Random thoughts about the universe

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by Nan

Tourists from the future? I think that was Clarke.

John Wyndham got there first - "Pawley's Peepholes", anyone?

I'm firmly of the belief that the universe is the most sublime headfuck ever concieved. The Creator is one scary bastard, if you ask me.

[danieldoof]

oh that leads us directly to another problem: who or what created the universe......or was it even necessary to create it.....
many people believe it was "created" 15 billion years ago or so....has somebody or something created the universe or was is there forever?

others believe that the universe was there the whole time but was only going through contraction and compression phases over and over again

that is another aspect of our time problem....if time is infinite to both directions or if it was created through the "big bang" and will end in a "big crunch" or does not end at all
in case of the second possibility the question of what happened before the "big bang" is not relevant....

it also blasts our minds if we think about the expansion of the universe...our term "expansion" describes that something expands in another room....in the case of the universe what room would that be?
it could also be that the universe expanses into no space at all

another problem is the size of the universe....is it infinite? is it finite? is it finite but does not have boundaries?
I would vote for the third possibility.....it could be described by the relations between the 2dimensional structure of the earths surface and hypothetical 2dimensional beings.....you might already have read about it.....

that is it for this time :wink:

[PG15]

Originally Posted by PointyHairedJedi

I'm firmly of the belief that the universe is the most sublime headfuck ever concieved. The Creator is one scary bastard, if you ask me.

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

Indeed.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

And here I was already to quote Douglas Adams.

"In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded."

[richardson]

Watch the entire RedVsBlue seires.

"nough said on the topic of time travel right there.

[danieldoof]

okay than we can go to another subject :wink:

I have to think a bit

[danieldoof]

okay I thought a bit and decided to go on to some not so light subject......

what do you think about our existence as human beings....for example yourself...how far back reach your memories?
it is difficult to believe that *boom* our mind just pops into existence and with the same *boom* disappears when we die...

I find it very difficult to accept that our existence will end in a single moment later on...then there comes believe into play......could it be that after death we will exist further in another of our many dimensions?
will there be a rest of our existence left in this one?

it is also difficult to grasp what our so called "free will" really is
some scientist say that an impulse for for example arm moving an arm is there before we even realise that we want to move our arm

and is the uncertainty principle really imporant in telling if there is a free will or not.....


philosophy a bit :wink:

[Michiel]

I am an atheist. Or, as some call it, a bright. I do not believe in an afterlife. I do not believe in 'free will', in that I think that our brain is just a biological computer. When it is born, it can transmit electrical signals through itself and the body. It is just running a program, which evolved by chance. It makes decisions based on memory and five senses.

When you die, you die. The elektrical impulses stop, and that which some call your conciousness is no more. You don't go to an afterlife. In my opinion, this is just something made up by people who fear death, later also used to control people.

[danieldoof]

I would also consider myself as an atheist but science as I know does not exclude the possibility of a so called "afterlife"
I think it could be possible to for example transfer the whole personality of somebody into a computer, maybe grown from neural cells.....
that would make "life" neverending....

[Michiel]

Actually, an atheist is defined as one who does not believe in a supernatural being.

Science could never disprove God, or an afterlife. Just like we could never prove it if we were really all inside the matrix, if the simulation is precise enough.

Therefore I cannot say with 100% certainty that there is no God, or no afterlife, but I choose to believe they don't exist. If there were a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, the world would be a different place.

And naturally, if we have learned enough about the human brain, and it really is just a computer, we could copy it, like you say. But it is possible that mechanical circuits could never handle it, and that we would need to replicate our biological brain.

[PointyHairedJedi]

My way of looking at it is that although we can only percieve them in a linear fashion, all moments in time exist at once, so therefore nobody ever really dies in the sense that they disappear forever - they're still existing out there somewhere, even though you can't percieve themm. Immortality of a sort, if you like.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

You just made my brain explode.

[whoiam]

Imagine that you are sitting in a train on a completely straight track, and you are fastened into your seat. All that is visible is a narrow slice of countryside through slit windows on either side of you.

The train moves along this track in only the one direction, and so you can see everything out of the windows, so long as you are patient enough to wait for it to come into the LoS of the windows level with your seat.

Now, say there is a windmill off to one side. You will see it just the once, as the train passes it. However, when you can no longer see it through the windoes, it is nevertheless still there - it is just somewhere you cannot see.

I think this is a fairly accurate visualisation for PHJ's view on things - if you assume that the train is your passage through time, then you can only ever experience the slice of time you are in now, but the times you have already passed are still there, regardless of whether or not we are in them.

Or to put it another way, just because you cannot turn around, doesn't mean that the world behind you isn't there...

[Michiel]

Nice explanation!

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by Sa'ar Chasm

You just made my brain explode.

Then my work here is done.

That is exactly what I mean, whoiam. Nicely put.

[danieldoof]

@pointy
but doesn't that mean that also the future moments exist somewhere?
so do you even have choices to make without those moments change all the time?

and if it is so ... why is it that the "past" moments are sensible to us but not the "future" ones? maybe it comes from the fact that the "future" moments like I said change instantly when we make a decision..... so they are not sensible to us at all

(I like torturing my brain with all this :wink: )

[Michiel]

I think I said this already, but: I think the entire Space-time-continuüm is fixed. So, the future doesn't 'change' at all.

We can no more 'decide' to do something than a row of dominoes can decide to fall down. When the first one is pushed, they just do. Our brains are just part of the equation.

[NeoMatrix]

Time could be like a neverending movie. You are just along for the ride, playing your part in the movie.

Time travelling could be like a movie on a DVD. You can't go back to change something because technically the change already occured when the event took place the first time, which brings up a paradox

[whoiam]

No, the paradox is if you can change the past in a way that invalidates the future you came from. If your meddling succeeds only in producing the (exact) same timeline that existed originally, then there is no paradox.

Of course, in a completely deterministic universe, there is no other way such a time travel could turn out... the end result would have to be the same as it was originally.

[Michiel]

Like I said, I don't believe in the "Time will fix everything" theory. If you travel into the past, you have changed the future, no matter what you do next.

The fixed space-time-continuüm of which I speak does not exclude either time-travel theory that I posted about earlier.