Is Space a Concept?

[C C]

I realize that and it's a perfect segue to my next head scratcher : If I'm mostly space then am I also mostly time, assuming that space-time fills those voids between the particles I'm composed of?

There are always virtual particles fluctuating in and out of those specious "voids", which items like the Casimir effect depend upon.

You can shift from subsuming change under "time" to construing those differences between one specious moment and the next as simply partaking in the room of an extra spatial dimension. Regardless of whether spacetime is represented as a field or a hypersolid (un-neatly paginated and warped or disfigured block-universe).

It just requires getting rid of that magical silliness which commonsense presentism sports -- of the universe globally blinking in and out of existence in yoctosecond intervals (the next cosmic state both replacing and bringing about the extinction of the one preceding it). A human's feeling of "now" is a variable unit of cognition which is a milliseconds "sized" elephant in duration. Thereby it having to supervene on and being produced by a chunk-sequence of a vast number of co-existing subatomic and electrochemical changes in the brain which the aforementioned yoctosecond would otherwise accommodate in presentism (i.e., the "speediness" of particle events being why presentism could not use the "longer" interval of subjective human consciousness for its objective "present").

Robert Geroch: "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle." --General Relativity from A to B

Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters

Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science

~

[Zinjanthropos]

The God Entity: Scott Gordon's Theory of Everything sounds like an interesting read. Not that it is guaranteed to sway my thinking but still I'm inquisitive about the new book nonetheless. I stole this from a site preamble:

Spacetime is a medium composed of a single component building block called, “ The Gordon Omnipresent Dot” or the GOD entity. (These entities are referred to as entities and not particles because particles exist “in” spacetime where these entities exist “as” spacetime.) Each GOD entity creates a planar radial energy field.

Is this Gordon guy a quack? Guess I'll have to pick up a copy. Anyone read it?

[Yazata]

Yeah, the passage of time is essentially "making" more time, and space expands over time.
I don't subscribe to the notion of a "block" spacetime, where the future already exists, just waiting for the moving "now" to reach it, as that smacks of predetermination similar to some bad religious ideas.

I don't really have a clue what time is or what the ontological status of the past and future are. Those are just more of the countless mysteries that I feel surrounded by at every moment. (Mysteries that motivate my interest in philosophy and science.)

But yeah, I don't really favor the fixed 'block universe' idea either. (I have less objection to growing-block ideas.) These are just philosophical preferences of mine though, since I simply don't know how time should best be understood.

I'm more inclined to think of the future, present and past as something analogous to a giant universal scale quantum-mechanical wave-function collapse.

I see the future as a sort of superposition of possibilities. I'm not a hard metaphysical determinist and I speculate that the future can unfold in a number of different ways.

The present might arguably represent the point of transition from a whole variety of possibilities to a single actuality.

Which kind of trails off in the other direction as the fixed past in which nothing more can happen and everything is frozen in temporal amber.

Which does leave us with a real movement through time. I'm not entirely convinced that our experiential intuition of the unfolding of time is just an illusion, like so many intellectuals preach today. I damnably continue to think that my life experience tells me something important about the nature of reality. I guess that I picture time as a sort of wave of crystalization propagating and spreading out (from some initial 'big-bang'?) through some sort of abstract temporal dimension. And all of us essentially as surfers riding that cosmic wave.

So however speculatively, I'm a "presentist" of a sort, I guess.

[Secular Sanity]

Is this Gordon guy a quack?

Read through his response.  Cheeky or not, he’s a little weird. LOL!

https://www.quora.com/What-is-inside-a-quark

"It is funny to me that physicists think of down quarks as an elementary particles when they are not. Imagine the surprise on Frank Wilczek’s face (and Sheldon Cooper’s) when he realizes that for all the work he did on baryons and winning the Nobel Prize… He is about to be outsmarted by some guy who only took three undergraduate physics courses 40 years ago while earning a master’s degree in engineering. In my defense I did earn all A’s. LOL!"

As far as time is concerned, I’ll stick with good ole fashion entropy.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yKbJ9leUNDE

[Syne]

Yeah, the passage of time is essentially "making" more time, and space expands over time.
I don't subscribe to the notion of a "block" spacetime, where the future already exists, just waiting for the moving "now" to reach it, as that smacks of predetermination similar to some bad religious ideas.

I don't really have a clue what time is or what the ontological status of the past and future are. Those are just more of the countless mysteries that I feel surrounded by at every moment. (Mysteries that motivate my interest in philosophy and science.)

But yeah, I don't really favor the fixed 'block universe' idea either. (I have less objection to growing-block ideas.) These are just philosophical preferences of mine though, since I simply don't know how time should best be understood.

I'm more inclined to think of the future, present and past as something analogous to a giant universal scale quantum-mechanical wave-function collapse.

I see the future as a sort of superposition of possibilities. I'm not a hard metaphysical determinist and I speculate that the future can unfold in a number of different ways.

The present might arguably represent the point of transition from a whole variety of possibilities to a single actuality.

Which kind of trails off in the other direction as the fixed past in which nothing more can happen and everything is frozen in temporal amber.

Which does leave us with a real movement through time. I'm not entirely convinced that our experiential intuition of the unfolding of time is just an illusion, like so many intellectuals preach today. I damnably continue to think that my life experience tells me something important about the nature of reality. I guess that I picture time as a sort of wave of crystalization propagating and spreading out (from some initial 'big-bang'?) through some sort of abstract temporal dimension. And all of us essentially as surfers riding that cosmic wave.

So however speculatively, I'm a "presentist" of a sort, I guess.

Yeah, I don't have too many objections to the growing-block universe. For all practice purposes, the past could just as well continue to exist, although I seriously doubt it does. The present as wave function collapse is pretty much what I think, with the "flow" of time being the time-evolving ("spreading") wave function potential.

I don't think our perception of time's "flow" is illusory either. That science has trouble reconciling the arrow of time seems more a limitation of science than a limitation on perception.

Presentism seems the most likely to me, with eternalism being the least likely.

[Yazata]

I'm lead to the idea that gravity can be put in the matter category

I'm inclined to speculate that space (in the sense of what physicists call vacuum) is a physical... something. The things that we call matter, from tangible 'stuff' like tables and chairs, to sub-atomic particles, might arguably be compounded from different kinds of excitations of the underlying vacuum. Gravity (and other fields as well, I guess) would certainly seem to be a physical sort of event that happens in that kind of very physical space as well.  

a type of matter extending between two things that have mass in the Newtonian sense.  If the graviton is taken to be the particle involved, it could be a form of matter...

An excitation of the underlying medium perhaps.

Of course, this kind of thinking doesn't really answer the question in the subject line: Is space a concept?

Concepts seem to me to be mental things. Ideas. Symbolic or (maybe) linguistic models that we use as conveniences in thinking about things that aren't physically present or about aspects of things that aren't immediately apparent to the senses.

I think that space in the pure mathematical geometrical sense is conceptual. Mathematicians invent various sorts of geometries in which various sorts of ideal elements must conform to various sorts of ideal rules. Then they deduce the implications. The most famous example of that, which all of us learned about in school, was Euclidean geometry. There are a whole variety of these ideal conceptual geometries depending on what elements and rules are taken to be axiomatic.

I don't think that this mathematical form of geometry should be confused with physical space. But geometry does capture something that we observe about physical space. (Which isn't surprising, since as the name suggests, 'geometry' began among the Egyptians as practical 'earth measurement', a set of rules-of-thumb for drawing property lines. It was the Greeks that made it abstract and mathematical.)

Physical space displays geometrical properties which the mathematicians abstract from the physical reality and play with conceptually. So we end up with two different things: physical space and the abstract conceptual models that we use to think about physical space. The first isn't a mental construct but the second is. Physicists loot the mathematicians' cabinet and select the conceptual constructs that best seem to model their observational results. For example.

Unfortunately, just like the rest of us, physicists often seem to confuse the constructs that they use to conceptualize the reality around them (and themselves along with it) with the reality that they are using the constructs to conceptualize. That's the occupational disease of theoretical physicists, coming to believe that the mathematics on their chalkboards is more real than physical reality. They start to think of their conceptual models as if they were indeed the underlying "laws of the universe" to which all physical reality must conform. (The theological origins of that kind of thinking should be obvious, despite many of the theoretical physicists being atheists, sometimes militantly so.)

[elte]

I was picturing in my mind (conceptualizing) two bodies sitting in an undisturbed vacuum of space.  Say, two 100 pound titanium balls connected by a one half inch rod, all molded from a single casting of molten metal.  The gravity between them would seeming persist for eternity.  If gravity were energy, then then in this thought experiment, I would expect the spheres to shrink in mass with the passage of time.   That is about as far as I can speculate.  (Giving more detail about my earlier post scenario.  Not couterarguing in any way.)

[Zinjanthropos]

physicists often seem to confuse the constructs that they use to conceptualize the reality around them (and themselves along with it) with the reality that they are using the constructs to conceptualize. That's the occupational disease of theoretical physicists, coming to believe that the mathematics on their chalkboards is more real than physical reality. They start to think of their conceptual models as if they were indeed the underlying "laws of the universe" to which all physical reality must conform. 

Great post Yaz.

[C C]

Zin:

The thing to remember is that there are two "external worlds" or different domains which that expression can reference. One is the experienced, extrospective world as outputted by the information processing of the observer -- the manifested, sensible, or empirical world (a kind of representation in the brain, as a neuroscientist like David Eagleman might put it). The other is an ultimate, archetypal, or abstract world as inferred by reason; and (much later in the game) supposedly poked and prodded by lab experiments to tease out features of it.

With regard to the former external world, the presentism view of time is the case as well as objects legitimately having color, odor, and whatever else commonsense realism entertains. With regard to the latter, realism about scientific entities and theories applies; or classic / newer philosophical (metaphysical) arguments.

Typically, but not necessarily always, the "given" external world of sensation is taken to be mind-dependent. But not with respect to the will of the individual observer having control over it -- only the generic attributes associated with consciousness like manifestation of objects, qualitative or phenomenal properties, experience of change, etc being emergent products.

Whereas the rational external world inferred by philosophy or scientific activity is typically treated as mind-independent. Which is actually arguable since it is outputted by the sapient aspect of mind -- reason is the means for apprehending it and abstract symbolic systems represent it. At any rate, the very fact that it is a product of reason and interrogative activity often results in the phenomenal properties of the sensible world being stripped away to leave behind a functional map or quantitative causal structure that is empty of the other characteristics, as well as the changes associated with time either co-existing or being yielded by eternal forms (generative principles).

Treating the sensible external world as mind-dependent has a history of flirting with views resembling immoral solipsism and potentially less selfish collective solipsism, shared dreaming, etc (some of the latter arguably cross with the third option below).

Treating the rational external world as being the case has a history of leaving it a mystery as to where or how the phenomenal attributes arise (as well as, of course, denigrating the everyday appearances of life).

Attempts to compromise the two roughly result in items like objective idealism, David Hume's panphenomenalism, panpsychism, neutral monism, multiple brains in a vat (proto-Matrix scenario) or relatedly the cosmos being the dream / virtual reality of some transcendent deity, archailect, master computer, etc (with the individual observer perspectives being internally nested and inferior copies or avatars of itself).

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[Zinjanthropos]

All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is supported by no appearance of probability...Hume

CC, that is my signature on another forum. It's been there for I don't know how many years. I think it speaks volumes about what I think for a lot of things, including the very topics I post. Hard for me to commit to any line of thinking and even my signature is not exempt. Different POV's are what it's all about, that's what humans are good at. Somewhere in all that I form an opinion, always keeping in mind my signature statement.