Getting at the fundamental base reality of our universe

a reply to: joeraynor

It sounds like you're right and we're circling the same ideas and contexts despite relying on different words to express them.

I'm rushing this post because I'm going out shortly. It's almost a shame because your thread is thought-provoking and the posts are all good.

a reply to: ClovenSky

But we can't even explain how they created the pyramids or many of the ancient megaliths/monoliths.

My best guess is it was done by the primitive humans we believe did it, but they had pretty sophisticated mechanical tools, and it took them WAAAAAAYYYYYYY longer to do than the records say. For instance, the records of when they were constructed would imply several ton blocks going into perfect position once every 20 seconds or so. I bet it took them 40 times as long, and something else screwy is going on... like the people around at the time of completion were not aware of how long it actually took before them, and believed it was mostly recent. We know that ancient peoples often didn't have accurate records of things that happened 200 years before them. If the pyramids took 10,000 years to build, would the people who finished them know, by that token?

I know that is a lot of supposition and thinking out loud, and there actually are detailed records we found from the time that talk about matters like material acquisition and schedules. But then it is quite strange that those same records don't describe their methods in great detail, isn't it?

a reply to: joeraynor

I like to think that these 'primitives' understood our reality and the physical properties behind it a little better than we do in today's age. Maybe it was due to an advanced society that was all but destroyed and a remnant lived on, slowly losing their knowledge. Did that make them better off? It didn't appear that knowledge or raw determination preserved their reality very far.

I always like to ask, 'what is the goal'. Where or when will all of this knowledge make us better as humans? Has electronic technology really improved the overall experience of this reality for the majority of the population? It almost looks like technology is a curse when viewing social interactions and the ability of different people to get along.

What would produce contentment? An atheistic view that we are simple physical matter with no soul. That once the electric signals stop, we are done for. Or would a agnostic view allow for more of a comforting reality? I won't even touch the other option.

I just wonder at the emotions this topic elicits. It is almost like people are fighting for their ability to relate to this existence. Experiencing different views and the people that support those views gives a lot of information in itself.

To me it is kind of simple. I want to create a view of this reality that produces the most contentment. Not even happiness or joy. Just simple contentment from which anything is possible.

Why do you search?

a reply to: ClovenSky

I like to think that these 'primitives' understood our reality and the physical properties behind it a little better than we do in today's age. Maybe it was due to an advanced society that was all but destroyed and a remnant lived on, slowly losing their knowledge. Did that make them better off? It didn't appear that knowledge or raw determination preserved their reality very far.

My own thought is that civilized history might extend much further back than we think. We normally think of it as going to 5-6000 BC, but to me it isn't inconceivable that the timeframe was actually much longer, more like 100,000 years, although that is just speculation. There are hints here or there, especially in Egypt with the pyramids, and even the sphinx, which looks as though it might be older than 10-20,000 based on some water damage patterns. Was there a civilization with advanced technology as we think of it? I suppose that is also possible, but the works of the past don't seem to suggest it would have been necessary, and nor do we really see any signs of it outside of the architectural wonders.

I always like to ask, 'what is the goal'. Where or when will all of this knowledge make us better as humans? Has electronic technology really improved the overall experience of this reality for the majority of the population?

That's a complicated thing, because our modern world and its gifts have caused both benefit and harm. My own thought is that more benefit than harm was derived. There is less violence today than 300 years ago. Lives are more stable in developed countries. There is way less abject suffering, and our industry has made the resources necessary to live far easier to obtain, which frees up our time for meaningful pursuits. I think that if you traded your current life for that of a Germanic peasant in 800 AD, you would prefer this life. Which isn't to say that life wouldn't have its own rewards, but I think what we have now is qualitatively better in more ways than it is worse.

For instance, I work a job that involves a lot of computer time, and my own interests also imply computer time. This takes a health toll if I don't balance it with physical exercise. But then my lifestyle gives me the choice to do that, or a number of other things. In large part a lot of my problems in life are the result of my own choices, rather than what my society did to me and forced me into. People back then had less ability to say that.

Why do you search?

This world is baffling and beautiful to me. I get joy out of just trying to work out how it is the way it is. I also suspect it is even more interesting than we currently believe, and various human frailties or social structures have stopped us from asking the questions that would allow us an even deeper understanding. I have gotten huge life upgrades from various fruits of understanding. Pursuing ever more knowledge generally pays off in most senses.

originally posted by: joeraynor
a reply to: Reverbs

Sort of like it's a simulation and quantum weirdness is like error correction, "oh # he noticed this" change everything to make that make sense as one reality.. And then Reverbs gets dejavu as the only fleeting consequence.. Dejavu movies that can be fast forwarder like memories, and then I know the very near future, said out loud those around me see that I am remembering the future.. Hasn't happened in some time but it really nags at me. in other words extremely advanced simulation, that is not coming from another reality.. It is all there is.. So one would call it then reality, but reality that follows rules of simulation..

This is an interesting view. If our material system was in fact the base reality, and not a simulation, but did exhibit traits we would only expect in a simulation (ie: error correction with respect to conscious beings) why would you suppose things would be arranged this way? It seems like an unlikely way for the world to operate...

Don't you guys ever get that weird feeling, if you could just turn around quick enough you could catch the editing before it's real?

yeah all the time... I ask myself if there really are any planets at all outside of this solar system, or just the least necessary data modeling a macro object's effect on its parent star we would need to be shown based on our current means of observation, like we are getting Truman Showed' in some dome. I don't think this is the most likely answer, but it is interesting to entertain and I can't fully exclude it!

In computer science terms, it's called "lazy evaluation". You have some software system that manages a lot of data in real time (maybe a simulation of public transit buses, trains and commuters). As data comes in, it changes the state of various objects (position of bus/train). The state of each object also affects the state of other objects (moving vehicles changes location of passengers, ferries move buses/cars). Now, you could completely update the entire system with every new piece of data, but it would be incredibly slow (for every vehicle that moves, update the position of all positions of all passengers). So the speed-up is to do lazy-evaluation. To find the location of a passenger, you check to see if the bus/trainferry moved since the last time it was read, then calculate the position of the passenger. You only calculate values and data when you actually need them, and it back-propagates until you have all the data to return the answer you need.

Extend this to our universe, and we are on a planet that is revolving around a star that is orbiting the center of a galaxy which is moving through space to some unknown destination towards another galaxy.

I was reading the other day of Nether Theory. It makes better sense to my simple mind than Einsteins relativity. With physical laws being properties of the ether rather than describing that speed of light and time is governed within the universe without rhyme or reason,

If everything including ourselves is made of the ether. Then segregation of all living entities is an illusion caused by limitations of our sense organs. Our senses simply cannot see the ether for what it really is. Eastern religions claim that the ether (curtain of maya) can be sensed within meditation. With my amateurish attempts at meditation confirming that some kind of universal bond exist (thought bubbles are not limited to our bodies but can travel along the ether and can be detected by others when their mind is still), but failed to go deep enough to understand much more about it.

Personally, I have great confidence in science. Science seems to be governed by a political beast that doesn't like change. That hinders new thought. But in the long run I believe it will identify the ether, start unravelling its properties, explaining why laws exist etc. But may never be able to explain why the ether exists, That question might be beyond logic alone.

From my perspective, reality is an epiphenomenon of information and information processing. We exist in a "rendered" reality that is the output of recursive feedback through a process of information gathering via our senses and the interface rendered by the mind. This reality is more psychological impacting than we realize as it facilitates what I call immersion. In this immersion we suffer from a lack of knowledge. The result of this psychologically is that we try to fill the knowledge gaps with beliefs both as individuals and as a group based on what ever evidence presents itself in the rendered output.

The base reality isn't the rendered output as that is a final product so the true reality is what facilitates or props up the information that we are interfacing with. The base reality is not physical, ergo it is a non-localized non-physical system. More interesting to me is the phenomena of consciousness and anomalous cognition such as deja vu linked to dreams of the past otherwise known as Deja Reve. Many people experience deja but there are those who connect the familiarity of the event to memories that legitimately stem from past dream content.

In this reveal, the originating dream is the future reality but is still entirely composed of the same content as all dreams which is a very highly organized thought. Dreams too are highly immersive systems where most who are in a dream think it's reality until they wake up. Again emphasis put on the nature of immersion as part of the challenge we all face in overcoming it to paint a larger picture of our reality.

So if reality in this thought paradox is first rendered in a dream format that later actualizes and comes true. That spits in the face of literally everything we know reality to be as a physical system because what came first? The dream or reality? Through precognition we can answer the thought paradox if we have the experience and know the dream came first.

What is amazingly obvious is we talk about simulation and reality being simulated needing a computer or something to process information when in each of us, we are born with natures perfected virtual reality simulator, it's called dreaming and all it takes is consciousness to play. In this relationship we can see how our consciousness can create and simulate a virtual reality we call a dream. Imagine if we are all co-processors in a larger consciousness system. Would this larger system then have the processing power to simulate a larger grander Universal dream which we now call reality but because of immersion we do not realize we are dreaming it at all until we "wake up".

Maybe it's a simple matter of waking up in this dream like one does in the more micro cosmic subjective dreams during sleep. My two bits.

a reply to: joeraynor

There are the answers we come up with that we like to talk about. Yet, to my mind, if we are anywhere on a track of insightful discovery, the answers we come up with, as fluid as they may be are not as important as the tools we use to approach them. Indeed if we are on a track of proximity to the truth, the tools we develop to do that can be used again and again in those evolving insights.

I think it is very important to entertain views that are not our own.

This is a tool I struggle to maintain. Your use of the word ''entertain'' displays for me an honest tool.
Entertaining a notion is not easy for me, though practicing it has helped bring me along my way.

I think that the memes we believe can have a hold on us that is very difficult to break. Almost like a gooey substance that when sampled seems to grow and consume us imprisoning our abilities to consider other possibilities.

Taking belief itself as a topic of consideration, there is ample evidence that it may be a root to many of our problems. Religious beliefs, personal beliefs nationalistic beliefs motivate much of the worlds turmoil. Belief's seem to allow only one direction of thought, that being the direction of deeper and deeper descent into whichever particular belief system it is. Belief is like quicksand. A gravity well.

Entertaining thoughts that allow for knowledge of varying memes without the attachments of belief, thoughts that can simmer a back burner until such time as they can be sparked into juxtaposition with other and newer consideration can serve us as one of those strong tools of discovery.

a reply to: joeraynor

You just asked (tried to question) why are there so many things? (my lil limited monkey enhanced brain thinks 0 is baseline, but even that may be wrong)

One answer is the multi universe way..

It always makes me wonder, what is the universe sitting in? That other universe's probabilities are related?

Is it the "common" knowledge that we are the .0000000000001% batch, that worked in such a way?

Any odds should work in infinity..

BUT

what is infinity without time?

originally posted by: joeraynor

Yeah that's it... is nothing inherently unstable? Does it have this need to bifurcate endlessly into pairs of opposites? What causes it to do that at some times but not others? Like why was it able to go from nothing to a singularity of so many somethings only that one time at the big bang? Why don't we see similar behavior from other nothings out there? Why don't universes just spring up from empty space? Is the space of this universe too much of a something to be a nothing?

I'll just repost what you said.

I might not be the most articulate person, but I can tell you were able to see what I meant.

MULTIVERSE!

is the auto answer, to make sense, which everything being random, when there is no everything to be random..


One can even wonder... Who or What created nothing?




Maybe we come from nothing...

It's too much for me to comprehend.




Can consciousness exist without senses?



I experienced enough to know I don't know anything..
I can't really say anything anymore.

a reply to: joeraynor

Appreciate the thoughts.
Don't have any answers.

There are moments of seemingly complete disconnection from physical matter reality (PMR), and then undeniable moments when PMR bangs the door down and bursts in uninvited. (Loud noises, toothache, other intense sensations...).

This place is weird. (Don't really mean place).
This experience is weird. (Don't really mean experience).

Fundamental questions of reality usually go like this for me, which came first, the chicken or the egg? When apparently neither of the above is the correct answer, when it was some prolonged, grotesque, yet beautiful miracle of life that is delicious in ether of it forms.

Where it comes to material and the immaterial things, it is no different then asking what's the difference between matter an energy? Not going into "think happy, hippie trippy" ideals, but what is the difference when matter can contain, store, or even transfer energy from one form, to another.

Then we can get into more vague, and infancy concepts like dark energy vs dark matter, where they are polar opposites in their own workings... theoretically speaking any ways.

Maybe it all relative to us, when to the universe it self is not, when yet it said that the universe doesn't even exist...and yet here we are.

Dbl

a reply to: Specimen

Where it comes to material and the immaterial things, it is no different then asking what's the difference between matter an energy?

So we have to be careful here, because material and immaterial mean specific things in the context of philosophy. Material in philosophy encompasses both matter and energy, and all things physical, which are so called because they are ruled by a physics- a system of laws.

Immaterial is the trickier concept to get your head around, because we can't "get at it". Immaterial would in theory be a substance that was neither matter nor energy, and was not governed by a system of laws or physics. That is a pretty strange concept, no? Some schemes of the universe say that consciousness is in fact an immaterial substance, that is neither matter nor energy, and completely independent of both.

a reply to: joeraynor

Yea it would be a very strange, leap of faith to get to a conclusion since it would ether defy or maybe even define such systems. I guess the hard part is, just trying to find some, or multiple (super)/natural phenomenon to work with or produce.

From what I summarized in my own musings, is that magnetic and gravitational forces both work in a similar fashion, although they are two independent systems, maybe even parallel. When we decide to grab something, like a cup, we know or we think that we are holding that cup. And yet at some tiny Atomic scale, we are at the same time not really touching the cup, we know or we think were holding the cup, even though at some other point in time, were not.

Philosophy..I think there fore I am..sort of speak. That the great thing about philopshy, one can make a literary equation for the lay men, to where men of deep thought can argue about something as simple as "how it is or why it is a nice day" for hours.

Maybe consciousness is just the experience of cause and effect. Time, space, events are relative. "Particles" are probability waves in "feilds", but cause and effect seems inviolable.

Maybe thoughts are not consciousness itself, I think it is more fundamental, but just hard for us to see because of our brain.

I guess I am closer to monism since I am influenced by oriental ideas, especially buddhist and taoist philosophies. Now is there a greater purpose ?

Maybe just to know thyself and help others do the same so you can break the chains of cause and effect and create spontaneous effect out of true volition.