, body auras, and telekinesis, a collection of phenomenon we now group together as "para-psychology." But as the contempt for social science continued, the science of psychology grew upward and outward like a tree, with neurobiology and neurochemistry taking us into the more precise and more scientific physical reality behind both the older psychology that overlapped with philosophy and religion to our modern psychological discipline that actually focuses on the physical structures and chemistry of life, thought and knowledge. The core problem of modern physics is that it persists in its contempt for psychological science and therefore actually rejects the information that would improve our valid knowledge of the real, physical universe. Because the physicists have rejected psychology, they do not devote adequate attention to the differences between the three separate parts of the human experience that comprise the process of detection. The scientific method is based on procedure and observation, and yet even the physicists acknowledge, when pressed on the issue, that an "observation" is not automatically objective. If a human being is making the observation, that observation is by definition "subjective." But then again, the physicists squirm away from the complexity of observation by claiming -- perhaps unconsciously -- the superiority of non-organic instrumentation. How can an instrument be wrong? We could count the ways.

Reality comes in threes:

Thus, by rejecting or at least by neglecting the facts of human psychology, the modern physicist glosses over the three distinctly separate parts of a human observation or human detection:

1) [event] a natural event occurs, or a contrived (experimental) event occurs;

2) [detection] the detector, either human and or instrumental, cycles through its own unique "detection processing interval of time";

3) [record] the detector, or a device connected to the detector, creates a record of the measurement or its subject detection.

Why do we have a theory of continuous motion -- the space-time continuum -- and quanta or "packets" of matter or energy? Because of the facts of modern psychology and the allied sciences of neurobiology and neurochemistry. Whatever is part 1 of the 3-part phenomenon of detection, whether ultimate reality be continuous OR quantum, our detection of ultimate reality is inescapably "quantum" because we do not have any detector, either organic (human) or instrumental (invented) that detects continuum even if it is the ultimate reality. The space-time continuum cannot be captured by a detector and recorded or depicted, except by a human brain, by inference. Consider the inescapable reality of how the discipline of psychology overlapped with the technological development of "moving pictures" and later motion-picture film technology. The first observation of "moving pictures" served as both the discovery and the proof that the human eye, or the sense of vision, could not perceive or measure continuous motion, but captured discreet "frames" or images that are in fact discreetly separate, BUT OUR BRAINS PROCESS THESE DISCREETLY SEPARATE IMAGES, OR QUANTA, AND PERFORM THE NEUROLOGICAL SERVICE OF BLENDING THEM TOGETHER TO FORM THE "ILLUSION" OF CONTINUOUS MOTION OR A SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM. It was discovered that if the frames are flashed, or "seen" at a rate slower than around 25 frames per second, the smooth continuous flow is not accomplished, and the human mind sees the separate images as a kind of "flickering" motion. This is actually an appropriate and valid description of quantum theory, but the physicists and mathematicians make it far more complicated because they are committed to explaining "quanta" without reference to the phenomenon of detection. In other words, the physicists insist that they can describe the real physical universe from observation without scientifically examining the phenomenon of observation. This flaw arises because it is the same as saying: "Our physics is the result of our conclusion that our observations are the equivalent of the events that we observe." But they are not. In fact, it is impossible for the observation of an event, or the detection of an event, to be the same thing as the event that is being detected.

Simplifying, for the purpose of elucidation: even if a celestial body, or a particle, does in fact move according to the continuous smooth flow of a space-time continuum, with no separation of discreet "packets" or "quanta," we still would DETECT MOTION BY COLLECTING A SERIES OF FRAMES OR IMAGES -- OR DETECTIONS -- AS DISCREETLY SEPARATE RECORDS, AND THE INFERENTIAL PROCESS, OR THE PROCESS OF NEUROLOGICAL INFERENCE (HUMAN THOUGHT) PERFORMS THE SERVICE OF TAKING US TO THE INFERRED CONCLUSION THAT THE MOTION IS ACTUALLY A SMOOTH, CONTINUOUS FLOW -- A SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM.

There are no fields of knowledge:

Fine. The physicists are self-righteously smiling at my ignorance, being outside of their club, and digging deeper into their refusal to recognize that the science of physics is inseparable from the science of psychology. In Nature, the subject of study, there are no fields of knowledge, and there are no separations of vocabulary or data or conclusions, or natural laws. By insisting that what physicists DETECT is the ultimate reality, we continuously come up with theories that conflict with other sets of observations. The only way we can improve our understanding of the real, physical universe is to combine or unify all of the sciences. It is said that we have not yet given up on a search for a unified field theory. A careful and genuine examination of the parallel but separate evolution of the physical and social sciences might actually be the unification that would pull all conflicting theories together in a single net, and capture the inescapable reality of the real physical universe:

1) [event]; 2) [detection processing]; 3) [detection record].

And then the cosmically significant #4) [interpretation, inference]. The space-time continuum cannot be proven because it is inferred. Especially if one considers the abundant evidence that "time" is a fiction of consciousness (see "Timeworks" on the jmanimas website). Physics extends in a curve and meets with philosophy after all. The physicist must accept psychology and the psychologist must accept physics. What has occurred in modern times is that the social scientist has become more scientific than the physical scientist. The modern psychologists and philosophers have accepted physics, but the physicists still keep trying to prove that what they see is what we have. They keep ignoring the inescapable reality that there is a detection processing that comes between the event and the detection record of the event.