TFNR - Indetermination / Uncertainty
Chaos, indetermination (or indeterminacy), uncertainty are the basis of Reality. They manifest themselves at the fundamental level, where the Creation of the most elementary form of Existence, Elementary Action, occurs incessantly, and in infinite different ways at the subsequent levels of Reality, contributing to the Evolution of the Complexity of Information which gives structure and form to the Universe.
While at large spatial distances and temporal durations the chaotic contributions are masked by a sort of compensation and by the modest entity of such contributions compared to the distances, durations, energies involved in the dynamics of the "classical world", at lower dimensions and / or at higher energies reveal themselves in ways and intensities that make what is called the "quantum world" (waves and particles of visible matter, atoms, molecules, etc.) rather bizarre.
At the quantum level, this contribution, which makes the behavior of quantum objects partly uncertain and indeterminate, and makes it impossible to obtain perfect knowledge of complementary aspects of the same phenomenon, is described by the Uncertainty Principle.
This translates into the impossibility of obtaining knowledge, information, and making infinitely precise predictions about the Physical Reality of quantum objects, for any couple of conjugate observables (es. position and momentum, energy and time, etc.). Either standard deviation can in principle be made arbitrarily small, but not both simultaneously.
Chaos and uncertainty, which are at the basis of Physical Reality, in some form propagate to the more complex levels of Reality, to the more extensive causal, spatial and temporal dimensions, characteristic of the quantum world, beyond many orders of magnitude, where they make part of the dynamics uncertain and indeterminate, producing, together with other properties and mechanisms, rather strange phenomena. To then (apparently) almost disappear to the dimensions of the classical world, to then appear again in the chaotic behaviors of complex systems, both inorganic and biological, and in the complex celestial dynamics of many-body systems, from planets, to stars, to galaxies and to the immense cosmic structures, effectively making the reductionist/deterministic perspective of the perfect predictability of an entirely deterministic world impossible.
As already stated many times in this work, we prefer to immerse ourselves in a broader research dimension, which alongside analytical reductionism, places emphasis on a synthetic holistic aspect, capable of creating general, overall visions, which can provide us with guidance, direction, for the search for a wider and profound understanding, in a constructionist perspective, where the Formation of Reality takes shape in a universal, unitary Process, albeit detailed in infinite sub-processes.
Returning to more technical aspects concerning indeterminacy, I believe that the fundamental element in which this fundamental, creative characteristic of Reality manifests itself is Time (Space seems to be floating in chaos around the Planck scale, but then away at higher orders of magnitude it becomes less and less uncertain and indeterminate). Time seems precisely the dimensional element that collects and propagates the creative chaos from the most elementary formative processes, which bring out Existence at lower scales and up to the Planck scale and a little beyond, in all areas and at all scales of the Evolution of the Universe.
Time, which in the past seemed the most absolute and regular thing that could exist, is probably the key to Creativity and Evolution, to the Formation of Reality, precisely because of this fundamental nature, which gives the chaotic, indeterminate, uncertain rhythm to every natural process, the emergence and unfolding of Complexity (with all the related aspects of Causality, of Mass and gravity, of Charge / Spin and electromagnetism, of Information and Entropy, and of the thermodynamic systems that are everywhere, at all scales, in all the corners of the Universe).
Links to the tables of contents of TFNR Paper
