söndag 11 oktober 2015

Multiscale Finite Element Method as Informational Structural Realism


Luciano Floridis concludes in The Philosophy of Information that the world on microscopic scales cannot be neither discrete nor continuous, since each of these standpoints is contradictory, but can maybe instead be described by Informational Structural Realism (ISR) as scale dependent structural description leaving out the true nature of the elements forming the structure. ISR can be viewed as synthesis of the discrete and continuous without internal contradiction and thus potentially as a useful world view.

This is nothing but the finite element method in multi-scale form, originally developed in structural mechanics, as scale dependent discretization of continuous differential equations, where a true physical realisation of the finite elements is not possible nor necessary.

This connects to my attempt to describe a complex world including turbulence and quantum mechanics as analog finite precision computation simulated by digital finite precision computation, where the flow of information under computation represents ISR and the true physical nature of the analog computation is unknowable, but irrelevant.

Why is then both discrete and continuous physics impossible? Because both requires infinite resolution: a discrete point particle or discontinuity has zero size and a continuum has no smallest size. Thus both discrete and continuous physics requires infinitely small resolution and thus an infinite amount of information on any scale. If you don´t think this is asking for too much, then you should reconsider your notion of the infinite.

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