Where is "here"?

[raw_thought]

“Um yes, PSR (principle of sufficient reason) means that everything has an explanation.’
ME
“No. This is not what the Principle of Sufficient Reason means.”
Obvious Leo
....................................................

“(Logic) the principle that nothing happens by pure chance, but that an explanation must always be available”
FROM
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Princi ... ent+reason
“If you accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason (= PSR), you will require an explanation for any fact, or in other words, you will reject the possibility of brute, or unexplainable, facts.’
FROM
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

[Obvious Leo]

Life would survive better if it didn't experience anything and instead simply operated informationally, selecting optimal approaches for every situation like a well programmed computer.

Well suck it up, baby, because that ain't the way it is. Without question the embodied mind is a computer but it's not like the Newtonian contraption we have sitting on our desktops because we are a computer without a programme. We get the hardware as part of our genetic inheritance and we get an operating system of sorts with a few free bits of trivial software chucked in to get us started but after that we're on our own. We begin writing our own software before we're even born and this process never stops until the day we die. We quite literally MAKE OURSELVES and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that happens to us in our lives is pre-programmed because our entire life's journey is a process of making it up as we go along. Furthermore we only get one crack at it so it behooves us to give it our best shot. If you make a mess of it, stiff shit.

You referred to subatomic particles travelling at the speed of light,

No I didn't. What I said was that the sub-atomic particles are CHANGING at the speed of light but events which are occurring on the Planck scale at the speed of light within these particles confer a mass on them in their emergent form and therefore in their emergent form they cannot travel at the speed of light. However some of them can get awfully close to it, neutrinos for instance, and electrons are also speedy little buggers, but no entity with mass can move through time at the speed of light in its emergent form. You might say that the act of Becoming Something slows information down.

To be aggregated by gravity is to be compressed into a smaller and denser space, like gas and dust clouds that eventually formed the planets and other entities.

We already know that when matter and energy aggregate under the influence of gravity this causes time to slow down so I have no idea what physical meaning you're attaching to a "denser" space. How does one determine the density of a co-ordinate system?

Greta wrote:
You sound like a big chicken - did you faint when your wife was delivering?


Obvious Leo wrote:
No. I was out in the carpark smoking cigarettes.


Spoken like a real Chuck Norris!

I had a good excuse. In the case of both our boys childbirth was an emergency drama for my wife and I was banished to the hinterlands to sweat it out alone. In both cases everything turned out fine but after all that anxiety I decided that the unkindest cut of all might be a more sensible option. So I missed out on daddy's little girl which may have been all for the best in hindsight. By this time she would have long ago brought home some arsehole not good enough for her for me to bitch about.

It's up to you to find a way to get your concepts across if you want to spread your memes.

I'm still rather conflicted about this because I live a very private life. To be honest I'd rather somebody else did it, which was a task I had Steve lined up for. I told him there'd be a Nobel in it for him but he has a young family and thus more important matters on his mind.

You used informal language so it's not as though you were aiming for academic purity.

I'm only a bloody story-teller, Greta, not the fucking messiah. It's not even a very original story because every major philosopher in history has been telling the same story since philosophy began. All I'm saying is that existence is about Being and Becoming. Even the god-folk managed to work that bit out and all I'm trying to do is locate this ancient story within the modern parables of science. It's still a work in progress and in all honesty I haven't quite figured out how to write it. If I had any talent for poetry I'd probably try a Rubaiyat in elegant quatrains but I fear that my natural voice is the Aussie vulgate.

You are too sure of your position IMO. When you think of the advances that will be made in the future, what makes you think that you have fully cracked the mystery just 7,000 years after we started organising agriculture. Are you so sure that our descendants in a million years will say, "Most of them didn't have a clue but, hey, this guy's on to something"? I don't mean to be critical, just to challenge some ideas.

I certainly don't claim to have cracked any mysteries and I can't quite see how you might think I have made such a claim. What I'm actually saying is that there are no mysteries to be cracked because reality is exactly what it appears to be. Nothing of what I'm saying is original although the way I interpret old ideas in a new context might reasonably be described as "eccentric". Personally I reckon academics in both science and philosophy have spent the last century trying to make an easy job look hard so that they can keep their snouts in the public trough. What the fuck are qualia?? I've got enough trouble trying to figure out what it is like to be me without worrying about what it's like to be a fucking bat. I rely heavily on thought experiments because I spend many hours of most days in my garden. Have you ever tried to project yourself into somebody else's mind and thing the way that they do? Take it from me, it can't be done. There is nothing that consciousness is "like".

We are relationships.

Agreed. Process philosophy is ONLY about relationships because everything in the universe is causally connected to everything else because of gravity. Even Newton knew this and he was by no means the brightest penny ever minted.

I suspect that time is not so definitive and that the past does not just disappear.

Omar can have the last word.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

From “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”

[attofishpi]

Where is "here"?

Local Cluster - Milky Way - Orion Spur - Solar System - Earth - Australia - Adelaide @ 20:03 12\09\2015

[Dubious]

I suspect that time is not so definitive and that the past does not just disappear.

Omar can have the last word.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

From “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”

Line for line what does this mean especially as denoted in ...

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on.

Clearly only this and nothing more. Whatever is inscribed by time or upon time is absolutely non retroactive as per the words which follow said mention. My question is when has this ever not been understood or acknowledged as supremely obvious. Also, it does not imply - if that was the inference - that the past disappears. The opposite is actually true when many shed tears in not being able to change it.

The events of the past are near and distant cousins to each succeeding moment depending on proximity. They are the operating themes within a fugue called The Present.

Nice quatrain but what it says is decidedly less than profound. The original Persian may have evinced a somewhat deeper meaning which is missing in the translation likely to be the most popular one namely FitzGerald's making it his poem as much as Omar's if Omar actually wrote The Rubáiyát.

[raw_thought]

Past and future are like east and west. Directions and not locations. Detroit is east of LA and west of New York.
The present is infinitesimal.(literally infinitely tiny)

[Obvious Leo]

Past and future are like east and west.

No they aren't. East and West refer to a Cartesian co-ordinate system and such systems are bi-directional. Time is a uni-directional co-ordinate system which means that its representation as a Cartesian dimension in the spacetime paradigm leads to equations which are time invariant. This doesn't make these equations useless but it does mean they are of epistemic value only and have no ontological authority.

The present is infinitesimal.(literally infinitely tiny)

This statement is false. Time is not infinitely divisible and it does indeed have a smallest possible unit value which is very easily defined. It is the briefest possible interval in which we can meaningfully say that something has actually happened and it has a value of 5.4 x 10(-44) seconds. In physics this is known as the Planck interval.

[raw_thought]

Take a line a___b___c
Suppose the NOW is finite (not infinitely small) in other words from a to c. However, that would mean that a and c are simultaneous (that is absurd). Obviously (if time moves.It does not, I am just provisionally accepting your idea) if that finite NOW cannot be further divided then half of a__c cannot exist. b is therefore impossible and that is absurd.
PS, if a and c are simultaneous then the now is infinitesimal. There is no duration that separates them.
Well, OK, I was being sloppy. The NOW would then have zero duration. However, zero and infinitesimal (see calculus. 1+1/2+1/4+1/8....= 1. Similarly, subtracting rather then adding =zero.

[raw_thought]

Past and future are not directions? So you are saying that a particular moment is past from all temporal points? That 1915 is not future for someone living in 1800?

[raw_thought]

Plank's constant contradicts itself. * It is a distance (either space like or time like) and is not a distance.
Once again, a___b___c
Suppose a_c is Plank's constant. There is no space between a and c!!!! Why? Because a___c is the shortest distance. There cannot be a b! Suppose an object enters a from the left. It will arrive at c without going thru b!!!!)
* Perhaps you are right and all ideas are useful fictions but that also includes your ideas!

[raw_thought]

a___b____c___d____e
if a is simultaneous with b then a is simultaneous with c and then a is simultaneous with d.....ad infinitum. All moments are simultaneous! That seems absurd to me.
Does that also work for distance? All places are the same place? Distance is an illusion. Is that the fundamental meaning of non locality?

[Obvious Leo]

Obviously (if time moves.It does not, I am just provisionally accepting your idea)

I didn't say that time moves. Time is merely a co-ordinate system which maps changes in a physical system.

"Time is what clocks measure" ....Albert Einstein

Past and future are not directions?

I didn't say this either and I don't like having my words misrepresented when my meaning was perfectly clear. I said they they are not directions like east and west are directions, which is what you claimed. You can move from east to west just as easily as you can move from west to east but time is resolutely unidirectional. We move only from the past into the future via the nexus of the present. Therefore time is NOT a Cartesian dimension as it is modelled in spacetime physics and this is why spacetime physics makes no fucking sense. This is what EVERY SINGLE counter-intuitive absurdity and paradox in the current models of physics derives from and this also why these models all contradict each other.

Plank's constant contradicts itself.

I made no mention of Planck's constant. Why is this in the conversation all of a sudden?

a___b____c___d____e
if a is simultaneous with b then a is simultaneous with c and then a is simultaneous with d.....ad infinitum. All moments are simultaneous! That seems absurd to me.
Does that also work for distance? All places are the same place? Distance is an illusion. Is that the fundamental meaning of non locality?

This is more like a sensible question because this proves my point. Time is NOT infinitely divisible but I don't propose to take the credit for this earth-shaking breakthrough in human thought because Zeno of Elea proved this almost 3 thousand years ago.

Yes. Distance is an illusion. Distance is a construct of the human consciousness whereby we spatialise time. This is what Minkowski did in SR because SR models our observed world and NOT the ding an sich. Kant 101.

[raw_thought]

"Past and future are not directions?
ME
"I didn't say this"
Obvious Leo
"Past and future are like east and west. Directions and not locations."
ME
"No they arnt"
Obvious Leo

[raw_thought]

"I made no mention of Plank's constant..."
Obvious Leo
"It is the briefist possible interval...in physics this is known an plank's interval".
Obvious Leo
Plank's constant is applied to time and distance.

[raw_thought]

No, Minkowski did not claim that all places are in the same location.
That is what is implied when one says that distance is an illusion.

[Greta]

The present is infinitesimal.(literally infinitely tiny)

This statement is false. Time is not infinitely divisible and it does indeed have a smallest possible unit value which is very easily defined. It is the briefest possible interval in which we can meaningfully say that something has actually happened and it has a value of 5.4 x 10(-44) seconds. In physics this is known as the Planck interval.

I don't think we can assume that the Planck interval is indivisible. It's the smallest interval in which we can observe change - in 2015, anyway.