I then flip the coin, i.e., transform it into a superposition of heads-up and heads-down. — Andrew M

Then you're not flipping it.

I daresay his much-publicized atheism — TheMadFool

He was never a atheist. He was considered a form of theist, he would have seen the deception as God like.

Personally, I have experienced these, including precognitive dreams — Jack Cummins

It came in the form of premonitions for me, when I was in danger.

As a matter of fact, we can't really help thinking this way. As a matter of fact, reasoning is deterministic. Reasons determine conclusions — Harry Hindu

You're making the assumption that the human brain and nervous system is deterministic.

David Bohm (re: hidden variables) would make a career of attempting to correct, or extend, 'einsteinian determinism' ... almost in spinozist fashion. — 180 Proof

I might have to read up on that,

The indeterminism we encounter in our lives could be divine mischief/deception. — TheMadFool

But you really are going deeper into the unknown there. There will always be philosophical questions.
I keep one quote in my profile that I think applies here.

“I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science. On the other hand, any assertion of probability is either right or wrong from the standpoint of the theory on which it is based. This loosening of thinking (Lockerung des Denkens) seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world” ― Max Born

We may be in a universe nested in another universe as a simulation for all we know. Nothing can ever be truly ruled out. We deceive ourselves everyday. Half of life is probably self deception. To a degree, I think we get out what we put in, in terms of mantras. If we dwell on the notion that we are being deceived or toyed with on some level by a higher power, it can become a self fulfilling prophecy.

You are the observer. Can you tell the difference between tables X andY based on the outcomes of the dice roll? — TheMadFool

Maybe not. There are tests of randomness but I don't think they are that useful, they can spot something that is deterministic if it makes no effort to use randomness from the results. Reasonably random results adhere to a distribution that can be detected using the Chi-square test for example.

But I don't think its that interesting to consider if you can be tricked or not.

That's an intriguing twist in the plot but I think robotic hands can also manage "random" dice rolls...I'm not sure though. — TheMadFool

I don't see why not if you have a source of "true" randomness like an unstable electrical field for example. But you could argue then that it would be the electrical field calling the shots, not the robot and its not for sure that there is truly such a thing as true randomness, but it is claimed.

Take the example in your OP - dice - which are, if you really look at it, deterministic phenomena - if one has complete knowledge of the initital state of the dice and also of the nature of the force that you apply as your roll the dice, you can predict the outcome with 100% accuracy - and yet they behave as if they're truly indeterministic processes when in fact they aren't as explained above. — TheMadFool

I agree that Einstein would see a dice roll as deterministic, and he was using the analogy more to say that he doesn't believe God would allow true randomness or indeterminism to play a part in the roll so to speak. But the act of rolling a die manifests from the central nervous system so the question is whether that the human mind and central nervous system is deterministic or not. But if the human mind and nervous system are deterministic, you can't escape from the reality that free will would be an illusion.

I'm not genuinely looking to mount a treatise on this. Just sharing ideas for now and hoping my perspective can cultivate imagination.

The platonic solids offer a symmetry that also maps well to dimensionality. A tetrahedron with its four vertices and four sides could encode coordinates in time.

But I see it's beauty as the canvas of space for atoms or molecules or both. Perhaps we could think of these polyhedral shapes as all having a time component even, since they all have even numbers of sides and vertices leaving an extra vertex or side for time, that pulls and stretches the atoms with length contraction from high speeds of t from relativity.

Or maybe they could represent molecules too since molecules demonstrate similar patterns. Think of an oxygen atom at one vertex of a tetrahedron, with two hydrogen representing the others, and the fourth representing the effect of time on this molecule. Maybe using nested platonic solids, both atoms and molecules could be represented this way to build up the structure.

If we were to think of space-time as a vast volumetric ocean of little tetrahedrons that can make up vastly more complex solids, with each one stretched and contorted for the curvature of large gravitational bodies just waiting to be filled in frame by frame or little tetrahedron by tetrahedron with the structure of atoms and molecules. We could go further and imagine the edges between the vertices alone with no volume and no area as the paths traversed by a photon of light at this quantum space-time level.

It's just speculation. I am not a God and I have no God complex, but I do like to imagine the mind of a creator sometimes.

I think when anyone studies numerology however, they will find there is no consensus on any number or relationship between numbers whatsoever. And the same probably applies to shapes. — Gregory

Yes, but no matter what number base we use, there are three perceived dimensions at least for humans, and mammals, with a 4th which is akin to a master reference dimension that governs the others, time. There are potentially more dimensions but we perceive three. This number is intrinsic to our existence, with the 4th. being like the flow for the river for experience.

When you ask what something is 'made of' you presume it has constituents or elements - which surely must be in question with respect to space. The nature of the existence of space - whether it is inherently real, or whether it is in part constituted by cognition - is still an open, and possibly an unanswerable, question. — Wayfarer

Yes. I should have stated "..what is space made of, if anything".

If we don't know the "who, or the how" - we may already be programmed by the machines. — Don Wade

We are really. But one man/woman at the "top" being replaced by a robot won't fix anything. When you take spirituality, family, and enlightenment out of a persons life and replace it with fear, hate and addiction, then they have been reduced to the level of a biological robot arguably, though not necessarily permanently.

If you can relish the moment of putting the sausages on the pizza and embrace the feeling that belittling the wonderful symmetry of the plain ole sausage would be a little petty, and not living in the moment, you may feel a sense of satori, or you may not. Who knows.

The platonic solids can be arranged to represent the structure of atoms, sausages and pizza cannot.

The jury is still out. LQG hasn't panned out yet. (Rovelli) — 180 Proof

I don't believe it will, or maybe I just don't want it to.

The number three is fundamental in many cultures including Buddhism. Are we drawn to shapes like the equilateral triangle from more than personal preference. Are such symmetries important to us at some primordial subconscious level?, since they occur so frequently in nature.

A journey through life, from infant to elderly.

And also the context of ontology: vacuum fluctuations, spontaneous symmetry-breaking (Noether's Theorem), quantum tunneling, radioactivity, etc. — 180 Proof

I tend to agree with you but it's not fully settled, and my never be. Is it not the case that space / space-time must be quantised if determinism has to break down at a certain point, and that leaves the paradox of what is space made of? Then even smaller quanta come back into relevance, ontologically speaking.

The difference though is in your journey to accept that.

Sub specie durationis the 'planck-scale' universe is indeterministic. — 180 Proof

Yes, but indeterministic in the context of measurement.

If he plays dice, nothing is different than it has been. If he doesn't, nothing is different than it has been.

A nice Buddhist like take on it!

I don't know what it means or if there is any structure. You could at least have attempted to not go full asymmetric and represented it with sea urchins.

That being said, I have met elephants and they are the most emotional creatures I have ever met. I like to think I can feel emotion from a being but I can't prove that, in any meaningful way without using something like tiny elephant logic.

In my assessment, it would make the measurement of those physical processes in terms of current quantum mechanics extremely probabilistic — Enrique

I doubt the human mind could be approximated on any meaningful level without a vast statistical quantum network, so that maybe the creation of AI is the only true way could hope to understand it.

We shall see. The fate of free will hangs in the balance lol — Enrique

I know, I wish I could share a lol about that part. It's very sad indeed.

I suppose the opposite of a system that tries to control the free will of its people, is people who constrain their free will wilfully, using their own discipline and rote devotion to managing their will formally and precisely, logically, Vulcan in short.

From my reading, I get the impression that quantum occurrences must be more deterministic than modeled by graphs of total statistical probability. — Enrique

I feel that if there is a probability distribution than can describe possible states of a system for waves (superposition) that is indeterministic, then that makes our lives indeterministic from a point of view. Our brains are also electrical and light literally moves around in waves inside our minds too. It would make make our thinking indeterministic too?

Determinism is often contrasted with free will.

That's true. But it also applies to Mathematics. And Energy is essentially an abstract relationship (800 degrees Celsius of the match, relative to 72 degrees of the tinder) between hot & cold, for instance. The potential is in the ratio, which can actualize changes in matter. — Gnomon

But again you can argue that is just out of perception. Try to define any perceived quanta of energy or elemental particle through an analogy where you cannot just choose a medium like a star for heat, or an atomic nucleus for distance. Can you think of any information that represents the universe without needing a physical or energetic phenomenon to explain it?

The radius of an electron is a property of an electron. We stick a label of information on it to categorise it at an abstract level. When a programmer compiles a program, the if statements and for loops are no longer relevant as information, it's just machine code after compilation, or a program and the output it creates happens whether these statements were ever present in the first place. And once the program is run, 1 or million times, its output occurs with or without any changes to the labels. Could the universe be the same?

If the universe was designed, what use is the information to the designer anymore once it is all set in motion?

If you ask me how I feel, and I reply, you can argue that my response contains an abstract representation of how I feel, and that it contains information. But if you measure my height, have you retrieved an abstract representation of my height, or just understood the reality of my dimensions and created that abstraction yourself?

If we cannot create an analogy that involves physical objects to describe information, then surely information is dependent on the objects energy, quanta, properties themselves. Would the universe not be more efficient if it doesn't require the concept of information as the inherent properties already define it.

Do we disassemble them into what they are physically using just our own imaginations?

On one hand, it is deterministic in the sense that everything that will ever happen already exists and cannot change. — litewave

Almost like we are in a movie, but just because we know the ending, we don't necessarily know the various plots and subplots yet, as if we still could potentially change the plot but no matter how much we change it we cannot change the ending, the ending that only light and the other waves know as they ripple through here.

Why not constrain yourself with determinism through the eyes of Baruch Spinoza, start from there, if you like or have time to do so?

But what do you, Tim Wood, (believe or) understand to be happening when you throw the dice? From the moment you receive the dice in your hands to the moment the dice have stopped rolling, what aspects of the event are indeterministic?

It has also been proven that the observation changes the object being observed. — Rxspence

This is the measurement problem in Quantum mechanics.

In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem considers how, or whether, wave function collapse occurs. The inability to observe such a collapse directly has given rise to different interpretations of quantum mechanics and poses a key set of questions that each interpretation must answer.

You can see a summary of interpretations here: Interpretations

Some theories say it changes the object being observed, some say it doesn't. I feel more drawn to the Ensemble or even Copenhagen interpretations at this moment but that wasn't always the case. The only reason I feel drawn to the Ensemble interpretation is it is more agnostic and I don't have to agree with outlandish ideas my intuition cannot accept. It was the least worst in Einstein's mind at the time, as it is agnostic deterministically, and Einstein found Born's statistical interpretation basically the least worst take on it.

Marta may be unrelated to Martha / not the same person. And even if she was Martha, the children may be Mary's children. If they are Mary's children, they are not Mary's nieces.

"Martha and Mary are sisters. Marta has two nieces who are not Mary's nieces. It's possible?" — Miguel Hernández

Yes

Marta and María are sisters. Marta has two nieces who are not Maria's nieces. It's possible? — Miguel Hernández

María
Maria

Yes, but your point?

Why? Why not tiny elephants instead? What feeds your intuition? Is it anything to warrant a second thought? — SophistiCat

Tiny elephants are not very optimal to represent the various configurations of atoms. Nested platonic solids are but I'm open to your projection and preference for tiny elephants ;)

I'm not in favour of manned missions to other planets using current technology. Have felt that way since my mid 20's I think. There is an argument that the act of trying to get there fosters new technological innovation but I think breakthroughs in antimatter storage or antimatter engines is required. We didn't send a man to the moon without a computer, and I don't think we should bother trying to send a man to Mars without a significant breakthrough in propulsion, with orders of magnitude more efficiency, and orders higher specific impulse. And should humans really go.

What is more interesting in my opinion is Elon Musks idea to nuke Mars and warm it up. If we could terraform Mars over thousands of years we could slowly prepare to put permanent settlements there.
It will be billions of years before our sun swallows up the Earth. We should have a long term objective to terraform Mars over a very long duration. That's my take.

But politics is a whole other story and in a few thousand years, we may live in an age of sticks and stones with 'flat earth' being the dominant model for the Earth.

Conventional intuition from Western education would point in that direction. Empirically though, it's simply not confirmed. We have no idea if space / spacetime is quantised, and leading physicists contend it is in fact quantised. I always believed it to be discreet or and infinite, now I'm not so sure. But if it is quantised and so finite, it can still be infinite as the leading theories suggest the universe itself is ever expanding, thus is infinite.

So there is a lot of weight behind the idea that it is potentially infinite, yet finite at anyone time, and quantised as opposed to discreet.


That's a fair point, and I wanted to spur your own opinion as to the actual questions I asked. Since this is a philosophy forum, I didn't feel it appropriate to load in Physics papers. It was intended to be more an open ended question outside of pure Physics with some pretty pictures as you pointed out ad the ad hominem level, where we talk what you think the nature of space and time is. Yes, I believe they are pictures, well done!

Well, what is there to think about? There is no theory, at least none in what you wrote. — SophistiCat

Edited the OP for you. Its more conjecture, and limited in scope.

Crystallographic dihedral groups is how I see the structure of space and perhaps spacetime at an intuitive level. There is no paper I can direct you that carries any more weight than what I present as it's entirely theoretical. When it comes to experimental physics at the macroscopic level of special or even general relativity I would be happy to present full theories and research by experts in the field if I feel I understand them but the truth is, I don't really take loop quantum gravity or string theory that seriously as its so deep in theory as to be speculative. Unlike relativity, it lacks an empirical means to verify its truth. Also, loop quantum gravity doesn't really tackle time as I understand it.

Space, as I understand it, can be BOTH a void and a structure - just not at the same time. It’s actually either, depending on the interacting relational structures. — Possibility

I sometimes think of space as like a wake that follows with energy and matter, so that space isn't some uniform entity that exists throughout the universe, but only exists where there is energy or matter. Other times, I think it's truly continuous and not at all quantised, that it's just emptiness. It's why I wanted to spur conversation, to see if anybody has any opinions on what exactly it is if anything other than nothingness.

In special relativity the speed of light is finite. — fishfry

Relativistically speaking yes. It's finite from our frame of reference here on earth, from the frame of a reference of a photon, the clock is not ticking so its difficult to define. I've found that Neil Degrasse Tyson speaks about it just as I see it. When I first saw this video I couldn't stop nodding!

Sections of space can be infinitely divided so they have infinite parts — Gregory

Thanks.

But space may not necessarily be infinitely divided. Proponents of quantised space (for example those who believe in loop quantum gravity) believe it cannot. We don't have the technology to find out, and there is also a fundamental limit to how small something can be measured in length. It's called Planck length and is the smallest possible measurement of length we can measure that makes any real sense. It is also the the theoretical limit for which two electrons can be pressed together before they collapse into a tiny black hole. But it doesn't mean it's the smallest possible length. As I said, that's unproven.

Physicists can "see"what an atom looks like from microscopy, (by zapping an atom with lasers and magnifying the interference pattern with an electrostatic lens), but that's not going to happen at something the size of a Planck length, which is trillions upon trillions of times smaller than even a proton inside an atom. We may never know!

To move infinite amount of spaces, infinite amount of time is required. — elucid

Depends on the frame of reference. There are temporal paradoxes to consider with this.

If something is moving at infinite speed - the speed of light - time isn't even ticking from the point of view of a photon. By the time it reaches the other end of the universe, it still hasn't ticked and it never will. You will perceive it move from your frame of reference but while you will have aged quintillions of years or however long it takes, from its pint of view it arrived at the same time it left.

Many experiments have shown this, including the delayed choice quantum eraser. Experimenters have been able to erase a state in a system in the past and effect its future. Well they haven't actually erased of course, that would be nonsense. It's simply that they were able to make a change to a photon of light at one point in our frame of reference, that we perceive as being temporally prior to another change made. But of course for the photon there is no time and so the arrow of time and causality was not violated. Tense is irrelevant when it comes to interfering with a photon in its flight.
From its point of view it gets there the same time it leaves, always.

Edit: Responded to a 3 year old post. Don't mind me!

Cyclical theories of history can be found in may cultures. So it's not unusual for us to ponder that we go through peaks and troughs. I was a 90's teen. I still often say to myself that 1996 was the high tide for this age we are in now. The tide is receding as I see but you never know.

Unless you believe in God, spirits, ghosts or other such things (pretty clear I'm an atheist) how could anyone argue that consciousness ISN'T simply an integral aspect of the material brain — GLEN willows

Because consciousness is an integral part of both the material brain and the universe that hosts it/is in symbiosis with it, including the very fabric of space time itself, not to mention any consideration to what existed before the big bang, We do not yet understand gravity at the quantum level for example. We do not truly understand the human brain and it's place "within" the universe.

There does seem to be a lot more atheists in academia in the mored era. Ironically though, we are not really in a golden age of discovery I would argue. Newton wasn't an atheist but an unconventional theist though he disagreed with the divinity of the trinity for example. Einstein believed that God existed, but that he was nebulous, universal, and not comprehensible to the human mind. Marie Curie was agnostic but not outright atheist.

I think there is a tendency in intellectual projection nowadays to attempt to set oneself apart by proclaiming ones atheism. But I would warn that that may not necessarily grant you additional favour, given that so many accomplished scholars greatly respected in the upper echelons of academia today are not atheist and a lot in fact believe in some higher power.

From our reference frame this is true but from the point of view of a photon of light, this is in fact not the case. It perceives reaching its destination instantaneously and it always travels at speed of c - the speed of light.



This is described by the Lorentz factor, γ

${\displaystyle \gamma ={\frac {1}{\sqrt {1-{\frac {v^{2}}{c^{2}}}}}}={\frac {1}{\sqrt {1-\beta ^{2}}}}={\frac {dt}{d\tau }}}$

Time dilation: The time (∆t′) between two ticks as measured in the frame in which the clock is moving, is longer than the time (∆t) between these ticks as measured in the rest frame of the clock:

${\displaystyle \Delta t'=\gamma \Delta t.}{\displaystyle \Delta t'=\gamma \Delta t.}$

But since γ = ∞ in this case, it simply reduces down to ∞

You may be aware of the analogy from school where a teacher talks about a rocket flying off on a mission. By the time the rocket returns, the astronaut hasn't aged much but everyone else back home has.

For light just think if it in more extreme terms. There is no time elapsing from the point of view of a photon of light but eternity has passed. It feels counterintuitive to think about it, but the inverse of this is that the light doesn't age so to speak. It gets there instantly from its frame of reference. This is where bizarre effects arise such as the EPR paradox. It appears as though we can influence a photon of light from the past. This has been documented in experiments like the delayed choice quantum eraser. In reality, nothing is erased as there is no time passing from the point of view of the photon. The concept of tense doesn't really exist from that reference frame.

I feel that in these times, people increasingly question the validity of their lives, and a lot of it stems from being cut off from nature and interaction, from the acts that humans have evolved with, our inate social activity.

We are social animals that live in communities and its like a scream telling you something is wrong because something is wrong. Humans socialise. This maybe the first time in the history of humanity where we are not living even as humans have done for millennia. So it's normal to feel that way. It's as much a question of psychology in 2021 as it's is philosophy. It would be more worrying if you didn't question your purpose in times like these.

We should all remember that we are important. Each of us in my view is like a neuron in the brain of the universe. We exist so that the universe is sentient.

yes Ben, I think so. That's how I think it came to be.

But you could argue too that we are part of a divine plan. We as individual people are also a small part of a much larger distributed group of all sentient beings in the universe. Kind of like the neurons of the universe itself. So that we exist so that the universe is conscious of itself. The beauty of a forest would have no meaning without people to perceive it.