KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA63 (Leslie / Rees)

Commentary 42 (to C26, Müller)

( SYMMETRY IN PHYSICS )
by Joseph Johnson
24 March 2004, posted 17 April 2004

<1>
HJFM: Your distinction of process and content <2> is helpful. Can one say that the contents are the product of the process ? As I understand it, the contents are (in principle temporary) fixations, needed for structure and stability. The next question is then : whose process ? It has to be a personal process, but with feedback constraints during use of the created contents.

JJ: Yes, contents are temporary fixations needed for structure and stability. It is therefore the home of nouns, metaphoric labels of experience for objects that ‘sustain’ long enough to support transition to an evolved state, from being to becoming, as Prigogine would put it. Within such finite systems, natural laws define the proximate cause of local process. Problems arise when we try to answer the subjective "Who" or "Why" questions when our only concept of natural order is from the content perspective of isolated systems. This is the plight of the modern world. Only after the other half of AT is analyzed, the process perspective, are subjective questions not only answered, but become self-evident truth.

Observation of cosmic process tells us natural order IS a creative first-person force and direction, in that no third-person description is possible. We also notice that a product of billions of years of process IS an explicit and very creative first-person force and direction for which no third-person description is possible. What IS has merely extended its creativity into a contrived realm of differences and limits to give expression to the subjective qualities of natural order, the higher abstracts of AT, to be applied to or superposed upon physical content. In other words, the question of "who is what" seems to answer itself in a way that remains independent of all the historical baggage of the content perspective.

<2>
HJFM: We find "subjectivity right at the top of physical order" - agreed. Another way of putting that is to say that the subject-object split is pragmatic and secondary rather than given and primary, and the subject is therefore an aspect of all reality.

JJ: Exactly. The only reality IS the subject whose ineffable imperative (natural order) is given willful expression across time. Its objective content is described as natural law. The subject has imposed upon itself a constraint that hides the essential symmetry, creating an illusion of differences, limits, and so plurality, but its expression does not sacrifice the internal coherence; hence conservation law. Science claims natural laws can exist that support countless different kinds of universes. But the subjective (aesthetic) constraint that the ‘ground’ of symmetry imposes upon all our forces seems to imply an essential coherence in any possible set of laws, which, after all, do nothing but reflect the way the forces interact.

<3>
HJFM: Symmetry (Weinberg) <6> seems to refer to quantum processes, e.g., concerning particles and anti-particles. As I understand it this is based on an assumption of mind-independent nature. In case that leads to a theory of everything, it would implicitly exclude the subject - i.e., a theory of everything except the mind.

JJ: Symmetry constraints apply to all forces at whatever scale they are relevant, including gravity and the homilies of everyday experience. Conservation laws are all consequences of the symmetry constraint, making natural laws coherent in any description of the energy of a system. They are manifest wherever we find the = sign in our equations where contrived illusions of asymmetry are balanced out against one-another in the more abstract level. While the idea of symmetry appeared as an intuitive inspiration guiding physics in its exploration of the energy scale from the late seventies, its essential role as a constraint upon conservation laws was not new. The mathematician Amalie Noether while at the University of Göttingen in Germany showed this relationship as far back as 1918, but its significance was not appreciated at the time. Noether’s theorem showed that "symmetries associated with the mathematical expression for the energy of a system will always appear in the form of conservation laws."[1] ("For every continuous symmetry of the laws of physics, there must exist a conservation law".[2] And for every conservation law, there must exist a continuous symmetry.) As to the "content perspective" of modern science ever coming up with a TOE, it isn’t going to happen, as it has no language or concept to articulate the implicit ineffable subjectivity of the process perspective of natural order. Physics is presently crashing against the absurdity of trying to be objective about process below Planck scales where quantities have no objective reality. Small wonder they are talking about supersymmetry. As the process perspective of AT tells us, the reality WAS and always IS the creative first-person perspective. The latest agency of that perspective (mind) is essential to give expression to the higher abstracts of natural order.

<4>
HJFM: I agree that symmetry has implications for esthetics, etc., but so far as I can see the physical theories must be judged by how well they work. If they are also beautiful, so much the better, but one should not jump to conclusions. For instance <8> our lives would seem to depend on asymmetry : if we came in contact with a sufficient amount of anti-matter, that would be the end of the earth and of us.

JJ: Indeed our lives depend on asymmetry; without it there would be no illusion of differences and limits, but these are all accommodated, balanced out, in conservation law. Anti-matter is a story in itself. The only relevant area of modern physical theory that remains unsettled is to explain or describe the creation event. Physics approached the creation event by learning how each force is subsumed at successively higher levels of energy, revealing a simpler structure, "a less complex symmetry," at each level. It is not rocket science to understand that the end result of such analysis is a ground of perfectly featureless symmetry. Physics has no language for such a state in which quantifiable properties are entirely lacking. Not surprisingly, physicists narrate various creation scenarios generally starting with the metaphor of "expansion from infinite energy at a point," meaning zero dimension.

This would seem to mean the emergence of dimensional constraints precedes any possibility of objectivity. The awkward part is talking in an objective way about the interval between zero and Planck scales of space and time that have no objective meaning. Time is granular, they say. In my view this ‘interval’ represents the self-imposition upon ground (i.e., choice) of dimensionality, the several axes without which the potential cannot be given form, i.e. constraints, limits, without which objective differences cannot be manifest. Perhaps an even more remarkable choice implicit in the same imperative if natural order is the apparent isolation of anti-matter from this cosmos. It seems hardly possible that this profound and vital isolation arises from a ‘random law of nature,’ yet physics has no idea how the isolation came about, nor, a similar confounding issue, how to derive the several constants of nature that make life possible in this cosmos.

All such issues had to be implicit choices prior to expression inasmuch as physics cannot otherwise derive them from any level of objective experience. So, what has Physics, the flagship of the primitive content-perspective of natural law, contrived to explain process from zero to Planck scales? Working myth, of course. Random quantum fluctuations in the sub-Planck realm is a working myth, a working metaphor of ‘chance and probability.’ It allows physicists to explain the otherwise unaccountable results of certain quantum experiments. Because particle/anti-particle fluctuations are sub-Planck scale events, and can never be directly demonstrated, neither can it be proven that ‘choice’ is a less valid explanation than ‘chance’ for the implicit structure of natural order; the coherent set of constraints that both create and manage the illusion of differences and limits and so plurality. Because cosmos and natural order is nothing if not a coherent unity, AT is about its process, and has no need to assign nouns, proper or otherwise, to characterize the origin or its products. The product is simply the integral expression of the origin.

Both the origin and the human agent share the first person perspective, as both are inaccessible to third person description. The origin is unconstrained in any way except for the manifest need for the perspective of the constrained. That is the demonstrable, meaningful, subjective rationale of creation. The meaningless objective rationale of creation, the content perspective, is simply that eternal sameness is somehow fundamentally unstable. The content perspective reduces creation to chance; the process perspective points to direction and meaning. This is why AT seems to be the story of ends AND means, thus a TOE. AT simply identifies the explicit footprint of the implicit imperative: ‘the indefinite evolution of system complexity.’

There is no science of this process, other than AT. Principles of physics cannot predict emergent chemical properties. Chemistry cannot predict emergent biological properties. There is no possible biological science to predict the effect of Genetic Modification (GM) on the infinitely complex open system of the biosphere. GM will shortly reveal itself as the modern Frankenstein of incompetent science, commercial greed, and uninformed government regulation. The evolution of system complexity has produced the emergent properties of a first-person perspective, with mental faculties capable of being self-aware of the fact of its own integral agency, its ultimate access to the cosmic imperative. The agent is capable of knowing that it shall sustain itself by creating even more complex systems not only to meet its needs for physical survival, but no less its needs for survival of mind.

Human choice is often self-destructive and conflicted, but this is the inevitable phase we must pass through on the way from the constructive evolutionary rational of conflict and competition to realize the faculties of intellect and emotion, and then to consciously choose for the potentially limitless synergies of cooperative creativity and its boundless potential. The particulars of symmetry in physics include conservation laws that keep it coherent, whether describing symmetries or non-symmetries. These particulars of physics have the utility of natural law. The relevance of symmetry to the subjective realm is in its solution to the problem of conflicted first-person perspectives (laws must look the same from every perspective, the Golden Rule, etc.). The abstracts of symmetry beyond physical science guide our more constructive and cooperative intuitions.

<5>
HJFM: I agree with your formulation in <11>. But I would say that one should see natural order as subject-inclusive rather than subjective <12>, which sounds solipsistic. This distinction is clear if one understands the subject-object split as secondary (pragmatic).

JJ: Natural laws are the dependent, derivative, explicit expressions of implicit natural order; shadows on the wall that mark the passing of process. Natural order is subjective because it cannot be given a finite third-person definition the way natural laws can. Natural order is therefore object-inclusive rather than objective. The subject-object split remains secondary (pragmatic).

Solipsism: 1. The theory that the self can be aware of nothing but its own experiences and states. 2. The theory that nothing exists or is real but the self.

I would say, in the absence of any possibility of knowing differently, that solipsism applies to Cosmos as a subjective whole self. The prospect of such isolation would seem to explain the instability of "ground" and the cosmic investment in differences and limits, directed toward the emergence of its own creative agent to enjoy and explore the garden of companionship and the challenge and mystery and differences imposed by limits.

<6>
HJFM: Your vocabulary is reminiscent of Whitehead's, could you comment on that ?

JJ: I have no contact with Whitehead, and very little contact with the world of philosophy and other non-science. I have read most of the popular writers in the sciences, been a subscriber of Scientific American for over 50 years, etc. Being essentially visual-oriented, I ‘saw’ how things were very early in life, but there were no words. I seem to find the words in AT. I do not trust long compound words, and barely survived Metzinger who seems quite unconscious of the process viewpoint. Again, I liked Korzybski’s categories of living things; plants as "energy-binders, animals as space-binders and humans as time-binders." Science remains stalled in animal materialism.

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NOTES

[1] Gregory, Bruce (1988) Inventing Reality, New York, John Wiley & Sons, p. 126.

[2] Emmy Noether "Invariante Variationsprobleme," Nachr. v. d. Ges. d. Wiss. zu Göttingen 1918, pp 235-257

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Joseph Johnson