A historical example that clarifies this relationship is that epicycles were brilliant math, as a mapping of our view of the cosmos. Yet the physical explanation derived from this description, of crystalline spheres, was lousy physics, because we are not at the center of the universe, galaxy, or even solar system. Math is the map. Physics/the physical, is the territory.
To construct a very elementary model of reality, consider it as the relationship between energy and the forms expressed by it. As in energy drives the wave, while frequency and amplitude are information expressed by its undulations.
While this might seem obvious, consider that as energy progresses, it is creating and absorbing these forms and information.
As mobile organisms, we experience our reality as a sequence of perceptions, as a function of navigating the environment. As well as members of a cultural community that has grown out of our ability to narrate our journeys and the knowledge acquired.
So we naturally model time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies this as measures of duration and correlates them with measures of distance, to formulate spacetime.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. There is no literal “dimension” of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
The energy is “conserved,” because it is the physical state that is the present. It’s changing configurations of the dynamic create the effect of time.
So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes. Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are not referred to as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
As consciousness goes past to future, as thoughts and feelings go future to past. Lives go birth to death, while the process of life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
Galaxies are energy radiating towards infinity, while the forms coalesce towards equilibrium. Both directions of entropy.
There is a lot of “missing mass” to explain the gravitational effect of galaxies, but what if any interaction of energies manifests some degree of wave collapse, even to the point of photons from fields. The gravity wouldn’t be a property of mass, so much as mass is the more dense end of the spectrum of this wave collapse? As Emerson said, “We are but thickened light.”
As these biological beings, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through and further orders the information precipitating out. Which might well create a mental bias towards seeing reality in terms of the information expressed, over the energy manifesting it.
Given the inherent direction of this information is toward reductionism and consolidation, it might seem the most distilled forms are the most elementary and thus the basis, but are we sure we are not boiling the body down to its skeleton and assuming that to be the seed from which it sprang? Description as explanation?
Maybe it is thermodynamics, of energy radiating out, as mass and form coalesce in, in cosmic convection cycles?
Energy and order. Youth and age. Liberal and conservative.
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