If anyone on this forum can challenge you or anyone else on philosophical thinking, it's folks like @180 Proof. What you seem to be recoiling from, is that he and his knowledge of all things philosophical is what you face as challenge. Face his scrutiny or run rabbit run! Those are your choices. Other TPF readers will decide who makes the stronger points between the two of you. That's an important part of any useful discussion/debate site, yes?

So why not drop your pseudonym or provide a link to your 'published articles,' or/and your 'new book,' and we can all judge for ourselves who the idiot between you and @180 Proof is, based on your exchange on this thread. I for one, suggest that in this case, it is you FrancisRay who has typed like an idiot.

However how well this would in the end work for him is doubtful. The scary part is if Maduro thinks that he can use military force, that the US and UK somehow will not intervene or that Venezuela could fight a war like Russia does. Well, Venezuela isn't Russia.

At least there are talks scheduled this week. — ssu

Yeah, it all fits into a pattern of brinksmanship that is sooooooo boring but sooooooo potentially deadly.
Gangland politics. Gang boss MADuro, try's to take a bite of anothers territory by disputing ownership, and the current boss of that territory objects. One of the big godfathers (USA) with its smaller supporting underbosses, (such as the UK) warns MADuro of the possible gang war that might happen if they 'try this shit!!' But the big brinksmanship-style problems, that threaten all of us, happen IF other big gang godfathers like Russia or China etc, make noises in support of MADuro, under the old directive, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction!) :rage:

I remember in the 80s when the possibility of a full nuclear exchange was a hot topic of debate, and a regular list of possible 'flash' events was offered to people via the main news outlets.
It was a long list! From trouble in the Middle East to a USSR or Chinese invasion of here or there.
I think that such a list even prompted this from Billy Joel:

Oh dear. This is not a good analysis. If all people are morally equal, then it is an error to divide them into the nefarious and the righteous. — unenlightened

I think you misuse the term 'morally equal,' in the context you use it above.
The morality displayed by any individual is based on the subjective judgment of others who will measure it, based on their own established notion of morality, and the moral code established in the society/culture they were raised amongst, yes?
'All people are equal and must be treated as such,' is a foundational goal, a prime directive.
Such a directive does not mean that all who revolt against a vile system are free from having nefarious participants!

That is what must result in the inequality, when the nefarious are brought down and the righteous exalted. Because it follows, after the revolution that the righteous are in charge and deserve all the benefits. — unenlightened

Are we talking past each other here? The fact that the nefarious who helped bring down a nefarious regime is often used via 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend realpolitik,' in any given struggle. Also good folks can turn bad when they gain access to riches and power. Where did I suggest that when a vile regime is overthrown, all who take part in the destruction of the vile regime are righteous?
ABSAFRAGGINLOOTLY NOT! Such misplaced trust has been a major part of the problem that allows the rot to seep back in and you end up with as bad or worse a regime as the one that was demolished.
We all know this! There are many books about it, such as Orwell's 1984 etc.

So the revolution just turns round and round getting nowhere, because the righteous become the nefarious - there is no difference. — unenlightened

This is the pattern we are trying to stop from repeating, yes?

So make a law that the people in charge of every institution must live in the accommodation for the homeless, and receive the minimum wage, and have no private wealth at all, and as long as this law is enforced you will never have a greedy politician, banker, or company director, and the wealth will be very well distributed. — unenlightened

Oh come on! Can you do no better than offer such a facetious paragraph?

You can be a bit of an enigma at times (at least to me). Perhaps that's the way you like it.

Chavez had the correct idea, based on such as:
Using record-high oil revenues of the 2000s, his government nationalized key industries, created participatory democratic Communal Councils and implemented social programs known as the Bolivarian missions to expand access to food, housing, healthcare and education. The high oil profits coinciding with the start of Chavez's presidency resulted in temporary improvements in areas such as poverty, literacy, income equality and quality of life between primarily 2003 and 2007

Like all revolutions of the past, we often start with the intention to enforce the foundation that 'all people are equal, and must be treated as such,' and we end up with 'all people are equal but some people deserve more resources and power than any other person.' When the people get rid of a nasty system, they often fail to prevent their good work from getting corrupted by the nefarious that still exist amongst them. Outside influence from regimes which are as nasty as the one just removed is also a major problem. We saw this exemplified in the French, Chinese and Russian Revolutions, The English and Spanish Civil Wars, the rise of horrors such as Pol Pot, Idi Amin and many others. These are very familiar recipes now.
All started off with good intentions, to create a better life for the populations involved. The Spanish had to endure years of horror under a fascist pig like Franco, because the German Nazis prevented the Spanish people from winning their struggle, even with the help of the international brigades.
I think what has happened in Venezuela is yet another example of this pattern.
Only when people learn how to prevent the rot from seeping in, once they have removed a long suffered, vile system of governance, will this pattern be stopped from repeating.

Sadly, there are still many pathological, narcissistic, sociopaths amongst us who also have wealth and/or power and/or nefarious followers (or easily duped fools,) behind them. Trump and his supporters being a current perfect example.
I think the Venezuelan people will have to rise again and establish secular humanist, democratic socialist governance with free and fair elections and a robust set of checks and balances to keep the nefarious from ruining and running their country.

Well, at least we have common ground in our wish that a war between Venezuela and Guyana does not happen.

You offered more statements than suggestions about ways to equitably share any wealth generated by Venezuela's resources amongst its population.

I like the idea of 'national funds' but I far prefer a UBI as a human right of being a citizen of a nation.
If your main models are Sweden and Norway then I agree that these models are better than the current situation in Venezuela but I am far more interested in systems which provide a far fairer wealth share than either of those countries.

Are you okay with individuals in these 'oil companies' you describe, becoming personally very rich?
I am no less offended by those at the head of 'private companies,' becoming personally rich and powerful, by extorting the wealth of a nation and diverting it from its people, than I am by autocratic politicians doing the same.
Do you think it is impossible to have an economic system that benefits all stakeholders or members of a national population in a equitable way?
Do you think the best that humans can ever possibly achieve for a national population is a 'some have' and 'most have not' society such as Norway, Sweden or Saudi Arabia?

So how would you ensure that all the people of Venezuela, get an equal share of the resources that Venezuela has?

what do you think of Hugo Chavez? Was he trying to bring a fairer system to Venezuela that benefited the people of that nation, more than it benefited rich elites, foreign profit-driven companies, and political forces that want to maintain capitalism and free market economies, or do you think Chavez was just another gangster?

For me, this feeds in a little to the string theory concept. A string is posited either as linear, (open) (1D) (1 axis), at any moment in time, or a closed (loop) (2D) and vibrating, and it is the vibration that creates the other macro/extended dimension(s) of 3D space. The extra (tiny) dimensions, required in string theory are 'wrapped around' every coordinate in 3D space. Maths allows this in the way it is demonstrated in Computing (I think). In the vast majority of programming languages, you can declare an array data structure. A linear array might be just declared as Numbers[10], so a list of 10 storage locations, with an associated type, such as REAL. So, 10 empty boxes that you can store 10 real numbers in for the purpose of reading/writing/editing the 'real number' content at those 10 locations (normally contiguous locations). A 2D array could just be declared as Numbers[10][10] and 3D as Numbers{10][10][10].
So mathematically, you can create an nth dimensional array, and such an array would exist in reality, but cannot be geometrically displayed in 3D. Apart from in abstractions, such as the calabi-yau manifolds (I think). When you describe a mathematical axis such as 'imaginary,' etc. Is there any geometric consideration involved in such projections? If pushed, would a mathematician be willing to say something such as 'well you could think of the 'imaginary number line,' as in a sense, 'wrapped around' every coordinate in a standard 3D coordinate system, such as (x,y,z), or (x,y,z,t), t being time.
So a coordinate such as (w,x,y,z,t) would indicate that w is a 4th geometric dimension which is a 'tiny/micro extension, ''surrounding?' every (x,y,z,t) macro coordinate in our 3D existence?
Does this have any credence level with you or is my musing here, no more than pure speculation?

I thought this might also be of some use, as an aid to thinking about this:

"Dimensional disaster
In string theory, little loops of vibrating stringiness (in the theory, they are the fundamental object of reality) manifest as the different particles (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.) and as the force-carriers of nature (photons, gluons, gravitons, etc.). The way they do this is through their vibrations. Each string is so tiny that it appears to us as nothing more than a point-like particle, but each string can vibrate with different modes, the same way you can get different notes out of a guitar string.

Each vibration mode is thought to relate to a different kind of particle. So all the strings vibrating one way look like electrons, all the strings vibrating another way look like photons, and so on. What we see as particle collisions are, in the string theory view, a bunch of strings merging together and splitting apart.

But for the math to work, there have to be more than four dimensions in our universe. This is because our usual space-time doesn't give the strings enough "room" to vibrate in all the ways they need to in order to fully express themselves as all the varieties of particles in the world. They're just too constrained.

In other words, the strings don't just wiggle, they wiggle hyperdimensionally.

Current versions of string theory require 10 dimensions total, while an even more hypothetical über-string theory known as M-theory requires 11. But when we look around the universe, we only ever see the usual three spatial dimensions plus the dimension of time. We're pretty sure that if the universe had more than four dimensions, we would've noticed by now.

How can the string theory's requirement for extra dimensions possibly be reconciled with our everyday experiences in the universe?

Curled up and compact
Thankfully, string theorists were able to point to a historical antecedent for this seemingly radical notion.

Back in 1919, shortly after Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, the mathematician and physicist Theodor Kaluza was playing around with the equations, just for fun. And he found something especially interesting when he added a fifth dimension to the equations — nothing happened. The equations of relativity don't really care about the number of dimensions; it's something you have to add in to make the theory applicable to our universe.

But then Kaluza added a special twist to that fifth dimension, making it wrap around itself in what he called the "cylinder condition." This requirement made something new pop out: Kaluza recovered the usual equations of general relativity in the usual four dimensions, plus a new equation that replicated the expressions of electromagnetism.

It looked like adding dimensions could potentially unify physics.

In retrospect, this was a bit of a red herring.

Still, a couple of decades later another physicist, Oskar Klein, tried to give Kaluza's idea an interpretation in terms of quantum mechanics. He found that if this fifth dimension existed and was responsible in some way for electromagnetism, that dimension had to be scrunched down, wrapping back around itself (just like in Kaluza’s original idea), but way smaller, down to a bare 10^-35 meters.

The many manifolds of string theory

If an extra dimension (or dimensions) is really that small, we wouldn't have noticed by now. It's so small that we couldn't possibly hope to directly probe it with our high-energy experiments. And if those dimensions are wrapped up on themselves, then every time you move around in four-dimensional space, you're really circumnavigating those extra dimensions billions upon billions of times.

And those are the dimensions where the strings of string theory live.

With further mathematical insight, it was found that the extra six spatial dimensions needed in string theory have to be wrapped up in a particular set of configurations, known as Calabi-Yau manifolds, after two prominent physicists. But there isn't one unique manifold that's allowed by string theory.

There's around 10^200,000.

It turns out that when you need six dimensions to curl up on themselves, and give them almost any possible way to do it, it … adds up.

That's a lot of different ways to wrap those extra dimensions in on themselves. And each possible configuration will affect the ways the strings inside them vibrate. Since the ways that strings vibrate determine how they behave up here in the macroscopic world, each choice of manifold leads to a distinct universe with its own set of physics.

So only one manifold can give rise to the world as we experience it. But which one?

Unfortunately, string theory can't give us an answer, at least not yet. The trouble is that string theory isn't done — we only have various approximation methods that we hope get close to the real thing, but right now we have no idea how right we are. So we have no mathematical technology for following the chain, from specific manifold to specific string vibration to the physics of the universe.

The response from string theorists is something called the Landscape, a multiverse of all possible universes predicted by the various manifolds, with our universe as just one point among many.

And that's where string theory sits today, somewhere on the Landscape."

:up:

as one united species.
incorrigible:
(of a person or their behaviour) not able to be changed or reformed.

I suppose we all hold some views, very strongly.

Oh my dear, I think I have to argue against that notion — Athena

Of course you do, and I am glad of it, in a democracy, people need alternate views to choose from.

I am fully expecting a New Age where our consciousness will be so changed people can no longer relate to our past. — Athena

Don't get me wrong Athena in that I am very aware of the truth of 'those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.' I am not saying that the thoughts and fables of the ancients have no value, but I am saying that they are not good enough to form the basis of our moral codes or human rights or global constitution or prime directives, in our spacefaring future as one united species.

What is cool about your musings (your posts), Athena, is that you demonstrate that you still need and want to muse so much. It is such a big part of who you are, imo. We all need to do the same.
In that lies the truth, that we are each, always learning. Arrogance and 'me,' 'me' me!' are part of the problem, that we all must fight against, in secular and humanist ways.
As I have stated many times, it's your legacy that will endure, in ways you can never know.
Cultural legacy in that sense, is indeed, critical, imo.
BUT, not the classics, they must make room for the new enlightenments to come.

I am Scottish, born and living in Scotland.

Oh, man, you have just hit on something that has been rattling around my head for a few months now, and I have to rant about it to you. It'd probably be more appropriate to start a new thread for a tangent this tangential, but whatever. — Jaded Scholar

:grin: happy moments!

I'll resist the urge to talk about the answers to the Fermi paradox that I find most plausible — Jaded Scholar

I would like to hear them sometimes! For me, I am content with even the thought that 'someone has to be first,' so why not us, as unlikely as that seems in such a vast universe. I love this quote from Carl Sagan's film Contact:

The original source:

It makes me feel a little better about human civilisation acting like a bunch of idiot babies, compared to what (I think/hope) we're capable of. On a cosmological scale, we ARE babies. And what's more, we're the very first ones, with no earlier pioneers we can possibly look to for guidance as we figure out our baby steps on our own — Jaded Scholar

:clap: :clap: This is part of why I say to the doomsters, the nihilists and the pessimists, that despite their very justified complaints about our bloody history, our very poor stewardship of this planet, that we had better reverse or be made extinct, and our current horrifically bad record of disunity and inhumanity towards our own and other species, they must also realise, that we have only been around for the last couple of seconds in the cosmic calendar scale, SO GIVE US A F****** CHANCE!!!!!!!!!
Btw: After 15 years of labelling yourself 'Jaded,' it's time you changed. How about 'Eager scholar', 'Inquiring scholar' or 'Musing scholar?'

@180 Proof (No! I am not again calling you a doomster, a nihilist or a pessimist! I just included you here, to ask you for a little less affection for your 2001 monolith and a little more for your fellow meat bags :grin: )

Oh what the hell, I might as well include @Vera Mont as well ..... you never know ....... it might at least make her chuckle! ..... of course .... she might also throw something sharp and deadly in my general direction! :scream:

Thanks for your kind and encouraging words. They help me believe that I can perhaps even 'quantum tunnel,' :joke: through some of the solid barriers that my limited maths and physics skills present me with.
You have given me lots of 'pathways,' I can wander down, in attempting to improve my understanding and pursuit of the greatest activity any human can have the privilege to take part in. That of 'truth seeking.' Most folks are too busy trying to just survive day to day.

The first example being the AdS/CFT conjecture, a theoretical spacetime configuration which achieves the limiting case where strings do not affect the shape of spacetime, so you can have both strings and LQG without one conflicting with the other — Jaded Scholar

However, this spacetime is not the spacetime we experience. Gravitons distort everything's interaction with the underlying spacetime, and produce gravitational dynamics that match the dynamics of relativistic spacetime. — Jaded Scholar

are two example of the paths I am referring to.

I have found the supersymmetry aspect hard to follow, along with the extra 'wrapped' dimensions.
I get the 'wrapped' idea, by thinking about a 3D pipe viewed from above, so that it looks like a 2D shape, with the 3rd dimension wrapped around. So the extra dimensions of string theory are tiny and are wrapped around every coordinate in our 3D existence.
Do you get any further understanding based on the Calabi-yau manifolds?


Have you watched this lecture by Ed Witten? He is the main genius in string theory imo.

I have watched it twice but I think I need to watch it again and again to try to analyse each sentence Ed utters! :lol: :scream:

Relatedly, I also did not understand the specific need for supersymmetry, which this paper helped me most with: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0410049
Horowitz plainly notes one big instantiation of the problems that arise in string theory without supersymmetry is that, in that case, the ground state of every string becomes a tachyon. — Jaded Scholar

So, just to clarify the implication here, without supersymmetry, the ground state (or lowest energy state) of every string would have to have a 'faster than light speed' potential (or actual?).
This confuses me more, but I wonder if I am conflating two ideas here? The motion of a string within spacetime and its 'inter-dimensional vibrational velocity.'

Sentences like the following form the beginnings of the basis of my confusion:
"In quantum mechanics waves and particles are dual aspects of the same phenomenon, and so each vibrational mode of a string corresponds to a particle. The vibrational frequency of the mode determines the energy of the particle and hence its mass."
So, this suggest to me that a string that 'vibrates' in multiple dimensions is 'excited' and would produce mass, is this not the case?
Anything with mass cannot travel at light speed, never mind superluminal speed (as in the case of the elusive tachyon).
I know that a 'ground state' is a 'non-excited' state, ( and a state with an absolute zero temperature) so how can such a state vibrate? I must be missing something quite obvious here!
So, does this mean that the inter-dimensional string vibrations, would not create any mass?
I know that the 'tachyon' ground state is part of the 'bosonic string theory,' and I have read such as this, from a discussion on the physics stack exchange (although the maths involved in the actual entry is currently beyond me):
"The zero mode of the set of harmonic oscillators (the string excitation) gives a negative energy for each dimension. So the ground state has a negative energy (if the "classical" center-of-mass momentum is zero) and a negative squared mass. For the coherence of the theory (there are −2 excited states at first level, so it it a representation of ( −2) which must be massless."

I've read several more articles (from both arXiv and the good folks over at physics.stackexchange.com), and I think I've got the gist. — Jaded Scholar

I read many of the exchanges on the physics stack exchange. One of the TPF members @noAxioms is/was a moderator on a physics site, but I can't remember if it was the physics stack exchange.
They certainly offer quick annihilation, to any peddlers of woo woo, on that site. It is a very good site, imo.

Of course, I'm probably wasting my time by spelling out the problems with your approach. All of the arguments you have doubled down on by basically just repeating yourself and ignoring my refutations (and any other easily accessible information on them) are a series of data points suggesting that you don't actually care about the truth or falsehood of the arguments you are summoning and, for some reason, are primarily motivated by a desire to disagree, and not remotely motivated by any desire to seek out actual truths. — Jaded Scholar

:clap: What is sooooooo important about your post to @Metaphysician Undercover is not the hope that he will, at last, gain some better understanding of the scientific method but that other readers of your response to him will. Imo, he may well be fully cooked and lost in a miasma of his own creation, but debunking him so effectively, imo, may assist others.
I hope you don't mind this 'heads up,' to @180 Proof. It's just that I would like his opinion on your response to MU.

Organizations are conscious life forms — ken2esq

So is Celtic, Jew, Spartan, Roman, Hun, American, European, Black, White, Male, Female, Intersex, baby, bird, fish etc merely ways to 'organise' lifeforms, or do you see each as 'separate forms of consciousness,' which are merely parts of a greater whole?
Are all notions or categorisations of separate 'cultures,' also organisations in your mind, that you also see as separate manifestations of:

conscious life forms — ken2esq

?
Are organisations like NATO or the 6 retail shops owned by the family of a friend of mine, also 'conscious life forms?'
Your line of argument here, and on the other threads you have posted on TPF, just seem so akin to mere 'flights of personal fantasy,' to me.
You are using the natural tendency of chaos to order back to chaos via entropy, to make quite bizarre claims about human conscience, to deliver an unfounded posit about the existence of a single overall conscience that in your view, either has always existed or is emergent.
Imo, what you offer is mainly theosophist woo woo nonsense.

I have no knowledge of the Reeh-Schlieder theorem, but, after I have finished this post, I will start to learn about it, until my current physics grasp gets overwhelmed again, but I am sure my efforts will expand my understanding a little, so thanks for directing me to the theorem. — universeness

:lol: I think I would need both @Jaded Scholar and @jgill to 'baby step me,' over all the hurdles presented to me by the Reeh-Schlieder theorem. Either that or become a mature student at uni again and gain a maths and then a physics PHD.

I just kept trying to drill deeper and deeper, using provided links, starting with a wiki entry.
From even this first sentence, I soon became overwhelmed:
The Reeh–Schlieder theorem is a result in relativistic local quantum field theory published by Helmut Reeh and Siegfried Schlieder (1918-2003) in 1961.
I clicked on the 'local quantum field theory' link, which took me to:
Algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT) is an application to local quantum physics of C*-algebra theory. Also referred to as the Haag–Kastler axiomatic framework for quantum field theory, because it was introduced by Rudolf Haag and Daniel Kastler (1964). The axioms are stated in terms of an algebra given for every open set in Minkowski space, and mappings between those.
So, I then had to click on the 'C*-algebra ' link and the 'Minkowski space' link, after I tried to follow the Haag–Kastler axioms, with limited success. :rofl:

I think I will stick to what I can garnish from youtube vids by the likes of Sabine Hossenfelder, Sean Carroll, Carlos Rovelli, Brian Cox, Jim Al Khalili, and other such 'science presenters/popularisers,' that put out their attempts to explain the basics for folks like me.

Wow! ('Very Valuable Scholar,' a.k.a, 'Jaded Scholar,') those were very interesting posts indeed.
Firstly, thank you for your various conformations regarding my own, small 'related to' physics, knowledge base.

Next:

This is true, but I think in this context, the existence of "you" requires the sustained existence of those excitations, which are generally constricted to follow the rules of special relativity (sorry, but I have avoided talking about the Reeh–Schlieder theorem because I do not entirely understand how well it acts as an analogue for quantum entanglement), unlike the field itself which has much more wiggle room in terms of relativistic causality. — Jaded Scholar

I have no knowledge of the Reeh-Schlieder theorem, but, after I have finished this post, I will start to learn about it, until my current physics grasp gets overwhelmed again, but I am sure my efforts will expand my understanding a little, so thanks for directing me to the theorem.

SR is pretty clear that your local time would pass more and more slowly as you accelerated and would stop entirely at v=c. At that velocity, everything within your timeframe would effectively stop - the entire lifespan of the universe (even if it's infinite) would zoom past you. You're not wrong in saying that you would continue aging, just in a different temporal reference frame, but "continue" is maybe an ambiguous term in a reference frame where time has reached the limit of not passing at all. — Jaded Scholar

But these points are all based on the relative reference frame of an observer, yes?
To an observer, I would not seem to age, if I was travelling at light speed, but in my own temporal reference frame, I would.
Is there any physics that indicates that I would not live my normal human lifespan, relative to any other object that exists with me, in that same 'light speed,' temporal reference frame?

Is this just an intuitive prediction based on:
The Earth rotates at approx 1,000 mph. Earth orbits the Sun at approx 67,000 mph. Our solar system orbits the centre of the Milky Way at approx 514,500 mph, the Milky Way is moving at approx 1.5 million mph and we also have the expansion rate:
"More recently, using Type Ia supernovae, the expansion rate was measured to be H0 = 73.24 ± 1.74 (km/s)/Mpc. This means that for every million parsecs of distance from the observer, objects at that distance are receding at about 73 kilometres per second (160,000 mph)."
Regardless of all these relative speeds, I still age as I do, in my current temporal reference frame, so I 'intuit' that regardless of my speed 'relative' to any other existent in the universe. I will always age at the rate I do, due to my own personal 'entropy,' is that not true?

So, photons do age, in their own temporal reference frame, from the stand point that they had an instant of becoming and they exist until such as, a moment of absorption?
Is this flawed thinking from a physics perspective, or more specifically a quantum physics perspective? Perhaps a better question to ask is are photons immune to entropy?

does a physical change require a passage of time? For our little scamp, the photon, one has to ask if it changes other than position? — jgill

As jgill indicates above, if a photon changes position and can be absorbed and emitted, then it must experience duration, or is this again, just an incorrect 'intuitive' thought based on 'classical' notions of physical reality.

A further point, might be the suggestion that an observer would never see a spaceship fall into a black hole, it would seem to be frozen in time, at the event horizon, BUT, the spaceship would actually fall into the black hole (and get spaghettified,) yes?

I haven't done the maths myself, but I actually read about some practical estimates on this exact thing in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of (Nearly) Everything" (my favourite book): I'm not sure what portion of a body generally gets dispersed to become part of another human or any other organism, but for anything short of a hermetically-sealed chamber, the amount is always nonzero. Whether you are buried, cremated, etc., it only takes a few centuries before a substantial portion of the atoms that comprised you have gotten into the atmosphere and circulated through various physical processes, ultimately distributing very far and wide, including into the atomic makeup of every other human that currently lives. At least a few dozen of the atoms in your body were once part of Isaac Newton, a few dozen were part of Socrates, Cleopatra, Ghenghis Khan, and even the long-forgotten hominid who first artifically kindled fire. But, to continue (roughly) plagiarising Bill Bryson, the process does require a few centuries - you are not yet one with, say, Elvis Presley. — Jaded Scholar

This is fascinating. I have heard this book in audio on youtube, but I have always fallen asleep to it in the past, perhaps I should buy a paper copy and read it properly :blush:
You would think such scientific findings, would help to alleviate the human fear of death, in that we are all, and in the main, always have been, partly, varieties of all who have lived before.
If human consciousness is ever proven, to be also quantisable, then perhaps each new human consciousness is also partly, built on spare parts of disassembled consciousnesses that have existed in the past. I find that 'religion,' more plausible than any other I know of, but it's not panpsychism or any kind of woo woo theosophism, imo. For me, the word religion is very soiled however. I am with Hitchens in his insistence that 'all religion is pernicious.'

And it was beautiful to learn that the astronauts who went to the moon on the Apollo 15 mission actually brought a hammer and a feather with them, to televise them falling at the same rate, vindicating Galileo's hypothetical claim, 300 years later. :') — Jaded Scholar

Yes, especially when it's so 'intuitive' (I realise this is a problem when it comes to my own thinking,) to assume that heavier (or more dense) objects would fall faster, especially when it is true that heavier/more dense object do create 'more' gravity.
Is gravity a push, a pull, or not a force at all, but a consequence of geometric spacetime warping.
I think this wee 15min vid is a good one, for making the main points involved (it also mentions your Galileo contribution).

This means that all the far galaxies we observe through telescopes actually did not exist until we peered through those telescopes and then collapsed the waves of probability out there into what we expected to see. Strangely, this means scientists often, if not always, create rather than discover. — ken2esq

So do you not exist for me, until I observe you? Does reading your post cause you to exist, for me? :rofl:
The 'for me' bit is the crucial notion, yes?
Carlo Rovelli often describes time and reality as an individualised experience. I can appreciate that pov, but I don't think such valid observations about spacetime and reference frames and individually interpreted worldview are significant enough to lead to anything like panpsychism/ dualism / pantheism or theosophism.

Those who suggest the universe is conscious, we are fragments / fractals of the conscious universe observing itself, are correct. But our physical body and consciousness not only observes the universe, we are actually the particle consciousness in the very ACT of creating the universe. — ken2esq

Are you a panpsychist / a duellist / a pantheist/ a theosophist? What actual evidence do you have?
Are there any peer reviewed, published, scientific papers you can cite, to support your 'are correct,' claim in the quote above, or are you merely making 'pure conjecture,' statements based on your personal opinion? (which is ok, if your are, but you should establish that that is the case.)

Thanks so much, for your encouraging words sir. I am happiest when I can spend time pondering such stuff. It seem to me that it is my best experience of being a human and living the human condition.

Sure, I will always have to accept that the nihilists, the doomsters and the pessimists have a valid case, but experiencing the wonder I sometimes do, like a child, when I think about seeking truths and I get to read the words of mathematicians like yourself or physicists like @Jaded Scholar(whose handle I disapprove of, but whose knowledge I envy,) means that we are not a lost cause of a species.

We are an infant species, when you consider the cosmic calendar scale.
Do you not think that we truly are, as Carl Sagan suggested, in the title of his first episode of the series COSMOS, 'on the shores of the cosmic ocean?'

For me, it's such a pleasant breeze of cool fresh air on a hot and sticky day, to read your posts.

and the strings themselves are objects that travel through spacetime (and/or other available degrees of freedom). — Jaded Scholar

That's not something I had considered before. I assumed some string or perhaps superstring states, were responsible for the actual (for want of a better term) 'fabric' of spacetime itself. I thought that's part of the reason why supersymmetric particles were so sought after at the LHC?
String theory/Mtheory was/is a possible t.o.e, is it not, and as such, does it not also suggest that spacetime is quantisable? If QFT is correct, is it not that string states, would be the same as field disturbances, rather than be free travelling particles/strings? Rather than the concept of a single electron (as such), we would have an electron as a string state/field disturbance?

I hope I am not frustrating you too much with my poor grasp of the details involved here.
Can you explain a little more about where I maybe making mistakes above in my attempts to connect string theory with QFT, for example?

But LQG is based on a modification of general relativity, and in GR, gravity is a force both created and enacted by spacetime itself. In a sense, it's not even accurate to describe gravity as a "force" in this setting. LQG attempts to unify GR with QM by quantising spacetime itself. So LQG quanta are not just the mediators of gravity, they are also, in a way, the origin of gravity and the medium in which its effects occur. — Jaded Scholar

So is the difference between String theory and LQG, your earlier point that in string theory, all proposed string states exist WITHIN spacetime. Spacetime would thus be a 'container,' for all string/superstring states, so, LQG includes spacetime and string/superstring theory does not? This seems to clash with my own (probably incorrect) interpretations of the Sabine Hossenfelder article below:

The article from Sabine. String Theory Meets Loop Quantum Gravity. Two leading candidates for a “theory of everything,” long thought incompatible, may be two sides of the same coin.

She makes the following comments:
"Among the attempts to unify quantum theory and gravity, string theory has attracted the most attention. Its premise is simple: Everything is made of tiny strings. The strings may be closed unto themselves or have loose ends; they can vibrate, stretch, join or split. And in these manifold appearances lie the explanations for all phenomena we observe, both matter and space-time included."


"Loop quantum gravity, by contrast, is concerned less with the matter that inhabits space-time than with the quantum properties of space-time itself. In loop quantum gravity, or LQG, space-time is a network. The smooth background of Einstein’s theory of gravity is replaced by nodes and links to which quantum properties are assigned. In this way, space is built up of discrete chunks. LQG is in large part a study of these chunks."

As Sabine goes on to describe the main differences between the two theories, such as string theory suggests supersymmetry and vibrations in 10 dimensions, whereas LQG suggests neither of these.
I can grasp these basic differences, but I don't get the node/link network imagery of LQG! I am a computer scientist, I understand network topologies very well, computers can be nodes in a network and can be connected via links, but such a notion occurs 'within a container,' within a space and cannot describe that space itself. So again, I get lost!

I read Sabines article 4 times and tried to grasp the main points she was making in paragraphs such as:

But this isn’t a conundrum only for string theorists. “This whole discussion about the black hole firewalls took place mostly within the string theory community, which I don’t understand,” Verlinde said. “These questions about quantum information, and entanglement, and how to construct a [mathematical] Hilbert space – that’s exactly what people in loop quantum gravity have been working on for a long time.”

My grasp of physics was just not up to the task, even with Sabine's attempt to simplify the concepts involved for folks like me.
It's not a long article, so it would be great if you could have a look at it and give your opinion on it.

I absolutely understand, if you just don't have the time to try to explain this stuff in lay terms, when folks like Sabine have already attempted to do so. I am willing to plod on in my running through strong setting glue, towards my own eureka moments, on this stuff, that always seem just a bit beyond my abilities in physics. :blush:

I think that is the basis of the thought that is supposed to have started Einstein on his quest for answers, when he tried to imagine himself. 'hitching a ride on a photon.'
But if QFT is correct then there is no such an object as a free particle, there are only field excitations/disturbances. Which for me, suggests that we must be constructions of field excitations, yes? We sure need those physicists. Where are you @Jaded Scholar?

Time doesn't exist for a freely moving photon. But when they are slowed down to a snail's pace time catches up. — jgill

Do you think that if a human travelled at light speed ( I know that human 'mass' currently makes that impossible) then the human would not age?
I think we would age at exactly the same rate that we do now, but within a different temporal reference frame.

After a human dies, it 'disassembles.' My fav thought is to 'tag' every sub-atomic sized particulate that departs from a human after death, and track each one, to see where it ends up. I wonder how much of a living humans atoms (or quarks and electrons), were, in all of human history, part of previous humans that have lived.
How much of 'us' is 'naturally recycled' after we die?
How much are we physically, part of all that has lived and died before us?

There are no witches, just some people engaging in fantasy role play.
A methodology you may well be employing at times here on TPF.

Well, I will do my laundry tomorrow and wash away the spit. — Athena

I spit on all notions of aristocracy Athena, not on your clothing.

So I will keep saying we can all be aristocratic and I think this is a good thing about democracy. — Athena

Sure you can, and as a fellow democrat, I will continue to keep saying that all notions and examples of aristos are net negatives.

I can avoid the man who has 8 children and never married. — Athena

I would take him for a few beers and see if I could help him and his wife (married or not makes absolutely no difference at all, imo.) directly with his 8 children, or give him the info he needs to get all the state help he is due, or I would help those who were campaigning to get his like more help and support and try to make sure his children have more opportunities and support than he ever had. I reckon you would also try to help such a family in such ways. In fact I think you would be compelled to help them, if they needed it, even more than I would.

:up:

Well root my toot! who knew it was as simple as that! :cool:

I have very little interest or concern regarding what you find to be a mocking insult.
I have even less interest in your lack of ability to assess who won or didn't win a debate.
I consider our boring exchange over.
I suggest we ignore each others posts in the future. I prefer to debate with grown ups.

Yeah, respond/don't respond? That is the question! We can but decide, act/don't act, and face the consequences. At least this adds to making life interesting Alikis.

:lol: Sounds to me that you are both quite emotional creatures. Perhaps, with little ability to be otherwise.

Perhaps look up the definition of a metaphor if you don't know what a metaphor is. — Vaskane

You have just responded like an emotionally hurt child.
Try to answer my question:

How would you demonstrate your own ability to be emotionless? — universeness

rather than seek ridiculous distractions, as described by the thread author:

why bring politics into this discussion ? — Massimo

You are not making much sense! I think I will leave it there.

one of the wall huggers — Vaskane

That is a meaningless image to me. A human can't hug a wall unless they can wrap their arms around both ends of the wall, and even then, it is still not appropriate as 'hugging' anything is an emotional act.

That you're being obtuse to the point of taking metaphoric language as literal it shows you're incapable of reading the emotion in the text, like a robot. — Vaskane

Which example are you complaining about in this thread of 'taking metaphorical language as literal?'

You're being that stiff rigid robot — Vaskane

How many stiff rigid robots have you communicated with?
What examples of advanced AI systems have you interacted with?
I absolutely agree with @Tom Storm here. Have you ever tried to act as if you were emotionless?
Have you any idea how difficult that would be for a human to achieve?
How would you demonstrate your own ability to be emotionless?

I love listening to Max Tegmark, he is a fascinating thinker. I think he is, however considered very fringe, by the physics/cosmology community. I have watched a few youtube videos about his 4 levels of multiverse. Including this discussion between him and Brian Greene:

All I can honestly say is that I prefer the musings of max, regarding reality, compared to the insistences that theists claim are facts about the universe/multiverse. They will always add 'yeah and if Max turns out to be correct, then that's just the way god made it.'
Exemplified by the theist who recently quoted a line at me, from 'all things bright and beautiful,' when I asked for a comment about his god, and the proposal that a multiverse existed.
"Well, if the multiverse exists, then 'The lord god made them all'" :broken:

A lot of scientists other than neuroscientists seem to be jumping on and off the 'consciousness' bandwagon. Have you watched any of the youtube stuff with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff on consciousness and quantum mechanics? Such as: