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The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...

  • Thread starter Will The Serious
  • Start date
Another later instance involved our new puppy, an Australian Shepherd. He had run off. We live in a very sparcely populated wooded area, and we can't see our neighbors for the trees. Driving up and down the road, and calling for our dog, I came across a couple out for a walk, who live a mile closer to town then us. I stopped to ask if they had seen our dog.

As it turned out, Jackie, the woman, was a well known animal communicator. I did not know that before. She communicated psychically with animals, apparently. She said she hadn't seen our dog, but she knew he was scared (of course), and had gotten lost while playing with a neighbor's Newfoundland.

I thought it was weird and didn't think she was anything but eccentric.

We had a neighbor who kept Newfoundlands. They lived in the opposite direction from Jackie, so a mile and a half away. I figured I might as well eliminate their property from my search. They have a long driveway, well out of sight from the road, so I drove up and called my dog, "Awesome". He came racing around from the back of the house.

Explanation: Maybe there was a psychic connection, or maybe my Newfoundland owning neighbors called the neighborhood animal communicator and said, "there's a lost Australian shepherd puppy at my house, do you know who might own him?"

To which, a shrewd "psychic" might say, "Don't worry, the owners will be by to collect him very soon." Then, she went for a walk and chanced to meet said owners out looking for their dog (of course), and made a show of psychically intuiting the lost dog's location.

Charlatan or did Jackie have a psychic connection with animals? "Psionics" is much like "magic" or "god" or "dark" or "singularity", words that have a specific connotation, but in the end mean, we just don't know how that works.

-Will
 
This is one of the greatest difficulties in proving psychic abilities. There is usually another possible explanation. Whether or not a psychic has made an accurate psychic statement, there is also the possibility that the statement is the result of some unconscious, but mundane awareness of the world around us.

My own experience is that while sailing across the Atlantic with my wife, aboard my parents boat, my wife woke up one morning while berthed in Horta, the Azores, and said she had a dream about something happening to our dog back home at her parent's house. She felt strongly enough to call her parents. (This was long before cell phones, and we had to use a public pay phone go through the Portuguese operator).
Our dog had been hit by a car that morning.

-Will

I would definitely be open to consider that a rare but real psychic event.
 
I've had similar experiences, but they are entirely subjective and unrecorded. For example, I was driving at night on a back road near Saratoga and had a sudden overwhelming feeling that I needed to slow right down. I did that and immediately round the next corner, previously unseen, was a deer standing right in my lane.
 
i wonder if the average endgame style time travel theory is true

its where if you go time travel back in the time and if you change anything in the past you would suddenly create new alternate earths which would not change the present you are from

well that was according to hulk who told nebula james scott and clint when scott and james were talking about time travel and mentioned movies like terminator bill and ted back to the future hot tub time machine
 
i wonder if the average endgame style time travel theory is true

its where if you go time travel back in the time and if you change anything in the past you would suddenly create new alternate earths which would not change the present you are from

well that was according to hulk who told nebula james scott and clint when scott and james were talking about time travel and mentioned movies like terminator bill and ted back to the future hot tub time machine
That corresponds to the many worlds interpretation of time travel by David Deutsch. Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics seems to divide physicists into two camps when there's no way of falsifying it. There is also no evidence for state vector reduction. It's like a doctrinal schism.
 
Not my thinking, but interesting. As someone who is writing some fan fiction with a strong time travel element, I'm more into the idea that what you do in the past is already your past, even when it is in your future. That way, I can have fun with the tangle of connecting the threads to events a the reader has already read about. The future travel into the past explains the past event in a whole new light without conflicting with the events.

So, maybe a new universe splits at a time travel event, but where's the paradoxical fun in that?

Then there's the "butterfly" effect of time travel. You go to the past and change one insignificant event, an ant colony gets disrupted when you walk by, the disturbed ants bite a sleeping dog, the dog wakes in a foul mood and nips at a neighbor who has the dog taken to the pound, the unprotected house gets robbed, the son grows up to become a police officer instead of a video game programmer, a new MIT grad gets the job the cop would have had, and doesn't go back to school to become a teacher, instead, the programmer codes the next generation AI that is used to design SkyNet... you get the picture.

But now we've changed the past, have a new world that still doesn't offer any real interesting paradoxes. More interesting series of event to read and write about, but not as cerebral as some Wizarding kids battling a werewolf only to be rescued by some other kids who, strangely, seem to know when to show up earlier and pass some cryptic message on to our bewildered heros, finally to discover they were messaging and saving themselves with their little time travel spell that one of them had been using to study more spells.

When it all finally comes together, it's like an epiphany out of "The Sixth Sense".

-Will
 
I realize one day's notice is very short notice, so in the interest of getting everyone's cooperation in joining me for this meet up with the future, we can include a second, alternate date, in case you are not capable of getting it together, even retroactively, for the 12th of April 2026. I'll be in Washington DC for a week, so I can meet my future offspring or their time traveling proxy sometime after that. How about the 28th of April 2026
I have bungled this meeting. As it turned out, I left for DC early this morning, so I haven't been home to answer the door, in case my time traveling descendants came calling. So, let's go for the alternate date of the 28th of April, 2026. Don't bother trying to show up for today's date. If you had shown up yesterday I would have been there, and if you, time traveler from the future, want to show up yesterday, well, we didn't meet.

Either, we did meet in an alternate universe, which means I'm still here in this universe unmet by a time traveler, or the universe doesn't change the future, because I still don't have meeting you in my past.

So, that leaves two options. Either you can't do anything to affect the past, and we still have to meet at a near future date, April 28, 2026 is a good one, or you simply can't travel into the past. There is a third possibility, that I'm not worthy of your "time". But that just seems the most unlikely scenario.

You'll know before you go, if we meet, because I'll tell you, but I won't know until we do meet. Looking forward to seeing you.

Anyone else have a time traveler stop by today?

-Will
 
Has anyone heard of the Magnus Effect or the Flettner Rotor?
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while this isn't ancient technology, Gustav Magnus studied the effect of spinning ballistic objects in a fluid medium in the late 1800s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Gustav_Magnus
And
Anton flettner developed his rotor in 1920. Very little of that technology has been made use of until this millennium.

-Will
 
I've had similar experiences, but they are entirely subjective and unrecorded. For example, I was driving at night on a back road near Saratoga and had a sudden overwhelming feeling that I needed to slow right down. I did that and immediately round the next corner, previously unseen, was a deer standing right in my lane.
With me it was the death of my father.

I drove to the gate a moment before the patrol officer rounded the corner to tell me he had just passed.

Cox’s timepiece (barometer clock) Maxwell’s Demon and this…suggested by the Fourth Doctor;)

Are as close to perpetual motion possible—but they are solar powered…after a fashion.

OT
Stars at the galactic center
 
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Has anyone heard of the Magnus Effect or the Flettner Rotor?
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while this isn't ancient technology, Gustav Magnus studied the effect of spinning ballistic objects in a fluid medium in the late 1800s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Gustav_Magnus
And
Anton flettner developed his rotor in 1920. Very little of that technology has been made use of until this millennium.

-Will
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Flettner Rotors are being implemented right now on working commercial ships.

So be happy, the technology is in actual commercial use now.
 
Has anyone heard of the Magnus Effect or the Flettner Rotor?
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while this isn't ancient technology, Gustav Magnus studied the effect of spinning ballistic objects in a fluid medium in the late 1800s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Gustav_Magnus
And
Anton flettner developed his rotor in 1920. Very little of that technology has been made use of until this millennium.

-Will
I heard of them several decades ago - the Magnus effect with regard to putting spin on a ball in sports to make its path deviate and the Flettner Rotor on Tomorrow's World. What I hadn't heard of until the latest war started was the existence of cavitation torpedoes that can travel at more than 200 knots. Apparently, Iran has them.
 
The "beach toy" concept is interesting in that the spin is perpendicular to the direction of travel, and therefore, to the wind direction. Why does it not have an effect on a rifled (spinning) bullet? Or does it, and it is minimized? I assume gravity is the force that creates the pressure difference in the air. The object is "falling" through the air, and that gives the spin the directional low pressure to pull it up, against that fall. Once it begins to change direction, that pressure variation would shift again. If it is predictable, based on diameter, RPMs, velocity, we can calculate the ballistics tables for a projectile.

Does the hallow tube make a difference? Is there a directional pressure variance on the inside of the tube?

-Will
 
I've been having a conversation with ChatGPT about quantum consciousness and the possibility that fringe illusions might arise and how one might test for them.


Even though I have chosen to expose this chat in a public forum, I am doing so anonymously. It does seem such ideas are perhaps more tractable than I believed. That it might do nothing but waste someone's time to consider it seriously or even at all is, of course, a distinct possibility.

ETA: Edited to include discussion of dimensionality perceived for spacetime, why there might be three generations of particles in Standard Model, and calculations of deviations in the normalised action ΔS for various example scenarios that demonstrate the classical vs quantum boundary, quantification of the “fringe” regime where borderline effects might occur, and testable scaling (in principle) of anomaly probability decaying as e^−ΔS.
 
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That is a very in-depth conversation.
I would be curious to know how ChatGPT might apply some sort of reflexive algorithm, like the Fibonacci sequence to a model of conscious experience.

I would think it would need to be a deeper level of retro-reflection than that, even taking the whole former pattern and reinserting it with each iteration. Of course, the exponential growth would very quickly exceed any bounds that could be easily dealt with, but it would model consciousness more as a fractal and explain an autopoiesis of consciousness. a/b = (a + b)/a = Φ

Perhapse what we experience is a combination of a "chaos" of physical existence with order and physics (rules of action) imposed upon the chaos by a self-defining mind.

What I find frustrating about my conversations with LLMs is the limited memory. After three or four posts to the conversation, the LLM can't even refer backwards to previous parts of the conversation, much less remember what was said. It keeps a running file of some key concepts, mostly words or short strings of words, but it won't remember the initial question or prompt unless you specifically tell it to.

Thanks for sharing your conversion.

-Will
 
That is a very in-depth conversation.
I would be curious to know how ChatGPT might apply some sort of reflexive algorithm, like the Fibonacci sequence to a model of conscious experience.

I would think it would need to be a deeper level of retro-reflection than that, even taking the whole former pattern and reinserting it with each iteration. Of course, the exponential growth would very quickly exceed any bounds that could be easily dealt with, but it would model consciousness more as a fractal and explain an autopoiesis of consciousness. a/b = (a + b)/a = Φ

Perhapse what we experience is a combination of a "chaos" of physical existence with order and physics (rules of action) imposed upon the chaos by a self-defining mind.

What I find frustrating about my conversations with LLMs is the limited memory. After three or four posts to the conversation, the LLM can't even refer backwards to previous parts of the conversation, much less remember what was said. It keeps a running file of some key concepts, mostly words or short strings of words, but it won't remember the initial question or prompt unless you specifically tell it to.

Thanks for sharing your conversion.

-Will
I pay £7 per month and haven't had it run out of resources on me. I don't know how the Fibonacci series would apply, but you are completely at liberty to pursue that line of inquiry for yourself.

I've halted my line of inquiry now as simulating a discrete observer-state network (in an effort to test whether consistency emerges from phase cancellation weighted by information cost) would cost too much for me to consider funding.
 
i still think there are alternate earths and the multiverse lol
I'm sure there are, but it's metaphysics unless such a claim is capable of falsification. I might ask ChatGPT if there are any ways of testing such a hypothesis. What it comes up with might well be complete nonsense, but it's somewhat entertaining. *

The annoying thing is that ChatGPT doesn't report your usage nor whether you're approaching your limit.

This is what it recommends re monitoring daily usage for the Go plan:

Here’s the 10-second version—just three rules:


🧠 Go Plan Mental Cheat Sheet
1. Count loosely

  • Short message = 1
  • Long message = 3–4

2. Know your zones

  • <50 total → completely safe
  • 50–100 → normal usage
  • 100+ → getting close

3. One quick sanity check

“Have I done ~20+ long prompts or ~80+ total messages?”
  • No → you’re fine
  • Yes → slow down or expect a limit soon

That’s all you need—no detailed tracking required.

I assume OpenAI wants you to bust your limit so you sign up for a more expensive plan.

* I asked ChapGPT:


Bottom line re MWI:
  • Direct falsification: Only if quantum mechanics is found to be non-unitary.
  • Current evidence: Fully consistent with MWI (but also with alternatives).
  • Practical status: MWI is not experimentally distinguishable today, but not unfalsifiable in principle.
Bottom line re falsifying wave function collapse models:
  • Collapse models predict new physics, unlike MWI.
  • That makes them falsifiable in practice.
  • Current experiments:

    Have ruled out large portions of parameter space, but not the canonical GRW region.

    The situation is now:

    We are approaching a regime where either
    (a) collapse effects will be detected, or
    (b) the viable parameter space will shrink to the point of implausibility.
 
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I thought I'd ask ChatGPT if Popperian epistemology is itself falsifiable. The result was interesting. Of course, it isn't the only framework for the scientific method and actual science appears to sometimes adopt the trappings of religion - possibly due to human nature - but that's just my subjective observation.

Bottom line
  • Strict falsification? → No (it’s not an empirical theory)
  • Serious challenges? → Yes, from history, logic, and alternative epistemologies
  • Fatal refutation? → Not cleanly; it tends to absorb critiques
A sharper formulation
The most precise conclusion is:
Popperian epistemology is not falsifiable in its own sense, but it is criticizable, replaceable, and comparatively defeasible by rival epistemological frameworks.

 
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