http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05well.html?em&ex=1202533200&en=eed03831444e3786&ei=5087

Read my post #48. Your external reality is that structured reality that seems to be squeezing the life out of you, as it falls away into the past, as your internal reality rushes blindly into the future. If you want to connect to the eternity(but only if it really is bad, otherwise..) don’t try and make sense of what you are told about the structure and order, insitutions, logic, top down rationality, but try and plug into the raw energy motivating it. It’s like winter and spring. The order and structure is the hard shell of winter and the energy is the raw burst of growth of spring that breaks through, constantly pushing at the weak spots, like grass pushing through the concrete. The source of life is the essence out of which we rise, not an Ideal Form from which we fell.

I have this saying that I can never feel sorry for myself because I read the paper every day. Our personal realities are like bubbles of awareness. Some rise to the surface, many are jostled around in the middle and most are ground into fertilizer at the bottom. Mother Nature creates life in order to consume it, giving sustenance to the next stage, as life bootstraps itself upward. If you want to escape your bubble, short of suicide, than try plugging into other people. Living beings consciousness exists as a sort of electrostatic connection between their interior and exterior reality. Have you ever seen or felt those spots in your vision? Feel your gaze controlled by subconscious attraction and rejection? Felt someone looking at you and turn to realize someone was? We can build $20 radios that can translate electromagnetic waves into forms of communication. I think that at some point in the future, we will be able to do some of this by mental control. I think one of the main reasons we don’t do it already is because it does interfere with our ability to function autonomously. As a young child, I found that I had to consciously shut out the mental spillover from my siblings in order to develop my own ability to think. Since I ride horses for a living, I’ve spent my life plugging into primitive minds. Civilization may claim to have the answers, but it is just hard crust on a raw beingness. The price we pay for being able to feel in the first place is that a lot of it is pain. Get used to it and develop thicker skin, cause it isn’t going to change.
As for the partying, hangovers happen.

Party on dude

It just looks like your trying to understand my story. The problem is that language is a real problem for me, so I am never going to be able to tell or prove to you, that you are just looking at me!
If I were you, I would also spend an eternity trying to figure out, what it is i am, because “I” am amazing!

I think one of the reasons people focus on the concept of now as a point in time is that motion is primarily at the speed of light and our brains don’t totally process it in real time, as the information/energy would just be a blur. So the mind is a process of conceptual flashes, like frames of film. As we get older and more focused, we process these flashes faster and time seems to speed up. A good analogy is that our shutter speed gets faster. An interesting example of this may be a study I read of some years ago, about chain crashes in fog that was done in England. What they found was that as fog settled onto traffic, people would inexplicably speed up. My theory is that as their information intake was reduced, they subconsciously sought to increase it by increasing their speed. Just a theory.

As a measure of motion, it would be meaningless to think of time as a point. Just as with temperature, the only absolute is zero, which is the complete absence of any motion in both cases.

I do think an infinite universe is the simpler description. Every point in space would be receiving energy from all directions and radiating it in all directions, thus creating a cycle of perpetual conservation of energy. With a finite universe, it would be subject to entropy and radiating this energy away, as the open Big Bang model proposes. This then requires an explanation for how the original source came to be. A closed BB model might say it does eventually collapse back together, but this argues for endless loops of time, ie. eternity. What if this process lost a little energy each time? Other dimensions, whatever. It would still be subject to entropy and eventually fade away. The only way to get around entropy is not to have a closed/finite universe in the first place.

It seems a much simpler description of the universe to say there is likely a finite amount of matter/energy with an infinite number of possible states and interactions; rather than that there is energy persisting in a possibly infinite and persistent present.

Temperature can also be a very precise measure of motion and it can be relativistic with regards to volume of space. If a certain level of energy is contained in a specific volume of space and this space was increased, the drop in temperature and density of the energy can be predicted, but that doesn’t make temperature equivalent to volume. Time is the same. As duration it is a measure of motion, not the basis for it. If it wasn’t an effective and accurate form of measurement, it wouldn’t be very useful.

Qubit,

Get your brain thinking about something else. When you’ve finally focused on that, try thinking of some other thing. Just keep doing that until you get a lattice of thought patterns and use that as your control to measure what it is that is bothering you.

I am not god, I am not the one! I am me, a man; a real man, but something about the last 7 years is definatly not real and its flowing from the future.

Appreciated your remarks on entanglement. As spooky as it seems, the principle follows logically- and technologically from the SR/GR/QM models- the experimentally validated fact of entanglement is evidence of a very important conceptual link between the models, and the veracity of the concepts.

JM,

“Actually I am arguing with the description of time as a form of metadimension, where all events exist, much as different points in space can co-exist. Given that it’s the energy that’s conserved, it is the same energy that manifests as successive points in time, so it requires the dissolution of past events for future events to take their place.

The story is that it was Edgar Allen Poe who first proposed that space and “duration” are the same.”

It is interesting- and I believe, significant- that time is usually treated as “space-like” in GR…with good success and no reduction in the accuracy of measurement. This relates to Poes’ interesting assertion that space and duration are the same…though I’m not sure he was the first to have the idea.

Just the fact that the speed of light separates events the way it does suggests that time is, in some way which is difficult for us 4D observers to understand, “spacelike”..that “time” relates to the overall geometry of the universe- and cosmic structure (patterns of energy density concentration existing at invariant frames and within a manifold of some kind).

Its a hard pill to swallow, I know, but as we observe planets around stars two thousand light years distant, we observe both star and planet as they existed two thousand years ago. I cannot see that we have a choice in this matter…information and complexity in the universe are conserved, and with appropriate technology and/or within an appropriate geometry exist eternally intact…and could be retrieved.

Best, Sam Cox

As Stephen Wolfram put it, “You need a computer the size of the universe to compute the universe.”

If on the other hand, the universe is infinite and what we percieve to be the edge of time is simply a horizon line of how far light travels before it gets too redshifted, so that we are bombarded by information from a 14 billion lightyear radius, that would be fairly indeterministic. It might make us slaves to the universe, but then we affect what affects us, so it’s a symbiotic relationship.

Lawrence is correct, but you are correct too. QM is a deterministic model that accurately describes nature. Nature itself is not deterministic.

In principle you could create a stochastic model of nature; and in fact, many simulations of natural processes are stochastically modelled with computers; but they have their own complexities, and the fact that there is a deterministic model that describes nature so well is interesting

Are we back to believing that we live in a completely deterministic universe? My existence isn’t a happy accident? I really don’t want to give that one up! Of course, the amount of information we would need to correctly characterize the complexity of all the minute forces at work would BE all the information in the universe. So, you could never have a model smaller than the actual thing.

The entangled pair just represent a new object that we know nothing about until we perform the measurement

I didn’t read his books, but from the interviews I did read, it seemed that his description of time is dimensional, in the sense that all points in time co-exist and any particular point in time is simply a subjective reference point, as with spatial perspectives. My point is that the only physical reality is the existing energy and whatever form it currently manifests. That different points in space require some measure of time to communicate doesn’t necessarily make time a fundamental dimension. Rather it is a measure of the motion in that space, just as temperature is another form of measurement.

Lawrence,

I realize quantum entanglement isn’t evidence of a transfer of force. That’s the whole mystery of it, that there is no time for this transfer. What makes sense to me is that these two measurements of separate particles are actually measurements of different points of some deeper wave phenomena, such as two radios equidistant from the transmitter will play the same sounds at the same time. The question then, what deeper levels of wave transmission are we missing that might provide some relation between collapsing and expanding space.

Sandy,

That was an intriguing article and it makes one wonder what the LHC will find.

Entanglements define a certain relationship structure which is different from the standard coordinate or space-spacetime understanding of things. They also do not involve gauge forces or the binding of two particles by an energy potential.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Actually I am arguing with the description of time as a form of metadimension, where all events exist, much as different points in space can co-exist. Given that it’s the energy that’s conserved, it is the same energy that manifests as successive points in time, so it requires the dissolution of past events for future events to take their place.

The story is that it was Edgar Allen Poe who first proposed that space and “duration” are the same. E. A. Poe was a master of narrative and that’s what time as a dimension is. That selective linear description of cause and effect that describes our thought processes. Time as dimension is the intuitive understanding of time, not necessarily the logical description. The point I keep making is that time is a consequence of motion, not its basis.

If time is a fundamental dimension, then physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. On the other hand, if time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and as the events are formed, they go from being in the future to being in the past. Time as consequence of motion means it has more in common with temperature, then space, since they are both descriptions of and methods for measuring motion, rather then dimensional basis for it. This relationship between the matter/energy moving forward in time, as the events created move back in time applies to all scales, whether the earth rotating and creating days, or a cesium atom going through transitions, or strings and their vibrations.

Consider a thermal medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules moving about. To construct a time keeping device we would take the motion of one of these points of reference and measure it against the medium it is moving through. The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock. Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all other clocks. The motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/face of the clock. To the hand of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise. At any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an event, so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones, the medium against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is displaced by the next, as all these individual points move around, so the events go from future potential to past circumstance. The illusion of direction is created because the physical reality of the points moves one way through the series of circumstances, though these events go the other way. There are innumerable points of reference describing their own narrative and all this activity exists in an equilibrium, so every potential clock constitutes its own measure of time.

This isn’t presentism, since time isn’t fundamental, either as point or line. The only absolute time would be like absolute temperature, the complete absence of it. Zero. No singular point of reference, because that would imply some way to measure it and that would require motion.

“I think that what everyone is forgetting is that QM is a deterministic MODEL.”

I would hope that no one is forgetting that QM is a model!…or that SR/GR are models of reality as well. If these models failed to precisely describe the behavior of the universe, neither we nor anyone else would be discussing them here. However, since these models work, and since we know that any future concept will have to be inclusive of their general parameters, I’m not sure that making the point that QM is a model is of much significance as an argument that just maybe QM may not be correct. The field work says QM IS an accurate description of the universe. My opinion is my opinion, but SR/GR/QM are the best we have. I know they work. I have seen them work. I know how accurate they are in describing reality…so accurate, in fact, that technologies can be formulated around them. The rest, as Einstein said about SR/GR are “the details”.

JM,

Your comments are interesting and I can see from your last comment that you get the idea of a permanent, everything and everywhere universe which, when observed from different frames and in different ways, is measured to be expanding and contracting at the same time. I think that is the substance of your original question to me and the reason why I answered it as I did. As baryonic infomational complexity, we electromagnetically “cross-read” the progression of events in the expansion and gravitational collapse of the universe remotely.

To use a simplified but obvious illustration of the permanence of embedded information in the universal manifold, people on Earth, now dead, could be observed, with proper equpment as living their lives at their own “place” in space and time anywhere in the universe. Every event since the big bang, and presumably into the future as well is permanently embedded in the energy density matrix and preserved at invariant frames. One would need only to tamper slightly with the past, to change everything…and possibly even destroy all life on Earth- and everywhere else.

A great thread! I’ll continue to read along!