You are wrong about Space. Our Space is 3D. There is no presupposing it is 4D. Think about the actual Space you live in. You can go Up/Down, Left/Right, Backward/Forward and that's it. In 4D Space you actually have another pair of directions you can move in. 4D is a whole different thing than 3D. — SteveKlinko

You're not attempting to understand what I say. To you it is obvious that our space is 3D, that there is no interpretation of the mind going on that makes it appear 3D, that it just is 3D. It used to be obvious that the Earth is flat. Often things appear obvious because of unchallenged deeply held beliefs, of how we intuitively generalize from limited experiences. Yes sure it appears to you that you can go up/down, left/right, backward/forward, that's obvious to you, just like it's obvious that the Earth is flat. And yet from another point of view the Earth doesn't appear flat. You know how some optical illusions make your mind see the exact same thing in two very different ways? It's not the thing that changes, it's how your mind interprets differently the thing that makes it look different. In the same way I'm saying that by interpreting what you see differently you could come to see things differently. And see that it is your mind that interprets space as 3D.

Again, try to assume for a moment that our space is 2D. Under this interpretation, it is not you who moves across a static scenery, it is the scenery that moves while you are under the impression to be the one moving. This interpretation is not intuitive, it takes some thought and focus to get used to, but it is not inconsistent. You cannot demonstrate empirically that the space is 3D and not 2D. Because it is the mind that imposes dimensions on what it experiences.

"Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
— Bitter Crank

...and that was in 1848. So where's the change? We can't change the world. Only the few people (the "1%") who own it can change it. Of course now they're in the process of speeding up their change a bit. — Michael Ossipoff

What if then, the point of philosophy, was to devise a way to change it?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Also, if the brain is made solely of particles as described in the current laws of physics, it is impossible for these particles to give rise to any conscious experience, so there is more to what we feel than mere observed brain states. You use a bunch of implicit assumptions you are not aware of.

If you are experiencing thoughts, then by definition of "thought" and by definition of "occur", your thoughts are occurring.

we have tons of data from neuroscience (both modern and historical, when it wasnt called neuroscience) of how third-person observations of brain states affect first-person reports of consciousness. — Terrapin Station

There is some correlation between observed electrical activity in the brain and what someone experiences, but that does not imply that all you feel stems from observable brain activity, nor that focusing on adjusting that activity is an efficient way nor the most efficient way to help someone get better. Again, if it is possible to help many people get better just by talking with them and spending time with them, with then observable results on their brain activity, then our environment and what we experience has much more influence on what we feel than it does on the functioning of a car, and then maybe the correct way to help people is precisely not to treat them as cars with a malfunctioning engine.

I'm talking about your brain, what's obvious about assuming that your brain that you can see with your eyes (well, that you could see if you opened your skull, or that you can detect through some instrument) is the source of everything you feel?

Well what you see with your eyes is one part of what you experience, what you feel is another part of what you experience, what's obvious about assuming that one part of what you can see with your eyes is the source of everything you feel?

I still interpret my thoughts as potentially not even occuring. — Kranky

What does it mean for you for something to "occur"? If something occurs it means you observe some change. The word occur would have no meaning to you if you didn't perceive change. But you see that you are thinking what you are thinking and not something else, so these thoughts that you are having are occurring, you are experiencing them. Whatever you might be tricked to experience, you are experiencing it.

I am reading your words here, they are real to me, you're real to me.

How you feel is always a factor of how your brain is functioning.

No one is saying that the environment doesn't have an impact on that, but that doesn't change the fact that how you feel is always a factor of how your brain is functioning. — Terrapin Station

This is an assumption in itself, that everything we feel stems from our physical brain, that what we see through our eyes could in principle give us the whole story on what we feel and how to change what we feel. But even if that assumption were true, why would one believe that the solution to mental sufferings should be ingesting chemicals rather than changing one's environment? After all, many people are successfully treated through therapies where only words are involved, so if one assumes that the cause of mental suffering is brain malfunction then it would appear that words have the power to fix brain malfunctions, while I don't think talking to a car would fix its malfunctioning engine.

Why would you think that I'm doing anything like searching for what I ought to do?

Re critical thinking, I simply see philosophy as a gobbledygooky waste of time without it. — Terrapin Station

What do you do philosophy for then? There is something you want to attain with it. If you don't do it to help you decide what you ought to do to attain what you want, then is it something you do just for the sake of it because you like doing it and practicing your critical thinking? But then I'm thinking that if you like to practice your critical thinking it's because there is something else you want to attain with it and that you believe you can attain with it, which may be merely feeling good, but then feeling good would be what the OP refers to as your chosen ideal of Truth.

I think that anxiety, at least of the sort that someone might need treatment for, is a brain chemistry/brain function issue — Terrapin Station

That's one of the assumptions of modern psychiatry, that a lot of mental sufferings stem from the brain alone, but I think that's a flawed way to look at things, because how we feel is impacted by our environment and not just our brain. If a wild animal is encaged and suffers as a result from chronic stress and depression, is it because there's something wrong in its brain or because it endures constraints it doesn't want to endure? We diagnose a lot of people with mental sicknesses and numb their minds with chemicals and pretend their brain was the problem instead of solving the root of their sufferings.

Unfortunately philosophy should have something to do with critical thinking. — Terrapin Station

You hold critical thinking in high esteem because you believe it is the path to attain your chosen ideal of Truth, in OP's words. But critical thinking itself leads one to realize that critical thinking alone cannot determine what you ought to do, it can only help you achieve a goal that was set in other ways. It's only a tool to help you get where you want, it doesn't tell you where you ought to be nor guarantees that you will get there.

Yes I too have come very much to a similar train of thought. Fear leads to all kinds of sufferings and beliefs which reinforce fear in a vicious circle. And fear cannot fight fear, it only adds more to it, only love can. The consequences of fear and love resemble very much what we use to call evil and good. Then that leads to the idea that there are no monsters, there is only fear. And fearing monsters and fighting them with fear leads us to become the monsters ourselves.

Someone who has been visually blind all their life wouldn't see what we see with our eyes. Maybe we do have other senses that we don't use much, that we discard as mere imagination or coincidence. And maybe some people sense much more than others, and we couldn't tell whether they really sense or are charlatans without being them. The picture we make of the universe is limited by what we are able to sense and by what we focus on, when we focus on what we see with the eyes emotions are seen as not fundamental, but we would get a very different picture by focusing on emotions first.

I specifically said that the Cosmologists make Speculations. Nobody is taking what they say as some kind of Gospel. But you have to start with some kind of Premise for any argument. it was a spectacular breakthrough and discovery when Science discovered that Matter is made out of Energy. So it means a lot to say that Matter is made out of Energy. — SteveKlinko

I tend to agree that what we call matter and what we call light are closely related, that fundamentally they may be one and the same, just gotta be careful in saying that "matter is made out of energy" because that can be misinterpreted in many ways, seeing that the concept of energy is used in so many inconsistent ways. If you say matter is made out of electromagnetic energy then fundamentally gravitational attraction would be electromagnetic attraction, which surely is possible but we haven't come up with a precise model for that yet. But I agree that light is closely connected to what we call matter.

We are talking about Space dimensions here. There are in fact 3 dimensions of Space in our Universe and you can designate any point in this Space using 3 coordinates. Having only 2 coordinates will not let you designate all the points. Having an extra coordinate would be redundant. You only need 3. But in an actual 4D Space you would need 4 coordinates. With 4D Space you actually have another direction that you can move in. There is a whole lot more Space in 4D Space than there is in 3D Space. 3D Space is an entirely different thing than 4D Space. — SteveKlinko

What I don't agree with here, is that we choose to construct the universe as having 3 dimensions of space, we are the ones who choose to interpret our experiences in that way. We presuppose that the universe has 3 dimensions of space and then fit what we experience into these 3 dimensions, but we could just as well presuppose that it has 2 dimensions and fit our experiences into these 2 dimensions. What that would change is that, when you 'think' that you are moving forward or backward, you would instead see the 2D universe change in front of you. What you interpret in a 3D space as you turning your head in an unchanging universe would be interpreted in a 2D space as you being still in a changing universe.

Then maybe we could come up with interesting insights by presupposing 4 dimensions of space and fitting our experiences into that. But what I'm saying is that we are the ones who through thought impose the number of dimensions of space over our experiences, rather than these dimensions preexisting. And that it would be more fruitful to fit our experiences into various numbers of dimensions and see what comes out of it, rather than assuming from the start that the universe has 3 spatial dimensions, which is a viewpoint that we force and not something testable empirically. Sure we intuitively fit many of our experiences into 3 dimensions of the mind, but maybe the interesting thing to do here would be to try fitting our experiences into 4 dimensions, rather than assuming there are 3 dimensions and thus finding ourselves unable to visualize a 4th.

Whether implanted or not, you do think what you think and feel what you feel and experience what you experience right? Whether implanted or not you do experience all of that, so if something has the power to make you experience these things that's quite amazing right? For what purpose would something trick you? If you are tricked it means that you exist in some way. But why would the thing that tricks you allow you to think at all about the fact that you may be tricked? If it is so powerful it could have made you not even think about that, then you might say maybe it's another trick to trick you. But why do you care so much about being tricked? What is it that you fear?

You have the power to control your life more than you think, you have the power to experience things that make your life worth living. And then when you experience that what does it matter whether you were tricked into experiencing that or if you are the one who made it happen? It's worth it either way. If you can be tricked to experience amazing things, then the trickster isn't such a bad guy. And then once you stop fearing the trickster maybe you will realize there was no trickster and it was you all along.

Consider the word "star". Does it refer to a star you see in the night sky, does it refer to a star you have drawn on a piece of paper, or does it refer to the Sun which itself is a star? The answer is all of them, the same word can refer to one thing or another depending on the context.

Words are an imperfect tool to communicate, you won't ever find a perfect definition of anything, each word is defined in terms of other words which themselves are defined in terms of other words and so on and so forth, so fundamentally each word is defined circularly in terms of itself and you will never find an answer by looking only at definitions. How a word acquires meaning is through how you see it used. The word water is used differently in different contexts, sometimes people are talking about the liquid (or solid or gas) that they see as a whole, sometimes they are talking about an individual molecule that makes up the liquid (or solid or gas).

H2O is a molecule, a bunch of H2O molecules interacting with each other can be a liquid, but a molecule itself isn't a liquid, so if someone says "the liquid H2O" they are using the word H2O improperly, using it as a shorthand for water, but that gives rise to confusion in people who like precise definitions and consistency.

Yes induction is not logical proof, just because we observe something to behave the same n times doesn't mean it is going to behave the same the (n+1)th time. In the neat constructed world of mathematics there is such a thing as logical proofs, but in the world we live there are only inferences. Mathematics are an approximation of our universe, applying them to our universe is necessarily based on some untestable assumptions.

The scientifically impossible is fundamentally what scientists believe to be impossible, but a lot of things they thought were impossible turned out to be possible.

The experience of red, of a sound, of love, any such experience I refer to as consciousness, and indeed it is subjective. It doesn't matter whether human animal or plant, the current laws of physics cannot possibly account for the existence of any of these experiences, because in these laws the building blocks of the universe are particles that don't feel anything and whose sole ability is to move other particles. If all these particles can possibly do is move each other then by definition they can't elicit any experience. Yet we experience. So something fundamental is missing in the current laws of physics.

Pantheism could be one solution, there are others, but it cannot be the current laws of physics.

I don't really understand what you're saying here. No physics student, much less a physicist, treats energy as a tangible thing. You yourself point out the standard definition of it, the capacity to perform work.
"particles and their motion and their ability to move other particles " just means energy (kinetic or potential) in physics. — MindForged

Have you never heard a physicist say that a ball thrown upwards decelerates because its kinetic energy is converted into potential energy, that a faster collision makes more damage than a slower one because more kinetic energy is dissipated, that a gravitational body attracts because its density of energy curves spacetime, or that particles have the ability to move other particles because they have energy? This kind of reification of energy is widespread everywhere, this treats energy as a cause rather than a description of what is observed, and leads students and curious minds to see energy as a cause and carry that misconception with them.

This kind of reification is widespread in research journals too. Many professional physicists see the concept of expanding space as a force in itself that causes galaxies to move away from each other, while there is no evidence of this, which leads them to come up with predictions inconsistent with the theory they claim to use.

I've never heard a physicist talk about consciousness as being explained by fundamental particles. — MindForged

I don't know who might claim that consciousness is explained by fundamental particles, but many physicists believe that they would arrive at a "theory of everything" by uniting the four "fundamental" forces into a neat unified theory, yet such a theory would still be totally unable to account for the fact that we experience anything, feel anything, and that they don't realize. It's not that it would be very complicated to derive consciousness from such a theory, it would be demonstrably impossible, and so it couldn't be a theory of everything claiming to have found the fundamental building blocks of existence.

Some scientists and teachers use words in inconsistent ways so don't assume every sentence they say is necessarily true because then you end up in confusion, but if you get confused it means you notice an apparent inconsistency so it's good to have it resolved. Probably different people in chemistry will use the word substance in different ways. To me a substance may be a liquid, a gas, a solid.

So the definition "substances made up of one type of atom" would mean a liquid, gas or solid made up of one type of atom. But a liquid, gas or solid is not necessarily made of just one type of atom, so then water could be characterized as a substance but not as made of just one type of atom.

If you define substance as a "form of matter having constant chemical composition with characteristic properties", then for instance water in a glass is a substance, but if you pour syrup into it it's not the same substance anymore it becomes another substance with a different chemical composition (different atoms or molecules) and different properties (different color, different density, different electrical conductivity, ...)

you believe it can be changed. That dos not mean it can — hks

I don't believe it can, I believe you cannot know it can't. I am keeping an open mind, you are not. If we were to destroy all trees and vegetation on Earth, I believe that would have quite an impact on a lot of things. I believe that what we do has an impact on things, and I believe that what we believe has an impact on what we do and what we don't do. And I believe that a lot of things that were believed impossible turned out to be possible.

If we all believe we can't change it, then we will interpret all changes as not originating from us, believing we have no control over our fate, that we are just the toy of some higher power. Whereas if we believe we can change it, we will actively try to understand how the climate changes and what is it that make it change, and then maybe it will turn out that we can change it. But in a self-fulfilling prophecy, if we believe like you that we can't change it then we will just do whatever, and maybe go extinct as we 'see' that it was the will of some higher power and that we couldn't change it anyway. You are promoting the belief that we are powerless and that's just an excuse to remain powerless about whatever happens.

When I say Energy I am referring to Electromagnetic Energy, which is not just a Mathematical Tool but is an actual thing. Energy is what Matter is made out of. At the dawn of the Universe there was only Energy and Matter formed at a later time out of the Energy. — SteveKlinko

What happened at the dawn of the universe is based on a bunch of untestable assumptions. Electromagnetic energy is a tool in the sense that we don't see it, we create the concept to describe what we do see. Observations lead us to imagine that there are small things that travel at the speed of light which can have an observable impact on what we see, it doesn't explain anything to call these things 'energy', energy is just a concept. Matter is a concept too. It doesn't mean much to say that matter is made of energy, all it says is that what used to be described by the concept of matter can be described by the concept of energy. Don't take the words of physicists as gospel, many of them are unfortunately poor philosophers and they use many words in an inconsistent way.

I agree that there must be something there, but when you see how Science views this Phenomenon, they usually have no other explanation than that it came out of Empty Space. — SteveKlinko

They call it empty space because they used to believe it was empty, but observations have come to show that it's not, it seemed empty because we didn't see anything in it but it is now clear it isn't empty, it is unfortunate that physicists keep calling it empty space and create misconceptions in the minds of people who want to understand the universe.

The Space we live in is 3D. You can go up/down, left/right, and forward/backward. It is a particular kind of Space. — SteveKlinko

I don't agree with that, I think up/down left/right forward/backward is just how we are used to interpret what we experience, but you could also describe what you experience without a notion of forward/backward, you would see the universe in a very different way, you would come up with different explanations for phenomena, but you could still do it in a consistent way. We choose to interpret what we experience by giving 3 coordinates to things, but we could give more or less coordinates and come up with another consistent way to view the universe. 3D is just what we find the most intuitive way to view it, but we are the ones who decide how many dimensions we use to describe what we experience.

But the really amazing conclusion is that if you can have 3D Space or 4D Space then it would seem that Space itself is a thing that can have different basic properties. This leads to the conclusion that there could be no Space! Most Cosmologists would say there was no Space before the Big Bang. The Space and the Energy were created by the Big Bang. — SteveKlinko

We create the concept of space. We can pick whatever as a 4th dimension, if you take what is in your memory as a 4th dimension then there you construct a 4D space. If you assume that what you don't see is in another dimension then there you construct a 4D space, you can say "at such or such 3D location there is some invisible thing that changes and which I can describe with a 4th coordinate".

Cosmologists have no idea what happened before their Big Bang. The space they talk about is the 4D spacetime of the theory of general relativity which they make use of, in that theory in some simulations with a finite universe you get at some point in the past a spacetime infinitely small and infinitely dense, their simulation doesn't go further than that so they say maybe the spacetime was created at that point, but really this isn't based on observations this is just fantasy. Don't blindly listen to what they say because what they say is based on a bunch of beliefs they don't state and are often not even aware of, when you look critically at what they say and try to find out what their claims are based on you come to realize that a lot of it is untestable and based on untestable assumptions which they never challenge, so I feel there are much more productive avenues than following their footsteps.

You believe it cannot be changed, that doesn't mean it cannot

Isn't something considered natural, real, simply because eye witnesses see it occur or because we find an explanation within what we consider to be real?

We say the Sun is real because most of us see it. We say a sound is real even if few of us hear it because we have come up with an agreed upon explanation as to why some people hear it and others not (that we don't all hear the same range of frequencies). We say radio waves are real even if none of us see them because we have come up with an agreed upon explanation as to why we seem to generate electricity in antennas from a distance.

We say some events are supernatural simply because we haven't come up with an agreed upon explanation as to what made these events happen. Solar eclipses used to be considered supernatural. The ideas that clocks would run at a different rate in different places used to be considered supernatural. There are probably a lot of things that we consider supernatural today that we will see as real in the future.

The idea that consciousness could cause anything physical is seen as supernatural by many, because that would defy the laws of physics that they deem to be real and absolute, but it's very possible that in the future we find out that consciousness has a local influence on the 'laws' of physics.

It's also possible that some people are able to see things that others are not able to, but that we haven't come up yet with an agreed upon explanation as to why.

I have come to the conclusion that we can be certain of nothing. — Kranky

What you experience is real to you, and that's what matters. Logic cannot tell you what is going to happen next with absolute certainty, all it does is relate some of your experiences with some others. But why is it that you long for absolute certainty? You say this causes you anxiety, and indeed do you not long for absolute certainty precisely because you fear death? Because you do not feel in control of your life, because you need to regain control, and logic and reason have helped you in the past but you see that they do not help you all the way.

Absolute certainty is the absence of change. But you can see change as the absolute root of existence, since the absence of change is the absence of existence. So in looking for absolute certainty you are looking for death. But you don't want death. So stop looking for absolute certainty.

Deep down it's not the lack of absolute certainty that makes you anxious, there is something else that makes you anxious, and you looked for a solution in absolute certainty, but you haven't found it, so you blame it on the lack of absolute certainty, but the root cause is something else.

I think saying it is as God wills it is an excuse to not change the way things are, an excuse to not change what we believe is out of our control. But a lot that was believed impossible turned out to be possible, so I don't believe man is unable to have an impact on the climate.

There is a lot we can do practically to live in harmony with the ecosystem, in a sustainable way, that's not idealistic. Maybe we are little responsible for the recent global warming, maybe we are a lot responsible, in any case there is a lot we can change about our ways if we don't want to go extinct one way or the other.

I have always more or less been on a quest to understand the Universe. — SteveKlinko

Same :smile:

What could be more fundamental than Electrons, Protons, and Neutrons? Well you quickly find out that Elementary Particles are just made out of Energy. So Energy seemed to be the thing to start with. — SteveKlinko

The problem with energy is, it's not a tangible thing, it's a mathematical tool. It took me a long time to grasp that. Physicists like to treat energy as an entity that has the ability to cause things, but energy doesn't cause anything, it is simply a description of motion and potential to cause motion. We don't need to talk about the fuzzy concept of energy to describe the universe, we could simply talk about particles and their motion and their ability to move other particles (even though as we talked about in your thread about physicalism such particles cannot explain the emergence of conscious experience so they cannot be all there is).

When they say a photon is pure energy, they mean to say that it can't be slowed down or accelerated, but it can be seen as a particle that has the ability to cause motion.

When they talk about the famous E = m.c², what that equation says is simply that an atom that emits a photon becomes easier to put into motion by a certain quantity, but again we could describe that without referring to the concept of energy which often carries with it a lot of misconceptions.

Eventually I learned that Energy can arise out of Space itself. So what does this mean about our concept of Space? — SteveKlinko

I think you may be referring here to what they call the energy of the void, of empty space, but really all that means is that what they call empty space isn't empty, there are a bunch of things in apparent empty space, a bunch of particles we don't detect easily, and again we don't have to treat energy or space as tangible substance or entities.

There could be different kinds of Spaces besides our 3D Space. There could be a 4D Space. There could be no Space. The possibility of no Space is almost impossible to grasp by the 3D human brain. — SteveKlinko

I wonder if you came to the idea of a 4D space because of the theory of general relativity that makes use of a 4D space. But in fact we don't need a 4D space to make the predictions that general relativity does, we can explain observations as accurately as general relativity in a theory that makes use of a 3D space, Einstein felt simply forced to use a 4D space because of the assumptions he made which made 4D more mathematically elegant, but mathematical elegance is not conceptual simplicity.

Space is just a background, a map on which we put the particles, we can choose whatever kind of map we want, flat, elliptic, hyperbolic, all that changes is the coordinates we give to the particles, but observations won't tell us what kind of space we live in, space has no shape other than the one we give it, I'm sure we could also come up with a convoluted way to describe the whole universe in 2 dimensions, it doesn't mean there is an actual physical entity called space that is 2D or 3D or 4D, it's just a tool, and we just find it easier to describe the whole in 3D.

Many concepts in physics are treated as tangible entities while they are merely mathematical tools, concepts, this is the fallacy of reification, and it is widespread regarding the concepts of energy, mass, force, space, time, they are all just tools, not things we actually observe or interact with.

I think this is an important realization for Philosophy and the study of the limits of our ability to understand things. — SteveKlinko

I wouldn't say there are limits to our ability to understand so much as limits of our ability to see, our eyes only see a small part of all that is, they only see a small part of the photons that reach them, many photons do not interact with our eyes in a detectable way but they interact with other instruments that we see with our eyes and that's how we come to believe that there are a bunch of photons we don't see, and that's just one small part of what we don't see, that we have feelings tells us that there is more than particles out there, there's more that we can't comprehend by focusing on what we see with the eyes and on all our concepts that stem from what we see with the eyes, we need to come up with other concepts that stem out of what we feel, and I feel there is a great unknown there we have barely explored.

And so the smart thing to do would be to prepare similarly to how Crank mentioned on the chance that there is at least a possibility. — Lif3r

I think an even smarter thing to do would be to try to change things rather than believing we can't put down economics from its pedestal, it's not easy and that would be a grand paradigm shift, but a much needed one, and it's possible, if we have been able to wake up about this state of affairs then potentially others can too. Change is brought about by a desire for change, and by believing that we can change things. And then after a lot of perseverance we eventually succeed. First they ignore you, ...

Okay, I agree I don't like infinity either, but I still stand by my point that time doesn't have to be fundamental to the universe, that it is superfluous to talk of time as a fundamental entity rather than simply talking about change, that it is change that gives rise to the concept of time in the first place :smile:

Don't you see how mad infinity is? It's larger than any possible thing. Yet we require it to expand; implying it was not larger than any possible thing. — Devans99

Well I agree it kinds of boggle the mind, but then if you don't want infinity you can think of an arbitrarily large universe and an arbitrarily large speed limit, and time doesn't have to be encoded as some fundamental entity.

Infinity is a tool, it comes with different mathematical rules which only defy common sense because we don't actually observe infinity.

We don't have to believe the universe is infinite, but we don't have to believe either that time is something fundamental that is a prerequisite for change, instead of simply saying that we observe change and time is just a measure of that change, a comparison of various processes relative to what we define as a standard process (a clock)

- The universe is expanding so it cannot be infinite in space else there would be nowhere to expand to
- The universe started with the Big Bang 14 Billion years ago and has been expanding since then; it must have a finite radius — Devans99

What is expanding is the distance between galaxies, that's all we infer to expand, we don't actually observe some space substance expanding, the distance between galaxies can increase in an infinite universe, it's a bit of a misnomer to say that it is the universe that is expanding, even though that's a widespread misconception.

These things used to drive me crazy some years ago, but I thought about it long and hard and I realized how many misconceptions are spread regarding the concept of expanding universe and expanding space, even in research journals, it's the distance between galaxies that we infer to expand, that's all, the universe doesn't have to have a finite radius.

- The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says if the universe has been around for ever then it should be in thermodynamic equilibrium by now — Devans99

The second law of thermodynamics is based on assumptions so that's not necessarily true, and again the universe could have been infinite at the time of the big bang.

- Actual infinity is an impossibility (covered here at length: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4183/do-you-believe-there-can-be-an-actual-infinite/p1) — Devans99

I haven't read that thread but even though it's impossible to measure infinity empirically, that doesn't mean the universe can't go on forever, this infinity would simply be out of reach.

Light has a constant speed; I understand the Shapiro effect to be spacetime dilation, which increases the path length the light has to travel; its does not slow down the speed of light. — Devans99

This is the interpretation within the context of general relativity, which postulates the universal constancy of the speed of light, so of course in that theory the speed of light doesn't change and one has to invoke a curved spacetime, thus a longer path length, but again the observations that are considered to be tests of general relativity are equally explained in a theory with a varying speed of light and no curved spacetime, so one can assume a varying speed of light and remain consistent with observations.

But to be a normally functioning universe, a speed limit is required. Else it's possible to accelerate objects to infinite velocity and thus straight out of the universe. This was a flaw in Newtonian mechanics that is corrected by relativity.

So we must have a speed limit theoretically; empirically it is maybe the most well tested scientific constant. So the universe has time built into it. — Devans99

I think you're adding implicit assumptions there, why would a speed limit be required if the universe is infinite? (the universe could have been infinite at the time of the big bang already)

What we measure empirically is the average speed of light over a round-trip, we are unable to measure the speed of light in one direction because that requires synchronizing distant clocks, and we do that by assuming a speed of light from one clock to the other in the first place. We can have physical theories as accurate as the current mainstream ones without a universal speed limit.

Also light doesn't actually always travel at the same average speed, light moves slower in presence of gravitation (that's called the Shapiro delay), Einstein assumed that the speed of light was a universal constant which led him to a complex description of curved spacetime, but without taking that postulate it's possible to formulate a theory with a varying speed of light and without curved spacetime yet equally consistent with observations (in such a theory clocks do not go slower in presence of gravitation because "time is curved", but because physical processes go slower in presence of gravitation).

Time is fundamental to the universe. The speed of light speed limit (speed = distance / TIME) is obeyed by every particle in the universe and exists independently of change. — Devans99

We observe change, not time, time is just a tool, there is no such thing as time beyond the clocks we use, the time that shows up in physical equations has no meaning beyond that of corresponding to a clock measurement. We don't know whether everything obeys the speed of light limit, also the theory of relativity can be formulated in a way where light travels at different speeds in different directions (it's called the Lorentz ether theory), and that theory matches observations equally well.

It's also possible to formulate physics by taking velocity as the fundamental thing (rather than distance and time) and then time doesn't show up explicitly in equations anymore, and it becomes clearer that time is just a reading on a clock.

Time is simply a measure of change, without change there is no such thing as the concept of time. Maybe it's possible for the absence of change to give rise to change, who knows? Cause and effect is just a way we interpret change, we're used to explaining a change in terms of another change, but that doesn't imply all change needs another change to happen.

Or maybe there always was change and never absence of change.

It's very possible man-made global warming is an urgent existential threat, but even if it isn't yes we could do much much better to preserve the environment and our future, but then again many people don't want to sacrifice economic growth for the environment, because they want to be better than, they want to be competitive, they want to have the upper hand, they want to have something others need, to feel in control, to feel more safe, because they fear others, and so they sacrifice the environment for economic growth, for power over others.

I don't think that you ought to be punished for believing such or such thing, it is through beliefs that we make sense of the world and decide what to do, without beliefs we are lost, if anything could happen at the next moment then how to decide what to do? I think everyone does their best based on what they experience and what they have come to believe.

There are also many beliefs we hold that we aren't aware of, through life we come to see that some of them are false and that is how we realize we held these beliefs. So I think we should take a compassionate approach to what others believe rather than a punitive one, it's not easy to overcome false beliefs. If you punish someone for not having what you deem to be the right belief, that doesn't mean they will come to believe what you believe, but simply that they will fear what will happen to them if they don't pretend to hold your belief.

I think it's better to focus on the idea that we have the power to change our beliefs, even if it isn't easy, rather than on an idea of responsibility which to me implies accountability and then punishment, and then fear and then suffering.

The whole system is the barrier. You are not free to go somewhere and build your house and grow your food there, someone will come and say "this land is mine" or "this land belongs to such or such organization and you have no right to be there" then call the cops on you if you don't want to move somewhere else where you will be faced with the same problem again. To gain the freedom of living anywhere, you first have to be a slave of the system for a given number of years until you manage to accumulate enough pieces of paper or numbers on an account, then give all those in exchange for having the freedom to live somewhere. And then your whole life you were never taught about building your own house or growing your own food or living in self-sustenance, you were taught to function as a part of the system which involves being a cog in a machine and not a self-sustaining individual, so that's another barrier which you have to overcome, and by that time it feels easier to remain part of the system.

We are forced to take part in that unsustainable machine, then those who come out on top with a lot of properties and numbers in their account want to keep what they have worked so hard to gain, they don't give that up or share that easily, so the others have to spend more and more effort to have a given standard of living, spend more and more resources, which takes its toll on the environment.

We could have food and warmth and comfort with a much lesser impact on the environment if we helped each other and cared about each other, and if we were taught and allowed to sustain ourselves to a greater extent, rather than taking part in this more and more straining and destructive rat race, but we can't do that without changing the whole system, laws, education, which requires to stop fearing each other and stop seeing the other as the enemy. We live as if our countries were at war with one another, we compete and have to be the best, spending so much effort and resources in the process, and meanwhile we and the environment suffer.

"How does Neural Activity produce Conscious Activity?"

Neural activity is something that we see with the eyes through some instrument. According to the physicalists everything is deep down made of particles whose sole property is to move one another in a certain way, as described in the mathematical equations that make up their theories. So according to the physicalist, neural activity is merely motion of particles in the brain.

Then indeed the physicalist is faced with the problem that the experience of red or of a high-pitched sound or of love is not made of moving particles, it is something of its own. The physicalist may see that certain patterns of his own neural activity correlate somewhat with certain feelings he experiences, but at no point in his mathematical equations there is the possibility of there being any feeling at all, for all there is in his equations is particles in motion with the sole ability to provoke motion. He could make endless simulations from his models and at no point would he find the emergence of a feeling, of a conscious experience. That's the case with all modern fundamental physical theories, general relativity, quantum field theories, the standard model of particle physics, string theory and so on, their equations are missing something fundamental about existence.

The best they could do is say that maybe all conscious experiences correlate perfectly with a corresponding pattern of particle motions, but that still wouldn't explain how conscious experiences emerge from particle motions at all, and if they claim that there is nothing to explain beyond the correspondence at the very least they would need to include in their equations the potential of particles to elicit conscious experiences, which they haven't done. As it stands these equations are empirically wrong, and you test that every time you have a conscious experience.

Then the view that conscious experiences have a one-to-one correspondence with particle motions and thus serve zero survival advantage is hard to reconcile with the theory of evolution, if what we desire and feel doesn't cause anything and choice is an illusion then why did we evolve that at all? And why does it feel bad when something threatens our survival, that would be quite the extraordinary coincidence.

A more coherent view than the widespread physicalist one would be that particles are not all that is, that it's not just that particles have the ability to elicit feelings through their relative motions but that there is more than particles, that particles are only one aspect of the "more", that our eyes are one tool we have to see the universe and what we feel is another tool, which we really shouldn't discard as an unecessary byproduct.

I would define it as having false beliefs about what we need to be happy. On a basic level material wealth allows us to survive more easily, so that makes us feel good, then we come to associate material wealth with feeling good and come to believe that more material wealth means more of that feeling good, more happiness, but that's a false belief, many with immense material wealth have told that it didn't make them happy, some of them have killed themselves too.

We are on a quest to always have more than the neighbor, not seeing that this cannot go on forever because resources are not infinite. An afternoon with a friend filled with laughter and kindness and mutual understanding goes much further in bringing happiness than getting a better car or better house than the neighbor. Some who have next to zero material wealth are happy, yet we keep looking for happiness in endless consumerism.

We have found out how to build weapons of mass destruction, we have focused on protecting ourselves from one another and being more frightening than the other, but happiness is not found in fear, happiness is shared.

There is also the fact that in our society most of us are forced to do repetitive, soul-sucking tasks every day so as to get a piece of paper or numbers on a card that we must have to get food and shelter. To escape from this modern slavery we drown our minds into mindless entertainment so as to make the whole bearable. Consumerism is the painkiller to this torture. Barriers are put into place to prevent us from freeing ourselves of these shackles, if we attempted to grow our own food and build our own house on some land we would be faced with self-proclaimed masters of the land who would evict us with force, and then again we weren't educated to know how to do that. We are born slaves to this all. Then we find ourselves powerless and believe that we can't change the way things are, and so goes on the escapism into unsustainable consumerism.

We want another life but there are forces that push us into that life, and we let ourselves be overwhelmed, and we know and feel this isn't right so we protest, but our cries are drown into the deafening march of those who believe that they will find their salvation in gathering enough material wealth, if only they can climb the ladder high enough to be above the others, and so it goes on and on.

This whole society is predicated on fear, we have built an intricate system that makes life good to some and bearable to most, but fear makes it unsustainable and at some point that will all come crashing down.