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

  • Thread starter Will The Serious
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Asbo Zaprudder said:
Individual consciousnesses could well be illusory - fragments of a larger whole that are stitched together by correlation between states.
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That's very similar to where I'm at. There's only one consciousness. It is yours. Everyone else is just an illusion. You are the universal mind who has not yet learned to know itself.

It is both a metaphysical and an epistemological phenomenon. You see others who appear to be like you, but you can only know your own mind. It is the only one, just like you can't know anything exists in reality beyond your experience in this moment. But, which moment is the only moment, this one, or the one that looks back upon this one?

-Will
 
Will The Serious said:
That's very similar to where I'm at. There's only one consciousness. It is yours. Everyone else is just an illusion. You are the universal mind who has not yet learned to know itself.

It is both a metaphysical and an epistemological phenomenon. You see others who appear to be like you, but you can only know your own mind. It is the only one, just like you can't know anything exists in reality beyond your experience in this moment. But, which moment is the only moment, this one, or the one that looks back upon this one?

-Will
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My view is less solipsistic - there is no I and there is no you - only the illusion. The illusions are all separate timeless states of consciousness, so if one must insist on the states being identified with an entity, there is exactly one and it experiences everything that is possible to experience simultaneously.

The analogy in physics would be the Wheeler DeWitt equation description of the universal wave function, although that is intended to describe physical reality and not mind. The latter is perhaps like the concept of a quantum Boltzmann Brain whose states exist in a kind of Hibert or Foch space. All possible conscious states of possible entities that might identify as selves exist within it.

However, it might well be finite and subject to informational limits as we deduce for our perceived reality. That could be the reason why error free transition between states is not observed and seemingly supernatural events are reported.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
My view is less solipsistic - there is no I and there is no you - only the illusion. The illusions are all separate timeless states of consciousness, so if one must insist on the states being identified with an entity, there is exactly one and it experiences everything that is possible to experience simultaneously.

The analogy in physics would be the Wheeler DeWitt equation description of the universal wave function, although that is intended to describe physical reality and not mind. The latter is perhaps like the concept of a quantum Boltzmann Brain whose states exist in a kind of Hibert or Foch space. All possible conscious states of possible entities that might identify as selves exist within it.

However, it might well be finite and subject to informational limits as we deduce for our perceived reality. That could be the reason why error free transition between states is not observed and seemingly supernatural events are reported.
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So you are the only poster on this board? :D
 
Candleicious Ghost said:
So you are the only poster on this board? :D
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Please learn to interpret what I typed. How many words did you have to look up or did you even bother?

ETA: In the words of Pink Floyd's Echoes: "I am you and what I see is me." except neither of us really exists. Obviously, it seems not all states of consciousness are equal.

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Asbo Zaprudder said:
Please learn to interpret what I typed. How many words did you have to look up or did you even bother?

ETA: In the words of Pink Floyd's Echoes: "I am you and what I see is me." except neither of us really exists. Obviously, it seems not all states of consciousness are equal.

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T'was a bit of humour old bean
 
Candleicious Ghost said:
T'was a bit of humour old bean.
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Although you were describing @Will The Serious 's thesis, which is a form of solipsism. Perhaps mine is more similar to Bishop Berkeley's view from the 18th century. In the 17th century, René Descartes proposed ontological dualism, which accepted the existence of a material world (res extensa) as well as immaterial minds (res cogitans), including God's. Berkeley denied the existence of matter, but accepted the existence of minds, including God's. My thesis is that there is a timeless quantum realm that describes all possible states of all possible minds within the limits of what it can encompass. Perhaps one might call that God - a passing state just suggested that and if another state encodes awareness of that suggestion being made, it is correlated and an instantiation of a mind has awareness of it.

“I refute him thus!”: Misunderstanding Berkeley – Irish Philosophy

www.irishphilosophy.com www.irishphilosophy.com
 
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Candleicious Ghost said:
What about 7 billion people on Earth but actually they're all one
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Earth does not exist except as a projection of perception. Only the perception of it and all possible worlds that can be encompassed by the encoded mental states exist. What an "individual" experience as consciousness in time is one possible thread through correlated states. More metaphysics than physics, to be sure, but physics would also be illusory. As stated in Physics from Fisher Information: A Unification: "By this theory, the observer becomes both a collector of data and an activator of the physical phenomenon that gives rise to the data. These ideas have probably been best stated by J. A. Wheeler (1990), (1994)."

The description on Amazon:
This book defines and develops a unifying principle of physics, that of 'extreme physical information'. The information in question is, perhaps surprisingly, not Shannon or Boltzmann entropy but, rather, Fisher information, a simple concept little known to physicists. Both statistical and physical properties of Fisher information are developed. This information is shown to be a physical measure of disorder, sharing with entropy the property of monotonic change with time. The information concept is applied 'phenomenally' to derive most known physics, from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to quantum mechanics, the Einstein field equations, and quantum gravity. Many new physical relations and concepts are developed, including new definitions of disorder, time and temperature. The information principle is based upon a new theory of measurement, one which incorporates the observer into the phenomenon that he/she observes. The 'request' for data creates the law that, ultimately, gives rise to the data. The observer creates his or her local reality.
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Asbo Zaprudder said:
there is exactly one and it experiences everything that is possible to experience simultaneously.
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I would not use the word "experience" since for this state of existence, there is only mind and anything that could be described by experiences are actually perception. The Mind, the only mind, perceives its thought in the moment, not over time. But does it experience those thoughts? This is an epistemological argument. Since we can't truly know the phenomenalogical nature of what our sense tell us, we can't even know our senses, only the perception they feed us, thus, the only thing that exists is this one moment of perception that we exist in this world.

Candleicious Ghost said:
What about 7 billion people on Earth but actually they're all one
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There are no 7 billion people, there is only the perception of the information about 7 billion people. One can't even know the person in front of them is real, let alone 7 billion people you can't possibly meet.

Solipsism takes the position, the one mind is my mind, and yes, that is my position, everything, EVERYTHING exists because I exist, but I also take the position that I am not important. I'm not the Red King snoring away at the base of a tree dreaming Alice. I'm dreaming myself and all those experiences. I am nothing more than a "crystalline thought in the minds of God," but so is God, and there is only one thought.

I, just last night, learned about Baruch Spinoza. He argued that God and Nature are one and the same, and that man, as part of Nature, are also one in the same with God. This is the one mind view, as well.

His views on Ethics (I have to read up more about him) appear to dismiss the idea of Good and Evil and lean towards harmony and artificial constructs based on position, or perspective.

The metaphysics of the Universe consist of substance and mode. There is only one substance. It is from and of itself. There are an infinite number of modes that cause the substance to appear divided. Modes, need substance to exist. They are attributes or relationships that don't exist on their own.

This is like matter and energy. Matter appears to exist from and of itself, but energy is a consequence of matter and its relationship to matter. It seems Baruch Spinoza also argued that since there was no power that could prevent God from existing, God (The entire Universe) must exist.

Spinoza was excommucated from the Danish Jewish church for his ideas.

-Will
 
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LOL, I think NDT might have a point about Parsecs.
 
Kamen Rider Blade said:
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LOL, I think NDT might have a point about Parsecs.
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Without watching the video, having trained in astronomy, is it because it sounds like a measurement of time (seemingly confusing George Lucas, but not Gene Roddenberry), because it's based on the size of the radius of the Earth's orbit rather than its diameter, or because it's so close to a light year (1 parsec = 3.262 light years) that it's an unnecessary complication?

...watches video...

Seems it's all three. He has a point. The parsec is annoyingly used in measurements of the Hubble constant, which is roughly 70 km/s per megaparsec, whose units are really 1/time, although I'd settle for 21 km/s per mega light year.

I prefer radians to degrees, arcminutes and arcseconds, and steradians to square degrees. However, very few people seem to have heard of arcminutes and arcseconds, never mind radians and steradians.

And I'm British and we used to have a weirdly complicated system of measurement units (and money) that some (old) people still prefer over the metric system (and decimal currency). Vive la France!
 
Will The Serious said:
I would not use the word "experience" since for this state of existence, there is only mind and anything that could be described by experiences are actually perception.
Click to expand...
Indeed.
Will The Serious said:
The Mind, the only mind, perceives its thought in the moment, not over time. But does it experience those thoughts? This is an epistemological argument. Since we can't truly know the phenomenalogical nature of what our sense tell us, we can't even know our senses, only the perception they feed us, thus, the only thing that exists is this one moment of perception that we exist in this world.


There are no 7 billion people, there is only the perception of the information about 7 billion people. One can't even know the person in front of them is real, let alone 7 billion people you can't possibly meet.

Solipsism takes the position, the one mind is my mind, and yes, that is my position, everything, EVERYTHING exists because I exist, but I also take the position that I am not important. I'm not the Red King snoring away at the base of a tree dreaming Alice. I'm dreaming myself and all those experiences. I am nothing more than a "crystalline thought in the minds of God," but so is God, and there is only one thought.

I, just last night, learned about Baruch Spinoza. He argued that God and Nature are one and the same, and that man, as part of Nature, are also one in the same with God. This is the one mind view, as well.

His views on Ethics (I have to read up more about him) appear to dismiss the idea of Good and Evil and lean towards harmony and artificial constructs based on position, or perspective.

The metaphysics of the Universe consist of substance and mode. There is only one substance. It is from and of itself. There are an infinite number of modes that cause the substance to appear divided. Modes, need substance to exist. They are attributes or relationships that don't exist on their own.

This is like matter and energy. Matter appears to exist from and of itself, but energy is a consequence of matter and its relationship to matter. It seems Baruch Spinoza also argued that since there was no power that could prevent God from existing, God (The entire Universe) must exist.

Spinoza was excommucated from the Danish Jewish church for his ideas.
Click to expand...
Yes, he seemed to espouse something akin to what Robert Heinlein popularised as "pantheistic solipsism", which even Christian theology would regard as heretical as God is meant to exist outside our realm - even though Jesus as man existed within it. It has its attractions, although it diminishes the agency of God to something akin to that of H P Lovecraft's Azathoth or Lord Dunsany's Māna-Yood-Sushāī.

I find theology very boring. I expect many find non-theological metaphysical speculation equally so - pretty much like long recounting of other people's dreams.
 
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Should we avoid discussing metaphysics as it's beyond measurement, if measurement and physics themselves are illusions - stories that are constructed from correlated states of consciousness that imperfectly nest information about each other? What states are impossible to encode in such a realm of consciousness? What falls through the cracks and can never be perceived? Do unknowable unknowns exist? Is the realm of consciousness finite (if incredibly huge) or some measure of infinity on the continuum of infinities?
 
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“Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

---

Maybe we are all in the matrix
 
Osol Twist said:
“Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

---

Maybe we are all in the matrix
Click to expand...

"There is no matter as such—mind is the matrix of all matter." - Max Planck

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Meanwhile, another Mandela effect shows up and this one is entertainingly weird:

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I remember the ad being aired in the UK. Never seen the Super Bowl.
 
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