!! ATTENTION all Physicists !! — Amity

Maxwell was OK, (7 out of ten) with good rhythm and rhyme, but some of the others stunk as poems and as also from being too technical. There are better ways to write philosophical scientific poems. I may have some myself.

And does he also sends texts using his mobile phone, and watching TVs, drinking beer, while reading his comic books and mags, while taking a break from playing the online games? :rofl: — Corvus

Yes, for we were made in His image.

He gets a quadrillion requests every second from all over our universe and from all the others universes in the Cosmos. He transfers the short ones to his phone and the longer ones to his email for better recall. He's worried about his memory ever since He couldn't retrieve His earliest memory, there not being one since He is Eternal; but He is forever working on it. Perhaps it would be, "Why Me?"

His million-foot-wide TV only shows live reality shows, but they are ever the same old, same old follies of human history. He has no money, so He can't afford Netflix. The churches don't forward the money to Him, even though they accept all denominations. He never can pay when He goes to stores, so they usually put up a sign, "In God We Trust; Others Pay Cash'.

He's too lofty for comic books and so He is currently reading 'The God Delusion' and other books by Richard Dawkins to get the whole story of how his fine-tuning worked. Sometimes He reads 'People' magazine to see how we're doing.

His beer is the ultimate brew, called 'ButWiser', and sometimes He turns water into wine.

He cooks his food in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.

He didn't have friends at first, so thus he made humans, but found that He couldn't trust them.

He's so old that He's getting OldTimers' disease, but the up side is that soon everything will seem new and surprising again.

Have no fear though, for He's not at all like his portrayal in the Old Testament.

The next part of the OP appears to be to show 'God' by extending the starting arguments or at least to get on to some more grounded 'God'-like labels out of 'What IS' before layering too much more on to a presumed 'God'.

So far, we have no 'Nothing' existing, thus Indivisible as Continuous with No Separation within, and thus Eternal without Beginning or End;

no Stillness, thus our Constant Change/Time of Presentism, making the Block Universe rather doubtful, although the mode of time favored by theists;

no Determinism projected (but hard to show choice as not stuck to a fixed will of the moment);

'God's' Unconditional Love projected, although confidently, thus no Blame;

no instant evolution, it taking very long, plus a 'God' not observed, thus then projected as perhaps just a Deity 'God' only kicking things off in the Big Bang via fine-tuning scientific expertise, with no likely personal Theity 'God' intervening in time.

It's only the most difficult assignment ever!

And then we have to explain how a Mind could be First, instead of evolving later on, since that is the reverse of the process we see in the history of the universe.

Me might magnify some of our human qualities, such as both being able to view the whole scene at once and also view it in detail, to get an insight into the nature of the 'Designer'.

Scientist deity to some, teacher deity to others — Derrick Huestis

Sometimes you and I gravitate toward the same conclusion, humor aside, that the universe is allowed to go on without pre-determination, as hands off by 'God', and so that is like a Deity. It is also that a 'God' would not be bound to time, plus many don't see him operating in time, doing this, doing this, Himself changing all the time, dumbly bumbling through 13 billion years to get us to come to life.

https://iep.utm.edu/god-time/

I'm taking it that 'God' is timeless/changeless, aka eternal, absolute, fundamental, 'IS' and thus a 'God' operating in time would be a changing 'God'. This is akin to the quantum fields ever remaining as they are, which they have to.

So now I have to invent a word, 'Theity', which isn't in the dictionary, for the unlikely 'God' who operates in time, as many think He does, such as when they pray to Him to change His Perfect Mind.

At least with the Deity notion, the believer doesn't have to stumble over the dilemma of why 'God' acts exactly the same as nature does and as nature would without Him as we well see through the science descriptions of what went on after the Big Bang.

The processes are of understandable laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, with no extra-natural of miracles. We know what happened in the first fractions of a second after the supposed Big Bang and can predict the course of the Universe to its thinned out future. After the start the progress was very slow, just as it would be naturally; it took 13+ billion years for life to appear on Earth.

So, 'God' the Deity is not a personal 'God'. God’s Good Plan would operate at the general, universal sense, not at a specific, personal sense. Example: water is good but also necessitates floods and drought; a farmer wishes for rain and the wedding party across the street hopes for sunshine. And so forth, as self-explanatory as what’s best for all.

Human nature must be imperfect. There can be only one 'God', plus perfection would be boring, and creatures and their natures are of a non personal general-for-all recipe of ingredients that can let life happen and be lived.

If we were Angels, life would be so just;
Instead, we try, we push, we climb, we lust,
We dance, we dream, we feel, and love with zest;
Yes, all this, thanks to the beast within us!

We have lesser abilities than the Whole/'God' because we have to be of smaller extent than it and also so as to be able to operate in the world. There can be only One Whole/'God', with the designs within or without necessarily having to be of less dimension in our lesser realm.

The 'God' not operating in linear time would be the Block Universe and we would be inside 'God'; however, I've given up on the Block Universe… allowing for some presentism.

Now after Now

Life’s a web, of whos, whys, whats, and hows,
Stretched as time between eternal boughs.
Gossamer threads bear the beads that glisten,
Each moment a sequence of instant nows.

No matter how one tries to shake from boughs
The fruits of truth from the Tree of Knows;
Computation makes not yet the morrows;
There’s naught else but lone, resultant Nows.

Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone;
Sensation savors what is presently known;
Imagination anticipates coming sounds;
The delight is such that none could produce alone.

To future columns we stretch our present row,
By a lifeline of tenuously spun vow.
Oh, how soon the weighted web begins to fail;
The only real time under our feet is now.

Yet, still,

We, of the endless forms most beautiful,
Are stunned that our glass to the brim is full,
Life’s wine coursing through us, as magical,
On this lovely, rolling sphere so bountiful.


Of course, the Deity God could be outside of time. Or He just lets the universe alone that He started in time to do what it does (this relieves 'God' of having to be so slow-minded that cosmic and biological evolution took so mind-numbingly long.)


As for 'God's' Love, it is also for sure that it would Unconditional Love… and we can do that in our lives, too, and do:

Higher Consciousness

The three lower consciousnesses that are
Obsessed with the securing of objects,
With the chasing of sensations, and with
Power/control will never ever be enough.

There are NO actions of people that can
Justify our becoming irritable
Angry, fearful, jealous or anxious if
We give them our unconditional love.

Stress is the difference between what we
Expect to happen and what does happen,
Especially when we put our needs ahead
Of other, oft resulting in needless anger.

If we don’t accept the unacceptable,
Then we lower our level of consciousness
Our response will mirror their uptightness—
Which can spread the bad moods onto others.

Conscious Awareness, which can but witness,
Is a safe haven from which to observe
The drama of our lives playing in our minds,
Granting us a sobering distance from it.

From a safe subjective place that’s free of fear,
Our soul, our conscious awareness, can witness
The strange thoughts and emotions that surface
On the mind, sent by the subconscious brain.

Putting ourselves in the place of others
When hurtful things are done to us,
Expands our consciousness, compassion, and love
Since we can come to know why they did it.

When we converse with ourselves, it is our
Higher Consciousness—our Conscious Awareness
Or I, that questions our lower consciousness
Impulses toward securing, sensation, and power.

Seeing the big picture of life and its stages
And connections lets one not get annoyed, say,
At being cut off in traffic, for s/he
May be old, learning, lost, growing, or angry.

Putting the needs of others ahead of
Our own produces the byproduct of
Happiness and reduces stress, for we
No longer have unrealistic expectations.

Some fall for their thoughts, hook, line, and sinker:
Conditioned responses, reflexes, or
Overwhelming emotions, some spurious,
Or ancient, planted by evolution, or unbalanced.

Emotions are slow to react to logic,
Like molasses or slow forming crystals,
Or not at all, like rocks, blocking them.
Unless and until they change, progress halts.

Reason and emotion are hard to coordinate,
Each having a separate pathway to the mind,
That, perhaps, is all there is to tell about the
Miseries and follies of human history.

From its safe subjective place that’s free of fear,
The higher self, our Conscious Awareness, can witness
The strange thoughts and emotions that surface
On the mind, sent there by the subconscious brain.

First-level thoughts are beliefs and desires,
But second-level thoughts are beliefs
And desires about the beliefs and desires,
Becoming able spectators of the scene beneath.

Higher Awareness, which can but witness,
Is a safe haven from which to observe
The drama of the lives playing in the mind,
Granting one a sobering distance from it.

This detachment allows
The ‘thinking about a thought’
Without the thought itself
Trying to steal the show.

(soul acronym = spirit of unconditional love)


So far, we have both been eliminating what is impossible in order to better corner the truth, and this is where I think we are:

Oh, those imaginings of what can’t be!
Such as Nought, Stillness, and the Block’s decree,
As well as Apart, Beginning, and End,
Determinism, Blame, and Theity.

When the subject has not been coming forward to show it for thousands of years, and when it is impossible to locate for any ordinary living being, a subject who are with the attributes no matter how hard looking and searching every corner of the world for thousands of years, then should we not conclude that there is no such a being with such attributes existing? — Corvus

That the supernatural is supposed to be everywhere but is found nowhere implies that there is only the natural, making 'God' to be more of a Deity who no longer gets involved after throwing some stuff together, which makes Him a great scientist rather than a magician. So, then, while some livable planets or at least one came out of the humungous expanse over 14 billion years due to the odds of something working somewhere by having millions of the right conditions, a lot of good and horrible happenings can go on as a surprise and an amusement to Him.

The Great Scientist Deity sits back in his plush chair to watch this long great adventure movie or soap opera that He's never seen before…

knowing what is going on everywhere all at once. — Derrick Huestis

In the Cosmos, there may be some basic ‘knowing’ …

— All is One —

Everything connects to everything else
Through overlapping quantum field patterns,
And so nothing is separate at all, as it seems,
But is one large all-encompassing whole.

— Blake’s Vision Confirmed —

Every part of a hologram contains the whole,
The whole universe contained within a
Grain of sand, all eternity within a moment,
The universe rumbling when an electron vibrates.

— The All Is In the One —

All ‘things’ are connected, entangled,
As in a hologram each part contains the whole;
Everything interpenetrates everything;
The Cosmos is a seamless web of information.

— Seeing All? —

The connection of everything to everything
Is as a rudimentary perception,
But (responders can fill this in).

— Happenings —

Nature draws the world with interactions;
What’s real are relations between systems.
Events ground to the notion of ‘objects’;
‘Things’ are built by elementary events.

— Quantum Memory —

In the brain’s memory, every piece of info
Is cross-correlated with every other piece,
Which allows instant access and association;
Memories could be stored holographically.

— Instant Recall —

Memory does seem to be holographic,
Residing everywhere in the brain,
Every piece associated with others related,
Instantly broadcasting all the connections.

…

— The Will of the Cosmos? —

Where’s horrid Hell and gloried Heaven yon?
Who’s the scribe of my slab written upon?
I ask if I’m the stylus or the slate:
I’m both the dancer and the danced upon.

Can you say that what impels her - is to elucidate 'fundamental truths of the human experience of life' ? — Amity

Yes:

A poem is a truth fleshed in living words,
Which by showing unapprehended proof
Lifts the veil to reveal hidden beauty:
It’s life’s image drawn in eternal truth.


Emily's poem was already lyrical and so it was all the more suitable for being sung with music in the and so it became doubly powerful:

Poetry makes clear what’s just barely heard,
For it translates soul-language into words,
Whereas, music plays right on the heartstrings;
Merged, they create song; heart and soul converge.


Yes, her poem was private and so we need the background of it to fully understand it, but it still works wonderfully on its surface:

A poem is both the thought and the presence,
An object born from one’s profoundest sense,
An image of diction, feeling, and rhythm;
It’s both the existence and the essence.

Poems are renderings of the soul’s spirit,
The highest power of language and wit.
The reader then translates back to spirit;
If the soul responds, then a poem you’ve writ!


To get the unity of the flow, music, as well as any happening, requires three stages for continuity:

Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone;
Sensation savors what is presently known;
Imagination anticipates coming sounds;
The delight is such that none could produce alone.


In the Poetic Universe…

We are both essence and form, as poems versed,
Ever unveiling our live’s deeper thirsts,
As new riches, from strokes, letters, phonemes,
Words, phrases, and sentences—uni versed.

We have rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, sense,
Metric, melody, and beauty’s true pense,
Revealed through life’s participation,
From the latent whence into us hence.

The weave of the quantum fields as strokes writes
The letters of the elemental bytes—
The alphabet of the standard model,
Forming the words as the atoms whose mights

Merge to form molecules, as phrases,
Onto proteins and cells, as sentences,
Up to paragraphs of organisms,
And unto the stories of the species.

In this concordance of literature,
We are the Cosmos’ book of adventure,
As a uni-verse of sentient poems,
Being both the contained and the container.


In other more difficult words:

Informationally derived meanings
Unify in non-reductive gleanings,
In a relational reality,
Through the semantical life happenings.

Syntactical information exchange,
Without breaking of the holistic range,
Reveals the epic whole of nature’s poetics,
Within her requisite of ongoing change.

So there’s form before gloried substance,
Relationality before the chance
Of material impressions rising,
Traced in our world from the gestalt’s dance.

All lives in the multi–dimensional spaces
Of basic superpositional traces
Of Possibility, as like the whirl’s
Probable clouds of distributed paces.

What remains unchanged over time are All’s
Properties that find expression, as laws,
Of the conservation of energy,
Momentum, and electric charge—unpaused.


Emily, my 3rd or 4th cousin:

My great grandfather, Henry Johnson, famously captained schooners and steam ships to China and all over the world, somehow finding time to marry Henrietta Wood, who was related to Norcross somehow (my brother does the family tree, not me!), which was Emily's mother's maiden name.

Deriving the Narrative of the Cosmos

We’re already in touch with the unknown,
For that’s ever the reach of science shown.
Reality is grasped by focusing
On what interacts with what and the means.

There is a realm of happenings, not things,
For ‘things’ don’t remain the same on time’s wings.
What remains through time are processes—
Relations between different systems.

Quantum fields are the fundamental strokes
Whose excitations at harmonics cloaks
The quanta with the stability
To persist and thus obtain mobility.

The elementary particles beget,
As letters of the cosmic alphabet,
And combine in words to write the story
Of the stars, atoms, cells, and life’s glory.

For example, whether or not our universe would be made up of anti-matter doesn't seem determined, but once it was established to be matter there was no going back, and this is what makes up the whole universe today. — Derrick Huestis

Thank you, neutrinos, for our universe of matter!

https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrino-evidence-could-explain-matter-antimatter-asymmetry-20200415/

I still think there needs to be some work into the possibility of time being eternal and linear all-in-one. — Derrick Huestis

Carlo Rovelli did some work on this. He’s my favorite philosopher/physicist, along with Lee Smolin.

From Rovelli on ‘Neither Presentism nor Eternalism’:

Relativity is not the discovery of a new ontology of simultaneity: it is the discovery that there is no fact of the matter, whether two distant punctual events happen at the same time or not.

Notice that what we directly experience is local becoming, not global becoming. That is: we are directly aware of things happening around us, not far away in the uni- verse. The local becoming that we experience and the becoming well described by Newtonian physics, happen to have a peculiar feature: events can be distinct between past present and future, and labelled by a single time variable t which is tracked faithfully by any good clock, irrespectively from the way the clock moves.

We are always tempted to extrapolate our experience assuming that what is true locally is true globally. Some- times this works (the Maxwell equations, found in England, happen to work pretty well in far away galaxies as well), sometimes it doesn’t (mountains are not always in the North, the ‘up’ directions are not all parallel and the Maxwell equations are modified in the atomic nuclei.) In the case of becoming we are tempted to extrapolate local features of becoming to global features: to assume that all events of the universe can be uniquely and objectively separated into past, present and future, and labelled by a single time variable t which is tracked faithfully by any good clock, irrespectively from the way the clock moves. We have learned that this extrapolation is wrong.

The reasonable choice is to recalibrate the notion of becoming, dropping the illegitimate extrapolations implicit in its old conceptualisation.

This is possible. There is real becoming in the universe. Things happen. The relativistic equations describe this unfolding of happenings. Each individual time-like worldline describes a sequence of events, namely a specific unfolding of local becoming. Distinct local becomings are not independent: they are weaved to one another by the structure described by the four-dimensional pseudo-riemanniann geometry of general relativity. The ensemble of all events of the world cannot be objectively arranged into a single simple succession of global instants.

This impossibility is not the absence of becoming. It is the fact that becoming is more complex than a naive non- relativistic extrapolation assumes. The temporal structure of becoming is not the non-relativistic line with a special point, the ‘present’, but rather the one defined by the causal structure formed by the light cones of a pseudo Riemanniann manifold.

Relativity does not deny temporality, it shows that it is less trivial than we thought.

The different nows at different locations are not simultaneous: they are independent, and in communication via the causal structure of spacetime. They are thus partially related, but not fully. Some ‘nows’ in a distant galaxy are definitely in our past, some in our future. But there is a long sequence of distinct ‘nows’ (different moments of time) which are all neither in the past nor the future with respect to the ‘now here’. This is of course nothing else than Einstein’s key discovery: objective simultaneity is meaningless. We can think of reality as becoming is complex and multilayered [30, 31].

Different aspects of experiential time depend on different natural structures. Some aspects of our common-sense intuition about time do not carry on to relativistic becoming. Directionality, for instance, is rooted in the fact that we interact with the world via macroscopic coarse-grained variables. It is a property of these variables and it does not belong to the elementary grammar of relativistic becoming. Hence the fundamental becoming I am referring to is un-oriented [6]. Similarly, our vivid sense of the flow of time is a consequence of the functioning of our brain, rooted in memory and anticipation, and so on [30]. But the fact that so many aspects of experiential time depend on approximations, and on complex structures, does not alter the fact that what elementary physics describes is happenings, not entities.

More from Rovelli:

WHAT IS REAL NOW?

What is real in the universe, then? The question is ill defined. Reality has a temporal structure, therefore asking ‘what is real?’ without specifying ‘when’ leads to mixing events that are real now with those that were real.

There is a long tradition of contrary comments by major physicists (‘Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them’, Eddington, 1920. ‘The objective world simply is, it does not happen’, Weyl 1949. ‘Each observer has his own set of “nows”, and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time’, G ̈odel 1949. ‘An observer is merely a world-line, once and for all, on the four dimensional manifold?’, Geroch 1984. All quoted in [27].) I disagree with them. They played a rhetorical role when the new physics needed to break with old habits of thinking, but they are not the best guide for clarity today. A different case is the commonly quoted phrase by Einstein: ‘For us believing physicists, the difference between past, present, and future amounts to an illusion, albeit stubborn’ (Einstein to Besso’s wife, 21 May 1955), which I believe is misinterpreted, when taken out of its emotional context (on this, see [30], Chapter 7).

Events in the past but are not real anymore. Hence to talk about the reality of something we have to specify a time. But to specify a time it is not sufficient to specify a number. We have to locate a region in the rich temporal structure of the universe. There are facts that are real now on Earth, facts that were real in the past, or will be real in the future with respect to here-now, and there are also facts that are real on distant galaxy at a time which is neither in our future, nor in our past, but nevertheless they are in the past of one another.

This may be hard to develop an intuition for, but it is just the way reality is. Our ancestors had equal difficulty in figuring out how people could live upside down on the other side of the Earth.

The fact that some events can be ‘real now here’ without being ‘real now’ in some other location is no more and no less mysterious than the fact that some events can be ‘real now’ at some time without being ‘real now’ at other times, which so much anguished Mc Taggart [7]. Hence relativity does not really add nor subtract much with respect to the pre-relativistic debate on the reality of time.

The fact that there is no preferred objective foliation of four-dimensional spacetime into three dimensional ‘time instants’ is not a denial of becoming: it is only a a denial of a synchronised global becoming. The ‘third option’ between Presentism and Eternalism is simply what most relativists give for granted: there is no global notion of present, but there is a local becoming, at every point of spacetime. The ‘present’ is not illusory: it is well defined, but relative to a location: in non relativistic physics, it is relative to a temporal location, in relativistic physics is relative to a spacetime location.

The four-dimensional spacetime is only a cartography of the relations between these multiple local becomings.

Einstein’s discovery is that Newtonian space and time and the gravitational field are the same entity. There is a tradition of expressing this discovery saying that ‘‘there is no gravitational field: space and time become dynamical’’. I think that this is a convoluted and misleading way of thinking, which does not do justice to Einstein’s discovery, and has the additional flaw of becoming meaningless as soon as we take into account the fact that the gravitational field has quantum properties.

The clean way of expressing Einstein’s discovery is to say that there are no space and time: there are only dynamical objects. The world is made by dynamical fields. These do not live in, or on, spacetime: they form and exhaust reality.

One of these fields is the gravitational field. In the regimes in which we can disregard its dynamics, this field interacts with the rest of the physical objects as if it were a fixed background. This background is what Newton discovered and called space and time. We can keep using the evocative terminology ‘‘spacetime’’ to indicate the gravitational field. But it has practically none of the features that characterized space and time. Relativistic spacetime is an entity far more akin to Maxwell’s electric and magnetic fields than to Newtonian space.

In classical GR, a given solution of the field equations might still have some vague resemblance to the Newtonian’s notions, since it defines a ‘‘continuum’’ which things can be imagined ‘‘to inhabit’’. But the only compelling reason for thinking that ‘‘spacetime’’ is the gravitational field, and not — say — the electromagnetic field, is the contingent fact that we live in a portion of the universe where the gravitational field is sufficiently constant for us to use it as a convenient reference.

Quantum mechanics reinforces this point of view. A solution of the classical field equations is like a particle trajectory: a notion that only makes physical sense in the classical limit. The gravitational field has quantum properties, and therefore it cannot define a spacetime continuum in the small.

Properly speaking, relativity has taught us that the effective way of thinking about the world in the light of what we have learned so far is to give up the notions of ‘‘space and time entities’’ entirely. This is not a dramatically radical view, since it is not far from the way space was commonly conceptualized before Newton. On the other hand, it has a novel twist of great interest, especially as far as time, and the relation between time and space, are concerned.

In Newtonian physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, what remains is space and time. In relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. As Whitehead put it, we cannot say that we can have spacetime without dynamical entities, anymore than saying that we can have the cat’s grin without the cat (Whitehead, 1983).

I would say that anything which is to become an existing thing anytime in the future carries the property of existence in a sort of eternal sense, even before it is created. — Derrick Huestis

(Just this first point for now…)

Your view might somehow help with a problem with presentism, which is:

The turning of a ‘now’ into the next ‘now’ sits on the thinnest knife edge imaginable, the previous ‘now’ wholly consumed in the making of the new ‘now’ all over the universe at once in a dynamical updating—the present now exhausting all reality. (Or at least just locally, according to Rovelli, which we can look at another time.) It’s not that the incredibly short Planck time couldn’t be the processing time, but… I don’t know.

The present undergoes a dynamical ‘updating’, or exhibits a quality as of a fleeting swoosh, and this additional dynamical aspect is what threatens the substance of the debate between the presentist and an eternalist opponent.

What is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as ‘to be’ or ‘has been’ is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of what is, and so presentism has no true ‘nonexistence’ of the future and the past—which means that there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.

In other words, what is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as to be or has been is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of What IS, and so it has no true ‘nonexistence’, for this as ‘Nothing’ cannot be. This is saying that there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.

!
!
V

The unborn future is inherent in the past,
Its ‘will be’ is real, with no unreal contrast class,
As there’s no opposite to existence—no Nil;
It’s not just that future is going to exist.

The present ‘now’ undergoes an updating,
In a fleeting swoosh that passes it away,
For the ‘now’ fades, consumed, as future becomes,
Yet, what will become past can’t just non-exist.


Presentism's 'now' occurring everywhere at once is also severely bedeviled by Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity.

Lee Smolin is one of the few who are for presentism, calling it ‘Temporal Naturalism’:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.8539.pdf

To Be or To Become

Being or becoming: that is the question
That haunts Existence’s investigation:
Whether ’tis simpler for the All to offer
The slings and vectors of a told fortune
All at once, in a marble monument,
Or to perform in the sea of actions,
And by disposing ever create them?

You mention some physicists as viewing randomness as the "bedrock of reality." Some quick research into this topic showed that apparently this concept of randomness was at odds with the views of Einstein. Reason is leading me to take Einstein's position, and it also places me in a good spot to promote the "omnificence" concept. — Derrick Huestis

I didn’t go for ‘random’ at first, but I came to realize that there can’t be any specific input or design going into the Eternal Existence that has no Beginning, nor anything going into it, for that matter, and so what would be its nature given that its bedrock can’t have a pre-definition?[/quote]

For this, I pose the question: Can randomness occur without being deliberate? Zeilinger argues that light reflecting off a mirror or being absorbed is a completely random phenomenon. But if it is truly random, then it could be the case that no light is absorbed, or all light is absorbed, and everything in between. But we don't see variation in the reflectivity of a mirror, so while it may be random at the individual level, it is patterned at the macro level, and what governs this to ensure that this "randomness" is patterned in such a way? — Derrick Huestis

The probabilities in QM results are unitary, in that they add up to one. This is like a pattern. When quantum systems don’t interact with something they are deterministic. Maybe it is that since we can’t take the whole universe into consideration during quantum experiment we get probabilities.

But really, there is no "random" at a macro level anywhere, everything is deliberate. Even human acts of obtaining "randomness" such as rolling a dice revolve around a deliberate act. At a macro level, there is randomness nowhere, but at a micro-level there seems to be randomness everywhere, and the governance of this--to my knowledge--is not fully known. — Derrick Huestis

Quantum probability ‘randomness’ averages out at the macro level, which is called decoherence. This use of “deliberate” suggests that there is mostly determinism at the macro level, which I would agree with. Others flat out won’t like it, emotionally, but the alternative is ‘not determined’, which is even harder to take. No one has ever been able to say what the ‘free’ in free will is supposed to refer to, other than the trivial sense that the will is usually able to operate. We are left with other non-starter notions such as one being a mini self cause, which wouldn’t know anything, or ‘random’, which would hurt the will, and never help it. Maybe some ‘randomness’ at rare times creeps in, but I hope that one is not standing at the edge of a cliff when this happens, or the ‘random’s vote gets swamped out but the majority votes. All in all, the fixed will grants consistency. Learning provides for new and better fixed wills to come along that have a wider range of intelligence behind them.

There is no "true" random, and presuming this statement is true, there is no "random" to the Big Bang and universe either. Everything is patterned, organized chaos. Even the logic we have been discussing demonstrates a necessity for pattern. But where things really get ambiguous is where the patterns are no longer necessitated by any logic, and yet they are patterned anyway. Here I find a kind of border line where arguing "omnificence is necessary" can be done. But if you have omnificence, you have a mind, you have a force that can create patterns, designs, uniqueness, etc. It organizes the "chaos" that exists out of necessity into a pattern that keeps changing and morphing but never dissolving back into chaos. — Derrick Huestis

Minds emerge later on, where there is more complexity. Look to the future for even higher human beings. In the past, we ever see but simpler and simpler things.

Determinism is still on, though, in presentism, as one ‘now’ leads to the next ‘now’, it getting consumed, and even more so, in a way, in eternalism, since it is all pre-determined.

It is the odd thing about this universe, everything that is "chaos" can be zoomed out of far enough to look beautiful. Black holes are one such example...So, back to the original question, can randomness exist without being deliberate? Especially when there seems to be two choices: random or patterned, and patterns seem to be the far more common choice than random — Derrick Huestis

The leftover relic of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation shows some minor variations. What we see in the universe as galaxies could be the quantum fluctuations writ large. From a very great distance out, the universe seems to be pretty smooth.

A Black Hole exists at the center of our galaxy. We are nowhere near this core but well safe from its harm out on the Orion Arm.

Again, what would be the nature of the forced Eternal Necessary Existence?

Random?

Everything, either as linear or all once?

A default for what is partless to have to be tiny?

— Derrick Huestis

So, your theory as far as it goes checks out, the philosophy being confirmed by science, which is really pretty far since it applies to the entire Cosmos, not just the universe!

The forced Existence as Necessity shows that it has to be ever and always, too, which is usually called ‘Eternal’. It is unbreakable and unmakeable.

Eternal pertains to an endless duration of time, while infinite pertains to an endless extent.

If there is presentism, then there is time; otherwise, if there is eternalism, then this is a timeless all-at-once type of eternal. We can’t tell them apart. In eternalism, we traverse an already complex block of past and future, this seeming as time to us. The mode of time has to get resolved, but we can go on to estimate well, I hope, about the supposed Big Bang. We know what comes right after a Big Bang, and it is useful, but I shan’t put it here yet.

Of course, the Bang is a continuation of the Cosmos since something banged. Also, since it happened once, it could happen again. I just hope that it doesn’t happen near me!

Stephen Hawking thinks that there is no boundary at all at the Bang, no before, no outside, etc., but others don’t agree, so I’m putting that in limbo for now.

He’s right, though, about the universe summing to a near-zero balance of opposites (he says zero; I say near) in that the negative potential energy of gravity balances/cancels the positive kinetic energy of stuff. His negative energy of gravity can make stuff for free and the universe is indeed a free lunch… This capability would still have to be a something.

Before the Bang, the quantum fields are still there, since they can never go away, if we continue to look at happenings in time, as we’re used to doing that. The field fluctuations are of a wee and most tiny bit of energy. This so-called zero-point energy rest state is not really zero for physicists. Plus, the rest point for the Higgs field that gives mass to some particles is even of a higher energy!

So, then, for the Bang, perhaps some lightweight stuff accumulated in Eternity’s Waiting Room, there being more and more amounting until a kind of bandwidth saturation point was reached, meaning that an infinite density could not be reached, and so, Boom.

The same for the Block Universe of eternalism if its events became all at once, I guess. I don’t like to guess.

Presentism has grave problems and eternalism has every event of past and future (to us) already there and figured to infinite precision (even the 3 body resists solution; and can there really be infinite precision? And why its specific starting point for the universe?).

As for ‘random’, Anton Zeilinger seems to have shown to 3-sigma that randomness is the bedrock of reality.

Just when we have made great leaps, larger than any before, we see that there is more work to do.

A poem set to music:



Article on the poem:

https://slowlander.com/2019/09/10/split-the-lark-and-youll-find-the-music/

Non-existence can't exist
-so, there must be infinite existence in all directions for all time — Derrick Huesits

You are doing well to corral the fundamental arts beginning with these points. 'Non-existence' as 'Nothing' cannot even be meant, so thus I have put it in single quotes. To flesh out the steps in your scheme, I add explicitly:

Thus, existence is mandatory, period, and so it is a given. and so this fact can never be undone. Thus, we have both a truth and its proof. One cannot later on claim that it was optional.

‘Nothing’, not being able to be, has no productive capability. This, too, is a truth and a proof. One cannot later on claim such as that ‘Nothing’ can divide into positives and negatives, for this capability would be a something and thus one did not truly start with ‘Nothing’.

So, there must be Existence as a continuous partless something with no spacers of ‘Nothing’ present (yes, I am being redundant here)! The Cosmos is indivisible.

To no surprise, science has already identified this Existence. It is the partless fundamental fields of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) that give rise to the elementary particles.

At this level, there is no Time or Space yet; the quantum fields are all atop one another (and can interact with one another).

Recall that Einstein did away with Newton’s supposed absolute and fundamental Space and Time. The notion of them is emergent from the true fundamental quantum fields.

What I am doing here is winnowing away all the previous and wrongly proposed fundamentals… to see what’s left standing.

So then, note too that Faraday got rid of the supposed classical particles being fundamental as spigots of fields and that the same was done for quantum particles in Quantum Mechanics (QM) and its QFT to support the Standard Model (SM) which works to great precision.

-something which exists carries certain attributes: is affected by things, effects things, takes up space and encompasses time — Derrick Huesits

This would be the fundamental quantum fields which ever remain as themselves. They exhaust all Reality, period.

Excitations in these quantum fields are the elementary particles, as quanta of certain discrete stable unit energy levels dictated by the waving nature of the fields. As the fields are everywhere, the particles may then travel anywhere to further combine upwards, which we take as ‘thing’s with ‘parts’.

In truth, while the notion of there being things is useful, it is that these so-call ‘things’ are events and process. The sun is a long event but it is not identical with itself over time. Its semblance is a ‘thing’ to us’

In charged particles, the unit charge level also adds to the strength conferred by the unit quantum strength for stability.

The model of these fields as sums of harmonic oscillators at every point is correct and true in that it shows the nature of the elementary particles. So it is that when adding energy to an electron in an atom that the electron can only jump to certain quantum levels.

-things are separated by things which are not of the same type, so the only thing that could separate existence itself would be nonexistence which cannot exist, thus there must be one undivided existence — Derrick Huesits

This is another truth and a proof, that there is no separation, never, that all is one, indivisible, though not under ‘God’, which ‘God’ needs more definition, but is indeed as itself as a must be as a default condition.

-this undivided existence must carry all the attributes labeled above. These attributes, when defined as being all-encompassing, define all the omni's associated with God: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. And perpetual change through creativity: omnificent. — Derrick Huesits

The quantum fields are all-encompassing and omnipresent as all there is. They only have whatever power that they can have, which also serves as what they can ‘know’.

They cannot be still, for then not anything would have happened, and so thus we have another truth and proof that there has to be “perpetual change”, meaning that it is continual and that not anything particular can ever remain for even an instant (would be small or else All would pass in just one flash). At any rate, change is constant, but the fundamental quantum fields remain themselves at heart. ‘Stillness’ is out, it gaining single quotes now, such as with its sort of cousin, ‘Nothing’.

-add to this the fact that it must encompass all time: eternal, and you get all the labels attributed to God
-thus, the notion of God can be grasped from a purely logical standpoint. — Derrick Huesits

More truths and proofs, in that ‘Beginnings’ and ‘Ends’ are out now, too, in that the quantum fields have to be eternal, or at least timeless (we can’t as yet tell presentism apart from eternalism).

‘God’ as a kind of a Person with Mind seems to be out, too, for systems of mind emerge at higher levels, and ever have ‘parts’ (events and processes really), and those had to emerge previously.

The quantum fields would be as a God-who-is-not-a-person, as having the labels of fundamental, everywhere, the Ground of Determination (G.O.D), all the power that is, eternal, ungenerated and deathless, the One, the Necessary, etc.

Well done!

Well even if that is the case, that still leaves the question of why there was a Big Bang in the first place. — HardWorker

Stuff collected. Infinite density cannot be; it went boom!

Do OBEs and/or NDEs
take you to some other realm?

OBEs and NDEs

NDE tunnels of light and such
Can be explained by neurology,
And OBEs by a condition called sleep paralysis,
In which one is partly awake,
But cannot move.

When one is half asleep but half awake,
Or even half dead or half alive,
One is in a mixed state of both.

OBEs can also be chemically induced,
Resulting in full blown episodes.
Neither, then, are proof of a beyond,
But of an altered brain state.

I’ve had several OBEs.

In the first one,
I noted that the scene
Looked as real as real could be,
But I did nothing further
Than to float around the bedroom,
Full of amazement.

I later figured that the dream model of reality
Is the same one that is employed
When we are awake.

During the second OBE,
I rearranged the items on my end table,
Even knocking one item off.

All still felt totally real to the touch and all that,
And I was sure that I would see the evidence
Of the end table results later when I fully awoke;
But when I really awoke
I saw that nothing had been moved.

I also found that I could awake
From dreams anytime
By clenching my whole body,
And so during the third OBE
I luckily found myself in a kind of halfway state
In which my dream-arms
Were seen to be fiddling with the end table stuff
While I could also see my real arms
Just lying beside me, unmoving.

It’s not only visions that come in an OBE,
But of any sense;
Once I kept a dream song playing
For 10-15 seconds after I awoke—
It was playing only on the mind-brain ‘radio’.

I guess the moral is that
Sometimes a virtual dream reality
Cannot be told apart from the real,
Although it is always
And only the mind-brain
That puts a face on reality.

I was so sure that I was out of my body,
But one must also remember
That memory and imagination
Often images scenes from above (try it now).

When one is ‘floating’ above one’s body in an OBE,
It is not that Gravity’s laws have been repealed,
Nor is one in another dimension,
But just in the mind, as always.

It is also the case that people of different religions
See different religious symbols during NDE’s,
An indication that the phenomenon
Occurs within the mind, not without.

OBE’s are easily induced by drugs.
The fact that there are receptor sites in the brain
For such artificially produced chemicals means
That there are naturally produced
Brain chemicals that,
Under certain circumstances
(The stress of an trauma
Or an accident, for example),
Can induce any or all of the experiences
Typically associated with an NDE or OBE.

NDE’s are then nothing more than wild trips
Induced by the trauma of almost dying.

In an NDE, one is in danger of death
And so the brain is certainly not in a normal state,
Perhaps even being drained
Of oxygen and nutrients.

Lack of oxygen produces increased activity
Though disinhibition—
Mental modes that give rise to consciousness.

What about the experience of a tunnel in an NDE?
Well, the visual cortex is on the back of the brain
Where information from the retina is processed.
Lack of oxygen, plus drugs generated,
Can interfere with the normal rate
Of firing by nerve cells in this area.

When this occurs ‘stripes’ of neuronal activity
Move across the visual cortex,
Which is interpreted by the brain
As concentric rings or spirals.
These spirals may be ‘seen’ as a tunnel.

Seeing a light at the end of a tunnel
Is a result of how the visual cortex
Works in this state.

We normally only see clearly only
At about the size of a deck of cards
Held at arm’s length
(Try looking just a little away
And the clarity goes way down)—
This is the center of the tunnel
Which is caused by the neuronal stripes.

(I am not dying to have an NDE)

Which one were you thinking of? — apokrisis

Either, as the nature of Ultimate Reality.

Or the attempt to explore its limit, don’tcha think? — apokrisis

What about the 'limit' of there seemingly being a zero-sum balance of opposites, or no absolutes, or as no intrinsic properties such as with relationism?

such as Plato's forms, — Jack Cummins

Like our shades dance the walls of Plato’s cave,
We’re 3D shadows of 4D’s enclave…
It’s like a lamp lights up a paper shade—
We are as figures thereupon portrayed.

We are magic lanterns shining here; 
Our spirits are the lights in there.
We’re the One’s Candled Magic Shadow-show,
In which we Phantom Figures come and go.

Now, given how likely it is that a mistake has been made in my reasoning, given how many claims I've made, I need to know, what do you think? — Hello Human

No mistakes.

Consciousness is

Intrinsic—My own, as independent;

Compositional—Structured with many phenomenological distinctions;

Informational—Particular and specific;

Integrated/Whole—Unified;

Exclusive—Definite content, no more no less.


Subjective Features:

Referral—The ‘projection’ of neural states with no perceiving of neural firings/states.

Mental Unity—Experienced as a unified field, whereas its sources are all over the brain.

Qualia—The subjectively experienced felt qualities of sensory consciousness.

Continuous—Seamless stitching of the ongoing changing contents from short term memory.

Mental causation?—How can consciousness—an intangible, unobservable, and fully subjective entity—cause material neurons to direct behaviors that change the world? Subconscious brain analysis, taking 300-500 milliseconds to complete, is all done and finished in its result before consciousness gets hold of the product.


Uses/Advantages:

Flexibility of Reaction—We’re better able to react to conscious content, beyond just the automatic reflex-like responses triggered by non conscious content.

Focus—Selective attention allows the brain to focus its activity on what’s important.

Evaluations—Feelings make one aware of what is good or bad.

Survival Value—Complex decisions possible.

Behavioral Flexibility—Unlimited associate learning combines multiple cues into a single perception.

Discrimination—Small perceptual differences possible, such as between good and poisonous food.

Diversification of Species—Such as the Cambrian explosion and a kind of evolutionary arms race in finding new ways to avoid detection, spurring predators to become more sophisticated.

Beauty—Such as plants evolving colorful flowers to attract pollination.

Actionizing—Pondering of the consequences of scenarios before a commitment to action.


The brain interprets reality, and puts
A face on the waves of sound, light, color, touch,
And a sense on molecules’ smell and taste.
Consciousness is the brain’s perception of itself.

Consciousness mediates thoughts versus outcomes,
And is distributed all over the body,
From the nerve spindles to the spine to the brain—
A way to actionize without moving.

Physics describes well the extrinsic causes,
While consciousness exists just for itself,
As the intrinsic, compositional,
Informational, whole, and exclusive—

As the distinctions toward survival,
Though causing nothing except in itself,
As in ne’er doing but only as being,
Leaving intelligence for the doing.

The posterior cortex holds correlates,
For this is the only brain region that
Can’t be removed for one to still retain
Consciousness, it having feedback in it;

Thusly, it presents a unified Whole,
And this Whole forms consciousness directly,
A process fundamental in nature,
Or is the brain’s own symbolic language.

The Whole can also be well spoken of
To communicate with others, as well as
Globally informing other brain states,
For nonconscious states know not what’s been formed.

2) In what sense and why is god necessary?
That is the question to be addressed in this thread. — Banno

Showing ‘God’ as Not Necessity
(Outline)

The fields form and exhaust reality,
As partless, continuous—there’s no Space!
Reality maintains itself in place
As the net of objects interacting.

Copernicus’ revolution’s complete;
External entities aren’t required
To hold the universe; God’s not needed,
Nor any background; there is no Outside.

Nor is there the ‘now’ all over the place.
GR’s relational nature extends
To Time as well—the ‘flow’ of time is not
An ultimate aspect of reality.

All is Relational: no entity
Exists independently of anything;
There are no intrinsic properties,
Just features in relation to what’s else.

Interactions and events (not things) are
Quantum entangled with such others else;
Impermanence pertains all the way through—
What Nagarjuna means by Emptiness.

There are no fundamental substances,
No permanences, no bird’s-eye view
Of All, no Foundation to Everything,
Plus no infinite regress ne’er completed.

The fields are not from anything—causeless!
Or ‘not from anything’ is of lawless
‘Nothing’, which can’t ever form to remain.
There is no reason, then, to existence.

Hope’s Necessary ‘God’ vanishes!
This realization of Impermanence,
No Absolutes, and Emptiness,
Is Nirvana, though coincidently.

explain — Jack Cummins

The music festival ended a while ago, but Jack is still there as the only one left, he lying on the grass on a blanket with a pillow under his head and savoring the atmosphere and the highs brought forth by the concert and its audience smoking pot…

He hears some voices in the sky from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. This is not yet the promised Worldly Love Story, but it’s a prelude to it…

Good and Evil sprang from Wrong and Right,
When from naught twin Genii split day and night.
“Oh, fear not that black’s might can vanquish white;
Darkest night can’t e’en quench the smallest light!”

“I’m the darkest,” boasts the Shadow to the Night.
“No,” gloats Midnight, “compared to me you’re bright.”
“You floodlights!” crows Starless Space, “Stop your fight.
The darkest plight is the lack of Love’s delight!”

Reason moons to Passion, with logic cool,
“Quench thy inner fire, lest it burn us, fool.”
Blazes Venus, “I know What I feel, not Why;
‘Tis better you take heed of me—I Rule!”

Plato's forms — Jack Cummins

Omar Khayyam, through Edward FitzGerald great transmogrification from the Arabic, has it:

For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.



To which I added, in my 'Extended Rubaiyat':

We are phenomena’s projected face,
Well-painted from noumena’s unseen base;
It’s as a lamp lights up a paper shade,
We figures revolving around in space.

Our being blocks the view of the Ultimate,
Nor to gaze at it can we our selves acquit.
E'en the wise can’t step beyond their nature—
All mothers’ sons stand helpless before it.

We are magic lanterns shining here; 
Our spirits are the lights in there.
From what bright star came the gleam in your eyes? 
From what distant sun came your smile, light-wise?

Come, light your lantern and mine with good cheer;
We’re magic lamps; our spirits dance in here.
Our beginnings and ends are of nowhere,
So, let’s radiate, since for now we’re here!

Our minds and senses interpret and dispense
The base reality into the colors and sensations
Of the phenomenal world from the noumenal;
We may become either rainbows or ugly stains!

Mind, like Shelley’s prism of many-colored glass,
Strains the white radiance of Eternity
Into our being—until death tramples us—
And then back we must go—to stardust.

the only reason for it all that does not beg the question with an infinite regress is that there isn't any reason for it all — 180 Proof

(The Hubble Deep Field—click)

Rhyme Without Reason
In No Space and No Time

Fields form and exhaust reality;
They are continuous; there is no Space!
Reality maintains itself in place—
It’s the net of objects interacting.

Copernicus’ revolution is complete;
An external entity isn’t required
To hold the universe. God’s not needed,
Nor a background of Space and Time.

There isn’t a ‘now’ all over the place.
The relational nature of GR
Extends to Time as well—the ‘flow’ of time
Is not an ultimate aspect of reality.

All’s Relational: no entity
Exists independently of anything;
There are no intrinsic properties,
Just ‘properties’ in relation to what’s else.

All interactions and events are
Quantum entangled with everything;
Impermanence goes all the way through—
What Nagarjuna means by Emptiness.

The fields are not from anything: causeless!
Or ‘not from anything’ is of lawless
‘Nothing’, which can’t form to remain.
There’s no reason, then, to the ‘mystery’.

This realization of Impermanence,
No Absolutes, and Emptiness
Is Nirvana.

more of the essence of the mysterious side of life — Jack Cummins

Up next on stage,

‘Calm Beauty’ by Michel Montecrossa

(Sung from these Omar Khayyam Rubaiyat quatrains,
with some slight changes)

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As much as Ocean of a pebble-cast.
(insignificance)

One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste—
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Draws to the dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!
(live!)

Would you that spangle of Existence spend
About The Secret—quick about it, Friend!
A Hair perhaps divides the False from True—
And upon what, prithee, may life depend?

A Hair perhaps divides the False and True;
Yes; and a single Alif were the clue—
Could you but find it—to the Treasure-house,
And peradventure to The Master too;

(the shape of the ‘alif’ arabic letter looks like a hair, plus it represents the Beginning or Allah)

Whose secret Presence through Creation’s veins
Running Quicksilver-like eludes your pains;
Taking all shapes from Máh to Máhi and
They change and perish all—but He remains;
(Echoes of Parmenides)

And fear not lest Existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour’d
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.
(cyclic universe or multiverse)

listening to some obscure band, while contemplating the mystery of existence. — Jack Cummins

And lo, a masterpiece is performed at the music concert, surprising Jack and all:

music festivals — Jack Cummins

Plus even too hot in some places to go out…

Nevertheless, the Earth and the moon will be joining us and the planets at the music festival and singing and telling everyone about their worldly love as actually kind of twin planets…

Then Parmenides will make an appearance, he the great one who shocked the Philosophic World way, way back with his One of Necessity. (in case you want to look him up.)

RIP Weinberg.

Hubris to the max:

SAPIENS SUPREME

From what beastly heart sprung our zest?
Through what searching eye became our sight?
What sounds in the bushes let us hear?
What dark past haunts but helps us be?

Across what ink black rivers did we have to swim?
To what ends at length did we search for food?
In what deep entangled forest were we bred?
Of what stars did we shine in their stead?

Oh Man! What a piece of work—the mind;
What noble deeds done and undone in kind.
What Rube Goldberg inventions heaped upon—
In the layers of brains the mind is made upon.

What is this sapiens mammal animal,
But of some slime and of brutish law!
So, let’s ‘neglect’ this state of affairing,
On the grounds that it is unappealing.

So then…

We are spun of the Eternal Golden Braid,
Those windings of Truth, Love, and Beauty made
From the Goodness of Purity Immortal—
The Theory of Everything’s singular portal.

What is Man but the special chosen species
For which all the plants grow and the waters reach,
For which the Earth turns ‘round, and orbits
A sunny furnace, spreading Love’s energy,
Enabling us to thrive above any and all creation.

What is Man but the only bloom for which all
The 13.7 billions years of evolution and love
Have occurred, in a predetermined swirling yeast,
To form and flower such a vainglorious beast.

It’s ever on forever’s edge that we meet our destiny,
That in our temporary parentheses of Eternity
We would flourish for just this moment, bidden,
As the blossoms of Perfection’s Flower Garden.

A hundred trillion stars and countless shores
Were built to light our universal nights explored;
Forty million other lower species too, the All-Might
Placed about our world, merely for our delight.

Our names are Writ Large on the Heaven’s marquee,
In the supernovae stardust showered from Thee.
From Nothing You came not, but of a naught
Our own universe was made and ever wrought.

A starring role we play in this reality show,
Every atom spinning fine just for us to know,
Our ancestors rising/falling for us to stand upon,
Oh man! They lived and died for our lone promise!

Every shaft of light shines with us in mind;
Thus it beams forth our beginning and our end—
In and of God’s hidden and Heavenly Shrine.
Oh life! We cherish being, that of Yours and mine.

We do so much deserve reward beyond this role—
And so it is that one’s immortal spirit-soul,
That angelic vapour that drives a living being,
Will go forth to glory on, beyond the scene.

We are not merely some mammally organic ‘luck’,
But purposely evolved on this planet, near a star,
In that intended long and winding mindless ‘birth’
Of slowly drifting time, dust, and selection by death
That ever sifted the best from the rest: Sapiens!

Interesting — Jack Cummins

Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone,
Sensation savors what is presently known,
Imagination anticipates coming sounds;
The delight is such that none could produce alone.

Time for a Summer Party with a concert in the park starring the Spheres…

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES—MOONLIGHT SONATA

The music of the night was in the breeze,
A prelude borne by the airy musicians
Of the trees: the evening calls of the birds
That opened for the cosmic symphony.

The Music of the Spheres played in the park
That night—flung down by our Father, the Sky,
Through the soft night, to our Mother, the Earth,
Then to us, their audience and progeny.

The planets joined in a concert to the
Merrie Monthe of Maie, arrayed as follows:
There was Venusia, the Bringer of Peace,
Singing side by side with warring Marsius.

Flitting about was the wingéd Mercuria,
The speedy messenger who conducted
The orchestra, melting all of us who
Were touched by her wand of burning desire.

And mighty Zeus, was there, full to the brim
With the jollity of the fat man’s belly.
By Jove, came Saturnus, so very gray
With age, lumbering into the party.

Thence sat Urania—the magician, and
The old sea captain—King Nep, the mystic,
But not Pluto; he was downsized, no more
One of the harmonics—an underworld!

Jupiter’s music was round and robust,
While Saturn’s boomed with sounds of grandeur
And the old venerable melodies;
But Mercury soon picked up the pace.

Next flowed the serene love songs of Venus,
Followed inexorably by Martial marches.
Now was the time for Urania’s magic—
She played musical jokes and surprises.

At last, their music came to mesh as one,
And our wanderers of the night floated
Away on the haunting, mystical strains
Of King Nep’s tune, into the May Flower moon.

Now we’re touched, so touched by the night's lights,
Afraid that we’ll ne’er be the same again.
Can you sense the euphony of the spheres?
Can you fathom the theory of everything?

PDF: https://austintorn.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/moonlight-sonata-8.5x11-jpg-300-dpi.pdf

But let's pause for a while and ask ourselves: Aren't we even near to the answer or at least getting closer to it? How long more should we wait before realizing that we are chasing phantoms?

Therefore: Shouldn't we at some point accept the fact and admit that we cannot solve the mystery, give up, and move on, creating other useful and fruitful questions? — Alkis Piskas

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.

— Omar Khayyam

Clue to something: normal matter makes up less than 5% of the universe.

SHADES OF THE OTHERWORLD?

Could there be more to this world—
Those of the undrawn shades unfurled?
Is there a universe alongside this bright zone,
A parallel, twilight world overlapping our own?

Are there shadow beings all about us,
That we can only perceive as blankness?

They’d be made of but the dark matter,
Yet lively with their own kind of chatter,
These shades flowing right on through us—
We the lighted plus to their dark minus.

These pale shadows of our attendants,
Are not as us of light’s extent,
But are as black clouds of a coal sack;
Nay, they’re not even dark or black,
But are of an invisible bivouac.

Dark matter and its shadows traverse
The bulk of our missing-mass universe.
The shades of evening draw us on—
We must look to the past, upon the first eon.

Two distinct families of matter
Were created in the Big Freeze batter,
Just those two that did then so accrue
When they were frozen out of the primordial stew
As the fetal universe was cooling,
When the heartiest gruel was stewing.

The normal universe and the shadow universe
Can interpenetrate, neither averse
(Or even “adverse” to rhyme the verse)
Nor to coerce; they just cannot interact,
As they have no contract.

If the shadow universe was richly sown
It could have evolved along with our own.

Shadow planets could form
Around shadow stars as norms
And become populated with swarms
Of those shadow beings lukewarm.

They would be invisible specters, unseen phantoms,
Unobserved presences, indiscernible apparitions,
Imperceptible wraiths, unnoticed spirits, magic places,
Inconspicuous spooks, and hidden traces…

But first we must ask what makes a universe,
Such as ours, the one in which we immerse.

It is the forces that count for everything,
Matter being but a secondary singing,
For atoms exert forces through space,
Especially of the electromagnetic race;

So then, it is forces that disburse
The currency of a rich universe.

This is why we don’t fall through a chair—
That mostly empty space of thin air
When we decide to sit down there.

Space is a kind of a large-scale limitation
Of an underlying discrete network of connections.

Atoms would not even know at all
That their companions existed, with no call,
Without the push or pull of the forces’ thrall,
For then they themselves would be as pall
As some ghosts passing through a wall.

The four forces hold our world together
In its diversity of shape, structure, form, and color.

Some forms of our matter don’t feel
All of the four forces as real:
Neutrons have no electric charge
And so they don’t care, Marge,
About that e/m force at large.

Suppose some form of matter didn’t feel
Any of the four forces that became real?

Dark Matter doesn’t appear to discourse,
Not having the resource of its own special forces
To bind it together; no packhorses.

All it can feel is the force of gravity,
And perhaps the weak force’s changeability—
Which is for decay and not stability;
In fact, both forces are weak, a pravity.

You cannot hold a person-size lump
Of matter together with just gravity’s slump;
So then, no interesting lumps can form
In the dark universe, not even unicorns.

Even making a star or a planet
Is difficult with just gravity alone working on it,
For the electromagnetic force is crucial
To slowing any of the material
Down enough to hold it in one place;
So then, there can be no shadow race…

…No veiled hints, obscured suggestions,
Unknown impressions, out of sight suspicions,
Nor any supposed tinges, shimmering glimmers,
Resembling semblances, or ghostly whispers.

What has no light is but a dark shade,
With no creatures therein made.
So dark matter is not a source for being,
Although it’s a large matter to us unseeing.

And yet is it we who are the outsiders,
Our luminous bubbles of foam the riders,
The stars, planets, and us the striders—
On the vast ocean of dark matters much wider.

We humans as from the matter that’s bright
Seem to be an afterword of the Cosmic scheme:
Not dark mats, we glow-surf on waves of light,
A tiny minority in the grand regime.

We were an afterthought, with no forethought,
Although perhaps made possible, nonetheless,
By the dark matter—since it was oblivious
To much of the great primeval blast,
It forming filaments that could last,

Attracting our regular matter
That was everywhere splattered,
Into the pearls of the galaxies
Strung along like cosmic necklaces.

Far from being the Magnificat,
We are more insignificant
Than we ever imagined,
For whatever is our measly count,
Compared to dark matter and dark energy,
We’re quite the rarity.

PDF: https://austintorn.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/dm-8.5x11-jpg-300-dpi.pdf

And Man is — Daniel

NON-CENTRIC

The holist brain side can entertain
Ungrounded notions
That are unfettered by detail,
But then, eventually,
Come the details that
Ever haunt the notion.

And this is even after the mistake
Of being human-centric,
The stance that man
Is the measure of all things.

It is neither meek nor humble
To suppose that humans
Are special and/or deserve
Reward in an afterlife.

The time of our universe happening
Is not of any special moment;
Therefore, any universes could be,
Any time or even at the same time.

Ours is not even the center of all.
There is no Earth-centric, human-centric,
Time-centric, or even universe-centric,
Which outlook is humble.

It is pride that wants one
To be King or Queen of reality.

the same basic laws that govern every object govern Man — Daniel

Man is just as organic as everything else in nature.

THE FOREVER FIELDS OF REALITY
AND THE END OF ‘ZERO'

Michael Faraday introduced
One of the most radical ideas in science.

They thought that he had,
For once, gone too far.

Particles were secondary excitations,
Being mere spigots in which the fields lumped.
The real stuff of reality was the forces flowing,
The particles being only the source.

The burden of reality had shifted,
For the space between particles became primary.
Particles were only the intersection
Of field forces that wove the universe.

Forces create stresses in space,
A superhighway of how to get from here to there.

An electron wiggles in the sun,
Tweaking the E/M field;
The ripples travel for 8 minutes
Then tickle an electron in your eye.

You see the light; light is a tweak.

Physics has never been the same since.
The field concept became real,
The idea being the same as the thing,
Fudging forever the difference
Between something and nothing;

Yet fields are made of something real,
For they have energy.

Einstein called the fields that be
“A change in the concept of reality…
The most profound and fruitful one
That has come to physics since Newton.”

Matter then is simply a place where
Some of the field happens to be concentrated.
Matter travels like a wave in a rope,
But the rope itself does not travel.

The field is not so much
Something in space,
But more as being space.

This is why all particles of a type are identical;
For they are each manifestations
Of their fields everywhere the same.

A field takes on a life of its own,
Even when the event that created it is gone.
The traveling kinks continue;
They propagate endlessly.

Where the vacuum is free of matter
It is not free of field, but filled with it.

Energy and mass are the same stuff,
But it takes a whole lot
Of energy to make mass.

Field is thus the bridge
Between matter and empty space.

Fields can’t go away,
As they’re part of the
Structure of the vacuum;
When in their quietest possible state
They are the vacuum.

This is about as close to nothing
As anything ever gets.

Forces act on things,
While matter is acted upon;
You can walk through a field,
But you cannot walk through a wall.

Kinks in fields can pile atop one another;
Kinks in matter hold each other at arm’s length.
Yet somehow, beneath it all they are kindred spirits.

Faraday made fields real;
Quantum Mechanics made them basic—
And lumpy—the currency of QM.

Everything melts via uncertainty,
As when we try to measure a quantum property.

But this too means that no quantum property
Can ever be zero, for zero is a precise amount,
That is, it is that motion can never cease.

Try to pin down an electron,
Such as putting it in a box,
And it increasingly moves about, ever faster.

Is it heads or tails while it is still spinning?
Well it is just a fuzzy ‘both’ yet neither.

In a way, QM eliminated
The very idea of zero
From the physical world,
As ‘nothing’ never sleeps,
But is ever up to something.

The History of All History

Ruby looks up, as if through the ceiling and up to the stars, remarking, “I’ve come such a long way to be here, with you, but our possibility was there in the beginning, although it was spread out all over.

“The Planck era at 1E-43 seconds was the first hint of us, as a cyclical compactfication or a vacuum fluctuation eruption in an indefinite realm that’s as close to Nothing as can be, but it can’t be a Nothing as such, since that would be a definite, whereas the vacuum as the basic quantum something must be fuzzy, uncaused, and undirected, matching that which we often note in the quantum realm. Apparently, motion can’t cease, for energy cannot be destroyed.”

“Ruby, I’ll knock Stillness off of the list of what can be, as being a kind of a cousin of ‘Nothing’, which we’ve already banished, along with ultimate Beginnings and Ends, plus Infinity, because it can’t be capped and so it cannot be had all at once or ever, since one can always add to it; it never completes, and that is more toward its meaning, not a meaning that it is a number or an amount. I’ll add ‘random’ as probably requiring a fundamental level or the quantum level, and as dubious otherwise, as it’s mostly evened out at the macroscopic level.”

“So, Austin, to learn the Secrets of what IS and ever WAS, we must brave the crypt and ghost of cause, as the causeless. The so-called quantum foam seems to be ever and always, remaining even now, and it still has pairs of virtual particles quick appearing and then annihilating and disappearing, as a kind of ‘noise’, during which events time still passes without any useful change overall, as the noise may not often produce something that lasts a bit or more.”

“Indeed, I answer, “The virtuals are ‘somethings’, or ‘sum-things’, as one might call them as of possibility or potential, but have not yet as a true, meaningful existence until they become part of an information process and thus are able persist in their effects and go forward somewhat or greatly. This state has always been, and must be, so jot: that this All is ever here to be, since nothing cannot. We philosophers love to fathom the cryptic, where perhaps only the shade of substance slept with arithmetic, although the descriptions in physics are very amenable to math.

“There is a basic lightness of elemental being because anything more would have to be of parts, and thus beyond the fundamental arts. Bits of information need to be separated to operate, maybe, perhaps manifesting by ‘creating’ a Planck sized piece of space. Maybe we experience their separation as space. The bits can have relative relationships, which is a must, there being nothing outside or before the All, such as absolute rulers or clocks. Time evolves as relations form, all of them having to be relative. Mass, energy, and information have been shown to be equivalent.”

“So, then, where the causeless reigns supreme, the spark nursed by embers is the first that the universe remembers, as it fires toward the other members in a processing way. The opposite twins are as virtual pairs that rule the causing call, these positives and negatives constituting most of the All.”

“Yes, I’ve often thought of the many opposite states appearing in nature, such as matter and antimatter, left and right, up and down, the polarity of charge, on/off, and many more, as a near zero-sum equation.”

Ruby Yacht readies to continues her Cosmic description, renaming it ‘The History of All History of Our Universe—From the First Instant Unto the Last.”

“The Great Wheel of our universe proceeds very quickly at first. At 1E-36 seconds, in a GUT transition in a hell of a short time, the strong force separates from the electro–weak force, the strong force eventually providing for stability and the weak force for changeability, another great balance. Inflation begins, maybe, as a slow rolling scalar field generates negative pressure, causing an exponential expansion of spacetime. The doubling is of a vacuum energy density of 1E73 tons/cm^3. Quantum fluctuations lock in nearly scale invariant 1E-5 variation in energy density. Here the enigma of the ever immortal is undone and unloosed through its portal.”

“Or at least inflation is proposed, for nothing else makes sense yet. The galaxies would seem to be the quantum fluctuations writ large across the night sky.”

Ruby continues, we alternating, “At 1E-34 seconds, inflation quickly ends, the decay of the scalar inflaton field causing reheating. Is this the ‘let there be light moment’? No, photons don’t exist yet, but other massless vector quanta like left and right weak and B-L particles may exist. Things are not well known about this era. You and I are still but a twinkling in the cosmic eye.”

“What is here now was there in the beginning.”

“At1E-34 to 1E-8 seconds, in the quark era, there is the quark gluon plasma, and then quarks and perhaps super particles dominate matter content. At 1E-17 to 1E-15 seconds, SUSY breaking occurs when proposed super partners acquire mass with the LSP expected to have a mass of about 10 Tev. In induced gravity models, this is where mass energy first generates the induced gravity field; gravity is born, and we are grounded.”

“At 1E-10 seconds, there comes the electroweak transition, when the electroweak force, under the action of the Higgs mechanism, breaks symmetry. The photon is born. Standard model particles acquire mass.”

“Yeah! The photons guide us, as illumination beside us, while the mind whirls round and round, as the ear draws forth the sound, as the eye sees the light, and of the dark the fright. Fear not the proof—it’s the beauty of the truth.”

“At 1E-5 seconds, quark confinement comes about when the QCD vacuum becomes superconducting to color magnetic current. Quarks and gluons become confined.”

“Ah, the quarks can never exist independently again.”

“At 1E-5 to 1 E-4 seconds, in the hadron era, protons, neutrons, and pions, etc., form. Now our future atoms are on the horizon.”

“What a long road our parts travelled.”

“At 1E -4 seconds, hadron annihilation occurs during a brief period of proton/anti proton and neutron/anti neutron annihilation. A slight favoring of matter over anti matter, possibly locked in by CP violation at reheating allows some very few excess protons and neutrons to survive, with ten billion photons for every matter particle now, which tells us how many annihilations there were, as 10*9, along with how much more there initially was.”

“It’s still a humongous amount of stuff, albeit gone from 2x10*85 particles down to 2x10*76.”

“At 1E-4 to 10 seconds, in the next era, leptons are the dominant energy density, such as electrons. We are up to about one second after the Big Bang now, at neutrino decoupling, when mass energy falls low enough to free neutrinos, creating the neutrino cosmic background.”

“We’ve many hints from the Cosmic Microwave Background, too.”

“At 10 seconds, electrons and positrons annihilate, leaving a tiny fraction of electrons remaining. At this point the total number of electrons equals the total number of protons. This is a beautiful symmetry.”

“Protons are of positive charge, while electrons are negative.”

“From 10 seconds to 57 thousand years is the radiation era, in which photons created from the annihilation of matter and anti-matter dominate the energy density of universe. Light has been let; We will shine.”

“Of course, our shining turns out to be another very slow part, later, in bio evolution, taking four billion years.”

“At 1-5 minutes, nucleosynthesis begins, as fusion of protons creates helium, deuterium and trace amounts of lithium. A few of our basics are there. Hydrogen is already present, it being so simple.”

“From the simple, composites and complexities form, as we ever note, through and through.”

“At 57,000 years, there is matter/radiation equality. The radiation density (photon and neutrino) and matter density (dark and atomic) are equal. This is because radiation density falls more quickly due to the stretching of the relativistic particles’ wavelengths. Dark matter clumps into structures. Atomic matter begins oscillation due to the battle between gravity and photon pressure generating acoustic oscillations. The first sounds of the new universe come forth as the ‘word’.”

“Gravity ever pulls back toward the past but the electromagnetic waves ever pull ahead, toward the future.”

“At 380,000 years, there is recombination, when the temperature falls low enough to allow atoms to form; photons decouple. The true CMB is born, locking in its structure—the story of the earliest times in the universe.”

“The radiation by now has been shifted into the microwave portion of the e/m spectrum.”

“For 5 to 200 million years, there is a dark age, as the photons fall into the infra red energy range. The universe goes dark. The atomic gas continues to fall toward the dark matter clumps, which grow more pronounced. Near to 100 million years, the densest clumps halt their expansion and begin collapsing. By 200 million years, the first mini halos form and within these the atomic cloud cools and collapses to make the very first stars whose light brings to an end the dark era. We are totally the hopes of further stars yet to become. By the way, I forgot that inflation could have been so fast that some virtual particles couldn’t recombine, thus becoming real.”

“It’s auspicious and of good fortune in the meadows of Heaven.”

“At 200 million years, there are the first stars, which are very massive and short lived, but emit some lower atomic elements since this doesn’t require extra energy. They die in violent supernova explosions filling the cosmos with the higher atomic elements that needed energy to be added, building dust for new stars and the planets of solar systems, and the elements for life.”

“The later generation stars are much more metal rich, this needed for solar system life to form.”

“At 200 to 800 million years, there is the epoch of ionization, in which the radiation from the stars and possibly the first quasars, ionizes much of the remaining neutral hydrogen and helium. A thin mist returns and partly obscures the CMB, but future Low Frequency Radio Telescopes may be able to see the epoch of ionization.”

“We’re getting through the first billion years.”

“At 1 to 2 billion years, there become infant galaxies, as star groups merge. There are frequent collisions of galaxies, high star birth rates, and high supernova rates. Heavy element production changes the pattern of star formation, making them lower mass, less luminous and longer lived, like the second generation stars of today. The stage is set for the emergence of life; the cosmos will soon have eyes to see and minds to think, like ours.”

“Um, your ‘soon’ takes another 10 billion years.”

“At 2 to 3 billion years, there is a star birth and quasar peak. In the dense environment of frequent galaxy collisions, the star birth rate reaches it maximum, as does the forming and feeding of supermassive black holes, as horrible darkling beasts. Abandon hope all ye who enter there.”

“Four to five billion years gone, and just as much to go to achieve the very early life of bacteria, who, by the way, took two billion years to make Earth’s atmosphere, by exuding oxygen as a waste product, as it was poisonous to them. Slow indeed.”

“At 6 billion years, there are the first very rich galaxy clusters, since enough time has elapsed for the densest regions to stop expanding and form these clusters. At 7 billion years, there is decelerated acceleration. The effects of dark energy kick in. The universe once again begins to accelerate its expansion rate, but gentler. Gravity has lost the battle.

“At 8 billion years, the first modern spiral galaxies form, although some elliptical galaxies form in the first billion years, but classic spiral galaxies aren’t seen until at about 5 billion years. Let’s skip over the next three billion years. That should be enough time for us to have dinner.”

“Yeah, nothing is near instant but for the Big Bang.”

I run my hand through Ruby's hair.

Ruby continues her description of All History, three billion years later.

“At 9 billion years, there is matter and dark energy equality, since the falling density of matter, both dark and atomic, become equal to that of dark energy. At 9.1 billion years, our sun and Earth form. We are inherent therein. Our solar system forms in the outer disk of the Milky Way, far out on a spiral arm, there further from harm. The stage is set for the emergence of humankind in the Cosmos—for you and I to meet and love. All this from stabilizations forming, onward and upward, in emergence, taking on a life of their own, and so on.”

“We’re going to fall in love?”

“Yes, probably.”

“Great!”

“At 13.7 billion years, we have the present time. Human civilization perhaps reaches its peak and perhaps begins heading into decline and eventual extinction due to over population, resource depletion, and environmental destruction, which generates conflict as human nation states fight for the ever dwindling resources. Hopefully, humankind is not typical and intelligent life solves the problem of balancing intelligent life needs with available resources by developing communitarian economic social structures. There have already been six near extinctions, some obliterating 95% of the species present at the time.”

“The religious were troubled by ‘God’ creating life and then then doing away with most of it, time after time, but it gave us mammals an opening. A nervous shrew looked out of the forest on day: the dinosaurs and most species were gone, the big beasts having seemed invincible for hundreds of millions of years. The shrew jumped up and down, celebrating, and thinking, if it could: ‘Hurray, now I can evolve.’ Of course, biological evolution shows to be as numbingly slow of a process as was cosmic evolution!”

“The Young Earthers claim that the Earth is only about 4000 years old, to save face, I suppose.”

“By the way, Austin, I think all of this is dynamic in time. There probably cannot be a Block Universe because it’s infinite into the future, and, because it’s a complexity. As First, it can’t have a definite blueprint, especially as composite and complex, plus we would not need brains to redundantly figure things out, if all was already set to follow a world line, as in a movie already made of still frames passing by, in this frozen Block Universe idea. We shall see. Lee Smolin is looking into presentism.”

Out of energy’s dispersion and decay of quality
Comes the emergence of growth and complexity.

Neutrinos may have swung the zero-sum balance to matter dominance over antimatter:

Quanta Magazine:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/do-neutrinos-explain-matter-antimatter-asymmetry-20160728/

Explaining the Cosmos is as easy as pie:
It’s an endless extravagance beyond the sky,
Which shows that matter’s very readily made—
Underlying energy raising the shades.

An intelligent agent can bring into existence a pocket watch. — Jan Ardena

The intelligent Agent is as a Super Watch, so all the more …