Very interesting way to look at systems.
The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...
- Thread starter Will The Serious
- Start date
Very interesting way to look at systems.
I hope this can fit in here but the idea of life after death..
I've had friends and family that have passed on in the last several years and often I wonder about them, what has happened to them and if they are around if they can see us or know what we're up to, yet they can't reach us or talk to us because they are separated by another universe or whatever.
I've had friends and family that have passed on in the last several years and often I wonder about them, what has happened to them and if they are around if they can see us or know what we're up to, yet they can't reach us or talk to us because they are separated by another universe or whatever.
Eternal life sounds simultaneously terrifying and tediously boring to me. The human brain can store only a finite amount of information. It would be like being trapped in Groundhog Day. The thought of playing shuffleboard or video games or singing Hosanna around His Throne forever more is perhaps not preferable to blissful extinction in a timeless state.
I appreciate your post.
Forever singing sounds like hell..
Part of me likes to think that we do continue in some form, but there's walls between the realms that prevent us meeting those that are passed. But also they can see us sometimes and what we're up to
Sounds like voyeurism or stalking.
I wouldn't call it that. I was thinking along the lines of just checking on loved ones.
Sounds extremely creepy. At least it's not controlling - except that you have no knowledge of when you might be being observed.
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Why not. I consider the definition of the Universe to be 'everything'. That would include the realm of the afterlife.
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If this is the afterlife, and our death here takes us back into a rebirth, then there is no voyeuristic checking up on lost loved ones. How would we ever know the difference?
On the other hand, if when we die there is nothing but oblivion, the universe not only no longer exists, but it never existed.
Considering that I am here composing these words, existence is, along with the universe within which existence occurs, is possible. Without it, consciousness has only one terrifying path... rinse and repeat. We have all time and possibilities in which to re-imerge over and over and over again. Waiting in nothingness can only last an incomprehensible instant. We would never know its passing no matter how long it took.
There are plenty of stories about past lives. Pythagoras was said to remember all of his past lives. It is easy enough to discount them as scientifically unsound, and just as easy to consider the idea as realistic based on the sheer number of corroborating tales.
I am of the one consciousness camp, The Universe is conscious and I am that consciousness. Therefore, when I die I will be instantly reborn as the universe ends and re-imerges untold eons/instantaneously later.
-Will
imagine if we can time travel to the past but where nobody can see you and hear you
So what would that imply, that there could be zero effects from you being there?
That was one of the concepts explored in DEVS.
Myself, I err on the side of the ultrafinitists:
Our reality appears to be fundamentally bounded - the number of possible quantum states within a given volume is finite according to largely accepted theory - but is it the only reality? Is there a countable infinity, an uncountable infinity or a finite number of bounded realities? Are all other realities - if any exist - necessarily bounded?
Consider the network of our brains as a bounded mathematical model. If we were to discover that our experiences and our memories are patterns across the connected synaptic pathways in our brains. Each unique experience, and memory of that experience was a unique set of synaptic paths across our neural matrix. How would we define the bounds of unique paths? Might there be an infinite number of unique experiences to be had, yet most, if not all of these experiences may share very similar elements to many other experiences.
That is to say, when the memory of an experience plays across our brains, not every link or combination of links in the path need be unique, only the overall path. Some experiences may, out of the trillions of synaptic connections, only require a few thousand synaptic firings, while others may travel those same pathways with the addition of a few more synapses, our a few more, or a few trillion more. When you can add a new memory by stimulating many of the same nodes as a previous memory plus expanding and lengthening the path to include more nodes. Then where is the limit to a matrix of trillions of connections? Obviously it is finite, but could it also be uncountable?
This may be the same with a bounded universe, still effectively infinite.
-Will
I don't know the answer, but I suspect that even if we were to use mathematics rather than language, the result would depend on which axioms were chosen. Both are merely symbol processing and fundamentally limited. Unfortunately, I know of no better alternative. We're exploring a tiny region of the library of Babel and we don't know how big the pages need to be. We might use AI to help search it, but there are doubtless many more misleading pages than enlightening ones.
libraryofbabel.info
Library of Babel
A project towards a universal library. By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters.
libraryofbabel.info
Language has the added weakness of interpretation. Even math is subject to variations of interpretation. Statistics is a prime example. There are plenty of people, good at math, who arrive at their answers without actually understanding, or even attempting to understand, how the equations actually describe what the math is modeling.
I may know perfectly and precisely what I am saying, chosen all the most accurate words in the perfect order to express them, and there may be one out of ten who misinterpret my meaning. If that one person is in a position of influence, my words could be rendered useless. I can do the calculations in all the math of Einstein's General Relativity, but I have no idea why those formulas look the way they do. I can not know that they prove anything except consistency with observations.
Still, with the possibility of that many false impressions of an expressed idea, there may be an advantage. What if an idea, completely incorrect in its understanding of reality, was perfectly and accurately expressed. So the many who interpret that idea accurately are now coupled with all those possible people who misunderstand, and thus continue searching for their answers. Maybe we need the ambiguity that language gives us to keep us from becoming complacent in our quest for understanding.
-Will
I may know perfectly and precisely what I am saying, chosen all the most accurate words in the perfect order to express them, and there may be one out of ten who misinterpret my meaning. If that one person is in a position of influence, my words could be rendered useless. I can do the calculations in all the math of Einstein's General Relativity, but I have no idea why those formulas look the way they do. I can not know that they prove anything except consistency with observations.
Still, with the possibility of that many false impressions of an expressed idea, there may be an advantage. What if an idea, completely incorrect in its understanding of reality, was perfectly and accurately expressed. So the many who interpret that idea accurately are now coupled with all those possible people who misunderstand, and thus continue searching for their answers. Maybe we need the ambiguity that language gives us to keep us from becoming complacent in our quest for understanding.
-Will
Rather than attempting to phrase hypotheses why things are the way that they are, should we instead try attempting to frame hypotheses why they are not otherwise? If there were nothing, nothing could be observed. We might well be merely one of a plenitude of unavoidable deviations from zero. Whether each possible conscious state is an instantiation of such fluctuation is perhaps unknowable. Might it be that there can only be something if there is the perception that the state changed when, in fact, all possible states exist timelessly with stateful recording of the effective parent state? Perception of the change would be an illusion. As each perceptual frame of reference is independent and not relative, there is no problem with Lorentz invariance given such atomicity.
This would work with falsifiability, and mathematical induction proofs. There may very well be somethings that can only be proven by proving that nothing else can be.
The word 'nothing' is interesting in its linguistic behavior in that it may mean there is nothing to observe, or it is Nothing that is observed. There is a certain delightful ambiguousness around it.
-Will
What might happen if the Sun went off for 24 hours then came back on as if nothing had happened?
Let me Google that for you...
Perhaps you could start a separate thread asking such questions.
Well, when I saw the latest full eclipse, I was amazed that in the few minutes the Sun was blocked, just how quickly the air cooled down. The temperature must have dropped four Celsius degrees. It just showed how much of the warmth we feel is direct radiant heat from the Sun.
-Will
-Will
The solar constant or amount of incident solar electromagnetic radiation at the distance of the Earth from the Sun (1 AU) is approximately 1,366 watts per square meter (W/m²). The effective radiation intercepted by an arbitrary surface, of course, depends on the angle of the surface with respect to the incident radiation and whether there's an atmosphere or indeed an entire planet in the way. If the source of incident radiation is removed, the surface will eventually cool to a minimum of 2.7 K, which is the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, but the Earth possesses its own radiogenic and primordial heat (together representing about 0.03% of that received from the Sun) and it would take a long time for the current heat energy to radiate away. One estimate has it that within a year, the top layer of the oceans would freeze over, but the ice would insulate the deep water below and prevent the oceans from freezing solid for hundreds of thousands of years, even after the air liquefied. I don't feel inspired to estimate the time scale for myself. If I were a Physics lecturer at university, I might set it as a Fermi problem for undergraduates to tackle.
