On Words, Objects and Cosmology

Question 1--'Do you think ideas and language exist? Do they exist in the level of things we can kick, or punch? I think not. In what sense do ideas, and language exist?'


I will write about this below--yet not answer your questions directly. I suggest reading W.V.O. Quine's Philosophy of Logic or Strawson's 'Individuals'. I like the fact that Quine wrote 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and devastated the philosophy of empiricism's premises about Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction. He returned language to a more reasonable basis of being in mind referring to experienced objects. About the nature of objects I tend to agree with Bishop Berkeley and yet modernize that to a pragmatist criterion wherein words refer to units of experience. Experience and all other concepts are human concepts that exist within a sentient continuum, yet so do our perceptions of the moon and stars. All in turn may exist within a universal force field of quanta or virtual particles--yet even those membranes or waves of zero dimensions and other nominal quanta are interpreted by reason and sensation. 

Thus a statistical representation of words and 'objects'is customary--words are a kind of way of mapping experience.

Question 2-'In what sense is "information" used in M-theory, or some other physical theory? Do you have any examples? How is information physical?'


These are good and yet difficult questions to answer. I have written a little upon each elsewhere, and so am naturally reluctant to reiterate the same material. They are topics that can use quite a bit of reading and thought. Luckily for me I was able to read a text on 'The Art of Reasoning' by Kelly and that led int the philosophy of logic. Recently I read W.V.O. Quine's 'Ontological Relativity' that was given at the Dewey lectures at Harvard. Quine died about the year 2000, and was one of the best of 20th century philosophers.


He wrote a lot about logic and the nature of language. I tend to agree with his ideas about words and their relation to thought. Words within sets of words as abstract groups or organizations and structures receive a meaning value by the user and of course social inheritence. It is equally possible to construct a language such as a math or computer language with nominal or no meaning, yet there may be an implicit bias within human nature to give meanings to words or unit symbols based on environment and effectiveness.


I don't want to get to far off track on the road to digressions here. Obviously when writing about words one might use a few thousand--and others have done so better making a judicious rationing of language desirable here. Word sets and our ontology or largest world view about things is expressed in malleable words sets. Circularity is one of the basic features of word meanings. Such as one defines green as a color perhaps by saying its a combination of red and blue colors, most words get meaning with definition references to other words as well as the environment experienced. The words 'physical' and 'existence' are such words.


We ask if something is physical, and assume a familiar definition. Perhaps it may be defined in comparison to something not physical--yet what is that? There are good books on quantum mechanical phenomena available for us non-mathematicians to read, and good books such as 'Why Beauty Is Truth' on the history of the mathematical concept of symmetry especially developed in algebra and useful in M-Theory and multi-dimensional experimental construction; it is apparent that at the largest and smallest levels of being the quantum construction is indefinate.


What is smaller than quarks?, where did virtual particles arise--why did space-time and physical causality arise at all from a vacuum field before the big bang? What are loops, strings, quarks and virtual particles in a macro-spatial field of quantum uncertainty?


There are so many questions about The One before the big bang and before the pre-big bang vacuum field arose: why did uncertainty exist to start with, why did quantum superposition and uncertainty in a monistic waveform download into a temporal condition? For may way of thinking I quickly get to the sort of questions that the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus brought to being in his 54 tractates named 'The Enneads'. It isn't necessary to leave the topic in what seems persently to some to be a vague mysticism.


It is possible to get book named 'The Essential Plotinus' used online for a dollar or two plus shipping. Its a good way to get what Russell thought to be the writing of the philosopher with the most kind nature in the history of philosophy (if you read Russell's History of Western Philosophy). Gasperini's book The Universe Before the Big Bang' is totally worth the reading for a briefing on that topic.


Mind exists as a physical field. Self awareness is a very specialized construction in that physical field including quarks, uncertainty and all of the very ponderable topics of beauty and complexity we might expect. Becuase we are not cerrtain due to the infinity of what the ultimate nature of anything is, with such Godelian and Cantorian limits to knowledge of things such that there is always more beyond our grasp, we are left to consider things as events--even Christians may consider cerrtain events as meaningful. Relationships may be meaningful for themselves to sentient beings. Sentience may comprise an evolved level attaining to a spiritual self-awareness of being.


I am sort of hurrying to a conclusion here--there are quite a few topic one might bring in or allude to such as Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind' that consider the subject or aspects of it from other points of view--the historical context of many philosophical ideas from Hume to Heidegger might be thought to occur within contemporary contexts of social politics and knowledge as well. So I will skipa lot of that and return to the ideas I am concerned with here about information or intelligence within a monistic pre-big bang field, and perhaps consider that for myself.


I agree with the ideas of Plotinus on the nature of The One...God requires no dimensional extension--yet that concept might seem vague without reading that math book mentioned above that helps to understand about the advance from linear to quadratic equations and higher literals led to multi-dimensional graphs and extra dimensional arrays. Those scaler fields (fields of adjustable scale) are tools for modern cosmology. It seems almost logical today that God would not require dimensions for-himself any more than space-time. They are temporal things or segments of some eternal wave that contains all potential quanta.

Regardless of how we go about it the words or terms used to say that things exist (ist means 'to be' in Germanic languages and also have roots in Sanskrit and the proto Indo-European language, so ex- ist may mean to remove or stand back and look at being initially) within our own ontologies. IIt is useful to examine a little our assumptions about what words mean. Analytic philosophy of the 20th century renormalized language and metaphysics a little in philosophy through logic and linguistic analysis to actually determine what particular words means, or refer to. Then we can find that some words are given more meaning ojectively through use than they actually have in fact. 


Words and even knowledge are sort of virtual tools like lights in the darkness we carry to illuminate the non-sentient Universe around us of which we are part. The spiritual is the intelligent aspect of experience that rises above the deterministic forces set into being long ago before the big bang--at least a little. It is possible to ponder the waveform, transcending super quanta of God just as rather comparatively silly assuming beings doing our best to learn about all His marvelous works.