Random thoughts about the universe

[Chancellor Valium]

Life, the Universe and Everything....you want some of my ideas?

15 billion years ago the universe was created by the supreme being. Only quasi-rational explanation for absolute nothing exploding into matter, IMO.
Size: Infinite (as far as anyone can tell)
Rainfall: None (in an infinite space there is no up for the rain to fall down from)

Time travel is possible, but the power requirements are extreme, possibly requiring a black hole for power....Or some way of harnessing a neutron star...And within your own personal Universe. Paradoxes are like pearls in time, a way to stop time having to fold up into itself, by containing the whole event...

Alternate realities do exist, caused by every choice every person makes. Therefore the universe is infinite in all directions. Free will also exists. The future is either all mapped out because everywhere is the present, so you're already doing it in that present, if you see what I mean, or the future doesn't exist because it hasn't happened yet, so you'd materialise with your time machine in absolute nothingness...


Your memories reach to your birth, because that is when you gain full consciousness, IMO. Your brain locks off your earliest memories due to the trauma of childbirth. Again, IMO....

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by 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: )

I should clarify anyway that I don't just mean "past" moments are fixed in time, becuse again that's the linear view. I mean that all points in time are fixed. When it comes to time, y'see, we can only think in straight lines because of the fundamental nature of how we percieve it. "The Future" only seems to be in flux because we have not experienced it yet - from our point of view it doesn't actually matter if all our future moments are already fixed because it seems to us that they haven't. You can argue that free will is an illusion, but I don't think that it is because we do genuinely decide for ourselves what our actions will be - that those actions are already fixed in a moment of time is an irrelevancy.

[Michiel]

Exactly. It all depends on how you define free will.

[MaverickZer0]

Which is exactly how I define free will. What you're saying basically is that it is only an illusion. I don't believe that. If free will were an illusion, then this would be slightly pointless. For alternate universes to work, there must be free will...

(Unless you believe my ideas, which I really don't advise.)

[AKAArzosah]

So if all points in time are fixed, maybe we just choose which point in time we go to (Choose your own Adventure). To use the already stated train example, while we can pick which train we get on, we can't see the other trains even though they're there.

Did that make any sense? I wouldn't know cos i'm so depressed.

[whoiam]

Yes, that would be the 'train' analogy of one of the 'alternate universes' theories - where every possible outcome becomes a different dimension - except it assumes that you can chose which branch to follow, instead of going down them all simultaneously.

Personally, I think we go down them all... this is where the train model kinda falls down, though - IRL, when a train track branches you don't get exact duplicates of the train and all its occupants...

[danieldoof]

I once heard that when a particle is moving it is not moving in one way but in all possible ways and the way of the highest probability is later visible to us......
maybe this could also be in our universe problem
lets say we have an infinite amount of alternate universes, one for every "decision" ever made, it is better to say for each possibility because there is no free will for decision making.....okay so there are those universes....what if we "move" in space time in all those universes simultanely and the universe that has the highest probability of things to happen comes to reality and is "seen", "sensed" by us....
in this theory free will is still an illusion because we move on "pathes of the highest probability"
then it would be pure math that leads our way
okay maybe I interpreted it a little wrong, maybe it is not the path of the highest probability, maybe it is the avarage of all possibilities and the one with high probability have come to life in the biggest number of alternate universes and therefor would be our "path"

[Opium]

If at every human decision an AU brached off into an AU, because they are all AU's, and each AU had the same amount of time in it, there would be such an infinite amount of AU's that they could never be accounted for...until of course, they all mashed into one during some horrid time-travel expirment. And the whole thing would start again, with one AU starting at each decision one of six billion people in each AU made...

[danieldoof]

well
but you also have an infinite number of numbers between the numbers one and two.....and there is an infinite number of numbers where an infinite number of numbers can be between them...

that also works...so why not the infinite amount of au's.....

[Michiel]

The same way free will is an illusion, I believe probability is also an illusion.

If a die is thrown, and an outside observer had access to all data the moment the die left the hand (air pressure, position of every molecule on the die and the table, etc.) and this observer had a computer with enough processing power, he could predict with 100% accuracy which number will land on top.

And because free will is an illusion, this observer could even predict the thrown number before the die left the hand. Even before the thrower 'decided' that it would be a neat idea to throw a die today. IF the observer had all the nessesary information at the time of prediction, which now includes the state of the throwers neurons.

Because such observation is impossible for us humans (we cannot have all this information and we don't have the processing-capacity to simulate the situation in enough detail), we created the concept of probability. A way to predict, with as much accuracy as possible, the outcome of a situation.

To quote Albert Einstein: "I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice."

[danieldoof]

I also think it is possible to know which side a die would fall on if you were able to know in which state all the atoms and molecules in the vicinity....yes even everywhere are
you would also have to know in which state even the vacuum is....so what energy it has (big scales see below)

but it is not possible to know the state of the atoms or molecules and also the vacuum....

I think that the uncertainty principle comes into play there......
so you could not predict the exact position and momentum of a given particle at a time...and so also not the energy

maybe on such big scales as dice it someday maybe even today could be possible to predict a toss because the molecules of the surrounding have not such great effect on the die and on its movement

[whoiam]

I think the most interesting point here is to ask if the uncertainty principle describes a fundamental limit to what we can know about the universe, or a scale at which reality actually *is* random? Both would, I think, give the same uncertainty - and there would be no experimental way of proving which was correct... but its an interesting point, isn't it? Are we merely on too large a scale to understand all of reality, or is it fundamentally unintelligible?

[MaverickZer0]

I'm rather inclined to believe the latter. I mean, with all the screwed up stuff everywhere, how can we possibly understand it all?

Then again, the secrets of the universe could be locked away in our subconscious...or maybe everything we know is wrong.

The universal answer may be 42, but let's not forget that the question is 'What is six multiplied by nine?'

[Chancellor Valium]

Originally Posted by danieldoof

well
but you also have an infinite number of numbers between the numbers one and two.....and there is an infinite number of numbers where an infinite number of numbers can be between them...

that also works...so why not the infinite amount of au's.....

Ahh, is this the "measuring the coastline of Britain" thingy, where it's infinitely divisible and therefore infinite?

If you could apply this theory you could almost stop time....

Also, if Free Will is an illusion, why not give up and go home already? There's no point to life if there's no free will, we're all just robots then.

IMO, the future is already mapped out, because the future is the present further forward, so you've made the decisions that you're going to make there, but on the other hand you will still make the decisions here. If you make the wrong decision for this universe, it branches off into another...

[Michiel]

Indeed. It is my belief that we are just biological robots. Amazingly advanced ones.

Even if free will is an illusion, it's a nice one. If you enjoy life, then THAT's the point. And, of course, you've never heard me say I was 100% certain of my theories. I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron.

[danieldoof]

yes then in your theory there would also be an "infinite" amount of au's...one for each decision ever made......and a free will would be possible even if the "future" already exists
also is a nice way thinking about free will......

and the problem with mesuring the coast of britain....do you think it is even possible to divide length to an infinite amount of pieces?
between two given numbers there is still an infinite amount of numbers.......but does this also work for space?

I do not believe that space or time is dividable into an infinite amount of pieces.........maybe it is because we do not understand yet what is going on on length scales equal to the planck-length.......

[Michiel]

Well, no, that's not consistent with my theory. A 'decision' is nothing more than an electrical reaction in the brain. No more significant to the universe than the interaction of two electrons on Pluto. And I think every one of those occurrences MUST happen in only one way. There's no possibility of its happening any other way, so there are no alternate universes.

The only kind of alternate universe that I think can be created, has to do with traveling back in time. And I really don't know if that's possible, or will ever be possible.

[PG15]

I like that theory.

Also, even if free will is an illusion, you still don't know what is planned for you. You could be a billionaire for all you know.