Perhaps an analogy is where the ground moves under you like a treadmill as you walk passively forward!

By comparison the moon spins 27 times slower than Earth and has 1/4 its radius. Roughly ac=v2/r so the Earth’s centripetal acceleration is 27v2/4r greater than the moon = 27/4 = 6.75. Gravity is actually 6 times greater here than the moon so it’s not too far off! I didn’t square the 27 and made v constant because it’s interdependent with gravity which is what we’re looking for. It’d be as if we’d begin with the Earth rotating at the same rate as the moon. A vast arc of the moon is rotating in line with a tectonic plate on Earth. We could draw it as if the moon was inside the spherical diagram of Earth. We then accelerate Earth’s radius by 27. We’re not looking for absolute gravity but relative gravity between the planets. V is relative to the core and not surface displacement.

If Earth’s rotation doubled in speed where we had two mini-nights a day, would that have any physical effect besides sunlight hours? If the Earth stopped rotating about itself, would we just have nightless days and dayless nights like Iceland?

We don’t see the full extent of the orientation of the Earth’s plane we’re rotating in unison with. We can only see as far as the horizon. The Earth’s surface is divided into vast plate tectonics, mountain ranges, rift valleys, ocean trenches and so forth.

We don’t see the surface of the earth rotating when we throw a ball straight up into the air. But the deep layers of the Earth’s crust below us are always in rotation. So when the ball is at maximum height it’s now marginally above a different point of the Earth’s mantle. It’s so far to the Earth’s core that microscopic deviations above the surface get amplified relative to deeper layers. Could this differential rotation help gravity?

“We know it’s not mathematical hocus-pocus because these kind of sums appear in physics.”


I don’t know the context of where these equations are used. I’m wondering is it the specific answer that’s important or the consistency in which it’s used? So hypothetically if they used a different answer but modified every single other equation there is in maths to conform with the new result, then would this new number still work in physics? In other words might there be an interdependency involved with other infinite sequences?

Randomness can be inferred when the process that caused it is unknowable, infinitely complicated and hence unpredictable or else if it was caused by something unconnected, dissociated that doesn’t make sense and is therefore illogical.

It’s like the entire sequence is unreal even from the very beginning rather than towards the later infinite part at the other side.

An interesting feature of the -1/12 result is that it’s legible which is surprising given the infinite number of possibilities. For instance it’s not an unreadably incomprehensible number like the number 1 trillion 2 billion and 3! This implies if the answer was caused by a hidden process that it would have to have been in operation since the beginning of the infinite addition. This doesn’t appear to be the case when we add the early numbers 1+2=3 and so on. So the answer wasn’t randomly selected out of all available numbers in the sample space of the infinite sequence. The -1/12 answer just appears ad hoc in the whole scheme of things! It’s random in the illogical sense of the word rather than the unpredictable sense.

We can’t make perfectly random sequences with chaotic mathematical equations and therefore random number generators have a spectrum of unpredictability. What if it were the other way round where we had to check if a sequence was truly random? If there was primordial randomness in our reality, how could we tell?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14321616/is-it-possible-to-prove-if-a-sequence-is-random

Perhaps the equations have their own sense of humour! Not technically random but capricious and whimsical!

I’m not a mathematician but I remember reading that all of the infinite number of natural numbers add up to -1/12. Maybe there will be a counterintuitive answer in the future. Or maybe it’s a sarcastic result that suggests maths has conscious and immaterial features. The result is irrational in the semantic sense of the word; as if it were arbitrarily picked out of thin air! The square root of -1 is an imaginary number that has no physical analogy even though it’s a useful abstraction. Can there be some “absurd” elements to maths?

Science often conveniently approximates the world as physical seeing as physical objects are by definition impersonal and objective. Historically science was always committed to experimentation, counter-argumentation and the logical analysis of data but not necessarily materialism. For instance a platonic interpretation of mathematics isn’t based on materialism but on the reality of abstract numbers. Subjects like psychology and social science are still objective even though they deal on a more holistic, abstract and metaphorical scale than physics.

Our voice in our head can sometimes be guided by subvocalising and so our motor system is in sync with our consciousness.

If we had the capacity to mentally time travel forward then we could skip the disordered states of dreams and only remember our organised conscious thoughts. This would decrease entropy.

Can there be two Boltzmann brains?! If I’m a Boltzmann brain then so are you! We’d be in a universe of interacting brains!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjAKTZhUS4&t=185s

The dawn of artificially intelligent people:
Thomas the Tank Engine

If we were somehow conscious during a saccade then we’d be momentarily cross-eyed.

Saccades are involved in moving our small central vision to look at objects. If the image we see is 2D then the micro-parallax of saccades could help explain why we can automatically and subconsciously see in 3D.

Parallax can be inferred from horizontal eye positions and also slanted or vertical eye positions when you rotate your head. There’s a plethora of parallax cues for depth when you rest your head on your shoulder and close one eye after the other. It’s easier for those like myself who’ve spent years learning to wink with both eyes!

Our eyes must be completely numb so as not to wake us up during REM sleep.

The brain moves relative to others but not relative to ourselves!

The body moves but the brain is always in the same location in the body. Moreover the skull protects it from accelerating.

If the mind is separate from the body under dualism then it wouldn’t have to move.

There’s little relative motion between our brain and our eyes, head or body. Your eyes are always a certain distance away from the visual cortex. So if we’re not directly conscious of our body then its motion doesn’t have to be palpable. What if we could walk numbly without a sense of touch in our legs? Then our brains could be perceived as motionless relative to our consciousness.

Instead of asking where’s our consciousness perhaps we need to first check where is our brain!

We tend to think the brain is behind where we feel our eyes to be. Although we also view colours as being internal which seems to contradict the previous sentence. If the visual cortex is situated at the rear of the brain then perhaps most of our brain is located in front of our field of view. The invisible brain could be interpreted to be behind the image we see. In this comparison the non-conscious eyes passively collects external light and the brain reorganises it to create the qualia in front of us. It may appear counterintuitive to non-neuroscientists that the visual cortex is at the back of the brain. If I never saw a brain diagram before I’d be tempted to think the visual cortex would be right behind the eyes or scattered throughout the brain. Instead the optic nerve goes to the opposite end of the skull.

Electromagnetism is stronger than gravity over short distances. So forces like friction between our feet and the ground means we don’t fully experience gravity by itself. Maybe if there was no such thing as friction we’d feel the Earth’s internal rotation from night to day.

The sense of touch is inside the brain so when you feel the back of your head that’s actually a lot closer to your visual screen than it appears. The tactile sensation of your head exists inside the brain itself!

If the mental sphere took up space then it would create a double occupancy problem with physical space unless it were always a millisecond ahead or behind physical time.

If the visual world were 2D then it’d be like our mind teleports forward whenever we walk around. In this example the mind would be stationary in the brain and so wherever you travel your consciousness would still be in the same location throughout the day. You wouldn’t actually be traversing any 3D space so to speak. It’d feel like you were gliding through centimetres of depth.

when subjected to an electric current, for example, someone says with his eyes shut “I am moving my arm up and down” though his arm is not moving — Richard B

In a dream we often have a semblance of a body even though we often don’t take any notice it. So if you were swimming in a dream then maybe you’re right and it’s just an electric current tingling our senses to simulate motion while our actual bodies are stationary. Could these motor currents be used to change dreams? For instance would mimicking uphill walking change my dream narrative from whatever it was to a different memory where I was climbing or trekking?

When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge of the future they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own voluntary movements. — Richard B

Perhaps while we’re asleep we first think of a cool sequence of events and then forget the order so that we can visually re-enact it. Then our subconscious would have “foreknowledge” of what will happen to us in a dream.

Remember our volitional muscles are always partially active through muscle tone. Maybe when we are choosing which arm to move, one of them will automatically tense up to permit motion. So the action of subconsciously increasing tone makes it easier to move the selected arm over the relaxed muscles on the opposite arm. Perhaps this biases our decision to pick one arm over the other without actually having compelled us.

if we can’t prove without “perfect” accuracy the outcome of some predicted event, this is evidence the world is not real. This is an odd conclusion. — Richard B

I watched a YouTube philosophy video that mentions a “frustrator”. It’s about trying to predict whether someone will press one of two buttons when they are alerted to your prediction in advance. It alleged that the person could change tack even when you know every law of physics about the situation. A real life version is when Libet could predict your decision from your brain waves a half-second before you consciously decided to move. There’s debate about a veto power in that instance. Let it be known that if anyone comes to me and makes a secret prediction from my neurons about where I’ll be in an hour and afterwards meeting up to see that they were right, then this would persuade me that I’m a wholly physical being. The catch is predicting that I’ll be in the sweet shop doesn’t count!

take the hypothesis that this "world is not real", what experience(s) could falsify such an idea? — Richard B

Perfect circles don’t exist in nature and pi has an infinite number of digits. So when you rotate around and move forward in a certain direction, we don’t ever know with perfect accuracy what that direction is. We see with the 3-body problem that movement can be chaotic between multiple connected objects. Fractal and chaos theory tells us the object’s constituent particles might be impossibly complex to understand reductively. A material object is physical but sometimes it’s not just chaotic but multitudes of chaos built on top of yet more chaos. Maybe it’s not technically random but neither is it predictable or deterministic. Thus it’s more open-ended and subjective: should we interpret it closer to being material or random?

How random would we view our place in the world if we could see planets with the naked eye?

How would a scientist go about determining if this world is "real" or "not real"? — Richard B

The mind is more arbitrary and whimsical in nature than the physical structures we observe. What would a random universe look like? For starters we can’t change the past and so the passage of time means every random decision is conditional on previous random outcomes; thereby reducing latent randomness. In that way our “power is limited”. Evolution says the human body is random yet we are never surprised by looking at fellow humans because we’ve grown accustomed to our physiology. We think donkeys are funny while a donkey probably thinks we look weirdly amusing with our flat faces and short noses! A person from a different planet would think our gravity is utterly bizarre though we’re so familiar with the way objects fall down that everything seems ordinary. For all we know the big bang was entirely random in the laws of physics it developed and the subsequent early universe may have become progressively less probabilistic.

“The probability that any given person has a cough on any given day may be only 5%. But if we know or assume that the person is sick, then they are much more likely to be coughing. For example, the conditional probability that someone unwell is coughing might be 75%, in which case we would have that P(Cough) = 5% and P(Cough|Sick) = 75%.
Conditional probability is one of the most important and fundamental concepts in probability theory.”

Besides even if we could artificially simulate our senses you’d still have to instantaneously rewire the brain with electrodes to prevent a deadly gap in awareness.

“It’s the most overused of horror clichés: A villain is stabbed or shot repeatedly, blown up, burnt, melted, nuked, thrown off a building — you name it — and somehow still manages to come back for one final shock, usually just as a movie is about to end. But when done properly, the “Not Dead Yet!” scare can be a glorious thing.”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.vulture.com/amp/2018/11/the-25-greatest-not-dead-yet-scares-in-movie-history.html

Why have a brain in a vat when you can have a brainless body? Ever had a dream where a character gets impaled in a sword fight and they continue on nonchalantly?

Could are sensory receptors themselves have elements of our consciousness?