@IAHM-COL and KL-666:
As I think through the implications of your responses, rooted in the Cartesian model, with deep respect for your perspective, I have many, many problems with your epistomological and ontological arguments regarding the structure of reality.
For one thing, it borders on a kind of mysticism that strays far from what I would consider a rational approach to understanding what it means to merely be. Why? It fails to provide a grounding for the singularity of my being. If I can never be sure there is a core of reality in which there is even a kernel of truth within my identity, my-self-ness, how can I have an identity to begin with from which I can say that there is a boundary between that which is me and which is not me? Without having that epigenetic truth as a deterministic and ontological foundation, then I cannot define if I even exist, let alone begin to assign any forms of meaning to my existenc?. Lacking that,
Cogito ergo sum is nonsense, because even if I think, I cannot know therefore if I am.
So, within the structure of the universe, there must be a source of connectivity to a cosmic truth. And I am not speaking theologically, here, although, I could write a treatise on the weaknesses of Descartes' theological arguments.
There is one truth in the universe as we know it, one not open to perception, and that is the Law of the conservation of Information. It is definitely a post-Cartesian postulate, and although Einstein would have had some familiarity with it, the Law has been perhaps the most profound discovery of String Theory, to date. It is such an immutable law that even Stephen Hawking initially got it wrong and had to revise his black hole theory after Leonard Susskind provided the mathematics to show that even when light crosses the event horizon of a black hole, the information is not stripped from it during that passage.
It is the implications of this law for cosmology and for the philosophy of science in general that directly challenges the Cartesian model and its successors. Simply put, the Law of the Conservation of Information is the essential ingredient for the universe to exist and "evolve." The unit of information is called the "bit," but it is not like a computer bit. The bit in this case is a Planck-sized "unit" of information, the smallest unit of space into which can information exist. Susskind defines it as:
The maximum amount of information that can be stuffed into a region of space is equal to the area of the region, not the volume
Source:
The Black Hole War, p. 140It is this rather unorthodox definition of the smallest bit-information building block defining the structure of the universe that for all intents and purposes, puts the final nails into the Cartesian coffin. For nothing can be more an absolute truth than
that which cannot be divided by any form or integer in the cosmos.In this, I stake out my philosophical position as not just a Lockian rationalist, but also a determinist in terms of my approach to science in general and astronomy and cosmology in particular. What I will explore in future posts is string theory's hypotheses regarding the holographic principle.
I leave you with the corollary to the above law regarding the bit:
The Maximum entropy in a region of space is one bit per Planck area.
Ibid. p. 295Happy pondering.