If a Maxwell’s demon was ever proven practical it would basically disprove the second law of thermodynamics.
how so? the little door demon needs a power source right? otherwise it couldn’t operate the door.
How could the earth be round? People would fall off the bottom.
Consciousness being an emergent property of the universe instead of the universe being an emergent property of consciousness.
Thank you for this. I was just thinking about it and how it implies consciousness is shared or linked in some way.
We are all the same entity, just different instances, existing inside of the greater consciousness that is the universe. We have performed every great and evil act to ourselves, as we are all the same entity.
I can’t say we are the same. Not definitively. Only similar.
I dont mean that we are the same as in each human is exactly like one another.
I mean we are the same as in there is no “we”, “we” is an illusion. There is only one of us, experiencing existence through the lens of each living creature simultaneously. “We” are the universe itself. The humans, the animals, all of the matter and energy are just perturbations in our collective fabric. The current body in which you are experiencing life is just one of many appendiges.
You are yourself and you are your parents. You are the primordial cavemen. You are hitler, and you are ghandi.
All of these experiences of each life feed back into the greater consciousness.
In a way, but we are also different and our own experiences/thoughts belong to only us. As far as we know.
I have a story I want to tell where in our dreams we reconnect with the “tree of life” and this is our opportunity to split from combined consciousness or recombine with the singularity.
In this space we are searching and experiencing different realities, lifetimes, or similar lifetimes where only a single choice is made different, where time isnt exactly 1:1 and when we wake there are remnants of our experiences in these states. It will explain how death isn’t a inevibiltiy but in this search we find where we think we want to be. It’s just that it’s a vast sea and the searching never truly ends.
Makes me think about how many might chose to be a cell or more complex life.
This is a good answer. Bernardo Kastrup argues this; check out his very eloquently titled book Why Materialism is Baloney.
Kastrup is entirely unconvincing because he pretends the only two schools of philosophy in the whole universe are his specific idealism and metaphysical realism which he falsely calls the latter “materialism.” He thus never feels the need to ever address anything outside of a critique of a single Laymen understanding of materialism which is more popular in western countries than eastern countries, ignoring the actual wealth of philosophical literature.
Anyone who actually reads books on philosophy would inevitably find Kastrup to be incredibly unconvincing as he, by focusing primarily on a single school, never justifies many of his premises. He begins from the very beginning talking about “conscious experience” and whatnot when, if you’re not a metaphysical realist, that is what you are supposed to be arguing in the first place. Unless you’re already a dualist or metaphysical realist, if you are pretty much any other philosophical school like contextual realist, dialectical materialist, empiriomonist, etc, you probably already view reality as inherently observable, and thus perception is just reality from a particular point-of-view. It then becomes invalid to add qualifiers to it like “conscious experience” or “subjective experience” as reality itself cannot had qualifiers.
I mean, the whole notion of “subjective experience” goes back to Nagel who was a metaphysical realist through-and-through and wrote a whole paper defending that notion, “What is it like to be a Bat?”, and this is what Kastrup assumes his audience already agrees with from the get-go. He never addresses any of the criticisms of metaphysical realism but pretends like they don’t exist and he is the unique sole critic of it and constantly calls metaphysical realism “materialism” as if they’re the same philosophy at all. He then builds all of his arguments off of this premise.
Sometimes the Dark Matter, Dark Energy conversations reminds me of waves moving through aether
As long as we are talking esotericlly, I think of fixed points on a primordial map. Like the fabric of everything and where the aether concentrates celestial bodies emerge. Like the backside of a cross stitch where we only see the stitch work rather than the image.
edit:
I don’t know enough about black holes to speak credibly on the subject but another thought comes to mind.
Pretend there is a loading point for any fixed volume of space that when the gravity gets massive enough matter can collapse in on itself. That matter still exists but it now occupies space within matter.
I think dark matter is spot on. We’re not finding it because it isn’t a thing.
However… Relevant explanation of why people think there’s dark matter.
Dark matter IS A THING. At least there is some thing out there that interacts weakly with the elctroweak force and interacts normally with gravity. We have plenty of evidence of it EXISTING. The problem of dark matter is we don’t know what it is… But sure as hell there is something. See the Bullet cluster if you don’t believe me. And if you are a bit physics savvy, you can understand that it’s evidence is imprinted in the CMB. We just don’t know what it is.
The gravitational effect is the only prerequisite. The WIMP theory predicts weakly interacting dark matter but even primordial nucleosynthesis does not require weakly interacting, just that it be nonbaryonic. So only if WIMPs are right is it going to be weakly interacting.
Well I’m not the one to argue with you but dark matter is only a thing because our current assumptions are a thing.
If we had to change our thinking because of new knowledge of some fundamental assumption (such as the reason for red shift), it could very well do away with dark matter. I’m sure such a change of thinking will seem as ridiculous to scientists today as heliocentrism seemed to astronomers of Galileo’s day.
Yes, there may be an alternative answer. Just need to throw general relativity out of the window.
To be fair, future physics may indeed throw it away so there’s that.
It is just not one observation that the new assumption has to fit. There are multiple options that fit some but not others, dark matter fits most we just don’t know what it’s made up of.
That the universe is infinite. It’s unknown if it is but commonly called infinite. It could, however, be finite in some way, such as be wrapping back around on itself out past observable space.
What would cause it to do that? Only thing I can think of is gravity, no? That would imply there’s something in the middle that keeps everything from straying too far?
Or do you simply mean that our perception of space is limited and we simply can’t perceive it properly and thus we’d go in one direction and end up back where we started? But if that’s the case, it means we’ve also misunderstood light? Doesn’t it go infinitely? So shouldn’t there be a light source that reaches us from different directions?
Only thing I can think of is gravity, no?
They’re not talking about the stuff in the universe being finite. The space itself could be finite, for example by looping back on itself. Tthe usual comparison is to a circular track - you can drive as far as you like on it without hitting an edge, but you’ll eventually come back to the point where you started. Now scale this up to three dimensions.
That would imply there’s something in the middle that keeps everything from straying too far?
Even if we’re talking about a system held together by gravity, it does not need a central mass. The overall system just needs to be dense enough that each piece is stabilised by all the others.
I’m late the game here, but I think I found the answer.
This one of those, “thought terminating cliches”?
Yep.
Followed by one of those “snarky ‘lil passive aggressive question cliches”, I see.
Oops, did i offend you?
Not in the least sweetheart.
Thinking of it as quantum first.
Before the 20th century, there was a preference for the idea that things were continuous.
Then there was experimental evidence that things were quantized when interacted with, and we ended up with wave particle duality. The pendulum swung in that direction and is still going.
This came with a ton of weird behaviors that didn’t make philosophical sense - things like Einstein saying “well if no one is looking at the moon does it not exist?”
So they decided fuck the philosophy and told the new generation to just shut up and calculate.
Now we have two incompatible frameworks. At cosmic scales, the best model (general relatively) is based on continuous behavior. And at small scales the framework is “continuous until interacted with when it becomes discrete.”
But had they kept the ‘why’ in mind, as time went on things like the moon not existing when you don’t look at it or the incompatibility of those two models would have made a lot more sense.
It’s impossible to simulate the interactions of free agents with a continuous universe. It would take an uncountably infinite amount of information to keep track.
So at the very point that our universe would be impossible to simulate, it suddenly switches from behaving in an impossible to simulate way to behaving in a way with finite discrete state changes.
Even more eyebrow raising, if you erase the information about the interaction, it switches back to continuous as if memory optimized/garbage collected with orphaned references cleaned up (the quantum eraser variation of Young’s double slit experiment).
The latching on to the quantum experimental results and ditching the ‘why’ in favor of “shut up and calculate” has created an entire generation of physicists chasing the ghost of a unified theory of gravity while never really entertaining the idea that maybe the quantum experimental results are the side effects of emulating a continuous universe.
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Something simple like if we just ignored Gravity we could move faster than light.
Or time maybe?
Gravity is an unproven hypothesis.
When we finally figure out and understand, in a real world mechanical sort of way, quantum mechanics, all bets will be off.
It’ll open up a new perspective on the Universe (dare I say Metaverse?), and where we fit in with everything.
Yeah, I’m not smart enough for thread, imma head out
I read some odd magic words like fabric of the universe idk if sounded like scufi and fintasy I got confused
That evolution is purely randomness + fitness landscape rather than that DNA guides the process at least somewhat. Don’t burn me alive guys
I would expect randomness to play a larger roll than fitness.
In the short term (single digit generations) that’s probably true, but I don’t see how it could be on longer scales. If the random mutations decrease fitness, they won’t be passed on at some point, since there is less reproduction. If they increase fitness, they will be passed on to more individuals.
What OP said is Motoo Kimura’s Neutral Theory of evolution. There’s a lot of evidence supporting it. The vast majority of mutations have a negligible effect on fitness. So it is very possible that something may evolve purely by chance.
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I don’t know for sure, but there are some debates that simply don’t make sense to me. For example, whether or not dark matter/energy exists is something many just absolutely insist upon. To me, I would imagine, if something exists, being “measurable” is a badge or prerequisite of its existence, but here we have a name for the black omnipresence essence everywhere, the substance of nothing, so to speak, to the point where one of the theories put forward about the gravitational anomalies in the outer solar system is that it’s simply dark matter. I’m not buying it. I’m of the school of thought that what we see really is just plain nothingness. For those who constantly accuse the “it could be aliens” theory, it ranks up there to float around a go-to for everything.
Another one are the constant asteroid theories. What made the moon? An asteroid. What tipped Uranus? An asteroid. What killed the dinosaurs?
The ice ageAn asteroid. It doesn’t come off as very critical, especially when imprecisions are growing out of them all, for example people went from saying dinosaurs were all genocided specifically by the asteroid to some people saying there were some who became birds to some saying all of them became birds and animals to saying the asteroid did almost nothing to any whole species.Dark matter isn’t something that was randomly invented and is believed for no good reason. We observe something going on, and the best way to describe the effect is through dark matter, as in matter that doesn’t interact with electromagnetic waves, but does affect gravity. There have been many alternative explanations for the effects (e.g. MOND), but none line up as well as dark matter.
So it’s something that is measurable, insofar that we even came up with the idea due to measurements. We don’t know how to detect it directly, but we can detect its influence.
Isn’t it judging a book by its cover that something so unknown to us is seen as so applicable as a go-to before we know what applies to it? It would be like seeing fire for the first time and thinking “we only know one thing about fire, that it’s hot, therefore anything that’s hot must be heated by internal fire”.
All the models happen to fit perfectly when we describe the interactions as dark matter, and no better model has been proposed so far. Mind you, nobody is saying “dark matter must be this or that” - until we know more, it’s pretty much a placeholder. But unless someone comes up with a better model (and many, many people are trying to) the only alternative is to throw our hands in the air and say “god did it, we can’t describe it physically”. As soon as you start describing it physically, you’d arrive back at dark matter.
That’s kind of what I mean, it’s a cop-out, especially considering that we know so little about it. For all we know, it could be tiny microscopic black holes, and right now, we wouldn’t know the difference, yet we assume it’s something we “just know about”. Typically in science (or at least it used to be this way), you don’t resort to going with the placeholder hypothesis until the more specific ones are absolutely ruled out, so that we don’t draw a conclusion in a way that seals the deal on other possibilities.
That’s where your understanding is wrong - nobody is saying that dark matter can’t be microscopic black holes. There are reasons to assume this to be untrue (e.g. microscopic black holes evaporating incredibly fast), but “dark matter” is a placeholder for whatever the underlying physical phenomenon is, be it microscopic black holes, or WIMPs, or whatever else. You yourself are asking for your explanation not to be considered.
How so? I was always taught/told (in the context of science and science class) that it’s better to not have an explanation than to not know how to explain something is and just go with something out of pressure. This is that in practice as I’d rather wait, for example, to have better instruments to see if Planet 9 (which there’s a demand to identify with clarity since we suspect it to keep hurling small bodies into the inner solar system) is really dark matter (however we might identify it) or if it’s an obscure planet, a small black hole, or a phenomenon we don’t even know about yet.
How so? I was always taught/told (in the context of science and science class) that it’s better to not have an explanation than to not know how to explain something is and just go with something out of pressure.
Who is doing that? Your comments all seem to imply that you think dark matter is something scientists just randomly assume to be true, and I don’t know how to explain that you’re misunderstanding this beyond what I already wrote.
This is that in practice as I’d rather wait, for example, to have better instruments to see if Planet 9 (which there’s a demand to identify with clarity since we suspect it to keep hurling small bodies into the inner solar system) is really dark matter (however we might identify it) or if it’s an obscure planet, a small black hole, or a phenomenon we don’t even know about yet.
But what do you want to wait for? Unless people think about what could be causing the gravitational anomalies we’re seeing, we won’t come up with better instruments. But you don’t want people to think about that, because they can’t fully explain it. So how do you get to better instruments?
Science works by observing phenomena, formulating a hypothesis to explain them, making predictions with that hypothesis, and finally testing (and refining) it. Scientists have observed gravitational anomalies, they’ve formulated many hypotheses (of which dark matter fits the best so far), and now they’re trying to make predictions and test them. This is really difficult, because we’re far away from the gravitational anomalies that we’re seeing, and they aren’t interacting with the electromagnetic spectrum. What exactly is your issue with this process? You keep saying that scientists assume things, but I see no violation of the normal process, and no better theories.
FYI, dinosaurs are not extinct; they’re quite abundant, and we walk alongside them. For example, chickens are dinosaurs.
I acknowledged that in the last sentence.
I once heard that dark matter is just the consequence of using approximations and then having equations not balance out further down the line. So we inject dark matter in there so that the math maths all right.
Thats literally how it started, yes.
Then scientists realized that their math hack might actually hold some weight.
Time (capital T) is vastly different than time (lowercase t).
