I'm educating myself about quantum mechanics for fun, which is something people do, right?

The problem that Schrodinger was trying to describe with his hypothetical about cat is this: reality seems to occupy all possible positions until the act of observation collapses the wave function into something definite and tangible.

It's like the universe is a simulation that doesn't render itself when nobody is looking to save memory. When we do look, we find a consistent objective reality with a definite, apparently self-existent past, but judging by its smallest underlying parts reality is really created by looking at it and it renders itself consistent with past instances as though it was always present and always evolving according to natural laws independent of us.

If there's a God, he must not have always been God. It looks like he's making it up as he goes according to how far his children have progressed technologically. The final product ends up being consistent enough in a way, but it doesn't feel like something he started with the intention of making the way it now is.

Are you real ?

Dust, Wind, Dude....

Put So Crates back in the phone booth.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

"Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.

Metaphysical solipsism is a variety of solipsism. Based on a philosophy of subjective idealism, metaphysical solipsists maintain that the self is the only existing reality and that all other realities, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self, and have no independent existence."

So, am I real? As real as Jesus, Thor, and Santa if the self is a mythological construct of the culture we are born in.

As much as I like to make fun of the utter BS of Mormon culture, their kookiness is just as valid as my own. Maybe we all really do live in our heads. The skull is Plato's Cave.

Good points. I think a hard thing for us to accept is that reality is different for different people. I usually use science to define my reality, but I understand art and literature in a subjective way. I like the skull as Plato's cave reference. We all live in our heads. Others frequently seem unreasonable, with the Mormons being prominent.

If you met someone who lived 100 years ago, it would be hard to relate to them. Never mind 200 or 500 years.

There are those who find the Mormon world not only reasonable, but divinely reasonable. What bearing should facts have on them? They live in a world that has been fabricated for them. Some people prefer it that way.

I don't, because I think I can do better.

Do you find out hard to relate to older people?

I find it hard to relate to Russell M Nelson.

I knew someone born in 1887. She told my dad, after he spawned eight children, that my mother should have cut his dick off. Is this relatable? Hahaha. So funny to hear this firsthand back in the '90's.

Wow. Long time no see.

Welcome back.

bradley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If you met someone who lived 100 years ago, it
> would be hard to relate to them. Never mind 200 or
> 500 years.

This is an intriguing hypothesis, but it is highly culturally dependent, and is definitely not universal across the cultures of humankind.

In daily life, Jews are continually switching (in great, and also granular, historic detail most of the time) between millions or thousands of years ago, to days or months ago, to hundreds of years ago, to what is likely to be revealed in the fairly immediate future, or in the centuries to come.

(As they are doing this, they are also switching constantly between the increasing scientific data of our time which is continually being discovered or postulated, and an increasing depth of understanding of what data we already do possess: geological/archaeological/scientific/psychological, etc.)

Science is depended upon to increasingly reveal "new" true facts, but learning the significance, and the societal and historical implications, of those "new" true facts can often create some immensely difficult intellectual and philosophical contradictions in present time.

[Although this is serious intellectual, scientific, and historical endeavor, it is also, very much, an example of what Jews--as a whole and throughout history-- generally consider "fun." :) ]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/2022 01:12PM by Tevai.

'...it doesn't feel like something he started with the intention of making the way it now is."

How long have humans been around and we can judge?

What we call ordinary matter is really rare 5% of the universe and what we call Dark Matter/Energy (Lambda) makes up 95% of the universe. But we have never seen it or detected it.
We just see how it holds the galaxy together, while the universe expands exponentially. It’s a miracle we are not separated atom from atom, but we are not, because of Lambda.

That sounds like a certain imaginary friend who theoretically must exist.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/2022 03:57AM by bradley.

bradley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That sounds like a certain imaginary friend who
> theoretically must exist.

https://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/education/graphic_history/univ_evol.html

In the innocence of my uninstructed youth, I took the Big Bang to be simply an explosion, and that with nothing else then existing with which to compare it, there was no point in wondering how big the 'thing' was that Big Banged.

And so it made sense to me that the explosion was like cartoon explosions, where everything expanded globularly from that central point.

Which made it plain in my mind that all one had to do was get enough 'readings' on the directions matter was traveling, and then one could trace back to the point of explosion, where there would be an expanding volume of ... nothing!  So eventually positioned at that point, everything moving away due to the Big Bang would be out of sight, and you could light off another one!

And I wondered how many others were curious to find and to see that position in space, especially those who wondered if there was something there!

The depiction seen in The Cat's NASA offering is nothing like my imagination proffered; it looks like the result of a breaching load that was used to blow through a locked door.  What if someone was trying to break in to steal the family jewels?!

I leave it to my humble and humpable readers to make up their own minds: my pure, childlike intuition or the crackpots at NASA...

In scientia victoria est; noli imitari ducem ludo!  Et adhuc tempus est aliud cervisiam.

This is what you ask when you are really high.

I'm supposing that when you're really low, you ask, "will the universe even miss me?"

Like Dagny, I've always assumed that when I cease to exist, so will all of you...

Dagny's statement was one of the greatest ever posted on this board.

Is the singularity real?
Is the cosmological constant, Lambda, real?
Einstein couldn’t believe it was real, even though he put it in his original equation, E=mc^2

See it?

He included it because he was told, by astronomers at the time that the universe was stable, not expanding, but in perfect balance, where E=mc^2 and m=E/c^2

But when Edwin Hubble told him, the universe is expanding, exponentially, he removed the cosmological constant and called it his biggest blunder.
Now 100 yrs later we have seen the singularity.
We have discovered our galaxy and all the galaxies are moving towards a singularity, at the center of every black hole, 100yrs after E=mc^2 predicted black holes, which Einstein refused to believe were real.
He bet on the wrong horse, the accepted well established scientific consensus, instead of his own math.

His biggest blunder was listening to people who believed the galaxy was only 100k light years across (the size of our Milky Way galaxy). His 2nd biggest blunder was listening to people who believed the universe was expanding and not noticing all of the closest galaxies are moving towards the same point in space, the great attractor, along a dipole Cosmic Microwave Background.
Which made him remove Lambda from his theory.
Because he had to rely upon the ‘scientific consensus’ at that time, based upon the limited observations and interpretations 100yrs ago.

So if you still don’t believe the singularity is real, despite the fact Roger Penrose just won a Nobel prize for proving they were real, mathematically, 50 yrs after E=mc^2,
then through observation. 50yrs later.

"I know, I know. Sisyphean task. A few weeks from now it will be repeated with the exact same pieces of misinformation, regardless of what I say."

--Brother of Jerry


https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2432751,2432799#msg-2432799

First, I have a lot of respect for what the sciences are discovering about our universe. It is quite possible that our universe could be infinite--nobody seems to have found an end to it.

That said, I am concerned when I read things that say other human beings live only in your own mind and/or are only extensions of yourself. This appears to have been the philosophy (such as it may have been for a basic simpleton) of our last leader of the United States (and let me make clear that I am not talking about our current leader but the person whom he replaced in that office). When you start believing that other people are there only in your mind or that their only purpose is to serve your wants and needs, then you have set yourself on a road that could lead to your own personal destruction as well as the destruction of the lives of many innocent human beings who have no knowledge or skill to challenge your destructive ways.

There's a difference between scientific and philosophical inquiry about the nature of reality on the one hand and, on the other, the nihilism of the sociopath. For the latter needs other people: they are the resources that enable him to live beyond his own physical, financial, and emotional means.

I'm not sure sociopaths are nihilists. In their minds, they certainly matter. I think JS was a sociopath. He wanted to be king with a harem and wealth.

Sociopaths especially consider themselves real even though their personalities are dissociated. They are the most unreal people out there.

It's no wonder that Joseph started a church. He lived in a fantasy world while being highly skilled at projecting a convincing persona, to the point that he became "that guy". The one his mother wanted him to be.

bradley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm not sure sociopaths are nihilists. In their
> minds, they certainly matter.

That's the point I was trying to make. First, "the nihilism of the sociopath" is a moral nihilism, an ethical nihilism; and second, the sociopath by nature relies on others as sources of physical and emotional supply. He assumes others exist as an extension, real or potential, of his own ego.


--------------
> I think JS was a
> sociopath. He wanted to be king with a harem and
> wealth.

I more or less agree. You don't need to be a sociopath to want sex and money, and JS showed empathy to others on many occasions although almost always when that identification did not require great personal sacrifice from him. But definitely somewhere on the narcissism/sociopathy spectrum.


---------------
> Sociopaths especially consider themselves real
> even though their personalities are dissociated.
> They are the most unreal people out there.

Or the most real given the purity of their incentives and motives. In short, it depends how we define "real."


--------------
> It's no wonder that Joseph started a church. He
> lived in a fantasy world while being highly
> skilled at projecting a convincing persona, to the
> point that he became "that guy". The one his
> mother wanted him to be.

I agree. Someone said in some thread that JS could have gone much farther if he had chosen a more respectable path. I do not concur with that. I don't think JS the farmer would have accomplished much at all. In my mind he picked a career that fit his desires and talents exceptionally well.

Joseph's trajectory is like Ozzy Osborne's "Crazy Train". He wasn't your run of the mill sociopath. He was more like an Aleister Crowley.

Is it better to burn out than fade away? Joseph found out as a natural result of the way he lived. Rock of ages, keep a rollin'.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2022 07:38AM by bradley.

It's all a simuation.

Or a simutation?

Or like what you're doing now, slimulating?

Maybe it's a symbolation.