This is for the outsider--as in outsider art--philosophers among us, the people who dream about science fiction and time travel. The people whose brains churn with crazy (not in a DSM sense) cogitations, the kinds of deep thoughts it's hard to talk about in normal conversation. The kinds of people who during office meetings are really thinking about quantum tunneling, chaos theory, spectography, and what dark matter may actually be.
edit: I once wrote a paper as a child in which, following scientific theory development guidelines, I came to the conclusion I could not disprove that I was a disembodied brain in a jar. Scared the crap out of me.
The rest of the book is divided into three parts. Part one, "Zooming Out," deals with locating ourselves in the cosmos and/or multiverse. Part two, "Zooming In," looks for added perspective from quantum mechanics and particle physics. Part three, "Stepping Back," interweaves a scientific viewpoint with Tegmark's speculative ideas about the mathematical nature of reality. By the end of the book, Tegmark has hypothesized four different levels of multiverse. You hit the bulls eye.The book begins with an account of a bicycle accident in Stockholm in which Tegmark was killed… in some theoretical parallel universes, though not in our own.
This isn't space/time, but it is existence I suppose - I used to think that everything we do was on a fixed track, a form of predestination in which we were always going to make the same choices at any given point. I have since further refined that idea to come as a result of brain chemistry - that it is impossible for us to "will" ourselves to do anything that we weren't already going to do, because all our actions are based on an unpredictable concoction of electrical impulses and hormones pumping through our system. So we can't know ahead of time what we're going to do at any given point, because it depends on those signals and impulses and chemicals, and consciousness is only an awareness of the result, not a motivator of action. This also a way of saying I don't believe in a mind/body duality, that your brain and your mind are one, so what seems like an instruction your mind is giving to your brain is just one impulse from one part of the brain to another. This is also why I don't think you could be a disembodied brain in a jar, because all of the inputs you're receiving are from chemical reactions in your body, and if you didn't have a body, you would have to be receiving those inputs some other way, and that's just some other sort of "body" (i.e. what's the difference between a sack of carbon and a computer if they're sending the same chemical signals?).
Yeah, I've done way too much reading on biology, neurobiology, neuroscience, et al ad infinitum to think it's a simple thing. The brain itself, there are parts of the brain that work against other parts of the brain that confuse other parts of the brain, and existential angst, basic human stupidity, cognitive biases, logical fallacies are due to how the brain's intermingling parts are matched and mismatched (evolution is trial and error, after all)... I'm all for the "I am the universe, and the universe is me" line of thinking, but one concern I have about that: when I die, I want to DIE.
Something that's always fascinated me is the useful units we land on at different levels of analysis. For example, it is hard and not very useful to describe everything in terms of the smallest units possible, right? That's why we describe molecules in the language of chemistry and not in terms of all of their subatomic particles, that's why we describe cells in the language of biology and not in terms of all of their subatomic particles, etc etc. This often makes me wonder -- what will end up being the useful units at higher levels of analysis? I have no answers, only questions, but it's a fun thing to think about.
I have a shape for humanity. In a sense, it's a single soul spiraling in an erratic pattern around a type of gravity well. Each time the soul goes into the well a life ends, each time it shoots back out a life begins. If looked at from a certain angle you could see that it's all one big line, but we don't have that perspective so we tend to think of all the lives happening at the same time. Some people's arc takes them far away from the well, others keep them close. A person you saw yesterday could be at the end of the line, a person you see tomorrow could be at the beginning. If you could unwind the entire line and mold it into a shape that would be understandable to our limited minds, you would find the most intricate and beautiful story that we could never imagine. I see it more clearly than I can speak it, but I'll keep trying.
Sounds kinda like grooves in a record. Very interesting. It reminded me of something I recently read, may've been here on Hubski, or links found via Hubski. That some basic building block of existence... photon? Gods, I can't remember. Anyhow, it travels faster than the speed of light, so in essence, it transcends time. All of time can be found in a single instance of that element, and at any given point in human time, it is existing in both earth's prehistorical periods and periods far into the future all at once.
Not so orderly as grooves on a record. Have you ever scribbled with a pen for a long time, making loop upon loop that all cross over a central point? Some loops are huge, others small, all eventually make their way back to the dark inky blotch in the middle. Something like that.
Sadly I don't remember much about them, but the Wikipedia article on attractors is actually pretty nice. Seems like attractors are just some set of numbers for which a system tends toward. Maybe the fixed-point attractor is a better descriptor of your original idea: the system tends toward one fixed point and oscillates around it chaotically. I first read about attractors in high school in the book Chaos by James Gleick, which is a fantastic book I highly recommend for this sort of stuff.
I have an ongoing pair of models of the universe. The first is the one that seems the most probable. The second is the world at it's most plausibly interesting. If there is no direct law of physics against an event, consider it plausible, if only for a second. An example from the latter being a sincere hope that some kind of initiative is conducted to put permanent livable installations on the Moon or Mars or both. I have some theories about the way that such structures could be feasibly constructed, and none of it seems to violate the laws of physics as I understand them. The only thing that I see being a direct problem would be money, and to quote Heinlein A large reason why I'm excited about building a proper gaming PC, so I can download Kerbal Space Program and a bunch of mods and see if I can create something like the process and architecture that i've been thinking about for a long time. For example, some scientists have conceptualized a band of solar panels that completely encircles the equator of the moon, as a mega source of power. Such a thing is preposterous in the short term, but if the process could be automated, it would become a progressively better investment in money, resources and energy, as each panel that came online began to immediately pay itself off, rather than once the whole array was in place as with traditional Terran methods. In the beginning the power levels would be relatively low, requiring no conceptually new hardware. By the time there was enough energy being generated by the array for overload to be a serious issue technology will have advanced somewhat, and creating/transporting the more sophisticated and robust system to handle the total load will be easier/cheaper. As a single example.Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.”
You may need some paper, to draw this out, but bear with me. At any given moment, a person can be represented by three interlocking rings or circles. All three meet at one point, and then any given two will intersect by themselves at some point as well. One ring is, solely for aesthetic and explination reasons, larger than the others. That's the basic shape. There are three rings for the three most basic constructions of time: future, past, and the large ring is the present (which really take up no more metaphysical room than the others, it is just where everything is happening, and so when I draw it, I need more room). As time progresses, these rings cycle, moving along each other. Where all three intersect, that is the present the person is in. Of course, there is an entire ring for the present, but there is only one situation whee past, present and future join. Call it Now (with the capital). The present ring contains all nows, not as alternatives or alternate universes, but as different situations that are also occurring to the person on the present. What seperstes Now from all other nows is that the past and future are also there. Based on their life and their goals, the person is in the Now as opposed to any other situation, which all occur within the same time unit. That covers the three-day intersection. The two-way intersections are different depending on which two rings intersect. For the present and past, the intersection is the 'remembered past'. Basically, the events in the person's mind that lead to the Now, and which are therefore being considered. The present and future intersect at the 'foreseeable future's. In short, the outcome the person predicts will come from the Now. The future and past intersect at the 'predicated now', which is what the person expected, but as life teaches us, is never the exact same as the Now. The drawing gets a little more complicated here. Each person's 'timeline' is touched by other people's. Here is why I draw the present ring big. For simplicity, I also only draw the arcs of other people's present. These arcs touch the timeline, sometimes once, sometimes twice. Sometimes they follow the same path for a while. While it can't say what type of interaction there was, it does say these two people interacted, and they could be interacting (and really, are interacting) in some now. Finally, all of this is taking place within the Now of the Universe, which has its own timeline with its own rings. The Universe's Now is big enough to contain all other rings, not just their Nows. This is the product of way to much time trying to think big thoughts, but my friends enjoy it, and I find it usefull at times. I'd love some feedback, refinements or additions.
Okay, it's been a lot more than a couple of day, but sorry, I got swamped with some college visits and stuff like that. But better late than never, I hope: http://m.imgur.com/P8MpNq7 I'm not very good at drawing circles, and I apologize for my handwriting in advance.
mk, I recall that years ago you posted a theory on time. Can you link to it or am I mistaken?
Thank you! You have a gift for clearly conveying what others would needlessly complicate.
Weeks are a spiral as well, months not so much, because there is less overlap. It goes up, and it is oriented so December is north. Another spacial thinking anomaly, I have to look west to tell left from right. I always know north, south, east, and west. I fell asleep on a car trip, and had to go outside, and reset. I am good at navigating, but I can't focus well enough to drive. I really don't like the responsibility, and prefer to take the bus or bike. It has also been pointed out, that I am bad at bike safety as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not_using_relative_directions A tribe in Australia has no left/right either and only use cardinal directions!
Your "resetting" reminded me of this radiolab story about a girl who got lost in her backyard.
Oh, I love radiolab. Her condition sounds very unsettling. I don't like to be lost. I had to reset, because my relatives lived in the suburbs, and their house was at an angle. We would leave the house, and it felt like the north and south streets, were at angles. I had to go outside several times a day, to get a feel for how tilted the house was. I do it now if I get off an airplane or something, so I don't have any more trouble than normal, navigating a new place.
I hope I'm not asking too many questions; your spiral concept intrigues me. So, in your mind's eye, are you seeing the spiral from a side view, as if looking at a corkscrew from the side, or are you inside the spiral and watching it revolve and unfurl around you? Similar to your directions issue, whenever I'm told to go left or right, I have to physically look down at my hands, think about it, extend my right hand outwards, physically orient, and have to follow in the direction my hand is pointed at or I have to start all over again.
I am in the spiral, but can look back, or think about the future. Like I have swimming exercise class, Monday and Wednesday, and Pilates on Thursdays. I can see that pattern the rest of the semester, while also thinking about graduation and transfer paperwork, due before December. The driving thing is a bit more complicated. I have my license, but I make sure my boyfriend teaches me how to drive, every once in a while, so I am better at driving, than he is drunk. Most of it has to do with ideological motivations, about oil policy and global warming. I don't drive as a public service, as many more bad drivers should. I would be an early adapter of self driving cars if it was electric, and I could afford it.