WORD MATRICES PREAMBLE Disclaimer: Words are not the objects they are used to represent. Words may be defined in any way that the author chooses in order to maximize usefulness to the subject at hand, as long as the definitions are well stated before use and remain logically consistent through the presentation. LOGIC Logic is the ethics of language. Anything that violates the laws of logic is not only invalid and useless, but even criminal to the degree that an argument pretends to logical validity all the while knowing it falls short. On the other hand anything that does not violate the laws of logic is acceptable and useful only to the degree that it matches some part of actuality that it is describing. The rules of logic are self evident and apply to anything that IS. They are: IS IS IS IS means IS IS ISNOT ISNOT IS does not mean IS NOT ISNOT IS ISNOT IS NOT means IS NOT ISNOT ISNOT IS IS NOT does not mean IS Stated another way: A implies A or not (A and not A) not (A implies not A) (A or not A) DEFINITIONS In this presentation, words are often used in meanings that are close to but not exactly equal to their common usage. Such definitions are declared in a 'we DEFINE' statement. Once a word has been explicitly defined, that definition applies to the end of the dissertation. ACTUALITY AND REALITY For example in this work we DEFINE actuality as that which is true, and we DEFINE REALITY as that which people think is true, that which is real to them. Many people believe that their reality = actuality, especially in a well designed virtual reality where the person forgets he is dreaming or wearing VR goggles. But the wise person is always on the lookout for a higher reality which more closely resembles actuality. We call this increasing lucidity, or awareness that we are dreaming or that reality does not in general equal actuality. Sometimes words are defined down to the level of reality of the person using them. For example many people consider only 'physical' things to be real or actual, and even while they may talk about consciousness or spirit or non physical phenomemon, they feel these things have no right to the terms 'exist' or 'real' or 'actual'. Thus for them physical reality is the only reality, and thus they have defined out of existence, to their detriment, anything that is real or actual which is not physical. DIMENSIONALITY The correct term for physical by the way is dimensional. People are very used to perceiving three dimensional objects, so only three dimensional objects are real to them. Certainly they have never seen any two dimensional or one dimensional objects, so the idea that a zero dimensional object might exist or be actual also exceeds them. Thus the world's reality that zero dimensional objects do not exist, violates the actuality that zero dimensional objects may exist and may in fact be more important than multi dimensional objects. For the purposes of this discourse, the following terms are defined. The careful reader will maintain awareness of the subtle change in definitions of reality and actuality from the common usage to the usage laid out below. Actuality is what actually exists. Reality is what people think exists. A virtual reality is a virtualization of an actuality in a medium other than the actuality that is being virtualized. Thus a movie of a car going over a hill is a virtualization of an actual car going over an actual hill. To exist means to IS (to BE and all of its conjugations.) To not exist means to IS NOT (to not BE). There are three kinds of existence. There is hypothetical existence, in which things are merely considered in the mind, given qualities, and studied. Unicorns may have hypothetical existence to a given person considering unicorns. There is also actual existence, in which things actually are. There are also "truths in heaven," which are true whether or not anything exists at all. The phrase 'truths in heaven' should not be taken to imply any religious significance or that these truths are subservient to some possible God, as these truths in heaven are true whether or not ANYTHING exists at all, including God, thus even God, if such exists, is subservient to these truths and must conform to them. An example of such a truth is: An object is either a something or a nothing. This statement is true whether or not something exists or nothing exists. As such the statement is true independent of any particular existing thing. The value of PI is another such truth in heaven. WORD MATRICES A "word matrix" is any constellation of words whose definitions have been finely honed to work with each other on a particular subject at hand. Such definitions may be slightly or majorly different than their normal English usage. As long as those definitions are clearly stated before their first use, and as long as their use does not violate logical laws of consistency, then there is no problem with using specialized matrices of words with specialized definitions. An easy example of a tightly defined word matrix from freshman physics are the terms FORCE, MASS, ACCELERATION, VELOCITY, MOMENTUM and ENERGY. The have exact definitions and relationships to each other that must not be quibbled with. In particular if you change or mess with the definition of any one of them, you will mess with its relationship to the whole word matrix rendering that word useless in the context of that matrix. GODEL JAILS Any word matrix may have areas of fuzziness and self referencing possibilities, that may lead to Godel jails. Such areas may be noted in passing for enjoyment's sake, but will generally be of no further concern. A Godel jail is an area of discourse where a word matrix leads to contradictory results or incomplete results, meaning the truth of a statement is logically contradictory or undecidable. Godel jail is also where we send people who try to foist off philosophically incompetent systems that are mostly contradictory or incomplete, but delivered in the pretense of great wisdom. If you have ever met someone who claimed that 'All generalizations are false," "There are no absolutes", or "Everyone's opinion is as good as everyone else's", you have had the honor of doing discourse with an long term inmate of a Godel jail. *ALL* word matrices of any worth may contain areas of potential Godel jails, this does not in any way lessen their usefulness or applicability of that word matrix in the areas which do not lead to Godel jails. Just because one can create contradictory or undecidable propositions in logic for example, does not in any way invalidate the validity of the rest of logic that is both not contradictory and decidable. RUSSELL'S PARADOX Bertrand Russell spent the better part of a summer looking at a blank piece of paper trying to figure his way out of a now world famous Godel Jail. Russell was a mathematician working with numbers and sets of numbers. The following is a rough example of what he was working on. He noticed that there are 'large sets' of numbers, sets that had 1000 or more numbers in them say, and 'small sets' of numbers, sets that had less than 1000 numbers in them. (I pick the number 1000 arbitrarily). A large set would be for example all the numbers from 1 to 1000. Another large set would be all the numbers from 1001 to 2000. Clearly there are an infinite number of different large sets. A small set might be all the numbers from 1 to 10, and another small set would be all the numbers from 10000 to 10020. Clearly there are an infinite number of different small sets. He saw that there are an infinite number of different large sets, thus the set of all large sets was itself a large set and thus was a member of itself. He saw that there were also an infinite number of different small sets, and thus the set of all small sets was also a LARGE set, and thus was NOT a member of itself. Thus he discovered the fact that some sets are members of themselves and some are not. Woe be the day. So the set of large sets is a member of itself, but the set of small sets is not, and there are many other sets which are members of themselves and others which are not. Thus he conceived further of the set of "all sets which are members of themselves" and the set of "all sets which are not members of themselves." It was a happy summer to that point. He then asked if the set of "all sets which are members of themselves" is a member of itself? The answer is undecidable, if you assume yes, then no contradiction arises, and if you assume no, no contradiction arises. This means one can freely choose to consider the answer yes or no according to your needs at the moment and it will have no influence on anything else you might be studying that is in fact decidable. But then he asked if the set of "all sets which are NOT members of themselves" is a member of itself? If you assume yes, then you get no. If you assume no, you get yes. Thus we have a contradiction. In the absence of the ability to directly determine the truth of a proposition one can use reductio ad absurdum, meaning to reduce to an absurdity. One assumes the answer is yes and if that leads to an absurdity, then the answer must have been no. This was used extensively by Euclid to prove that various geometrical propositions are true or false. The problem comes in when assuming the answer is no ALSO leads to an absurdity, then you have a contradiction. Which is it, yes or no? The answer is not undecidable, the answer is neither. This means that one can not consider the answer to be either true or false, which bothered him greatly, but again indicated that its truth value in the end had no affect on the truth value of anything else under study that was decidable or well behaved. One might be tempted to claim that finally logic has found a statement that is indeed both true and false, or neither true nor false. However all such statements to date have been shown to be degenerate, meaning self referencing or otherwise not well formed formulas, or WFFs, pronounced "woofs". We call statements that are degenerate or not well formed formulas UNWFFs, pronounced "unwoofs". For example the reader is invited to study the following degenerate statements and determine if they are true, false, contradictory or undecidable. This statement is true. This statement is false. This statement is uncertain. This statement is provable. This statement is unprovable. This statement is undecidable. We represent these solutions with logic diagrams like so: This statement is true. T -> T If you assume it is true, then it is true. F -> F If you assume it is false, then it is false. This statement is false. T -> F F -> T Double Contradiction and meaningless. This statement is uncertain. T -> F (if it is true, it isn't uncertain for its false!) F -> F (If it is false, it also isn't uncertain!) Thus this statement is always false. We will leave the remaining three for the reader to solve. Godel had a lot of fun with this stuff, and finally proved his two famous incompleteness theorems which said: Theorem 1: Any consistent formal system S, within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out, is incomplete in that statements can be made in S which are undecidable. Theorem 2: In the same formal system S, the consistency of S can not be proven in S alone. (Consistency means no contradictions.) One might wonder why one would study such a thing so hard and so long, but the problems with the perfection of logic greatly troubled great minds because for a while it threw doubt on the validity of the valid parts of logic. Eventually people saw that just because one can create a degenerate statement within a word matrix, does not mean the word matrix is not perfect where it is not degenerate of self referencing. A perfect example of a Godel jail in the following material is the definition of a nothing as an object with an empty quality set, and a something as an object with a non empty quality set. It could be argued that having a quality set, whether empty or not, IS a quality of any object and thus belongs in it's quality set, and thus all objects have non empty quality sets and thus there are no nothings. That's fine, but the failure to distinguish between objects whose ONLY quality is that they have a quality set and those objects who actually have other qualities in their quality sets, leads to catestrophic failure later on when discussing the ramifications of nothings and somethings. THE ILLOGIC OF THOSE WHOSE MOTHER'S BRED WITHOUT A LICENSE. Some day you will run into someone who will try to counter a valid logical argument with "Well Russell proved that logic was illogical and thus you can't trust any logic at all". With what logic did Russell prove that logic was illogical? Again these guys are idiots, so you are talking to a lifer in Godel jail. CERTAINTY THAT ALL CERTAINTY IS IMPOSSIBLE In the same wing are the nut jobs who are certain they can't be certain of anything. We DEFINE this as Mind Broke. And then there are the guys down the hall who doubt everything. When asked if they doubt that they doubt everything as they claim, they will say yes, at least they are being consistent. When asked if they also doubt that they are being consistent by doubting that they doubt everything, they will also say yes to maintain the consistency. They fail to notice that consistency is not the same thing as make sense, and it certainly is not the same thing as being TRUE. Idiot: "I doubt everything and am certain of nothing" Mentor: "Are you certain of that?" Idiot: "No." Mentor: "Well that means maybe you don't doubt everything." Idiot: "No, that may be logical but I doubt logic too, at least I am being consistent!" Mentor: "Are you sure or do you doubt you are being consistent?" Idiot: "I doubt I am being consistent and I am being consistent in doubting I am being consistent!" Mentor: "Ah I see." THE FIRST LAW OF LOGIC Lesson learned: EVERY statement begins with "I am certain it is true that..." or else why say it? Example: "I do not know your middle name," means "I am certain it is true that I don't know your middle name." You may be wrong about it, but at least such a presentation keeps one's personal integrity in place. You can always say "I am certain it is true that maybe I don't know what I am talking about." You see, honesty is so easy. It is impossible to be unsure you are unsure. You can only be sure you are unsure. Idiot: "Well maybe I know your middle name but I have forgotten it, I don't know, so I am unsure if I know your middle name" Mentor: Well right NOW you can't remember my middle name, and you are not sure if you ever knew it, and of those two facts YOU ARE CERTAIN, so you are SURE that you are UNSURE of my middle name. But the Mentor is wasting his breath, as idiots NEED their illogic to get by. No mercy for the professionally illogical. DIRECT AND INDIRECT PERCEPTION The following is out of place here but I present it so you will recognize it when we delve into these matters in detail. Indirect perception means learning about A by looking at B, via A's alleged causal effects on B. Direct perception means learning about A by looking at A. All physical universe perception is indirect perception. All conscious perception is direct perception. NO exceptions. RENDITION is the act of referent A RENDERING its own state in the RENDITION ZONE of symbol B. INTERPRETAION is the act of surmising about the nature of A according to what one finds in B. THEORIES Theories consist of Model, Theory and Evidence. The referent is the model, the symbol is the evidence, and theory is the causal pathway between them. FALLING OUT OF Often when working with or building theories, something new and unexpected will 'fall out of the theory' onto your table for further study. These things that fall out of a theory are usually of the form "If your theory is workable, then this also must be true (or false)". It is up to you then to check it out and verify it or disqualify it as something appropriate to be in your theory or not. CAUSAL PATHWAYS AND THEORY BRIDGES Knowledge of the state of things travels across the universe via Causal Messenger Waves, traveling along causal pathways from referents to symbols of final authority from which the knowledge is gleaned by an observer. One studies the symbol to find out about the referent in a clasic case of indirect perception and learning. The symbol of final authority is not the last symbol in the causal pathway which goes to infinity, it is the symbol the observer chooses to learn from about the referent. The more causal hops between a referent and a symbol, the more diluted the knowledge becomes. Each hop along a given causal pathway from one object (referent) to the next object (symbol) is a kind of bridge over which the causal wave travels from object to object. Since causation in the physical universe is *ALWAYS* a theory, never a perfect certainty, these causal bridges are called THEORY BRIDGES. A TRANPARENT theory bridge is one where you can stand at the far end and look BACK along the bridge to see where it came from and the hops it traveled from where it started THERE AND THEN (in the past) to where you are in the hear and now HERE AND NOW. Ain't no such thing. Homer Earth, ca. 21st century #----------------------------------------------------------------------- The alert reader will once again notice that some of the definitions below are not the usual common language definitions, and therefore care must be taken to keep the below definitions in mind when pursuing the rest of this manuscript. OPENING DEFINITIONS QUALITIES, OBJECTS AND CLASSES There are Qualities, Objects and Classes. Objects are collections of qualities. Classes are collections of objects. The set of all qualities that define an object is called the Object Quality Set. The set of all qualities that define a class is called the Class Quality set, or 'Pertinent' quality set. All objects have an Object Quality Set, and anything that has an Object Quality Set is an object. The pertinent quality set of any class are the qualities that are pertinent to the meaning of the class, they are both common and unique to that class. Common qualities are those qualities which are common to every member of the class, that is every member has those qualities. Unique means that every object in the universe that has those qualities (as a group) is a member of that class. Words act as labels to qualities, objects and classes. Brown is a quality label. Joey, my dog, is an object label. Dog is a class label. Quality, object and class are class labels. QUALITIES OF BEING AND QUALITIES OF RELATION There are qualities of Being and qualities of Relation. Qualities of being are qualities that an object has alone, unrelated to any other object in the universe. Qualities of relation are qualities that an object has by virtue of its relation to other objects. An object's quality set contains all of the object's qualities of being and qualities of relation to other objects. Existence is a quality of being. Mass is also a quality of being, as a physical object may have mass without respect to other objects. Weight is a quality of relation as weight depends on the relationship between the object and another object, for example the Earth's gravitational field. SPATIAL, TEMPORAL, MATERIAL, ENERGETIC and CAUSAL RELATIONS There are 5 broad kinds of qualities of relation. Qualities of material relation: heavier than, denser than, etc. Qualities of energetic relation: faster than, more powerful than, hotter than, etc. Qualities of spatial relation: next to, on top of, under, bigger than, smaller than etc. Qualities of temporal relation: before, after, coincident with etc. Qualities of causal relation, is the cause of, is the effect of, is the father of, is made from etc. DETERMINING QUALITIES OF RELATION Qualities of relation are equally true of both objects which are in relation to each other. It is true of the ball that the ball is on top of the table. It is true of the table that the ball is on top of the table. Both ball and table have the identical quality of relation in their object quality sets, namely 'the ball is on top of the table'. Qualities of relation can also often be expressed by an opposite. It is true of the ball that the table is under the ball. It is true of the table that the table is under the ball. Thus the same quality of relation can be expressed in two opposite ways. It is true of the spoon that the spoon is to the right of the fork. It is true of the fork that the spoon is to the right of the fork. It is true of the spoon that the fork is to the left of the spoon. It is true of the fork that the fork is to the left of the spoon. On top of and under are spatial qualities of relation. So are to the right of and to the left of. It is true of WW I that WW I came before WW II. It is true of WW II that WW I came before WW II It is true of WW I that WW II came after WW I. It is true of WW II that WW II came after WW I. Came before and came after are qualities of temporal relation. Sometimes these relationships can be hidden by the language in use at the time. The weight of an object is usually expressed in terms of a quality of being, but it is really a quality of relation. It is true of the Earth that the Earth pulls the ball. It is true of the ball that the Earth pulls the ball. It is true of the Earth that the ball is pulled by the Earth. It is true of the ball that the ball is pulled by the Earth. Pulls and is pulled by are causal relations. We belabor the point because it is critical to know whether a quality is a quality of being or quality of relation, and in normal language, many qualities of relation are expressed as qualities of being. For example 'The ball is red' is a complete mess. Redness of course is a quality of being but is a quality of the conscious experience of the ball, not the ball itself. What the statement really means to say is that the ball reflects photons of 7000 Angstroms, which is a causal relation! Thus we see a quick example of where qualities of being in consciousness are used to symbolize qualities of causal relation in the physical universe, which as we shall see later is a very big deal. RELATION IMPLIES BEING An object can not have a quality of relation without having at least one quality of being, namely existence, in both objects. Existence can be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, or any other kind of existence, that one might care to contemplate, including hypothetical, imaginatory, hallucinatory, or even Plato's truths in heaven. ALONE AND UNALONE Aloneness is a quality of being. Unaloneness is a quality of relation. The AllThatIs is alone as there is nothing outside the AllThatIs to which it could be in relation. Any part of the AllThatIs is unalone. SOMETHING AND NOTHING We DEFINE... A nothing is an object with an empty object quality set, that is there are NO qualities in its quality set. A something is an object with a non empty quality set, that is there are SOME qualities in its quality set. Start of Godel Jail: The fact that a nothing has an empty quality set IS a quality of a nothing and thus belongs in the quality set. But this means the quality set is no longer empty as it now has one quality in it, which makes the quality set non empty, which means the nothing is really a something. If Goober then used this argument to prove that therefore there always had to be a something, as there couldn't ever be a nothing, as all nothings are somethings anyhow, he would be doing time in Godel Jail, along with the rest of his nut case friends in philosophy. End of Godel Jail. To be fair one might try to work with the idea that both somethings and nothings are somethings, but it is much more USEFUL to clearly delineate those objects with quality sets that are rich in qualities like all the objects around you from those objects whose only quality is that they are objects or other self referencing descriptions of them. Indeed, both somethings and nothings are under intense study in this discourse which is a quality of relation of both objects to ourselves as the observer. Thus it is true both somethings and nothings are objects with quality sets. So it is an arbitrary decision in this case to exclude from all objects underlying wireframe qualities that all objects have, so that somethings and nothings then become qualitatively different from each other. Having done this, the following can be said with ramifications to impact us later on. There can be only one nothing. If there were two different nothings, then they would have to have two different object quality sets that differentiated them. However if two object quality sets are different, then at least one or both of them are not empty, and thus not a nothing. You can have two different object quality sets, but if their contents are identical, they refer to the same single object. Two different empty quality sets have indentical contents, so must refer to the same object, in this case a nothing. Thus there is only one nothing, as there is nothing to differentiate two different nothings. When we say "Something exists in general", we are claiming that the quality set of the AllThatIs is non empty. When we say nothing exists, we are claiming that the quality set that describes the AllThatIs is empty. By 'nothing exists' we mean more accurately 'no something exists'. A something can not come from nothing. If an object has the potential ability to change into a something then its object quality set is not empty and thus it can not be a nothing. Thus if something exists now, something must have always existed. A something can not go into a nothing. If a nothing had the potential ability to arise from a something, then its object quality set is again not empty, and thus the resulting nothing can't be a true nothing. Thus a nothing which results in a something can't be a true nothing, but is an apparent or faux nothing instead. And a nothing which results from a something can't be a true nothing, but is also an apparent or faux nothing instead. Thus if something exists now, something will always exist. Something exists now. Therefore something has always existed, and something will always exist. The idea that something can't come from nothing is an intutive idea, and is not proven as such by the above argument which is dependent upon the definitions of the words something and nothing. However those definitions were chosen to cleanly encompass and provide ideological support for the prime philosophical tenet that something can't come from nothing. SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS A symbol is an object that is used to refer to a referent. A referent is an object that is referred to by a symbol. Symbols and referents are TWO DIFFERENT OBJECTS. Symbols and referents each have their own independent object quality sets. Some of the qualities of the symbol are mapped to some of the qualities of the referent. That's called a SYMBOL MAP. Symbols can have PICTURE FORM and DATA CONTENT. Picture form means geometric congruency, conformance, similarity or resemblance with the referent. The symbol LOOKS LIKE the referent in some recognizable way. Data content means data about the referent is encoded in the symbol. Picture form is one kind of data content. Symbols can have data content without picture form. Not all symbols LOOK LIKE the referent. The astute reader will notice the next paragraph to be new and unusual. Any two events that are causally related to each other are referent and symbol to each other, earlier to later. Thus if event A causes event B, then B is a symbol for A where A is the referent. Symbols and referents always have a causal pathway between them, or else the symbol would never have come to be used as a symbol for the referent. Data content is conserved along the causal pathway but degenerates according to causal distance between referent and SYMBOL OF FINAL AUTHORITY. A symbol of final authority is the symbol used to 'learn' about the original referent by an observer. The only data that can be passed on from referent to symbol along the causal pathway are qualities of causal relation, namely how the referent caused the symbol to change state. Thus the only data that can be learned about the referent by looking at the symbol are the referent's qualities of causal relation. Any other qualities of relation or qualities of being can only be gleaned by inference from received qualities of causal relation by the symbol. Indirect perception means learning about a referent by looking at a symbol for the referent. Learning about A by looking at B. This is only possible if B's state is a CAUSAL function of A's state. An exact statement of the causal function is called a THEORY. Theories consist of model, theory and evidence. When A affects B's state, A is the model, B is the evidence and the causal function between them are the theory. Indirect perception means learning about a cause by looking at one of its effects. One can not learn with perfect certainty about a referent by looking at a symbol which is a different object than the referent. You can't learn with perfect certainty about A by looking at B, even if B was allegedly caused by A. Thus learning with certainty is impossible across a causal pathway. DATA and DATA FLOW Data is the nature of objects in the AllThatIs, and is stated in the object's quality sets. Data flows through the physical universe from referent to symbol, via causal pathways between referent and symbol, that produce renditional changes in the symbol's state allegedly due to the state of the referent. MECHANICAL LEARNING Mechanical learning in the physical universe is the process of learning about referents by looking at symbols. Thus we have, Learning with certainty across two different objects is impossble. Learning with certainty across a space or time distance is impossible. Since ALL space time universes consist of cause flowing along causal pathways from referent to symbol each at two different locations in space and time, can there can be no learning with certainty in any physical universe. The intervention of space and time between referent and symbol guarantee that they are two different objects and thus this process can not provide certainty. Remember that relative to the symbol the referent is always in the PAST. By the time the causal messenger wave hits the symbol the REFERENT IS GONE. Something similar to the referent may remain after the original referent has acted, but once the original moment of time of the original referent is gone, so is the original referent. Remember time location of a referent is part of its Object Quality set, and once that time location changes, the new object remaining is a new different object than the original one a moment before. The idea that one object moves along in time remaining itself except for its time tag is an illusion born of anthropomorphization from our sense of our consious sense of self. Self is timeless, so it remains the same object no matter what time it is. That's a big statement to be covered later. Since we can not see directly into the past, there is no way to prove the referent ever existed looking at it from the symbol. The most accurate symbol for a referent is the referent itself. Direct perception is the process of learning about a referent by looking at the referent. Learning about a cause by looking directly at the cause itself. Self luminous consciousness is a self symbolizing direct perception event. This means that we see our own conscious pictures (referent) by looking at them directly, thus the referent is the symbol. There is no further separate symbol later in the chain by which we see our own conscious pictures. However in this case learner and learned-about are one and the same object. Only in this way can perfect certainty arise. When you are looking at conscious redness, you are looking directly at cause. That's why you can see it! Indirect perception can't see anything, as it is always seeking a later symbol to learn about an earlier referent. Since the chain of symbols never ends, one never ends up looking at anything directly. In a machine which can only learn by indirect perception, perception follows through to machine action without ever actually being seen by anything! Direct perception can only be used when an object is learning about itself. Where ever there are two different objects in space or time, they are limited to learning about each other by indirect perception via the causal pathway between them. One learns about A by studying A's alleged data imprint on B. A is the model for event B, and B is the evidence for event A. Theory is the statement that A CAUSED B. Indirect perception provides evidence, model and theory, but never provides perfect certainty because one learns about A by looking at B and and not by LOOKING AT THE CAUSE THAT TRAVELS BETWEEN THEM. Direct perception only provides perfect certainty because one learns about A by looking at A. That A can look at A and learn about itself with perfect certainty is the miracle of conscious self awareness. A machine can not do that. The looker and the looked-at in a machine are always separated by the looked-through, namely a space time distance, no matter how minute, and thus certainty can not follow because effect at B does not provide proof of cause at A across a space time distance. TRUTH Statements of fact are statements of the form QUALITY BELONGS TO OBJECT, or OBJECT BELONGS TO CLASS. Statements of fact are not always true. Truth is a quality of relation between a statement of fact and a given specified actuality. "This house is square" is of the form 'Squareness belongs to this house'. 'Squareness' is the quality, and 'this house' is the object. This statement of fact is true only relative to a given specified house. Certain statements can be true even though nothing exists at all. "The first 6 digits of PI are 3.14159" is true regardless of whether anything exists at all or anyone exists to know it. In this sense there can be absolute truths, statements which are true whether anything exists or not. Another example is, "Either there is something or there is nothing." That statement is clearly true whether there is something or nothing, and thus is true in all possible universes for all people and all time. FOUR KINDS OF STATEMENTS There are 4 kinds of statements of fact, and thus 4 kinds of truths. DEFINITIONAL TRUTHS are true by definition of the words within them. "A circle is the locus of points equidistant from a given single point." OBSERVATIONAL TRUTHS are true by observation. "I see two or more different colors when I look at the world around me." LOGICAL TRUTHS are logically true. "Joey is either a dog or not a dog." "If all dogs are mammals, and Joey is a dog, then Joey is a mammal." "Either something exists or nothing exists." INTUITIVE TRUTHS Something can't come from nothing, and something can't go into nothing. CERTAINTY Perfect certainty means "Can't be wrong." Certainty is a quality of relation between a knower of statements of fact and the alleged truth value of a given specified statement of fact. Being certain you can't be certain of anything, is absurd. Certainly. Therefore certainty exists. Uncertainty exists. To doubt this is to prove it. Certainty is different from Uncertainty. To doubt this is to assert that everyone is both certain and uncertain of everything all of the time. There are no degrees of certainty. Either one is certain, or one is uncertain. All theories born of indirect perception are uncertain. CAUSALITY There is, FOLLOWINGNESS DEPENDABLE FOLLOWINGNESS and NECESSARY DEPENDABLE FOLLOWINGNESS Followingness means event B followed event A. Dependable followingness means that as observed to date, event B always follows event A. Necessary dependable followingness means that event B MUST follow event A, and thus always has and always will follow A as long the necessariness has held and will hold. All causation implies necessary dependable followingness, and all necessary dependable followingness implies causation. Thus the entanglement between causation and necessariness is inextricable. Thus we DEFINE NECESSARINESS <-> CAUSATION. Although event B may be observed to follow event A, there is no observation of the NECESSARINESS of that followingness, thus no observation of causation, thus no assurance that event B will always follow event A because it must. Dependable followingness does not prove necessary dependable followingness. Corelation is dependable followingness. Correlation does not prove causation. Effect does not prove cause. Causation is not sufficient to witness causation. This is is Jane's Law, it is true because ovservaction is limited to the states of the referent and the states of the symbols, and any changes between them, but never the agency that travels between them that we call cause. CAUSE is ALWAYS a theory to any observer limited to observing the states of things. Necessariness is not observable in the physical universe because there is nothing in event A or B that indicates that B MUST follow from event A or even that it did more than a few times. Thus causation between event A and B remains forever a theory as long as one can only observe the beginning and end points of causation, events A and B. Causation in the physical universe is an anthropomorphization of our direct perception of personal agency within our own consciousness. Anthropomorphization means to assign qualities of zero dimensional consciousness to the physical universe. "Consciousness feels pain, so my wounded robot over here needs anesthetics." Reverse anthropomorphization means to assign qualities of the physical universe to consciousness. "Matter and energy move through time, so the conscious unit is moving through time also." For example, does time move forward because two electrons repel each other locally, or do two electrons repel because time moves forward globally? Are there two causes, one is time moving forward globally, and the other is two electrons pushing on each other locally? Which then is cause of action, local force between electrons or global time moving forward? If there is no global cause of time moving forward everywhere present, can there be local cause of changes between anything at all? Is there local cause at all in the physical universe? Or is the concept of local cause in the dimensional world an anthropomorphization of the directly perceived local cause we see in our conscious selves through personal agency? Are you certain of personal agency? Does this imply certainty of causation in consciousness. Does this say anything about the space time dimensionality of consciousness? Is space and time a quality of an electron, or is 'electronness' a quality of some points in space, i.e. is an electron just another kind of space? When an electron moves, is it the same electron in the next moment of time, or is it a whole new recreation? When an image 'moves' across an LCD screen like in a video game, is any part of the LCD screen moving? Or is the position of polarization changing? Is an electron merely a different polarization of space time? If so, what possible local cause could there be between them? Do two different images on an LCD screen have any local cause between them? PROBABILISTIC CAUSE It is generally considered that if event A causes event B, then event A must ALWAYS cause event B. It is argued that if sometimes event A doesn't give rise to event B, then either event A is not cause of event B, or else event A isn't always exactly the same event A, in other words its not event A at all when B doesn't happen. It is granted that there may be probabilistic cause, in the sense that identical events A may give rise to event B 25 percent of the time and to event C 75 percent of the time. Notice however it is not a far step from there to claiming that identical events A may give rise to an infinite number of different events 0 through N, one infinitieth of the time. Isn't that the same as saying even A has nothing to do with what follows at all? STATE DETERMINED State determined means that what happens next in time is a function of the present state in time. There can be strict state determinedness, such that A always gives rise to B. There can be probabilistic state determinedness, such that A always gives rise to a random selection of B and C etc, with various probabilities assigned to each outcome. GLOBAL AND LOCAL CAUSE It is considered that perhaps time moving forward results from an underlying timeless global cause. It is global in that it affects everything everywhere in space at the "same time," whether or not anything exists IN that space or not. It should be noted that the term 'same time' can be confused by abuse of special relativity. For example if two events happen on a world line diagram, one observer may claim A and B happened at 12noon and another observer may claim they both happened at 1pm. Each observer will say the two events happened at the same time, but assign WHAT time it was differently. This is an artifact of changing coordinate systems. If event A and event B happen AT THE SAME POINT ON THE WORLD LINE DIAGRAM, then they happen at the 'same time' for all observers, even though different observers may lable what that time was differently. Local cause is the apparancy of forces between matter and energy that cause changes in state within the physical universe, for example, electrons repelling each other, or planets going around the sun. If one wishes to use Occam's razor to cut one's throat, one might presume that having two causes, one global and one local is one too many, and so postulate the possibility that the global cause not only moves everything forward in time one frame at a time, but also causes everything to move relative to each other in space AS IF there were local cause between them. Thus 'state determinedness' would be an illusion based on the whim of global cause, which could just as easily cause planets to go around each other in square orbits if it wanted to. Thus if a global cause could create and control an entire space time continuum, and also virtualize local causation correctly down to the last quark, it could create the apparancy of a fully state determined system. However it could also originate or inject changes into that system at any time that were not a function of the present state or any state in the past. A system that was truly caused only by local causes, could not do such a thing, as the local causation would be a fundamental part of the nature of the objects that were interacting, and thus there is no virtualization of cause that could be violated at whim. STATE AND CHANGE IN STATE An object is any event in space time described by its related quality set. The state of an object is the state or contents of its quality set at the time. An object that has moved to a new unit of time is a new different object as its quality set is not identical to the object at the prior moment of time. They at least differ by time stamp. A process is a change in state in an object, a movement of an object to the next object in space and time, with a new quality set thereby. A process chain is a chain of changes in state in a series of objects (space time events) that form a causal pathway. Remember that an object 'moving through time' is really the recreation of a series of objects similar to each other, pretending to be one single object whose only change is to have 'moved through time.' A casual pathway is a chain of events that are causally related to each other, one to the next. A causal chain produces a chain of objects which are referent and symbol to each other. Each object later in time is a symbol for each object which is a referent earlier in time. Each symbol later in time records data in its changed state about the nature of the referent that caused it to change state. We call this data transfer a causal imprint. However state does not prove prior state. There is no data in any object's present state that provides perfect certainty that it was ever in any other prior state, including earlier in time. Thus state does not prove change in state. One can not tell with perfect certainty if an object has changed state merely by looking at its present state. This is a major assertion, please do not go by it without understanding it. Thus looking at the state of a symbol does not prove that the symbol has changed state, and thus does not prove that the symbol received an effect of causal relation from the referent, and thus does not prove anything at all about the referent. Thus learning about referents by looking at symbols does not produce certainty. The only way a machine can learn about anything is to BE a symbol in the causal pathway originating from the referent. Since symbol does not prove referent, i.e. effect does not prove cause, a machine can not be certain of anything. DIMENSION and EXTENSION The word 'physical' means dimensional. Dimensional actualities are a subset of all actualities, as there can be zero dimensional or non dimensional actualities. Zero and non dimensional mean the same thing. The dimensionality of an object is its shape, denoted by {a,b,c} where a, b, and c are the extensions in each dimension. Thus an object with shape {2,3,4} is 3 dimensional with extensions 2, 3 and 4 in each dimension respectively. This might correspond to a 2 x 3 x 4 piece of gold, or 24 cubic units of gold. A scalar object has zero dimensions. It has no dimensions in which to have extension. It's shape is {}, the empty set. A vector object has 1 dimension and zero or more extension in that 1 dimension. It's shape is {a}, where a is the extension in its one dimensions. a may be zero, in which case one has a zero length 1 dimensional object. This is not a total nothing because it still has shape but it is a physical nothing, because its extension is zero. A matrix object has 2 dimensions and zero or more extensions in those 2 dimensions. The shape of a matrix is {a,b}. A cubic object has 3 dimensions and zero or more extensions in those 3 dimensions. The shape of a cube is {a,b,c}. If an object has any dimensions, it must have non zero extension in all dimensions in order to not be a physical nothing, in order to be a physical something. For example a cube of shape {0, 2, 3} is 0 cubic units in size (0x2x3) and thus a physical nothing, but because it still has 3 dimensions and specific shape, it can not be called a total nothing. Since a scalar object does not have any dimensions, it does not need to have non zero extension to be a something, as it has no dimensions in which to have extension. Scalar objects are always a something by default. They are not however a physical something. Remember physical is DEFINED as non zero dimensional, so it must have at least one or more dimensions. Scalars may however exist in the exact same sense as a physical something exists. In the end, the distinction between physical objects as dimensional, and non physical objects as non dimensional may be useless. GOLD A {2 x 2 x 2} gold object is 6 cubic units of 3 dimensional gold and is a physical something. A {0 x 2 x 2} gold object is 0 cubic units of 3 dimensional gold and is a physical nothing. A {2 x 2} gold object is 4 square units of 2 dimensional gold and is a physical something. A {0 x 2} gold object is 0 square units of 2 dimensional gold and is a physical nothing. A {2} gold object is 2 linear units of 1 dimensional gold and is a physical something. A {0} gold object is 0 linear units of 1 dimensional gold and is a physical nothing. A {} gold object is {} scalar units of 0 dimensional gold and is a non physical something. If God created space and time, then God itself must have no space and time, and must therefore be a scalar actuality. It is also possible that holographic illusions of space and time exist in a scalar substrate. In this case the illusions of space and time do not themselves take up any space or time. No two objects in dimensional space time can ever be certain of each other's existence or qualities, because the only way two different objects can learn about each other is through indirect perception, learning about cause in the first object by looking at effects in the second object. Only 'two objects' in a zero dimensional scalar object can be certain of each other, because all objects are one object. In such a case the object is certain of itself. We call this self luminosity or self luminousness. The symbol of final authority would have to be self symbolizing, and self referencing. A scalar can create the illusion of two, but a non scalar can not create the illusion of one. Homer Wilson Smith