My best vulgarization, which I hope not to be a rationalization (read: Looking for more evidence that it is!), is that Physical kinds of stuff are about what is, while logical kinds of stuff are about “what they do”.
If you have one lone particle¹ in an empty universe, there’s only the one kind, the physical. The particle is there. Once you have two particles, the physical kind of stuff is about how they are, their description, while the logical stuff is about the axiom “these two particles interact”—and everything that derives from there, such as “how” they interact².
I do not see any room for more kinds of stuff that is necessary in order to fully and perfectly simulate all the states of the entire universe where these two particles exist. I also don’t see how adding more particles is going to change that in any manner. As per the evidence we have, it seems extremely likely that our own universe is a version of this universe with simply more particles in it.
So really, you can reduce it to “one”, if you’re willing to hyper-reduce the conceptual fundamental “is” to the simple logical “do”—if you posit that a single particle in a separate universe simply does not exist, because the only existence of a particle is its interaction, and therefore interactions are the only thing that do exist. Then the distinction between the physical and logical becomes merely one of levels of abstraction, AFAICT, and can theoretically be done away with. However, the physical-logical two-rule seems to be useful, and the above seems extremely easy to misinterpret or confuse with other things.
Defined as whatever is the most fundamentally reduced smallest possible unit of the universe, be that a point in a wave field equation, a quark, or anything else reality runs on.
I’ve read some theories (and thought some of my own) implying that there is no real “how” of interaction, and that all the interactions are simply the simplest, most primitive possible kind of logical interaction, the reveal-existence function or something similar, and that from this function derive as abstractions all the phenomena we observe as “forces” or “kinds of interactions” or “transmissions of information”. However, all such theories I’ve read are incomplete and also lack experimental verifiability. They do sound much simpler and more elegant, though.
My best vulgarization, which I hope not to be a rationalization (read: Looking for more evidence that it is!), is that Physical kinds of stuff are about what is, while logical kinds of stuff are about “what they do”.
If you have one lone particle¹ in an empty universe, there’s only the one kind, the physical. The particle is there. Once you have two particles, the physical kind of stuff is about how they are, their description, while the logical stuff is about the axiom “these two particles interact”—and everything that derives from there, such as “how” they interact².
I do not see any room for more kinds of stuff that is necessary in order to fully and perfectly simulate all the states of the entire universe where these two particles exist. I also don’t see how adding more particles is going to change that in any manner. As per the evidence we have, it seems extremely likely that our own universe is a version of this universe with simply more particles in it.
So really, you can reduce it to “one”, if you’re willing to hyper-reduce the conceptual fundamental “is” to the simple logical “do”—if you posit that a single particle in a separate universe simply does not exist, because the only existence of a particle is its interaction, and therefore interactions are the only thing that do exist. Then the distinction between the physical and logical becomes merely one of levels of abstraction, AFAICT, and can theoretically be done away with. However, the physical-logical two-rule seems to be useful, and the above seems extremely easy to misinterpret or confuse with other things.
Defined as whatever is the most fundamentally reduced smallest possible unit of the universe, be that a point in a wave field equation, a quark, or anything else reality runs on.
I’ve read some theories (and thought some of my own) implying that there is no real “how” of interaction, and that all the interactions are simply the simplest, most primitive possible kind of logical interaction, the reveal-existence function or something similar, and that from this function derive as abstractions all the phenomena we observe as “forces” or “kinds of interactions” or “transmissions of information”. However, all such theories I’ve read are incomplete and also lack experimental verifiability. They do sound much simpler and more elegant, though.