High ten, Dasixsevenone! Let's call the ego real as well as illusionary. Real in the sense it interacts with other egos, creating a sense of community, illusionary in the sense it stands apart. And a similar for the community, and it's relation to other communities. More balanced we can't get! A dynamical balance.

Yes, indeed. Just like unbridled collectivism. Attention to the individual might blind us for other people and can lead to nasty behavior towards other people (or lack of contact). Attention to the collective only can lead to nasty behavior towards the individual. So both can lead to nasty behavior. The collective, as well as the individual, are abstractions in the sense that they don't have an independent existence, and any claim on individuality or collectivity is a claim that ignores reality.

Nobody is fundamental indeed, because the distinction between everybody and nobody isn't as easy to make — DA671

I see what you mean. No one is unique, contrary to what commercials show you. In that sense the ego is illusionary. Only isolated egos are unique.

It was "I", but it really wasn't anybody in a fundamental sense — DA671

Nobody is fundamental. We are all children of the universe, created by the eternal beings. If you want to make an illusion out of that, no problem. :wink:

The ego is an illusion to the extent it can't be zeroed in on — Agent Smith

This is the root of the identity crisis. Who am I? Every time you think you have found yourself, it slips away. Why can't you zero in in on yourself? Because you stand always one step behind it? There only is one you. Not you and you looking at it.

The self is certainly an illusion — DA671

Then who wrote these words, if it wasn't you? Or is "you" equally illusionary? The illusion seems pretty real. I think the ego is called an illusion to counteract the egoism present in our world.

Not all will agree I'm afraid. — Agent Smith

Thats true.

If the ego talks to itself, who does the talking or who does it talk to? Who is it even? The root of identity crisis. Who am I? What's ego? The body. All problems solved. So no illusion at all.

A black hole has a perfect cylindrical symmetry. It exists in the real world.

Can you tell me what's your ego? Is it your body? — Agent Smith

Exactly! It's your body. You walk and talk between the world and your brain.

If you want to say that minds are activities or actions, then you are speaking nonsense — Reformed Nihilist

Just like it is utterly blatant, and seriously grave nonsense if you say mind is a thing. It's not an activity either. A volcano is a thing. It erupting is an activity, if it's an active volcano. Neither posses mind.

Minds are things, not activities, no matter how often you want to say otherwise, and the only way to change that is to change the English language... — Reformed Nihilist

That's what you think. Not all words in English language refer to things though. That's your limited interpretation. How would changing language change your mind?

Mind is not a thing. In plain English.

Isn't so called (velocity/gravitational) time dilation, a case of warping the 4th dimension (time); however, unlike space in which case a straight line becomes a curve, with time, a curve becomes a straight line. — Agent Smith

The straight line of time becomes a curved one too. If space is curved, so does time. Curvature can be defined only for the space between two different points. A point has no curvature. If you imagine two different points on the timeline (an imaginary line) and put a clock on each point, then the curvature of time is the difference in timerate of the two clocks. If the two clocks show no difference, time is flat, like space is. All flat lines, quasi Euclidean because of a factor i that is placed in front of t, it. If space is straight, flat, there is no difference between subsequent intervals mdx (corresponding to the rates of the clock on different mdt on the timeline). The m is called the metric on the spacetime. If the metric is constant there is no curvature. Mass curves spacetime, induces a metric (which are the m's arranged in a symmetric 4x4 matrix, which is usually a diagonal matrix with elements on the diagonal only but sometimes contains off diagonal elements giving rise to a torsion of space, like frame dragging), and instead of moving through flat spacetime around mass and under the influence of a force, as happens according to Newton (and even with an instantaneous action...), a mass just follows the curvature, just as in flat spacetime it travels straight.

Yeah, so we just don't know enough yet — universeness

The problem, at the same the true kicker, is knowing it. Once you see it, it all seems so obvious.

but Information is also an immaterial function. — Gnomon

Dunno. This directs attention away from the matter itself. And, so I think, that's exactly the stuff conscious resides in. You can consider the conscious as an outside function of matter, like force fields, but these are a necessary element to express the conscious, to form forlmations, so to speak. The force fields emanate from charged particles (though they were, and still can be, given a quite independent existence, like real photons are created when charges interact, thereby influencing other electrically bound charges or free charges, say an atom they excite or an electron they scatter from). The potential energy fields, which can be charged even themselves, like is the case for the colored interaction fields, have a function, but conscience resides inside matter, like charge in a particle, and it is in fact informed charge. That renders it material in a sense, but the inside of matter, its charged content, is not really material.

All that is required is the laws of the universe, and memory. Time as a real thing seems inessential to explaining what we experience. — hypericin

There you go. Time as the variable t is an illusion. Light doesn't travel in time, and it's finite speed in space prevents things from happening at once. There only exists irreversible processes (which can be compared with a clock and its values written on an axis, the time axis, sometimes even written as "it", t preceded by the imaginary number i (to symmetrize the metri, already an indication of its imaginary nature. And only at the singularity time is existing as a real clock, which simply doesn't exist in reality. Only in the realm of thought. Time as a coordinate is an illusion. It can be used though to indicate relative progressions of irreversible processes relative to each other in different frames, but labeling processes themselves with clock values (like is done in evolution formulas of a process) is an imaginary excercise.

Are you theistic? — universeness

Of course I am. But I leave the gods to their own devices. Who else can have created the universe? Thanatos and Hypnos were once reality. These days they battle each other far away from us. But they still make us sleep an die. They are replaced by laws of nature, which are just as fable like. I haven't encountered a single law yet.

This begs what question? — universeness

About the reality of a mathematical metaphysical universe.

Sounds to me, by torus you mean a geometric model. Would you consider the magnetic fields of planets, stars as torus? — magritte

Yes. They look like torus shapes.

Black holes like the ones in the center of many galaxies appear to be torus like from a great distance but they are motivated into that appearance by equatorial accretion disks due to gravity and polar bidirectional outward streams of charged particles in a polarized field. — magritte

I don't think they are torus shaped. The accretion disc and
particles shot out might be a sign the black hole rotates. All bodies in the universe rotate, so. A rotation of a black hole causes space around it to twist (frame-dragging, Lens-Thirring effect, if you're interested) and this induces an asymmetry. If there is matter in rest around a rotating hole, it will attract it and and cause it to move in the direction of rotation also. But this is not the cause for the rotation of the galaxy. It might be that the rotation of the hole (which has a circle singularity) is not parallel to the rotation of the galaxy (though I'm not sure; maybe they coincide, like the rotation of the Sun and the planets, and now that I think about it, the hole probably has the same direction of rotation indeed).
There is still a cylindrical symmetry, like a torus has, but the hole in the torus doesn’t correspond to a hole in a hole. The matter around these mega monsters falls in and starts to rotate faster and faster around it. At the two poles (not generated by the hole itself, as it's charge neutral) there is mass ejected. So, the matter rotating around it is not accelerated towards the poles by an internal magnetic field but somehow this matter creates its own projecting fields. Once inside it falls to the circularity.

The torus shape in the model mentioned is a model for the complete shape of our universe. The whole 3d shape is a closed 3d torus shape with in the center a hole from which universes arise and travel around it, to arrive on the other side again. The acceleration of the universe was not known yet though. But indirect measurements on gravitational waves suggest the universe is a closed structure indeed.

I'm hungry for a doughnut!

The torus I mean is geometrical indeed. But 4d spatial (well, actually 7d, of which 3 small Planck-sized one). And open on the outside, to allow space in both directions of the mouth to reach for infinity, so it's not a real torus actually.

What the clock measures is change. The measurement of change is time, like the measurement of space is length. Clock is to the ruler as time is to length. — Harry Hindu

The clock is not what the ruler is to distance. An odometer would be more appropriate to compare the clock with. The numbers on the clock represent the time passed, the number of times the clock has tic-tac-ed. A An odometer does the same with distance. It's number given corresponds to the amount of distance traveled. The ruler just points to the points in spacetime. This corresponds to the hand of the clock only, or, say to the pendulum swinging below it, or a metronome. So the pairs clock-odometer and pendulum-ruler are appropriate.

Time doesn't measure change. It's a number, represented on the time axis, and by an imaginary clock we put besides an irreversible process. It is itself based on a reversible periodic motion and is as such imaginary. No reversible periodic motion exists in nature (except for the situation around the big bang). So there doesn't even exist a reliable measure for the alleged measuring. How do you measure change by a clock if the change is time? If the clock next to a process indicates that the process has proceeded two hours instead of one hour, is the change twice, what does the clock measure? It indicates a value, (an imaginary value, as the perfect clock doesn't exist), you can put in expressions that describe the evolution of the process, which by itself constitutes time. All processes are irreversible, so the artificial recreation, transformation, of time into a clock is turning time into a non-existent process. Time as represented by the clock is a chimera.
It comes in handy though for describing another more realistic time, i.e, irreversible entropic time and only at the begin state of the universe it had a real existence. It was all that existed, in fact. If we could place that initial state besides a process, we would have the ideal clock. We couldn't say though if that clock was going backwards or forwards.

Pretty far fetched, but hey, it's a philosophy site. Ah! 1 o'clock. Coffee time!

Mind emerges not just from a Material Brain, but ultimately from the Immaterial Information that is knitted-together into novel patterns of inter-relationships, which humans interpret as Meaning. — Gnomon

Information is a material notion. It describes the spatial relationships between particles. I agree that if there is information in motion, like there is between heat and cold, and if this information structures can form correspondences, resonances, with informed structures around them and interact with them, one can speak of conscious life. At the same time you take out an essential ingredient. Consciousness itself. It is like taking out the charges of elementary particles. Without them they would stray in the void, diverging into the whole vastness of space. It's because of these charges they can form structures in the first place.

and finally get rid of the need for gods and monsters.h — universeness

To be superseded by new monsters? So called objective monsters?



Logos was invented to make a connection of the forms Plato thought existed in the metaphysical realm of mathematical objects. Only logic could describe them approximately and mathematical logic supposed to be the best approximation. This begs the question.

Thanatos is no fable. Together with Hypnos he had a grip on humanity and made them sleep and let them die.

So yeah they surely should be considered alive. Despite how "shocking" that might sound to some. — dimosthenis9

I wholeheartedly agree! It appears to be the primordial form that even survived to these days and a world of life without them (or bacteria, which have their own ribosomes, contrary to the virus) seems indeed impossible. Viruses are like some necessary ingredient for the whole spectrum of life (to which it belongs too). Without viruses, life would be sent to oblivion.

I don't think an interpretation of an artist's or subject's motivations tell us anything about whether the work is any good or not. — Tom Storm

My point is that R doesn't know how to tell a story about reality. He just freezes a visible aspect of it, and implicitly tells us it was all about ego and money. The golden age ruled supreme. Warhol at least shows that reality explicitly. Maybe some more religious paintings of Rembrandt qualify as good art.

The strange thing with words is that they talk to us. You can consider them as objects on their own, as drawings, but then they cease to talk. You need other words to express what you see.



How does it help in interpreting political and pseudoscientific talk? Don't these have to be interpreted firstly, as being political and pseudo?

The more I think about it it the more I like it! It (CR), at least, doesn't have that pompous intention most standard interpretations have! And because it allows allows anything from the UFO, to politics, to "pseudo"-scientific debate.

Off course. But you say also. Why should a work with humor be bad (or good)?

The qualities you mention don't constitute a basis for the quality of art. They say if your qualities can be found in it. Or are they a base for good art?

Indeed. Whoever told you that doesn't understand that all languages can be translated into one another. All languages are spoken by people and no language is an isolated entity without an overlap with other languages. Even mathematical language. Language separates, gives a means for identity but it doesn't isolate.

People are viruses in disguise. That's why viruses have a will, a conscious (not a consciousness), a longing, a drift, and they even bring new life into existence. Nobody knows how it is to be a virus, but they certainly have features in common with us. Features that are dressed up in people and other organisms. We can tug our forelog, viruses can't.

So, viruses are alive! Naked. Without a naked body. In between the naked nudidity of the virus and the free naked human beauty, live dressed organisms like bacteria, unicellulars, insects, trees, plants, birds, amphibians, reptiles, or mammals, fish, and crabs.

is Rembrandt's Night Watch a better painting than a Warhol screen-printed Marilyn? If yes or no, why — Tom Storm

It definitely, absolutely, irrevocably, seriously, and objectively is a worse pain(t)ing than the projection of Warhol. The Nachtwacht is a dull 2d fixation of blown up egos and Rembrandt was the robot faithfully reproducing their outer appearance on a 2d plane. Vermeer used the camera obscura in producing his almost photo realistic images. Perspective drawing, the enlightenment technique used to render "reality" as faithfully as possible, was well applied by R. It's pretty easy to put on linen what you see from a fixed angle, but exactly this is given great value in assessing artistry. "It is exactly how it is in reality!" is so often heard. R. just made it a bit more dramatically, dark and locally enlightened. Big deal. He got too much credit for it. The people he froze alive belonged to an elite group of people only interested in propagating their own image in time, just like R himself. R sold his skills to the elite who used him as a camera only. R was rich and asked for. History made him famous because history needs famous figures. People need them. Put them in a museum or at Madame Tussauds. Big deal. Warhol just projected, and ironized this whole shebang of iconization. Thereby parking himself in the same lot but he at least told a story (and promised everyone 15 minutes of it).

There's artistic vision, truth, technical mastery, surprise, emotional insight, playfulness, complexity, narrative, simplicity, clarity, idiosyncrasy, depth, history, humor, community.... and on and on. — T Clark

These are all contingent to art. Except the narrative. The narrative is the key ingredient. If the artists knows to tell a story, then he/she is an artist. Everyone has a vision. What's so special about the artistic one? Everybody can tell the truth. What is so special about truth in art? It's not art in itself. Technical mastery comes with practice. Surprise can be distracting. For emotional insight you can go to a shrink. Children exhibit playfulness. Complexity and simplicity, just take a walk or look at the smoke blown in the wind. Idiosyncrasy, being original? That's the kill for Japanes art. Depth? Depth in the literal sense is easily learnt and turns reality in a fixed abstraction which, is in reality a weird collection of shapes in 2d. Depth? Shallow stories can be just as interesting. Going deep distracts the view from the object you go deep in. History I can learn from books or listening to people. You can learn it from people too and by watching the Nightwatch you can learn the clothes worn by the elite or the stuff used by them, even that dogs looked the same back then. Humor and community I can find at all places but art these days seems the last place to find it. Though the balloon dog of Koons is a funny "little" pisser!

The truth sets free. It's pretty clear to me what happened back then. But maybe that's all happening inside a quark, who knows. Don't we ask questions to know the truth? I think it's no problem to know what happened back then or how nature looks fundamentally. Is that the ultimate goal of science? At a certain point, there is nothing left to ask. Think I kill myself... I'm gonna watch some comedy too! :wink:

Now that's a good question! And the answer is no. The clock is only a device we invented and use in relation to irreversible processes. If an irreversible process has proceeded we compare it to the clock and look how many periods it has executed. Tic, 1, tac, 2, tic, 3, ti..., 3.7687987. In nature there are no perfect periodic processes to be found. That's an imaginary only. Even the cesium clock is not perfect.
A clock measures nothing at all. It quantifies irreversible progress by comparing that progress with an imaginary. Of course the progress can be called time.

Luckily, physicists can have wrong stories. There are different views on the big bang and it depends on your view on big and bang where you place the bìg bang. It is usually placed on the moment matter came into being, after inflation. The real bang is the short moment of inflation. Some people think that inflation is eternal in an infinite universe. And our universe is just a local patch where matter condensed. Without an explanation why inflation. This view is supported by the hypothesis that the universe is flat, which is basically the same position as flat Earthers take. Observations suggest the visible universe is flat but the same holds for Earth and only by looking at the Earth from afar, it is global.Of course we can't look at the universe from afar. But you can give arguments why it is flat only locally. Nobody knows how far the universe extends after the horizon.
General relativity doesn't forbid extra dimensions (string theory even brings in 6, 7, or 26 of them) and it is possible our universe is expanding as a 3d closed structure on a 4d space. At the center of this space was a Planck sized wormhole on which our universe was wriggling tiny weeny as a Planck sized timeless structure. It was wriggling but without a direction in time. There was no cesium back than but you still can put (mentally) a clock there. The timeless state was in fact itself a perfect clock. You can't tell by looking at the state of the universe back then if time goes forward or backward and you can even imagine it has a fluctuating existence with no global direction. So you can put a clock next to it but if this clock goes forwards or backwards, no one can tell. So it becomes pretty meaningless to talk about time at all.
When the two universes of a previous bang on the structure have accelerated away to infinity, the conditions for the next are ideal for a new bang to occur and on both sides of the 4d mouth two 3d structures, a universe and an mirror universe bang into time-like existence.

Hawking radiation suggests time does not stand still inside a black hole and that over an immensity of time, a black hole will evaporate. — universeness

Hawking radiation does imply that particles just outside the horizon are entangled with the particles inside and take away the frozen information inside. On the inside time hasn't stopped. This looks so from the outside only (if you fall in it takes an amount of time to reach infinity inside (which can't truly be infinity though but in the classical picture it is). The moment a black hole has formed it's almost instantly radiated away by from the quantum vacuum near the horizon, the heavy curvature of spacetime being the exciter. Negative energy solutions cause the inside mass to reduce. On the outside though, this process lasts very long. :cool:

Is a photon dead? Nice question. It hasn't an associated restframe. Very strange! In a sense it mediates instantly, like the instant interaction in Newtonian space. But an instant interaction implies that everything happens at once, in space as well in time, hence only a finite lightspeed can make things happen.

Seems you think a lot about this stuff! I don't know a lot of people who have their head exploding on stuff like this! That's what geniuses are made of. (Just kidding...) :smile:



Depends who you ask it. For a lot of people the clock is very real and they fight it, save it, buy it, or kill it even. The clock can go awfully slow when waiting. Don't think about the clock!

If you want to say that human activity is associated with extinction or near extinction of a large number of species all over the world, you've got science on your side.

If you want to say we're in a mass extinction, you don't — frank

And yet... The second law of thermodynamics says that if order in a closed system is created, like is done globally on a massive scale and an exponentially increasing rate, there has to be an accompanying decrease in the medium the order is created in, i.e, in nature. We can nothing but conclude then, that a mass extinction is immanent.

Ain't the belief in one god a doctrine? Like the belief in one physical reality in science? I don't think doctrines have an inherent value. A ham sandwich though...

What's the difference between a unitarian and a catholic? Brings the catholic three times as much disaster? I can't quite spot the difference, apart from the trinity which is basically a split personality. Of the same one god.

"The concept of ethical monotheism, which holds that morality stems from God alone and that its laws are unchanging, first occurred in Judaism, but is now a core tenet of most modern monotheistic religions, including Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and Baháʼí Faith."

Is all monotheism to be traced back to the replacement of the old Greek gods by one? It seems monotheism is a western concept as is the concept of a one and only true reality.

That I call Enlightenment with a true capital P! It even brings a tear to the edge of my eye! But I'm too damned proud to let it flow... :smile:

So much for Christianity! I'm sure the same goes for other religions as well. — Agent Smith

And not only for religions...

Christ was just hanging around on Earth playing the radio of God. God is the DJ, the Holy Spirit His radio waves, and God the receiver and loudspeaker.

"Everybody, tune in to the morning show! Life from heaven, God Himself, voiced by the upcoming talent JC! Second time around, ain't you JC?" "Yaman! Mama was f$#$%d twice!"

What if I told you that I'm one with my room and when you enter my room, all you see is the room? — Agent Smith

:lol:

If I were your mum, I would scream to get your ass out of the closet!