Static Logic...Kinetic Reality

What Is the Relationship Between a Moving Reality and the Static Constructions of Logic?

Western science and philosophy have always been dominated by non-process thought. This 'historical record' or being model of reality has been with us since Parmenides, and his student Zeno of Elea, and is known as the Eleatic model (c500 BCE). Zeno gave us the first insights into the inherent problems of comprehending motion, a problem long forgotten by conventional non-process physics, but finally explained by process physics.

The becoming or processing model of reality dates back to Heraclitus of Ephesus (540-480 BCE) who argued that common sense is mistaken in thinking that the world consists of stable things; rather the world is in a state of flux. The appearances of 'things' depend upon this flux for their continuity and identity. What needs to be explained, Heraclitus argued, is not change, but the appearance of stability. With process physics western science and philosophy is now able to move beyond the moribund non-process mindset. While it was the work of Gödel who demonstrated beyond any doubt that the non-process system of thought had fundamental limitations; implicit in his work is that the whole reductionist mindset that goes back to Thales of Miletus could not offer, in the end, an effective account of reality. However the notion that there were limits to syntactical or symbolic encoding is actually very old. Priest [25] has given an account of that history. However in the East the Buddhists in particular were amazingly advanced in their analysis and comprehension of reality. Stcherbatsky [26], writing about the extraordinary achievements of Buddhist logic in the C6 and C7th CE, noted that

Reality according to Buddhists is kinetic, not static, but logic, on the other hand, imagines a reality stabilized in concepts and names. The ultimate aim of Buddhist logic is to explain the relation between a moving reality and the static constructions of logic.

In theWest the process system approach to reality was developed, much later, by such process philosophers as Peirce, James, Bergson and Whitehead to name a few, although their achievements were very limited and substantially flawed, limited as they were by the physical phenomena known to them. A collection of their writings is available in [2]. Perhaps a quote from Charles Peirce [2], writing in 1891, gives the sense of their thinking;

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionalty of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every philosophy.

With process physics we have almost achieved this end, and Wheeler has already expressed this notion of inveterate habits as "law without law" [27]. As the reader will note the self-referentially limited neural network model, that underpins process physics, is remarkably akin to Peirce's effete mind. It is the limitations of syntax, and the need for intrinsic or semantic information 'within' reality and at all levels, that reality is not imposed, that drives us to this approach. Einstein, the modern day eleatic thinker, realised all too well the limitations of non-process thinking but was unable to move out of the non-process realm that the West had created for itself, for according to Carnap [28];

Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seems to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. I remarked that all that occurs objectively can be described in science: on the one hand the temporal sequence of events is described in physics; and, on the other hand, the peculiarities of man's experiences with respect to time, including his different attitude toward past, present and future, can be described and (in principle) explained in psychology. But Einstein thought that scientific descriptions cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside of the realm of science.

It was the Einsteins error in rejecting absolute motion that trapped twentieth century physics in the non-process or no now mindest. As is shown here experiments that could detect absolute motion did so, and those that could not not do so in principle of course did not detect absolute motion. Nevertheless all of these later experiments were claimed to have confirmed the SR and GR formalism which is fundamentally based an the absence of absolute motion as an aspect of reality.

—Reginald T. Cahill, Process Physics: From Information Theory to Quantum Space and Matter