Space is Fundamental

In this post I will address some nonsensical attempts at denying space, proposed by real physicists and philosophers.

1.The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: space is actually made of numbers. Cosmologist Max Tegmark is responsible for this trainwreck of an idea.

•But numbers don't take up space, you can't observe numbers, and numbers don't do anything. It also makes no sense to talk of numbers having charge, mass, etc.
•Physics is empirical, but math is a priori.
•If the universe is reducible to mathematical descriptions, then everything that is mathematically possible should exist. In other words, everything should exist, and exist necessarily. There is no way for the MUH to distinguish between hypothetical math and actual math.
•It is also impossible to identify what math any physical object is reducible to.

2. Ontic Structural Realism: Entities don't exist, only relations or abstract "structures" do. Ex. The table is five feet away from the door. The table, door, and space do not exist. What exists is the relation, "five (nonspatial) feet away from."

For another example, let's apply OSR to light: The entity posited as an elementary component of light has changed, but the theoretical structure describing its behavior has remained the same. Therefore, light doesn't exist, but the structure describing its behavior does. In the diagram below you can see how "light"; i.e., nothing, behaves.

•This denial of objects is refuted by the very obvious fact that we’re constantly observing objects. I'm not surrounded by theoretical descriptions. When I flick a light switch I'm not suddenly hit with a diagram about the behavior of light, I just see the fucking light. If the theoretical structure describing light is all that exists, then wtf did we study in order to come up with that theoretical structure?

•If everything is just "relations" then we are left with a list of phrases comparing nothing to nothing. I can't drink a glass of "sweeter than" or even comprehend what "sweeter than" alone is supposed to be, and neither can you. It's just an incomplete thought. If we were to translate our statements about the world into the language of OSR then all of our scientific theories would become gibberish.

Relations require entities by definition:
•Relation: the way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected; a thing's effect on or relevance to another.

This is what the definition becomes when we remove all references to entities:
•Relation: the way in which are connected; an effect on or relevance to.
Pure gibberish.

•If Ontic Structural Realism was true, it would be impossible to explain how the view itself came about, since there would be nothing to think of it in the first place, unless you believe some combination of phrases like "smarter than, happier than, lighter than, etc." can think, which has yet to be explained. It hasn't been explained how relations alone could account for anything.

•This is clearly a meaningless view that reduces reality to abstract objects just like the MUH, and falls apart for the same reasons.

3. Pop-cosmology: Space emerges from vague things that sound like they’d require space to exist but don’t for some reason.

•See if you can decipher this word salad from a quack string theorist: "However, the effects in string theory do not say simply that "space is made of atoms of space". Instead, there are many new objects, fields, concepts appearing in this regime and all of them are "fuzzy" and mixed up in some way. This fuzziness also allows topology of space to change smoothly once a topologically nontrivial submanifold shrinks to very short, substringy distances."

And here's some hilariously vague nonsense from some idiot named Preskill:
“If you probe geometry at scales comparable to the Planck scale — the shortest possible distance — it looks less and less like space-time. It’s not really geometry anymore. It’s something else, an emergent thing [that arises] from something more fundamental.”
It's an "emergent thing"? Really? That's your theory?

Sean Carroll, using multiple intricate and horribly written articles to express his self-defeating view, claims that spacetime arises from quantum entanglement. But quantum entanglement requires particles. And particles require space.

Sean Carroll has made another self-defeating argument against space. He says, instead of describing particles as being in space, we can "completely describe the particles by how fast they're moving".

But of course, movement requires space. This man is a clown.

Years of study in a field don’t make up for a childlike grasp of language and a lack of basic reasoning skills.
No one needs bite-size descriptions of theoretical physics. Scientists should stop trying to articulate their ideas in this way unless they become better at it.

4. Subjective idealism: space doesn’t exist, all that exists are perceptions.

•Then what does the thinking and seeing? Do perceptions have intelligence? Do perceptions see things? What does "the taste of peanut butter" think about? What organizes perceptions?

5. Transcendental idealism: space doesn't exist, the world outside of perception is the realm of noumena, of which nothing can be said.

•If noumena are outside of spacetime, then what could they possibly be? The problem isn’t that we don’t know which answer to this is true, it’s that we know all of them are false. How does noumena have any effect on our experience? How does noumena account for things going on outside of perception? How does my brain work if it's really made of nonspatiotemporal stuff? This view doesn't make sense of anything.