Broad Physical Categories: A Vocabulary for Making Inferences Beyond Observation 

You are very welcome!

Thanks Alex, it's always great to hear from you. The book I told you about way back when is the second phase of the Inductive Physics Project, which is the phase where I use my theory of induction to reprove the essential principles of physics. This video is part of phase 1, to make a theory of induction. I've already started on phase 2, but want to finish the theory of induction, which will be a lengthy paper, practically a book in its own right. I want to finish that paper by October, but at the current rate, it will probably take longer than that.

Hahah, glad I could help.

Thanks!

Very interesting. Its being a long time since I thought about ontology and the major concepts. Thanks for vid.

@@periteu Thanks for the compliment, and thanks for the time stamps, including those with the Spanish translation haha. I'd like to mention that as it stands, this set of concepts refer to physical categories, not metaphysical ones or ontological ones. I decided for the time being to not deal with anything mental. Therefore these categories really are physical as I say, though this kind of subject matter has often been called metaphysics of course.

@@Inductica Thanks for clarification. Saludos (= Cheers) haha

Thanks for the timeline!

Yes, that's a good point. Though it comes later in the presentation, it is on the same level in the conditional hierarchy as entity and property. Charting the hierarchy out with colors like that is a good exercise! Is there a way to tie the characteristic line to the entity/property line? Yes, I left this out of the presentation for brevity: all characteristics are aspects of entities or properties of entities, since everything that exists is either an entity or a property of an entity. Characteristics of entities are properties, characteristics of properties (like high in pitch, fast, far) are abstractions which separate out different aspects of those properties.

Yes, this is exactly why I formulate Newton's Third Law as "Every force necessitates an equal, anticollinear force."

This is actually a very good question. Traditionally, the subject matter I cover here has been filed under metaphysics, since it deals with existence on the broadest level. However, I did not want to deal with the mental, since that lead to a lot of challenges I did not want to tackle right away, so I confined myself to the physical. I have not yet thought about how to come up with the broadest metaphysical categories, which would include the mental, but I think what I have done makes a solid step towards a set of broader categories which would include the mental. Once we had such categories, they might then help us understand the kinds of questions you've asked about the nature of consciousness. I'll include a quote from an earlier draft of my script, which I cut for time. This might help you understand what kinds of things I regard as mental existents, and therefore will help you understand what kinds of things BPCs don't cover. "What do I mean by a mental existent? Think about an elephant. That is a mental existent. There are neurons in your head doing something when you think of the elephant, and that is physical, but there is no physical elephant in your head. The elephant exists though, but it exists mentally. My concepts in this presentation will not cover things like thoughts. Let me give you a more complex example of a mental existent, another kind of thing I won’t be covering: an army. An army is a set of people, it acts as an entity because the minds of the soldiers are choosing to act in a certain way, certain men follow the orders of other men, causing the army as a whole to act in a certain way. If the commanders are killed, the army as a whole might be thrown into disarray, no longer existing as a single entity. An army is therefore a composite entity with a mental character. I’m not going to be treating these kinds of cases and will be confining myself only to physical things for now. In general, these categories will cover matter and its interactions, not what goes on inside a mind and how minds interact with other minds."

This is somewhat addressed by your later discussion of composite entities. It makes sense that you could describe entities at different levels, and that each level would have unique properties. Technically anything above quarks would be a composite, until we find sun-quarks things and then those too become composites. There could be the level of quarks, atoms, molecules like lignin, wood beam, chair from multiple wood pieces. All are entities with unique properties. Maybe my question is perhaps rephrased as the following: how is a physical relationship like electrostatic or gravitational forces/interaction categorized?

Perhaps I should just watch the video in full since you do address F = MA and electrostatic and magnetism as examples. Would you say that “the law of gravity” is simply the mathematical relationship that holds for all entities that have mass? That is there is no special gravity that was defined upon creation of existence? Rather there is a gravity-ness property to all entities with mass, and that these entities then have a relationship with other entities with mass in a quantifiable way that can be correlated to “the law of gravity”?

The fact that the sticks are in a position where they are able to spread the stress from one to the other would be the relationship.

@@folechno "how is a physical relationship like electrostatic or gravitational forces/interaction categorized?" Good question: recall that any way that one entity conditions the properties of another is called a relationship. Electrostatic and Gravitational effects change the "net force" properties of nearby entities. Therefore these interactions are relationships. That being said, these forces often change over time, so for example, as a spaceship enters the earth's atmosphere, it gets closer and closer to the earth, increasing its weight. This change in the gravitational force is an action. Further analysis can be done regarding what the underlying cause of these "long range" effects are, but that will have to wait until I present my broad physical principles. Indeed, much of my thinking on BPCs is motivated by a desire to understand the underlying nature of gravity, electricity and magnetism.

@@folechno Regarding the "law of gravity," yes, I think you are shifting your perspective from the common notion to a more correct way of thinking. Let me put this same point in my own words: There are no laws of nature, there are only entities, their properties and the resulting way those entities act and persist in relationships with one another. Gravity is not a rule that masses follow, it is a property of masses, it is part of what makes them a mass (and not some other kind of thing.) If we came across a body which was a body in every way, except that it was gravitationally inert, we would open up a new category, separate from mass, to refer to it. We can use the phrase "natural law" as a way of referring to such generalizations, which ascribe characteristics to different kinds of existents, but it is better to just call these generalizations: they are statements which ascribe a characteristic to a certain class of existents. This avoids any possible confusion about the nature of the identification: what exists are entities, their properties and generalizations (our means of grasping those properties.) In contrast, existence does NOT consist of laws and entities "obeying" those laws.

If so, would that be form or matter or both that cause the emergent properties?

@@ExistenceUniversity Yes, composite entities do have emergent properties, from what I understand so far, and emergent properties are conditioned by both form and matter. I have not thought about the concept of "emergent properties" yet, and what other people typically think about them. I cover two kinds of emergence here 27:11. As I think about this stuff further, I'll see if these categories can help us understand emergence in more prosaic things, like atoms and molecules, then see if that can help us understand more difficult instances of emergence, like consciousness.