Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Max™]

I was referring to things like Nacirema, btw.

That is a really good point. Would an alternate-universe me be the same me as me?

Define "alternate universe" though.

Like a many-worlds interpretation? Why a branching universes instead of an overlapping phase space?

As it is, if you've seen those .gifs of a tesseract rotating and got the general idea that the extra dimension, in/out, ana/kata, w-/w+, whatever term, is the one where the rotation which looks like it is deforming the shape takes place, but that all sides are always the same size and shape, it's just that rotating through that extra dimension isn't a thing we're good at seeing, right?

Ok, now take a dot and inflate it into a sphere, then rotate it like those tesseracts so it kinda resembles a ball wearing a conical hat <o and realize that if you slice a 3-D sphere out of that 4-D shape you get a sphere, and if you were a piece of that shape looking at it from the inside you would observe a spherical volume around you which seemed to originate in a very small dense state and is expanding.

Your brain is a tool that slices the 4-D universe into a 3-D shape you can observe and interact with by organizing those slices into a pattern by which you can note changes from one slice to the next. One may ask why it doesn't organize them and provide a sense of awareness which proceeds into the past, and that is a good question, but there are less ways to make use of an overall tendency for entropy to decrease I expect, than the various methods by which local decreases against an overall trend of increasing entropy can lead to useful results.

It's rather silly all in all, the moment I am typing this existed just like the moment in which you were writing the post I am responding to. The difference was that we couldn't see it from those earlier moments, but I was able to see it recently, and my slicing tool imparts a sense of continuity that tells me I saw that moment recently.

Generally there are lots of animals that possess this ability to, how would you put it... remember things that happened recently. There are some which can anticipate things that will happen soon.

There are not many which can know that those moments in the future, just like this one, exist in the same sense as those earlier moments I was discussing before. The way basic awareness works here just isn't set up to need that information, even ours has to be reminded of the fact that time is not a process, it is not a thing that happens, it is the direction along which events can be said to happen but even then language isn't well suited for it.

Extending that to another region of spacetime which is almost exactly like our own but doesn't overlap our own requires a rather tortured explanation for why that other region wouldn't have it's own shape, rather than being an almost-copy of ours.

Assuming we went past some Asimov point into full on tech=magic territory and could bud off universes exactly like our own at the moment of budding but which aren't constrained to unfurl beyond that point, then the you in that universe would have the same sense of continuity that you feel right now, except right now I'm going to close my eyes and type a key after hitting enter twice:

g

In the other universe I hit o or something, so there is another you which saw this same post with an o where that g is, are they still you?

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

I was referring to things like Nacirema, btw.

That is a really good point. Would an alternate-universe me be the same me as me?

Define "alternate universe" though.

Like a many-worlds interpretation? Why a branching universes instead of an overlapping phase space?

Layman's popular "alternate universe," as in "another dimension!" (*shudder*) What is an "overlapping phase space"?

As it is, if you've seen those .gifs of a tesseract rotating and got the general idea that the extra dimension, in/out, ana/kata, w-/w+, whatever term, is the one where the rotation which looks like it is deforming the shape takes place, but that all sides are always the same size and shape, it's just that rotating through that extra dimension isn't a thing we're good at seeing, right?

Ok, now take a dot and inflate it into a sphere, then rotate it like those tesseracts so it kinda resembles a ball wearing a conical hat <o and realize that if you slice a 3-D sphere out of that 4-D shape you get a sphere, and if you were a piece of that shape looking at it from the inside you would observe a spherical volume around you which seemed to originate in a very small dense state and is expanding.

Your brain is a tool that slices the 4-D universe into a 3-D shape you can observe and interact with by organizing those slices into a pattern by which you can note changes from one slice to the next. One may ask why it doesn't organize them and provide a sense of awareness which proceeds into the past, and that is a good question, but there are less ways to make use of an overall tendency for entropy to decrease I expect, than the various methods by which local decreases against an overall trend of increasing entropy can lead to useful results.

I think maybe causation?

It's rather silly all in all, the moment I am typing this existed just like the moment in which you were writing the post I am responding to. The difference was that we couldn't see it from those earlier moments, but I was able to see it recently, and my slicing tool imparts a sense of continuity that tells me I saw that moment recently.

Generally there are lots of animals that possess this ability to, how would you put it... remember things that happened recently. There are some which can anticipate things that will happen soon.

They may get signals about earthquakes before we do, but information still travels at lightspeed, and always forward in time, right?

There are not many which can know that those moments in the future, just like this one, exist in the same sense as those earlier moments I was discussing before. The way basic awareness works here just isn't set up to need that information, even ours has to be reminded of the fact that time is not a process, it is not a thing that happens, it is the direction along which events can be said to happen but even then language isn't well suited for it.

Extending that to another region of spacetime which is almost exactly like our own but doesn't overlap our own requires a rather tortured explanation for why that other region wouldn't have it's own shape, rather than being an almost-copy of ours.

Oh, I see!
]quote]Assuming we went past some Asimov point into full on tech=magic territory and could bud off universes exactly like our own at the moment of budding but which aren't constrained to unfurl beyond that point, then the you in that universe would have the same sense of continuity that you feel right now, except right now I'm going to close my eyes and type a key after hitting enter twice:

g

In the other universe I hit o or something, so there is another you which saw this same post with an o where that g is, are they still you?
[/quote]

Not necessarily.

[Starver]

The seminal work (for me, as I read it shortly after it came out, and was one of the first ones I read where it was done well) was Greg Bear's 'Eon', in which (IIRC) "partials" could be created, subset consciousnesses of individuals to carry out personal tasks using (frexample) the expertise of the original in a subject without being bothered by the various other physical/psychological needs and urges of them.

(These days, one could imagine a 'bot to just persistently trawl Twitter on your behalf to tag which of all the innumerable tweets you might actually be intested in (regardless of Following status), possibly also autoreply/retweet back at the same time with the full authority and confidence of you, bringing to your own notice everything that 'you' have ultimately noted as important to see or know that 'you' have done.)

[Max™]

I was trying to figure out how to reconcile some of the many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, where each possible outcome of an event coexists with the 4-D shape of the universe, so the phase space of a 4-D universe would be... hell this is another region where language is not built to handle it, mathematics though?

Though now I've got the idea in my head of taking the 4-D point > sphere rotation to produce the cone-hat-ball universe and expanding it to fill a 5-D shape, but besides blooming them all out of the same point I can't figure out how to do the full rotation along the new axis, and can't figure out what it would represent in a physical sense... but I guess you could handwave it into something like the layman "alternate universe" idea, but either every cone-hat-ball slice is the same, or they're randomized from the point, hmmmm... I guess overlapping parts of the (x, y, z) slices along the t axis is fine, so I don't really know why I shouldn't be looking at overlapping the (x, y, z, t) volumes along the w axis.

If it was a smooth continuum then the volumes most similar to our own being found adjacent to our own volume would be a clean result.

Hmmm. I must ponder this out more.

[Catmeat]

Hmmm. I must ponder this out more.

Take some LSD to assist you.
DNA was discovered by some nerd on the drug.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

...no? It wasn't.

[Max™]

Hmmm. I must ponder this out more.

Take some LSD to assist you.
DNA was discovered by some nerd on the drug.

I've tried it, it was neat, but it's not actually useful for mathematical and physical theorizing, though I can understand why it might feel like it is.

[x2yzh9]

Hmmm. I must ponder this out more.

Take some LSD to assist you.
DNA was discovered by some nerd on the drug.

Well, the structure and the shape was indeed discovered by some random scientist on LSD. That same scientist believes the earth and other planets were seeded by large seedships, but I won't go into that topic..instead(feel free to ask though)

I choose to represent this as relativity. Of course, Albert Einstein explained it in the sense that most people are trying to understand today. It's so simple to me though, (probably because science thinking has literally made me go crazy before) but it is a passion I hold.

   In lehmans term, albert einsteins theory of general relativity basically explains everything that has already been said here. It's relative, you see-A theory I once garnered at a young age was that inside of every human being, every cell, even every atom, is a multiverse inside of itself. You see-matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Therefore, it makes sense to me at least that every cell in your body has a universe inside of it. For example we have mitochondria-the powerhouse. What power holds our universe together? Why, relativity(not gonna say higgs boson because I have certain issues with CERN I'd rather not elaborate on) of course. So really, we are constantly in a multiverse constrained by the own universes that we create or destroy, every day. By growing a plant, you create a universe completely different. By destroying a plant in the same way, the ashes rise and create a new universe in it's destruction.

   Albert einstein(I feel, but do not know) felt the way that he shouldn't tell everybody all this, because his various theories would scare the living shit out of people. But it's actually peaceful to me to know that regardless of the conspiracy theories that 'we are in a matrix' it can be explained simply and non-scarily like this.

Everything I just said represents the fact that we, as human beings or whatever, hold a matrix. Now, think outside of the box on the aspect that we are in a matrix. For all we know our universe could literally just be a mitochondria in an ulterior universe.

I hope everything I said made sense. Please, ask questions and quote specifically so I may answer them if you wish.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Hmmm. I must ponder this out more.

Take some LSD to assist you.
DNA was discovered by some nerd on the drug.

Well, the structure and the shape was indeed discovered by some random scientist on LSD. That same scientist believes the earth and other planets were seeded by large seedships, but I won't go into that topic..instead(feel free to ask though)

I choose to represent this as relativity. Of course, Albert Einstein explained it in the sense that most people are trying to understand today. It's so simple to me though, (probably because science thinking has literally made me go crazy before) but it is a passion I hold.

   In lehmans term, albert einsteins theory of general relativity basically explains everything that has already been said here. It's relative, you see-A theory I once garnered at a young age was that inside of every human being, every cell, even every atom, is a multiverse inside of itself. You see-matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Therefore, it makes sense to me at least that every cell in your body has a universe inside of it. For example we have mitochondria-the powerhouse. What power holds our universe together? Why, relativity(not gonna say higgs boson because I have certain issues with CERN I'd rather not elaborate on) of course. So really, we are constantly in a multiverse constrained by the own universes that we create or destroy, every day. By growing a plant, you create a universe completely different. By destroying a plant in the same way, the ashes rise and create a new universe in it's destruction.

   Albert einstein(I feel, but do not know) felt the way that he shouldn't tell everybody all this, because his various theories would scare the living shit out of people. But it's actually peaceful to me to know that regardless of the conspiracy theories that 'we are in a matrix' it can be explained simply and non-scarily like this.

Everything I just said represents the fact that we, as human beings or whatever, hold a matrix. Now, think outside of the box on the aspect that we are in a matrix. For all we know our universe could literally just be a mitochondria in an ulterior universe.

I hope everything I said made sense. Please, ask questions and quote specifically so I may answer them if you wish.

AAAAAAUGH

Relativity is not a "force holding everything together." It's a law or model that describes (general) spacetime warping and gravity or (special) the effects of near-c travel.

The Planck time and distance place constraints on "tinier universes within our own." We're the bottom, at least.

[x2yzh9]

Hmmm. I must ponder this out more.

Take some LSD to assist you.
DNA was discovered by some nerd on the drug.

Well, the structure and the shape was indeed discovered by some random scientist on LSD. That same scientist believes the earth and other planets were seeded by large seedships, but I won't go into that topic..instead(feel free to ask though)

I choose to represent this as relativity. Of course, Albert Einstein explained it in the sense that most people are trying to understand today. It's so simple to me though, (probably because science thinking has literally made me go crazy before) but it is a passion I hold.

   In lehmans term, albert einsteins theory of general relativity basically explains everything that has already been said here. It's relative, you see-A theory I once garnered at a young age was that inside of every human being, every cell, even every atom, is a multiverse inside of itself. You see-matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Therefore, it makes sense to me at least that every cell in your body has a universe inside of it. For example we have mitochondria-the powerhouse. What power holds our universe together? Why, relativity(not gonna say higgs boson because I have certain issues with CERN I'd rather not elaborate on) of course. So really, we are constantly in a multiverse constrained by the own universes that we create or destroy, every day. By growing a plant, you create a universe completely different. By destroying a plant in the same way, the ashes rise and create a new universe in it's destruction.

   Albert einstein(I feel, but do not know) felt the way that he shouldn't tell everybody all this, because his various theories would scare the living shit out of people. But it's actually peaceful to me to know that regardless of the conspiracy theories that 'we are in a matrix' it can be explained simply and non-scarily like this.

Everything I just said represents the fact that we, as human beings or whatever, hold a matrix. Now, think outside of the box on the aspect that we are in a matrix. For all we know our universe could literally just be a mitochondria in an ulterior universe.

I hope everything I said made sense. Please, ask questions and quote specifically so I may answer them if you wish.

AAAAAAUGH

Relativity is not a "force holding everything together." It's a law or model that describes (general) spacetime warping and gravity or (special) the effects of near-c travel.

The Planck time and distance place constraints on "tinier universes within our own." We're the bottom, at least.

and I whole heartedly accept that argument, although I would kindly differ on the idea that were the bottom level of the universe. When your in zero gravity space there are no cardinal directions for instance, so how could we identify us to be the top or bottom level of this multiverse? That is my question, please do answer.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

"Bottom" doesn't mean "toward Earth," it means "the smallest".

[i2amroy]

Yeah, no offense, but the only reason that that question would appear to make any sense at all is because you're falsely using the same word twice in two different contexts. When you're talking about space you use the terms "top" or "bottom to reference cardinal directions (which of course don't actually exist without a frame of reference). On the other hand Doze was using the term "bottom" in the frame of reference of some sort of "universal stack" of universes within universe, i.e. to represent the universe that contained no other universes within it.

The two reference frames are absolutely unconnected other than the fact that they use similar terminology, and any sort of attempt to combine the two based on the shear fact that they happen to use similar terms is just going to cause worthless confusion that is absolutely meaningless.

[x2yzh9]

Yeah, no offense, but the only reason that that question would appear to make any sense at all is because you're falsely using the same word twice in two different contexts. When you're talking about space you use the terms "top" or "bottom to reference cardinal directions (which of course don't actually exist without a frame of reference). On the other hand Doze was using the term "bottom" in the frame of reference of some sort of "universal stack" of universes within universe, i.e. to represent the universe that contained no other universes within it.

The two reference frames are absolutely unconnected other than the fact that they use similar terminology, and any sort of attempt to combine the two based on the shear fact that they happen to use similar terms is just going to cause worthless confusion that is absolutely meaningless.

very true

[Gentlefish]

I mean, there's also the simple fact that matter can be destroyed (and created, but hoo boy is that a tough process) through energy. Now, energy can't really be lost, but can be "lost" through heat waste, which we'll never get back (hence heat death of the universe). Fission is making use of this principle by splitting a heavy atom into two smaller atoms with less mass; the energy released by the process was mass, but that mass is gone.

And somehow, fusion in light elements gives energy. That one still stumps me a little bit.

What's interesting, though, is iron. Iron is a net loss for bot fission and fusion; it's the element at the bottom of the food-chain. Again, I personally dunno why, but it's there and it's one of the more common metals we use in day-to-day.

[Sergarr]

And somehow, fusion in light elements gives energy. That one still stumps me a little bit.

That's easy! As every nuclear fairy knows, the energy that binds protons and neutrons together is actually also mass - but, since that's negative energy, the mass is also negative - hence it's called "mass defect". For light atoms, the extra energy from fusion arises from that mass defect, since the mass of light elements separate from each other is actually bigger than the mass of the combined element. Cool, isn't it?