Aug 9, 2025 03:58 AM
But the more you keep turning the "external world" of physics into abstract items consisting of purely functional roles, the more it ironically only seems to have any substantive, material or spatially extended existence in the brain's sensory representations of it.
- - - - - - - - - -
Spacetime isn’t real in the way you think
https://iai.tv/articles/spacetime-is-an-..._auid=2020
INTRO: Physicists often describe spacetime as a container in which the universe unfolds, but this metaphor is misleading and even obstructive. Philosopher of physics Eleanor Knox dismantles the classical view and argues for an alternative: spacetime should be understood functionally, as whatever plays the right theoretical roles in our best physical models. From string theory to emergent quantum realms, Knox shows how this shift opens the door to a deeper and more flexible understanding of reality.
EXCERPTS: . . . What kind of thing is this potentially infinite space? One popular conception is that it's a kind of container, arena, or backdrop for everything else - after all, I described it as the space in which things live. If you think of space like this, it's natural to think of it as a kind of thing, a substance in its own right. This view, known as substantivalism, has a long history. Isaac Newton famously thought of space like this - an immovable substance in which matter lived and relative to which motion was defined. That said, substantivalism has never been the only game in town. Renee Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz both disagreed with Newton. Leibniz, in particular, espoused relationism – he believed that space was reducible to relations between bodies, rather than an independent substance.
[...] Not all ‘spaces’ are spatiotemporal. As an obvious example, consider ‘colour space’, a nice way of representing the various combinations of and shades of colour that digital files can represent...
[...] words like container, arena, and backdrop are metaphorical here – they bring to mind boxes and stages. Can we dig deeper into the container metaphor to find its real content? I think not. A container has edges, and the contents of a container have positions relative to those edges. We know that spacetime is nothing like that. Not only does it have no edges, it has no preferred coordinates – there's no special way to pick out positions within it.
And, importantly, there’s no way to pick out the ‘same place’ in space over time – that's one of the lessons of Galileo’s principle of relativity, enshrined in the structure of Einstein’s relativity. Under scrutiny, the container metaphor starts to crumble. Moreover, if the container must be fundamental, emergent spacetime is ruled out. It’s generally a bad idea to rule out interesting physics ideas based on philosophical intuitions (rather than arguments), but a particularly bad idea when the foundations of the idea are already shaky... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - -
Spacetime isn’t real in the way you think
https://iai.tv/articles/spacetime-is-an-..._auid=2020
INTRO: Physicists often describe spacetime as a container in which the universe unfolds, but this metaphor is misleading and even obstructive. Philosopher of physics Eleanor Knox dismantles the classical view and argues for an alternative: spacetime should be understood functionally, as whatever plays the right theoretical roles in our best physical models. From string theory to emergent quantum realms, Knox shows how this shift opens the door to a deeper and more flexible understanding of reality.
EXCERPTS: . . . What kind of thing is this potentially infinite space? One popular conception is that it's a kind of container, arena, or backdrop for everything else - after all, I described it as the space in which things live. If you think of space like this, it's natural to think of it as a kind of thing, a substance in its own right. This view, known as substantivalism, has a long history. Isaac Newton famously thought of space like this - an immovable substance in which matter lived and relative to which motion was defined. That said, substantivalism has never been the only game in town. Renee Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz both disagreed with Newton. Leibniz, in particular, espoused relationism – he believed that space was reducible to relations between bodies, rather than an independent substance.
[...] Not all ‘spaces’ are spatiotemporal. As an obvious example, consider ‘colour space’, a nice way of representing the various combinations of and shades of colour that digital files can represent...
[...] words like container, arena, and backdrop are metaphorical here – they bring to mind boxes and stages. Can we dig deeper into the container metaphor to find its real content? I think not. A container has edges, and the contents of a container have positions relative to those edges. We know that spacetime is nothing like that. Not only does it have no edges, it has no preferred coordinates – there's no special way to pick out positions within it.
And, importantly, there’s no way to pick out the ‘same place’ in space over time – that's one of the lessons of Galileo’s principle of relativity, enshrined in the structure of Einstein’s relativity. Under scrutiny, the container metaphor starts to crumble. Moreover, if the container must be fundamental, emergent spacetime is ruled out. It’s generally a bad idea to rule out interesting physics ideas based on philosophical intuitions (rather than arguments), but a particularly bad idea when the foundations of the idea are already shaky... (MORE - missing details)
