Psience Quest

(2018-03-20, 12:48 PM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]School me, bro. Tell it how it is.

It's obvious you're well schooled on on these subjects so there's no need to continue.

(2018-03-20, 01:41 AM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]Technically, in physics, at least by the definition with which I'm familiar from high school and a bit at university, energy is the capacity to do work. Too, according to that same physics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed: it can only change forms, e.g., from potential gravitational energy to the kinetic energy of motion. In this latter respect it is curious that Steve001 claims that “In the distant future life will be impossible - not enough energy to perform work”: curious because the total amount of energy in the universe (assuming that the universe is closed, which is a questionable assumption) according to the physics with which I'm familiar does not change, so it is not that at the hypothesised heat death of the universe there will be "not enough" energy to perform work - there will be the same amount of energy as at any other point in time - but that the energy, being uniformly distributed in maximal entropy, will not exist in a form that can be readily harnessed to perform work.

But what then is work? It still seems to me, as IIRC Brian Whitworth once said, physics is a "hollow science" in that it elucidates only as much as the realization that striking a match makes a flame.

We can discover and apply a great deal by building on such facts, but it doesn't - to my knowledge - help us understand change...at least not to the level that we can be certain of something so far into the distant future as the supposed Heat Death of the Universe?

(2018-03-20, 02:09 PM)Steve001 Wrote: [ -> ]It's obvious you're well schooled on on these subjects so there's no need to continue.

Well, I did find an interesting blog post by Sean Carroll, Energy Is Not Conserved, which makes this point (emphases in the original):

Quote:The point is pretty simple: back when you thought energy was conserved, there was a reason why you thought that, namely time-translation invariance. A fancy way of saying “the background on which particles and forces evolve, as well as the dynamical rules governing their motions, are fixed, not changing with time.” But in general relativity that’s simply no longer true. Einstein tells us that space and time are dynamical, and in particular that they can evolve with time. When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved

How that relates to our conversation I'm not sure (I haven't studied General Relativity).

(2018-03-20, 10:16 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]But what then is work?

Well... that's defined in terms of energy [transfer]...

Which, I guess, helps your case.

(2018-03-20, 10:16 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]It still seems to me, as IIRC Brian Whitworth once said, physics is a "hollow science" in that it elucidates only as much as the realization that striking a match makes a flame.

That's one way of looking at it, although, taking inspiration from Mediochre's thread, another way of looking at it might be that it helps us to figure out "the way the god(dess) of this reality 'coded' it to work".

(2018-03-20, 10:16 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]We can discover and apply a great deal by building on such facts, but it doesn't - to my knowledge - help us understand change...at least not to the level that we can be certain of something so far into the distant future as the supposed Heat Death of the Universe?

That's above my pay grade...

(2018-03-21, 07:35 AM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]That's one way of looking at it, although, taking inspiration from Mediochre's thread, another way of looking at it might be that it helps us to figure out "the way the god(dess) of this reality 'coded' it to work".

Well, for the record, I really don't think this reality was coded by anyone. If the past life stuff is anywhere accurate then this reality has all the characteristics of a naturally occurring one. Typically those ones are the super complex "fine tuned" ones and created ones tend to be a lot simpler and more direct. Although it doesn't rule it out since the past also indicates that a really common practice was to just copy/paste the "seed" of a natural one and then build your own stuff on top of it, or use some sort of procedural generation although I think that's really unlikely. But still, no reason it couldn't be true. In any case, I don't personally think there's a god of any type in control of any of this on a universal level. I don't think there's any evidence of it, although there's lots of evidence of some form of interaction given all the stuff with NDE's and whatnot. But that might be just for earth and might be put together from humans who died and then wanted to help other people. No idea.

(2018-03-21, 06:16 PM)Mediochre Wrote: [ -> ]Well, for the record, I really don't think this reality was coded by anyone. If the past life stuff is anywhere accurate then this reality has all the characteristics of a naturally occurring one. Typically those ones are the super complex "fine tuned" ones and created ones tend to be a lot simpler and more direct. Although it doesn't rule it out since the past also indicates that a really common practice was to just copy/paste the "seed" of a natural one and then build your own stuff on top of it, or use some sort of procedural generation although I think that's really unlikely. But still, no reason it couldn't be true. In any case, I don't personally think there's a god of any type in control of any of this on a universal level. I don't think there's any evidence of it, although there's lots of evidence of some form of interaction given all the stuff with NDE's and whatnot. But that might be just for earth and might be put together from humans who died and then wanted to help other people. No idea.

I'm not sure what to think about this approach. I'm quite happy to consider the existence of - how should I term them - other dimensional beings whom we might refer to as gods. Creative entities who perhaps construct worlds and eco-systems constrained by what we know as natural laws. But I return to the same question again and again: if they exists, how? My only recourse is ultimately a single source of creative "energy". Perhaps this "energy", this creative impulse is somehow distributed or delegated or shared? Perhaps every fragment of the source is endowed with free will and creative freedom? So there might be a creative continuum which includes these other "gods" but also includes ourselves, creating our own reality?

(2018-03-21, 06:16 PM)Mediochre Wrote: [ -> ]Well, for the record, I really don't think this reality was coded by anyone.

I had been planning on asking you about that.

(2018-03-21, 06:16 PM)Mediochre Wrote: [ -> ]If the past life stuff is anywhere accurate then this reality has all the characteristics of a naturally occurring one. Typically those ones are the super complex "fine tuned" ones and created ones tend to be a lot simpler and more direct.

Hmm... fine-tuning is usually taken to be evidence of design, yet here you use it as evidence against design. Can you explain?

(2018-03-23, 02:14 PM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]I had been planning on asking you about that.


Hmm... fine-tuning is usually taken to be evidence of design, yet here you use it as evidence against design. Can you explain?

Well I don't know if it's really evidence since I can't prove the past stuff anyways. But according to it naturally occurring dimensions were the result of collisions of/betyween rivers of what I can only describe as "dimensional energy" which is really not the right term to use but I don't know how else to name it. In incredibly rare cases the collision would be at such a perfect angle that the flows would swirl around each other and become encapsulated, creating a definite inside and outside. internally the dimensional energy would fill every possible logical nook and cranny, creating emergent physical laws based on the initial angles and weights of the collision of all relevant flows.

Creating a single fundamental repeating compound pattern that all else emerged from referred to as the dimension's "marker" which was literally it's laws of physics. All realities and planes within that dimension shared the core physics, being different in their specific expressions of them. Dimensional energy isn't really energy at all, I can only think to describe it as a sort of proto logic soup. Because this soup was infinite because it was just pure logic and arguably not even there at all these incredibly rare events were also infinitely reoccurring. You could think of it like having an infinite ocean with the odd island here or there at somewhat regular intervals. Although some places had many clumped closely together and other places had very few spread very far apart and everything in between. Oh and these islands could float and drift around based on ocean currents. All these islands had their own unique ecosystems that developed in relative isolation.  Some ecosystems shared characteristics with others if the islands were close enough for things to  travel easily. The closer they were, the more similar the ecosystems.


Because the dimensional energy would be forced into every logical possibility it would create properties and relationships far more intricate and complex that what most people could come up with on their own even if they tried to mimic it via procedural generation. It was hard to both get final effects that you wanted while also having all that complexity. Naturally occurring dimensions were also far more stable than created ones, less prone to popping from shifts in the various flows to the point where it might as well be impossible. Once encapsulation was achieved internal stability could be maintained by almost nothing if not nothing. So they acted as very good seeds to build other stuff on and their markers were often copied for that purpose.

Universes didn't need to be giant vast empty things like this one. an entire universe could consist of a single planet or a single room or less. Or it could be things like a totally flat featureless grey wasteland that had no space or planets or anything. Or a repeating forest that only takes up 1 square kilometer but loops in on itself creating the illusion of an infinite flat landscape. etc, etc.

It was even indicated that souls functioned this way as well, being individuated thanks to their own natural encapsulation. Other differences were that created dimensions generally had more direct physics, An example being gravity, setting up the orbit of a planet around a sun to just be at a certain distance travelling a certain speed rather than the distance and speed being the indirect result of actual gravitational laws. indirect physics offered far more complex interactions and things you could naturally do than direct ones, which also helped make them popular. Plus if you made a mistake trying to code in too much complexity you ran the risk of creating some effect that destabilized the universe, making it lose encapsulation and then pop. Natural dimensions were also far, far more common than created ones.

Ultimately I can't say for sure that there's no "god" of this place and I'm saying all this stuff from past life memory so maybe it isn't even accurate. But from my perspective there is probably no god of this place, and even if there was it wouldn't change anything.

::EDIT::

Man there's a lot I didn't cover with this and I can already tell there's going to be some misconceptions. Still I'll keep answering questions as best I can if people want me to. Just can't promise I'll get to it immediately.

Swirling flows of an infinite soup of proto logic out of which drifting islands emerge with unique ecosystems of physical laws... it's a way cool metaphor although maybe a little too abstract (for me) to grasp fully. In particular, I don't see how it explains the fine-tuning of the universe as described in the article linked to in the OP (check it out if you haven't already - it gives good context).

A few other interrelated questions re your post (aside from fine-tuning):

How do souls become associated with particular "islands", in particular by being born into them? Are there "native" souls, as in souls who "belong to" a particular reality? Who or what determines which reality a soul goes to upon death, and who or what decides which reality (if any) that soul is reborn into?

(2018-02-10, 12:08 AM)Ninshub Wrote: [ -> ]Is the Universe a conscious mind?
by Philip Goff
aeon.co

Cosmopsychism might seem crazy, but it provides a robust explanatory model for how the Universe became fine-tuned for life.

Only just got around to reading this, Ian. Very interesting. Cosmopsychism and idealism seem to me to be compatible theories, albeit perhaps requiring a bit of reframing before that becomes evident.