(2018-03-28, 05:44 PM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]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?
First, I don't remotely see how the Boltzmann Brain Problem refutes a multiverse theory since all it appears to be saying is there'd be less observers like us according to it. Which is a far cry from a refutation. In fact it does more to support what the past life memory indicates, that there are vast oceans of "chaos" or at least places we wouldn't recognize as ordered and little islands of "order" only some of which are compatible with human life as we know it to varying degrees. But with all of it being technically infinite it was more a ratio of how often you'd find one/how spaced out they tended to be rather than how many discreet examples there were. So either I really, really don't understand the paradox or it's just religious people trying to act like they're special again. The Boltzmann Brain problem is like me saying that, because 90% of humanity live in abject poverty in 3rd world countries, but I don't live in abject poverty in a 3rd world country, well, 3rd world countries must not exist because it's too improbable for me to be living in a 1st world one. What a ridiculous farce of a refutation! The probabilities of anyone even being who they are, where they are, right now are so astronomically low that I guess none of us exist right?
I wasn't a fan of the article as a whole and was not surprised after reading it that it was funded by a religious group because it sure as hell read like it was. Just people wanting to believe that they're somehow objectively super special unique snowflakes. Yeah they're
real unique... just like everyone else.
Stating that the only thing we know about matter is that "some of it is conscious" is not a fact, its an opinion. We don't know what consciousness is, where it comes from, or if it's associated with matter at all. I'd argue that NDE research on it's own is evidence to the contrary.
Furthermore once the article starts talking about the "fact" that life has value it totally loses the argument. life having value is an opinion not a fact. As far as I'm concerned the world could end in the next 5 minutes, the whole universe could implode into chaos and it's intrinsic "value" wouldn't change at all. Since I disagree with the idea that there's any value to life, that means the theory that value intrinsically exists is false since I'm an example that goes against that idea.
Also when it tries to postulate that the universe "chose" the laws of physics was another deathblow. I've yet to see or develop a mathematical proof that free will and thus choice are even possible so that idea dies right there. And I like the idea of free will, or I did until I realized you can't both have free will and a self. Then I decided I liked the idea of the self better. Plus I've yet to experience free will. Everything I've ever done feels more like a reaction than an action.
In my opinion the article seemed like it was trying to come up with some kind of plausibly deniable excuse to shoehorn in the idea of a conscious universe in the most secularly palatable way possible why still retaining hints of religion rather than any sort of real logic. The issue with the whole "consciousness in fundamental" idea is you could just as easily say "zinc is fundamental" or "red is fundamental" and apply the same logic to prove it. None of this rules out the idea that the universe could somehow be created, but I'd argue it rules out the idea that it HAS to be created, that there is NO OTHER WAY it could exist.
In any case your interrelated questions are things that I probably should've covered (and briefly mention in my mentality sim thread replies) in my first reply because I knew it was going to cause some confusion. The island analogy is, believe it or not, no where near complex enough to be an accurate analogy for what I was talking about, but it's the closest thing I could think of that still kinda worked.
How do souls get associated with a particular universe? the short answer is "I don't know." In order to give the proper long answer I'd have to try talking about specifics on the past life stuff and I started writing it but I just can't bring myself to post it in this thread so I'll just give the end result stuff. What I can say is that there will never be a "who" answer to any of these questions. There will never be an answer that goes "oh yeah and then there's this 'God' and they 'Decide' how things works". Never going to happen, ever. Unless of course you're talking about the inside of a particular thing that someone specifically made, then sometimes yes, but outside of that on the 'objective' level, no.
Yes, its possible for souls to be native to a particular universe/plane/timeline/dimension/etc and the reasons why they are associated was well understood. However the process for how a soul becomes
initialized within a particular place was never discovered. Last I can remember they were attempting to find someone who was in their very first incarnation so they could study their soul to see what characteristics it had. But they couldn't find anyone who was a fresh soul. So the theories people were talking about at the time were:
A: Souls were created by rogue bits of energy slamming into each other within or outside of a universe which would achieve encapsulation the same way dimensions seemed to. Sometimes the pattern of these "proto souls" would be compatible enough with human brains and general anatomy to successfully interface with them and the random variations in patterns in the energy created a sort of "personality seed" which could generate psuedo past life memories that might as well be real to the person when such a soul interfaced with a human brain.
B: The soul was generated through neural processes and attained encapsulation through normal physical life, becoming capable of surviving bodily death and possessing new, compatible human hosts via reincarnation. Since the initial host was human in a particular universe, on a particular plane, etc, those factors became the lowest energy, most compatible state for that soul to interface with, and subsequent interfacing would only strengthen this compatibility creating a standard native soul.
C: Some combination of A and B
If the answer was ever found I was not there to know about it. I only know what was being discussed at the time. I have no idea how long I've been out of the loop for either.
In short, a soul, just like literally everything else material or otherwise, belongs to the same dimension/plane/etc that matches it's marker, the same fundamental compound pattern that dimensions and etc had. a soul will always reincarnated/reform in its lowest energy, stable state. Generally that meant floating back to the place that matched its marker and rooting into whatever was the most compatible thing at the time. Although thanks to the constant fluctuations in reality among other factors, compatibility would fluctuate as well.
I don't remember anything specific about this but after analysing the memories I think it's possible that this applies to initial life circumstances as well since all of that could be easily classified as a time space pattern/coordinate thing of sorts. Certainly my own early memories seem to support this and since I've analysed a lot of the other ones I've noticed patterns for myself and others that seem oddly stable. Generally speaking, the more of something you experience, the more of it you are likely to experience. This seems to be common in other people reincarnation stories as well. for example, the vast majority of people remember being human and generally within this timeline. The exceptions are just that, exceptions, which is the same thing that was found back then.
This process eventually became so well understood that the military figured to how to co opt it to shove dead soldiers back into pre made military grade clones whenever they'd die. Retaining at least some if not all of their former knowledge in the process. There was a medical condition referred to as "Reality Tearing" which was when someones soul was poorly/weakly anchored to a particular reality. in extreme cases it would cause sudden perceptual shifts back and forth between one or more timelines that were usually very closely adjacent to the one they physically inhabited. Obviously if you were someone who was driving or operating heavy machinery or even just talking to another person this was a pretty major problem. It was treated with sugar water pills heavily laced with the energy of the reality you were "supposed" to be in. I only know that because I got treated for it.
The classification system that got developed to categorise things based on their relative markers went like this:
1st Party - Native to the dimension, plane, and timeline it currently inhabits.
2nd Party - Not native to the plane
3rd Party - Not native to the dimension
4th Party - Not native to the timeline
If I remember correctly the terms "timeline" and "reality" were synonymous but saying timeline was technically more correct because it literally dealt with the local flow of time. So literally a line of time.
Likewise if I remember correctly the definitions of the timespaces went something like this:
Dimension - the base physics
Plane - The lateral displacement of the dimension
Timeline - the linear displacement of the dimension
I haven't had to try defining these things in words like this for I don't know how long and I don't remember their initial definitions like I do for the Party system. I know I did it wrong but I just can't think of how else to say it. It's stupid because I know what I mean but I'm pretty sure no one else does. None of these were discreet values, meaning there were infinite of them since you could slice their coordinates finer and finer and finer forever. Just like regular physical space. Making trying to map the multiverse kind of like trying to map the water in a swimming pool. An absurd concept at first since it's all just water so how could you possibly differentiate it?
Presumably dimensions themselves were just an expression of something more fundamental and vague which would be an expression of something else even more fundamental and vague and so on and so forth. If I could sum up what the math was like it would be "infinite layers of infinites"
One way I found to look at it is to think about computer programs. All programs are just some combination of permutations of combinations of some length of bit caches. You could, therefore, create all possible programs for a given architecture by doing nothing but generating and saving all possible machine language code. You are guaranteed to eventually hit complex things like operating system and, I don't know, Doom. Likewise someone else could come along like John Carmack and program Doom themselves. The cosmopsychism/religious side would look at Doom and go "oh my god, its so complex and intricate, surely something intelligent MUST have created it, it's far too intricate to have happened randomly!" and they'd be wrong. The mere fact that Doom was a combination of permutations of bits meant it could've happened either way, and chances are if you had a computer running forever doing nothing but churning out and saving various machine language programs whether they worked or not you're probably gong to find Doom in it's database long before Carmack ever programmed his. But you're not just going to find the "official" Doom, you're also going to find every possible tiny little variation of Doom. Doom where the colours are ever so slightly different. Doom where one enemy's health is one point higher or lower. Doom's where the starting levels are slightly different. But for all intents and purposes its still Doom. Likely these Dooms will all share a great deal of compatibility with each other, so much so they could probably share assets and code with each other without modification.
But you're going to find far more junk programs, things that don't run at all or things that run for a moment and stop. An ocean of chaotic junk that you have to sail through to get to the small islands of Doom and equivalent.
You could repeat this on other architectures and do the same thing, eventually Doom and all it's variations would show up on them too even though the fundamental instruction set is different. Maybe those differences would make Doom run slightly differently but otherwise be the exact same game. Maybe the differences would be so huge that Doom could not be created at all. You could start organising all these things, all these architectures, operating systems, and programs, in a database. Hell you could have something generating the architectures too and add another layer to it all. Chances are it would be convenient to think of each layer as a spectrum rather than a discreet thing. an easier way of categorising all things that are like something:
Architecture, OS, Program, etc
And one entry of Doom in the database might look like this
x86, Windows7, Doom.
Maybe the generator also generated systems with save games on certain levels as well so you could get more specific with your categorisation
x86, Windows7, Doom, E2, M5
Maybe there's even saves within that level but in different parts of the level and/or where different tasks have already been completed.
But wait Doom can run on multiple systems so you could have:
Armv8, Raspbian, Doom, E2, M5, etc, etc
Armv7, ArchLinux, Doom, E2, M5, etc, etc
AMD64, Gentoo, Doom, E2, M5, etc, etc
x86. FreeBSD, Doom E2, M5, etc, etc
AMD64, OpenBSD, Doom, E2, M5, etc, etc
x86, Debian, Doom, E2, M5, etc, etc
And so on and so forth. All different instruction sets and/or operating systems yet all running the exact same program.
This is how the Dimension, Plane, Timeline, X,Y,Z, etc, etc classification system works to teh best of my knowledge. An ocean of chaotic junk that has little islands of order in them.
The assertion the article makes that "oh my god if things were only a little different life couldn't exist, surely life is special then!" is stupid. These fundamental characteristics interact with each other, they don't exist in isolation as the article itself points out. Which means you could, for example, change the nuclear force if other characteristics about subatomic particles also changed, creating a balance that equated in the
exact same behaviour but with different fundamental values.
I know I should wrrite more, I know this doesn't explain everything, but I've been working on this for too long already and I really don't want to spend the time on top of it spellchecking everything. Obviously this is all based on past life knowledge that I admittedly believe but also have no true proof for for anyone else so I'm not saying any of this is true nor do I expect anyone to believe it.