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Forums > Social Chat > one day spirituality and science got it on
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just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posted:
One Day spirituality and science got it on in my head and heres the result
so before i start i should quite clearly state that these are just ideas and as such change on a regular basis based on my interactions. Id be most interested to hear ppls thoughts and ideas, i would ask that ppl quote exactly what it is they are refering to when expanding/questioning/debating ideas just to aid in claity of ideas be exchanged. i have a habit of brushing over details when i write stuff as its clear in my head but doesnt always come out clear so if there is something that is unclear please ask but please make sure that you have read what i have written not what u think i have written
so that all said here are a few ideas
idea number 1: the concept of time
The traditional concept of time is that it is a straight line, a series of events that occur sequentially. At the moment i like the concept of everything, every possible reality past
present and future all coexisting. In our current vessle of consciousness we are unable to process all this information so our conscious mind filters out all of the realitys bar one being the one that we are all currently coexperiencing. in the same way that our eyes filter out most of the visible light spectrum so that we can process the information.
To visualise how this would work imagine a infinite sided pryomid with each step that is taken down the pyromid another infinite sides appears from each face. this raises to interesting questions, firstly does that mean there is no free will and everything is predetermined and secondly which universe do we experience. To answer the first question no it doesnt mean there is no free will on the contoury it means there has to be free will, in effect it is all of our choices that choose which reality we experience. With every instant our collective consiousness is choosing which step on the pryomid we experience next.
idea number 2: pivot points
There are certain points in life that greatly affect the course of our lives and what direction they take, ill call these pivot points and then there are other choices like do i choose pepsi or coke that have less profound effects on you personally. This doesnt mean that those choices dont have any influence just not a life changing one on your personal path but that whole butterfly flapping its wings in china causing tidal waves in america effect is still very prominant but does not necessarily affect you directly.
As it is our collective conscious that determines the path that we travel and all of time coexists it makes fourtune tellers and the like a plausable posibility. As There are certain aspects of your life that can be forseen up to a certain point being a pivot point after which the future is unclear. This doesnt mean everyone that claims to see the future can just that it is a possiblity.
idea number 3: talking to god
The question then becomes how can we influence which pivot points come into our life. Many people do this through faith and prayer to their respective gods. I personally believe that we all are able to bring things that we want into our life with our own desires. Before reacting with a horrible tale of the loss or abuse of a loved one let me elaborate. We all have multiple personalitys, the difference between people with multiple personality disorder and the rest of the world is that the rest of the worlds multiple personalities are aware of each other. Each of out personalities is a learned behaviour pattern that has developed throughout or lives to help us survive in the real world. Unfortunately not all of the personalities are positive and not all of them opperate in the conscious mind. This means that if left unattended they can bring unpleasant events into your life until they are dealt with. (there is an excellent book called absolute happyness by Michael Rowland if ppl want to learn more)
So when we pray, talk to god, think positively whatever it is that you do to bring things into your life you are actively helping to choose the path that we are all traveling down the pryomid. perhaps it is our collective consiounesses that are god? maybe that would make some sense as to why our father in heaven allows so many attrocities to occur
idea number 4: What about death
i believe that when we are alive our consciousness simply has a vessle in while to experience and filter reality in, so while we are "on" the pryomid in a physical sense whether it be as a human, cat, dog, tree
tree detour
yes trees have feelings to u might say that animals are conscious living entities that feel pain and plants are not as they dont have a nervous system to feel pain. however this is not the case
https://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/bio/plants/otherplant/b01052d.html
explains how plants have what appears to be a similar pain response system to animals. while it is different and we dont fully comprehend it to discount the fact that plants have a reaction to such events is ignorant just because u dont understand how it hurts the plants doesnt make it hurt neless
/tree detour
what happens when we are off the pryomid? i have a feeling that as we dont need to filter any more to be able to interact in the course of selecting the path that we are collectively taking on the pryomid. I think this allows us to reflect on our past lives and to examine the possible future lives that our consciouness can choose to future our journey.
idea number 5: time travel
as much as i wish this was my idea its not but one of einstiens lesser known theories has been persued by mallet rather than rephrasing it you can read a well written explaination of it and all its ramifications here
https://www.advance.uconn.edu/01091012.htm
idea number 6: what started all this hub bub
this is something that has bothered me since i was a wittle boy, because how can all of this stuff have just appeared from no where, and the big bang theory why was all the stuff there all built up ready to bang and what happened before the big bang and how can anything actually exist. the only semi plausable answer to this that i have been able to come up with is that initially there was nothing, no matter no space no time no nothing. but nothing is something, its both matter, antimatter and energy all not existing together. matter and antimatter are particles moving around which have gravitational pulls that would eventually attract like particles which could emass into the big bang.
idea number 7: quantum theory
my understanding of quantum theory is that particles both exist and dont exist at the same time until viewed by a consious observer either directly or indirectly which then forces the particles to choose what they are doing. So when you shine a ray of light through a prism it travels all of the paths and then only when viewed by a conscious observer does it choose one. which makes it kind of interesting to think about the tree falling in the forest making noise. another way to think about it is like in a 3D video game, the computer doesnt render bits of the game that nobody is looking at as what would be the point. i think that this fits in quite nicely with the pryomid idea
idea number 8: duality of light
same deal with a consious observer viewing it and forcing it to be a wave or a particle..... then again mabye its a stream of lots of little waves that act like particles .......
idea number 9: energy
ive had several experiences through meditation that make me inclined to think that the concept of chakras and blockages (see michaels book) makes alot of sense. Energy flowing through and around the body also makes sense considering the fact that we have electrity running through us from head to toe in our nervous system and that our mind controls how that flows based on our subpersonalities and blockages.
idea number 10: is there an end
i dont see any reason why there should be an end, i guess the question should be does it become a loop cos of gravity once the universe finishes expanding and runs out of energy good old gravity may pull us back into to an antibig bang. maybe then it all happens again but differently
idea number 11: this journey thing whats up with that
well a cop out answer would be to say that you cant understand the functioning of a system if you are part of it because in trying to understanding it you are changing the system. but thats a cop out, another answer would be to say that we are hear to grow and experience the many facets of existance, but once again i feel for me that is a cop out. as thats all well and good but why, whats the point of that what function does it serve. and why have the physical bodys we enhabit evolved in such a way that they present us with the need for growth. If there is a god why didnt they create us at the evolved point that we are supposed to be at. An obvious answer being that god gave us free will so that we could grow in our own way but if there is a god that designed everything so that we could grow etc then if god is indeed all knowing they would know all of the events that would occur to us and how they made us so they would know how we would react so in essence we wouldnt have free will. maybe the stuggle makes the destination better? but then again better and all that are concepts that we use to describe the world we live in and our based on our human bodies so find that hard to accept as a reason.
idea number 12: what u didnt really answer that last bit
i think that human evolution will occur over the next 50 year or so whereby we will evolve with machines such that enhanced human bodies will be just one of many vessles we will coexist (yay nanobot swarms The age of spiritual machines by ray kurzweil gives some cool predictions its a wicked read) in and maybe once that happens ill have a better answer.
One Day spirituality and science got it on in my head and heres the result
so before i start i should quite clearly state that these are just ideas and as such change on a regular basis based on my interactions. Id be most interested to hear ppls thoughts and ideas, i would ask that ppl quote exactly what it is they are refering to when expanding/questioning/debating ideas just to aid in claity of ideas be exchanged. i have a habit of brushing over details when i write stuff as its clear in my head but doesnt always come out clear so if there is something that is unclear please ask but please make sure that you have read what i have written not what u think i have written
so that all said here are a few ideas
idea number 1: the concept of time
The traditional concept of time is that it is a straight line, a series of events that occur sequentially. At the moment i like the concept of everything, every possible reality past
present and future all coexisting. In our current vessle of consciousness we are unable to process all this information so our conscious mind filters out all of the realitys bar one being the one that we are all currently coexperiencing. in the same way that our eyes filter out most of the visible light spectrum so that we can process the information.
To visualise how this would work imagine a infinite sided pryomid with each step that is taken down the pyromid another infinite sides appears from each face. this raises to interesting questions, firstly does that mean there is no free will and everything is predetermined and secondly which universe do we experience. To answer the first question no it doesnt mean there is no free will on the contoury it means there has to be free will, in effect it is all of our choices that choose which reality we experience. With every instant our collective consiousness is choosing which step on the pryomid we experience next.
idea number 2: pivot points
There are certain points in life that greatly affect the course of our lives and what direction they take, ill call these pivot points and then there are other choices like do i choose pepsi or coke that have less profound effects on you personally. This doesnt mean that those choices dont have any influence just not a life changing one on your personal path but that whole butterfly flapping its wings in china causing tidal waves in america effect is still very prominant but does not necessarily affect you directly.
As it is our collective conscious that determines the path that we travel and all of time coexists it makes fourtune tellers and the like a plausable posibility. As There are certain aspects of your life that can be forseen up to a certain point being a pivot point after which the future is unclear. This doesnt mean everyone that claims to see the future can just that it is a possiblity.
idea number 3: talking to god
The question then becomes how can we influence which pivot points come into our life. Many people do this through faith and prayer to their respective gods. I personally believe that we all are able to bring things that we want into our life with our own desires. Before reacting with a horrible tale of the loss or abuse of a loved one let me elaborate. We all have multiple personalitys, the difference between people with multiple personality disorder and the rest of the world is that the rest of the worlds multiple personalities are aware of each other. Each of out personalities is a learned behaviour pattern that has developed throughout or lives to help us survive in the real world. Unfortunately not all of the personalities are positive and not all of them opperate in the conscious mind. This means that if left unattended they can bring unpleasant events into your life until they are dealt with. (there is an excellent book called absolute happyness by Michael Rowland if ppl want to learn more)
So when we pray, talk to god, think positively whatever it is that you do to bring things into your life you are actively helping to choose the path that we are all traveling down the pryomid. perhaps it is our collective consiounesses that are god? maybe that would make some sense as to why our father in heaven allows so many attrocities to occur
idea number 4: What about death
i believe that when we are alive our consciousness simply has a vessle in while to experience and filter reality in, so while we are "on" the pryomid in a physical sense whether it be as a human, cat, dog, tree
tree detour
yes trees have feelings to u might say that animals are conscious living entities that feel pain and plants are not as they dont have a nervous system to feel pain. however this is not the case
https://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/bio/plants/otherplant/b01052d.html
explains how plants have what appears to be a similar pain response system to animals. while it is different and we dont fully comprehend it to discount the fact that plants have a reaction to such events is ignorant just because u dont understand how it hurts the plants doesnt make it hurt neless
/tree detour
what happens when we are off the pryomid? i have a feeling that as we dont need to filter any more to be able to interact in the course of selecting the path that we are collectively taking on the pryomid. I think this allows us to reflect on our past lives and to examine the possible future lives that our consciouness can choose to future our journey.
idea number 5: time travel
as much as i wish this was my idea its not but one of einstiens lesser known theories has been persued by mallet rather than rephrasing it you can read a well written explaination of it and all its ramifications here
https://www.advance.uconn.edu/01091012.htm
idea number 6: what started all this hub bub
this is something that has bothered me since i was a wittle boy, because how can all of this stuff have just appeared from no where, and the big bang theory why was all the stuff there all built up ready to bang and what happened before the big bang and how can anything actually exist. the only semi plausable answer to this that i have been able to come up with is that initially there was nothing, no matter no space no time no nothing. but nothing is something, its both matter, antimatter and energy all not existing together. matter and antimatter are particles moving around which have gravitational pulls that would eventually attract like particles which could emass into the big bang.
idea number 7: quantum theory
my understanding of quantum theory is that particles both exist and dont exist at the same time until viewed by a consious observer either directly or indirectly which then forces the particles to choose what they are doing. So when you shine a ray of light through a prism it travels all of the paths and then only when viewed by a conscious observer does it choose one. which makes it kind of interesting to think about the tree falling in the forest making noise. another way to think about it is like in a 3D video game, the computer doesnt render bits of the game that nobody is looking at as what would be the point. i think that this fits in quite nicely with the pryomid idea
idea number 8: duality of light
same deal with a consious observer viewing it and forcing it to be a wave or a particle..... then again mabye its a stream of lots of little waves that act like particles .......
idea number 9: energy
ive had several experiences through meditation that make me inclined to think that the concept of chakras and blockages (see michaels book) makes alot of sense. Energy flowing through and around the body also makes sense considering the fact that we have electrity running through us from head to toe in our nervous system and that our mind controls how that flows based on our subpersonalities and blockages.
idea number 10: is there an end
i dont see any reason why there should be an end, i guess the question should be does it become a loop cos of gravity once the universe finishes expanding and runs out of energy good old gravity may pull us back into to an antibig bang. maybe then it all happens again but differently
idea number 11: this journey thing whats up with that
well a cop out answer would be to say that you cant understand the functioning of a system if you are part of it because in trying to understanding it you are changing the system. but thats a cop out, another answer would be to say that we are hear to grow and experience the many facets of existance, but once again i feel for me that is a cop out. as thats all well and good but why, whats the point of that what function does it serve. and why have the physical bodys we enhabit evolved in such a way that they present us with the need for growth. If there is a god why didnt they create us at the evolved point that we are supposed to be at. An obvious answer being that god gave us free will so that we could grow in our own way but if there is a god that designed everything so that we could grow etc then if god is indeed all knowing they would know all of the events that would occur to us and how they made us so they would know how we would react so in essence we wouldnt have free will. maybe the stuggle makes the destination better? but then again better and all that are concepts that we use to describe the world we live in and our based on our human bodies so find that hard to accept as a reason.
idea number 12: what u didnt really answer that last bit
i think that human evolution will occur over the next 50 year or so whereby we will evolve with machines such that enhanced human bodies will be just one of many vessles we will coexist (yay nanobot swarms The age of spiritual machines by ray kurzweil gives some cool predictions its a wicked read) in and maybe once that happens ill have a better answer.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourself, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous and talented? Who are you NOT to be?
SILVER Member
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
Posted:
i think about things like that sometimes, ive never written it all down as coherently as that though...
i dunno i think its very interesting to think about things like that. your first idea with the pyromid reminds me of something that i may have seen on a tv program about einstiens theorys... the fact that time is like space, and every bit of it exists simultaniously.
i quite like the idea that there are millions of other me's living out my life, but with hardly noticable differences.
if all that is true surely it means that everything that can (theoretically) have happened since the universe formed has happened or is happening 'now' but maybe there is only one therotical universe that is actually possible? and that must be our one, so no matter what you do to the universe it allways ends up tending towards the same outcome. i dont know. these are some of my ideas
thanks for sharing yours.
i think about things like that sometimes, ive never written it all down as coherently as that though...
i dunno i think its very interesting to think about things like that. your first idea with the pyromid reminds me of something that i may have seen on a tv program about einstiens theorys... the fact that time is like space, and every bit of it exists simultaniously.
i quite like the idea that there are millions of other me's living out my life, but with hardly noticable differences.
if all that is true surely it means that everything that can (theoretically) have happened since the universe formed has happened or is happening 'now' but maybe there is only one therotical universe that is actually possible? and that must be our one, so no matter what you do to the universe it allways ends up tending towards the same outcome. i dont know. these are some of my ideas
thanks for sharing yours.
Me train running low on soul coal
They push+pull tactics are driving me loco
They shouldn't do that no no no
GOLD Member
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posted:
yep thats what i believe at the moment
if there is only one possible universe which will end up with the same outcome doesnt that remove free will? if no matter what we do its all going to end up the same then whats the point of doing anything?
Quote:
if all that is true surely it means that everything that can (theoretically) have happened since the universe formed has happened or is happening 'now'
yep thats what i believe at the moment
Quote:
but maybe there is only one therotical universe that is actually possible? and that must be our one, so no matter what you do to the universe it allways ends up tending towards the same outcome.
if there is only one possible universe which will end up with the same outcome doesnt that remove free will? if no matter what we do its all going to end up the same then whats the point of doing anything?
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourself, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous and talented? Who are you NOT to be?
Enter a "Title" here:
2,905 posts
Location: San Diego California
2,905 posts
Location: San Diego California
Posted:
Here is a quote "WOOOSHHHH" It came from what you just said as it went flying over my head!!
hehehe sorry man I can't agree disagree or comment anything useful, I think I'll stay out of this one before my head explodes
Here is a quote "WOOOSHHHH" It came from what you just said as it went flying over my head!!
hehehe sorry man I can't agree disagree or comment anything useful, I think I'll stay out of this one before my head explodes Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"
SILVER Member
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
Posted:
ben:
no i think i belive in free will, or at least an illusion of it which is all that matters.
what i meant by there being only one possible universe is that, if there was say slightly more hydrogen molecules in the universe than there was at the moment, it wouldnt work, and some law of physics wouldnt work any more, and the universe couldnt exist. so the current 'configurtion' of the universe is the only one that would work. (?)
im not sure now, (after thinking about it a bit more) that i even think that thats a sensible thing to think any more. but thats what i meant
ben:
no i think i belive in free will, or at least an illusion of it which is all that matters.
what i meant by there being only one possible universe is that, if there was say slightly more hydrogen molecules in the universe than there was at the moment, it wouldnt work, and some law of physics wouldnt work any more, and the universe couldnt exist. so the current 'configurtion' of the universe is the only one that would work. (?)
im not sure now, (after thinking about it a bit more) that i even think that thats a sensible thing to think any more. but thats what i meant
Me train running low on soul coal
They push+pull tactics are driving me loco
They shouldn't do that no no no
GOLD Member
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posted:
that whole illusion of freewill is an interesting one, lately ive been pondering as to teh difference between us and the characters in a computer game, apart from the level of detail. we are born into life with our initial program being our genes and then through our experiences and interactions we develope as individuals and react to our environment. In the same way you could say a bad guy in a computer game has a program and when a user comes along based on what the user does the character reacts. The obvious initial reaction is to go no but im conscious i learn i grow, but computer game characters can learn and grow from their experiences using artificial neural networks. which just leaves consciousness ......... but what is that? is it just an information processing mechanism that we have evolved to cope with all of the sensory input we recieve so that we can react in the world in real time? or is it something more
that whole illusion of freewill is an interesting one, lately ive been pondering as to teh difference between us and the characters in a computer game, apart from the level of detail. we are born into life with our initial program being our genes and then through our experiences and interactions we develope as individuals and react to our environment. In the same way you could say a bad guy in a computer game has a program and when a user comes along based on what the user does the character reacts. The obvious initial reaction is to go no but im conscious i learn i grow, but computer game characters can learn and grow from their experiences using artificial neural networks. which just leaves consciousness ......... but what is that? is it just an information processing mechanism that we have evolved to cope with all of the sensory input we recieve so that we can react in the world in real time? or is it something more
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourself, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous and talented? Who are you NOT to be?
SILVER Member
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
Posted:
i think consciousness is probably different to different people, i mean how can i be sure your red isnt my black kinda thing?
but beause we all refer to stuff that we see as whatever as the same thing, it isnt very clear that we all see things differently.
as for weather its real or not? i dont know. for now im going to belive it is and that i can make choices and stuff.
which is, i think a reasonable assumption to make about life.i dont think there will be a way to prove or disprove that soon.
te computer game analogy is a good one, makes me think of the matrix. (that was bound to get mentioned here at some point)
i think consciousness is probably different to different people, i mean how can i be sure your red isnt my black kinda thing?
but beause we all refer to stuff that we see as whatever as the same thing, it isnt very clear that we all see things differently.
as for weather its real or not? i dont know. for now im going to belive it is and that i can make choices and stuff.
which is, i think a reasonable assumption to make about life.i dont think there will be a way to prove or disprove that soon.
te computer game analogy is a good one, makes me think of the matrix. (that was bound to get mentioned here at some point)
Me train running low on soul coal
They push+pull tactics are driving me loco
They shouldn't do that no no no
GOLD Member
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posted:
red and black are just labels that we give to things, if there are three independant entities all with a common knowledge base then u can sort of know that u are seeing the same thing in that u have an external observer to compare with. but i know what u mean u can never really what anyone else sees or even know if anyone else is intelligent
ah the matrix good old 01 with his i want to preserve myself attitude, whoever programmed that one did a good botch job. we have a primal desire to survive which we fufull with are basic needs for food, clothing, shelter and love, give machines the same/similar desires they are sure to behave like humans and have a similar desire for survival but give machines the primal desire to serve humans (aka serving humans makes robots happy in the same way success makes ppl happy) and not endanger human life through direct action (if u include not taking action its just to messy with intensions and blah) i cant see the matrix happening especially as the two species start to merge through bionic implants and neural upgrades
Quote:
i mean how can i be sure your red isnt my black kinda thing?
red and black are just labels that we give to things, if there are three independant entities all with a common knowledge base then u can sort of know that u are seeing the same thing in that u have an external observer to compare with. but i know what u mean u can never really what anyone else sees or even know if anyone else is intelligent
Quote:
te computer game analogy is a good one, makes me think of the matrix. (that was bound to get mentioned here at some point)
ah the matrix good old 01 with his i want to preserve myself attitude, whoever programmed that one did a good botch job. we have a primal desire to survive which we fufull with are basic needs for food, clothing, shelter and love, give machines the same/similar desires they are sure to behave like humans and have a similar desire for survival but give machines the primal desire to serve humans (aka serving humans makes robots happy in the same way success makes ppl happy) and not endanger human life through direct action (if u include not taking action its just to messy with intensions and blah) i cant see the matrix happening especially as the two species start to merge through bionic implants and neural upgrades
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourself, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous and talented? Who are you NOT to be?
SILVER Member
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Posted:
Ok, I'm sorry to say that I could write for days on the subjects you brought up, but I'm not going to. Unfortunately, I have a Ph.D. in physics, and while you are not doing so bad with some of your concepts, they are they results of "popular science". Popular science basically consists of flights of imagination based on some scientific principle. the problem is, these theories tend to ignore other (usually more fundimental) principles.
You delve into a fair amount of multi-dimentional ideas, a fair amount of chaos theory, and quantum mechanics. These all have profound philosophical implications, but unfortunately are almost always mis-understood by philosophers.
Please don't attribute that bunk about time travel to Einstein. The only thing Einstein has to do with it is the notion that matter and energy can bend space and therefor technically 'stretch time'. I promise you that Einstein would never have wasted his time on what this Mallet person is proposing. Now, it may be possible to twist space enough to create a sort of time machine, but some essential parts of this are dropped out that would make this time machine nothing like the one H G Wells dreamed about. First, to use the time machine, you would have to travel through a 'sigularity' (such as exists at the center of a back hole). To create a singularity here on earth, you would have to harness many times the amount of power than even our sun produces. Second, you would have to set this singularity spinning as extreme rates (actually possible, but taking way more power than even creating the singualrity itself) such that you can use a physical technicality to pass through the singularity without actually going literally thru it (as in you would pass through a region surrounded by the singularity). This is neccisary, because anything actually hitting a singularity will be hopelessly stuck there. But really, these first two thing I have mentioned are irrelevant because of the third, which is the fact that the human body could never survive coming anywhere even remotely in the neigborhood of the singularity. Anything with enough energy to bend space to the degree needed to make it fold back on itself would not only rip a human body to shreads, but it would tear apart every molecule of it too and then rip the electrons away from the resulting atoms, then break apart the nuclei of the atoms till they were only protons and neutrons, and then it would even squeaze the quarks out of those protons and neutrons. At best, using this time machine would deliver a quark soup that used to be you, but probably even the quarks would have been converted into free energy by the time they made it wherever they were going, and the only thing at the receiveing end would look for all the world just like a burst of tachyons.
Don't even get me started on tachyons - though, if you are going to make a time machine - converting a human into a coherent stream of tachyons and back again is the only way you are going to do it - this would be vaguely similar to the transporters on star trek, except you get turned into weird particles that don't follow causality laws instead of just into an energy beam - which means we are going to have to perfect matter-to-energy transporter technology long before we can hope to make a time machine.
Ok, but even if you could travel through a singularity to time travel - the kicker is, how far back in time you go by traveling through a warped space loop is dependant on how far you travel distance-wise. You see, you can only go back in time by this method if you are beating the light information from your original destination. If I used a time machine to go back 8 minutes, I would have to go as far as the Sun is from Earth to do it. 20 minutes, and I'd have to go to mars when it is on the opposite side of the sun. If I wanted to go back in time 3 years, I'd have to go to Alpha Centuri. I could never visit my grandfather here on earth when he was my age. And you can't cheat by say going back and forth from Alpha Centuri 10 times either. That would just leave you back at here and now plus a whopping bill from the power company (and maybe a LOT of frequent flier miles)
Ok, I only addressed one out of your 12(!) points of discussion. I can't type anymore tonight. if you want to narrow your range and discuss say one topic, I'll be happy to add some thoughts.
Ok, I'm sorry to say that I could write for days on the subjects you brought up, but I'm not going to. Unfortunately, I have a Ph.D. in physics, and while you are not doing so bad with some of your concepts, they are they results of "popular science". Popular science basically consists of flights of imagination based on some scientific principle. the problem is, these theories tend to ignore other (usually more fundimental) principles.
You delve into a fair amount of multi-dimentional ideas, a fair amount of chaos theory, and quantum mechanics. These all have profound philosophical implications, but unfortunately are almost always mis-understood by philosophers.
Please don't attribute that bunk about time travel to Einstein. The only thing Einstein has to do with it is the notion that matter and energy can bend space and therefor technically 'stretch time'. I promise you that Einstein would never have wasted his time on what this Mallet person is proposing. Now, it may be possible to twist space enough to create a sort of time machine, but some essential parts of this are dropped out that would make this time machine nothing like the one H G Wells dreamed about. First, to use the time machine, you would have to travel through a 'sigularity' (such as exists at the center of a back hole). To create a singularity here on earth, you would have to harness many times the amount of power than even our sun produces. Second, you would have to set this singularity spinning as extreme rates (actually possible, but taking way more power than even creating the singualrity itself) such that you can use a physical technicality to pass through the singularity without actually going literally thru it (as in you would pass through a region surrounded by the singularity). This is neccisary, because anything actually hitting a singularity will be hopelessly stuck there. But really, these first two thing I have mentioned are irrelevant because of the third, which is the fact that the human body could never survive coming anywhere even remotely in the neigborhood of the singularity. Anything with enough energy to bend space to the degree needed to make it fold back on itself would not only rip a human body to shreads, but it would tear apart every molecule of it too and then rip the electrons away from the resulting atoms, then break apart the nuclei of the atoms till they were only protons and neutrons, and then it would even squeaze the quarks out of those protons and neutrons. At best, using this time machine would deliver a quark soup that used to be you, but probably even the quarks would have been converted into free energy by the time they made it wherever they were going, and the only thing at the receiveing end would look for all the world just like a burst of tachyons.
Don't even get me started on tachyons - though, if you are going to make a time machine - converting a human into a coherent stream of tachyons and back again is the only way you are going to do it - this would be vaguely similar to the transporters on star trek, except you get turned into weird particles that don't follow causality laws instead of just into an energy beam - which means we are going to have to perfect matter-to-energy transporter technology long before we can hope to make a time machine.
Ok, but even if you could travel through a singularity to time travel - the kicker is, how far back in time you go by traveling through a warped space loop is dependant on how far you travel distance-wise. You see, you can only go back in time by this method if you are beating the light information from your original destination. If I used a time machine to go back 8 minutes, I would have to go as far as the Sun is from Earth to do it. 20 minutes, and I'd have to go to mars when it is on the opposite side of the sun. If I wanted to go back in time 3 years, I'd have to go to Alpha Centuri. I could never visit my grandfather here on earth when he was my age. And you can't cheat by say going back and forth from Alpha Centuri 10 times either. That would just leave you back at here and now plus a whopping bill from the power company (and maybe a LOT of frequent flier miles)
Ok, I only addressed one out of your 12(!) points of discussion. I can't type anymore tonight. if you want to narrow your range and discuss say one topic, I'll be happy to add some thoughts.
-v-
Wiederstand ist Zwecklos!
GOLD Member
journeyman
84 posts
Location: Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
journeyman
84 posts
Location: Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
Posted:
I think I learned more by reading that post than I could ever have hoped to learn from high school physics!
a phd who spins fire?
I think I learned more by reading that post than I could ever have hoped to learn from high school physics!
a phd who spins fire?
Genuineness only thrives in the dark -- like celery.
SILVER Member
Pooh-Bah
2,014 posts
Location: Galveston, TX, USA
Pooh-Bah
2,014 posts
Location: Galveston, TX, USA
Posted:
There's more than one of us around...And, ya, vanize knows his stuff.
Quote:
a phd who spins fire?
There's more than one of us around...And, ya, vanize knows his stuff.
SILVER Member
All the neurotic makings of America's lesser known sweetheart
9,831 posts
Location: body in Las Vegas, heart all around the world, USA
All the neurotic makings of America's lesser known sweetheart
9,831 posts
Location: body in Las Vegas, heart all around the world, USA
Posted:
yup, phd here too. there's quite a few of intellectuals on here
Quote:
Quote:
a phd who spins fire?
There's more than one of us around...And, ya, vanize knows his stuff.
yup, phd here too. there's quite a few of intellectuals on here
I was always scared with my mother's obsession with the good scissors. It made me wonder if there were evil scissors lurking in the house somewhere.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
**giggles**
SILVER Member
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Posted:
well, sorry to burst your theory bubble, but not only is this not the case, but the reality of quantum mechanics actually allows for things that have already happened to basically unhappen.
let me explain it this way - when something happens, there is a probability distribution on various ways on how it could happen. This probability distribution can be thought of a spread-out wave. Now, when an observer comes along, he forces that distribution into one of the many possibilities allowed, and suddenly this broad wave becomes a very sharp spike - there is no longer an array of possibilites with a certain prescribed chance of any particular one happening - one has been picked, and the other disappear. Everyone is happy, because they know what happened. But here comes the tricky part, as soon as you and everyone else looks away, that spike begins to decay - it starts to spread out as time goes on and now it begins to be possible for not only the event to have occured the way everyone agreed upon at the time, but similar, neighboring possibilties begin to have some probability of having occured to - small at first, but growing with increasing time. As the event moves further and further into the past, the chances of things having happened one way or another go back to their original probability distribution.
The implications of this are huge. Most directly, it means that history is literally only as good as it is recorded or remembered. The only way you have of observing an event that happened in the past is to remember it or experience some recording of it (in words or video, whatever). Thus, in retrospect you can only collapse the wave function that is the probability distribution associated with that event in the way the memory or recording dictates, and only the parts of it specific to the memory or recording. This literally means there is no truely accurate histories possible - hisory has undone itself while no one was looking.
Another implication is the following: We here on Earth have developed our science and have found some fundimental ways the universe works and have a rough idea of how it is contructed (and some people even think they might have a guess at how it began - but I'm pretty sure they are mostly wrong and only a little correct). But it we also see that there are other ways the universe could have been put together - other laws of physics could have prevailed, but they didn't. Why? because we devised a series of experiments and made a series of observations that collapsed the probabilty distribution and recorded the results. But, if we were to destroy all those recordings, forget all those results, let enough time pass, and then start over and devise a totally different set of experiments (based perhaps on different expectations), then you could actually find that the universe works differently and is constructed in a different way, and was created in a different manner. Now, some things couldn't change - things essential to building humans or bacteria or any other observer (eg, the elements would have to work the same, particle and energy interactions couldn't change and a bizzilion other things - and that is a huge constraint on the universe, and anything essential to things they observe with - the basic nature of sound and light, etc, etc...), but within the amount that that probability wave of how the universe is constructed is allowed to relax and still allow any observers to exist, different results are entirely possible, and even likely. In fact it is unlikely we would come up with the same result unless we did everything exactly the same.
So that basically means that the universe is not only completely immune to being pre-ordained, it reserves the right to change its mind. Your life is not fated to happen. Heck - your history isn't even valid. Your memory of it is really no more valid than anyone elses, since everyone's memory is subject to drift.
Memory has been shown to be another quantum mechanical process - and subject to the same pattern decay of the probability waves that I mentioned above, though with different constraints - so if you think you have a sharp memory and can remember exactly what happened, I'm sorry to tell you, but you only remeber one of the possibilties that is approximately similar to the one that actually did, with that similarity degrading over time and no way to ever compair to the orginal, since the spike of that probability distribution has long since decayed. Your memory is the only valid thing left, but it cannot be prescise - though video or recordings may help sharpen the fuzz a bit.
In short - there is no truth about the past. The future is only a series of probabilities which become better defined as present events occure and that future gets closer. To some extent, the near future is preordained by what is happening now, but that 'fate' only exists a short distance into the future and gets weaker with distance, and if you push at the edges of it, you can change its eevntual course. You do not have freedom of will exactly, but to a much greater extent, your future is not predestined.
A creature that experiences in 4 dimentions would live in nothing but probabilities (as we see it anyway). I say 'experiences' because we ourselves live in 4 dimentions, but only percieve 3. (Heck we proably live in something like 11 dimentions). To be precise about it, our brain actually gives us information in something like 2.7 dimentions, and therefore we can infer 3 to a reasonable degree. There is evidence that evolution is perhaps leading up toward higher dimentional perception (cats, for example, are around 2.6), atleast to the extent that supporting a brain that can handle the processing is feasable and adaptive to the enviroment we live in. The problem is, it takes a huge increase in brain processing ability to make even a small gain on the dimentionality truely perceived. Even getting to a full 3 dimentional anaysis ability in our brain will be almost certainly unfeasable. It is extremely unlikey a 4 dimention experienceing creature could ever support the brain needed for parcing the information. If one did exist and he could manage to pick the right you to communicate with you you think you are, he could only tell you what was probably going to happen to you in your probable timeline. nothing would be definite for him in the way it is definite for you and me. It is likely that he would have such a different perception of the universe, that he wouldn't even be aware of your existance per se - at least not in the way that you are.
ok - enough! Like I said before, I could go on all night, but can't. just remember:
There is no real truth in the past, and no real certainly in the future. The only things that exists on either side of the present are possibilities that become increasingly vague the further they are from now.
Quote:
Quote:
if all that is true surely it means that everything that can (theoretically) have happened since the universe formed has happened or is happening 'now'
yep thats what i believe at the moment
well, sorry to burst your theory bubble, but not only is this not the case, but the reality of quantum mechanics actually allows for things that have already happened to basically unhappen.
let me explain it this way - when something happens, there is a probability distribution on various ways on how it could happen. This probability distribution can be thought of a spread-out wave. Now, when an observer comes along, he forces that distribution into one of the many possibilities allowed, and suddenly this broad wave becomes a very sharp spike - there is no longer an array of possibilites with a certain prescribed chance of any particular one happening - one has been picked, and the other disappear. Everyone is happy, because they know what happened. But here comes the tricky part, as soon as you and everyone else looks away, that spike begins to decay - it starts to spread out as time goes on and now it begins to be possible for not only the event to have occured the way everyone agreed upon at the time, but similar, neighboring possibilties begin to have some probability of having occured to - small at first, but growing with increasing time. As the event moves further and further into the past, the chances of things having happened one way or another go back to their original probability distribution.
The implications of this are huge. Most directly, it means that history is literally only as good as it is recorded or remembered. The only way you have of observing an event that happened in the past is to remember it or experience some recording of it (in words or video, whatever). Thus, in retrospect you can only collapse the wave function that is the probability distribution associated with that event in the way the memory or recording dictates, and only the parts of it specific to the memory or recording. This literally means there is no truely accurate histories possible - hisory has undone itself while no one was looking.
Another implication is the following: We here on Earth have developed our science and have found some fundimental ways the universe works and have a rough idea of how it is contructed (and some people even think they might have a guess at how it began - but I'm pretty sure they are mostly wrong and only a little correct). But it we also see that there are other ways the universe could have been put together - other laws of physics could have prevailed, but they didn't. Why? because we devised a series of experiments and made a series of observations that collapsed the probabilty distribution and recorded the results. But, if we were to destroy all those recordings, forget all those results, let enough time pass, and then start over and devise a totally different set of experiments (based perhaps on different expectations), then you could actually find that the universe works differently and is constructed in a different way, and was created in a different manner. Now, some things couldn't change - things essential to building humans or bacteria or any other observer (eg, the elements would have to work the same, particle and energy interactions couldn't change and a bizzilion other things - and that is a huge constraint on the universe, and anything essential to things they observe with - the basic nature of sound and light, etc, etc...), but within the amount that that probability wave of how the universe is constructed is allowed to relax and still allow any observers to exist, different results are entirely possible, and even likely. In fact it is unlikely we would come up with the same result unless we did everything exactly the same.
So that basically means that the universe is not only completely immune to being pre-ordained, it reserves the right to change its mind. Your life is not fated to happen. Heck - your history isn't even valid. Your memory of it is really no more valid than anyone elses, since everyone's memory is subject to drift.
Memory has been shown to be another quantum mechanical process - and subject to the same pattern decay of the probability waves that I mentioned above, though with different constraints - so if you think you have a sharp memory and can remember exactly what happened, I'm sorry to tell you, but you only remeber one of the possibilties that is approximately similar to the one that actually did, with that similarity degrading over time and no way to ever compair to the orginal, since the spike of that probability distribution has long since decayed. Your memory is the only valid thing left, but it cannot be prescise - though video or recordings may help sharpen the fuzz a bit.
In short - there is no truth about the past. The future is only a series of probabilities which become better defined as present events occure and that future gets closer. To some extent, the near future is preordained by what is happening now, but that 'fate' only exists a short distance into the future and gets weaker with distance, and if you push at the edges of it, you can change its eevntual course. You do not have freedom of will exactly, but to a much greater extent, your future is not predestined.
A creature that experiences in 4 dimentions would live in nothing but probabilities (as we see it anyway). I say 'experiences' because we ourselves live in 4 dimentions, but only percieve 3. (Heck we proably live in something like 11 dimentions). To be precise about it, our brain actually gives us information in something like 2.7 dimentions, and therefore we can infer 3 to a reasonable degree. There is evidence that evolution is perhaps leading up toward higher dimentional perception (cats, for example, are around 2.6), atleast to the extent that supporting a brain that can handle the processing is feasable and adaptive to the enviroment we live in. The problem is, it takes a huge increase in brain processing ability to make even a small gain on the dimentionality truely perceived. Even getting to a full 3 dimentional anaysis ability in our brain will be almost certainly unfeasable. It is extremely unlikey a 4 dimention experienceing creature could ever support the brain needed for parcing the information. If one did exist and he could manage to pick the right you to communicate with you you think you are, he could only tell you what was probably going to happen to you in your probable timeline. nothing would be definite for him in the way it is definite for you and me. It is likely that he would have such a different perception of the universe, that he wouldn't even be aware of your existance per se - at least not in the way that you are.
ok - enough! Like I said before, I could go on all night, but can't. just remember:
There is no real truth in the past, and no real certainly in the future. The only things that exists on either side of the present are possibilities that become increasingly vague the further they are from now.
-v-
Wiederstand ist Zwecklos!
GOLD Member
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posted:
sorry i worded it poorly the lesser known idea of Einstein was that around black holes even empty space is dragged, so like when u have a cup of coffee and stir it if u drop a coffee bean in the bean swirls round but not cos the bean is moving but because the coffee is moving it, at least thats how mallet explained it.
my understand is that if u where to approach the event horizon you could use the acceleration to go faster than the speed on light so to an external observer u would vanish back in time. mallet says that it may be possible to do the same with high powered lazers as light can bend space time. well that was my understanding anyway, i think the idea for the time machine wasnt to send ppl back but to send particles just to prove that time travel is possible.
if an event occurs which allows another one to be possible which then occurs and the first event is forgotten by all humans but the second is remember and could only have happened because the first one occured doesnt that mean that the first event is indirectly remembered so as long as the second is remembered? if u extrapolate that then if the current moment is remember then surely all of the past moments must keep being as they where? what about the fact that people remember different events differently? the mind often changes memorys with time, what happens when multiple ppl have multiple different memories of the same event? surely if the past changed then that would effect the present?
everyone used to think the earth was flat to, until one day it was proven to be wrong. how can finding trends in experiments and ideas change the laws of physics? surely just because the other laws wherent taken into consideration doesnt stop them from being there it just means that they arnt understood?
id be very interested to read your thoughts on the idea of the pryomid thingy which is basically points 1-4 i just seperated them into bits to make it a tad easier to read. most of the rest is just random ideas that got remembered while i was typing the first bit so i figured id chuck em in as well
i kinda like it when ppl do it challenges my ideas which usually ends up with better ideas forming
ps what was ur topic for ur phd?
Quote:
Please don't attribute that bunk about time travel to Einstein. The only thing Einstein has to do with it is the notion that matter and energy can bend space and therefor technically 'stretch time'
sorry i worded it poorly the lesser known idea of Einstein was that around black holes even empty space is dragged, so like when u have a cup of coffee and stir it if u drop a coffee bean in the bean swirls round but not cos the bean is moving but because the coffee is moving it, at least thats how mallet explained it.
Quote:
First, to use the time machine, you would have to travel through a 'sigularity' (such as exists at the center of a back hole)
my understand is that if u where to approach the event horizon you could use the acceleration to go faster than the speed on light so to an external observer u would vanish back in time. mallet says that it may be possible to do the same with high powered lazers as light can bend space time. well that was my understanding anyway, i think the idea for the time machine wasnt to send ppl back but to send particles just to prove that time travel is possible.
Quote:
The implications of this are huge. Most directly, it means that history is literally only as good as it is recorded or remembered. The only way you have of observing an event that happened in the past is to remember it or experience some recording of it (in words or video, whatever). Thus, in retrospect you can only collapse the wave function that is the probability distribution associated with that event in the way the memory or recording dictates, and only the parts of it specific to the memory or recording. This literally means there is no truely accurate histories possible - hisory has undone itself while no one was looking.
if an event occurs which allows another one to be possible which then occurs and the first event is forgotten by all humans but the second is remember and could only have happened because the first one occured doesnt that mean that the first event is indirectly remembered so as long as the second is remembered? if u extrapolate that then if the current moment is remember then surely all of the past moments must keep being as they where? what about the fact that people remember different events differently? the mind often changes memorys with time, what happens when multiple ppl have multiple different memories of the same event? surely if the past changed then that would effect the present?
Quote:
But it we also see that there are other ways the universe could have been put together - other laws of physics could have prevailed, but they didn't. Why? because we devised a series of experiments and made a series of observations that collapsed the probabilty distribution and recorded the results
everyone used to think the earth was flat to, until one day it was proven to be wrong. how can finding trends in experiments and ideas change the laws of physics? surely just because the other laws wherent taken into consideration doesnt stop them from being there it just means that they arnt understood?
id be very interested to read your thoughts on the idea of the pryomid thingy which is basically points 1-4 i just seperated them into bits to make it a tad easier to read. most of the rest is just random ideas that got remembered while i was typing the first bit so i figured id chuck em in as well
Quote:
well, sorry to burst your theory bubble
i kinda like it when ppl do it challenges my ideas which usually ends up with better ideas forming
ps what was ur topic for ur phd?
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourself, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous and talented? Who are you NOT to be?
SILVER Member
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Posted:
well, I have to say it isn't really a lesser known theory - unless you call general relativity 'lesser known'. Also, Mallet seems to have choosen a much more difficult way to explain it than the usual way.
Actually, as you approach an event horizon your apparent velocity depends on the observer. to someone else, it looks like you are accelerating towards the speed of light, but you never quite reach that speed till you get to the event horizon. To you the situation is such that everything would actually seem to slow down because of time dialation - and an event horizon is the limit of time dialation - ie, time is so stretch that before even the smallest fraction of a nanosecond does not pass before the entire rest of eternity passes to those outside the event horizon. Basically - once you get to an event horizon, you are at the end of time. But the intersting thing is - you never actually get to that event horizon, since time stretches to the limit of infinty at that point. so basically you spend the rest of eternity trying to reach infinity at a single cutoff point in 3 dimentional space.
As far as sending particles back in time, you are still limited to the constraint that they can not go further back in time than the time allowed by the speed of light limit I discussed above (ie, to go three years back, you must go as far as alpha centuri). what that means is if he creates this experiment in a lab the size of a large lecture hall (30 meters), to the people at the recieving end, it will look like the particle arrived one ten-millionth of a second before they observe the signal that it was transmitted (ie, the particles get there instantly, but the signal that the transmission had begun takes one ten-millionth of a second to arrive). If the people doing at the other end of the lecture hall can see the particle arrive - they would see it arrive there one ten-millionth of a second after they had transmitted it - one ten-millionth of a second ahead of schedual as far as they were concerned, but they still see it after they transmit it.
Is that time travel? Not in the H.G. Wells sense of it.
you are correct that succesive events do constrain the past, but pretty much in the same way they constrain the future - it gets fuzzier the futher in the past it is because the events next closest in time to it between then and now have grown fuzzier. As soon as something that is right now becomes something that was just a second ago, it's exact nature is no longer determinable and so its nature has already begun to fuzz out. The not-quite completely exact recollection of that just past second alows a the one before it to become just slightly more out of focus, and so on down the line. That people remember things differently is, if you ask me, an expression of this inexactitude of the past. And the increasing fuzzyness of history the further back in time it is cannot change the present because the fuzzyness of the past is contrained by the present, but less and less constrained the further in the past it is, just as the future is less and less constrained by the present the further forward in time you go. A whole host of things could have happened to get us to where we are now. That one set of events did is inmaterial, and in fact it is impossible to say with any accuracy which set events that are allowed within the constaints of the now actually did get us here.
An interesting consequence of this is the new idea that if were to go back in time to change events, you would actually have a hell of a time doing anything to affect the present since the further you go back in time, the more and more radical a change you would have to make to put it outside the wide array of possible pasts the now has. And If you only travel back in time a very short way, the 'now' that you are trying to affect is only a short way off and tightly constrained. You could make a small change t the now in that case, and then in principle the further future, but it wouldn't actually aim anything anywhere unless you continuously applied these changes (loose anaolgy: a small sprinkle of rain doesn't stop you from getting to work, but if it keeps raining for days and days, then it floods and you might not be able to get to work). It is likely that even if you could time travel, you would get extremely frustrated trying to accomplish any changes There is a sci-fi book by Fritz Lieber called "the Big Time" which explores this so-call 'conservation of the present' theme in the setting of a vast time-space war between two unspecified factions. It seems very likely to me that 'conservation of the present' is in fact all we really have. The future is uncertain, but vaguely aimed in some direction, at least in the short term, and the past is increasingly indeterminant the further away it gets. All we have is now. Both the past and the future can be changed. The future is the only one that matters, except in so far as perceptions about the past affect our decisions of the now and influence the future and the coming now.
just because an observation is misunderstood by the human intellect doesn't mean that it's consequence in true physics are not realized. The earth was never flat because we experienced gravity the whole time, and that constraint dictates a spherical earth. we didn't understand it, but we experienced it. The earth was never at the center of the universe just because we thought it was. there is a difference between the actuallity of an event and the comprehension of it. Our comprension of how the universe began is certainly not entirely accurate, but our trying to figure out how it did form has narrowed the list of possibilities, even if we don't actually know or even have a hope of ever fully comprehending what any of them could be (in any terms beyond analogy anyway). But, had we chosen a different path of exploration and experimentation, a different (and perhaps overlapping) subset of possiblilties would have arisen. It is fully possible that an alien civilization10 billion light years away has a completely different, but just as valid idea of how the universe began. in so far as each view is accurate, neither would be more valid than the other but might seem completely contradictory. Of course, if we ever got together and compared notes, we would have a bit of an enigma on our hands - but the universe has a solution readily available for such circumstances. Since both of our pasts would be increasingly fuzzy the further back in time we look, the more and more room nature has to play with devising things such that both are possible, but which would suddenly place more constraints on the universe - more tricks of physics could be discovered, not just because we didn't know about them before, but because we couldn't as there was no need for them to exist until we shared our information and collapsed the probability distribution that governed our meeting and how our science would interact and how we would be influnced by that interaction. New science could come of it that was completely new and previously completely undiscoverable to both parties because it literally did not exist in the universe before their exchange. But the interesting thing is, these consequences of the meeting between us now not only propagate forward in time (as in we will be able to discover new things that didn't exist before), but they also propagate backwards in time, such that as we take the chance to look backwards into our past, we can suddenly see the evidence for it staring us in the face. This propagation happens at the speed of light BTW - which is also the maximum speed of information - unless you build a time machine like Proffessor Mallet proposes and broadcast that information to a specific point.
There is an interesting diagram by a nobel laureate (meaning he was nominated, but didn't actually get the prize - a nobel prize winner is a nobel laureate, but a laureate didn't neccisarily get a noble prize) at the university of Texas. I forget his name, but basically it is a rip-off of the old snake eating its tail thing, except it is a snake looking at its tail with a telescope. the meaning behind it (which is more obvious if you see more of the detail which I am not going to take the time to describe) is that as we look into the past to see how things came to be, we are actually in a sense seeing our own expectations out of a host of possibilties.
I'll try to look into them later, but my brain is kinda tired now.
me too
My specialization was in magnetospheric physics - basically the interaction between the earth' magnetic field and the sun enviroment (is magnetic field, the solar wind, solar storms, coronal mass ejections, etc...). The area around the Earth is actually a very complex system of fields and particles and currents and all sorts of other stuff, all interdependent on each other - in short - it is a very chaotic system.
I worked closely with a satellite mission named IMAGE for my Ph.D., the analysis of data from the instrument I worked with involved a lot of particle physics and wave dynamics. I have a fairly strong background in quantum mechanis because of this, and a smattering of general relativity principles bouncing around in my head as well - both from that and a curiosity about cosmology/origins of the universe. I don't ever do any research on the latter, but I try to keep up with current advances on it and like to formulate guesses in my head as to where thoughts and theories about that are going next.
Also, I tinker a lot with philosophical ideas and try to apply quantum mechanics, cosmology, choas, and other intersting science towards that (and vice versa).
Please do remember that much of what I have said is my philosophy - not all of it is science fact. Some of it is science fact (like my technical disccusions on the speed of light, warping space time, and time travel), at least in the context as science as we now understand it. Other stuff (fuzzyness of the future and past for example) is my philosphical thinking, though I try my best to apply as many tests to it as I can to make it self consistant within the framework of science fact. It is basically like a mental hobby. When other people get bored, I just pull up some part of my philosphy that has been bugging me and I try to grind it to peices with what I know and see what comes out the other side. I like finding new consequences of modern science and see how well my current version of my philosophy hold up, or what modifacations or complete re-vamps might be necessary and ear mark them for future consideration.
Keep up the thinking. Brain excercise is as important as body excercise.
But basically my point to all this is that there is such a thing as free will - you just have to work hard to exhert enough pressure with it to make a large difference. If you don't, you are letting social inertia and others who may be pushing hard to control your general (but not specific) fate.
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Please don't attribute that bunk about time travel to Einstein. The only thing Einstein has to do with it is the notion that matter and energy can bend space and therefor technically 'stretch time'
sorry i worded it poorly the lesser known idea of Einstein was that around black holes even empty space is dragged, so like when u have a cup of coffee and stir it if u drop a coffee bean in the bean swirls round but not cos the bean is moving but because the coffee is moving it, at least thats how mallet explained it.
well, I have to say it isn't really a lesser known theory - unless you call general relativity 'lesser known'. Also, Mallet seems to have choosen a much more difficult way to explain it than the usual way.
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First, to use the time machine, you would have to travel through a 'sigularity' (such as exists at the center of a back hole)
my understand is that if u where to approach the event horizon you could use the acceleration to go faster than the speed on light so to an external observer u would vanish back in time. mallet says that it may be possible to do the same with high powered lazers as light can bend space time. well that was my understanding anyway, i think the idea for the time machine wasnt to send ppl back but to send particles just to prove that time travel is possible.
Actually, as you approach an event horizon your apparent velocity depends on the observer. to someone else, it looks like you are accelerating towards the speed of light, but you never quite reach that speed till you get to the event horizon. To you the situation is such that everything would actually seem to slow down because of time dialation - and an event horizon is the limit of time dialation - ie, time is so stretch that before even the smallest fraction of a nanosecond does not pass before the entire rest of eternity passes to those outside the event horizon. Basically - once you get to an event horizon, you are at the end of time. But the intersting thing is - you never actually get to that event horizon, since time stretches to the limit of infinty at that point. so basically you spend the rest of eternity trying to reach infinity at a single cutoff point in 3 dimentional space.
As far as sending particles back in time, you are still limited to the constraint that they can not go further back in time than the time allowed by the speed of light limit I discussed above (ie, to go three years back, you must go as far as alpha centuri). what that means is if he creates this experiment in a lab the size of a large lecture hall (30 meters), to the people at the recieving end, it will look like the particle arrived one ten-millionth of a second before they observe the signal that it was transmitted (ie, the particles get there instantly, but the signal that the transmission had begun takes one ten-millionth of a second to arrive). If the people doing at the other end of the lecture hall can see the particle arrive - they would see it arrive there one ten-millionth of a second after they had transmitted it - one ten-millionth of a second ahead of schedual as far as they were concerned, but they still see it after they transmit it.
Is that time travel? Not in the H.G. Wells sense of it.
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The implications of this are huge. Most directly, it means that history is literally only as good as it is recorded or remembered. The only way you have of observing an event that happened in the past is to remember it or experience some recording of it (in words or video, whatever). Thus, in retrospect you can only collapse the wave function that is the probability distribution associated with that event in the way the memory or recording dictates, and only the parts of it specific to the memory or recording. This literally means there is no truely accurate histories possible - hisory has undone itself while no one was looking.
if an event occurs which allows another one to be possible which then occurs and the first event is forgotten by all humans but the second is remember and could only have happened because the first one occured doesnt that mean that the first event is indirectly remembered so as long as the second is remembered? if u extrapolate that then if the current moment is remember then surely all of the past moments must keep being as they where? what about the fact that people remember different events differently? the mind often changes memorys with time, what happens when multiple ppl have multiple different memories of the same event? surely if the past changed then that would effect the present?
you are correct that succesive events do constrain the past, but pretty much in the same way they constrain the future - it gets fuzzier the futher in the past it is because the events next closest in time to it between then and now have grown fuzzier. As soon as something that is right now becomes something that was just a second ago, it's exact nature is no longer determinable and so its nature has already begun to fuzz out. The not-quite completely exact recollection of that just past second alows a the one before it to become just slightly more out of focus, and so on down the line. That people remember things differently is, if you ask me, an expression of this inexactitude of the past. And the increasing fuzzyness of history the further back in time it is cannot change the present because the fuzzyness of the past is contrained by the present, but less and less constrained the further in the past it is, just as the future is less and less constrained by the present the further forward in time you go. A whole host of things could have happened to get us to where we are now. That one set of events did is inmaterial, and in fact it is impossible to say with any accuracy which set events that are allowed within the constaints of the now actually did get us here.
An interesting consequence of this is the new idea that if were to go back in time to change events, you would actually have a hell of a time doing anything to affect the present since the further you go back in time, the more and more radical a change you would have to make to put it outside the wide array of possible pasts the now has. And If you only travel back in time a very short way, the 'now' that you are trying to affect is only a short way off and tightly constrained. You could make a small change t the now in that case, and then in principle the further future, but it wouldn't actually aim anything anywhere unless you continuously applied these changes (loose anaolgy: a small sprinkle of rain doesn't stop you from getting to work, but if it keeps raining for days and days, then it floods and you might not be able to get to work). It is likely that even if you could time travel, you would get extremely frustrated trying to accomplish any changes There is a sci-fi book by Fritz Lieber called "the Big Time" which explores this so-call 'conservation of the present' theme in the setting of a vast time-space war between two unspecified factions. It seems very likely to me that 'conservation of the present' is in fact all we really have. The future is uncertain, but vaguely aimed in some direction, at least in the short term, and the past is increasingly indeterminant the further away it gets. All we have is now. Both the past and the future can be changed. The future is the only one that matters, except in so far as perceptions about the past affect our decisions of the now and influence the future and the coming now.
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But it we also see that there are other ways the universe could have been put together - other laws of physics could have prevailed, but they didn't. Why? because we devised a series of experiments and made a series of observations that collapsed the probabilty distribution and recorded the results
everyone used to think the earth was flat to, until one day it was proven to be wrong. how can finding trends in experiments and ideas change the laws of physics? surely just because the other laws wherent taken into consideration doesnt stop them from being there it just means that they arnt understood?
just because an observation is misunderstood by the human intellect doesn't mean that it's consequence in true physics are not realized. The earth was never flat because we experienced gravity the whole time, and that constraint dictates a spherical earth. we didn't understand it, but we experienced it. The earth was never at the center of the universe just because we thought it was. there is a difference between the actuallity of an event and the comprehension of it. Our comprension of how the universe began is certainly not entirely accurate, but our trying to figure out how it did form has narrowed the list of possibilities, even if we don't actually know or even have a hope of ever fully comprehending what any of them could be (in any terms beyond analogy anyway). But, had we chosen a different path of exploration and experimentation, a different (and perhaps overlapping) subset of possiblilties would have arisen. It is fully possible that an alien civilization10 billion light years away has a completely different, but just as valid idea of how the universe began. in so far as each view is accurate, neither would be more valid than the other but might seem completely contradictory. Of course, if we ever got together and compared notes, we would have a bit of an enigma on our hands - but the universe has a solution readily available for such circumstances. Since both of our pasts would be increasingly fuzzy the further back in time we look, the more and more room nature has to play with devising things such that both are possible, but which would suddenly place more constraints on the universe - more tricks of physics could be discovered, not just because we didn't know about them before, but because we couldn't as there was no need for them to exist until we shared our information and collapsed the probability distribution that governed our meeting and how our science would interact and how we would be influnced by that interaction. New science could come of it that was completely new and previously completely undiscoverable to both parties because it literally did not exist in the universe before their exchange. But the interesting thing is, these consequences of the meeting between us now not only propagate forward in time (as in we will be able to discover new things that didn't exist before), but they also propagate backwards in time, such that as we take the chance to look backwards into our past, we can suddenly see the evidence for it staring us in the face. This propagation happens at the speed of light BTW - which is also the maximum speed of information - unless you build a time machine like Proffessor Mallet proposes and broadcast that information to a specific point.
There is an interesting diagram by a nobel laureate (meaning he was nominated, but didn't actually get the prize - a nobel prize winner is a nobel laureate, but a laureate didn't neccisarily get a noble prize) at the university of Texas. I forget his name, but basically it is a rip-off of the old snake eating its tail thing, except it is a snake looking at its tail with a telescope. the meaning behind it (which is more obvious if you see more of the detail which I am not going to take the time to describe) is that as we look into the past to see how things came to be, we are actually in a sense seeing our own expectations out of a host of possibilties.
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id be very interested to read your thoughts on the idea of the pryomid thingy which is basically points 1-4 i just seperated them into bits to make it a tad easier to read. most of the rest is just random ideas that got remembered while i was typing the first bit so i figured id chuck em in as well
I'll try to look into them later, but my brain is kinda tired now.
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well, sorry to burst your theory bubble
i kinda like it when ppl do it challenges my ideas which usually ends up with better ideas forming
me too
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ps what was ur topic for ur phd?
My specialization was in magnetospheric physics - basically the interaction between the earth' magnetic field and the sun enviroment (is magnetic field, the solar wind, solar storms, coronal mass ejections, etc...). The area around the Earth is actually a very complex system of fields and particles and currents and all sorts of other stuff, all interdependent on each other - in short - it is a very chaotic system.
I worked closely with a satellite mission named IMAGE for my Ph.D., the analysis of data from the instrument I worked with involved a lot of particle physics and wave dynamics. I have a fairly strong background in quantum mechanis because of this, and a smattering of general relativity principles bouncing around in my head as well - both from that and a curiosity about cosmology/origins of the universe. I don't ever do any research on the latter, but I try to keep up with current advances on it and like to formulate guesses in my head as to where thoughts and theories about that are going next.
Also, I tinker a lot with philosophical ideas and try to apply quantum mechanics, cosmology, choas, and other intersting science towards that (and vice versa).
Please do remember that much of what I have said is my philosophy - not all of it is science fact. Some of it is science fact (like my technical disccusions on the speed of light, warping space time, and time travel), at least in the context as science as we now understand it. Other stuff (fuzzyness of the future and past for example) is my philosphical thinking, though I try my best to apply as many tests to it as I can to make it self consistant within the framework of science fact. It is basically like a mental hobby. When other people get bored, I just pull up some part of my philosphy that has been bugging me and I try to grind it to peices with what I know and see what comes out the other side. I like finding new consequences of modern science and see how well my current version of my philosophy hold up, or what modifacations or complete re-vamps might be necessary and ear mark them for future consideration.
Keep up the thinking. Brain excercise is as important as body excercise.
But basically my point to all this is that there is such a thing as free will - you just have to work hard to exhert enough pressure with it to make a large difference. If you don't, you are letting social inertia and others who may be pushing hard to control your general (but not specific) fate.
-v-
Wiederstand ist Zwecklos!
GOLD Member
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posted:
maybe i missed something from what mallet said, the impression i got was that time travel with the lasers would only be possible back to teh point in time when the laser is first turned on and wasnt dependant on the distance traveled. as it was the lasers fields that where distorting space and time and not the speed on teh particle.
im having trouble understanding this concept. to take a simple example my father and mother met got married had me, my fathers father and mother got married and had my father. my mothers father and mother got married and had her. keep going backwards. now surely if 100 generations ago one of my great great great ...... greats didnt have their child i wouldnt exist as me today as i would have different dna? sure there are little things like if my great great great ... great didnt order chicken and ordered steak on teh first date they probably would have still got together. but then again maybe ordering that steak would have made him sick and he might have died. or maybe the cow was the only cow to be immune to some virus and as such was able to pass on its genes which ensured the survival of the species. i dont understand how the past can fuzz out, it seems to me that everything affects everything else whether it be on a small or grand scale.
if i was to travel back in time a day and shoot the president of the united states that would have massive ramifications, or if on september 11 i time traveled back to september 10 and told them about the hijaking once again that would have massive ramifications.
im a little confused why new laws would suddenly exist because of the exchanging of ideas, surely the laws where there just not understood
like for arguements sake lets say gravity is determined by g=a*r*h
where a is a constant and h is the height and r is the radius of the planet. now say on planet one they discover that gravity is proportional to height and come up with a constant that works for all cases on their planet and they get g=3h
on another planet with a different radius they get g=2h the two come together and realise that gravity is proportional to the radius of the planet. gravity hasnt evolved to fit their models the rules where just incompletely understood to start with, after all thats what science does doesnt it? finds rules and patterns in the chaos until they are proved to be wrong then finds a new model.. so while their concepts of gravity has evolved the rules of the universe are unchanged?
im eagerly awaiting ur take on them
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As far as sending particles back in time, you are still limited to the constraint that they can not go further back in time than the time allowed by the speed of light limit I discussed above (ie, to go three years back, you must go as far as alpha centuri). what that means is if he creates this experiment in a lab the size of a large lecture hall (30 meters), to the people at the recieving end, it will look like the particle arrived one ten-millionth of a second before they observe the signal that it was transmitted (ie, the particles get there instantly, but the signal that the transmission had begun takes one ten-millionth of a second to arrive). If the people doing at the other end of the lecture hall can see the particle arrive - they would see it arrive there one ten-millionth of a second after they had transmitted it - one ten-millionth of a second ahead of schedual as far as they were concerned, but they still see it after they transmit it.
maybe i missed something from what mallet said, the impression i got was that time travel with the lasers would only be possible back to teh point in time when the laser is first turned on and wasnt dependant on the distance traveled. as it was the lasers fields that where distorting space and time and not the speed on teh particle.
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you are correct that succesive events do constrain the past, but pretty much in the same way they constrain the future - it gets fuzzier the futher in the past it is because the events next closest in time to it between then and now have grown fuzzier. As soon as something that is right now becomes something that was just a second ago, it's exact nature is no longer determinable and so its nature has already begun to fuzz out. The not-quite completely exact recollection of that just past second alows a the one before it to become just slightly more out of focus, and so on down the line.
im having trouble understanding this concept. to take a simple example my father and mother met got married had me, my fathers father and mother got married and had my father. my mothers father and mother got married and had her. keep going backwards. now surely if 100 generations ago one of my great great great ...... greats didnt have their child i wouldnt exist as me today as i would have different dna? sure there are little things like if my great great great ... great didnt order chicken and ordered steak on teh first date they probably would have still got together. but then again maybe ordering that steak would have made him sick and he might have died. or maybe the cow was the only cow to be immune to some virus and as such was able to pass on its genes which ensured the survival of the species. i dont understand how the past can fuzz out, it seems to me that everything affects everything else whether it be on a small or grand scale.
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And If you only travel back in time a very short way, the 'now' that you are trying to affect is only a short way off and tightly constrained. You could make a small change t the now in that case
if i was to travel back in time a day and shoot the president of the united states that would have massive ramifications, or if on september 11 i time traveled back to september 10 and told them about the hijaking once again that would have massive ramifications.
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neither would be more valid than the other but might seem completely contradictory. Of course, if we ever got together and compared notes, we would have a bit of an enigma on our hands - but the universe has a solution readily available for such circumstances. Since both of our pasts would be increasingly fuzzy the further back in time we look, the more and more room nature has to play with devising things such that both are possible, but which would suddenly place more constraints on the universe - more tricks of physics could be discovered, not just because we didn't know about them before, but because we couldn't as there was no need for them to exist until we shared our information and collapsed the probability distribution that governed our meeting and how our science would interact and how we would be influnced by that interaction. New science could come of it that was completely new and previously completely undiscoverable to both parties because it literally did not exist in the universe before their exchange.
im a little confused why new laws would suddenly exist because of the exchanging of ideas, surely the laws where there just not understood
like for arguements sake lets say gravity is determined by g=a*r*h
where a is a constant and h is the height and r is the radius of the planet. now say on planet one they discover that gravity is proportional to height and come up with a constant that works for all cases on their planet and they get g=3h
on another planet with a different radius they get g=2h the two come together and realise that gravity is proportional to the radius of the planet. gravity hasnt evolved to fit their models the rules where just incompletely understood to start with, after all thats what science does doesnt it? finds rules and patterns in the chaos until they are proved to be wrong then finds a new model.. so while their concepts of gravity has evolved the rules of the universe are unchanged?
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I'll try to look into them later, but my brain is kinda tired now
im eagerly awaiting ur take on them
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourself, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous and talented? Who are you NOT to be?
BRONZE Member
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,009 posts
Location: Bristol, UK
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,009 posts
Location: Bristol, UK
Posted:
OK, what I'm doing is reading a point, typing, then moving on.
Point 1 - The nature of time.
I don't buy the concept that our conscious brain chooses what we perceive from an 'everything'. My reasons include the fact that I don't like anything that relies too much on the story that the 'conscious' and 'unconscious' brains are so separate and that our unconscious knows all. This is partially because it's been shown that the 2 can be interchangeable, and also that it reeks of a superiority complex. Your brain is a biological organ, do not credit it with mysticism and other worldly powers.
The theory of no time appears in a few religious ideas and more recently in a lot of new age thinkings, especially as there's some scientist who claim (albeit very debatably) that time is unnecessary and probably only a human perception. However it is pretty much accepted that time is flexible and a very odd fellow at times.
What is more likely a mechanism for the removal of time is replacing it with probability journeys. Think of a moment in time. That moment can be described as the data on all positions of quantum particles in the universe. Probability tells us the likelyhood of what the data on all the particles will be in the next instance of now. On a quantum scale it's really messy, but on an atomic level it means that a coin dropped is almost infinitely likely to fall as directed by gravity. Sounds a bit cookoo, I know. I haven't looked into it enough to comment too much on it.
So, remove time and everything exists at one instance, but this doesn't mean that everything happens at once. Our perception of time is a progression of all the universe's particles along a probability curve, or journey. This in itself could be dubbed the new time but is fundamentally different in that the separation of events is removed.
Conversations with God Book 2 puts forward the view that there is no time, and all possible 'nows' exist at one. Our journey from now to the next now is influenced by our choices and those around us. It also puts forward the idea that the other 'yous' who made other choices also exist in a ghost form and serve to guide our choices depending upon what our soul chooses to experience. (The CWG theory is that our soul is a small part of what makes up 'God' which is currently occupying a life journey in order to experience what 'God' is or is not. - read it)
"butterfly flapping its wings in china causing tidal waves in america effect" - try not to use this argument - it's pretty unsound.
Pivot points and the unclearness to fortune tellers - I don't think this fits with a no time theory. If there's no time and fortune tellers can see into the future they would be able to see everything.
Try this for size:
Yes, we, and everything around us, is basically just made of energy and so has a frequency. Energy effects itself, and through that can affect what we perceive of each other. For instance sometimes you can 'feel' people you can't see and there's the aura theory too. So, if there is no time, then all energy exists at once and can affect itself. To put it another way - the energy of you 50 years in the future directly affects your energy now. So we call forth our own futures, but interestingly this theory allows us to call up our own pasts. Think on that one for a few days or weeks.
"the difference between people with multiple personality disorder and the rest of the world is that the rest of the worlds multiple personalities are aware of each other." - I would say it's the other way round.
The pre big bang question. It's interesting that people often use the fact that there's no 'real' theory to answer the question "Where did it all come from?" as a reason why God should be the answer. The normal answer is "But where did God come from?". However I personally think that to think too long about this is a waste of time. We can never know what there was before the big bang. I'm happy with this and I don't feel it undermines my belief in science (and good science never claims to know something for sure) in the same way that not knowing how gravity works doesn't undermine my faith in things falling down.
Quantum theory, time travel, etc... I see Vanize has got involved, so that's cool. I said the same thing in a sentence: don't rely on popular science - go research academic science.
Why we're designed to grow? Because of evolution. We're where we're at because it suits us best in many ways, and we're flaws because they don't exert enough negative evolutionary pressure for us to have bred them out. If you want to think of this in a spiritual context I once again refer you to Conversations with God Book 1.
Conclusion: It's very comforting to believe in a soul, a god and a greater meaning. But I think this thinking is merely a comfort blanket for a paranoid, insecure species deadly afraid of it's own mortality. We are a happy accident, there is no soul, and we are the way we are due to the laws of physics. The universe is a large place and we will most probably never know all it's secrets. We as people, a species, a planet and solar system are a small, inconsequential part of the grand play. To place ourselves and our miniscule actions in a position of importance is to once again display that superiority complex, which is ultimately a product of our insecurities.
OK, what I'm doing is reading a point, typing, then moving on.
Point 1 - The nature of time.
I don't buy the concept that our conscious brain chooses what we perceive from an 'everything'. My reasons include the fact that I don't like anything that relies too much on the story that the 'conscious' and 'unconscious' brains are so separate and that our unconscious knows all. This is partially because it's been shown that the 2 can be interchangeable, and also that it reeks of a superiority complex. Your brain is a biological organ, do not credit it with mysticism and other worldly powers.
The theory of no time appears in a few religious ideas and more recently in a lot of new age thinkings, especially as there's some scientist who claim (albeit very debatably) that time is unnecessary and probably only a human perception. However it is pretty much accepted that time is flexible and a very odd fellow at times.
What is more likely a mechanism for the removal of time is replacing it with probability journeys. Think of a moment in time. That moment can be described as the data on all positions of quantum particles in the universe. Probability tells us the likelyhood of what the data on all the particles will be in the next instance of now. On a quantum scale it's really messy, but on an atomic level it means that a coin dropped is almost infinitely likely to fall as directed by gravity. Sounds a bit cookoo, I know. I haven't looked into it enough to comment too much on it.
So, remove time and everything exists at one instance, but this doesn't mean that everything happens at once. Our perception of time is a progression of all the universe's particles along a probability curve, or journey. This in itself could be dubbed the new time but is fundamentally different in that the separation of events is removed.
Conversations with God Book 2 puts forward the view that there is no time, and all possible 'nows' exist at one. Our journey from now to the next now is influenced by our choices and those around us. It also puts forward the idea that the other 'yous' who made other choices also exist in a ghost form and serve to guide our choices depending upon what our soul chooses to experience. (The CWG theory is that our soul is a small part of what makes up 'God' which is currently occupying a life journey in order to experience what 'God' is or is not. - read it)
"butterfly flapping its wings in china causing tidal waves in america effect" - try not to use this argument - it's pretty unsound.
Pivot points and the unclearness to fortune tellers - I don't think this fits with a no time theory. If there's no time and fortune tellers can see into the future they would be able to see everything.
Try this for size:
Yes, we, and everything around us, is basically just made of energy and so has a frequency. Energy effects itself, and through that can affect what we perceive of each other. For instance sometimes you can 'feel' people you can't see and there's the aura theory too. So, if there is no time, then all energy exists at once and can affect itself. To put it another way - the energy of you 50 years in the future directly affects your energy now. So we call forth our own futures, but interestingly this theory allows us to call up our own pasts. Think on that one for a few days or weeks.
"the difference between people with multiple personality disorder and the rest of the world is that the rest of the worlds multiple personalities are aware of each other." - I would say it's the other way round.
The pre big bang question. It's interesting that people often use the fact that there's no 'real' theory to answer the question "Where did it all come from?" as a reason why God should be the answer. The normal answer is "But where did God come from?". However I personally think that to think too long about this is a waste of time. We can never know what there was before the big bang. I'm happy with this and I don't feel it undermines my belief in science (and good science never claims to know something for sure) in the same way that not knowing how gravity works doesn't undermine my faith in things falling down.
Quantum theory, time travel, etc... I see Vanize has got involved, so that's cool. I said the same thing in a sentence: don't rely on popular science - go research academic science.
Why we're designed to grow? Because of evolution. We're where we're at because it suits us best in many ways, and we're flaws because they don't exert enough negative evolutionary pressure for us to have bred them out. If you want to think of this in a spiritual context I once again refer you to Conversations with God Book 1.
Conclusion: It's very comforting to believe in a soul, a god and a greater meaning. But I think this thinking is merely a comfort blanket for a paranoid, insecure species deadly afraid of it's own mortality. We are a happy accident, there is no soul, and we are the way we are due to the laws of physics. The universe is a large place and we will most probably never know all it's secrets. We as people, a species, a planet and solar system are a small, inconsequential part of the grand play. To place ourselves and our miniscule actions in a position of importance is to once again display that superiority complex, which is ultimately a product of our insecurities.
member
313 posts
Location: london,uk
313 posts
Location: london,uk
Posted:
some very interesting points and i in no way can match the intellectual physics and scientific stuff,but the idea that we are a happy accident dumbfounds me.........just looking at the diverse species on planet earth,the amazing details and colours..........also,what about the known fact that we only use a tiny percentage of our brain?What would we be perceiving if we used more of our brain...?
some very interesting points and i in no way can match the intellectual physics and scientific stuff,but the idea that we are a happy accident dumbfounds me.........just looking at the diverse species on planet earth,the amazing details and colours..........also,what about the known fact that we only use a tiny percentage of our brain?What would we be perceiving if we used more of our brain...?
PLATINUM Member
Hyperloops suck
595 posts
Location: USA
Hyperloops suck
595 posts
Location: USA
member
313 posts
Location: london,uk
313 posts
Location: london,uk
Posted:
humble pie,anyone?.....ok,but what about the fact that scientists are beginning to think it's worth investigating after death experiences cos there are so many people claiming to have them?Not just the white light at the end of tunnel stuff,but people describing things that were done to them while they were supposedly dead,in hospital.(this refers to the no soul part of Dom's argument.)
humble pie,anyone?.....ok,but what about the fact that scientists are beginning to think it's worth investigating after death experiences cos there are so many people claiming to have them?Not just the white light at the end of tunnel stuff,but people describing things that were done to them while they were supposedly dead,in hospital.(this refers to the no soul part of Dom's argument.)
SILVER Member
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
not with cactus
2,052 posts
Location: bristol/ southern eastern devon, United Kingdom
Posted:
that thing about only using 10% of your brain - i read a book once, think it may have been by douglas adams. but anyway, the charecter in this book uses the other 9/10 of his brain to think about penguins. which i think is funny.
but yea, what vanize was saying about the past and future being fuzzy was interesting, i need to reread all of what was written though, because i dont feel ive entirely absorbed it all.
that thing about only using 10% of your brain - i read a book once, think it may have been by douglas adams. but anyway, the charecter in this book uses the other 9/10 of his brain to think about penguins. which i think is funny.
but yea, what vanize was saying about the past and future being fuzzy was interesting, i need to reread all of what was written though, because i dont feel ive entirely absorbed it all.
Me train running low on soul coal
They push+pull tactics are driving me loco
They shouldn't do that no no no
GOLD Member
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
just lost .... evil init
2,474 posts
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Posted:
i agree that the brain is just a biologoical organ, the current model for quantum physics says that particles dont choose their states until viewed by a conscious observer, to me that raises a few questions about whatelse consciousness might do
im a little unclear as to how that is different to what i said? what is it that chooses which of the probable events is experienced by us
i totally agree
i most definately will thanx for the reference
its an analogy my stats lecturer used to use, the point is that the butterfly flaps its wings which might affect the airflow at a point which changes a pressure system which blah blah blah and results in a massive effect on the otherside of the world
if everything exists at once but we only experience one step of the pryomid at a time the information a few steps done is there but we arnt experienceing them yet theres no reason that i can see why it would be impossible to somehow see a few steps down, provided it isnt past a life changing decision.
i agree that everything is made of energy and that everything effects everything else, can u clarify what mean by energy affects itself? as far as the energy of you from 50 years in the future affecting you now, well if you take the point of view of the probabilities there would be so many possible probabilities 50 years from now i would guess that their influences would cancel each other out unless there was a massive amount of similarities in the majority of them.
maybe i didnt phrase that to well, ppl with multiple personality disorder have multiple personalities that are unaware of what actions the others have taken. the rest of us have a continous memory of events, when u do something and later thing i dont know what i was thinking, or i wasnt myself thats just a sub personality that doesnt get a run in the conscious mind to often.
thats a pretty big call kinda like saying man will never walk on the moon, or my favourite "No one will ever need more than 640k of memory"-Bill Gates,1985
most researchers devote their entire lives to understanding a particular field as much as i would like to there is far to many different fields to be able to research them all indepth
ok but where did evolution come from? i find it difficult to believe that it just accidentally happen as its a very well designed mechanism that is able to pass on useful information from one generation to the next such that each generation becomes better.
i agree
thats quite a big claim, but accidents require actions and actions require conscious entitys so something had to create us and design this universe that we live in. If there was no conscious entities or whatever u want to call it i could accept that if there was nothing, no space no matter no nothing
i agree that we make up a tiny part of a tiny part of a. ..... but i disagree that we are inconsequential, take the atoms in our body we have lots and lots of em, but if one of the neutrons in an atom was to become detacted that would greatly affect the stability of the atom --> affect the function of the molecule---> affect the function of whatever structure it was in and so on and would set in affect a chain reaction, the result of this might not be major but then again it might be. I guess this is at the heart of where our opinions differ i believe that everything is interconnected and affects everything else (even if its not in a profound way its still an effect)
Quote:
Your brain is a biological organ, do not credit it with mysticism and other worldly powers.
i agree that the brain is just a biologoical organ, the current model for quantum physics says that particles dont choose their states until viewed by a conscious observer, to me that raises a few questions about whatelse consciousness might do
Quote:
So, remove time and everything exists at one instance, but this doesn't mean that everything happens at once. Our perception of time is a progression of all the universe's particles along a probability curve, or journey. This in itself could be dubbed the new time but is fundamentally different in that the separation of events is removed.
im a little unclear as to how that is different to what i said? what is it that chooses which of the probable events is experienced by us
Quote:
puts forward the view that there is no time, and all possible 'nows' exist at one. Our journey from now to the next now is influenced by our choices and those around us.
i totally agree
Quote:
(The CWG theory is that our soul is a small part of what makes up 'God' which is currently occupying a life journey in order to experience what 'God' is or is not. - read it
i most definately will thanx for the reference
Quote:
"butterfly flapping its wings in china causing tidal waves in america effect" - try not to use this argument - it's pretty unsound.
its an analogy my stats lecturer used to use, the point is that the butterfly flaps its wings which might affect the airflow at a point which changes a pressure system which blah blah blah and results in a massive effect on the otherside of the world
Quote:
Pivot points and the unclearness to fortune tellers - I don't think this fits with a no time theory. If there's no time and fortune tellers can see into the future they would be able to see everything.
if everything exists at once but we only experience one step of the pryomid at a time the information a few steps done is there but we arnt experienceing them yet theres no reason that i can see why it would be impossible to somehow see a few steps down, provided it isnt past a life changing decision.
Quote:
Yes, we, and everything around us, is basically just made of energy and so has a frequency. Energy effects itself, and through that can affect what we perceive of each other. For instance sometimes you can 'feel' people you can't see and there's the aura theory too. So, if there is no time, then all energy exists at once and can affect itself. To put it another way - the energy of you 50 years in the future directly affects your energy now. So we call forth our own futures, but interestingly this theory allows us to call up our own pasts. Think on that one for a few days or weeks.
i agree that everything is made of energy and that everything effects everything else, can u clarify what mean by energy affects itself? as far as the energy of you from 50 years in the future affecting you now, well if you take the point of view of the probabilities there would be so many possible probabilities 50 years from now i would guess that their influences would cancel each other out unless there was a massive amount of similarities in the majority of them.
Quote:
"the difference between people with multiple personality disorder and the rest of the world is that the rest of the worlds multiple personalities are aware of each other." - I would say it's the other way round.
maybe i didnt phrase that to well, ppl with multiple personality disorder have multiple personalities that are unaware of what actions the others have taken. the rest of us have a continous memory of events, when u do something and later thing i dont know what i was thinking, or i wasnt myself thats just a sub personality that doesnt get a run in the conscious mind to often.
Quote:
We can never know what there was before the big bang
thats a pretty big call kinda like saying man will never walk on the moon, or my favourite "No one will ever need more than 640k of memory"-Bill Gates,1985
Quote:
don't rely on popular science - go research academic science.
most researchers devote their entire lives to understanding a particular field as much as i would like to there is far to many different fields to be able to research them all indepth
Quote:
Why we're designed to grow? Because of evolution. We're where we're at because it suits us best in many ways, and we're flaws because they don't exert enough negative evolutionary pressure for us to have bred them out. If you want to think of this in a spiritual context I once again refer you to Conversations with God Book 1.
ok but where did evolution come from? i find it difficult to believe that it just accidentally happen as its a very well designed mechanism that is able to pass on useful information from one generation to the next such that each generation becomes better.
Quote:
Conclusion: It's very comforting to believe in a soul, a god and a greater meaning. But I think this thinking is merely a comfort blanket for a paranoid, insecure species deadly afraid of it's own mortality.
i agree
Quote:
We are a happy accident, there is no soul
thats quite a big claim, but accidents require actions and actions require conscious entitys so something had to create us and design this universe that we live in. If there was no conscious entities or whatever u want to call it i could accept that if there was nothing, no space no matter no nothing
Quote:
We as people, a species, a planet and solar system are a small, inconsequential part of the grand play. To place ourselves and our miniscule actions in a position of importance is to once again display that superiority complex, which is ultimately a product of our insecurities.
i agree that we make up a tiny part of a tiny part of a. ..... but i disagree that we are inconsequential, take the atoms in our body we have lots and lots of em, but if one of the neutrons in an atom was to become detacted that would greatly affect the stability of the atom --> affect the function of the molecule---> affect the function of whatever structure it was in and so on and would set in affect a chain reaction, the result of this might not be major but then again it might be. I guess this is at the heart of where our opinions differ i believe that everything is interconnected and affects everything else (even if its not in a profound way its still an effect)
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourself, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous and talented? Who are you NOT to be?
member
340 posts
Location: Australia
340 posts
Location: Australia
Posted:
Full respect for the passion you guys have when in comes to intellectually exploring what reality truly is.
I was quite taken by the title of this thread, "one day spirituality and science got it on". My older brother was once told by an entity not of this planet that he would be part of a group of scientists that would discover what consciousness/spirit/lifeforce/god really is and present undeniable evidence of it. Why this thread caught my eye was because one of the things that they said to him was that these discoveries would bring science and spirituality together. My brother is a geneticist (sp).
Absolute respect to anyone that has the passion AND the courage to EXPERIENCE what reality truly is.
Full respect for the passion you guys have when in comes to intellectually exploring what reality truly is.
I was quite taken by the title of this thread, "one day spirituality and science got it on". My older brother was once told by an entity not of this planet that he would be part of a group of scientists that would discover what consciousness/spirit/lifeforce/god really is and present undeniable evidence of it. Why this thread caught my eye was because one of the things that they said to him was that these discoveries would bring science and spirituality together. My brother is a geneticist (sp).
Absolute respect to anyone that has the passion AND the courage to EXPERIENCE what reality truly is.
HOW TO FLY 101:
step 1. Throw your self at the ground.
step 2. Miss.
False Eyelash
346 posts
Location: New York City
346 posts
Location: New York City
Posted:
Damn child. What a thread. I'm trying to take it all in... I'm also trying to recover (still) from seeing Janet's breast during the half-time show - the "wardrobe malfunction" as Justin Timberlake called it. Hilarious.
Seriously though there's an awful lot here. And it sounds like you're talking a lot about awareness - samsara/nirvana - and karma. I have a pretty involved spiritual practice (both meditation and yoga) which I hesitate to talk about because people often think I'm even more of a freak. So, first of all, it's so nice to know there are other freaky types around. Yay.
I didn't fully understand the pyramid thing. But I do know that concepts like "time" and "death" start to take on a different meaning as you get into meditation - sounds like you know that already. What I am learning is that everything around us is reality. But there's plenty more that we're not aware of. Much like the eyeball filtering light example. And you can train yourself - or broaden your awareness, to include things that aren't immediately obvious.
Death...this part confused me also. There is no death. Everything is consciousness. Everything is everything. If you don't broaden your awareness then you continue to be reborn into the same level of existance, to live the same life (more or less) and go around the circle again. That is samsara - the circle we go around and around because we don't have the awareness to advance.
Pivot points sound like karma. Positive energy brings positive things - I think this was the example you used. And it's true. You can control what you bring in largely by what you put out. Then why do bad things happen to good people? I'll save that for the next installment - this is getting long and I have work to do.
Thanks for a great post. Lots to think about.
Damn child. What a thread. I'm trying to take it all in... I'm also trying to recover (still) from seeing Janet's breast during the half-time show - the "wardrobe malfunction" as Justin Timberlake called it.
Hilarious.Seriously though there's an awful lot here. And it sounds like you're talking a lot about awareness - samsara/nirvana - and karma. I have a pretty involved spiritual practice (both meditation and yoga) which I hesitate to talk about because people often think I'm even more of a freak. So, first of all, it's so nice to know there are other freaky types around. Yay.
I didn't fully understand the pyramid thing. But I do know that concepts like "time" and "death" start to take on a different meaning as you get into meditation - sounds like you know that already. What I am learning is that everything around us is reality. But there's plenty more that we're not aware of. Much like the eyeball filtering light example. And you can train yourself - or broaden your awareness, to include things that aren't immediately obvious.
Death...this part confused me also. There is no death. Everything is consciousness. Everything is everything. If you don't broaden your awareness then you continue to be reborn into the same level of existance, to live the same life (more or less) and go around the circle again. That is samsara - the circle we go around and around because we don't have the awareness to advance.
Pivot points sound like karma. Positive energy brings positive things - I think this was the example you used. And it's true. You can control what you bring in largely by what you put out. Then why do bad things happen to good people? I'll save that for the next installment - this is getting long and I have work to do.
Thanks for a great post. Lots to think about.
All the freaky people make the beauty of the world.
Pooh-Bah
2,364 posts
Location: austin,tx
2,364 posts
Location: austin,tx
Posted:
well you knew it was going to happen... yes, a link to my philosophy thread cause we eventually talk about some similar things (and vanize even makes a much appreciated rock star appearance)
there's some REALLY fascinating, educational links on this thread, to help gat rid of those pop physics notions, and though i don't have a degree i went to college for 9 years
, studying astrophysics, molecular biology, evolution, psychology, and art, that ought to count for some kind of qualification... 
[Old link]
well you knew it was going to happen... yes, a link to my philosophy thread cause we eventually talk about some similar things (and vanize even makes a much appreciated rock star appearance)
there's some REALLY fascinating, educational links on this thread, to help gat rid of those pop physics notions, and though i don't have a degree i went to college for 9 years
, studying astrophysics, molecular biology, evolution, psychology, and art, that ought to count for some kind of qualification... [Old link]
-Such a price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing
-Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
-When the center of the storm does not move, you are in its path.
GOLD Member
addict
674 posts
Location: Ohio, USA
addict
674 posts
Location: Ohio, USA
Posted:
I'm going to venture into a little of this before I read too far...
You might enjoy Carlos Casteneda. Don Juan had this concept called "controlled folly"... which I interpret and use in my current philosophy work to explain the deterministic nature of my view of the universe. I see as the most plausable (for me) answer to the question of free will is that we have none. Every choice we've ever made are making or will make is already set in time, and will happen as it needs to. This completely rules out time travel of course... like a video tape, you can rewind and fast forward but changing it is out of the question, and once you got there you'd have no idea you had time traveled.
Divergance: For that matter how do you know we don't live out this life over and over in memory when you die? Hmmm, anyway...
Now here's where the controlled folly comes in. To live your life like nothing you chose to do is your "free will" may seem pretty pesimistic to some (Fate can be cruel, but also wonderful), you MUST live your life as if you didn't know that anyway. Controlled Folly is doing something pointless, knowing that it is pointless, but doing it anyway for the benefit derived. Yeah, I like that idea.
Basically I look at it like this: Time is like this crystal ball I'm holding. As I move from one end to the other (Picture a plane, the geometrical kind, not the winged ones, moving through it) time progresses, but nothing is changed, I am only observing. It's the only way I can see God existing (as outside of time), as this outside observor who CAN see all of time because it is all cercumspect to him.
Of course theres the God arguments.... but I won't get into that. Just go read some Augustine, Abelard, Anslow, and Aquinas if your into that sort of stuff... they do a pretty good job of it when they aren't copping out with the old "impious to ask such questions" argument. (Thats a really funny one... What was God doing before he created the universe? Devising the methods to punish the people who asked that question). Note, however, that most of these deal with the mere existence of someTHING similar to the concept of God. When you start getting into all the POWERS or whatever that thing is supposed to have things get real fuzzy real quick, and its all speculation and sillyness... really best to skip that stuff and just say "Yep, theres something out there" at that point.
As for the quantum physics stuff, well it is an interesting idea, yep. All those infinite universes out there co-existing. Might want to gander at Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument regarding actual vs. approaching infinities first though... and the arguments against him for it. Once you start talking infinities all kinds of weird little nuances pop up. Specifically, look up the afterlife arguments against the Kalam Argument... makes some interesting points about God.
And now on to my final view... it's not about the beginning or the end, but the journey. I know, your spewing out "Cop out!" right now, and ya know, maybe it is, but I enjoy it far more than arguing vehemoutly about such things that we will never experience and that only exist in obscure physics models and logical argumentation. The fact of the matter is, Life is Good, and thats all that I care. There's this old saying about so called White Tower Acedemics. Basically people who collect and hoarde knowledge and yet have no pragmatic use or application of it. The argument being, even if you knew what the beginning and the end were, what would you do then? Probably just say "Ahh.." and go back to living your life, assuming of course that your head doesn't explode. There is no pragmatic use for such knowledge, except to have the satisfaction of being Right, and we all know how much greif and missery that causes.
The Path my man, the Path!!! Such questions are good to discuss, but without merrit of pragmatics in the end. You know what a better question is?: Why don't I have a date on a Friday night? Ha!
I'm going to venture into a little of this before I read too far...
You might enjoy Carlos Casteneda. Don Juan had this concept called "controlled folly"... which I interpret and use in my current philosophy work to explain the deterministic nature of my view of the universe. I see as the most plausable (for me) answer to the question of free will is that we have none. Every choice we've ever made are making or will make is already set in time, and will happen as it needs to. This completely rules out time travel of course... like a video tape, you can rewind and fast forward but changing it is out of the question, and once you got there you'd have no idea you had time traveled.
Divergance: For that matter how do you know we don't live out this life over and over in memory when you die? Hmmm, anyway...
Now here's where the controlled folly comes in. To live your life like nothing you chose to do is your "free will" may seem pretty pesimistic to some (Fate can be cruel, but also wonderful), you MUST live your life as if you didn't know that anyway. Controlled Folly is doing something pointless, knowing that it is pointless, but doing it anyway for the benefit derived. Yeah, I like that idea.
Basically I look at it like this: Time is like this crystal ball I'm holding. As I move from one end to the other (Picture a plane, the geometrical kind, not the winged ones, moving through it) time progresses, but nothing is changed, I am only observing. It's the only way I can see God existing (as outside of time), as this outside observor who CAN see all of time because it is all cercumspect to him.
Of course theres the God arguments.... but I won't get into that. Just go read some Augustine, Abelard, Anslow, and Aquinas if your into that sort of stuff... they do a pretty good job of it when they aren't copping out with the old "impious to ask such questions" argument. (Thats a really funny one... What was God doing before he created the universe? Devising the methods to punish the people who asked that question). Note, however, that most of these deal with the mere existence of someTHING similar to the concept of God. When you start getting into all the POWERS or whatever that thing is supposed to have things get real fuzzy real quick, and its all speculation and sillyness... really best to skip that stuff and just say "Yep, theres something out there" at that point.
As for the quantum physics stuff, well it is an interesting idea, yep. All those infinite universes out there co-existing. Might want to gander at Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument regarding actual vs. approaching infinities first though... and the arguments against him for it. Once you start talking infinities all kinds of weird little nuances pop up. Specifically, look up the afterlife arguments against the Kalam Argument... makes some interesting points about God.
And now on to my final view... it's not about the beginning or the end, but the journey. I know, your spewing out "Cop out!" right now, and ya know, maybe it is, but I enjoy it far more than arguing vehemoutly about such things that we will never experience and that only exist in obscure physics models and logical argumentation. The fact of the matter is, Life is Good, and thats all that I care. There's this old saying about so called White Tower Acedemics. Basically people who collect and hoarde knowledge and yet have no pragmatic use or application of it. The argument being, even if you knew what the beginning and the end were, what would you do then? Probably just say "Ahh.." and go back to living your life, assuming of course that your head doesn't explode.
There is no pragmatic use for such knowledge, except to have the satisfaction of being Right, and we all know how much greif and missery that causes.The Path my man, the Path!!! Such questions are good to discuss, but without merrit of pragmatics in the end. You know what a better question is?: Why don't I have a date on a Friday night? Ha!
SILVER Member
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Posted:
well, I can tell you from personal experience what the 'white light at the end of the tunnel' is - I've seen it twice. It is your last bit of conciousness - the last of your vision being processed by your brain before it shuts down its visual center in order to try and preserve other more essential functions for just a little longer.
Both times (once from blood loss and once from near drowning) I actually watched my full field of vision collapse into a narrow field and begin to receed, the end result being a bit like looking through a wide angle lense at the end of a tube with everything badly overexposed. If you concentrate really hard on it as you are going under, you can still make out larger details and even act on them (which is how I saved myself both times). If you still have things to do to save yourself and want to live, do go towards the light, use all your effort to keep it from getting any further. Make your brain keep a little power supplied to your (now very warped) vision. The dark that has encroached upon the majority of your awareness is velvety soft and very seductive - harder to much resist than intense drowsyness in a dull class after a big lunch in a warm, dark lecture hall. The white light is harsh and uncomfortable to contemplate, and only sheer force of will can bring it back to you. Also, people talking to you and trying to get you to interact with them will help too, at least in bursts.
Ok, I've gone off topic. I was meaning to reply more to the core of this thread, but it'll have to wait longer....
well, I can tell you from personal experience what the 'white light at the end of the tunnel' is - I've seen it twice. It is your last bit of conciousness - the last of your vision being processed by your brain before it shuts down its visual center in order to try and preserve other more essential functions for just a little longer.
Both times (once from blood loss and once from near drowning) I actually watched my full field of vision collapse into a narrow field and begin to receed, the end result being a bit like looking through a wide angle lense at the end of a tube with everything badly overexposed. If you concentrate really hard on it as you are going under, you can still make out larger details and even act on them (which is how I saved myself both times). If you still have things to do to save yourself and want to live, do go towards the light, use all your effort to keep it from getting any further. Make your brain keep a little power supplied to your (now very warped) vision. The dark that has encroached upon the majority of your awareness is velvety soft and very seductive - harder to much resist than intense drowsyness in a dull class after a big lunch in a warm, dark lecture hall. The white light is harsh and uncomfortable to contemplate, and only sheer force of will can bring it back to you. Also, people talking to you and trying to get you to interact with them will help too, at least in bursts.
Ok, I've gone off topic. I was meaning to reply more to the core of this thread, but it'll have to wait longer....
-v-
Wiederstand ist Zwecklos!
veteran
1,376 posts
Location: London, UK
1,376 posts
Location: London, UK
Posted:
Re: Memory. So far there's no firm evidence that memory is a quantum process at all... calculations done have indicated that the physical scales that the smallest parts of the brain (microtubules) operate at are too large and too slow for them to be affected by quantum effects. Of course this isn't the last word on the subject, but as of now it's definitely nothing more than a theory.
Re: Observers in quantum mechanics. A lot of people without a good knowledge of science pick up on the idea that there's a special role for a conscious observer in QM. This comes from the "standard" explaination of QM, called the Copenhagen Interpretation. However it is just that, an interpretation, and there are plenty of other interpretations out there that don't require a special role for the observer - the many-worlds theory, pilot waves and the transaction interpretation being three. Each of these explains QM in a different way, each is consistent with all experiments. So chances are the role of the observer isn't anything special.
Re: No time. The nature of time is something we don't understand fully now, but the fact that there's an arrow of time does seem to indicate that it's not the same as just another dimension. However there are theories out there which may provide new insights into it, I suggest reading The End of Time by Julian Barbour
https://homepage.ntlworld.com/anthony.campbell1/bookreviews/r/barbour.html
Re: Time travel. It depends whether we live in a universe in which closed timelike curves are possible. We probably don't as there seems to be all kinds of reasons why having them would break a lot of physics, but we still have an incomplete understanding of these things...
Re: Memory. So far there's no firm evidence that memory is a quantum process at all... calculations done have indicated that the physical scales that the smallest parts of the brain (microtubules) operate at are too large and too slow for them to be affected by quantum effects. Of course this isn't the last word on the subject, but as of now it's definitely nothing more than a theory.
Re: Observers in quantum mechanics. A lot of people without a good knowledge of science pick up on the idea that there's a special role for a conscious observer in QM. This comes from the "standard" explaination of QM, called the Copenhagen Interpretation. However it is just that, an interpretation, and there are plenty of other interpretations out there that don't require a special role for the observer - the many-worlds theory, pilot waves and the transaction interpretation being three. Each of these explains QM in a different way, each is consistent with all experiments. So chances are the role of the observer isn't anything special.
Re: No time. The nature of time is something we don't understand fully now, but the fact that there's an arrow of time does seem to indicate that it's not the same as just another dimension. However there are theories out there which may provide new insights into it, I suggest reading The End of Time by Julian Barbour
https://homepage.ntlworld.com/anthony.campbell1/bookreviews/r/barbour.html
Re: Time travel. It depends whether we live in a universe in which closed timelike curves are possible. We probably don't as there seems to be all kinds of reasons why having them would break a lot of physics, but we still have an incomplete understanding of these things...
"Moo," said the happy cow.
veteran
1,376 posts
Location: London, UK
1,376 posts
Location: London, UK
Posted:
Evolution comes from the principle of natural selection i.e. that things that are better are more likely to survive. It seems to me to be a fairly fundamental and obvious thing, but I'm constantly amazed at how it has given rise to the diversity we see today.
Quote:
ok but where did evolution come from? i find it difficult to believe that it just accidentally happen as its a very well designed mechanism that is able to pass on useful information from one generation to the next such that each generation becomes better.
Evolution comes from the principle of natural selection i.e. that things that are better are more likely to survive. It seems to me to be a fairly fundamental and obvious thing, but I'm constantly amazed at how it has given rise to the diversity we see today.
"Moo," said the happy cow.
HOP Lord of the Pirate Admiralty
1,079 posts
Location: Canterbury, UK
1,079 posts
Location: Canterbury, UK
Posted:
just watch donnie darko
then visit www.donniedarko.com
all will be revealed
just watch donnie darko
then visit www.donniedarko.com
all will be revealed
D.B.
X x X x X
Ship off the starboard! sound general quarters! noise and light discipline! man the cannons! GET ME THE RUM!
Master of the Free Hug Program
SILVER Member
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Posted:
Actually there was a really interesting report about a year ago (unfortunately I don't remember the reference and am not going to take the time to look it up) that did a study on these microfiliments that exist inside brain cells. They found not only that these microfiliments vibrate in certain quantum mechanical modes (analogous to brownian motion), but that the vibration modes actually changed when different memories were accessed. The hypothesis was that basically memories were thus stored as these different vibration modes. Of course that is only a guess based off of what they were looking at. But, if that were the case, then memory would certainly be subject to degredation over time due to the processes I discussed above.
What they really need to do (well it would be interesting anyway - I don't suppose the NEED to do it) with the experiment is go back after a length of time and see if the same memories tested before reproduce the same mode after the time gap, or a different one.
But I totally agree there is no firm evidence as to what memory is at all. these quantum vibrational modes could just be something that happens to be a by product of memory recollection for that matter.
Actually there was a really interesting report about a year ago (unfortunately I don't remember the reference and am not going to take the time to look it up) that did a study on these microfiliments that exist inside brain cells. They found not only that these microfiliments vibrate in certain quantum mechanical modes (analogous to brownian motion), but that the vibration modes actually changed when different memories were accessed. The hypothesis was that basically memories were thus stored as these different vibration modes. Of course that is only a guess based off of what they were looking at. But, if that were the case, then memory would certainly be subject to degredation over time due to the processes I discussed above.
What they really need to do (well it would be interesting anyway - I don't suppose the NEED to do it) with the experiment is go back after a length of time and see if the same memories tested before reproduce the same mode after the time gap, or a different one.
But I totally agree there is no firm evidence as to what memory is at all. these quantum vibrational modes could just be something that happens to be a by product of memory recollection for that matter.
-v-
Wiederstand ist Zwecklos!
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