Earth at the center of the Universe?

How does science work? And what's all this about quantum mechanics?

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Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

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Arising_uk wrote:
Obvious Leo wrote:... Is the universe a "place" or is the universe simply an eternal sequence of events which the observer observes as a "place"? ...
Or is it just an 'ancestor sim', as you appear to be assuming the 'eternal' bit?
I assume the eternal bit on the grounds of Occam economy and for no other reason. If the universe is everything that exists then it can have had no beginning and unless we define the universe as everything that exists we immediately define its nature as unknowable. In other words we've given up before we've even begun, which is fine for the theists but not so good for the scientists or philosophers.

Interestingly the way physics models the universe would be defined in information theory as a simulation or a virtual reality which is remarkably close to the way Newton actually defined it. He saw the universe as an artefact of the mind of god and he even went so far as to define the three dimensions of the Cartesian space as god's senses. Even though he was a believer himself Leibniz was having none of this crap.
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Arising_uk
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

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Obvious Leo wrote:I assume the eternal bit on the grounds of Occam economy and for no other reason. If the universe is everything that exists then it can have had no beginning and unless we define the universe as everything that exists we immediately define its nature as unknowable. In other words we've given up before we've even begun, which is fine for the theists but not so good for the scientists or philosophers. ...
Yet but if in everything that exists we're just an 'ancestor sim' then we would have a beginning?
Interestingly the way physics models the universe would be defined in information theory as a simulation or a virtual reality which is remarkably close to the way Newton actually defined it. He saw the universe as an artefact of the mind of god and he even went so far as to define the three dimensions of the Cartesian space as god's senses.
Leibniz's Monads can still be on such a sim.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

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Arising_uk wrote:Yet but if in everything that exists we're just an 'ancestor sim' then we would have a beginning?
And if your auntie had balls she'd be your uncle. IF the universe had a beginning THEN it must have had an external causal agent. This is a perfectly logical conclusion from an unverifiable premise and is therefore not philosophy.
Arising_uk wrote:Leibniz's Monads can still be on such a sim.
But this would violate his own Principle of Sufficient Reason. His monads can be equally real in a universe which is everything that exists and is therefore one which is sufficient to its own existence.
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Arising_uk
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Arising_uk »

Obvious Leo wrote: And if your auntie had balls she'd be your uncle. IF the universe had a beginning THEN it must have had an external causal agent. This is a perfectly logical conclusion from an unverifiable premise and is therefore not philosophy.
Are you saying ancestor sims are impossible?

I thought Leibniz thought there was a 'God' exactly because a transcendent cause was required for the facts?
But this would violate his own Principle of Sufficient Reason. His monads can be equally real in a universe which is everything that exists and is therefore one which is sufficient to its own existence.
But if ancestor sims are possible then how would we know we're not in one?
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Arising_uk wrote:Are you saying ancestor sims are impossible?
Nothing is impossible and the ancestor sims are as plausible as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, god, the multiverse or any other unverifiable hypothesis.
Arising_uk wrote:I thought Leibniz thought there was a 'God' exactly because a transcendent cause was required for the facts?
Indeed. He stole some of Spinoza's ideas but not all of them, just as I have stolen some of Leibniz's ideas but not all of them. Transcendent cause is strictly for the faithful but not Necessity in a self-causal reality.
surreptitious57
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by surreptitious57 »

Obvious Leo wrote:
We can truthfully say that the universe has existed in the past and will exist in the future but it actually only currently exists at the nexus between the two and this nexus point is changing at the speed of light. It is simply a matter of physical fact that we cannot observe the universe as it IS and the space between the observer and an observed event is ALWAYS different for every observer of this event
Every thing that we see is in the past but because of the time it takes for light to travel that distance is usually such an infinitesimal
amount of time our brain perceives it as instantaneous. Light can travel 299 792 kilometres or 186 282 miles in one second but every
day objects are significantly closer than that so we are unaware of any time difference. So our past effectively becomes our present
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

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surreptitious57 wrote:
Obvious Leo wrote:
We can truthfully say that the universe has existed in the past and will exist in the future but it actually only currently exists at the nexus between the two and this nexus point is changing at the speed of light. It is simply a matter of physical fact that we cannot observe the universe as it IS and the space between the observer and an observed event is ALWAYS different for every observer of this event
Every thing that we see is in the past but because of the time it takes for light to travel that distance is usually such an infinitesimal
amount of time our brain perceives it as instantaneous. Light can travel 299 792 kilometres or 186 282 miles in one second but every
day objects are significantly closer than that so we are unaware of any time difference. So our past effectively becomes our present
Effectively yes but literally no and the distinction is not a trivial one when it comes to what's real and what's not real. It's OK to say that the past WAS ONCE real but it's not OK to say that the past is real NOW and to suggest that a physical space can exist between the observer and something which is no longer real is both a metaphysical absurdity and the logical fallacy of the 4D manifold of spacetime.
surreptitious57
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by surreptitious57 »

Obvious Leo wrote:
surreptitious57 wrote:
Every thing that we see is in the past but because of the time it takes for light to travel that distance is usually such an infinitesimal
amount of time our brain perceives it as instantaneous. Light can travel 299 792 kilometres or 186 282 miles in one second but every
day objects are significantly closer than that so we are unaware of any time difference. So our past effectively becomes our present
Effectively yes but literally no and the distinction is not a trivial one when it comes to what is real and what is not real. It is OK to say
that the past WAS ONCE real but its not OK to say that the past is real NOW and to suggest that a physical space can exist between the
observer and something which is no longer real is both a metaphysical absurdity and the logical fallacy of the 4D manifold of spacetime
Even if our brain could correct the error so that the present was actually regarded as the past no matter how infinitesimal the difference
it would make no difference in practical terms. It is only important from a purely theoretical perspective. Even physicists do not imagine
they are literally living in the past from day to day. As they live in what their brain perceives as the present just like everybody else does
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Arising_uk
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Arising_uk »

Obvious Leo wrote:Nothing is impossible and the ancestor sims are as plausible as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, god, the multiverse or any other unverifiable hypothesis. ...
How is your 'planck bit' verifiable?
Arising_uk wrote:Indeed. He stole some of Spinoza's ideas but not all of them, just as I have stolen some of Leibniz's ideas but not all of them. Transcendent cause is strictly for the faithful but not Necessity in a self-causal reality.
But his 'God' is a necessary self-causal 'being'? Just asking as I admire what you've been trying to do for Leibniz's ideas.
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Arising_uk
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Arising_uk »

Obvious Leo wrote:... and the logical fallacy of the 4D manifold of spacetime.
Does this recent 'gravity wave' detection make any difference?
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

surreptitious57 wrote:Even if our brain could correct the error so that the present was actually regarded as the past no matter how infinitesimal the difference
it would make no difference in practical terms. It is only important from a purely theoretical perspective
At the risk of overstating the bloody obvious theoretical physics is supposed to be examining this question from a theoretical perspective. Instead it treats it as if it were a mathematical problem.
surreptitious57 wrote:Even physicists do not imagine
they are literally living in the past from day to day.
This has nothing to do with what physicists are imagining. This is to do with what physicists are modelling and the Minkowski manifold quite unambiguously models reality as if past, present and future were metaphysically equivalent notions.

"The passage of time is a deliberate and persistent illusion"....Albert Einstein

As it happens Einstein didn't personally believe this and this statement was made only to illustrate an inescapable conclusion which must be drawn from SR if SR was to be accepted as a physical model, which he himself never did.

"Spacetime should NEVER be regarded as physically real".....Albert Einstein.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Arising_uk wrote: Obvious Leo wrote:
Nothing is impossible and the ancestor sims are as plausible as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, god, the multiverse or any other unverifiable hypothesis. ...

How is your 'planck bit' verifiable?
It's verifiable on logical grounds which date all the way back to pre-Socratic philosophy, particularly that of Zeno of Elea, Democritus of Thrace, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. It's verifiable on mathematical grounds through the work not only of Leibniz but also of Georg Cantor into set theory as well as through the work of George Boole, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell into the logical foundations of applied mathematics. It's verifiable on physical grounds through the work of Max Planck into black body radiation. Although a full exploration of this work is rather technical and beyond the scope of this OP it is universally regarded by the scientific community as unquestionable. Energy cannot possibly be infinitely divisible. However it was Einstein who showed through E=mcc that it is energy which is fundamental and that matter is nothing more than an emergent property of it. At the fundamental scale of reality energy is all there is and when we read Leibniz in the appropriate context of his culture and times then this is more or less exactly what he was driving at with his monads. Whilst it's true that Leibniz's monads were of transcendent origin it is no great leap of logic to instead locate them within the Spinozan framework of immanent cause. He stole quite a few of his ideas from Spinoza but for some reason not this one. One can only assume that this reason must have related to his religious beliefs because the logic of his monadology has nothing like the coherent superstructure of the rest of his philosophy. Nevertheless I still chose to acknowledge the profound significance of Gottfried's idea in my own philosophy by naming my own fundamental Planck units as monads, because his was the first true information theory which anticipated the notion of a binary logic gate.
Arising_uk wrote: Arising_uk wrote:
Indeed. He stole some of Spinoza's ideas but not all of them, just as I have stolen some of Leibniz's ideas but not all of them. Transcendent cause is strictly for the faithful but not Necessity in a self-causal reality.

But his 'God' is a necessary self-causal 'being'? Just asking as I admire what you've been trying to do for Leibniz's ideas.
In Leibniz's world god was a necessary being but in Spinoza's it was not. Spinoza's universe was sufficient to its own existence and my philosophy demonstrates how the inversely logarithmic relationship between gravity and time at the Planck scale is the causal mechanism which drives this self-determinism via an embedded hierarchy of emergent self-organising structures such as particles, atoms, molecules etc. Evolution towards informational complexity thus becomes a self-organising principle mandated solely by the meta-law of cause and effect.
Arising_uk wrote: Obvious Leo wrote:
... and the logical fallacy of the 4D manifold of spacetime.

Does this recent 'gravity wave' detection make any difference?
None at all. Physics is an intrinsically tautologous method as pointed out by the great man himself.

"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe"....Albert Einstein.

Unfortunately what the theory cannot do is explain why the observer observes what he does. For that we need philosophers.
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skakos
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by skakos »

Dubious wrote:
Obvious Leo wrote:This highly austere perspective also explains why the overall entropy of the universe is decreasing, a paradox which spacetime physics is utterly unable to account for.
...yet the Second of Law of Thermodynamics states precisely the opposite, that the entropy of the universe can never decrease only go into equilibrium in it's so called 'heat death' scenario...which seems quite well understood by physicists.
But again this "law" is more of an axiom than a law...
It is like the notion of "time": we believe it cannot go back. But no law of physics dictates that.
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by skakos »

Hobbes' Choice wrote:
skakos wrote:
Hobbes' Choice wrote: Tell that to the projectionist when you show up late to the cinema and the film has been running for 15 minutes.
Too shallow answer if you ask me. Yes I agree that our senses tell us that things change, but philosophically you would have a really hard time proving it or proving that time as a notion exists. (especially since we do not even know what "exists" means...)
Too shallow?
How about sitting underwater in the deep end, and telling yourself that the amount of time you spend not breathing is just a construction.
Deep enough?
Relying on the senses has never been the best way to do philosophy. Yes, I see your point but the greatest philosophers of all time would disagree with what the senses tell us. But let's for the sake of the discussion accept our senses: On what "sense" does the existence of time rely on? On what senses does the things you believe you know about death rely on? On what senses does the choosing of Sun (i.e. a point DIFFERENT than the point from where your senses see the planets revolve around you) as the center is based upon?
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Hobbes' Choice
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Re: Earth at the center of the Universe?

Post by Hobbes' Choice »

skakos wrote:
Hobbes' Choice wrote:
skakos wrote: Too shallow answer if you ask me. Yes I agree that our senses tell us that things change, but philosophically you would have a really hard time proving it or proving that time as a notion exists. (especially since we do not even know what "exists" means...)
Too shallow?
How about sitting underwater in the deep end, and telling yourself that the amount of time you spend not breathing is just a construction.
Deep enough?
Relying on the senses has never been the best way to do philosophy. Yes, I see your point but the greatest philosophers of all time would disagree with what the senses tell us. But let's for the sake of the discussion accept our senses: On what "sense" does the existence of time rely on? On what senses does the things you believe you know about death rely on? On what senses does the choosing of Sun (i.e. a point DIFFERENT than the point from where your senses see the planets revolve around you) as the center is based upon?
What's your point - its not like you have anything else upon which to rationalise.
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