under construction...
(for a very long time)
What does it mean to “exist”? What does it mean for something to “be” or “not be”? Is “meaning” something intrinsic to the message itself, or is it always created through interaction between a mind or some mechanism and the message? When does something that is the same become not the same? When is an object no longer truly identical as itself?
These questions are what I’ve been pondering for years. Still I don’t really know. The scope of these two questions is immensely large. Yet I get the feeling that there may not be any clear answers. Perhaps these will become lifelong questions for me. They seem to touch deeply on topics - quantum information and solid state physics… though they might not be all that important.
Physics is actually a discipline that tries to explain “being”. What is existence? For Einstein, time and space were forms of existence, and matter was its substance. In Space, Time, Matter, Weyl explains that in relativity, time is the stream of consciousness and space is the form of the external world. Here space can be thought of as something akin to “green.” We call a specific wavelength range of visible light green but that doesn’t mean that when we see the color and thinking “Wow, this light has a wavelength of exactly 562.21nm!” In this sense, space is akin to that pure mathematical concept, like a wavelength of visible light. From this perspective nature “embodies” these concepts. Einstein believed that these concepts have an objective, independent reality. (Perhaps this is why - during his debate with Bohr at the Solvay Conference - Einstein could only incredulously ask to Bohr, “Do you really think the moon does not exist if I am not looking at it?”)
But what does it mean for something to be just as it is?
What is energy? What is field? What is spin? What is information? What is what? Often we begin questions with phrases like “What is …?” but when we ask that way, we’re not really talking about the thing itself. Instead we end up just describing how to measure it, or explaining its function, or stating its equations, but no one really explains what it fundamentally is… Of course trying to explain the essence of existence requires questioning existence itself, and when we start doubting existence itself…….well things get really tough.