I had a quick unintended thought when I was asking myself on how to define “Mind”. I ran into the dilemma on wether to define mind by its function (physical interaction) or by the category it could belong to.
Physical properties:
• Ones we see
• Ones we don’t see but which can be proven to exist (EMW)
Dark matter cannot be seen and can be proven to exist.
But it doesn’t exist in the same way that electromagnetic waves do. Why? EMW clearly interact with other things, and dark matter interacts with other things too?
The difference, I think, could be that EMW can be assigned a form or category called waves, whereas dark matter cannot belong to any existing forms.
This brings me to the Idea that the existence of things can be a truth without things necessarily belonging to an abstract category (forms), but the existence of physical interaction is necessary for things to exist.
Do you think such an assumption could have implications on how to define things?
Tabby - the cat - is brown. Hence brown things exist. There’s no Tabby for unicorns and hence the empty extension.
One of the biggest controversies of our times is the ontology of God. The most powerful argument IMHO is the Anselm-Godel ontological argument.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance that exerts gravity (25% of the total stuff in the universe, 0.05% being ordinary matter we’re made of). What springs to mind are deep, underground labs with supersensitive detectors, capable of sensing even the smallest of light flashes (isn’t that how they confirmed the existence of neutrinos?).
EMW exists: are EMW-based. A clear, night sky is sparkling with starlight.
Light is something that arises in phenomenal experience so we give it a name, and some people wonder about its nature. Newton was confident it consisted of a stream of particles, whilst Huygens was convinced it consisted of waves. Newton was more famous than Huygens so his idea was more widely adopted and stood for a hundred years before Thomas Young performed his two-slit experiment, confirming Huygen’s view. And Young’s view stood for another hundred years until Einstein addressed the photoelectric effect, reinstating some respectability to Newton’s view and contributing to the advent of quantum theory with its wave/particle duality.
In the 1860s Maxwell combined the known laws of electricity and magnetism and predicted the existence of EM waves. His equations indicated that light was an EM wave. Heinrich Herts later confirmed the existence of Maxwell’s prediction of EM waves experimentally using an alternating electric current and a loop of wire to produce radio waves. The EM force became understood as a fundamental force of nature.
In the early 1900s it was noted that rotating galaxies had only one percent of the mass necessary to hold themselves together under rotation. By 1980 the evidence was indisputable, but given gravity as a fundamental force of nature, the mechanism was not understood. The term “Dark Matter” was coined as a place-holder for “whatever it was” that prevented galaxies from disintegrating. To my knowledge no candidate material has yet been confirmed.
The existence of EM waves is now widely accepted as more than just a theoretical construct – we can generate and manipulate them whenever we like. The account holds solid. Dark matter, on the other hand, is currently an inference from a gravitational phenomenon. We know what it is intended to account for but we do not yet know what it is.
So I think that on a pragmatic level we can say that EM waves exist, but not that Dark Matter exists – what exists in this latter case is an empirical phenomenon that defies expalanation in terms of our current physical theories. There is as yet nothing agreed upon to which the term “Dark Matter” refers.
One could ask, how are oceanic waves, light waves and gravity waves analogous enough to belong to the same category. Though they don’t really, since “wave” in one domain of jargon/discipline means something different in another.
Is there a universal property to be assigned to the linguistic category wave? Not likely. Signature pattern changes in a medium, often with the property of a periodicity (or fluctuating field). Though waves apparently don’t require periodicity, depending on the parameters of the phenomenon you’re are measuring, how you are measuring it. Are there kinds of waves with no wavelength or frequency? Apparently so.
Things exist without language. Language gets to helping us navigate and predict that existence, but it gets in the way as much as it helps us at times. That is why everyone is so obsessed with trying to be on the same page (everyone knows what a bird means…)
Am going to go feed my etheral unicorn now. I’m the only one who owns one. His name is Dark Matter.
What category does Dark Matter the unicorn belong to? Who would like to verify whether he is a unicorn or not? By what standard of shared language does he theoretically exist? Just because you deny him doesn’t mean he doesn’t have casual power. Maybe you can infer his presence. But like more than just a single, epheremal, unpredictable pulse, a singularity which cannot be grasped, his identity must persist in time to be known. Dark Matter is Dark Matter, and holds his intelligible properties in time.
In what sense are there properties or things in our universe that are unintelligible and thus may somehow defy categorization. Or is “unintelligible thing” incoherent?
All matter is a manifestation produced by a duality—the duality of dispersal and convergence. What we presently define as “matter” is in fact only a small fragment of the true concept of matter. We take matter to be observable matter, that is, matter under the dominance of convergence—the principle that allows regularities and laws to hold. But actual matter also includes that which is governed by dispersal. Dark matter and dark energy are precisely forms of matter dominated by dispersal. Because dispersal dominates in them, they cannot be observed—and that is why they strike us as so strange.
Observable matter is, in fact, the mode of being in which convergence dominates. Energy itself is matter—matter in which dispersal dominates. When convergence acts upon energy and takes hold as the dominant principle, that energy is disciplined into observable invariance; this is the observable matter we see. We human beings affirm only identity and invariance, and for that reason we see only observable matter—and feel at home with it. Energy (dark matter, dark energy), on the other hand, is governed by dispersal—with identity still present within it, preserving the existence of this unobservable matter. Yet in its presence we suffer acutely, because dispersal runs counter to our very nature; and so we experience dispersive energy as demons, ghosts, and evil spirits.
The energy-conversion formula expresses the amount of dispersive energy required to shift a converged state into a wholly dispersed one. What the formula actually describes is the conversion of energy between convergence and dispersal—not a conversion between matter and energy. To frame it as a conversion of matter into energy misleads, because it makes it sound as though matter and energy were two distinct kinds of existent. In truth, both matter and energy are merely modes of being of what alone deserves the name “matter”; that is precisely why they can communicate with and transform into one another.
The presumption that only the physical - be it matter, energy, or space-time continua - counts as what exists, needs some justification.
'cause I reckon there are things like money, and other things like Frodo Baggins, and there is pain. And it seems to me that they might be worth explaining, too.
are EMW-based. A clear, night sky is sparkling with starlight.