Where is "here"?

[Hobbes' Choice]

Those of you who don't think they know what a zebra crossing is....

...and that's about the ONLY thing I learned in this entire thread! Zebra crossing! If somebody would have asked what it was, I wouldn't have known but after showing me what the "bloody obvious" looks like it's justified to feel like an idiot...which I'm still not completely used to but getting there!

It's an odd one, because zebra, and zebra crossing is something all British children learn from the age of 4. So it can take Brits by surprise when they find themselves having to explain that to, say, Americans.

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Do you still have panda cars, too?

[Hobbes' Choice]

Do you still have panda cars, too?

Sadly not.
They could not keep up with the faster models.

[Skip]

How does blue paint make it faster than black?
Their headgear doesn't match their uniforms.

[Obvious Leo]

They'd have to be the unlikeliest looking old bill imaginable. The little old sheila can barely see over the roof of the Morris so she's not likely to be very scary when beating a confession out of a suspect down the nick. As for the old bloke he looks like if he wasn't leaning on the car he'd go arse over tit.

[PoeticUniverse]

Here-Now

As I lay on a beach in Papeete, one morning, thinking of a new ‘Here to Eternity’ movie, starring Mother Nature and Father Time, a Klein bottle washed ashore and puffed out a djinni, right after I’d rubbed it just the right way. She then thanked me and asked what I wished to see or know—anything at all, no hurry.

While I pondered this new sprung fountain of potential knowledge that had arrived in form of the fullest bloom of the ideal female, she spread out a blanket and produced two glasses of wine from the water for us to drink of, her glowing visage wavering here-there and obviously asking me what I’d like.

“Show me eternity,” I requested, even though she was immediately alluring and inviting romantically.

“I can, for I have it all,” she replied, raising her glass in a toast to and from the wellspring of time.

“Wait—you have all of eternity, complete in its perpetual entirety?”

“Yes, I have the whole extant shebang, as like a wondrous poem carved in stone, fixed, pre-made, wholly existent in its eternal block, containing all past and future, with a window through which this beauteous eternity can be viewed as it passes by, or, rather, as us passing through it, whichever way you wish to see it, but ever through a glass, brightly, in all its splendour.“

“Where did you get it?”

“Einstein gave it to me—and somewhere he still exists.”

She leaned over and gave me a moist kiss, which I returned, thinking myself perhaps too hastily wishing to undress the philosophy of time ahead of her fine silk pajamas.

“Soon,” she promised, “I’ll unveil Eternity for you, bare, but first, my own, for I’ve just arrived in this all too captivating here and now in French Polynesia.”

My poetic self answered, now back to form, “Let actions tell what words can never pass. Pour thy rose-cheeks into the secret’s glass, and thy mouth onto my fare, beloved; my contrition’s to be lost in your morass.”

She rejoined, “The universe’s mantle binds us worn—tears feeding the river on which we’re borne.”

I added, “Beauty is melancholy’s other side.”

“Ah, and Hell’s but an ember of our senseless fears, and Heaven’s the rose-breath of this opening morn.”

And so it went, veering into deeper philosophy.

I offered, “My Life’s spirit to the causeless was near blind”.

Quoth she, continuing, “If the Beginning you could find—the Alif—of word, phrase, and uni-verse, thou needs not the rest of the alphabet—all’s been mined.”

(To be con't)

[Skip]

Please do continue.

[PoeticUniverse]

Please do continue.

OK, here's the rest of the draft; it's in fair enough shape to serve. (Anyone want to add to it?)

…
With that she bid me up and onward from our reverie, leading me down the boarded pier to a hut on stilts over the turquoise ocean.

We approached the hut, the sign above the door reading, ‘SpaceTime’. Upon entering, she walked me to what served as a window in the tropics—a square hole made in the straw wall.

“Here it is. Behold. It’s the glorious emergence of all that was, is, and will be.”

“This is a view of ordinary spacetime. You promised me eternity. And where is the future and the past of it?”

She paused for an instant, then said, “You just viewed the past an instant ago, and at this time we have passed unto the now, and in another moment we’ll arrive in the future. Behold the marvelous Eternity through our window upon it! See it strong and sturdy, this solid slab set for all time, pre-designed. One of its four distances has been converted into time, via the speed of light, so that we can move through its otherwise chock full extent of solidity.”

“Sturdy? Spacetime’s block universe consists of dynamical space and matter, each influencing the other. That’s stability?”

“Yes, it as if we stand in a place made of Jello, but I’m indeed showing you the result of Mother Nature’s maternity with Father Time’s paternity that began from their cosmic egg produced at the radial time center of this hypersphere that goes on forever outward in all directions.”

“How does a sphere that never ends even have a spherical shape?”

She took my hand. “It just does. And it is as it is; as in its frozen and unchanging state, all laid out unto its minutest detail, of the largest and the smallest.”

“I see, but there is almost universal agreement that Relativity is not a complete theory, for it doesn’t take quantum effects into consideration.”
“Since we viewing it from the inside, the explicate collective rises and rules at our level. We are phenomena’s projected face, well-painted from noumena’s unseen base; it’s as a lamp lights up a paper shade, we figures revolving around in space.”

“Well, you did mention emergence, meaning such as ‘more is different’ and ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’, but where did this block come from? From what quarry was it excavated?”

“It was built in what to us would be all at once in the 5th dimension, lest it take forever to be completed, again, just to us.”

“Well, even just building a never-ending determinate block that only has a specific past and a certain future is a tremendous accomplishment, what with the foreseeing of every eventuality on forward from the Big Bang unto forever, especially the finishing of it in time, which was even in our shortest time.”

“I told you it was fantastic.”

“All its paths are fixed—pre-determined.”

“What matters where, what, when, or even who? In life’s fill, any narrative will do.”


“Well, true, but we’ve only just seen the near future and the near past; can you zoom out into the next dimension and show me a larger view.”

“Sure.”

She enlarged our view point, which was really a kind of condensing. I felt an uneasy shift.

“Ugh, Holy Cripes, I see things as tube-worms that begin with a fetus and end with a corpse. Oh, horrors!”

“Those are the world lines of you and everyone.”

“Quick, get rid of it; take me through my own world line, like a home movie run on fast forward.”

“OK, here we go. It will be such as just before you die when your whole life flashes before you just ahead of your merging into the timelessness of the great block externe. It’s the 5th dimensional wonder of the Universe.”

“Wait; there’s life after death in this block?”

“Everything in it exists forever. Rejoice, for your goose was cooked long ago, your future eggs laid ‘fore you were aglow.”

And so I saw myself being conceived—yuck, and then as a baby, a toddler, a young boy, an adolescent, and so forth, unto laying on a beach in Tahiti, then the djinni appearing…”

“Wait, stop it; I don’t want to know my future that is carved as dogma into this gargantuan tablet, upon which I’ve already had a glimpse of my cadaver.”

“That’s part of what has to be shown if we go on, even horrid Hell and gloried Heaven yon.”

“Who’s the scribe of my slab written upon? I ask whether I’m the stylus or the slate?”

“Even I’m not so sure, of late, but am fond that we’re both the dancer and the danced upon.”

“Well, perhaps we can’t have everything.”

“Do you want to relive a part of your life, even in the future portion, or go on further, to such as all the possible Big Bang starts to ends, in which you could jump to one, or even to the 10th dimensional wonder of the ‘IS’ of all possible realities?”

“No, I’ll take this time, for, as you say, the narrative doesn’t much matter, as any one will do.”

We returned to the beach, kissing and frolicking on the blanket while drinking more wine and enjoying the soft breezes caressing our bodies, happy to be returned to this wonderland drenched with the perfumes of flowers that begged our passions to be quenched again.

In this lovely parentheses of eternity, on this fertile shore, love’s houri drank with me, pouring her cup into my soul so thirsty. Would I then gasp for Heaven’s Paradise or Eternity, then, I daresay, dogs whine better than me.

“Oh sweet, almond-eyed fortune of love’s glow, our life-streams flow toward the great below.”

“In Fate’s clutch, back to the block we must go, so let us liquify ‘long life’s plateau.”

Afterwards, I asked, “Show me another, more fundamental, version of time, in which the past and the future don’t exist.”

“It’s difficult,” she said, “for the prospects are grim; presentism does not just amount to the assertion that only present events or entities exist, but also that the present undergoes a dynamical ‘updating’, or exhibits a quality as of a fleeting swoosh, and this additional dynamical aspect is what threatens the substance of the debate between the presentist and an eternalist opponent.”

“In other words, what is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as to be or has been is indicated coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of What IS, and so it has no ‘nonexistence’, for this as Nothing cannot be.”

“Yes, as you’re saying that since there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is reals or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.”

“Still, what if our perceived persistence of a selfsame world is an illusion?”

“We’ll still need a respite for presentism from the besieging relativity of simultaneity.”
“What if we even went past the emergence quality of space as a degree of realness nevertheless, unto the complete elimination of space, leaving only time as the implicate order, an illusion of timelessness then only referring to the emergent but now totally explicate geometric time of spacetime, but not to a microscopic fundamental time where there would be no geometry, so that fundamental time exists but space and geometry do not?”

“I thought you’d never ask. Your wish is my command, singing, ‘Ne’er can be recalled now’s bird that has flown, so love life’s flight, on the winds that must blow.’”

“And then we’ll get rid of space completely.”

“First things first. So, then, as you say, it is then possible that one can have this fundamental time, consistent with quantum mechanics, at the microscopic level, and an emergent or geometric time, macroscopically. Quantum theory and General Relativity could be reconciled if we have a reason why they should apply at different levels, and emergence can provide that reason; yet, to have only time, with no space at all, emergent, explicate, or otherwise, we’ll have to invent a whole new ontology, which is a heck of a lot to do; whereas, we could just chill on the beach or roam the island, savoring the here and now.”

“We can do both, for a good way to know ‘What is life?’ is to live it, as well as think it.”

She took me to another hut, the signage reading, ‘Ongoing Construction of Now’.

We looked out the window hole in the wall at Now, or at least as close as we could get to ‘now’, it slightly having gone past by the time we got the news of it.

‘Reality is created anew at every now?”

“Well, updated really, from the previous now that is wholly consumed by the process, so, yes, it amounts to becoming new.”

“OK. I didn’t think every now was created from scratch as some kind of miracle; so, it’s the constituents that do the work, but what does ‘doing the work’ mean?”

“It means a process.”

“What are the basic, no longer divisible, constituents, at heart?”

“Quantum monads—bits with various states of what we might call energy or just levels. The ‘it’ of reality comes from ‘bit’, via an information process.”

“Mass/energy reduces to information as its final subdivision?”

“Equivalence of mass/energy to information has been shown.”

“Where’s the hardware, of what must be a kind of quantum computer? There’s nothing here.”

“If there was hardware, then there would no longer be just a ‘now’, for the hardware would remain across time.”

“So, the bits do it all themselves?”

“Yes.”

“So, the future’s not what it used to be anymore?”

“No matter how one tries to shake from boughs the fruits of time’s truth from the Tree of Knows, computation makes not yet the morrows; there’s naught else but lone, resultant Nows.

We looked out the hut’s window, into what was not a distance, but a past that was just past, except for the sun, which was a whole eight minutes ago.

“Space has been eliminated. We ‘see’ only inside the mind.””

“We ride the crest of a continuously emerging wave of time which is carrying us into the future at the speed of light. We observe only its wake and it is this wake which spacetime physics is modeling. What we observe is as a holographic representation of events which exist no longer. Nature is frugal. We are not object, but are a process, and its nexus is the now. It is nothing more than an eternal sequence of events following one upon the other in an orderly, causal, and generative fashion. Process philosophy is all about relationships, of which se see the hint in the quantum realm, everything connected to everything, as if all right on top of each other in no space.”

“Our anticipation’s imagination suggests the future, while we’re in the now of our present sensation, our memory holding a bit of the past, this ‘smoothly rolling now’ blended by the mind.”

“The delight is such that none of the three could produce alone.”

“This arrangement is still determinate, although not pre-determinate.”

“Well, we can’t eat our cake and still have, too, for consistency is a good thing, the impossible ‘random’ a horror.”

We headed back.

“Ah, spring’s new year unfolds the garden’s jewels—the sweet rose, my Peri, and us fools. Yester-now expires gifting the present; ‘twould be naught to speak outside of what rules.”

“We clutch the skirt of Heaven, on it borne, while the day-stars dimmed are at night reborn. If time lives, and grants us a fresh morn, we’ll still the universe’s dress adorn.”

(Thanks to Leo's posts for the information processing part near the end.)

[Hobbes' Choice]

They'd have to be the unlikeliest looking old bill imaginable. The little old sheila can barely see over the roof of the Morris so she's not likely to be very scary when beating a confession out of a suspect down the nick. As for the old bloke he looks like if he wasn't leaning on the car he'd go arse over tit.

She is of normal height, he is standing on the running board.
The Morris Minor, although small was higher than modern cars.

[Hobbes' Choice]

How does blue paint make it faster than black?
Their headgear doesn't match their uniforms.

??

[Dubious]

Do you still have panda cars, too?

Sadly not.
They could not keep up with the faster models.

Love the picture, quaint and humorous to boot but it's hard to imagine them chasing down a meanie.

[Obvious Leo]

Thank you, Austin, you've got it mate. The truth of time will not be found in the equations of our hologram but in the reality of our personal experience as both dancers and danced upon. As the universe is itself becoming so too are we the future-makers privileged to scratch our indelible mark on the slate of time and change reality forever. The frozen block is Newton's timeless mind of god, a map of soul-less snapshots with no Truth and no breath of Hawking's longed for fire.

The cosmos is ALIVE.

[Obvious Leo]

The Morris Minor, although small was higher than modern cars.

I owned one briefly in a previous life but I treated it unkindly and it fell to bits.

[Obvious Leo]

“Quantum monads—bits with various states of what we might call energy or just levels. The ‘it’ of reality comes from ‘bit’, via an information process.”

It seems you got my clarification about the no background state for the gravity/time continuum. Neither Newton's flat space nor Einstein's geometric one is needed for a presentist ontology but this is not an easy procedure of thought to translate into words because our observational experience is of the hologram of a no longer existent past. We live in time's wake, which makes the Libet story a statement of the bloody obvious as well.

[Skip]

Best hijack of a thread. EVER.