Where is "here"?

So what's really going on?

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PoeticUniverse
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by PoeticUniverse »

Image

The waves roll in, as do those of time, whose wake the physicists model, and there a surfer rides on one, as do we on the crest of the now, but, really, not apart from it, while, on shore, the birds flutter down to eat the crumbs from our loaf of bread. (Oh, my djinni, you’ve got me using the present tense in my narration now.)

I sweep my eyes across the scene, in a manner of speaking, in this purest part of the isle, spotting no rubbish, but there is a skeleton sculpture, the title on the pedestal reading, ‘Bora Bora Bored’. Beyond that are only the waving palms.

Image

“I get it now, my fair creature twixt human and angel, about the informational monads: The only possible Fundamental is what has no parts, as a simple, continuous function, which necessitates a monad, for there isn’t anything simpler; thus its assemblies of the ‘it’ can only be of the more and more composite and complex, in the informational patterns that the bits make as the nows ever go on.”

“And the monads have to be, we should jot, because Nothing cannot, which is the truth we’ve found that thus no longer needs any proof, which demonstrates the power of philosophy.”

“So, my jasmine-bloomed and fairy-born, upon whose glowing breasts I rest my head this morn, we cast not to the wind but flow as time’s bourn; thus there are two times about which we needn’t ask, the one that hasn’t come and the one that’s past, for we are of the now, and, at that, ever only ‘seeing’ the inside of the ‘brain’ from the inside.”


“Yes, traveler through time. While life flows like water and blows like wind, our idyllic ‘now’ prevails, unsurpassed.”

“So then, in the great silence amid the great absence of the so-called vacuum is the now-here of time as the no-where of space—and to think it was said that our being blocks the view of the Ultimate, nor to gaze at it could we our selves acquit, that even the wise couldn’t step beyond their nature, leaving all mothers’ sons standing helpless before it.”

“Indeed, ‘now-here’ is ‘no-where’, a slight rearrangement that’s still of the same letter sequence, representing a truth so simple that even a child could understand it, though we must relinquish all future and past—a necessary melancholy.”

“If I indulge the yearning and reflect it back, then from birth we can look forward to being host to woe, and then to giving up the ghost.”

“Ah yes, sad, but ‘happy’ are they who quickly burn to toast, and blessed are they who ne’er came to the roast! Ha-ha.”

“Live; life’s doom is to e’er sleep in the tomb, without wine, friends, or love—an empty whom.”

“Come close, I will lift the dark secret’s veil… Never again can withered flowers bloom.”

‘E’en the smoke from an ember’s ash fades away, the warp with the woof and weave burned to clay. How many beautiful hearts have melted here? Where in heaven’s cosmic vault wefts their sway?”

“There are no “where’s”, my island man. They believe, from fear of Hell’s misery, lured onward by Heaven’s reward to be, yet he who lives real, and thus knows what ‘IS’, never fires his heart from chaff’s smoke tree.”

“Oh, meddling thoughts that harp on faith’s plea, my cheeks glow red from djinni’s grape tree, so to your face I throw my other hand, and drop you into sleep, oh fantasy.”

“Lay waste to the rites of prayer and fasting; shatter faith’s pious claims never lasting; slam fast the gate on myth-spells and myth-takes arriving. Live, and be kind to all of life’s casting.”

“There’s more cheer in a single ‘now’ full than in the Vault of Heaven hollow as a skull.”

“Yes, tropic man, why fret o’er spilling drops of sin from life’s temptation glass filled to the brim? Play with the imaginary friend: Him; what is mercy for but to save thy skin!”

“Why would the All Knowing, Loving Expert compose with Power His designed concert, then decompose His grand Magnificat?

“Because there’s none Such beyond the turret.”

“The best of all that is below the moon and above the fish is beauty’s commune, in this life poured and sipped, all else forgone, from your Mah to Mahi, raptured noon to noon!”

“Rent, the mask of sorrows shrouding doom’s face; sheared, the cloth of grief’s idling chase. Feast on my lips, body, and verse; drain life’s bank, ere Earth enfold thee in a last embrace.”

“Thin as the air, the ‘now’ is time’s gift rare, an ethereal sprite whose flow is swift.”

"Morning springs us over the wasteland’s brink, and on time’s sand we the oasis drink. Life’s strange caravan through the desert winds back toward Nothing; drink—afore the stars sink.”

“We have solved the Mystery, and have found that Beginnings and spaces cannot be, so what goes round is near all things generating, for there’s no point to impart a design; so drink—to naught more we’re bound!”

“Nought is left. We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight, spread fast our wings on the ocean of light—that is the wake of the time-grav wave, of no breadth, mass, or space that is seemingly made.”

Image

“All is of a holographic light dream, as products time and time again by time’s means, as bubbled baubles blown and burst, through the frames of time that quench our thirst.”

“Time future, time present, and time past are not all at once, but only as ‘nows’, with not a bit of them to last.”

“The glorious light flashes us into being shone, as the dilated broadcast of time’s nows becoming the known.”

“Here the friends, lovers, and flowers that be—parentheses within eternity!”

‘What the meaning to this play we’re befit, from dirt to dust within the script as it’s being writ?”

“The wise in search have thrown themselves to waste; experience alone is the benefit. Don’t worry; be happy.”

“Worries seldom come true, but, if they do, thus they had to, so in them one must stew.”

“Past imperfect points to a future tense, yet ever only nows does the Wheel brew.”

“Ere Fate fells us dried up like an old leaf, let the wine course through our veins of life so brief.”

“Ne’er for treasured gold will you be dug up, nor even sought by an impoverished thief.”

“Drain thy goblet’s nectar of the moon’s shine, while the light sparkles in this ‘now’ of thine.”


“Reign with Night’s Queen and drink deep the King’s wine, for the morrow may not find you in time.”

“Oh, to our friends and successors: When you with such lively tread make your way through the garden of the dead and reach the flowered bed where we made one and now lie, turn down an empty glass and break some bread.”

“Then, unto love’s moonlight tryst, arm in arm, aft taking delight in each others charm, raise thy glasses once more in blessing, and cheer the ones who lived and died without alarm.”
Dubious
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Dubious »

A wonderful poetic depiction of where "Where" really is! It's all over the place.

IT'S EVERYWHERE!!
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Nicely done as always mate and always opening new directions.
PoeticUniverse wrote:“I get it now, my fair creature twixt human and angel, about the informational monads: The only possible Fundamental is what has no parts, as a simple, continuous function, which necessitates a monad, for there isn’t anything simpler; thus its assemblies of the ‘it’ can only be of the more and more composite and complex, in the informational patterns that the bits make as the nows ever go on.”
You get it all right and this is where grav/time and space/time show us the noumenal/phenomenal divide. The Big Bang was the Big Whimper because the cycle of birth and death is a gradual new awakening from a hole of total cosmic blackness but time can never stand still. In the fourth law of thermodynamics the Whimper is the highest entropy state and not the lowest offered to us in the god-given reality of Newton and Hawking. Now Shannon's negentropy is a syntropy and Boltzmann's statistical world comes sharply into focus because in the hologram of time's wake we only see truth in the temporal mirror. Looking at the world from inside out is not so easy, Austin, but it brings a frisson of clarity to the journey through the paradoxes. Light bends and space expands within the mind alone as time marches us inexorably but inconstantly into the future as determined by the cosmic metronome of gravity. Let the barmaids of the world rejoice.

Albert had it staring him in the face all along, my friend, and if he hadn't listened to that jackass Minkowski he would have had it all figured out for us before we were even born. He had the Spinozan feel for immanent causes and it was only the geo-politics of the day which prevented him from linking his thoughts with Henri Poincare and finding the fractal continuum through the three-body puzzle. He may even have beaten Benoit Mandelbrot to the story of the matryoshka dolls and how the Turing machine makes itself from the inside out in its Boolean, self-generative and autopoietic fashion.

The job is done.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Dubious wrote:A wonderful poetic depiction of where "Where" really is! It's all over the place.

IT'S EVERYWHERE!!
You mean EVERYWHEN, Dubious, because the universe is not a place. The universe is an event which the observer observes as a place. This may seem like a tedious point of pedantry but it is in fact the ToE.
Dubious
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Dubious »

In ALL cases, poetic license supersedes both theory and fact but it's also often true that theory surpasses what poetic license was meant to convey.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

It was always the task of poets to uncover the deepest truths because the deepest truths always lie so perilously close to the surface where the minds of children play. The Rubaiyat that is our human journey is simply a question of seeking within for the bloody obvious and those who look for mystery where no mystery exists will inevitably confound themselves with their own cleverness. This was the story of the Cartesian space which the Persians knew and the cloistered monks in their god-infested hubris chose deliberately to ignore. Newton was a cretin.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Ask a child what is reality and he will say reality is what is happening all around me. Pay heed to the tense of his verb and you will know the universe.
Dubious
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Dubious »

Obvious Leo wrote:Ask a child what is reality and he will say reality is what is happening all around me. Pay heed to the tense of his verb and you will know the universe.
All very poetic but "what is happening" is very different from why it's happening. Perspectives change when walking backward on a theory that was created going forwards.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Dubious wrote: All very poetic but "what is happening" is very different from why it's happening.
The problem is that this is the wrong question. Why things happen is because they have been caused to happen but in Newton's created universe of modern physics this is taken to mean that things happen for a reason and this implies a transcendent purpose to the universe which emanates from beyond it. This is the universe with a beginning which came into existence with a suite of laws of unknown origin and such a universe is insufficient to its own existence. That this is a metaphysical abomination is beside the point but the inescapable conclusion which must be drawn from such a model is the intrinsic timelessness of such a virtual reality. Newton imagined that he was modelling the mind of god and the god of his infatuation was a timeless being and thus Newton designed a methodology which made time relative to the Cartesian space. Leibniz roared in indignation at this mathematical legerdemain but his protest went unheeded and even after Mach put Newton's famous bucket to the sword nobody ever took the trouble to revisit his utterly unphilosophical a priori assumption. Michelson and Morley proved Leibniz right in a definitive experiment which was completely unambiguous and still the penny never dropped. However it was Hermann Minkowski who drove the final nail into the coffin of human reason when he vomited up a model which made no metaphysical distinction at all between past, present and future and he did this by representing time as a spatial dimension. Physics has been floundering ever since in a conceptual cul-de-sac with mathematical models which are mutually incompatible and which describe a universe which makes no sense.

I say that we should find the truths which come from the fairy tales of the Pitjanjatjara man and the small child more persuasive than those in the fairy tales of geeks who see cats in boxes both alive and dead and effects which precede their causes.

On the other hand I might just be a pig-headed Aussie contrarian committed to the idea that if it sounds like bullshit it probably is. I guess time will tell but of one thing I am certain. The spaceless universe is a legitimate scientific hypothesis because it yields a testable prediction which differs from that offered by current theory. If my experiment is performed and my prediction validated then spacetime will be cast into the bin of failed ideas, there to join phlogiston and the luminiferous aether which gave birth to it.
PoeticUniverse
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by PoeticUniverse »

Dubious wrote:
Obvious Leo wrote:Ask a child what is reality and he will say reality is what is happening all around me. Pay heed to the tense of his verb and you will know the universe.
All very poetic but "what is happening" is very different from why it's happening. Perspectives change when walking backward on a theory that was created going forwards.
The why to what is [happening] is that is has to, given that something must be, precluding stillness/nothing. Walking backward is to walk off the Planck into nowhere from now here.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

PoeticUniverse wrote:Walking backward is to walk off the Planck into nowhere from now here.
The walking backward imagery is a useful metaphor in understanding the role of the observer, the most misunderstood bloke in the history of physics. We actually observe our world from the inside looking out but physics models the world as if we were observing it from the outside looking in. If we understand time's arrow as exactly what it appears to be, namely an infinite sequence of moments Now, then when we observe the world from the inside looking out then what we're actually doing is looking BACKWARDS down the arrow of time to a past which no longer exists.

This is why I say that the problem of physics which leads to all the paradoxes is not actually a problem of physics at all but is in fact a problem of metaphysics. To emphasise the central thrust of my entire philosophy I'll state the point again and this is a statement of absolute and irrefutable FACT which no physicist would dare to deny.

When the observer makes an observation of the world he is making an observation of a world which no longer exists.

The speed of light is mind-bogglingly fast but this speed is nevertheless finite so the truth of this statement is beyond question. The fact that this truth is of no consequence in the way we conduct our everyday lives is completely irrelevant but it has profound consequences for the ontological status of the Cartesian space which we construct in our minds to make sense of the world we observe. If the observer is observing an object which no longer exists then the space he constructs in his mind between himself and this no-longer-existent object must likewise no longer exist. To suggest otherwise is logically ludicrous so what the observer is actually doing is spatialising a time interval. It was this simple but elusive truth which struck such a note of terror into the mind of Albert Einstein when it was pointed out to him that under the spacetime model the moon only exists when somebody is actually watching it. As any man of rudimentary sense would do Albert immediately declared that this was crap and that the moon continues to exist whether somebody is observing it or not. However this conclusion drawn from the spacetime model was not a misunderstanding of the model but in fact an inescapable conclusion drawn from the model which simply couldn't be avoided and one which prompted Einstein to immediately declare that his own model was fatally flawed. It made no fucking sense.

Einstein never liked Hermann Minkowski but Einstein was a lousy mathematician who needed help with his sums so that his SR model could be properly formulated. He turned to his former maths teacher for help despite the fact that Minkowski had earlier declared that Einstein would never amount to anything as a scientist. Albert initially refused to accept Minkowski's "block universe" formulations and Henri Poincare, the true father of relativity, immediately pronounced Minkowski full of shit and then he inconveniently died before he had a chance to fix up the mess which Hermann had made of an exquisitely subtle yet simple idea. Sadly the intellectual climate of the time was such that the Minkowski block carried the day and very quickly became a part of the canonical doctrine of physics, a status which it enjoys right up till the present day. It is this block model on which QM is entirely based and every single paradox thrown up by the QM model can be sheeted squarely home to it, including the dead and alive cat.

ALL of the QM bullshit is a direct and unavoidable consequence of the Minkowski "block" model.

What was it that Minkowski fucked up? Here it is. Minkowski's mistake was entirely a metaphysical one because instead of modelling the real universe he modelled the world of the observer, a world which no longer exists, and he did this by spatialising time, which is exactly what the observer does when he makes his observation. Minkowski's block model is a model of a cadaver on a slab, a dead and timeless universe stretching back in the observer's past all the way back to the big bang itself. No amount of existential angst from the likes of Steven Hawking could ever breathe life into such a model because the Moving Finger has moved on. Einstein was right to be alarmed at the havoc his ideas had wrought but the mistake had been made two centuries earlier by Descartes and Newton and the flaw lay in Newton's a priori assumption about the physicality of the Cartesian space, an assumption which Leibniz hotly disputed. Newton was just plain WRONG. For sure the moon is still there whether somebody is observing it or not but the space between the observer and the moon is only there when somebody is observing it because the space between the observer and the moon is the property of the observer and NOT the property of the universe.

From this perspective EVERY SINGLE paradox and counter-intuitive absurdity in modern physics simply vanishes back into the luminiferous aether which gave birth to it and our universe is presented as an entity of such sublime austerity that even a child could understand it, let alone Einstein's barmaid.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

Another phrase often used in physics to describe this process when the observer spatialises time is "collapsing a wave function". It sounds like a very fancy term but "collapsing a wave function" simple means "having a look".
PoeticUniverse
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by PoeticUniverse »

I'm going to 'decohere' and then look for the 'here', for the 'there' is in limbo.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by Obvious Leo »

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine"....J.B.S. Haldane.

As a maestro of evolutionary theory Haldane has always been one of my greatest idols in science but when I first encountered this arresting quote as a young man on a quest I knew instinctively that he was wrong. That Simplicity is Truth is a metaphysical mantra which pervades all philosophies across all of the human cultures across the entire span of recorded human history. When the lunatics took over the asylum in physics in the midst of all the other pre-war lunacy which was corrupting European thought at the time it sounded the death-knell for the supremacy of human reason in the conduct of human affairs. But where were the philosophers? Where were the custodians of our ancient truths so hard-won over the millennia and written of so lyrically by the wordsmiths of the ages? The navel-gazers were asleep at the wheel, mesmerised by the mathematical virtuosity of the geeks and stunned into silence at the spectacular hubris of their claims. Effects could now precede their causes, grandfathers could be slain to prevent our own existence, particles could be everywhere at once and at the most fundamental level of reality which the geeks could model it seemed that our reality was nothing more than a gigantic cosmic accident vomited into existence by a dice-playing god. Why did nobody dare to raise his head above the parapet and say "hang on a minute, you blokes, what you're trying to sell us here doesn't make any fucking sense?".

History will judge the philosophers and scientists of the 20th century harshly for a host of different reasons and the piss-takers on the late-night talk shows will find a cornucopia of comedic opportunity in the treasure trove of bullshit which the physicists spent a century trying to force into the reluctant minds of a population which was never going to buy it for a nanosecond. They brought this catastrophe upon themselves and now they must reap what they have sown. The insidious doctrine of logical positivism declares that mathematics can define our truths for us, a Platonist fantasy which found its way into the very heart of Christian theology and via this route into some of the greatest minds of the so-called Enlightenment and then into our modern era. This doctrine is both evil and false because mathematics cannot define our truths and the unholy trinity of Aquinas, Descartes and Newton are found guilty of diverting humanity into a conceptual cul-de-sac. Our universe is not a confection of the mind of god but a dynamic reality which is continuously coming into existence in an orderly and generative fashion under its own steam. It is a Spinozan world of immanent cause and not a Newtonian transaction of transcendent causal origin where the past, present and future are laid out in advance like some horrendous Laplacian nightmare. Where is a human mind to find meaning in such a universe? The notion of the examined mind becomes a piss-take inflicted on the self by a malevolent fate which declares it doesn't matter a fuck what we do with our lives because the future of the universe has already been written. This is bullshit, and the philosophers should never have let the geeks get away with it, but luckily the wordsmiths have always kept their eye on the ball. Our poets know truths which our mathematicians do not and the Rubaiyat of human creativity will never be silenced.

( I sort of got into this essay by accident and now I've run out of time because I'm off with the grandkids today. I actually have a point to make pertinent to where is here? but I'm a bit slow working up to it so I'll have to come back to it later. That's if anybody's interested, of course. If not I can always finish it in the privacy of my own thoughts, where most things never get finished but rather drift off into something else.)
PoeticUniverse
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Re: Where is "here"?

Post by PoeticUniverse »

Yes, 'God' made the entire block in an instant, and then he had nothing to do for a really long time, but now he gets zillions of emails a day from people asking for favors.
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